Redesigning a small business website in 2010: a checklist

Before anyone opens Photoshop, write down the two or three things a visitor should do: call, fill out a quote form, buy, book, find directions. Then look at your Google Analytics for the last twelve months. Which pages get traffic from search? Which ones do people leave from immediately? What search terms bring people in? If you do not have Analytics installed, install it today and start the redesign in two months with real data.

Rules that save money later:

• One primary call to action per page, visible without scrolling.
• Phone number in the header of every page, as text so it can be read on a phone.
• Fewer pages, better written. Ten strong pages beat forty thin ones.
• Write the content before design starts. Designing around lorem ipsum is how projects go three months over.

Three years ago a small business site was hand-built HTML or an expensive proprietary CMS. In 2010 the sensible default is WordPress. It is free, it runs on any $7-a-month host, more than 10 percent of the web's largest sites use it, and the pool of designers and developers who know it is enormous, which keeps you from being locked in to one vendor.

Consider the alternatives only in specific cases. Drupal or Joomla if you need complex membership or directory functionality. A hosted builder such as Squarespace if you want to spend under $20 a month and have no custom needs. Magento or a hosted cart such as Shopify or Volusion if you are selling more than a handful of products, with WordPress running the content pages alongside.

Within WordPress, decide between a custom theme and a premium theme framework. Frameworks such as Thesis, Genesis and the WooThemes catalog cost $60 to $200, are well coded for search engines, and can be customized to look nothing like the default. For most businesses under 20 employees that is the right trade.

Buy the domain yourself, in your own name, at a registrar separate from your host, and keep the login. Every year we meet an owner whose former designer registered the domain and has disappeared. Turn on auto-renew. Keep hosting on a monthly or annual plan, not the three-year prepaid deals, so you can move.

Ask the host for PHP 5.2 or later and MySQL 5, daily backups you can download yourself, and a one-click WordPress installer. Avoid any host that cannot tell you where your backups are.

This is where redesigns go wrong. The old site has rankings, inbound links and pages people have bookmarked, and a redesign that ignores them can cut search traffic in half overnight.

1. Export a full list of current URLs. Use the Crawl Errors and Top Pages reports in Google Webmaster Tools, plus a crawl with Xenu Link Sleuth, which is free.
2. Map every old URL to a new one. Page for page where the content survives, to the closest relevant page where it does not.
3. Set up 301 permanent redirects in the .htaccess file before launch, not after. A 404 is a lost ranking. A 301 passes most of the credit.
4. Keep the page titles that rank. If "Plumber in Scottsdale AZ" is bringing traffic, the new page keeps that title tag.
5. Keep the content, rewrite the design. The copy that ranks can be tightened, but do not throw away pages because they are ugly.
6. Keep Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools verified through the switch so you can compare before and after.

• Fixed width around 960 pixels. Most US visitors are on 1024 by 768 or wider, and a 960 grid fits them all.
• Readable type. 13 to 14 pixel body text minimum, dark gray on white. The 10-pixel gray text era is over.
• No Flash for navigation or content. The iPad launched in April and does not play it, the iPhone never did, and search engines cannot read it. A Flash photo slideshow in the header is tolerable if the site works without it, but jQuery sliders do the same job and work everywhere.
• Consider mobile. Somewhere between 3 and 8 percent of visits to typical business sites now come from phones. A full mobile site is overkill for most, but the WPtouch plugin for WordPress gives you a clean phone version for free.
• Test in IE7, IE8, Firefox, Safari and Chrome before sign-off, with IE6 as readable but not pixel-perfect.

Install the All in One SEO Pack or similar plugin so each page has its own title and description. Create an XML sitemap and submit it in Webmaster Tools. Put your business name, address and phone in the footer of every page in text, which also supports your Google Places listing. Make the contact form submit to an address somebody reads daily, and set up a Thank You page so you can track form submissions as goals in Analytics.

• Goals and analytics review complete before design starts
• Content written and approved
• Domain and hosting in the business's name
• Platform and theme chosen
• Old URL inventory and redirect map
• Design signed off on one home page and one inside page before the rest is built
• Browser testing
• Redirects live, Analytics and Webmaster Tools verified
• Backups scheduled and tested
• Owner trained to edit pages, add a post and swap an image

Expect six to twelve weeks from kickoff to launch when the content is ready, and most delays come from content and approvals, not code.

We treat a redesign as part of a connected brand, growth and technology plan rather than a new coat of paint. Discovery covers analytics, search rankings, the sales process and what customers actually ask. We plan the site map, content, redirects and hosting together, with the brand identity and any paid or local search in view. We build on WordPress or on whatever platform the business genuinely needs, test it, and train the team. Then we improve it after launch against the goals we agreed on, because the launch is the start of the site's useful life, not the end of the project.

For an established service business running a six-year-old static site nobody could update, we led a full digital transformation: new positioning, a WordPress rebuild with a complete redirect map, a lead-tracking setup and training for the office team. Organic traffic held through launch and grew in the following quarters, and the team now publishes its own updates. You can read about that engagement at our transformation work.