Site Makeover

When It’s Time For A Makeover

There comes a time in the life of every long-lived site when it needs a partial or complete makeover. Reasons for the makeover or redesign vary but several reasons could be:

Internet technology has changed and your site is obsolete. It could be something as simple as removing in-line style tags and using a more versatile external style sheet. It could also be that browser capabilities and HTML have changed and your site is acceptable but out of date.
The focus of your site needs to be changed because your business focus has changed. New products have replaced old products or the company has reinvented itself.
Search engine rankings are good but your competitors have shoved your listings to the third or fourth page and site optimization alone isn’t enough the regain your lead.
You have a framed site but realize that while it works it could be better and easier for your users to bookmark a page or to navigate the site.

All of the above plus many more are good reasons for considering a site makeover or a site redesign. However, before you trash the old site in favor of the latest web fad, consider what needs to be done and exactly what the goals are for your site makeover.

Analyze your site logs.

Are you losing site visitors too quickly?
What are the most popular pages?
What do your regular site visitors like or dislike?
Do you want a brand new look or only a slight change?

If your site is getting good daily traffic, you may not want to completely change the site, only liven it up and improve its usability and search engine ranking.

After a serious review, you decide on a site makeover. What are some things to keep in mind so as to have the least impact on regular site visitors while allowing you to attract more visitors?

First:
If you can reuse the old page file names you will prevent your frequent visitors from having to start over. By retaining the old file names, current user bookmarks will still be valid, assuming you retain the same directory structure. If a page file name cannot be reused, then you should keep the old page active. You can either redirect the user to the appropriate new page or display the old page with a note that the page is obsolete and include a link to the new page.

While redirects work, I prefer to keep the old page but remove all graphics and all page links except to the new page. If there isn’t an equivalent new page, then link to a site map page. Also, add a note to have the visitor update their bookmark from the old page to the new page. This method is more search engine and user friendly because the user understands why he or she is being redirected and will not think they have the wrong page or the wrong site.

Over time the old pages will disappear from search engine listings because there are no links to the old pages. After 6 to 12 months you may decide to remove the old pages, especially if your site logs indicate they aren’t getting any traffic.

Second:
As you create the title names for your new pages, try to always include the product or company name to improve search engine ranking and to provide additional information to the user. Do the same for all links to these pages. Instead of having a link to "tools", subdivide and be more descriptive: "power tools", "hand tools", or "cordless tools" - you get the idea.

Third:
If possible, complete the total site before uploading to your host. If your site is divided into sections, you may elect to upload each section as it is done. However before uploading, check all of your pages for spelling errors, verify all links, and check all page titles.

Fourth:
As a last touch, create a custom "page not found" 404 page that looks like your other site pages. This is much better than using the host’s or the browser’s 404 page, plus you can provide links to your main site pages and to your site map page.

Fifth And Last:
Create a robots.txt file and exclude unnecessary or uninformative pages from search engine indexing. For more information on the type of pages to exclude and how to create a robots.txt file, refer to the robots.txt article.