we break it down into simple things like multiple image and text fields to add a degree of safety rails. There is markup and CSS behind the scenes powering the module to make it styled consistently so over time a marketer doesn’t inadvertently break the formatting. Rip and replace migrations might just take all the generated markup from the old site and dump it into a single rich text field. It’ll look fine and work until someone actually tries updating it, and you won’t have the freedom to customize pages without having to worry about really specific markup and CSS within the content editor.
Such a big part of a website budget is developing the code, doing the QA, flowing the content and launching the site — that’s probably 60% of your whole budget. If you’re going to spend 60% of the cost of a rcs database new website, why don’t you audit your website and actually do a redesign that’ll get you better performance? Knowing that for best practices the code and development have to be revisited in a migration, it makes more sense to do a redesign as opposed a straight migration.
Migrations are not a quick flip of a switch for anybody to do, and the price is indicative of the quality you want out of it. If you want a rip and replace, and you can handle the effects of that internally, you can go with a cheap migration that’ll just duplicate the code you have. But if you want to revisit the code and follow best practices to have a site that’s easily manageable by your marketing team and built specifically to leverage the features of a particular CMS you’ll have to revisit the code anyways — in which case it’s usually better to go with a redesign.
7. We can completely redo the layout and design without changing the content
When you redesign persona-specific navigation, the way you build out the content on the same site will inherently change. It’s okay to be okay with your messaging and your general tone, but the specifics of the content are going to need to change to physically fit into a new layout where word counts and conversion points differ.
People sometimes have the mindset that the website and design should be the primary focus. But you need to start with a content-first approach. A website, really, is a bunch of content. The website serves the content and not vice versa.