Know what your website should say before you redesign it.
Settle your brand strategy before website redesign work starts, and you get a site you can send to anyone without a caveat.
Redesign first, and the new site tells the old story.
Somewhere in planning the redesign, you notice you can’t say what the new site should say. A redesign that starts with the look puts new photos around the old words, and you still hesitate to send anyone the link.
Deep & Beyond
Before
After
Decide what it says, then how it looks.
You get the words and the site from the same studio, so nothing gets lost between a strategy deck and whoever builds the pages.
Your best customers could tell you in a sentence why they chose you. Your website ought to be able to say it too.
Signs the redesign needs words first
You started a brief for a designer and got stuck on the homepage.
Your team describes the company a few different ways, and a homepage only gets one.
People you hope to hire check the site, and it reads smaller than the company.
The Lighthouse Method
Where the website comes in.
Identity
We find who you already are.
You leave with
What makes you worth choosing, in writing, for your sign-off
Strategy
We put it into words you’d use.
You leave with
Your brand strategy in writing, with a one-line test for every decision
Expression
We make it look and sound like you.
You leave with
Your logo, look and messaging, in a style guide your team can use
Build
We build it and stay until it’s live.
You leave with
Your website, emails and team training, built and live
The strategy ends up on your homepage.
You’ve seen strategy end up as a deck nobody opens. Here it’s what the site gets built from, so it ends up in the first words a referral or a new hire reads about you.
Built on the words first
The Creative Box Company
Positioning, messaging, website, systems
We wrote the positioning before we built the site, and now the leads are custom jobs.
“Since Cole rebuilt our website and registration, our team gets five-plus hours a week back, and first-timers and their families can see what a Snorkel Day looks like before they ever come down to the beach.”
Jonas Mahoe, Snorkel Day Director, Deep & Beyond
Questions
Know what your website should say before you redesign it.
Tell us what the redesign was meant to fix, and we’ll tell you what we see, including whether the site needs new words at all. It’s a thirty-minute call with Cole, our founder, with no pitch and no deck.