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Upanup recommends starting to prepare early for your website redesign, even before the process officially starts with us.
Here are a few things your team can do in advance:
- Loved Websites — Start collecting a list of websites your team likes and doesn't like (e.g. shared Google Doc), and add to it as you come across ideas and features you want to ask about. Be specific in your notes, such as "we like [x] because of the rotating image on the homepage".
- Content is King — Decide on who will be cleaning up the website content such as text and images on webpages.
- If editing content in-house: Remove or edit any known outdated content prior to the redesign (start early, this typically takes more time than you think and helps our team start with fresh content).
- If the vendor will be doing the content edits: Start collecting a wish list of your current content that needs updating. In particular, online forms (current form fields you have online, or PDF fillable forms), webpages. The amount of content cleaning you ask the vendor (i.e. the website designer and developer like Upanup) to do can impact the overall fees.
- Steering Committee — If you don't have a website redesign steering committee, we highly recommend creating one. They will steer the key decisions throughout the project. It can be as simple as 2-4 people. Typically, a website redesign steering committee involves people from key departments, and ideally includes someone who is close contact with the public users.
- Get Key Assets Ready — Collect related assets, such as:
- Logo file, in high resolution.
- Past research such as community survey results.
- Brand or content style guidelines.
- A variety of high quality images to be used in the design mock ups (landscape/horizontal images tend to work best).
If you need to go to open procurement or want to know more about integrations, see our article on How to Write an RFP for Municipal Website Projects.
Also, see some of our recent work: