Planning for your site Migration? — Doug Bell // Searchmetrics

Quotes

• “The first tip is, do not underestimate just how resource-intensive a site migration is. Then find great partners that can help you with the design and partners that can help you with the build.” -Doug

• “We engaged with our amazing DevOps team at Searchmetrics and our DevOps is not just responsible for our website, they actually are responsible for the infrastructure for our entire product suite, so really highly qualified and capable people. We also engaged our web development resources.” -Doug

• “I think the smartest thing we did then is that we were able to tell the resources that can ride in partner with us and that we werent overwhelming our development resources internally.” -Doug

• “With phase one, tasks were: get the message positioning, get the packaging and the brand right, and all of these things in the product taxonomy had found ourselves in the spot where our platform has developed over the years as our service offerings.” -Doug

• “The key thing we really had there was that, we started with a design and we are able to iterate that design to user experience.” -Doug

• “At the end of the day, you have an underlying architecture and that is driven by your main navigation, sometimes the utility navigation. What you want to be doing is, as much as possible, not messing with those hierarchies.” -Doug

• “If your main navigation, if its going to change should get simpler and that should be about user experience.” -Doug

• “We started with site experience and what it is effectively doing is doing an inventory and also looking for the broken stuff, so errors were all over the place.” -Doug

• “So really, you are starting with an inventory and then as you are building and architecting the site, what you are doing is you are trying to understand how Google might regard any changes in architecture and then youre just looking for that low-hanging fruit.” -Doug

• “We were attacking this very much like an agile project. To do that, youre honestly not doing a crawl then stopping, youve got another crawl that is coming up. The adjunct, the thing that couples really well with that is a content audit.” -Doug

• “The key thing was to look at the page that we were looking at updating or any architectural type of change we were making and to audit that content.” -Doug

• “Make sure that you are optimized for speed as a first thing. Make sure that you are in a good neighborhood from a hosting standpoint as well. Youd be shocked at how Google can penalize you for that.” -Doug

• “What Im hearing from you is that this phase before you actually start your development is very much centered around collecting your inventory. You are trying to understand what you have in terms of a site structure problem, of content, of business performance and of opportunities to optimize your hosting.” -Ben

• “Youre really just looking at the lay of the land and figuring out the parts of your site that are working so you could figure out where you need to investyour time in developing new solutions.” -Ben