When to Relaunch Your Website?

by Victor J. McCoy
www.3vdesignmedia.com

There are several primary motivators for relaunching your organizations of companies’ website. The motivators include some of the following:

• Never really satisfied with the design in the first place.
• Enhancing some of the technical features that are dated.
• Creating a new or different brand image to coincide with the new or updated marketing strategy.
• Just need to add a fresh look to the website.
• The organization has new leadership.

 In the start-up phase of an organization, the website reflects the current position, offerings of the organization, the brand, and message of the organization. In time the organization begins to evolve with the addition/subtraction of services, personnel changes, etc. When this happens the website must evolve along with the business. The technical features may need to be changed to keep up with technological advances.

These changes or additions may present new functions, new applications easier navigation, and so on. Many business and religious websites have begun to move away from the more text-and image oriented websites to more interactive models, many featuring personalization options that allowed users to create accounts and store personal preferences and information on the site. Some even add the e-commerce component, enabling online transactions of all sorts.

If the benefits of a technical upgrade are new front-and back end capabilities, the drawback can be in a bumpy transition. Retooling a large site can be exceedingly complicated and may lead to unexpected problems, as was the case in a publicized failure during an ambitious relaunch of eBay.com in 1999. The company didn’t devote adequate staffing to the project, and the result was costly downtime in which visitors could not use the sit or all of its function.

  

Creating a new brand image or significantly revising and existing one is a weighty marketing decision, usually separate from any technical considerations. Companies face rebranding, for example when the merge or party to an acquisition, when their marketing results are substantially below potential, or when they adopt a new marketing or commerce strategy. The risk is of course that new brand image will alienate the market and cause the company to lose some of the equity it had established in its brand. When confronted with change, customers often adopt an agnostic, even wary stance, requiring the company to demonstrate to them again that its brand is worth their loyalty and high regard. For instance, long flash animations on the home page a trend of the late 1990s as the flash language and higher-speed connections came into vogue-are widely considered annoyances that may drive some visitors away.

In situations like mergers and acquisitions, however, the company has little choice but to relaunch in order to reflect the new identity of combined firm. Here the relaunch is most likely party of an integrated marketing program aimed at raising awareness of the new company and articulating its value new propositions to potential costumers; Web content may be reinforced by advertising and publicity efforts.