Is a site redesign among your company's New Year's resolutions? Marketers who have delayed much-needed site overhauls during two years of recessionary budgets may be looking to shape up their Web presence in 2012. But like so many other resolutions, site redesigns are much easier to commit to than to actually undertake.

This year, resolve to redesign your request for proposal (RFP) process along with your site. There's never been a better time: Big changes in the digital marketing landscape over the last several years demand a fresh approach to the RFP to ensure that you end up with a site that's built to last. The risk of rapid obsolescence is real: A site redesign in early 2012 will launch onto a landscape with up to 70 million tablet users in the US alone—a trend that was entirely unforeseen just two years ago.

Future-proofing your redesign starts with the RFP itself. A well-crafted RFP vets the responding agencies' capabilities in areas of innovation, such as mobile design. But just as important, a well-crafted RFP aligns your own organization behind those needs, ensuring that IT, Marketing, and upper management share common goals for the site's evolution.

With that in mind, I offer the following RFP guidelines—first the do's, then the don'ts.

What Your RFP Should Ask For

1. Mobile Integration

A site redesign is the most natural opportunity to address a brand's mobile presence, because mobile's role in the customer journey (i.e., when customers use your mobile site, mobile app, and desktop website) is best uncovered in the user research that accompanies a redesign. If the mobile and desktop sites will be managed via a common content management system, the RFP should address that requirement as well.

2. Content Sharing Features

By now, marketers have embraced social sharing as a crucial tool in the marketing arsenal, but branded social channels, such as Facebook and Twitter, get most of the mindshare, while people neglect the site's social dimension. It's time to remedy that oversight with RFP requirements for integration of social sharing tools that'll enable site visitors to share valuable content with their social networks and to gather feedback on purchases they're considering.

3. SEO 2.0

Most site redesign RFPs simply check the box on search engine optimization (SEO) by asking responding agencies to affirm that their development processes include site optimization. Has any agency ever claimed otherwise? As the search landscape rapidly evolves to favor more recent and more social content, respondents' SEO capabilities deserve a little more scrutiny. Google has made an estimated 400 search algorithm changes in the last year alone. How does a prospective agency's solution ensure that your site will stay competitive? What role does social content, especially blogging, play in the agency's recommended SEO strategy?

4. Community Features

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Redesigning the Site Redesign RFP: Eight Do's and Don'ts

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Eric Anderson is a partner at digital agency White Horse and the author of Social Media Marketing: Game Theory and the Emergence of Collaboration.