The Cure for Your (Site's) Mid-Life Crisis, from Solopreneurial Tendencies

The Cure for Your (Site's) Mid-Life Crisis

March 19, 2007

My work on the Paltrowitz & Kaufman site was featured in an article published today on ecommerce-guide.com. The subject is one near and dear to my business: knowing when to give your existing site a facelift.

For many small business people, developing an updated web presence can be more traumatic than launching the initial site. I feel like I just went through all of this! is a common refrain, even if the site was launched while Clinton was still in the White House.

The process can be made much less painful if some things are kept in mind:

Determine what it is you don't like about your existing web site.
Come up with a basic strategy, that you should continue to refine with your design/copywriting team.
Create a budget.
Don't do it yourself.
Double your timeline.

What all of these suggestions (and the additional ones listed in the article) boil down to is this: set some basic parameters for the project, and then be as flexible as possible within them. Inform the project with both good and bad experiences from your previous site.

Read the entire article here.

filed under: Pulling It All Together, Shameless Self-Promotion

On Monday, April 2, 2007, Mary wrote:

This is a great article. I am running into the same questions on a site that I manage. One tool that my designer put on the site was a basic survey that asks some simple questions about the site. This has helped to get some feedback about what the visitors of the site think about the existing site, in order to decide how to proceed with the redesign. For example I found out that 65 percent of my site visitors think the pages load too slow. I would have never thought about this! The survey I used was at www.ekoscore.com, and right now I'm still capturing data during this planning phase.

So in addition to all your great points - make sure you know why you need to make the changes. That will keep you focused.

- Mary.

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