The budget is approved, the agency chosen, the project run properly. The new site is faster, clearer, undeniably better looking. Six months later, enquiries have not moved.
This happens often enough to deserve an explanation other than poor delivery. The project succeeded. It was the question that was wrong.
What a redesign actually fixes
- a technically obsolete site, expensive to maintain
- a layout unreadable on mobile
- updates impossible without going through an agency
- load times that make visitors leave
- a dated image, out of step with the standing of the business
These problems are real, and a redesign fixes them for good. One notes only that none of them explains a shortage of enquiries.
What it does not fix
If visitors cannot tell within ten seconds what you sell and to whom, a faster site will simply let them not understand faster. A redesign improves the vehicle; it does not change the message it carries.
A rebuilt site does not say any better what the business has not decided to say.
The same holds for the numbers: a conversion rate is optimised on a proposition that was never settled. The gain is real but marginal, and it plateaus quickly.
The four questions to settle first
- Who is it primarily for — not “anyone who might be interested”.
- Who we stop addressing. A positioning is measured by what it makes you give up.
- What action is expected of the visitor — one only.
- How we will know it is working, before the budget has been spent.
Those four answers fit on one page. They rarely take less than three weeks to obtain, because they require decisions nobody wants to make.
The right order costs less
Run in that order, the web project moves faster: most of the decisions are already made, and the back and forth over mock-ups disappears. Run the other way, it drags on in arguments about aesthetics — a sign that colours are being decided for want of having decided the strategy.