# Before a Redesign, Decide What Needs to Stay

A clearer brief starts with what works: useful pages, familiar workflows, and the reasons people visit your site.

Published: 2026-01-14
Updated: 2026-09-17
Author: Zane DeFazio
Tags: Strategy, Web Design

---
It's easy to make a list of things you dislike about your website. The harder question is what you would miss if the new one got it wrong.

A useful redesign brief needs both. I want to know what frustrates you, and I want to know which pages, tools, and habits people already rely on. That gives the work a direction beyond making everything look newer.

## Start with a few real tasks

Pick the things visitors and your team need to do. Find the right service. Send an inquiry. Publish an article. Update opening hours. Share a project example with a prospective client.

Walk through each task on the current site. Keep the notes simple: what works, what gets in the way, and who needs to be involved in changing it.

A frustrating editing screen and a confusing navigation label are both worth addressing. They need different fixes, and neither is solved by a new color palette alone.

## Make a keep, change, and retire list

Use those observations to decide what belongs in the new site. Keep useful content and familiar language where it still fits. Change what has a clear problem. Retire pages deliberately, with a plan for visitors who still have the old address.

For a hypothetical small business, that might mean keeping a helpful service explanation, rewriting an outdated pricing page, and combining two pages that answer the same question. The decisions should come before polishing layouts around them.

If URLs change, allow time to map them and handle the move. Search visibility can fluctuate during a migration; careful preparation reduces avoidable problems without promising unchanged rankings. [Google's site-move guidance](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/site-move-with-url-changes) describes the planning and monitoring involved.

## Put real words in the design

You don't need every sentence approved before design starts. You do need enough real content to test the important choices.

Can a visitor tell what you do from the opening screen? Do the service names mean anything outside your team? Does the page give someone a sensible next step?

On this Code For Broke rebuild, one concrete decision was to give the two ways of working equal prominence. Marketing teams and small businesses need different explanations. That decision shapes the homepage more than choosing a decorative detail does.

## Agree on who decides

Name the people who need to review content, design, and functionality. Be clear about who makes the final call when their needs conflict. Group feedback around a page's purpose so the team can resolve it together.

Also decide what is needed for launch and what can follow. A smaller, coherent release is easier to review than a plan that keeps growing without an agreed finish.

## Review the work as a visitor

Before release, follow the important journeys on a phone and a larger screen. Check links, forms, page addresses, and the content itself. Make room to review the live site after the move, too.

If your current website has useful things worth keeping, [start there with me](/contact/?service=site-redesigns). We can work out what a [redesign](/services/site-redesigns/) needs to change and what it needs to respect.