PROCESS
Phase 1: Start Here to Plan Your Website Revamp.
Taking these actions before you start revamping your website will help you align your team on the strategy, process, and work to be done. Set your team up to succeed on your first revamp—and as you continue to enhance your site.
Understand the Process and Build the Right Team
Take time to understand the big picture of the redesign process before you begin. Revamping your website is most successful when you follow these stages in order: Plan, Discover/Define, Design, Deliver, and Improve.
Note that the webpage you are currently reading describes what you should do during the Plan stage. So, keep on reading to get started on the right foot!
To travel the road to success, you’ll need to assemble a team with the right skillsets. Each phase of the revamp will require your team to activate different capabilities. This chart shows which talent you’ll need in order to accomplish the activities in each phase.
Gather the Right Information for Kickoff
Essential Activities and Capabilities
Engage external partners to fill in any missing capabilities.
Plan
Before kickoff, it’s crucial to create a team with the right capabilities for success and align stakeholders on the goals for your website revamp.
Capabilities
| - Marketing strategy | - Business strategy |
| - Content strategy | |
| - User experience |
Discover & Define
Discover how you can improve your website to engage your audiences and convert leads. Analyzing your audiences and mapping their journey across your site shows how you can align that journey with your business goals.
Capabilities
| - Marketing analytics | - Design direction |
| - Experience Strategy | - Content strategy |
| - Technical architecture | - SEO/SEM strategy |
Design
Designing your website translates your vision and strategy into prototypes. It’s time to create, test, and optimize your website’s content, visual design, and user experience.
Capabilities
| - Information architecture | - Visual design |
| - Content Strategy | - Copywriting |
| - UX/UI Design | - User testing |
Deliver
Turn your wireframes into a real website, and test your website before you go live.
Capabilities
| - Web/page development | -Accessibility testing |
| - QA | - Authoring |
| - UAT | - User testing |
Improve
The best websites continuously improve. By tracking your website’s performance, you’ll gain insights that empower you to evolve your website over time.
Capabilities
| - Page development | - A/B testing |
| - Page design | |
| - Performance measurement & KPI analysis |
Roles of Local, Regional, and Global Stakeholders
Before kickoff, make sure that each set of stakeholders understands their roles and responsibilities in each phase of the process.
Local Team
Owns the website experience and roadmap and collaborates with agency partners to execute the website.
Regional Team
Supports local team and helps transfer knowledge across the markets in a region.
Global Team
Serves as advisors sharing best practices and expanding our Design System.
Define Goals for Your Website
Before you start your website revamp, it is crucial to align stakeholders on shared goals. Defining the goals for your website before kickoff empowers all stakeholders to rally around the vision and strategy. Furthermore, by collaboratively answering these questions early on, you can create an RFP that matches your website objectives.
Which audiences do we want to come to our site?
- Who is the primary audience we are trying to serve? Who is our secondary target audience?
- What experiences do we want our audiences to interact with on our website?
- What should our primary audience gain from interacting with our website?
What are our business objectives, and how can our website support them?
- What role should the website play in helping us reach our business goals?
- How will we measure the success of our website in helping us reach those goals?
Which pages will we redesign first?
- Since we will be adding pages that use a new codebase and new designs, how will the website’s navigation flow? Will the customer journey work?
- Have we prioritized the correct pages to redesign in order to optimize the moments that matter most for our customers and our business?
Onboard Your Team to the Design System
By visiting the Get Started page, your team can familiarize themselves with MetLife’s new design system. Or you can bring in the global Customer Experience and Design (CXD) Team to onboard your team.
Request a Walkthrough
Define Your Ways of Working
How Will Your Team Communicate?
Outline communication touchpoints across the revamp process. Establishing touchpoints in advance helps the team move faster and stay consistent in strategy, design, and delivery.
Choose which tools and technology you’ll use for seamless communication. Housing documents in a collaborative, live-editing space like SharePoint helps all stakeholders access and comment on the latest materials.
Get Aligned on Communication
How Will Your Team Share Feedback?
Set expectations and methods for giving feedback so that all stakeholders stay on the same page. Be sure to consider the team’s bandwidth in planning how and when team members will give and receive feedback. This will help everyone provide timely feedback and keep the project moving on schedule.
Note that it should be easy to track feedback and show the dates when it is due. You may want to distribute a tracking document immediately after meetings incorporating notes and actions assigned to specific team members.
Assess Risks
Complete a risk assessment with your team in advance to uncover potential pitfalls, uncertainties, and constraints before they impact your work. This practice empowers all stakeholders to raise and proactively address concerns as a team.
Choose and Brief Your Agency Partner
Collaborate with a local design agency for a successful website redesign.
Agency Selection Guidance
Agency Partner Checklist
- Examine the capabilities you need to fill, and RFP for what you need
- Note that some agencies specialize in strategy (content and SEO strategy, user research), some agencies specialize in execution (UX design, creating assets and final pages), and other agencies will do both
- Request bios or roles to ensure that your partner is staffing the project to fit your needs
- Choose an agency whose team communicates effectively with your team.
Agency Partner Onboarding
To ensure appropriate onboarding, it’s important to provide your agency partner with the latest information and deliverables—no matter where in the revamp process your agency partner is joining.
Get Started Onboarding Your Agency Partner
PROCESS
Next: Discover Your Vision and Define Your Strategy
In this phase of your website revamp, you’ll align stakeholders on the vision and strategy of your website. You’ll make sure your website engages customers and adds value to your business. Read on to gain an overview of the work, considerations, and deliverables during this important phase.