REDESIGN GUIDE
By Joshua Jackai, Founder and Lead Designer · Updated September 2026
Most disappointing redesigns are not badly designed. They are badly sequenced: design starts before anyone agrees what the site is for, and the rest of the project spends its budget correcting that.
What exists, what works, and what the data says. Current traffic and conversion behaviour, the pages carrying value, competitor positioning, and what customers actually ask before buying. This stage is what stops the new site from confidently repeating the old site’s mistakes.
From you: access to analytics, and an honest account of what is not working.
The goal, the metric, the page inventory, the information architecture, and the conversion paths. This is where the site is actually decided. Everything visual after this is execution.
From you: the decisions on the checklist, and one round of feedback on structure before any design begins.
Visual direction, then key templates, then the remaining pages. Designing templates rather than pages is what keeps the cost sane and the site consistent.
From you: consolidated feedback from the named decision-maker, within the agreed turnaround.
The site gets built responsively, content goes in, integrations get wired, and analytics and tracking are configured before launch rather than after. SEO carries over here: titles, headings, redirects, structured data.
From you: final copy and assets, and review on a staging link.
Redirects go live with the site, sitemaps are resubmitted, and Search Console gets watched daily for the first fortnight. If the platform is changing, this stage follows the migration discipline exactly. Post-launch support covers the tweaks that only surface once real traffic arrives.
When a timeline is compressed, stages one and two are what disappear, because they are the least visible. The result looks finished and performs like the old site. The timeline guide covers what is safe to compress and what is not, and the cost guide shows what each level of process actually costs.
How involved do I need to be?
Heavily in stages one and two, lightly after that. Front-loading your involvement is what keeps the later stages fast.
What if I do not like the design?
That is what the strategy stage prevents. When structure and direction are agreed first, design review becomes refinement rather than restart.
Can stages overlap?
Build often starts while later pages are still in design. Strategy overlapping design is the overlap that causes problems.
How many revision rounds are normal?
Two substantive rounds, when the earlier stages were done properly. More than that usually signals a skipped strategy stage.
We will walk your site through the five stages out loud, so you can see where the work actually is before committing to anything.
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