the other hand, you may want to accomplish several core objectives in the redesign.

Consider the following wish list for a fictional redesign:

1. Make the website standards compliant by using semantic markup and CSS-based

design. Construct the site with valid XHTML.

2. Reduce the average page weight by half to decrease load time.

3. Make the website more accessible by complying with WCAG 1.0 Priority Level 1

guidelines.

4. Add the new company logo and implement the revised style guide for corporate

colors.

5. Create consistency in the site’s navigation by replacing the current disparate menus

with a collective drop-down menu.

6. Halve the number of steps in the shopping cart checkout process.

7. Use Ajax widgets to improve the interactivity of the shopping cart process.

8. Add a corporate blog written by the CEO.

While these are all good objectives, tagging each one as a critical, red-alert, priority-one

intention simply dilutes the resources for the core, must-meet goals. Budget, time, and

technology constraints might force a team of designers and developers to distill the list

down to only two or three.

These few top-level goals are unique to every situation, and only the web developer and

his marketing team would be able to accurately rank the preceding list. For instance, it

may be critical to get more customers to finish the sales process, so the sixth item might

be most important. In addition, the first objective directly contributes to the second, third,

and potentially fourth and fifth, so that would also be the primary objective. After consid-

eration, our primary goals might look like this:

11

OVERVIEW

To that end, it is critical to craft a detailed list of objectives that the redesign will address.

Most (if not all) of the objectives need to be quantitative, not qualitative; the better the

results can be measured with hard evidence, the more successful the design will be. For

instance, it is easy to promise that the redesign will “look better,” because that is a purely 1

subjective gauge no one can logically refute. However, if the objective is to be WCAG 1.0