Why a new website won’t fix a brand problem

It’s an easy decision to make. The website is visible, it’s a few years old, and everyone has an opinion about it. A new one feels like progress.

Then it launches, looks better, and the enquiries stay the same.

The redesign that changes nothing

A new website built on an old story is the same website with better photos.

Most websites aren’t failing because of how they look. They’re failing because of what they say, or because nobody agreed what they should say. If your leadership team describes the business three different ways, the new site will too. It’ll just do it in a nicer font.

• The same vague homepage line, reworded. “Trusted partner” becomes “your partner for growth”, and buyers still can’t tell what you do.
• Every department still gets its page. The site is organised around how the business is structured, not around the decision the buyer is making.
• The design gets argued over. With no decision to design against, sign-off comes down to who likes what.
• It runs over. Designing while you’re still deciding is how website projects go over time and over budget.

Website problem or brand problem: how to tell

Look at what’s actually going wrong, not at what’s easiest to replace.

It’s probably the website if:

• People understand what you do but can’t find what they need.
• It’s slow, breaks on mobile, or your team can’t update it.
• Visitors arrive on the right pages and drop off at the same point every time.

It’s probably the brand if:

• Buyers, and your own team, describe you in different ways.
• You’re compared on price with firms you don’t think of as competitors.
• The right people visit and leave without getting in touch, and nobody can say why.
• You’ve grown, added services or merged, and the story never caught up.

If it’s mostly the first list, fix the website. A UX audit will tell you where. If it’s the second, a new website won’t help until the story is sorted.

Your positioning has six outputs, not one

The website is the output people think of first. It shouldn’t be the only one.

Once you’ve agreed who you’re for, what you do for them and why they choose you, that should run through everything you produce:

• The website. Structure, pages and what each one has to do.
• Your assets. Icons, illustrations, patterns and imagery that all look like they belong together.
• Your content. What you publish, for which audience, answering which question.
• Your sales material. Proposals, decks and case studies that tell the same story as the website.
• Your campaigns. Built on the same messaging, instead of starting from a blank page every quarter.
• Your team. New starters, agencies and freelancers all working from the same thing.

Fix the website on its own and you’ve fixed one of six. Fix the positioning and the website is the first of six things that get better.

Why the order matters

Strategy first. Then the identity. Then the website.

Do it the other way round and you end up designing while you’re still deciding. Every page becomes a debate about what the business is, held in the comments on a design file.

When we worked with Colmore BID, the problem wasn’t the look. They had four audiences and four types of content that never connected, so nobody saw the scale of what they actually do. The work started with who the site was for and how everything joined up. The platform came after.

What to do first

Before you brief a web agency, settle three things.

• Can your leadership team describe the business the same way? If not, start there. These four tests will show you quickly.
• Do you know what the website is for? Who’s coming, what they’re deciding, and what has to happen for them to get in touch.
• Can you measure it now? If you can’t count enquiries today, you won’t know whether the new site worked.

If all three are a yes, you’re ready to brief, and the website brief template will help. If not, a one-day strategy workshop settles the first two, and makes the brief a lot shorter.