Website RedesignPreparing for a Drupal

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Author Photo

Author Photo

Author Photo

Author Photo

Author Photo

Jeff Deicks VP Professional Services

Jeff Deicks is the VP of Professional Services at Mediacurrent. He assists with process improvement, marketing, and managing deliverables on customer engagements. Jeff brings over 18 years of web development experience, primarily at Turner Broadcasting Systems in Atlanta, Georgia. In his previous position as Director of Operations at Turner Sports New Media, his team managed technical operations for NASCAR.COM.

Adam WaidDirector of Marketing

Adam Waid is the Marketing Director at Mediacurrent overseeing all marketing efforts and lead generation. With nearly 10 years of experience with implementing social media strategies, building complex CRM campaigns, and evangelizing Marketing Automation, Adam is a strategic thinker who has a passion for producing revenue-generating results through solutions-driven marketing.

Dawn BorglundSr. Project Manager

Dawn Borglund is a Sr. Project Manager at Mediacurrent with a passion for helping business owners improve their digital presence. Dawn's expertise in analytics reporting, brand management, and interactive campaigns provide critical insight and guidance to her clients' strategies.

Kendall TottenDrupal Designer & Theming Specialist

Kendall Totten is a Drupal Designer & Theming Specialist at Mediacurrent. Moving beyond her initial love of graphic design, she expanded her knowledge in Drupal front-end development, support, and client training. She has designed, built and launched many Drupal-based websites. Kendall shares her passion for responsive design with the Drupal community by blogging, maintaining her own website, speaking at Drupal camps, and holding Drupal training workshops.

Danté TaylorCreative Director

Danté Taylor is the Creative Director at Mediacurrent and manages the creative and theming initiatives. With his Bachelors of Fine Arts Degree from the Savannah College of Art & Design he has over 12 years experience working in the creative industry. He is a passionate advocate for user experience and good design. Good design can change the world!

Authors

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Web site redesigns originate for unique reasons, but fundamentally fall into two distinct categories: the right and the wrong.

Ultimately a rational redesign delivers true value to an organization, instead of simply consuming time and money for window dressing.

Most of the right reasons for redesigning a site carry an objective goal, such as:

● Increasing conversion rates for registrations or product purchase● Improving user experience on mobile devices● Putting the focus on core content and removing non-performing clutter● A shift in overall company strategy toward a new product or service● Migration from an inflexible legacy CMS to a modern framework like Drupal

Subjective reasons, such as an executive thinking the current site is "ugly" can certainly be addressed with a redesign. But to be successful, the beauty is best tied to a rational and measurable purpose.

This eBook guides you through important things your organization should consider before embarking on your next website design.

Introduction

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Chapter 1

Analytics that Indicate it is Time for a Website RedesignWritten by Dawn Borglund

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It might mean switching technology platforms,reimagining the strategy behind the architecture, or rebranding. But how do you know when it’s time? If you have Google Analytics, or a similar reporting program on your website, here are 4 signs (and what they mean) that indicate it’s time for a redesign.

Redesigning your website is not just swapping one visual

design for another.

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Think about conversions as the thing your website is supposed to do—that might mean getting a user to request a demonstration, buy something, or sign up for an account. A conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who become conversions.

A conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who become conversions.

● Is there something technically wrong with your website? Think load times, broken links, and anything along those lines that might discourage a visitor from converting.

● Are you getting enough traffic? Obvious, yes, but if you’re not getting visitors to your website, you’re not going to get a high volume of conversions. More on this below.

● Are you getting the right traffic? If the people coming to your website don’t want your services, then it’s no surprise they aren’t converting! Retarget your advertising or SEO efforts to match your ideal customer.

● How’s your pitch? If you’re getting people to your website, but they aren’t converting, it might be time to look at your message.

1. Your conversion rate is low

If these are on the decline it means your website isn’t doing its job. To understand why it’s not doing its job any more, there are several other factors to look into:

2. Mobile conversionsYou're not getting any.

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Mobile users are doing more than looking for directions and things on the go. Many are doing complex tasks from their phone or tablet which means you should give them a rich experience if you expect them to convert.

If you’re still on the fence on whether or not it’s time to invest in a mobile strategy, take a look at the number of users visiting your site from a mobile or tablet device in a month. At this point, it’s rare to find a website without a significant number of mobile visitors which means “going mobile” is no longer an option—it has to be a mandatory part of your digital presence.

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3. Your bounce rate is very high

Bounce rates are the percentage of users who land on your website and then leave (or “bounce”) without clicking to any other pages. A high bounce rate means lots of visitors are leaving your site before doing what you want them to do—which could be another reason why your conversion rate is low.

If your bounce rate is high, it probably means any one or more of the following:

● Visitors aren't finding what they're looking for and then leaving.● You haven't given users a “next step.”● Your message isn't compelling.

4. Traffic is slow

If you're visitor numbers are low, then there’s a good chance you need to work on your search engine optimization. A key element to SEO nirvana is constantly publishing new, interesting content to your website. Each page you add to your website is an opportunity for a search engine ranking, which is going to bring more traffic to your website, which will give you more opportunities for conversions. Long story short: adding pages to your site is important to your bottom line.

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Tip: You are writing for people and not just search engines.

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Chapter 2

Visually Plan Your Next WebsiteWritten by Jeff Deicks

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The blank canvas in Photoshop is where many well-intentioned Web redesign projects go to die.

Design is a critical component of a redesign, but it is only one component. Web sites grow and change on a daily (and sometimes hourly) basis. The design must accommodate content - from how it will be produced to how it will be consumed.

When embarking upon a redesign, consider the team that gets seats at the table for the design phase. One stakeholder sitting down with a graphic designer to bang out mockups won't cut it. This approach leads to countless iterations of debating which shade of blue to use.

A healthy team requires equal parts experience with content production, site development and visual design. Run the pretty pictures past a committee for review only after they've been drawn on top of a solid (and approved) structure for the site.

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Instead of mockups, make a visual plan the first deliverable for the project. At Mediacurrent we start with high-definition wireframes, produced by designers who understand the code behind a web site and the process behind content production.

Mediacurrent believes that detailed wireframes help to provide a clear picture of how the site will be expected to function, before development work begins. Mediacurrent's wireframe format helps present this vision without the distraction of subjective elements such as colors, fonts and textures.

Ultimately, this visual planning for a site leads to increased predictability for the development and theming phases of the project.

With a clear visual plan in place, the design approval process proves more efficient, and the project is well on its way to becoming a rational redesign.

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Chapter 3

Design Your New Site Around Buyer PersonasWritten by Danté Taylor

Personas can give you a profound and insightful view into your target audience's frame of mind and common behavior patterns—which makes personas a powerful aid during the design process. They're not just for the web design industry, personas are used to develop brands across several disciplines and industries.

The Primary Persona is the archetype that the website can't do business without. Other personas are variants of the Primary Persona. The best way to start a persona is to review input from customers, key business goals, usability reports, interviews from primary stakeholders, or gather feedback from focus groups. The end goal is to design an interface that works for your primary persona but the otherpersonas could use.

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Building The Perfect Persona

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Questions to help identify your buyer personas

● What are their demographics? What are their interests? Who influences their product choices?

● What are their personal goals?

● Where do they look for information about your product category?

● What type of information do they want?

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How to use a persona in the design process?

Remember to build your design around the needs of the primary persona. When developing a persona remember that you are looking to address that person's needs in the most efficient way possible while strengthening your brand awareness. The user interface should not make them think (see Steven Krug book Don't Make Me Think), but should be designed with their personality type and core needs in mind.

Making better design decisions

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Designing with user stories and following User Centered Design, removes the need for a long waterfall design cycle that has the potential missing your target audience.

The more you understand the values of your key audiences the better you can fulfill their needs adequately thus meeting your business objectives.

Need help developing your Buyer Personas? Download our Buyer Persona Guide.

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Chapter 4

Ensure your new site has a Solid SEO StrategyWritten by Dawn Borglund & Adam Waid

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Its core features support many of the critical SEO elements.

Combined with third party modules, Drupal becomes a very powerful “search engine friendly” environment. The Drupal community also provides an excellent tool to check the “SEO health” of your website, called seo_checklist. It examines the structure, settings, and modules installed on your Drupal website and provides a checklist for improvements based on Drupal SEO best practices.

Drupal’s content management system is perfectly structured for

search optimization.

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A few additional SEO tips before you begin your redesign include:

● Take an inventory of your site's pages - this is so important yet is often overlooked due to the inability to compile and keep an inventory of your site pages. Understanding not only how many pages your site consists of, but knowing what those pages are, is critical for moving forward with your redesign.

● Take an inventory of your links - gain a general understanding of who is linking to your pages and have an idea of which pages currently have large inbound link inventories.

● Understand your keyword rankings - Take the time to know where you rank for your important key phrase, in particular your non-branded phrases. Anytime you perform a redesign or make major site changes, you run the risk of losing rankings and traffic as a result. Mitigate this risk with a knowledge of where you stand in the search engines.

For more information on developing a solid SEO Keyword strategy, download our latest SEO eBook

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Chapter 5

Ensure Your Site’s Security is up-to-date

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Online security can be daunting. . .but that's where the robust and thorough security of Drupal comes into play.

All code on drupal.org gets scrutinized by a public community of incredibly smart developers (including Chris Hales from our team at Mediacurrent). Which is part of the contributing reasons why open source software, like Drupal, is often just as secure, if not more secure, than commercial software. It’s not just our opinion either - increased security was one of the reasons The White House cited when they switched to Drupal.

There is also an active security group discussion on Drupal.org devoted to helping out those in need of security issues or concerns and addressing questions others may have. This page contains such helpful topics as "Common code mistakes that open vulnerabilities" and "Enabling the overlay module for anonymous: Security risks"

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When a lapse in security

is found,perhaps in a contributed module or even with Drupal core itself, it helps to be prepared to handle the necessary updates. Budgeting time and resources for periodic Drupal module updates and security patches is sound planning and worth the consideration, especially as your site grows and the number of modules provided by the community increases.

Safety through planning

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In the event of a major security update, it helps to have the available resources to plug the risk ASAP. Updating a module to close a security threat may be as simple as updating the module's code, or as complex as applying a patch and update. Regardless of the threat, frequent checking and updating of your site's modules is good practice.

When planning for a site's development quota, be sure to leave sufficient time throughout the life of your Drupal site to accommodate periodic module and core code updates. What they say regarding an ounce of prevention is true and keeping on top of necessary releases through proper developer allocation can prevent major headaches down the road. An hour spent updating contributed modules could prevent 10 hours of cleanup and restoration later.

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Chapter 6

Make Mobile Part of Your StrategyWritten by Kendall Totten

Is your website future-ready?

Maybe you already know by now that mobile web is important. There are now more than 100 million smartphone users in the U.S. and the percentage of overall web traffic that comes from mobile users just doubled in 2011.

So what does that mean for your website? If your site isn't optimized for mobile, that's a lot of people that are struggling to get the information they need from you, or worse, that are leaving to find it someplace else. It can be overwhelming to consider all the possible ways you could try to reach this target audience. One route would be to build a mobile app, but that can be expensive to both build and update an app for several smartphone operating systems—and then there's the small matter of users being able to find and download it from the app store.

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Million smartphone users in the

United States.

100

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What if there was a way to update all your content in one place, and have it display one way to visitors on desktop computers and a different way to users on mobile devices? What if the layout could shape-shift to accommodate tablets of all sizes and even expand to showcase a wider version for users with large monitors?

Mobile web seems to be the quickest and easiest route. Everyone with a smart phone (and sometimes feature phones) has access to the web and all that hard work you did building up your SEO can help mobile users find your site quickly. So how do you prepare your site for mobile users? You could build an entirely separate website using a third party tool and try to incorporate the most important information into the mobile site. Re-route traffic to m.yourdomain.com and then struggle to keep your regular website and your new mobile site in sync. But device detection isn't perfect and often mobile users want to see all the content on your site, not the abridged version.

Enter the perfect couple: Drupal + Responsive Design. It's no Brangelina, but it still rocks. With Drupal, a powerful, open-source, fully customizable content management system— adding and updating your content is a snap. CSS media queries detect the width of the device,

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Drupal + Responsive Design

For more information on going mobile with Drupal, download our latest mobile + Drupal whitepaper.

then formatting and layout are adjusted accordingly. Images can also be automatically resized to become mobile-friendly and even retina versions can be loaded when needed. Drupal can be themed using a ready-made responsive base theme like Omega or AdaptiveTheme. This means that your content is optimized for whatever screen size your visitor is using and no one leaves grumbling and frustrated. Take a look at some of the most recent responsive sites we've launched on Drupal.

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Chapter 7

Syncing Your CRM and Marketing Automation Platforms Written by Adam Waid

Organize, track, and manage all of your customer information, activities, and conversations.

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Every day, your team is interacting with customers and prospects. A CRM's primary purpose is to organize, track, and manage all of your customer information, activities, and conversations. This helps your sales, marketing, and customer service teams better understand your customers. It also ensures you are delivering the right message at the right time.

In short, CRM is an application that is designed to help you and your business to organize all the data that you have on your customers.

What is CRM integration?

Simply put, CRM integration is building your website and CRM to function together seamlessly. Instead of using your CRM to just be a system that retains customer information based on manual entries, integrating your website/marketing automation software brings in valuable customer information directly into your CRM.

For example, let’s say a prospect downloads your recent whitepaper from your website. This “prospect” is graded with a solid “B” (based on the grading structure you’ve put in place in your marketing automation software). If your marketing automation software is integrated with your CRM, a new record will be created and assigned to a sales person for follow-up.

In addition, your salesperson will be able to pinpoint when that lead last visited your site, what they looked at, and what other information they requested.

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Like any software you are integrating with your website, IT staffs should thoroughly think through coding issues before getting started. Participating in a live Demo and asking questions about other successful Drupal implementations and calling references is key. It's a great way find out what issues they had that you might not have thought through. Drupal SEO best practices.

Integrating A CRM into Your Drupal Website

Many of the larger CRMs have modules already created to make installing a bit easier (.i.e Salesforce, SugarCRM, and a suite of modules for the Drupal-based CRMs like RedHen and Civicrm).

If you are going with a less widely accepted CRM, a custom API might need to be written. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but can be time consuming.

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What about Marketing Automation?

A strong lead management process requires B2B marketing professionals to respond to each prospect within the buying process. However, as your business grows, understanding and responding relevantly to a buyer’s interest is almost impossible to do manually. To ensure that your marketing efforts are targeting customers and prospects with the right messages at the right time, a marketing automation software is key.

What Is Marketing Automation?Marketing automation software brings together content assets such as landing pages, emails, web events, etc. and delivers them to prospects at a time when it is most relevant to them in their buying cycle. Knowing the "right time" is key to effectively engaging prospects with your brand. Conducting an analysis of your target audience and capturing demographic information, along with their interactions with your brand through your website and social platforms, allows you to qualify a lead and deliver to your sales team. Most marketing automation platforms integrate seamlessly with popular CRMs, so your sales staff can most likely continue to use their existing tools.

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Marketing automation and Drupal?

We're skipping ahead in the process and assuming you’ve already determined that you need a marketing automation software. The question now is “how effectively will this software integrate into a Drupal website?”

Drupal is definitely one of the better marketing platforms, and with a simple install of custom modules, the most popular marketing automation platforms can quickly be integrated with your Drupal Site.

The next page offers are few examples of custom Drupal modules that have been created for marketing automation platforms:

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● Marketo Munchkin Module - (created by Mediacurrent's Damien McKenna) The Marketo Munchkin is a very simple module to output the Marketo Munchkin tracking code obtained from http://www.marketo.com/.

● Eloqua Module - This module allows you to build webforms that directly parallel forms in eloqua, and can thereby be posted into eloqua.

● Pardot Module - This module adds Pardot web analytics directly onto your Drupal site. It supports general visitor tracking, path-based individual campaign tracking, and path-based lead scoring.

● Drupal websites integrate seamlessly with countless other marketing automation platforms.

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Chapter 8

10 Questions to Answer before your Redesign

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Do not worry if you can not answer some of the questions right away or believe that some of your answers might change later.

The important thing is to capture your vision before getting mired in details.

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1. What are some of the fundamental issues you're trying to improve or business problems you're trying to solve with a site redesign? Or, if this is a new site, what’s its purpose?

2. What sites do you consider competitors or similar to your idea? Comment on their strengths and/or weaknesses.

3. Aside from competitors, are there any sites you consider best-of-breed? (Could be completely outside of your business or industry)

4. To the best of your ability, describe the primary and secondary users of your site.

5. What known needs are they bringing to your website? (e.g. curiosity about or passionate interest in subject matter, desire to help a cause/become involved, or business need requiring software solution.)

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6. What primary action should a user take when visiting your site? (e.g. registering for an account, subscribing to a newsletter, making a donation, reading editorial content, or referring a friend.)

7. What needs aren't being met? Where does the site fall short?

8. Describe in as few sentences or words as possible the feelings you wish your site to evoke, and the brand attributes you want it to convey. (Sample feelings might include: warmth, friendliness, reassurance, comfort, or excitement. Sample brand attributes might include: caring, honesty, humor, professionalism, intelligence, technological savvy, sophistication, reliability, and trustworthiness.)

9. Using adjectives and short phrases, describe the site’s desired look and feel. (“Easy to look at, edgy, classic, up-to-date, crisp, modern, traditional, understated,” etc.)

10. Are there any third-party integration points (interfaces to a CRM, e-commerce, mapping solution, social site or other use of a third party API)?

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Conclusion

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Rational Redesigns grow from the roots of rational requirements. It is most important to provide an understanding of the problem to be solved and why it needs to be solved. If you were responsible for prescribing how the problem should be solved, then a development team wouldn't be needed for the project.

Our job at Mediacurrent is to provide you the tools, expertise, and guidance to turn your redesign project into a rational one.

Ultimately, the goal is to give you enough knowledge and skills to not only manage your Drupal site yourself, but to grow it as your business flourishes. Of course, we’re always there for those parts you can't do or don't want to do!

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