You put a lot of thought and effort into a website redesign.  There's no reason to settle for an approach that limits your ability to enhance and update your site -- every website redesign should include the following steps and capabilities:

1. To give you control, make sure you are getting a custom graphic design by design staff with industry experience - no one-size-fits-all template without the ability to fine-tune

2. Your designer should understand your business, content, and readers to design your site according to relevant categories and delivery channels

3. Before your site launches, be sure to review an Annotated Prototype - you approve both design and functionality (see example below)

4. Your site relaunches with tools built in to ensure success: Web Analytics, Updating Sitemap, Optimized Page Elements

5.  Once your site launches, you can Test what works best: create new pages, adjust navigation, move content, require registration or payment for premium content

6.  Automate the many small steps to ensure your site is always intuitive, easy to use and Search optimized:

• Update SEO elements automatically: all new content includes url, meta keywords and description conforming to Search Engine protocols
• Segment Content intuitively: Deliver articles, blogs, events and listings to specific site sections
• Create internal links, automatically, with related keywords for every article and post
• Present Events, Listings, Archives and other resources in Search results
• Present related Articles, Posts, Events and other content on Article pages

7.  Consult with your Developer's staff who should understand your business and have Publishing industry experience to recommend best practices

8.  Add New Features or completely New Site, quickly and cost effectively

• You should not have to take your site down or start from scratch to launch a new site
• Updates should not break features already on your site

9. Feed the roadmap: in addition to Design updates, your ideas should also be included on your software development roadmap.

Appendix:

Here is an example of an Annotated Homepage Prototype.  Note how each design element function is represented.