You know your website needs a revamp and a new web 2.0 look and feel. Probably, you are no longer that “very small business” but have qualified to become a small business.

Yes, businesses grow over time and they need to communicate this to their clients, channel partners, media and to the trade associations. All this helps them gain a better position in the eyes of all those who might positively or negatively affect the business.

1. Communicate what is new and what is important - These two may not always be in consonance with each other but you need to tell the most important things that seem to be happening at your company and that too in a reverse chronological order with the newest items listed first. First things that come to mind are the recent products and services added to your portfolio, the growth in number of employees or the counties/states that you represent in and may be signing up of new clients and business channel partners.
2. Your audience and your objectives - Know the likes and dislikes and craft your website redesign strategy around it. Also, never loose the focus of what it is that you wish to accomplish with the redesign. A redesign, just for the sake of redesign is bound to fall flat. Instead, ask questions to yourself as to what you look forward to changing. Are you receiving inquiries that are very small in nature? Do you which to get bulk orders and bigger orders? Do not fix all objectives on one website and all call to actions on one page. Give the command to your users with simple options that are easy to understand and are actionable.
3. Make it hard along with soft - Most probably you will be working with a website redesign company but still maintain a physical area/space in your office where may be you can put up ideas on a white board, sketches on paper, early wireframes, magazines related to your industry and a couple of chairs where you can discuss internally how to make the site resonate you corporate philosophy.
4. Make statements that echo in the minds of your visitors - Tell what you do in an unequivocal manner and using words that resonate in the minds of your website visitors. Tell them the thing you can best help them with in one line (punchline/slogan/motto whatever you might want to call it) and then substantiate it with your projects/clients list or service testimonials. This will fill the echo chamber with a resounding “Yes” and your users will be inclined to learn more if not act more right now.
5. Rethink Your Content - What better time to think about your content strategy? Sure, there may be some better content writers and services, but you know your business the best. Look for how information should be laid out on the site and what should the individual pages say, which new sections or pages you may need and collate all the information pertaining to the pages and the objectives of these pages in a spreadsheet format (like meta, images, alt attributes, headings and keywords).
6. Teams that coordinate the Web Redesign - Decide carefully on members who work with the service provider
   Don’t just depute someone because he or she is good in Corel Draw or knows a bit about HTML or CSS. Hopefully, if you have done your homework well, your web design company will understand both the technical and the design aspects well. What you probably need to tell in a better fashion is your objectives, your target audiences, your philosophy and may be your keywords and the competitors.
7. Listen carefully - Did you know that posting content on a regular basis on your website is not a big bottleneck and can be done easily using a content management system? Even the cost of developing a content management based solution for your website is not too high. Talk to the solutions provider and ask if there are technologies like content management systems that can help you easing out the update portion and web maintenance. The other things that immediately come to mind are search rankings and email solutions that may help you in spreading out the word on your business.
8. Building search friendliness and SEO - Search Engines should be able to at least “see” your entire website, index it and hopefully rank it. We say “hopefully” since SEO is a long drawn process and needs careful attention from experts who understand the search engine ranking factors and the dynamism of search engine.
9. Testing and QA - Depending upon the size of your website and the implementation technologies, test the site for bugs, broken links, missing images, unstructured and unstyled text and non working functionality. Do a testing of the load time and how the website looks in different browsers. Do usability testing and see how the information is laid out. May be, show the site to friends and family members and get their opinion on how things look.
10. Getting Feedback - With tools like Survey Monkey, it is easy to have collective opinion about the look and feel of the site after the redesign. Analyze the feedback and see if there are some obvious problems that need to be addressed.

This may not be the most comprehensive list but definitely closes on many points that may need a looking into for website redesign and makeover. Please share in comments what else you think might be important.