Ben May, CEO of The Code Company, talks to your host Vahe Arabian, State of Digital Publishing’s (SODP) founder, about website migration and redesigns. The Code Company offers WordPress solutions for established digital publishers around the world. Ben guides us through the best practices and important considerations while redesigning and migrating your website.
Episode Highlights
- Ben explains The Code Company, its mission and services.
- Different types of site migration and how they work.
- Various approaches to migration.
- What are the most common pitfalls of site migration and redesign that most publishers underestimate?
- Why do most people miss out on taking the design part more seriously?
- AMP framework, its benefits and the best approaches while implementing it.
- What are the common practices big publishers incorporate when it comes to choosing CDN, and what’s the decision-making process?
- When should publishers consider what CMS they should use and how that ties in with their infrastructure?
- Conditions where WordPress might not be the ideal solution.
- What’s the time inefficiency behind developing a customized solution against running it with WordPress, and is it worth it?
- Detailed highlights on negotiables and non-negotiables while relaunching a site.
- Best tips for speeding up the process.
- What are the major considerations you should look at during the pre-launch and post-launch periods, and what needs special attention during the launch?
- What should publishers do to continue the momentum of the redesign or re-platform process?
- How to keep the team interested, motivated and engaged during the whole process.
- Suggestions on tools and techniques that help with repurposing templates and images.
- Tips on managing designs across different devices.
- What are some of the smartest practices that help with the website restructure?
- Page optimization from the CDN level — is it something that should be considered from the beginning, or is it a lazy approach?
Key Points
- Design is one of the first things that is crucial but usually overlooked.
- Generalized hosts don’t have the infrastructure to keep up with technology that’s becoming so much more advanced.
- Relaunching a website may have a positive impact because Google recrawls everything.
- It’s common to see a dip in traffic on the website when there are wholesale changes, as Google needs to confirm whether the site is still legit.
Tweetable Quotes
- “WordPress is a huge bag of PHP scripts. It can do anything.” — Ben May
- “When you relaunch a site, Google will probably do the most thorough crawl of your site it’s done in a long time.” — Ben May
- “Post-launch is a tricky process. Sometimes people want to forget about it for a month and then pretend it never happened.” — Ben May
- “One of the most important things is to be super vigilant when it comes to SEO and monitoring repercussions of a launch.” — Ben May
