Website Redesign – How Important is it?

This blog isn’t about stats or best practices. It’s my own personal journey into the realm of website redesign which I’m currently suffering through.

I am not a web designer. I hire web designers and I actively participate as much as I am able (hopefully without frustrating our very nice web team).

We are redesigning two sites and both are set to go live Jan. 1, 2011. First is the COS Productions website. I have to say that I am so excited about this redesign. Sometimes you come up with a natural evolution concept for your site that you know is perfect and this one is exactly that for me. We have spent so much time working on “How do people want to interact with us? And “What do people seem to want the most and how do they want it?” The entire site is shifting from “presentation”, meaning we give you our information in an organized fashion and you look through it until you find what you’re looking for, to this paradigm shift of “serving”.  We want to have a website that feels good to the person visiting it. It lets them know we care about them and what their needs are.

Of course that means a lot of work. Most of it in content, some of it in multimedia.
We have hired someone who is a communications expert. She understands what we’re wanting to do with the changes and she will help us communicate that clearly with our visitors. Very excited about that too.

The other site we are working on is HUGE. We will be creating a new Reader’s Entertainment site that will be functional with mobile, online and television. That is a huge undertaking. We have to follow all the specs for Google TV network and mobile. That means we have to have three sites that function just a little differently according to how you land on the page.

We will also have new content that’s exciting and a lot more interaction on the site than ever before.

It feels overwhelming. I hate being technologically challenged when it comes to learning what I can or can’t do and why, but I love learning, so that evens out I guess.

There’s so much to consider now that online and portable and television are all accessible to our content. Or that our content is accessible to all of those different venues. But, we’re about to see a huge explosion of opportunities and I can’t wait!