We get a strange kind of access to the aftermath of website redesigns. Because Emily Journey & Associates provides ongoing Website Management, we inherit websites other agencies built. Because we provide WordPress training, we meet marketing teams that just paid for a new website and are already stuck. The website may look great. That does not mean the redesign went well.
The direct answer this guide keeps coming back to: manage the organization’s decisions, not the website designer. The agency should lead discovery, scope, design, development, testing, and launch. Your job is to provide business context, coordinate internal decisions, protect the organization’s assets, and notice when the agency is quietly handing its own work back to you.
| Managing a Website Redesign: Quick Facts | |
|---|---|
| Who this guide is for: | A marketing manager employed by the business or nonprofit planning the redesign |
| The marketing manager owns: | Business context, access, internal coordination, timely decisions, approvals |
| The website designer owns: | Process leadership, design, development, project tracking, testing, launch, communication |
| The biggest risks: | Weak discovery, vague scope, hidden staffing, custom code, lost SEO assets, no post-launch plan |
| The desired outcome: | A website your organization controls, understands, can edit, and can keep improving |
| Author / reviewed: | Emily Journey, founder and CEO · Reviewed by Melanie Mann · Last reviewed July 10, 2026 |
Most Website Redesign Problems Begin Before Design Starts
The worst redesign problems rarely begin with a bad color choice. They begin when the organization selects a provider without understanding how that provider works.
By the time a homepage mockup appears, the agency has already decided who will do the work, how the site will be built, and who will own the accounts. A marketing manager who begins with design feedback is already late.
A polished website can hide a poor development process
We have opened recently launched WordPress websites during training sessions and discovered the client cannot change ordinary text through the dashboard. The site was technically built on WordPress, but much of it was hard-coded into PHP templates.
That is a rough conversation. The client just spent a large amount of money, expected training, and instead learns that routine changes require a developer.
Make these decisions before anyone designs a page
- What business problem the redesign must solve
- What content, URLs, rankings, forms, data, and functionality must be preserved
- Who will lead, design, develop, test, and launch the website
- Whether any work will be subcontracted
- How the website will be built and maintained
- Who will own the domain, hosting, software licenses, analytics, and administrator accounts
- How scope changes will be reviewed and approved
- Who will manage the website after launch
One decision comes before all of this: whether a redesign is even the right solution. If nobody can say what the new website must change for the business, start with How Often Should You Redesign Your Website?
Decide What the New Website Must Preserve
A redesign changes the website. It should not erase the value the organization has already built.
The existing site contains more than visible pages: bookmarked URLs, backlinks, forms, integrations, analytics, and workflows your staff relies on daily. Before development starts, put in writing which pages produce business value, which URLs will change and where each will redirect, and who owns the domain, hosting, analytics, and administrator accounts.
| Asset to preserve | Question to answer before development |
|---|---|
| High-value pages and content | Which pages attract qualified visitors, answer important questions, support sales, or establish authority? |
| URLs | Which URLs will stay the same, which will change, and where will every changed URL redirect? |
| Search visibility | Which queries, pages, locations, and backlinks produce business value? |
| Forms and integrations | Which systems receive submissions, orders, applications, registrations, or data? |
| Accounts and access | Who owns the domain, hosting, analytics, Search Console, software licenses, and administrator credentials? |
| Editing workflows | What does the marketing team update now, and what must remain easy to update after launch? |
| Proof and entity information | Which reviews, case studies, team profiles, credentials, policies, and verified claims must remain visible and connected? |
URL changes need a written redirect plan
We regularly inherit websites where old URLs were changed and no redirect map was ever created. Visitors reach dead pages, and search engines lose the connection between the old page and the replacement. Google treats URL changes as a site move and recommends mapping old URLs to new ones with permanent redirects.
Redirect planning is a standard migration responsibility; you should not have to request it.
Evaluate Professional Maturity, Not Just the Portfolio
A portfolio shows visual taste. It tells you almost nothing about whether the designer can lead a complicated business project.
Clients come to us after recent redesigns feeling bewildered. The proposal wasn’t fraudulent and the deadline may even have been met. They are unhappy because meetings ended without decisions, boundaries were never stated, and no one ever told them what would happen next.
Watch behavior during the sales process. Does the provider lead the meeting, or wait for you to organize it? Do they follow up with decisions, owners, and next steps? Can they say no kindly?
A designer who avoids a necessary conversation before the contract will not become more direct after it. Apply the same standard to us: read our web design and development reviews and meet our web development team, and look for proof about communication and follow-through, not compliments about appearance.
Find Out Who Will Actually Build Your Website
The person presenting the proposal is not always the person building the site.
Clients have told us they assumed their project manager was the developer, then learned that person was passing messages to an overseas subcontractor they never met. The person doing the work never heard the client’s concerns directly.
Ask for names, roles, and employment relationships
| Question | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Who will lead the project? | You need one accountable person who owns communication, decisions, and progress. |
| Who will create the graphic design? | Design direction can be lost when the designer has no access to discovery conversations. |
| Who will develop the website? | The developer makes structural decisions that affect editing, performance, security, and maintenance. |
| Who handles SEO and migration? | A developer may launch a functioning site without protecting URLs, indexing, metadata, or analytics. |
| Will any work be outsourced or subcontracted? | You need to understand who can access your systems and whether staffing can change mid-project. |
| Can we speak directly with the people doing the work? | A chain of intermediaries increases the chance of misunderstanding. |
For a complex project completed in 2022, our accepted proposal stated that an Emily Journey & Associates employee would complete the conversion, and the service agreement required the client’s consent before outside services could be used. That promise belonged in a contract, not in a reassuring sales conversation.
Real Discovery Costs Something
A complex website cannot be scoped responsibly after one pleasant sales call. Without real discovery, the proposal is a guess presented as a plan.
An established U.S. manufacturer approached us about replacing a large legacy website: more than 1,500 URLs, hundreds of products and technical records, e-commerce, and connections to other business systems.
We did not rush out a free estimate. We proposed a $1,000 Website Design Strategy that audited the site, investigated the feasibility of moving to WordPress, documented migration requirements, and produced the proposal for the full Website Design Project: a six-figure engagement planned over approximately 30 weeks, covering migration, e-commerce, systems coordination, testing, and staff training.
The client told us other proposals were dramatically lower. We did not review them, so we cannot compare their scope. What we could show was how we arrived at our recommendation and exactly what the work included. The client accepted, and later hired us for two more website projects.
This is the test of any proposal: it should create clarity, not just a price.
A useful proposal states what is being built, what is being preserved, who performs the work, what you must provide, what is excluded, and how changes will be handled. A proposal that leaves you as confused as you were before the sales process has not done its job. For what drives the numbers, see website design cost.
A detailed scope also makes pricing easier to evaluate. See Website Design Cost: What to Expect.
Your Job Is Context and Decisions, Not Managing the Designer
Marketing managers sometimes leave redesign meetings with a new list of work that belongs to the agency: tracking missing features, reminding the developer what was promised, testing work that was never tested. Clients describe comparing finished work against old emails until they feel they work for the developer.
That is where the division of responsibility has gone wrong.
Your business knowledge is essential to the redesign. Process leadership, development, testing, and quality control remain the agency’s responsibility.
You understand the audience, internal politics, sales process, brand, approval structure, and reasons previous efforts succeeded or failed. The agency cannot invent that knowledge. It also should not hand its own responsibilities back to you.
| The marketing manager owns | The website designer or agency owns |
|---|---|
| Explain the business problem and priorities | Turn the business problem into a workable project process |
| Identify stakeholders and one final decision-maker | Set the meeting, approval, and communication structure |
| Provide access, brand materials, content, and context | Identify missing inputs and say exactly what is needed |
| Make or obtain timely decisions | Document decisions and track scope, schedule, and risks |
| Review work from the organization’s perspective | Test the site technically and correct defects |
| Prepare the internal team for launch | Lead launch, post-launch testing, handoff, and training |
One habit prevents most of the chaos on your side: before kickoff, name a single point of contact and write down who has final approval for design, content, functionality, and cost. Projects bog down when everyone comments and no one decides.
An Approved Design Brief Beats “Make It Modern”
One of the clearest design briefs we ever produced began with a client saying he wanted the site to feel like it was built for a sophisticated engineer, not like an enterprise marketing brochure. That sentence gave the designer more direction than “modern,” “clean,” and “professional” combined.
Clients who say they don’t know what they want usually do: show them real websites, ask what they like and dislike and why, and the designer turns the reactions into written criteria. A brief that records the audience, the pages to be designed, and the person with final design authority lets feedback return to agreed criteria instead of becoming a new round of personal opinions.
Custom Code Is a Long-Term Liability
At Emily Journey & Associates, we consider custom-coded themes, custom plugins, and hard-coded PHP templates inherently problematic for most marketing websites.
WordPress core, supported themes, and supported plugins have published update paths. Custom code does not. Someone has to remember it exists, test it against every surrounding change, and fix it when a conflict appears.
In the websites we inherit, that maintenance has usually stopped. The result is what I call frankensteining: layers of private code and old workarounds that make the site fragile and open doors to malware.
The problem extends beyond editing. It affects the structural longevity of the website. Ask why custom code is necessary, who will maintain it, how that work will be priced, and what happens when the original developer is no longer available.
The same discipline applies to every “simple” request during the project. A customer login or a second language changes development, testing, security, and timing. Require a written change process: what the request changes, what it costs, who maintains it, and who approves it. That protects both sides from a vague memory of a meeting.
Red Flags to Catch While Walking Away Is Still Easy
Most redesign problems show themselves during the sales process, when walking away is still relatively easy.
| Red flag | Question to ask |
|---|---|
| A price arrives after one short call | What did you review to calculate this scope and price? |
| The actual developer is unnamed | Who will build the site, and can we speak with that person? |
| Custom code is presented as a sign of quality | Which parts require custom code, and who will maintain them? |
| The finished site will live on the developer’s hosting account | Will our organization own and pay for hosting directly? |
| SEO is described as a launch add-on | Who owns the migration and search-preservation plan? |
| There is no written change process | How are scope changes priced, approved, and documented? |
| Post-launch responsibility is vague | Who handles corrections, maintenance, and training after launch? |
Our web design and development FAQs answer these questions for our own projects; hold any agency to that standard. When a new site misbehaves within months of launch, the cause usually traces to one of these rows.
Protect SEO and AI Visibility From the Beginning
One new client had a finished website people could visit, but the WordPress setting that asks search engines not to index the site was still switched on. Nothing about the visual design revealed the problem. Launch testing has to include what search systems can access, not only what people see.
This happened because search protection was treated as launch cleanup instead of part of the redesign plan.
A redesign changes the information search engines and AI systems use to understand your organization: URLs, service descriptions, authorship, reviews, structured data, and the evidence behind your claims.
When those elements are removed or weakened, the organization loses more than rankings. Search engines and AI systems have a harder time understanding who the organization is, what it does, who is responsible for the content, and which claims are supported.
Include search and entity preservation in the project scope
- Export current URLs and map every changed URL
- Identify pages, queries, and backlinks that produce business value
- Preserve or improve important service, location, author, review, FAQ, and case-study content
- Retain verified organization facts and consistent service language
- Preserve useful internal links and rebuild them where the structure changes
- Carry forward appropriate metadata and visible authorship
- Review structured data so it describes the visible page accurately
- Confirm the live site is crawlable and indexable
- Verify analytics and Search Console after launch
- Monitor changed URLs, indexing, traffic, and conversions after launch
Map every URL change, keep the pages that produce business value, carry forward metadata and visible authorship, confirm the live site is crawlable, and monitor indexing after launch.
Our SEO Services focus on long-term search visibility, and our Generative Engine Optimization Services make priority pages easier for AI systems to understand, trust, and reference accurately.
Decide Who Owns the Website After Launch Before You Sign
Launch begins the client’s long-term responsibility for the new website.
We meet teams who schedule WordPress training because the developer stopped answering their emails. We find plugin licenses owned by a former provider, administrator accounts tied to personal email addresses, and businesses that cannot move their site because it lives on the developer’s server.
Every one of those problems traces back to a decision that should have been made before the contract was signed.
Your organization should own and pay for its domain, hosting, key software licenses, analytics, and Search Console; a provider can manage those accounts without owning them.
Decide before signing who will handle updates, backups, security, and new requests once the project ends. At our agency, that ongoing relationship is Website Management, and the transition itself is covered in Who Takes Care of Your Website After It Launches?.
Organizations leaving another provider can use our guide to changing website management agencies to protect access, backups, and the handoff.
Pre-Signing Questions to Ask the Website Designer
Use this list before accepting a website design proposal.
- What business problem do you believe this redesign needs to solve?
- What do you still need to learn before you can scope the project accurately?
- Should this project begin with a paid Website Design Strategy?
- What will we receive from the strategy, even if we do not hire you for development?
- Who will lead, design, develop, test, and launch the website?
- Are those people employees or subcontractors?
- Can we communicate directly with the people doing the work?
- How will the site be built, and which parts will require custom code?
- Will our marketing team be able to edit routine text, images, and layouts through WordPress?
- Who owns and pays for the domain, hosting, software licenses, analytics, and administrator accounts?
- What existing URLs, content, data, integrations, rankings, and workflows will you preserve?
- Who is responsible for redirects, indexing, metadata, internal links, schema, analytics, and Search Console?
- What does your design brief include, and who approves it?
- What is included, excluded, and assumed in the proposal?
- How are scope changes evaluated, priced, approved, and documented?
- How do you communicate decisions, next steps, delays, and risks?
- What testing happens before and after launch?
- What training, documentation, and post-launch correction period are included?
- Who will manage and maintain the website after launch?
- Can you show client evidence about communication, accountability, and long-term website ownership?
A Website Redesign Should Leave Your Organization With More Control
A successful redesign leaves the organization with a website it understands, controls, and can continue using long after the launch presentation.
Pay attention to what happens before design starts. Ask who will do the work. Require real discovery. Use an approved design brief. Read the proposal for clarity. Protect your accounts, content, search history, and post-launch future.
Those decisions are less exciting than a homepage concept. They are also the decisions that determine whether the redesign becomes a useful business asset or another expensive experience your organization has to recover from.
Learn about our Web Design and Development services, meet the Emily Journey & Associates team, or contact us about a website project.
About the Author
Emily Journey is the CEO of Emily Journey & Associates. She founded the agency in 2012 and works in agency direction, service design, WordPress strategy, training, AI search visibility, and responsible AI.
Emily is a Certified AI Auditor and has completed training in AI ethics and governance through Oxford University.
Source Notes
Google site move guidance (https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/site-move-with-url-changes) establishes that Google treats URL changes as a site move and recommends mapping old URLs to new destinations with permanent redirects, testing, and monitoring.
WordPress Reading Settings documentation (https://wordpress.org/documentation/article/settings-reading-screen/) establishes that the “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” setting asks search engines not to index the website.
WordPress update documentation (https://wordpress.org/documentation/article/updating-wordpress/) establishes that WordPress core, themes, and plugins have published update processes; the conclusion that custom code lacks an equivalent maintained path is Emily Journey & Associates’ assessment from its website management experience.
Emily Journey & Associates, anonymized Website Design Strategy records (2022; internal client records retained) establish the proposed and accepted $1,000 strategy engagement for an established U.S. manufacturer.
Emily Journey & Associates, anonymized Website Design Project records (2022; internal client records retained) establish the accepted six-figure engagement planned over approximately 30 weeks, covering more than 1,500 URLs and hundreds of products and records. The statement that competing proposals were dramatically lower comes from the client’s account; Emily Journey & Associates did not review those proposals. The two later website projects are documented in internal records. Results and circumstances are client-specific.
Emily Journey & Associates, anonymized technology-company website redesign design brief (internal client record retained) establishes the design criteria and client direction described in the guide. The client and company are anonymized.
Emily Journey interview (June 30, 2026) establishes the firsthand accounts of recurring inherited-website patterns, discoveries made during WordPress training, and agency recommendations. Experiences described are client-specific.
