Website Redesign in New Zealand

Answer "why" before anyone quotes

Redesign briefs usually arrive as "it looks dated". That may be true, and it is rarely the actual problem. The versions worth separating:

• It looks old. A design problem. Fixable relatively cheaply, and largely cosmetic.
• It does not produce enquiries. Usually a content and structure problem. A new design alone will not fix it, and often does not change the number at all.
• Nobody finds us. A search problem. The fix is structure and content, not appearance.
• We cannot update it. A platform problem, and the clearest case for a rebuild.
• It is slow or broken on phones. Technical, and sometimes fixable without a redesign at all.

Each of those is a different project at a different price. Saying which one you have is the most useful thing in your brief, and if you are not sure, that is worth admitting too — the quotes will then tell you what different people think is wrong.

The risk nobody mentions

A new website starts from zero and can only improve. A redesign starts from something that already works, and can go backwards.

Rankings live on URLs. If /services/plumbing has been earning you calls for six years and becomes /what-we-do without a redirect, that page is gone — and Google will take months to work out that the new one is its replacement. Traffic falls about six weeks after launch, by which point nobody connects it to the redesign.

The fix is routine and it has to be deliberate: every old address redirects to its closest new equivalent, one to one. Not everything to the homepage, which is the shortcut that causes the damage. Ask each developer how they build that map and how they test it. Precise answers are a strong signal.

Record the numbers first

Before anything changes, write down:

• Monthly visits, and where they come from
• Enquiries and calls per month
• Your top ten pages by traffic
• Which pages produce the contacts

Without this you cannot tell whether the redesign worked, and you will end up arguing about whether it looks better — which was never the point. With it, you know within two months, and you can fix a regression while anyone still remembers what changed.

A developer who asks for these numbers before quoting is thinking about the right things.

Careful with the pages that already work

Every site has a few pages doing most of the work — often not the ones anyone is proud of. A plain page answering a specific question can quietly generate half your enquiries.

Find those pages before the redesign and treat them as fragile. Keep the URL, keep the content that earns the traffic, and be conservative about redesigning the parts that convert. Improving the look of a page that converts at 8% into a page that looks better and converts at 4% is a real and common outcome.

How much to change at once

The safest redesigns change one thing at a time: appearance first on the same structure, then structure once the new look is proven, then content. The riskiest change everything on one night and hope.

Staged is not always possible — a platform migration tends to be all or nothing — but where it is, it is worth the slight extra cost. When something goes wrong you know what caused it.

Comparing quotes

• Redirects. Ask everyone. The answer separates the field faster than any other question.
• Which pages are staying? A developer who has looked at your analytics before quoting is ahead of one who has looked at your homepage.
• What is measured? Before and after, agreed in advance.
• Content. Rewritten, migrated as-is, or your job? This is where quotes diverge most.
• Rollback. If launch goes badly, how quickly can the old site come back?

Describe what your current site does well, what it does badly, and what you want to change. Developers who redesign sites for a living will tell you whether you need a refresh, a rebuild, or something that is not a redesign at all — and that last answer is worth having before you spend anything.