Website Redesign

What a redesign replaces, and what it keeps

A redesign is not a new coat of paint on the same site. The pages, the structure underneath them and the platform the whole thing runs on are all replaced. What stays is everything that is yours: your domain, your words, your photographs, and the standing the site has built up in search results over the years it has been live.

That last one is the part that gets lost. A site that has been online for five years has been linked to, indexed and ranked under a particular set of page addresses. Replace those addresses without telling search engines where everything went, and you hand back every position the old site earned.

Do I need a redesign or a new site?

If you have no site, or one on a platform nobody can get into any more, you are looking at a new build. Website design covers that.

If you have a site that works but looks its age, loads slowly, is awkward to change, or has no page for half the services you sell, that is a redesign. The distinction matters because the risks differ. A new build has nothing to lose. A redesign has everything the old site earned sitting on the table.

The order the work happens in

First, a full list of every page on the current site and what each one is for. That includes the pages you have forgotten about, which are often the ones carrying the links.

Second, the new structure: which pages should exist, which ones merge, which ones go.

Third, the mapping. Every old page address is paired with the page that replaces it, and anything without an obvious replacement gets a decision.

Fourth, design and build, with the speed and the page structure handled as part of the build.

Fifth, the redirects go in at launch. This is the step that decides whether the rankings survive.

What drives the cost

Three things, in the main. How many pages the current site has, because each one needs a decision. How many services and areas the new site needs to cover, because that sets the page count. And how much of the writing and photography can be carried across as it stands.

Pricing is an upfront build fee plus a monthly fee covering hosting, updates, content and the ongoing search work. Your estimate comes from the call, once we have seen the site and know its size. What the fees cover.

How long it takes depends almost entirely on content. Sites where the words and photographs are ready move quickly. Sites where they need writing take as long as the writing takes.

What goes wrong when the redirects are an afterthought

The site launches, it looks better than it ever has, and six weeks later the enquiries have not come back. Every link anyone made to the old site now lands on a page that does not exist, search engines have dropped the addresses they knew, and the new site is starting from nothing with none of the credit.

It is recoverable, but it is far more work than doing it in the right order, and the months in between are months of lost enquiries. Frively treats the mapping as the first half of the job rather than a tidy-up at the end.