Anatomy of a website redesign: tips and tricks.

• Author: Chin, Arthur
• Position: Online presence

How do you eat an elephant? As my children tell me, "one bite at a time." That's sound advice for how you redesign websites, too. When CalCPA set out to redesign its content-rich website more than a year ago, a couple of the more challenging tasks was determining what information needed updating and how to make information easier to find. Over the last 10 years, the site grew so large that it needed to be pruned. More than 7,000 pages of content were reviewed for relevancy, updated and archived.

"We asked our members and looked at our analytics, and the results didn't really match when it came to the most popular areas for our site," said Moe Asgharnia, CalCPA IT director.

Our website is in the top 5 percent of websites in the U.S. in terms of visitors, and in the top 1 percent of websites in the world. We had a diamond that needed some polishing.

A lot of work was done with our vendor to redesign the website, including how to preserve the links and redirect people to new ones.

"We needed to ensure that the most popular areas would still show up in search results and that those links would still work," said Alana Hope, associate director of marketing for CalCPA Education Foundation.

We also had to greatly improve the speed and performance of the website, and remove a lot of the PDFs and downloads, while making sure the content would render quickly.

Several systems are integrated with our new site, including our database, CPE instructor module, exams and certificates, Classifieds and chapter blog pages.

"It was a team effort and we tested day and night to make sure it was ready," said Barbara Maciel, CalCPA associate director of operations.

A new universal search engine is available and the user experience has been enhanced for mobile devices and tablets. You also can now chat online with member services during business hours or fill out a form from the HELP link (www.calcpa.org/calcpa-support).

After poring over content, deciding on color schemes and studying layout options, as well as pulling in members for their input on how they use the site and their time as testers, we launched the website in March.

But wait, there's...