Planning a marketing site redesign

In this episode, Tyler gets Rick’s advice on how to think about redesigning the Less Annoying CRM marketing website. Here are some of the takeaways:

• There are different types of website redesigns, including:
  • AB testing (iterating pages on the site based on performance).
  • Style update (updating the CSS, or look and feel based on a new brand style guide).
  • Restructuring the site (changing the site navigation and pages to better accomplish objectives).
  • Rebranding the site (changing the brand name and/or positioning of the site).
• You want to do the minimum necessary when you're redesigning a website. 
  • Figure out the smallest thing that you know you need and just go do it.
  • If you can get away with basic iterative AB testing, that's awesome. It means you're in a really good place. 
  • If you need a whole rebrand, figure out how to do it as quickly as possible because when you're going through wholesale changes, it's messing with reporting.
• When doing a redesign consider the following questions:
  • Is my brand name or positioning changing?
    • If your brand name is changing, you may need to consider transitioning a new domain. (Note: This comes with significant search engine optimization challenges.)  
    • If your positioning is changing, you may need to review copy on all of your pages. (Note: This might impact SEO if the copy changes are significant.)
  • What are the main functions of the site and are they changing?
    • Is it for users to login?
    • Is it to generate leads?
    • Is it to convert free trials?
    • If the functions are changing, you may need to restructure the site (Note: This can impact SEO in a big way if you are onsite links or removing pages).  
  • How complex is the site?
    • How many unique pages and designs are there on the site?
    • Can you get away with designing a few templates and applying them across multiple pages?
    • Or, is every page unique?
    • More complex sites taking longer to redesign.
  • Does look and feel (style) need to change?
    • Do colors need to change?
    • Do fonts need to change?
    • Do page layouts need to change?
    • Do UI components need to change?
• It’s OK to prioritize a redesign based on a standards without data proof.
  • At the end of the day, if brand is important to you, it's important to you. 
  • If you're failing on your brand promise or standard, that's going to keep you up at night and that's not healthy. 
  • Just go fix it and don’t waste time trying to justify your brand standards.

What else would you add to this list?

Context

Tyler: So what we're going to talk about is ... I'm actually interested, I'm not entirely sure where this is going to go, but Less Annoying CRM, my company, just did this big redesign that I keep talking about, but that was just the app. So when a customer logs in, the experience they have in the logged in part of it has been redesigned. The other stuff, what I'll call the marketing site here, still looks like it did four or five years ago. And so there's this big mismatch between the, first, impression a customer gets when going to our marketing site versus the actual polished and good design that they get once they log in. So we're basically trying to think about some kind of a redesign of the marketing site. This could be really, really small. It could literally just be like go in and make some CSS tweaks, but leave everything else the same. It could be completely, from the ground up, rethink what this website should even be, think about SEO, switch to a content management system like WordPress or something. It could be as big as we want it to be. So that's basically what we're talking about here. I have a little more context, but maybe what I should say is just what I'm hoping is we can talk through, A, how big of a project should this be and then, B, we're not going to plan the whole thing out in this next 40 minutes or whatever, but where should I start? What should some actions be that I can take to really get moving on this project?

Rick: Yeah. So I'm interested in what problems you need to solve by doing this. It sounds like you're mostly concerned about more of a brand consistency or user experience consistency more so than anything else. I'm not hearing, "Hey, we need to get more leads," or, "Man, people are complaining about the website." It seems like it's more of a personal, "Hey, this website is no longer up to my standard," type thing.

Tyler: Mm-hmm (affirmative). There's definitely part of that. And, yeah. I'll say, I'm really skeptical about a lot of marketing. I think 20% of marketing is super valuable and critical to a company and I think a lot of it is just a bunch of overpaid people in suits being like, "Oh, your font doesn't communicate the trust that you're ..." Nobody cares about the font. Shut up. So, yeah. I don't want it to be what a marketing agency would turn this project into. The way I look at it is, it's kind of like if you're single and you're dating and you go to a bar to meet somebody, you know that the things that matter are personality and trust and all this, but all you can see is their physical appearance when you walk into the bar. And so people naturally tend to overemphasize that when it comes to first impressions. The same thing is true with a company. Just the other day, actually, for my wedding, I had to get insurance for the wedding and our wedding planner sent us two websites. I went to both of them. One of them had not been redesigned in a decade and one of them looked nice and I was just like, "I have no information here. I can't tell which insurance is better, so I'm just going to go with the one that looks like a more professional company." So that's really what I'm going for is, once someone uses our product, they like it, we treat them well, everything goes well, the personality stuff in the dating analogy is good, but we need to put on a little makeup and actually try at the bar if we're going to get these customers in the first place.

Rick: So it sounds like your main concern is what's the first impression people have of Less Annoying CRM when they come to your website.

Tyler: Absolutely.

Why is this a priority right now?

Rick: Okay. So flying up a little higher, just for context, why are we talking about this right now over some other priority? Why do you feel like now is the right time to worry about the first impression?

Tyler: That's a fair question. It's possible that it's not. I would say that, probably two years ago was the right time, but the reality was that the app would've let down that first impression either way. So I think it's just, now that the app looks good, I don't think ... Redesigning the app was a nine-month project. I think redesigning the website could be as little as a one-week project. And so I just feel like it's kind of low-hanging fruit because we've done the hard part already.

Rick: Interesting.

Tyler: But, yeah. If it didn't happen for the next six months, I don't think there would be any real consequences.

Rick: Have you talked to any new users who've gone through the existing marketing site experience with the new interface?

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