CT No.34: My website redesign research process
Blending SEO, UX and technical research before developing anything at all
It’s a weird time. You don’t need to hear from me about it. Best of luck to everyone, and stay safe out there.
But! It is a really great time to dive into the lonesome depths of a digital research project, so here’s my website redesign research process.
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What you should know about content-driven website redesigns in 2020
Although they are on the internet, a magical place where some people still believe work happens for free, true website redesigns are neither fast nor cheap. A website programs many machines — which are not really that smart, you know — to present your content in a similar style across many contexts, for a variety of uses. That’s a hard task! If you receive any business awareness or activity from your content, a website redesign should involve significant research and planning for improved back-end and front-end performance.
What worked for your website in 2010 will likely not work in 2020. If your website has been iterating and changing with user behavior over time, good for you! You must work at the New York Times. So glad to hear you’re not going anywhere!
But for the rest of you: a redesign is a significant effort. If you want to move beyond your homegrown Squarespace or Wordpress website and invest in your website content, you’ll want to invest in research first. Researching user behavior and technical requirements will position your site to drive revenue from your content.
A content-centric website:
Is designed to accommodate regularly published content across multiple media
Takes at least two months, and more like six or eight, from start to finish
Costs at least $10,000 (if you make more than $1M in revenue)
Requires some kind of custom back-end work to ensure the site speed is fast
Needs to be sustainable on the back end (authorship experience) as well as on the front end (user experience)
Has massive return-on-investment and is a really fun process and not a headache, I promise
Beyond colors and fonts: The content-centric redesign
Content-driven redesigns laser focus on content presentation and sustainable growth. You may need to restructure how content is set up on the back end to prepare for future growth.
If you grow your business from readers and subscribers, you’ll need to research user needs and behaviors. Before embarking on a redesign, you should have a data-backed idea — and not just anecdotes or what you learned about design in college — of how your specific users interact with your website.
Even if you’ve worked with your audience for a long time, you still need to put in the work of research. Outside perspective is key for a redesign. You’ll likely find new opportunities to grow and better meet your users’ needs. You’ll identify new audiences who want to interact with your content. And you can’t define those in a two-hour meeting without talking to anyone outside your team.
My background in search/SEO and user experience has shaped the research process below. It differs from other content development processes because I’m not just sprinkling in keywords after content is developed — I’m basing my website and content development strategy on core findings from that search research. (Soapbox says: You can’t just “SEO your website” after the redesign is completed. Good search research should be the anchor for your website as a whole.)
To align teams on these data-backed ideas, I create a brief or strategy deck. The research is a process — anywhere between two and eight weeks — but it can save significant time in development costs and extend your time between redesigns. The research process creates a data structure and vision that can save you from another redesign two years down the line.
Following this process means that you will:
Build a website that lasts 4-5 years as the foundation for your digital marketing or publication
Be able to generate revenue from your website content — and not just through display ads, but actual membership or subscription revenue
Save money on advertising over time. Good websites have content that is discoverable through organic means without the support of advertising
Grow an audience who cares about what you have to say, which will create immense brand loyalty and sustain your business long-term
The UX/SEO/content-driven website research process
Quick goals. In a quick stakeholder meeting (30-60 minutes), identify high-level internal goals. Figure out what you’re trying to accomplish with the website beyond updating look and feel. Some common goals:
Implement a better subscription and revenue system
Attract more traffic or improve organic search visibility
Create a better experience for existing audiences
Search query research. Dive deep (deep!) how people are actually searching for your website, as well as identifying entities that Google likely identifies as related to your business. Some day I’ll go deep into my query research process, but for now start with Google Ads’ keyword planner or your preferred search research tool and work from there.
User survey. If you haven’t done an audience or user survey recently, now’s the perfect time. What do active users want to see? How do they use the site? Let them tell you. (I use Typeform, but there are many tools that can assist you with a survey.)
Performance analysis. What’s resonated with audiences in the past? What pages perform best in organic search or from direct sources? What’s not working or not being found? Keep this high level — you’ll be auditing in depth later.
Social listening. Do people talk about your business on Twitter, LinkedIn or forums? Now’s a good time to scour to see how people talk about topics related to your business. I use tools like Buzzsumo, Brand 24 and RivalIQ for this process.
Competitive research. I don’t go hog wild here, but I look at how competitors show up in search results and social. Have they already optimized their websites for search? What are they doing that resonates with customers (and how can we add more value)?
Audit. If your website is more than 50 pages, you’ll want to audit. Which content is the baby and which is the bathwater? Often in redesigns, some stakeholders say “everything sucks and it should all go.”
Sometimes that’s true, but more often websites have successful content hidden in an outdated design. If you’re getting steady traffic from organic search, it’s crucial to your redesign’s success that you maintain at least the idea of the high-performing content. Any pages that are ranking for any keywords above 30 in organic search results should be evaluated for quality and maintained in some form or another.
You may rewrite or revise your website’s current high performing content — but it still needs to be present on your new website to maintain search equity. To do this, you need to audit, page by page, and understand what has to stay, what can be revised or consolidated, and what content should be retired.
In-depth stakeholder interviews. With that research in your back pocket, it’s time to talk with stakeholders. You’ll want to talk with sales and marketing teams, technical and IT collaborators, as well as content production or editorial.
Basically, if a department depends on a website, you should spend at least 30 minutes talking with them about what they need the website to do and how they’ve observed users on the website. To avoid the trap of a “here’s everything wrong with our website” complaint session, come prepared specific questions. In this stage, I spend time with people who input the content to find out how they’re trained on content production and identify where we can add efficiencies.
Technical requirements. How is the database currently set up? Where is audience data stored? How does the content management system integrate with email and social media? What’s the site speed like? Is the current server setup working? Is the website secure? Is Google seeing the website the way it’s meant to be seen? All of these questions will need to go into the brief or RFP documents for developers.
From all of these steps, I create a brief or a strategy deck, depending on the size and needs of the project. Next week I’ll dive deeper into what goes into that document.
Are you going to use the above process for a project? Hooray! If so, would you mind sharing with a friend or social network? You can just press
A writing app that discourages your writerly tendency to distraction: Ulysses review
For decades, writing apps have hoped to overtake the behemoth of Microsoft Word, that bloated, ugly software that we all learned to type papers on. People write all the time about how Word is a shitty program, yet many writers still use it, because it’s comfortable and familiar.
The free, sharable Google Docs has replaced Word in other instances — and it’s what I push most teams toward for content editing and management.
But when you’re writing a lot, like thousands of words a day, being chained to Google Docs is terrifying, since most of its best features are cloud-based and sometimes the whole point of writing is to get off the internet. And Word’s not even remotely built for the fluid editing that you need as a digital writer.
Note-taking apps like Evernote and Notion enable more dynamic, drag-and-drop content management, but at the end of the day they’re designed for jotting, not the personal and deep process of writing and editing. Evernote’s specifically marvelous for phone writing, along with making grocery lists. However, those apps don’t have a lot of flexibility in some of the more helpful features of writing apps: specifically annotations and comments.
Like any writer, I’m a master procrastinator. As I embarked on the process of writing, annotating and researching, I decided to look for an app that would better fit my Big Project needs. A tabula rasa app, an app I haven’t yet sullied with opinions.
Ulysses at a glance
Ulysses is the best markdown editor I’ve used, with customizable themes and easy keyword or drag-and-drop organization. Ulysses counts your words for you, so you can see exactly how productive or prolix you’ve been this week. It enables you to set goals of characters or pages or time or reading time. It does all those easy language counting things.
It’s an exercise in hubris to name a piece of work Ulysses, but men keep on doing it. But Ulysses is a great app for a writing journey, a well-built boat that can be prettified and decorated and brought into a fleet, then back out on its own. It enables diversions but pushes a writer back to the words.
Ulysses offers:
Full-screen document writing for when you need to stop looking at tabs
All the best word processor features and none of the worst ones (why do you need to draw a picture in your Word document???)
Speech to text
Side-by-side editing
Well-designed built-in themes, if you’re like me and just want the program to function and look nice
Custom themes, if you’re a persnickety prettifier
Integrations with Wordpress, Ghost or Medium
Incorporations of annotations, comments and footnotes as separate content types (as they should be)
Typewriter mode, or fixed scrolling, for when you want to focus on one line at a time
Version history, because I can’t use anything that doesn’t auto-save with version history at this point
It’s fast and not buggy and lets you copy and paste and move text with ease. It’s funny how you don’t notice how slow your text editor was until you use a really fast one.
I recommend Ulysses for writers who are working on a large writing project, as well as other side projects. I recommend Ulysses for me.
Content tech links of the week
Two new publications you should check out if you’re homebound and looking for something new to read:
Protocol -Daily tech industry coverage from the creator of Politico
The Markup - NYC-based coverage of the inner workings of algorithms
Visit The Content Technologist! About. Ethics. Features Legend. Pricing Legend.