Website Refresh Discovery & Analysis

Engage me to completely redesign your website or simply to refresh its content, look, and functionality. 

A great member or user experience on your website begins with setting the stage: what are your goals, and what experiences are you hoping to deliver to members or users? What is it that they want to accomplish on your site? 

To find answers, I employ a combination of qualitative and quantitative analysis, conducting primary research such as interviews and focus groups along with reviewing secondary data such as Google Analytics and results from site auditing tools. I also can conduct usability tests with members - check out this quick case study. 

Once answers to those questions are found, I will dig into whether your site is delivering on those expectations. Below are several areas of inquiry that I typically cover in a website discovery and analysis engagement for a refresh or a complete redesign. 

Overview

• What is working and what is not working on your website?

• What are the primary drivers of the refresh? What do you hope to gain?

• Are there websites you find particularly engaging that you wish your site could emulate?

Organizational Assessment

• What is your mission? Has it changed recently? 

• What are your key initiatives? 

• Who are your target audiences? 

• Are there secondary audiences the website needs to serve?

• What is the purpose of your website?

User Expectations

• What tasks are users hoping to accomplish on your website?

• How well does your site measure user expectations?

• What tasks can users complete on competing websites that they cannot perform on yours?

Content Assessment

• At a high level, how much of the content is outdated?

• At a high level, how much of the content needs to be rewritten? For what reasons?

• How much (or how little) does your current content reflect your current brand?

• Do you have a web writing style guide?

• Do you have a brand guide? Does your site reflect it?

• Are the images and video high-quality and representative?

• Are you consistently ranking in searches where you want or need to be on key pages?

• Do you have content that generates action?

• Is the content written in the second person?

• Are good grammar, spelling, and business writing principles followed?

• Do you use headings, subheadings, bullets, colors, and other stylistic features to break up long blocks of text?

• Do you avoid using underline to decorate text that is not hyperlinked?

Brand Assessment

• What are your brand pillars? 

• What is your brand personality? Does your website support it?

• Do you have sections of the website devoted to your mission and key activities?

• Do you have a brand guide? Is the website in compliance?

• What is your tagline? Does your website deliver on your organization brand promise?

Competitive Assessment

• Does a SWOT analysis of competitor websites clearly show superiority?

• What do competing sites do that your site should do?

Accessibility

• Is your content WCAG 2.1 optimized?

• Images have <alt> text
• Text can be resized to 200% without loss of content or function
• Color contrast is sufficient (at least at least 4.5:1; 3:1 for user interface components)
• Links have <alt> descriptions
• Page titles are clear and helpful
• Videos have captions available
• Users have access to audio description for video content
• Tables, charts, and graphs are also presented in narrative form
• User controls exist to pause, stop, start, change the timing, or hide automatic or dynamic content
• The site follows a logical structure (menus)

• The website is optimized for mobile

Technical Assessment

• Does your website follow https protocols?

• Is the average page load time 3 seconds or less?

• Are there minimal 4XX errors?

• Is SSO working properly across the website?

• Are all integrations working properly across the website?