After months of planning and hard work, the new ECHOtape.com is here, and we are ecstatic!
But… while the champagne is pouring and we are all breathing a sigh of relief, it wasn’t without challenges. If you don’t know what to expect once your long-awaited redesign launches, here’s the best piece of advice we can give you – Expect the unexpected.
For us, that meant some technical challenges. To be expected, of course, but it did delay the launch. First, we were migrating from one platform to another – Magento to WordPress – and we needed to try and move as much data as we could without having to re-enter it. Great in theory, but there was some head scratching in development for a little while, and there was still some manual entry that needed to be done. During the redesign process, we used a team-based, cloud-hosted application to help manage all of the to dos, and we can’t recommend that highly enough (we used Teamwork but have used Basecamp in the past).
The second situation difficile occurred when we decided to develop two websites to accommodate our various audiences, French and English. While our previous website combined the two, it wasn’t always seamless, and it made for a messy user interface (UI). So while two sites meant twice the work, it was still the best option for our customers.
All told, the entire redesign process took about two months longer than originally anticipated. And like most projects, there’s more work to be done, like creating a new company video and optimizing the site to drive more qualified traffic to our website. However, our perspective is that the site did not need to be 100% perfect to launch, so we will be editing and updating it in real time. Besides, if you wait for perfection, you’ve never launch.
