When faced with the decision of whether to refresh their website design or to replatform to a new CMS, senior teams rarely find it obvious which route is best. Not entirely surprising, as there’s a lot to consider.
It’s not just about the difficulty of comparing costs and benefits. Leaders are often too focussed on visible issues, like an outdated design, while overlooking deeper CMS limitations. Other times, they may be drawn to the promise of a new platform without weighing the risks, indirect costs, or the organization’s ability to deliver the change.
So, how best to avoid bias and associated risk in deciding whether to redesign or re-patform? This article will look at how a structured decision matrix can support a recommendation that holds up at board level. If you’d like to see how it works, you can download the matrix here to illustrate the article as we go.
Mistakes in the decision-making process usually arise from the motivations to update the website.
For example, a redesign is often chosen when a site looks dated or the user experience no longer fits the brand. The problem comes when leaders assume the CMS is good enough and focus only on making surface changes.
As a result, any or all of the following can occur:
Perhaps most importantly, this can typically be a short-term fix at best: frustrations usually return within a few years.
However, that isn’t to say that replatforming is a cast-iron solution. A new CMS can be tempting, with promises of advanced features – but those capabilities often go unused.
The main problems with unnecessary replatforming are:
Even when the direction is correct, the process can still fail. Bias, blind spots, and unbalanced priorities exist throughout the process.
Senior influencers, for example, can often push for a familiar CMS, with confidence mistaken for evidence. That can result in a single function taking unhelpful prominence: IT focuses on security, marketing on speed etc., while trade-offs remain unresolved.
Additionally, short-term pressures can often hurry the decision-making process along, exacerbating those issues.
So, without a structured way to weigh trade-offs, decisions rest on opinion rather than evidence. That’s why the choice between redesign and replatform can’t be reduced to surface comparisons.
There’s no silver bullet. A redesign, or website refresh, is often the right choice if the CMS continues to support publishing and integration needs, but if the site itself is dated or hard to use. Replatforming, a full rebuild on a new CMS, is usually more justifiable when the existing platform fails on several critical criteria such as scalability, security, or workflows.
The truth is that a simple head-to-head comparison doesn’t capture the whole picture. That’s why organizations benefit from using a structured approach to weigh those trade-offs.
Because neither option is a clear winner in any given situation, organizations need a structured way to evaluate the trade-offs.
Bringing all the needs of each team into view through this approach reduces bias, surfaces hidden assumptions, and creates a clear record of how the conclusion was reached. It also makes the trade-offs explicit, so leadership teams can see not just which option scores higher overall, but why.
A well-constructed matrix should cover a number of criteria:
To save you some time and effort you can download our “starter” decision matrix that can be used “out the box” or adapt it and customize for your own particular requirements .
To save you some time and effort you can download our “starter” decision matrix that can be used “out the box” or adapt it and customize for your own particular requirements .
