A website redesign goes better when it is planned before a single page is drawn. Bedaya Polyclinic in Al Wasl, Dubai, offers conventional and complementary medicine under one roof. We designed its identity first, then planned and built its new website. These are the steps we followed, in order, and they apply to most businesses planning a redesign.

Step 1. Read the site you have

Start with an inventory: every page, what it says, who it is for and what it is missing. A redesign that skips this step tends to copy the old site's problems into a new layout.

Read it as a visitor would, too. Where does someone looking for a treatment, a doctor or the opening hours get lost? That list becomes the brief.

Step 2. Keep the structure, change everything else

Bedaya kept its site map: the departments, the treatments and the practitioners. What changed was everything a visitor sees and reads: the layout, the copy and the imagery.

Keeping the structure has two benefits. Returning visitors still find their way, and pages that search engines already know can keep their addresses. Change the structure only where it is actually broken.

Step 3. Write the strategy down first

Before design, we wrote the website strategy. It was a delivered piece of work, not a conversation. A website strategy sets down who the site is for, what each part has to do and how a visitor moves from arriving to getting in touch.

A written strategy gives every later decision something to be checked against. When a page, a picture or a line of copy is in doubt, the strategy settles it.

Step 4. One template for every service page

A clinic has many service pages, and they are easy to let drift. At Bedaya every service page shares one template.

A template is not a shortcut. It means a visitor learns the layout once and finds the same information in the same place on every page, and a design change lands once instead of many times. It also makes adding a new treatment a matter of filling in a page, not designing one.

Step 5. Plan the copy and the search together

Each page gets one search phrase, written into the copy rather than added afterwards. The copy and the search work were done in the same pass, by the same team, so the words that help a page be found are also the words that help a patient decide.

Health copy needs particular care. It should describe what a treatment is and who it is for, and avoid promises a clinic cannot keep.

Step 6. Plan the imagery as a set

Pictures chosen one at a time rarely look like one site. At Bedaya the rooms, the treatments and the still lifes were made for the site as a set, in one light.

Some of those images are generated, and the case page says so plainly. Being clear about what is a photograph and what is not is part of being trusted.

Step 7. Decide the first channel, then end every page on it

Decide how most visitors will get in touch, and make it easy from every page. For Bedaya that channel is WhatsApp, so every inner page closes on a WhatsApp message.

The principle is to use the channel your visitors already use, not the one that is easiest to set up.

Step 8. Then build

Only after the first seven steps do we build. By then most of the hard decisions have been made, and the build can focus on doing them well. The Bedaya home page opens on a butterfly film that plays as the page scrolls; the rest of the site follows the template and the strategy.

What to take from it

A website redesign is mostly planning. Keep what works, write down what the site is for, plan the words and the search together, make the pictures as a set and decide how people will reach you. The design is easier once those are settled.

A website project with us starts with one conversation about the business, the site you have and what the new one has to do. Read more about our web design agency in Dubai.