One of the interesting challenges you'll often have in taking an existing design and updating it is this: Some of the content from the current design won't fit into the new thing you're building. And that may be a good thing, because rebuilding a section of a web site is not like rebuilding a motorcycle engine. With an engine, it's usually bad if you have leftover parts. But sometimes if you have leftover parts after a web section redesign, it may mean that you should pat yourself on the back for a job well done.
But it's still vexing toward the end of a project to have a content without a clear home. The best way to avoid a content predicament at the end is with a content audit during the early stages of the project. There are lots of ways to do this, but the simplest is to read through all of the content (including information that's implied in graphics and even ads) and categorize the kind of info that it is. Print out the pages you're trying to redesign. Then, get a big red pen and circle stuff. Make notes about what works an does about the current content and writing style. Flag or "X" stuff that's repetitive and could be eliminated. Label information that ought to be grouped together but isn't. As to what kinds of categories to use... think about how customers will use the information. Is it for researching the product (basic and detailed specs, etc)? To bolster credibility (reviews, testimonials, comparisons)? To encourage immediate purchase? To build credibility with your readers' bosses?
To do things right, you really should bring customers into the mix and observe them using the current pages on your site and similar sites. Then ask them some basic questions like what information they use the most, and (perhaps even more important) what things are missing that they really would like to have. This usability testing and interviewing will give you a lot of insight not only into what content should exist, but also what the best ways will be to organize it. (A useful technique for grouping information is card sorting; we just did a really interesting card sort that I'll write about sometime later.)
You should also have some usage scenarios written down that describe how customers will use the pages. Some scenarios for a product page might be (1) someone reading about your product and deciding to buy it on the spot; (2) someone reading about the product and getting excited about it and sending information around to their colleagues; (3) someone coming to the product page because they already own the product and have a support question... etc. Once you have developed the information architecture and mapped all of the content, you can use your scenarios to quickly check that all of the information and navigation exists to support them.
With the desktop and server pages that I've been writing about recently, we already had a lot of user requirements from several previous usability tests and interviews, so we had a pretty good idea about the kind of content that needed to fit into the new design. Marilyn on our team group worked with an information architect with our design vendor to identify what should stay and what should go. Here's a cleaned up page they marked up. Stuff that's circled is important to keep. Stuff with an X was redundant or unimportant:
Later in the project, we used this audit to make sure that all of the key information mapped to reasonable places in the new design. It turned out we'd done such a good job that even the pig had a home (though she turned into a text promo, as if by magic)!
I highly recommend doing a content inventory of any existing designs you're retrofitting, and then going back and doing an audit against your scenarios when you're nearing completion of your visual design -- just to make sure you're not missing anything!
Cheers.
