Making a business argument for redesigning our business website

[Brian Meyer]

Hello Hello.

I’m working at a company that has a bad website.
I’m going to give a presentation to our decision makers as to why I think I should be tasked with redesigning/developing a new site…

My reasons..

• Search Engine Visibility is extremely poor.
• Functionally, the site is badly designed. The navigation hierarchy doesn’t make sense, information is too segregated, and the site doesn’t work well on a variety of computers/web browsers.
• Text is rendered as image which creates usability issues, and further hinders search engine visibility.
• It has a dated, generic, amateur look to it.
• It is slow.

I’m having trouble drafting a lucid business case for redeveloping our site. I believe their attitude is that it’s, “good enough” and ultimately not that important to their core business objectives.

Frankly, I’m realizing that I’m not that good at selling this redesign. I don’t have a business background, and the language and business logic aren’t intuitive too me.

Does anyone have suggestions related to my quandary? I’d like to pose this question to other design forums too if anyone has suggestions..

[michaeloneill]

Can we see the site ?

[Brian Meyer]

Sorry, I can’t disclose the site. It’s not all that relevant to my question though!

[whiteInkDesign]

You list some pretty solid reasons to redesign. Just expand on them, explaining why the current set up is, for example, resulting in poor search engine visibility, and how a redesign could change this.
With skeptics a big thing is to list key benefits of the redesign, though you do have to keep perspective that some of the results can be hard to measure.
If you’re using some kind of site analytics, reference those numbers and how they can be improved.
Depending on the business, consider showing their site compared to a competitor’s site that you think is working.
In the end, some businesses just don’t think they need to a good web presence and there’s nothing you can do about factors beyond your control. I recently talked with a restaurant owner who’s site looks like it was made in 1999. After presenting a case for redesign, the owner was still extremely apathetic to the idea due to 1. Business was good and consistent so he didn’t really see a redesign benefiting him that much and 2. (I only know this because I have friends you work at said restaurant) He’s extremely tight with his money.

[Brian Meyer]

WhiteInk, those tips are extremely helpful.

Specifically, comparing our business site to others. We’re in an architecture/medical/planning industry. Our site, by contrast to some of the industry leaders, really looks amateur.

Analytics is a great strategy to explore as well. Their response will likely be more favorable to, “this should generate an additional 2000 visitors annually, a 47% increase over last year” versus, “we’ll have a really good looking site that will look better and totally get more hits”.

Our company is busy and successful, so there isn’t this hunger to market for business we don’t have time to do. Your story about the the restaurant owner rings true here. However, I would say that this attitude is problematic, presupposing the future. Websites are time intensive projects that will be deployed in an environment that may look slightly different than the one we’re in today. As such, one might argue that it’s important to improve upon what you can, so that you don’t wake up one day to find yourself behind the curve.

[Author]

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