If a Web site redesign is what you're striving for, here's a quick guide to make your business case.

Is it too early to declare 2005 the Year of the Web Site Redesign? Maybe a little early. But this holiday season, lots of corporate marketers will be snug in their beds with visions of online enhancements dancing in their heads. Forrester predicts that 40 percent of companies plan to increase spending on customer-facing Web design next year, outpacing overall IT spending.

Unfortunately, the Naughty/Nice List (NNL) did not determine who got a site redesign in their stocking this year; the realities of budget allocation are a touch more complex. For many companies, having an outdated Web site has become self-perpetuating: If the Web channel has underperformed for you in the past, how do you justify spending more in the future?

The phrase that pays in these tight-fisted times is “measurable return,” and we’re getting more and more requests from corporate marketers to help them make the ROI case before they can earmark a redesign budget. So in the interests of spreading a little holiday cheer (and increasing our ranking for next year’s NNL), we’ve put together a quick guide to making the business case for a site redesign this year.

Method 1: The devil is in the data

Sure, we can gripe all the way to 2006 that the Web channel gets held to an unjustly high standard for performance measurement (what’s the conversion rate on all that airport signage, anyway?), but complaining ain’t gonna get us our redesign any faster. So let’s make the best of what the Web does well: It delivers real numbers.

Start with your overall corporate marketing budget. Chances are it’s bigger next year. That fact alone should create some urgency around the Web site. When spending increases in other channels, traffic to the Web site surges (that’s your URL on your marketing materials, after all), and greeting all those new visitors with a less-than-optimal site is like throwing good money after bad.

Some basic analysis of your site traffic data will help you decide how much more money gets left on the table when marketing spending goes up. How much of your traffic abandons the site from the home page alone? What percentage of your overall traffic fulfills valuable actions (e.g., making a purchase, filling out a lead form, etc.)?

Of course, finding your soft spots is only half the battle. In order to calculate increased return on your overall marketing investment, you need to project a reasonable degree of improvement, and that can be tricky. You have a few options. One is to seek the input of an interactive agency or a data aggregator like Forrester or Jupiter. Chances are they’ve seen enough data on soft spots like yours to project accurately what improvements will accomplish.

The other option is to run a few head-to-head tests on the live site. You can substitute an alternate page in a single critical spot on your site, for instance, and use the percentage improvement as a leading indicator of what overall site enhancements can accomplish. A single powerful instance of actual improvement can be the centerpiece of your business case.

Method 2: Making headcount count

Surveys of projected IT spending for next year show that tools designed to improve workflow are at the top of everybody’s wish list. The must-have item is portal technology, which enables things like centralized document distribution and multiple access levels for employee intranets and customer extranets. Next in line is content management software, which gives non-technical users the ability to update Web site content.

These tools are getting serious buzz right now in part because the licensing prices have dropped faster than the post-Christmas sale on Inflatable Santa. For that reason alone, any company contemplating a redesign needs to consider adding workflow tools to the equation. Calculating the ROI on such a tool is relatively easy because it's meant to replace work your company is already doing. If it takes six times as long to maintain your site with manual updates, or if employees use 400 hours/year of the HR department’s time requesting information that could be posted on an intranet, then the resultant headcount savings is the core of your business case.

Method 3: Making the truth hurt

For Scrooge, it took visits from three spirits to spook him enough to pry open his purse strings. For even the most miserly corporate budget-holder, eight to 10 real-life site users ought to do the job. Make your stubborn hold-outs attend a usability lab, in which representative users try to complete basic tasks on the site and give you a blow-by-blow of what goes wrong for them.

In our experience, there is nothing quite so sobering or illuminating than hearing it straight from the user. But the usability lab is not just for shock effect. When done properly by an experienced information architect, a usability lab yields precise, usable data on what’s not working and how to fix it. Of course, being able to lace your business case with cries of pain from frustrated users doesn’t hurt either.

A usability lab requires more of an upfront investment than Method 1, but it also yields a deeper data set. As a general rule, consider that just 5 to 10 percent of your Web marketing budget set aside for user testing will always pay itself back in performance, often several times over.

Method 4: The pilot project

Sometimes our new year’s resolutions reach too far, like when you resolve to run a marathon, and by May you’re using the treadmill for a clothes-hanger. Better to set your sites a little lower and take on something realistic. This has become something of a trend in Web development: doing a partial redesign and using the results to make a case for full redesign down the road.

For most corporate Web sites, there are plenty of opportunities to do this without creating serious discontinuity in the user experience. Often a single “flagship” product site under a corporate umbrella gets redesigned, or a “micro-site” is developed to handle traffic from a campaign. In the latter case, the conversion performance of the micro-site is compared to that of the original site in order to calculate potential gains from a redesign.

So maybe 2005 will be the Year of the Phased Redesign. That suits us fine, because the trend is very encouraging. The Web is maturing as a marketing medium, and it’s good to be in the company of peers who are boosting their NNL ranking by making the Web a better place to do business. Happy holidays to all of you, and a rewarding new year.

Jennifer DeVoe is Principal of White Horse, a nationally recognized provider of strategic Internet professional services. White Horse's high profile clients include Nautilus, Cisco Systems, Microsoft Corporation and Celestial Seasonings. DeVoe is an expert in interactive marketing and a captivating speaker.