1.      Set the Right Goal. Your goal should be to get visitors and leads. It shouldn’t necessarily be to change the look and feel of your company. Approach this whole Web site redesign from a marketing perspective, not based on what some creative person says looks attractive.

2.      Avoid Pitfalls.  It’s really important that you take an inventory of your Web assets and protect them through your redesign.  Know what actually works for your company. Its important you don’t remove value content. Don’t lose inbound links by changing URLs. Don’t lose keyword ranking. Don’t change good conversion tools.
3.      Spend Resources on Content, Not Design.  Unique Web content will turn results while original designs may only serve to confuse and distract. Your car isn’t unique.  If you got into a car and didn’t know where the steering wheel was, you wouldn’t be able to drive it. The same is true for your Web site.

4.      Create an Ongoing Content Strategy.  Search engines and readers like fresh content, says Volpe. So, make sure you have someone in place that add to and manage your Web content. “Every single page you have on your Web site has a chance at being a winner in the SEO lottery. So, the more pages you have, the more likely it’s going to be that one of those page someone will think is really, really cool.”

5.      Enable Conversion Experiments.  What are you doing to build tools so that you can effectively and efficiently experiment so you can drive more and more conversions. The landing pages and forms are not an IT responsibility.There really needs to be some marketing ownership of those pages.

6.      Include SEO, RSS, Landing Pages and a Blog.    There’s no reason today that every Web site shouldn’t have those features.  Blogging helps on social networking sites. RSS is a way to publish your content to others, freeing up your content from the confines of your Web site for others to repurpose. Landing pages are a must. A form that captures your traffic as leads is key. All of the content of your site should bear SEO in mind, especially page titles and descriptions, URLs, headers and the paragraph content itself.

7.      Measure Your Visitor & Lead Metrics. Make sure you have some analytics system in place where you can measure not only the number of people coming to your Web sites, but how they’re converting into leads and, hopefully, how they’re converting into sales as well.