The day a client’s new website went live, its contact form inquiries were still arriving in my inbox. So were the email signups. The site looked exactly the way we’d designed it, and the client’s leads were going to the person who built it.

I asked whether they were getting the inquiries too, and offered to switch the notifications so they only went to them. They asked me to double-check and turn off anything still pointing at me. Small fix. It’s also the clearest example I have of something I keep running into on website projects.

A redesign gets scoped by what the old site shows, so the work it did without showing anything is what breaks at launch.

What the old site was doing

This was a migration for an education company: new design, new platform, same business underneath. Before launch I listed what still had to be sorted, and four items had nothing to do with how the site looked.

Their Google Analytics tag ran outside their tag manager. Carry the tag manager across and you’d assume tracking was covered, but their analytics would have stopped on launch day. I kept the tag.

Every form needed a destination, so I asked where each one should send people. A form with nowhere to go looks fine until someone fills it in.

The fonts needed web licences, and I asked for them to be bought in the client’s name, so the business owns them once I’m gone.

And the Terms page still said “[Your Country/State]” in its governing-law line. On the current, live site. Nobody had noticed, which tells you how often anyone reads that page before they need it.

Why this keeps happening

None of this shows up in a design review. A founder approving a new homepage is judging what a buyer will see, and that’s the right thing to judge. Tracking, routing and ownership sit underneath. The old site handled them quietly, so they never feel like scope. Then the new site goes live and the analytics go quiet, or leads land in a contractor’s inbox, the way they briefly landed in mine.

That’s why I treat launch checks as part of building a site, alongside the pages. The handover isn’t done until every form, signup and notification goes to the owner, and the licences and logins sit in their name.

Before your next redesign

Open your current site and write down what it does when nobody’s looking: what it tracks and with which tag, where each form sends its message, who owns the fonts and the domain, what your legal pages say. Give that list to whoever builds the new one before they start designing, so it lands in the scope instead of the launch-day scramble.

If you have a launch coming up, reply with your list and I’ll tell you what I’d check first.

Daniel G. Bright

Founder, BrightStudios