At the end of each calendar year, I often schedule a quick review of my clients’ websites with the owner or person in charge of the website. These days, website design involves much more than graphics or the layout of a web page. We look at visitor statistics, any changes in revenue or traffic, and put together a timeline for any changes we deem necessary. Sometimes there are new products or maybe updates to existing information.

So one of my long time clients replies to my email and says he wants to do it early as they will be closing for the last two weeks of December. We schedule the meeting, gather the key players and draw up a very brief agenda. This particular owner, Bill, often sits back but lets his operations and marketing people make most of the decisions.

Let me give you a quick summary so you can better appreciate the meeting notes. We have been doing business with this client for about 15 years. In addition to doing your website design work, we also provide all of your IT and network support services. The company has been in business for about 35 years and has been doing well in its industry for many years. This year has been difficult due to all the financial mess, but they have managed to cut some costs and even find some new clients.

Okay, let’s get back to the meeting. I get there about 15 minutes early and go up to the conference room to set up my laptop so we can view the website while we discuss any changes. A couple of people stick their heads in the door and say hello, I know most of the office staff pretty well. The COO walks in and, after some small talk, says that he’ll love this meeting. I look up from what I’m doing and say, why? He says that he will let the owner, Bill, tell me everything.

So the other 4 managers walk in at the appointed time. One mentions Bill, he’s on the phone and will be here in a few minutes. So everyone sit back and I’ll pass through the website stats for the last 12 months. We have good software installed to track a lot of information, plus they also have an internal tracking system. Part of our core website design services also includes the marketing aspect of any website.

The owner, Bill, walks in and asks if we start and I tell him no, I just handed over last year’s numbers. He says that before we start on the agenda, I would like to say a few words. I say okay, go ahead. Bill says that he has already checked the numbers and, given the current economy and the general slowdown, he looks better than he would have forecast. But then he drops the bombshell that he thinks the website looks a bit old and he thinks we should do a total facelift and content overhaul.

It took me totally by surprise; I never imagined that something like this would come up in this meeting. Everyone at the table turned and looked at me for my reaction. I said OK, what do you think needs to change? Bill said “well I’m tired of looking at the same old website and I think it needs some new information and maybe a little more.”

Now don’t get me wrong, I would love to have the extra billable hours that something like this would provide for the website design part of my business. Your website has a lot of content and would make a great project. It would really help my December billing and provide a huge boost to my year-end numbers on our website design revenue.

But the bad news is that you will most likely lose keyword rankings, a lot of targeted traffic, and worse, lost revenue. I’ve been through these kinds of situations where a website was working well and producing revenue and quickly fell apart in a major redesign. Major overhauls on a production website can lead to a huge loss of traffic and indexing, I’ve seen this happen too many times.

So I told Bill about a client who decided to do the same type of redesign even though I recommended against it. And I gave some very impressive numbers on how badly the website lost traffic and in turn the business lost revenue. He looked up into the air for a moment, you could see the wheels turning and said it was fine, all the other staff expressed similar opinions, so let’s forget about the redesign for now.

Everyone at the table breathed a sigh of relief, especially me. The rest of the meeting went well and we decided to add new content and make some other small changes. Overall it was a good meeting and we made some progress.

The bottom line is that when your website is firing on all cylinders, don’t go in and start making changes just because you may be tired of the same old design. It’s good to make some improvements based on monitoring and testing different aspects of your website. But if you make major reviews for no business or marketing reason, it usually works to your disadvantage. Always try to make small changes and test them to see if they offer any improvement.

And if you don’t have a good method for analyzing important stats on your website, you need to address it quickly. This will give you the information to make those small big changes and test each one to make sure you get the expected results. Small changes that prove their worth through testing are always the best approach and should be incorporated into any website design project.