Why redesign projects often feel chaotic inside the company
From the outside, a website redesign looks simple: hire a team, discuss goals, choose a direction, build, launch.
Inside the company, the experience can feel very different. Departments push for their section to be prominent. Content appears late or not at all. Decision-makers join meetings halfway through the project and question fundamental choices. What should have been a three-month redesign turns into a year of small crises.
Most of these problems are not technical; they are organisational. The good news is that you can reduce a lot of the chaos with preparation that has nothing to do with layout files or frameworks.
This article focuses on that preparation. It complements the pieces on redesign ROI, timelines, and project briefs by looking at what you need to do inside your team before a redesign starts.
Step 1: appoint a real project owner
“We will decide together” sounds nice, but it rarely works for design decisions.
Without a clear project owner, every choice becomes a negotiation between different preferences. Design reviews turn into long discussions where nobody feels responsible for closing them. External partners receive mixed signals and are forced to guess whose opinion matters most.
A real project owner:
Understands the business goals behind the redesign.
Has enough authority to make decisions and say “no” when needed.
Is available throughout the project instead of disappearing after kickoff.
They do not have to decide everything alone, but they are the person who synthesises input and carries responsibility. In small companies this is often the founder or managing director; in larger ones, a marketing or product lead.
Step 2: decide where content will come from
Content is one of the most common reasons redesigns slip.
If nobody owns it, content reviews get pushed to “later”, and layouts are built on placeholders. When real copy finally appears, it does not fit the structure, forcing extra rounds of design and development work.
Before you start, answer a few simple questions:
Which pages will reuse and polish existing content, and which need to be written from scratch?
Who is responsible for drafting each key page? Who edits and approves?
Do you need external copywriting support, and is that budgeted?
You do not need final text before design begins, but you do need ownership. Even outlines or bullet points for each page are enough to give designers and developers something real to work with.
Step 3: create a decision framework instead of endless debates
Many redesign arguments are not about the details people claim. They are about different ideas of what the site is supposed to achieve.
One person wants maximum lead volume. Another wants to attract only large, long-term clients. A third wants the site to impress potential hires. The homepage cannot be everything at once.
It helps to write down a small set of priorities before design work starts:
What are the top two or three outcomes this redesign must support?
Which audiences are primary, and which are secondary?
If there is a trade-off between two goals, which one wins?
You can still listen to feedback from across the company, but you judge suggestions against this framework. That keeps reviews focused and gives your external partner a way to resolve conflicts constructively.
Step 4: align expectations about timelines and workload
Redesigns feel more stressful when everyone treats them as something that will magically fit into existing workloads.
Content owners think they will “find time” to write pages. Decision-makers assume they will only be needed for one or two reviews. In reality, both groups have to make space for the project across several weeks or months.
Before you commit to a timeline, be honest about internal capacity:
How many hours per week can the project owner realistically dedicate?
When are key decision-makers likely to be unavailable because of travel, quarter-end, or major launches?
Do content owners have dedicated time blocked, or are you hoping they will write copy between other tasks?
Matching your internal reality to the external timeline avoids a lot of frustration later.
Step 5: communicate the plan to the rest of the company
Even people who are not directly involved will care about how the website represents their work. If they only hear about the redesign when everything is almost finished, they may push back simply because they feel excluded.
A short, clear internal message early in the project can help:
Explain why the redesign is happening and what outcomes you expect.
Name the project owner and content leads so people know whom to talk to.
Set expectations: who will be consulted, who will decide, and how feedback will be handled.
This does not eliminate all late opinions, but it makes them easier to manage because the structure was clear from the start.
Making your next redesign less painful
Preparing your team for a redesign does not require a huge internal project. It requires a few deliberate choices made before you sign contracts.
Choose a project owner with enough authority and time.
Assign content ownership for key pages.
Write down a simple decision framework everyone can reference.
Be realistic about internal workload and block time accordingly.
Communicate the plan so people know how and when to contribute.
Combined with a solid brief and realistic external timeline, these steps turn a redesign from a slow-moving internal argument into a focused collaboration. Your external partner can then do what you hired them for: designing and building a site that supports your business, instead of trying to mediate debates that could have been resolved before the project even started.
