When you make the decision to redesign, much of the excitement centres on the future, and all the exciting potential it holds. The big plans for the new site become the focus of everyone's attention, and the existing site tends to hold little interest.
After all, if the decision has already been made to replace or update it, why bother critiquing the existing site? Why not just move on and invest in the future?
The truth is, a comprehensive audit and assessment of today's activities is one of the most important ways to invest in tomorrow.
It is remarkable how many site owners do not have a clear record of anything as basic as the contents of their existing site, let alone a comprehensive assessment of its customers, its usage, or the market standards set by its competitors. Without this, how can any secure decisions be made about its future?
Even less common is an understanding of the strengths of the existing site. In so many cases, sites are redesigned more extensively than they should be, throwing away good features or qualities that could have been retained.
An assessment of the current state-of-play should involve a range of analytical activities, and should make use of a range of techniques that help the entire project team access the information and make practical use of it.
At a basic level, auditing exactly what exists is essential. Sitemaps and content indexes are the bare minimum, including all linked files like PDF documents and PowerPoint presentations. It is important not to forget that content and valuable data can live in many peripheral documents like email archives and registered user databases.
This auditing should extend to processes and information – how the site performs key functions, what information is captured, and what formats it is collected in.
Alongside the architecture and content, the visual language of the site should be captured and collated so that its elements can be assessed as part of the future design development.
Diagrams are a valuable part of the analytical process at this stage. More than just documentary aids, diagrams help to present complex information in simpler, more accessible forms, and can help highlight issues relating to organisation, content weighting and processes more effectively than any other method.
More complex assessments focus on customers and markets, but they need not be a painful or arduous process. Assessing these effectively is a crucial step in moving any project forward, and any effort will be repaid with a more solid base for future plans.
Customer-focused assessment can span a wide range of activities, from focus groups and usability testing to more straightforward profiling and journey mapping based on site usage statistics and general market patterns. The output from these should be a clear set of results showing what customers do on the current site, what works well, what they like, and often the easiest to extract, what they dislike.
Assessing the peer group, the site's closest competitors, is essential. A clear understanding of how your existing site stacks up against those sites most likely to be visited and used by your own customers helps establish where your existing site is weak (and again, strong) in relative terms: an absolutely vital measure of performance.
However, it has far greater importance than this alone. We firmly believe that the most successful sites fit into their market as aggressively as they stand out from them: conforming to accepted standards for that market delivers an immediate level of acceptance among customers and increases the impact of the distinctive personality. The 'stand out' is enhanced by the 'fit in'. And in order to fit in, you need to understand what you are fitting into.
Beyond the direct peer group, there is much to learn from the broader market: assessing trends and developments in an equivalent market, or set of companies, can help understand what the broader standards expected by the same type of customer are.
Clearly everyone will move on: customers and competitors alike. But crystal-ball gazing is tough: predicting the future behaviour of anyone or anything is difficult, and is rarely truly accurate. Assessing today is the only certain analysis we can perform, and from this we can plot a course for the future that is based on solid information.
You can build for the future without this knowledge, but you'll always be building on shaky foundations. Given how accessible this information can be, why take the chance?