Businesses need to regularly revisit and refine their digital assets to keep them fresh, optimized, and aligned with current best practices. If your website has become outdated or unresponsive to user needs, a complete redesign might be your best path forward. Companies can realize significant benefits from carrying out a redesign. For instance:
- An improved user experience (UX) can help you forge more impactful connections with potential customers.
- You can elevate your branding and curate a consistent brand identity across the entire site.
- Creating new content can improve your search engine optimization (SEO) results.
- With targeted improvements, you can boost both lead generation and conversion rates.
Unfortunately, businesses often make the mistake of entrusting their website redesign to an internal IT team that may lack the required time, knowledge or expertise. This can lead to five distinct risks and problems.
1. Lack of Specialized Expertise and Product Knowledge
Web design is a dynamic field that requires specialized insights and training. Your IT team might have the technical skills to build a new website. But that doesn’t mean they have the necessary user-centric design skills or long-term vision perspective. In the B2B world, users have elevated needs when they visit a commercial website. For instance, they often need to find precise, targeted, and technical information. They also expect to find the info just as quickly as they could on a B2C website.
A suboptimal or poor website redesign will make this difficult or impossible. When that happens, potential customers will likely move on. To overcome this challenge, you need design thinking led by experts with advanced knowledge and insights.
2. Limited Website Redesign Resources and Bandwidth
In most business settings, internal teams focus on IT management, administration, and security. These important duties take priority over their adjacent or supplementary tasks. Assigning a website redesign to your internal IT team may take their attention from these core duties while stretching their resources beyond normal limits. Your IT team members may face strain under the added workload. As a result, this could extend your redesign project’s timeline and ultimately endanger the quality of your finished product.
3. Insufficient Focus on User-Centric Design
To execute a successful website redesign, you must prioritize user-centric design informed by important research tools like customer journey mapping. While some members of your IT staff may have a basic level of familiarity with user-centric design concepts, specialists can leverage far more advanced and valuable research techniques. What’s more, you risk potentially serious consequences by neglecting the importance of user-centric approaches to design. When the unique needs and preferences of your B2B customers aren’t built into your website design, you’re more likely to end up with an unresponsive and inadequate final product. Specifically, user-centric design requires a close analysis of:
- Who is visiting your website
- What they came to find
- How they can use your site to answer their question
- Why they should choose your business to solve their problem or issue
Effective approaches to answering these questions emphasize simplicity, concision, and precision relevance.
4. Lack of Industry Insights
For your website redesign to connect with users, project leaders must understand your industry. Your internal IT staff will have baseline knowledge of your business, and some members may even have more relevant or advanced insights. But IT professionals don’t generally have the industry-specific market research insight needed to craft a website that speaks to users in a powerful and direct way. Similarly, your website redesign must incorporate several fundamental concepts that are difficult for non-experts to nail. These include:
- Cross-device and cross-platform compatibility
- The seamless incorporation of multiple user touchpoints and contact channels
- Logically optimized approaches to internal linking
- Maximized accessibility, data protection, and user privacy
- Consistent and effective branding across the entire site
Note that failures in these areas carry risks beyond simple website redesign challenges. They can also result in regulatory or compliance violations, which could carry fines and other costly penalties.
UpTop Perspective
Accessibility on a website has often been deprioritized over “more important” initiatives. Only when businesses begin to perceive accessibility as a missed business opportunity or a potential regulatory violation do they start to pay attention.
5. Lack of Scalability and Future-Proofing
Non-experts will face website redesign challenges related to both scalability and future-proofing as well. Anticipating future technological advancements is essential to the success of any redesign project because it allows you to build them into your site today. This extends its usability timeline and also supports a more seamless future user experience. As a result, you can gain and retain critical competitive advantages with respect to organizational branding and values.
At UpTop, we’ve worked with many clients who have found that their internal IT teams face significant skills and insight limitations. These typically extend to:
- An inability to think beyond increments to consider the bigger picture
- Strictly tactical thinking that can’t adapt to strategic goals
- Institutionalized perspectives are unable to extend beyond what’s already familiar
- A slow work pace beset by struggles to handle large, sweeping initiatives
Let’s look at a case study in which we helped resolve a client’s website redesign challenges after they had initially assigned the project to its internal IT team.
Website Redesign Case Study: Transforming Healthcare Accessibility
The client’s internal IT and product teams faced serious friction as they attempted a comprehensive website redesign. The client’s internal Product & Marketing team gave IT personnel a long and complex list of business and user requirements, expecting the IT team to execute them. Due to various challenges, the IT group struggled to carry out the Product & Marketing team’s requests. But after taking over the project, UpTop was able to guide the redesign to a successful conclusion.
Challenges Faced
- Both the Product & Marketing and IT teams lacked communicative leadership.
- The IT team didn’t correctly scope the project during the initial stages of planning.
- IT personnel lacked the technical, design, and project management skills needed to meet the Product & Marketing team’s demands.
- Underperforming IT team members weren’t held accountable.
- Multiple attempts to resolve the challenges with outside help resulted in incomplete efforts that created more work.
The UpTop Approach
UpTop joined the website redesign project after months of struggles. Following a comprehensive project audit and assessment, we implemented these strategies:
- UpTop led a cross-team discovery session with stakeholders from both the IT and Product & Marketing groups.
- We mediated communications between the teams, added technical expertise and leadership, and filled gaps in the internal team’s technical capabilities.
- We worked with the client’s new director of project management to address the internal team’s performance shortcomings and redefine an attainable technical scope for the project.
- Drawing on our UX strategy insights, we created a visionary design prototype that created a viable framework for moving the project forward.
The end result was a website redesign that prioritized the user experience and met the needs of the Product & Marketing team. Read more about the project.
Entrust Your Website Redesign to the Experts
B2B websites carry elevated requirements because their users typically have more complex, precise, and technical needs. Internal IT groups may have the technical ability to construct websites. But they often lack the project management acumen, creative skills, design aplomb, and user-centric, long-term focus required to generate optimal results. UpTop has helped dozens of clients execute highly successful website redesigns. Our agency offers a unique combination of design skills, research capabilities, industry insight, and technical proficiency. This combination of competencies empowers us to confidently and capably lead website redesign projects of any size or scope. See what clients have to say about our services, and contact us to discuss your B2B website redesign needs in detail.
