Last week I shared three keys to a successful website redesign on my TikTok (be sure to follow me and check out my videos). In the video, I discussed the importance of having a vision, a plan, and a set of detailed goals that are vocalized at the start of a project and then articulated again at every step in the process.

For this post, I wanted to expand on this topic and share a recent example of how a vision, plan, and set of detailed goals to help illustrate how these three keys can help.

A website redesign for a nonprofit that creates lasting change in the Americas

Partners of the Americas is a nonprofit organization that implements programs across the western hemisphere to promote social and economic change. They worked with me and my team to unify their brand, redesign their website, and create a more integrated ecosystem.

A vision

At the start of the project, we created a vision statement to drive the entire project and ensure that all of our efforts are in support of a larger strategy.

“The Partners website should be approachable, discoverable, and empowering to all who engage with it.”

Vision Statement

Here are a few examples of how our vision statement influenced various aspects of the website:

• Design – A warm, rich color palette makes the site approachable. This expanded their initial brand color palette.
• Development Feature – A focus on enhanced search and in-page promotional space increases discoverability throughout the website. 
• Development Feature- Elementor empowers site admins to create the necessary page layouts.
• Development Feature – Views and filters empower users to find what they need also helping discoverability of content. 
• Marketing – Ensuring page translations (that support both automated and manual translations) allows for multilingual marketing efforts and helps ensure the content is both approachable and discoverable.

A plan

The project involved a migration from Drupal to WordPress. It also included a number of pages that needed to be unpublished and a complete restructuring of their website to provide more hierarchy. With all of this information we created a plan to migrate content, redirect the URLs that changed and were unpublished, and a way to handle translations for pages both manually created and automated.

Having a plan meant that we thought about and planned for 404s and dead links. It made sure that the site worked across browsers. And ensuring that all features worked across all devices. 

A series of detailed goals

We’re still measuring our goals as the website launched in May of this year. So far we’re hitting our goals which we use as both success metrics and leading indicators for the project’s impact.

Some of our goals:

1. Increase organic traffic by 15% – This allowed us to measure organic impact. A better user experience and more optimized metadata and better site structure should increase organic traffic. 
2. Increase pages per session by 1 – This measures site engagement. We expected that exit rates were high because people couldn’t find what they wanted, so creating a more discoverable website should increase pages per session. 
3. Increase average time on site for mobile by :30 – This measures user empowerment. Users should spend more time on the site if the features we provided encourage them to engage and keep digging into the site content. 

While there are lots of things that go into ensuring a website redesign is successful, these are my three keys that help set up redesign projects for success.