Revamping your website? Reorganizing? Redesigning? Read this first.

So, you want to redesign and/or reorganize your site? Great! We love it. Let’s get you through this process in the most efficient way we can.

First, we would love to spend some time with you and talk through your plans. Submit a ticket with a short summary of your plan, and we’ll chat.

Considerations before starting a redesign or reorganization of a website.

There are significant issues that can be creating by moving files around and changing filenames within your site, even as part of a revamp or redesign.

Big issue #1: broken links.

Unless your site is very new, any movement of files or folders within your site, or the changing of filenames or folder names can cause breakage in links to that webpage or group of webpages.

Big issue #2: search engine authority lost.

Is your site appearing near the top of Google for any search terms? Moving or changing webpages within your site will take it back to the start and the visibility of that page will need to be rebuilt.

What is the best path for your redesign or reorganization?

If you wish to proceed, let’s walk through your different options.

Is your website very new, or not visited very often?

• Yes? The “big issues” may not have much affect on your site. Skip down to “Live Revamp”.

• No? Move onto the next item.

Are you interested in only updating your homepage?

• Yes? We can provide a subfolder with a new homepage and when you’re ready, we can assist in taking it live. Submit a ticket with us and we’ll get you started.

• No? Move onto the next item.

Should this be a new website?

• If you’re getting rid of most of your site and starting fresh, we can start a brand new site for you instead. Submit a ticket with us and we can set that up.

Somewhere in the middle?

• You may just want to submit a ticket with us and we can help put you on the right path.

Live Revamp

So… you need to reorganize or redesign a significant portion of your website, it’s highly trafficked and/or it has been around for longer than 6 months.

Concerns

Changing filenames can cause significant issues.

• It breaks current URLs linking to it.

• The pages lose all SEO authority gained.

• Any printed references will no longer work.

Moving files

• This breaks external URLs linking to it.

• The CMS will rewrite any dependency links within it and republish those pages.

CMS issues

• If you copy a file and delete the original file, you will lose:

  • all CMS links to it (dependency links)

  • all version history.

Best practices

Completely reorganizing your site? Make a plan! There is a sample plan below as a table to get you started.

• Do it in chunks over a longer period of time.

• Do not copy files. Keep track of the pages you want to keep and the pages you want to get rid of.

• As above, so below. Try to keep the file structure and breadcrumb structure the same as the structure from the visitor’s side.

• Simplify your navigation. Use landing pages instead of putting all the subdirectories in the navigation. You can have different subdirectories as you go down. We can turn them on for you.

Sample plan of website hierarchy

Legend: pages = normal font | folders = bold font, no .pcf

Root/home

• index.pcf

• channels

  • index.pcf

  • netflix

    • index.pcf

    • comedy.pcf

    • action.pcf

  • hulu

    • index.pcf

    • network-shows.pcf

    • favorite-shows

      • handmaids-tale.pcf

      • greys-anatomy.pcf

• publications

  • 2019

    • index.pcf

  • 2020

    • index.pcf

    • 1st-quarter

      • index.pcf

    • 2nd-quarter

      • index.pcf

Sample plan of swapping out files

Current location & filename	New location & filename
(new)	/channels/netflix/index.pcf
/channels/netflix/comedy/index.html	/channels/netflix/comedy.pcf (and remove /comedy/ folder)
/publications/2019.pcf	/publications/2019/index.pcf

Responsibilities

What will Web do?

• Create a new

  • Folder for a few new pages, if you’re just revamping your homepage, and perhaps one or two others.

  • New development homepage, landing page skeleton, or stock template.

  • New website, if needed.

  • Assistance “going live” when you’re ready to go.

    • “Code swap” your index.html and any other critical pages.

What will you do?

• Create new content.

  • Pages.

  • Copy.

  • Structure. (We can help you get started.)

  • Design.

• Edit photos (Creative can help create images if needed.)

• Convert any PDFs into webpages as needed.

What will Web NOT do?

• While there may be some redirection that needs to occur, we will not redirect all of the old locations to the new. We have to create these manually, they are hard to maintain and can cause problems down the road.