Website Ecosystem Redesign

It takes courage to redesign the entire ecosystem of websites — it is a long and expensive project that requires the collaboration of many different people. It places great demands on both the organization and the supplier. But in many cases, it can help the organization in the long term:

1. you reduce costs — not only in the creation of new websites, but also for the administration, which will better adapt to your processes
2. unify communication — your brand will have a consistent tone and visual style across current and future websites
3. improve branding — among other things, the visitor finally understands that they are on your site
4. Improve UX by leaps and bounds -- you'll be forced to pull skeletons out of the closet and revise both outdated content and user interface
5. You will be able to understand the supply structure. — one CMS vendor, one mailing, one content,...

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Redesigning the ecosystem of sites is competently a completely different universe than the design of multi-page microsites and it really shows how systematic your web agency has to work.

• Instead of a nice main party, you are dealing with a design system that has to accommodate many situations and types of content.
• Instead of one target group of visitors, you deal with higher units or dozens of them.
• Instead of one key stakeholder on the client side, you have dozens or hundreds of them.

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And this is an order of magnitude more challenging situation. When creating one site of several pages, a lot of problems may not manifest themselves at all. When you redesign hundreds of sites at the same time, all defects in the beauty of your agency's processes multiply hundreds of times.

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Key moments of website ecosystem redesign

In the last few years we have been working on three redesigns of larger web ecosystems — Brno (100+ sites), Masaryk University (800+ sites), University of Technology (200+ sites). None of them are finished, the furthest we are at Masaryk University, which has about 150 sites on the new design system. We have selected for you three key moments that need to be firmly grasped in this type of project.

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Clear project management

The role of project manager and project managers is crucial. Its job is not just to coordinate the creation of sites or content, but to create a shared reality across all key stakeholders in the organization.

When you have one website, you have one project owner to handle everything with. When you redesign the ecosystem of hundreds of sites, you suddenly have many more owners. Your first task is create a shared reality between key project people and maintain this reality for the long term. Stakeholders need to understand what the project will bring them, how it will play out, when we will get to their site, and what we will all need to do to succeed.

A working group was formed at University of Technology, in which there were representatives of faculties and key organizational units, which met approximately once a month and within which we transparently dealt with the progress of the project. Without this shared reality, we would never have moved forward, as each faculty has dealt with sites separately to date, and some would certainly not wait for a unified design system. Thanks to the task force, we also had the opportunity to prepare key stakeholders for the fact that they will have to expend a lot of energy revising the content of the entire site.

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User-Centered Design

The moment you manage to unify the stakeholder reality, you need to understand the people you're creating the sites for. If an organization is to truly move forward, it needs a design system that adapts to the needs of website visitors. Changing just the visual side of the sites is a missed opportunity because no one goes to the sites because of the graphics.

Advertising insert — for effective user research we have every once in a while trainings. 😊

There's a downside to understanding web visitors — it forces you to rethink virtually all site content, revise marketing, branding, and sometimes visual style. The redesign of the website ecosystem is not about nice graphics, but about a deep intervention in the communication of the organization externally.

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Careful selection of suppliers

If a website ecosystem redesign is to work, you need reliable vendors for project management, UX, content, graphic design, coding and programming. The quality of suppliers cannot be replaced by quantity, so it makes no sense to select them based on the lowest price. At the time of writing, I do not know of a single full-service supplier in the Czech Republic that would be able to handle all types of work at the same time at the top level. What experience should different types of suppliers have?

• Project Management — coordination of multiple suppliers on multiple projects at the same time
• UX — extensive user research and design of design systems
• Graphics — systematic design of typographic systems
• Content — the ability to strategically manage the creation of multiple content types at the same time
• Coding — experience with frameworks and frontend speed optimization
• Programming — reliability, security, speed, portability, speed of deployment of new sites (and a million other things)

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We advised the City of Brno to divide the selection of suppliers into three groups (graphics, frontend+backend, content) and organize three different requests/tenders. When we complete them, we will coordinate the vendors and ensure that they work in line with a unified vision for the future site ecosystem.

The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.
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‍— Chinese Proverb

Redesigning site ecosystems takes years. In our experience, the biggest obstacle is the capacity of the programming teams and the creation of new content, from the collection of documents to the creation of new content to its approval. If you are wondering when it makes sense to start preparing a redesign of your website ecosystem... it is today, because only the approval of the project itself can take the following year.

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In conclusion, a few recommendations

• Don't redesign everything at once. This is a bit counterintuitive — after all, we want to create an ecosystem, so we have to figure everything out now! As a result, you will never run anything. Prioritize and redesign one site after another as you gradually build a design system, expand CMS capabilities, and add user know-how. The results will be seen much earlier than with the big bang method.
• Have one person in your organization responsible for the entire website ecosystem redesign project and manage it internally. It's a full-time job, at some times maybe multi-tenured.
• Engage actively in user research — understanding website visitors can help you in the long run by an order of magnitude more than unifying visual style.
• Bring up the topic of redesign at the nearest consultation. The best time to start is today.

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