The process
What is the process for redesigning a website?
First things first...
This is the ENTIRE process. It's the kitchen sink.
Not everyone will need every step and every stage of the process. You'll most likely need a little bit of each step, but in varying degrees of depth.
Look at it this way, a redesign will not exceed the steps below.
A custom project scope will be detailed, shared, and reviewed before your project begins.
0
TLDR;
Diagnosis and strategy
Let's understand your problem.
Let’s figure out why you’re not getting the results you want, what’s keeping you from achieving your goals, and why! Together, we’ll diagnose the problem and formulate a strategy for your new website.
Team interviews
What wins and why? What loses and why? What are the bad fits? What is the company vision?
Market research
You vs. them – Your prospects – SEO and SERPs
Define your KPIs
What does success look like? What are the blockers? What is the method? Probability of success?
Wire-framing and design
The structure, user-flow, and aesthetics of your new website will rely on the completed strategy sessions. With a clear direction, your design will focus on:
Site-mapping
What are the entry points? How did users get there? What is their logical next-step?
Wireframing
Who is on this page? What do they care about? What are their triggers? Is the page linear?
High-fidelity layouts
Does the look & feel meet user expectations? Is the content clear or too conceptual?
Code and development
Your website will be custom built using WordPress or Webflow. It will follow SEO best practices, be responsive and mobile friendly, leverage the bare minimum use of plugins, be secure, and integrate any 3rd party applications that you’ll require.
1
Diagnosis & Strategy
The absolute first step for your project is to explore and understand the problem.
Everyone has the desire to get higher quality leads. That’s a given. More. Faster. Yesterday!
You can “always” do better, but keep in mind, you’re getting leads already. You’re doing a good job. You don’t want to spend precious resources solving a problem you don’t have.
So, let’s figure out if and why you’re not getting the leads you want. What’s keeping you from getting there? Why?
To make your new website effective, together, we need to find where the problems are.
Is your website generating high-value traffic, but missing the mark and not capturing the leads it should? If so, why?
Is it bad SEO, misleading campaigns, confusing copy, awkward site-flow, poor landing page experience, etc..?
Maybe, you’re bleeding leads on the back-end during the sales process?
If that’s the case, then how can the website support your sales staff better? What content or explanations are lacking that are hurting your AE’s opportunities?
Or… worse, are you trying to solve a churn problem by front-loading your sales pipeline? If so, then, maybe you don’t need a new website at all.
Together, we’ll diagnose the problems.
2
Interviews
First, we need to get together and conduct interviews.
Interviews
They key point of contact / project owner
Stakeholders in the project / C-Levels
2-3 SDRs / AEs
3-5 Customers ( those who have signed up within the past 120 days )
Agenda for interviews:
Wins ( what wins and why )
What’s winning? Where are you crushing it? Who is the perfect fit for your product/service?
Losses that should be wins ( what loses and why )
Where are you losing where you shouldn’t be? Who are you losing deals too? Why are you losing these opportunities? What do you think would help?
Losses ( bad fits, never going to win )
Where are you losing? How hard do you fight to win these deals even though they’re not a great fit? Why should these losses stay losses?
Company vision
Who is your ideal customer – the perfect fit? Where would you like to see the company go, or what would you like to see your company do to be successful over the next 2-4 years? Do you think that’s where the company is heading right now? What do you think should happen to get the company there?
3
Research
You don’t exist in a vacuum. You are in a competition and we need to know what you’re up against.
The goal is to find where you shine compared to your competition in relation to your ideal prospect. Let’s connect your prospect’s pain to your perfect solution – guiding them along the way instead of putting more work on their shoulders to figure what makes you different.
Example:
Is your competitor cheap, and you’re expensive? Then we showcase your professionalism and demonstrate the inadequacies of the cheap one-size-fits all model.
Vice versa: We leverage the low-risk and safety prospects can enjoy as opposed to the over-charging and over-complication of an expensive solution.
Who are your:
Direct competitors – Who has very similar product offerings that you’re constantly competing against on sales calls and in the SERPs?
Indirect competitors – Who is stealing away your business because they overlap just enough or offer trimmed down solutions? What are the trade-offs your prospects are willing to make with these indirect competitors compared to your overall product offering?
Questions to ask:
How are they similar? How are they different? Who are they a better fit for? Who are you a better fit for?
4
Analytics & SEO
This is the technical backdrop to your website. The goal is to understand your current SERP position in relation to your market and competitors.
We want to find out:
Are you following best practices and are there any easy wins we can get right away? Are you showing up where you should? How is your competition performing compared to you? What other noise are you competing against?
And most importantly in relation to your redesign:
What SEO wins do you currently have that MUST be preserved? You don’t want to lose ground on the equity you’ve already built up.
Things we’ll look at:
What are your highest converting LPs? What are your best referral sources? What keywords are you ranking for, how, where? What are your best performing content pieces? What pages have the highest bound and exit rates? etc…
5
Goals & KPIs
We need to set very defined goals that are measurable. We need goals to aim at. Getting more leads doesn’t cut it.
Questions for setting each goal:
What is the goal? What is the unit of measure? What is the timeframe to achieve the goal? What are the qualifiers? What is the method for achieving the goal? What is the probability of success? What are the known blockers/hurdles that need to be overcome to achieve this goal? What is the reason for the goal?
An example goal:
Increase your leads per month by 40%. Current lead generation is 5 per month or 0.7% of overall traffic.
Qualifiers and blockers:
Your current avg bounce rate for organic traffic on the homepage is over 70%. Paid traffic has a 55% bounce rate. Of the users who do not bounce, avg time on site is less than 75 seconds, and most users don’t go deeper than 2 pages, with insignificant differences between organic and paid. There is only one existing CTA on the site – “request a demo”
Strategy to achieve goal:
Analyze traffic referral source. What is the click intent and user expectation before hitting the LP? Is that expectation, in relation to the user’s buyer journey position, being met? Introduce additional CTA’s with less friction targeting the different buyer journey positions.
6
End of strategy
After the strategy session, we’ll have defined your current KPI’s and the win/loss of those goals.
We’ll have set new KPI’s and created a plan on how to overcome the blockers and hurldes that are lying in wait.
We’ll have defined your ideal customer, what they care about, why they’re coming to you, and how to best engage the prospect at each stage of their buyer’s journey.
We’ll package all that up together, and wrap it with your company vision.
This will allow us to define the overall site-flow and individual page-flow… and how those work together.
We’ll be able to highlight and include persona triggers and give users content when they need it and where they expect to find it.
To put it simply, your website should give each prospect exactly what they need to know, when they need to know it.
7
Design
The structure, user-flow, and aesthetics of your new website will rely on the completed strategy sessions.
Site-mapping + site flow
The site architecture stage will be a high-level diagram of how your pages link together. They will demonstrate expected LPs/entry points and user flow through the site.
They’ll help define what persona’s are expected to hit what pages, why, and what they expect to see and do on those pages.
Wire-framing + page flow
Before getting into the look and feel, we want to block out each page and how the content will flow down the page.
For each page, we want to ask:
Does it present the content in a logical flow? Does each page appropriately address the concerns and usage patterns for each persona? Are the CTA’s enticing and relevant enough?
High fidelity mockups
Does the look-and-feel meet user expectations? Is the brand presentation consistent? Is the presentation clear or too conceptual?
Reviewing
A static prototype will be made available for review and discussion. You will have the ability to navigate the site as if it were live – minus dynamic functionality and animated content.
The prototype will be shareable through a live URL and give you the ability to make comments.
8
Development
Your website will be unique and custom built most likely using WordPress or Webflow.
Your website will follow SEO best practices.
It will be responsive and mobile friendly.
It will leverage the bare minimum use of plugins.
It will be deployed with a robust 301 redirect strategy.
It will be secure.
It will include Google Tag Manager and any other 3rd party integrations that are required.
It will be recommended that you host the site using Webflow or a WP managed solution: WP Engine, FlyWheel, Kinsta
Your site will be reviewable before going live through a staging URL.
Once approved, a launch/go-live schedule and timeline will be set.
Then... we go live!