Looking Towards the Future: Anticipating Change

By Margaret Nyambura Ndung'u, EcoNews Africa
May 2001

Maintenance and continuity: documentation

Documenting your experience is a very good and important aspect for future reference. Nevertheless it is rarely given the priority it deserves and leads to a lot of duplication or even redoing of the whole work. Imagine if the redesign team worked without documenting anything and then for some reason had to leave the organization abruptly. In this case, the knowledge and experience they had is forgotten and not made use of. Naturally this is a very big loss to an institution and results in the duplication of efforts and unjustifiable use of resources.

After the redesign and overhauls of a Web site, a manual should be developed showing in detail way all the procedures that were followed, problems experienced, how they were addressed and how they can be addressed given a different scenario.

Launching of the site

When the site has been redesigned, all the staff and active stakeholders should be given an orientation on how to find their way to needed documents. The knowledge should not just been left to the Web manager. Launching the site gives the designers the opportunity to interact with the real users as well as the potential users, and enhances mutual understanding of the site.

Quality control

It is important to maintain the quality after the redesign. This can be done by ensuring that there are detailed ways of keeping the site active and engaging all the clients to enhance and maintain the good look. Once the redesign has been completed, you should go through the site to ensure that there are no broken links and that the search engines do not direct the users to non-existent sites.

Publicity

Once a Web site has been redesigned, it is important to publicize the new look with the objective of not just informing, but also of getting feedback from the users. There are various ways in which this can be done. This includes but is not limited to:

• News Briefs
• Newsletters
• Mailing lists
• Banners
• Exchange links
• Indexing and re-registering with the search engines

When redesigning the site, it should be done bearing in mind that after a certain duration another redesign will be deemed necessary hence continuity should be borne in mind. The old materials could be archived for future reference and access.

User feedback

Once the site has been redesigned, it is important to have a system of managing user feedback. All comments that are aimed at improving the site should be given consideration and acted upon. However care should be taken to avoid daily major changes on the site since it is not always possible to satisfy all users.

User statistics

After the overhaul, you should ensure that the user statistics are maintained to determine if the change attracted more customers or not. The most frequently visited sections should be determined and learning experience drawn from them.