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Plenty of redesigns arrive with a design direction that assumes photography nobody has funded. The mockups use images bought for the presentation. Then the build starts and the real library turns out to be a folder of snapshots at inconsistent sizes.

This is worth settling before layouts are approved. Look at what exists. Count how many images are usable at full width. Check whether people appear in them, whether the releases were ever signed, and whether the products shown are still sold.

A design that survives a thin library looks different from one that does not. It leans on typography, colour blocks, diagrams and generous space. Images become accents rather than structure. That is a legitimate direction, and it holds up better over the years, because it does not degrade the moment somebody uploads a poor photograph.

Where photography is essential, it is cheaper to plan a small shoot around specific slots than to commission a general one. Six defined images beat forty vague ones. The brief names the crop, the orientation and where it will sit.

Stock has a place and a cost. The cost is recognition. A visitor who has seen the same smiling meeting room on four competitor sites reads the page as generic before reading a word. If stock is unavoidable, choose images that are abstract enough to avoid that, and keep them away from the first screen.

Illustration is the middle path that teams forget. A simple set commissioned once can cover every slot, stays consistent, and does not date the way a photograph of an office does.

Whichever direction is chosen, the content model should record image requirements per template. Width, aspect, whether text sits on top. That single decision prevents the slow drift where each new page carries an image that fits nothing.

Redesigns rarely stall on design work. They stall in review. A round of feedback arrives, then a second opinion, then somebody who was not in the first meeting asks for a change the group already rejected.

The fix is structural and it has to be agreed before any design is shown. Name who approves. Name who advises. Those are different roles, and conflating them is what produces endless rounds.

Set the number of rounds in advance. Two is usually right for a page template: one for direction, one for detail. Saying this out loud early changes how people give feedback, because they know the round is finite.

Feedback should be collected in one place and consolidated before it reaches the designer. Contradictory instructions sent separately put the designer in the position of choosing between stakeholders, which is not their decision to make. Somebody on the client side should resolve conflicts first.

Ask for the problem rather than the fix. Make the logo bigger is a solution to something. It might be that the brand feels absent, or the page feels unbalanced, or the person simply expected something else. The underlying issue often has a better answer than the one proposed.

Record decisions with dates. A written note that the navigation pattern was settled on a given date, with the reasoning, closes the reopening politely. Without it, every new participant restarts the discussion in good faith.

There is one case worth protecting: genuine new information. A change in the business, a regulation, a product that will not ship. That reopens a decision legitimately, and the process should allow it explicitly, so that the discipline elsewhere does not feel arbitrary.

A redesign expands unless somebody stops it. The visual work begins. Within weeks the list has grown: a booking flow, a migration, a search rebuild, a change to how products are categorised. Each addition is reasonable on its own. Together they turn a short project into an open-ended one.

The defence is a written fence, agreed at the start and visible throughout. It names what is in and, more usefully, what is explicitly out for this round.

Some exclusions are almost always worth making. Integrations that work today. The commerce engine, where the project is presentational. Any data migration nobody has rehearsed. Any feature whose owner is away during the project.

An out-of-scope item needs somewhere to go, or it comes back. A visible list of deferred work, with a note of who raised it and why it was deferred, keeps the conversation calm. People accept a later date far more easily than a refusal.

There is one category that should never be fenced out, and teams try: accessibility and performance. These are properties of the build rather than features, and retrofitting them costs several times what building them in does.

The fence needs a formal way through it. New information can justify a change, and pretending otherwise leads to people routing around the process. A short written change note, with its effect on the date, is enough. What matters is that the cost is visible when the decision is made rather than discovered at the end.

Review the fence at each milestone rather than filing it. A scope agreement nobody has read since kickoff does not hold anything.