An aggressive deadline helped the e-retailer focus on essentials, an IRCE speaker says.

Dazadi Inc., an online sporting goods retailer, last summer decided it was time to improve the look, feel and functionality of its web site so that it matched up with the company’s new tagline “the home of awesome.”

“The site worked, but it was not the ‘home of awesome,’” says Josh Klaristenfeld, co-founder and executive vice president of operations at Dazadi. “We knew we had to put the energy and effort into it.”

Klaristenfeld will talk about the challenges Dazadi.com faced in redesigning the site in time for the busy holiday sales season during a presentation at the Internet Retailer Conference & Exhibition 2012 in Chicago June 7 from 4:15 p.m. to 5 p.m. The session is titled “When—and how—do you redesign?

The Dazadi team redesigned the site in about four months, in time for a November relaunch, Klaristenfeld says. The retailer did the majority of the work in-house. It was tough, he says, because when the e-retailer decided to green light the redesign every stakeholder brought ideas of what they’d like the site to include, and it just wasn’t possible to get it all done and still meet a non-negotiable deadline.  “As soon as we decided to go forth with a large redesign, everybody pulled out their lists,” he says. “We had to prioritize the most important features and functionalities. It forced us to be disciplined.”

Dazadi rolled out the initial redesign in November, but in the following months continued to add features such as product videos. It continues to work down the list of improvements it created last summer. Dazadi, which launched in 2002, is No. 706 in Internet Retailer’s Second 500 Guide.

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Internet Retailer’s editors asked Klaristenfeld to speak at IRCE 2012 because of his leadership in the web site redesign process and his more than 10 years of experience running a niche e-commerce company.

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