Websites and (Re)Design in a Pandemic

Image by Alexandra_Koch from Pixabay

Everything has changed in the past three months because of the coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic. Besides all the changes in your day to day life, meetings and conferences disappeared, offices closed and in order to minimize contact with crowds, almost everyone has turned to online connections and work.

Many organizations have relied on their web teams to make changes to sites t handle new tasks, needs and perhaps greater traffic. Those changes vary greatly based on your business. I have spent most of my life in education and the rush to move learning online has been enormous. The local restaurant that had minimal or no online business (takeout, pickup, delivery) is suddenly needing all that in order to survive. The office that now has all its workers working from home needs more than email and chat.

Of course, surrounded by tragedy, every crisis provides opportunities for some. Not to focus on marketing and profit, I wonder what your web designers have been doing during this pandemic.

I have been working and teaching virtually part-time for 20 years and fully online for the past five years, so that hasn't changed lately. What has changed is the needs of clients. Just based on my own work and what I hear from others, I suspect these things have been happening for many designers.

1. Upgrading (or creating) online stores.
2. Greater need for video, conferencing, demos, presentations, and videoconferencing tools.
3. Intranet for organizations to do chats, file-sharing, remote scheduling tools. 
4. Lots of updates - hours of availability, alternative contacts...
5. Changing marketing, ads, offers
6. Monitoring your analytics for changes in patterns
7. Offering updates via email newsletters, new pages, banners...

Of course, ideally, all this was in place BEFORE the pandemic and should be unavailable for everything from the employee who can't get to work for the day or a week, weather closings, natural disasters, etc. But clearly, that has not been the case for many organizations.

What have you been doing with your web presence to cope with the pandemic?  Post a comment.

This post also appears at RonkowitzLLC.com