Spring Cleaning Your Online Presence: Arkane Digital’s Checklist for Success

Spring is here! As this time of year brings a sense of renewal and growth, it’s the perfect time to give your company’s online presence a thoughtful refresh. Whether you’re tackling this internally or considering partnering with experts like Arkane Digital, a comprehensive approach ensures your efforts will be impactful. 

Here’s your checklist for a successful website revamp:

1. Assess your current state

Before diving into design stages, it’s important to start with a strategy that’s rooted in a detailed understanding of your current online presence. Identify your website’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Engage with different stakeholders to identify current problems and define clear objectives. What do you want your website to achieve? Better brand storytelling, higher traffic, or improved conversion rates? This stage is highly collaborative—at Arkane, we conduct a detailed discovery to gather the client’s input and feedback throughout.

2. Go beyond visual appeal with UX/UI

A visually stunning website is important, but great design goes deeper. Focus on creating a user experience that is intuitive, consistent, and easy to navigate. Your user interface should not only reflect your brand but also be accessible, complying with standards like the ADA and WCAG that you might be subject to. Review your site’s current UX/UI: are there confusing navigation paths or inaccessible content? Addressing these issues will ensure your website is welcoming and usable for everyone.

3. Build future-proof solutions that scale

Technology evolves rapidly, and your website should be built on a platform that can grow and adapt with your business. This requires a deep understanding of how the solution should be implemented technically. For example, following a merger, First Horizon wanted to redesign their outdated website and share their message of community and trust to their customers. Leveraging their existing content management system, we helped them translate their design into reusable, well-documented components, that were both experience editor compatible as well as ADA compliant. The result was a beautiful, new website created within their existing infrastructure, with ADA compatibility and all best practices employed.

4. Adopt an Agile approach

Adopting an Agile methodology for your website revamp can lead to better outcomes. This process involves breaking down the project into smaller, manageable sprints, allowing for regular reassessment and adjustments based on real-time feedback. This approach ensures that the project remains aligned with your strategic goals. Ideally, your internal team or partner will host daily stand-up meetings to foster open communication and issue resolution, ensuring a smooth workflow. If working with a partner, consider also requiring weekly demos so stakeholders can provide feedback. At Arkane, our Agile process is divided into 2-week sprints, with each sprint beginning with a planning session to define objectives and prioritize tasks.

5. Verify, validate, and optimize

Before any of your changes go live, it’s important to conduct user acceptance testing. This is a dedicated phase where real users test the site in a controlled environment to identify any issues or areas for improvement, helping ensure that the site meets your business requirements and provides a quality user experience. On top of that, be sure to also collect external data after populating the system with the appropriate data and content. Gather feedback, make adjustments, test, tweak, and test again—performing a final deployment only once the site accomplishes your objectives.

Create Meaningful, Strategy-Driven Digital Experiences

At Arkane Digital, we partner with you to create meaningful digital experiences based on strategy and experience. Led by a team of industry veterans, we bring years of experience in a technology landscape that is ever changing. Projects never stop at discovery, and we are a full-service digital agency that gets you from start to finish, whether that's launching the redesign of a new website or modernizing your e-commerce system.

Interested? Let’s start a conversation today.