The website is not the deliverable

A website redesign is usually scoped as a design and build project with a launch date. Eighteen months later the site is visibly worse than it was at launch, everyone blames the team who has been maintaining it, and a new redesign gets scoped. The cycle is so consistent that most companies have simply budgeted for it.

The failure is not in the design. It is in what the design assumed about who would be filling it in.

Decay is a modelling problem

Design a page and you have designed one page. Model your content and you have designed every page anybody will make for the next five years, including the ones you have not thought of. Most redesigns do the first thing and hope.

The symptom is a CMS full of free-text rich-text fields. Every one of those is a decision deferred to a marketer at nine on a Friday, and they will not make the same decision you would have. Within a year the visual system has been sanded down to whatever the rich-text editor makes easy.

Every free-text rich-text field is a design decision deferred to a marketer at nine on a Friday.

Model the entities, not the pages

• What things exist? Services, projects, people, articles, offices, integrations.
• How do they relate? A project has services; a service has related services; an article has an author who is a person.
• Which fields are structured and which are genuinely prose? Be ruthless. A “year” is a number. A “result” is a value, a unit and a label, not a sentence.

Do this before any visual design, and the design becomes a rendering of a model rather than a set of pictures somebody will later have to approximate. It also means one edit can correctly update fourteen pages, which is the difference between a site that stays accurate and one that quietly stops being true.

The test

Before launch, ask the person who will actually maintain the site to add three new items without help. Watch, and do not assist. Everything they hesitate over is a modelling failure you still have time to fix.