At some point in time, every service provider takes a look at his or her website and decides it’s time for a redesign.

And, to be perfectly honest, a website redesign can be more difficult and time-consuming than building a completely new site from the ground up. Not only is there a need to create a new design, but you will also be dealing with moving and renaming pages and other files, which puts traffic and page rank at risk.

That’s why it’s extremely important to have a solid plan in place before the redesign process takes place.

Start by analyzing what you have.

The first thing we need to do is review each and every file at the current site. Depending on the age and size of the current site, this step can often take several weeks.

We catalog each piece of content at the site, which includes pages, articles, posts, comments, images, videos, audios, free reports, digital downloads, forms, scripts, products, autoresponders, newsletters, plug-ins, etc. We simply list every asset at the site.

Next, decide what you’ll do with it all.

Now that the list of assets has been created, it’s time to come up with a plan for what stays and what goes. Look at every item and decide if it will be added to the new site? Will it be moved to a different directory? Will the URL change? Will the asset be renamed? Do any of the pages require new Meta tags?

Pay special attention to your scripts and forms, do they refer to a certain asset that you wanted to discard? Does a form point to a certain thank you page? Make a notation of what will stay and what will go.

Thirdly, list all of your exceptions.

Before completely eliminating an item, you’ll want to investigate your off-site assets. Are any of your active PPC campaigns referring to a particular landing page? Are your linking partners linking to a page that will get renamed?

Take a look at your traffic analytics to determine which off-site sources are driving traffic and exactly where they’re sending that traffic. You might want to keep these pages as-is, disallow them in your robots text file to avoid any duplicate content issues, and contact your traffic sources about the change. Keep the items live until you are 100% sure there is no traffic being directed to them.

Give WGC Designs a call to create a plan for your website today.

About the Author: Karen Scharf is an Indianapolis marketing consultant who works with small business owners and entrepreneurs. She offers several whitepapers, free reports and checklists, including her free Can-Spam checklist and free email pre-flight checklist to ensure your emails get delivered, get opened and get read. Download your copies at http://www.ModernImage.com.