I’ve been working with a lot of clients lately on site re-designs and below is a list of questions that I find helpful to ask and answer before handing off directions to the the designers and developers.

Section 1: Goals & Objectives
- Why do we need a re-design? We need 3-5 good reasons…
- What do we want to accomplish with a website re-design? Specifically…
- What KPI’s do we want to improve upon? What is the benchmark?
- What are we doing right currently? What are we doing wrong?
- Do we have any info on what people like/don’t like?
- What are our competitors doing that we like/don’t like? What should we copy or reject?

Section 2: Audience & Segments
- Who are we designing the new site for?
- What are the audience segments?
- What are their characteristics? Personas? Traffic sources?
- How will these segments respond to the new site design?
- What is our value proposition and how can we communicate it prominently?

Section 3: Products, Branding and Design
- What products will we include on the site?
- Which ones will need to get featured?
- Where do we see expansion in the next 2-3 years?
- What about partners? How do we get them involved?
- What design aesthetic are we going for? What look & feel elements do we like? What direction can we give designers?

Section 4: Site Structure, Technology and Features
- What pages do we need to include? What are the content elements on those pages? Where does the content come from?
- What is the primary call to action on the various pages?
- What features do we want the site to house? Comparisons? Reviews? Blog? Video? Demos? Testimonials? E-Commerce?
- Do we need landing pages? What are the impacts on the current landing pages?
- What is the right technology for the new site? (depends on features and future management resources) ASP? PHP? Rails? MySQL? Drupal?
- What should page load times be? How wide should we design the site?

Section 5: SEO, Marketing and Conversion
- What are the SEO elements we need to focus on and build into the new site (URLs, Sitemaps, content, page structure, etc,)
- What are the keywords we need to focus on in terms of content and link building?
- What elements can we/should we include with the new site to improve traffic and conversion? Images, video, reviews, demos, etc.
- What happens post launch in terms of measurement and improvement? Who is in charge of constant optimization?