OK, first a bit of background information – I work for a company called Marcom, and we made a decision back in January to rebuild our website as the old one was outdated, didn’t sell us and didn’t demonstrate what we were capable of. As you’re well aware, it’s now nearly August and the site is the same now as it was in January; but we have been making progress!

The most basic problem of getting your own site redesigned and rebuilt, is that it gets in the way of paid work. At the end of the day you have bills to pay, so your site gets pushed back and back and back. Even when you finally get a spot of down time, a client dumps a last minute deadline on you and you’re off again.

So how do you get around this? Unfortunately, there’s is no magic button. We tried outsourcing the actual designing to a freelancer – although the coding would still be done by me – to get the ball rolling. We decided that having an outsider would bring some fresh ideas to the table that we hadn’t thought about – however this method didn’t work for us.

Both myself and Rob – our Creative Director – clearly had strong ideas on what we wanted the site to look and feel like. None of the designs the freelancer came back with fitted our preconceptions, and before we had the time to take it any further, more work came in. Our attention was once again taken away from the new site.

This was obviously no good. Suddenly, out of the blue, Rob churned out a couple of design options which he then gave to me to code up.

How did he find the time? Magic…OK maybe not. He actually used his home time to get started and make some serious headway. In between other jobs, he would continue to work away at it, handing designs to me to start coding up so we could see it in a browser. It took a few weeks, but we got 2 completely separate concepts up to help us decide what to go with.

I’ll mention at this point that we also used our website to test out a few ideas we’d had about. These were on how to run on-going projects, the most notable being designing in the browser (as described in Andy Clarke’s brilliant presentation “Walls Come Tumbling Down” – a long read but well worth it). Internal projects like this are a great chance to “beta test” ideas you have for managing on-going projects, without having to get paid work involved.

So that was that – two design options were hastily coded up and ready for us to ponder over, get opinions from the rest of the company and make our choice. Of course, that’s easier said than done. The real challenge was getting everyone together long enough to make a decision.

This did take a few days, but we managed to nail down who we needed. This meant a late night lock-in and discussing the choices into the night. We trawled through the age old process of going through the options, discussing relative merits, explaining how features that were incomplete would work, and then finally picked our preferred design.

Helpfully, we were all on the same page with the option that we wanted to pursue. The next stage was to sit down and sketch out all major pages that hadn’t yet been designed…which is where we are now.

Putting off your site redesign until a quiet patch isn’t going to get anything done – if you’re really serious about getting the job done, at some point you gotta just do it, whether you turn away some paid work, outsource it or doing it on your own time.