A redesign of a website begins with great excitement and new ideas for the website’s look. But often the new design is not just a face lift, rather a new website built from scratch. The first months of a redesign are spent on setting up a new CMS and on migrating the content to the new system.

Often the new website’s design does not look as expected and a lot of work is required to get the new website right.

The cycle of redesign, rebuild and relaunch of your website doesn’t have to happen. But it does happen because of the way your website was set up initially, before you even started designing it. Avoiding that cycle in the first place usually starts with researching the best headless CMS for enterprise teams before a redesign is even on the table, not scrambling to find one once the old setup has already broken down.

Why Redesigns Turn Into Rebuilds

Traditional CMS setups usually mix content with the theme or template that is used to display that content. This means that the text, images and layout are built and stored as a single unit within the CMS. So when you change the visual part of your website, the content part usually has to change as well.

A lot of problems come up because the content of a site is, in a sense, “locked in” to the structure of the theme or of the templates of a site. This makes it so that when designers try to change the look and feel of a site during a redesign, fields and other pieces of content do not map well to the new design in an elegant way.

In fact, it is not uncommon for content that was perfectly formatted and published on a site in the past to look broken after a redesign.

Because of this, what seems at first to be a purely creative and visually oriented process can turn into a very technical process in short order. The design team will find that they are waiting for the development team to implement changes to the design time and time again.

What Actually Changes When Content and Design Are Separated

On the other hand, a headless CMS such as Contentful treats the content separately from the visual layer. The content is stored and then delivered to the frontend to be presented to the user. This is how headless CMS work, as explained by Contentful. So, for example, a new design can be built on top of the existing content, or the entire frontend can be rebuilt from scratch.

Think of it this way: when you move to a new home, you unpack the boxes without unpacking the boxes from the previous home. The boxes (your content) were never stuck to the walls of the previous house (your old CMS and design) to begin with.

And so, when you move to a new house, you just unload the boxes as is.

This is what Sanity calls separating the body of the content from the head, or the presentation of the content. This is the essential change that allows you to redesign your site without having to rebuild the site from scratch.

What This Means for a Real Redesign Process

However, with Sanity as the CMS, a redesign of the frontend can be done without touching the content that has been structured beforehand.

This means that a new layout, new components and a completely new visual can be created on top of the already structured content. This makes it possible to test, compare and even A/B test different new looks against the current look of the website.

With your new CMS, your content is free from being stuck in a theme or template. You can easily test out a completely new visual direction and compare it to your current design. You can even A/B test it to see which one performs better for your users.

Signs Your Current Setup Is Working Against You

Here are a few indicators that your current setup could be stifling your design efforts:

• Content feels trapped inside theme-specific formatting, and moving it anywhere else means reformatting it by hand.
• The site relies heavily on a page builder. Since page builders are typically tied to a specific look and/or layout, it is difficult to work with the content outside of the builder’s constraints.
• The thought of a redesign brings you fear because all the content on your website is so fragile and the process of redesigning would be very painful for you and your team.

None of these are design failures. These are structural problems that are likely to get worse with every redesign.

Conclusion

So as to design without starting over every time there is a redesign, it is therefore important that the foundation of a website is built in a way to be easily redesigned. Only then will a creative refresh of a website be what it should be: design decisions, and not development decisions.

So now that we’ve detailed the issues caused by tying content to design in a CMS, and the huge benefits gained from creating a headless CMS, the question now remains, what can you do to ensure that future redesigns bring design freedom and not a whole lot of headaches. In short, create a design-focused CMS, and designing will become what it should be, fun!