It's a fact though that designers are rarely given a really good brief. Sure, there'll be requirements as to the house style for graphics and all that, but that's superficial stuff. A real redesign is structural, trying to improve the route to conversion being offered to visitors. This is the type of project I love to get invited to consult on. And as the Refresh, Renew, Redesign article at SEO Scoop explains, things should be built around keyword usage, which means doing some serious research before going anywhere near a designer. Finally, once the new site is mapped out, ensure the old site is redirected properly!

Two things to remember before redesigning a website

WordPress began life several years ago as an application for publishing blogs; this blog is run with WordPress. The reason WordPress became so successful, apart from the fact it was free, was how easy it made "posting" new pages on your blog. WordPress is an open-source program, and a large number of developers around the world have added code to it, to enable it to be used in all sorts of ways. One of these, and perhaps the most significant, has been to use it as a content management system to run complete websites, not just blogs. And why not? Its main advantages (speed and ease of adding pages, and the ability to make sitewide design changes instantly) are what any site needs, not just blogs.

A couple of years ago I helped my old friend Morten Moller create a new website for his company, the industrial electronics specialist Sensor-Technik UK. We decided that WordPress was a great route to go down for a website of that size (it has a hundred or so pages at the moment). Because WordPress is used so widely, it would mean that almost anyone could pick up the website development in the future, and Morten would not be reliant on me, or anyone else for that matter. The site has worked exceptionally well, according to Morten – he has added and amended pages himself, and commissioned other people inside and outside of his company to add new material themselves, while he got on with running the business. The site doesn't even have a blog yet: WordPress is being used just as an exceptionally straightforward content management system. When Morten wanted to add to the design site-wide (or on one occasion, change the address on every page), it took a web designer just a few moments.

WordPress won't be appropriate for every company, by any means. But it's a great benchmark if you're ever listening to a pitch from a web design company for your own site. What can their system do that a WordPress site can't do? It needs to be something good if you're going to agree to tie your company into some proprietary system for the next few years at least.

If you want to explore this concept further, read The Rise of the Blog as a Business Gateway on SEO Scoop, and there's a follow-up post there you might want to read too.

Running your company's website on WordPress

These thousands of possible combinations of browsers, operating systems and screen sizes will each result a unique display of your website. If you've only ever looked at your website in Internet Explorer on a Windows XP machine with your own PC's screen (do you even know what resolution that is?), then you're seeing your website in a way that probably fewer than half of your visitors do. Many companies' websites don't just look different in some browsers, they actually fall to pieces.

On the Insider Programme we show our subscribers how to view their websites in all the different browsers without installing them or doing anything technical. If your designers were any good, they'd have tested this, of course. But the trouble is, when they created the website, many of today's browsers and operating systems didn't even exist. So you do need to check that everyone can see your website as you assume they do.

Furthermore, if screens are getting larger, should you be redesigning your content to take advantage of that? This subject is discussed intelligenty in Bigger Screens More Or Less on SEO Scoop. I would say that for industrial websites, where the majority of visitors have come from Google, you need to get them to the focus of the page (whatever they were searching for) as quickly as possible, and therefore we should be paring back the information presented, not increasing it …however large the visitor's screen might be.

The big screen experience