Streamlining website relaunch

If you're planning a website relaunch, ActiveStandards should be at the centre of your project management programme. Rolling out a new design across a large or multi-site web presence can be a vast and complicated governance challenge:

• How do you keep control of the development process? Companies frequently underestimate the number of iterations their website specification will undergo - with changes occurring up to the last minute. The need to roll out and QA each design iteration is a major cause of delayed launch and over-stretched budgets.
• How do you communicate your new standards and policies to your website editors and ensure they're understood?
• How do you make sure that your finished site is fully compliant and ready to go?

ActiveStandards takes the pain out of website relaunch.  By streamlining and automating the most challenging processes it ensures targets are met, and the new site goes live on time, on budget and fully compliant with your new brand and website standards.

Common challenges and requirements:

Common drivers for a relaunch are: global rebrand, redesign, company merger or acquisition. Because relaunches are often driven by external imperatives timescales are tight, and expectations are high.

• Existing websites need to be audited and selected content migrated into the new templates
• Any pre-existing compliance issues on the old site need to be identified to ensure they are not copied over when content is migrated to the new website templates
• Newly created sites need to be centrally reviewed and signed off before being published into the live environment
• Editors require training and guidance in your new website policies and the use of the new templates
• In addition, managers often need to oversee two websites in parallel - the live site and the new design - doubling the quality assurance challenge

ActiveStandards will help you:

• Monitor the compliance of your existing site to ensure your brand and reputation aren't damaged as your focus shifts to your new website design
• Easily manage pre-launch QA of your new site, by supervising development in the staging environment. ActiveStandards will enable you to seamlessly QA any iterations in your design as they occur, providing significant time savings and eliminating error.
• Verify whether migrated content is at expected levels
• Eliminate key messaging issues, such as misspellings of the new company and product names
• Capture issues caused by migrating content, and easily detect and remove legacy content such as old products, logos and references to people that have left the company
• Ensure new content created for the website meets your policies
• Communicate and reinforce you new policies to website editors, and enable them to prioritise their pre-launch workload
• Set unambiguous targets for site sign-off
• Check link integrity as the site is launched into the production environment
• Check tracker scripts are correctly applied

 

When launching a new set of website templates you will need to provide your editors with practical documentation on how to use them. This is also a good time to review your standards on issues like accessibility, SEO, and copywriting, to support your editor training programme and provide a shared understanding of best practice.

Our website standards experts can help you define and document your web standards and policies.