I run a website that has grown considerable over the past few years. I built the site from scratch and over time the look and user experience of the site has gotten a bit out dated (however the site is still growing pretty well). I'm considering a total UI/UX facelift for the site and am willing to invest some money to have a designer involved. Since I know HTML/CSS quite well I was thinking of having a designer redesign (but not code) the 3 or 4 critical pages of the site and then take it from there. I'm curious of others opinions about how I should proceed and what I should expect to invest to get a good design for 3 or 4 pages of the site. Thanks!
Make careful note of your current IA. Don't change URL structure if possible. Make note of links in Google Webmaster Tools Mark important changes in Google Analytics as annotations Implement the change on test domain ( may be same domain name but different TLD , keep crawlers out during dev stage ) Back up everything: full ftp, database, sitemap/s, robots.txt, etc Ensure that you don't do down for extended period of time during the transfer. my 2 cents
Thanks for the reply, all very good points. I guess my focus of the question was more about how to find the right designer - run a contest? And what to expect from the designer, a PSD, html, css? How much of the site do I need them to design? Is it common to have someone design a few pages and then use that as a template going forward?
Forget the "psd" approach.... Not sure what your site is focused on or what your niche / target audience is, but work on a layout for content first then fill in the areas needed with aesthetics.
Find a site that's designed the way you like, and has a link to the developer. Contact that developer.
Starting out with a "design" made by a "designer" -- as in some artsy fartsy type who draws a pretty picture in photoshop and has the muda to call themselves a web designer, is most ALWAYS the road to /FAIL/ -- because those artists as a rule of thumb know nothing of emissive/additive colorspace (universally they're only taught reflective/subtractive), accessibility in terms of different screen sizes and measurement metrics, much less bothered ever reading accessibility guidelines like the WCAG. The end result is most always broken buggy inaccessible trash thanks to basically shoe-horning you content a crappy little stripe fixed layout. Beware the "but I can do it in photoshop" trap... because a LOT of design elements, like fixed height containers, equal height elements, fixed width elements fitting the page width, are to be brutally frank, NOT viable for web deployment if you care about accessibility, want to add things like responsive layout, or don't want to spend the rest of your life dicking with the code every time you want to change just one paragraph! Start out with your content as plaintext or a reasonable facsimile. Put it into a logical/sensible order. Mark it up using semantic markup -- which is to say say what things ARE with zero concern for what it's going to look like on all the different targets (like screen, small screen/handheld, print)... that way you have a nice simple easy to use site that search engines, screen readers and people who turn off the extra stuff can actually use. Then you can use CSS and media targets (and the new media queries) to bend that markup to your will for all the different layouts. Yes, layouts... plural... at this point you may have to add a couple DIV or SPAN as hooks, but try not to say WHAT presentation those are applying (this includes your classes/ID's) since presentation has NO MALFING BUSINESS IN THE HTML. Only once you have logical document structure, semantic markup, and a working layout, do you bring in the PSD jockey to make the goof assed graphics to hang on the layout... because, and I've said this a billion times and it's a VERY bitter pill for artsy types to swallow -- people do NOT visit websites for the goofy graphics around the content, they visit for the content, so START with the content! Same goes for 'goofy animations' and 'stupid javascript trickery' -- more often than not it gets in the way thanks to taking longer to download, distracting from the actual page content, getting in the way of actually using the page in a sensible manner, and quite often provide no fallbacks should god forbid someone block plugins or scripting due to being smart enough not to trust them on some platforms, if at all. (see all the people who download the 'noscript' browser extensions). See 99% of the idiotic rubbish people bloat out their websites with using jquery or mootools, which seems to exist just to stroke the programmer's... ego, and IMHO have no malfing business on websites in the first damned place. Also beware of tools -- Dreamweaver is a steaming pile that the only thing about it that can be considered professional grade tools are the people promoting it's use. Google analytics is a waste of bandwidth and handshaking time since if you need more information that your server logs through tools like Analog or Webalizer can provide, you're wasting time obsessing over statistics that could be better spent building content of value.' ... and honestly, having done enough site overhauls, do NOT obsess on preserving everything (sorry nicole_75, I have to disagree here) -- it takes at most a month for the engines to catch up on changes to the URL's. If you're going to relaunch, do it properly instead of crippling yourself obsessing over preserving every last stupid little inbound link. At MOST, 302 the most important of the old links. If anything on a rewrite if you end up with more semantic markup than you have, content of interest better organized than you have... worrying about the old **** is just a waste of time.