Guide
Six steps from the first list to the first month online, for teams without a web department.
A relaunch fails most often before the first pixel is drawn. Ask what each page should achieve and write the answer in one sentence. A page that wants three things usually gets none of them.
For a small bakery that might read like this. The home page brings people into the shop, the order page takes cake orders for the weekend and the jobs page finds two new bakers before spring.
Export every address of the old site into a list. Most sites hold more pages than their owners remember, and some of them still bring visitors every week.
Keep every page that people still find through search or that answers a question you hear on the phone. Rewrite it in the new tone, but keep its address if you can.
Three short pages about opening hours, parking and the café corner make one good page about visiting. Merge them and send the old addresses to the new one.
Before any design, sketch the navigation with no more than six entries. Read it aloud to someone who does not know the business. If they hesitate at an entry, the word is wrong, not the person.
Put the things people ask for most in the first two entries. Everything else can live one level deeper or in the footer.
Every old address that changes needs a permanent redirect to its closest new page. Without it, links from newsletters, maps and other sites end on an error page.
Keep the list in a spreadsheet with two columns, old and new, and test it the day before launch.
Choose a Tuesday or Wednesday morning, never a Friday afternoon. Check the forms with a real address, call the phone link from a phone and order one thing in the shop yourself.
Look at your search engine reports every few days. New errors show up in the first week, rankings settle in the third. Write down what visitors ask by phone and email, those questions are your next pages.