The first law of website design is that the owners of a company usually hate their new site within 24 months

MARCH 24, 2014, 7:00 AM  2 Comments

Why I Redesigned My Website

By JOSH PATRICK

Are you getting the most out of your business?

As soon as you finish your new website’s design, it’s time to start figuring out how to change it. At least, that’s how it has always been for me. But this time around I actually had a good reason.

My new site is on its third iteration in seven years. Two versions ago, the site was a set of static pages that functioned more like an electronic brochure. It demonstrated that our company, a wealth management firm that advises owners of private businesses, existed, but it offered little else. The second site, which was in operation until December, was a little better. It incorporated a blog and a set of special reports for visitors to download.

We chose WordPress for the second site’s platform because we believed it would give us the ability to control our site’s content. This turned out to be a poor assumption. Our designer provided little or no training, and I had a hard time understanding how to update the site — never mind create new pages for it.

To say this left me frustrated would have been an understatement.

While trying to make our WordPress site useable, I ran across a book, “Inbound Marketing,” by Dharmesh Shah and Brian Halligan, the founders of Hubspot, which makes marketing software. I found their ideas persuasive, and I decided to give the company a shot.

Hubspot was able to migrate our WordPress site to its platform for very little money, and this time, the ease-of-use promises proved true. To the public, the two sites looked identical, but on the back end, I now had a site I could expand.

This was a step in the right direction. Our company put up some rudimentary landing pages allowing visitors to download some of the 40-plus white papers and case studies I had written over the years.

From my experience, the first law of website design is that the owners of a company usually hate their new site within 24 months. I managed to make it almost an extra year before I started to feel the itch for an overhaul. And this time, the need was more about functionality than design.

Last summer, a few weeks before Hubspot’s annual user conference, I started a conversation with a local web design firm. The people I spoke with told me what to look for at the conference.

There, I learned that Hubspot had gone past providing a platform for managing blogs and landing pages. Its new software would allow me to integrate our email newsletter, track and evaluate leads, and post dynamic offers steering visitors toward useful information. Our old site had a flat appearance and too much text. I wanted a modern-looking site that would start conversations with our prospects.

After the Hubspot conference, I took the plunge and hired the local firm to design a new site. The cost to build our second site had been $10,000. This time, the project ran about $13,000 but also involved a substantial investment of time. Here’s what the process was like:

We went through a brainstorming phase to identify and describe our best customers – the target market for our new site. This took about 10 hours of my time.

Over the following six weeks, we worked through several versions of the site’s design. Those discussions and approvals took another 10 hours or so of my time.

I spent well over 100 hours thinking about, writing and editing the content we wanted to put on the site. This included writing several case studies.

I learned, or relearned, that designing and introducing a website always takes longer and costs more than expected. Migrating a blog with more than 500 posts was a major project that cost $1,500 more than initially estimated. I also decided we needed better photography, and that cost another $1,000 that hadn’t been budgeted.

The original time frame for building and introducing the site was four months. It ended up taking six and would have taken much longer if I hadn’t kept pushing our designers. I’m happy with the work the firm did, but it always takes vigilance to keep outside contractors focused.

In my next post, I’ll tell you what the results have been.

Josh Patrick is a founder and principal at Stage 2 Planning Partners, where he works with private business owners to create personal and business value.