Submerge
03-23-2007, 02:54 PM
Here's an article I wrote a day ago. Thought I'd share it.
http://www.stuarthannig.com/2007/03/22/10-crucial-steps-to-follow-while-redesigning-your-website/
10 Crucial Steps to Follow While Redesigning Your Website
As web developers, I’m sure we’ve all been there. You’re unhappy with you current web design, maybe it’s lacking features that you’d like to add or maybe it looks like something that came out of the early 2000 era (”Phhh, that’s so five years ago!”). Anyways, regardless of your circumstances, you may be facing many hidden obstacles that could hinder and ruin all the previous hard work you invested in your website.
You may not think about it, but your visitors and the search engines are most affected by this change, so you should put them first. What’s the best route of attack to minimize the damages and actually help your website? Just follow these 10 simple procedures and everything should work out just fine, as you intended.
1. Keep the same file naming structure
Probably the most important step during the redesigning process is keeping the same file name structure. Many search engines aren’t able to change their links to your website on the whim. If you don’t have the same location for web pages, all incoming links will be incorrect, resulting in 404 error pages. Not only are search engines and other link-backs affected, visitors who’ve bookmarked your web pages will be taken to web pages that don’t exist anymore. Make sure to keep the exact file name structure or you may see a major loss of visitors.
2. 301 Redirect all changed web pages to their new locations
Okay; maybe you can’t keep the same file naming structure for some odd reason. If this is the case, make sure to 301 redirect all web pages from their old location to their new locations. This will make it a lot easier on the search engines to re-crawl your web pages. Not only that, but all incoming links will redirect your visitors to the destination they are looking for. Cutting down on the loss of visitors to your website.
3. Create custom 404 error pages
The most frustrating event for web surfers is coming across 404 error page. For one reason, they are ugly. But most importantly, you can bring these visitors into your website. The default 404 error page has no beneficial purpose for your website, and most of all, they turn visitors away from your website in search for other interests. Why not put a stop to this? A custom 404 error page allows you to link to your website, maybe even to other related articles that may be of interest to the visitor, persuade them to dig deeper!
4. Search for broken links
So you took the advice from the previous tips, but nobody’s perfect. Once you’ve implemented your redesign, search high and low for any broken links. It took a lot of work just to redesign the site, but maybe some mistakes were made in the code. You don’t want some simple mistakes to lead to broken links and anger visitors, take your time and make sure your work is top-notch.
5. Create a site map
Site maps are a simple, yet ingenious invention. They allow for a one-stop spot for access to every page on your website. Many times when a visitor visits a newly redesigned website, they may become confused by the new navigation structure. To help ease the transformation, allow easy access to your visitors of a site map. That way, if they are looking for a specific web page, they’ll be able to find it in the site map.
6. Create and submit an XML site map to search engines
Not only are site maps useful for visitors, but they are a great SEO tool for search engines. With many search engines, such as Google and Yahoo, you are able to submit an XML site map. This is a great step to allow the search engine spiders to find new content on your website to crawl and grow search engine results to your website faster.
7. Keep content as identical as possible
The major drawback to redesigning is the moving around and deletion of content. Resulting in the loss of keywords and tags that fetched good search result ranking for the original design. To limit the blow of dropping ranks, keep your content identical as the previous version. And hopefully, the new design will be friendlier for SEO purposes. Plus remember, not only should you keep the content identical; also make sure to keep the page title tags identical.
8. Inform your visitors of the redesign ahead of time
Before your returning visitors come upon the redesign, inform them about it. Nothing is more shell shocking to a returning visitor than a change in the layout. Announce the redesign in an announcement on your homepage and forum. That way, they can embrace for a change in the website. If it is at all possible, send an email to your visitors. Maybe you’ll be able to get previous visitors of the website, whom haven’t visited in awhile, to return and turn them into regular visitors once again.
9. Change your incoming links to reflect the new page locations
If you’ve changed the file naming structure of your pages. Try to change all the incoming links to your website from their external sources. If you’ve submitted your pages to websites and are able to update the URLs, change them from the older locations to their newer locations. If you want to go as far as emailing other webmasters to change link back locations, feel free to. Maybe some will be as nice to help you out. This way, you are relying less on the 301 redirects.
10. Make sure your code is valid and compatible
You may not know this, but search engines do take into consideration of valid code. One slip up of invalid code can hurt your placement among the results by many places. And that affects your search engine traffic significantly. Take your time to test out your new design layout at the W3C Markup Validation Service. Also, test out your new design in the other web browsers. If the design isn’t showing up properly, you’ll lose visitors faster than a church on game day. If you don’t have the various web browsers installed on your computer, feel free to use Browser Shots. They provide a free service that takes screen shots of your web page from multiple browsers including Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, Safari, etc. on the different operating systems such as Linux, Windows, and Mac OS.
11. Bonus Tip: Create a contact page
Alright, so you’ve released the new version of your website. Nothing can be made perfect for everyone, and you sure can’t test out every circumstance of something going wrong. So let your visitors know that they can contact you if they encounter any errors. This way, you’ll be able to correct the problem for them and show loyalty to your visitors.
Hopefully this list of 10 crucial steps to follow while redesigning your website comes handy. Many people have made these mistakes previously so you don’t have to! Don’t take them for granted. We don’t want a simple redesign to kill the activity on your website. And if any of you guys have other tips to follow, share them.
http://www.stuarthannig.com/2007/03/22/10-crucial-steps-to-follow-while-redesigning-your-website/
10 Crucial Steps to Follow While Redesigning Your Website
As web developers, I’m sure we’ve all been there. You’re unhappy with you current web design, maybe it’s lacking features that you’d like to add or maybe it looks like something that came out of the early 2000 era (”Phhh, that’s so five years ago!”). Anyways, regardless of your circumstances, you may be facing many hidden obstacles that could hinder and ruin all the previous hard work you invested in your website.
You may not think about it, but your visitors and the search engines are most affected by this change, so you should put them first. What’s the best route of attack to minimize the damages and actually help your website? Just follow these 10 simple procedures and everything should work out just fine, as you intended.
1. Keep the same file naming structure
Probably the most important step during the redesigning process is keeping the same file name structure. Many search engines aren’t able to change their links to your website on the whim. If you don’t have the same location for web pages, all incoming links will be incorrect, resulting in 404 error pages. Not only are search engines and other link-backs affected, visitors who’ve bookmarked your web pages will be taken to web pages that don’t exist anymore. Make sure to keep the exact file name structure or you may see a major loss of visitors.
2. 301 Redirect all changed web pages to their new locations
Okay; maybe you can’t keep the same file naming structure for some odd reason. If this is the case, make sure to 301 redirect all web pages from their old location to their new locations. This will make it a lot easier on the search engines to re-crawl your web pages. Not only that, but all incoming links will redirect your visitors to the destination they are looking for. Cutting down on the loss of visitors to your website.
3. Create custom 404 error pages
The most frustrating event for web surfers is coming across 404 error page. For one reason, they are ugly. But most importantly, you can bring these visitors into your website. The default 404 error page has no beneficial purpose for your website, and most of all, they turn visitors away from your website in search for other interests. Why not put a stop to this? A custom 404 error page allows you to link to your website, maybe even to other related articles that may be of interest to the visitor, persuade them to dig deeper!
4. Search for broken links
So you took the advice from the previous tips, but nobody’s perfect. Once you’ve implemented your redesign, search high and low for any broken links. It took a lot of work just to redesign the site, but maybe some mistakes were made in the code. You don’t want some simple mistakes to lead to broken links and anger visitors, take your time and make sure your work is top-notch.
5. Create a site map
Site maps are a simple, yet ingenious invention. They allow for a one-stop spot for access to every page on your website. Many times when a visitor visits a newly redesigned website, they may become confused by the new navigation structure. To help ease the transformation, allow easy access to your visitors of a site map. That way, if they are looking for a specific web page, they’ll be able to find it in the site map.
6. Create and submit an XML site map to search engines
Not only are site maps useful for visitors, but they are a great SEO tool for search engines. With many search engines, such as Google and Yahoo, you are able to submit an XML site map. This is a great step to allow the search engine spiders to find new content on your website to crawl and grow search engine results to your website faster.
7. Keep content as identical as possible
The major drawback to redesigning is the moving around and deletion of content. Resulting in the loss of keywords and tags that fetched good search result ranking for the original design. To limit the blow of dropping ranks, keep your content identical as the previous version. And hopefully, the new design will be friendlier for SEO purposes. Plus remember, not only should you keep the content identical; also make sure to keep the page title tags identical.
8. Inform your visitors of the redesign ahead of time
Before your returning visitors come upon the redesign, inform them about it. Nothing is more shell shocking to a returning visitor than a change in the layout. Announce the redesign in an announcement on your homepage and forum. That way, they can embrace for a change in the website. If it is at all possible, send an email to your visitors. Maybe you’ll be able to get previous visitors of the website, whom haven’t visited in awhile, to return and turn them into regular visitors once again.
9. Change your incoming links to reflect the new page locations
If you’ve changed the file naming structure of your pages. Try to change all the incoming links to your website from their external sources. If you’ve submitted your pages to websites and are able to update the URLs, change them from the older locations to their newer locations. If you want to go as far as emailing other webmasters to change link back locations, feel free to. Maybe some will be as nice to help you out. This way, you are relying less on the 301 redirects.
10. Make sure your code is valid and compatible
You may not know this, but search engines do take into consideration of valid code. One slip up of invalid code can hurt your placement among the results by many places. And that affects your search engine traffic significantly. Take your time to test out your new design layout at the W3C Markup Validation Service. Also, test out your new design in the other web browsers. If the design isn’t showing up properly, you’ll lose visitors faster than a church on game day. If you don’t have the various web browsers installed on your computer, feel free to use Browser Shots. They provide a free service that takes screen shots of your web page from multiple browsers including Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, Safari, etc. on the different operating systems such as Linux, Windows, and Mac OS.
11. Bonus Tip: Create a contact page
Alright, so you’ve released the new version of your website. Nothing can be made perfect for everyone, and you sure can’t test out every circumstance of something going wrong. So let your visitors know that they can contact you if they encounter any errors. This way, you’ll be able to correct the problem for them and show loyalty to your visitors.
Hopefully this list of 10 crucial steps to follow while redesigning your website comes handy. Many people have made these mistakes previously so you don’t have to! Don’t take them for granted. We don’t want a simple redesign to kill the activity on your website. And if any of you guys have other tips to follow, share them.