You typically go through a website redesign because, overtime, your business changes:
Eventually, you look at your website, and think: “Dang, this thing is outdated. And, no one actually uses it.”
Your website has grown over the years and you don’t know how to go about a website redesign process.
Where do you start?
That is the question I wanted to answer, and to do so, I partnered up with Garrett Jestice to write the guide that’s needed when it’s time to think about a messaging and website refresh.
Ideal clients and crappy clients
Not all customers are created equal. This is a harsh truth that many businesses learn the hard way – usually after spending precious time and resources trying to serve customers who aren’t a great fit.
To create messaging that truly converts, you first need to identify your best-fit customer segments. Only then can you craft messaging that resonates with them and attracts more of them when you redesign your website.
Here’s a simple but powerful framework I use to evaluate and rank different customer segments. Rate each segment on a scale of 1-10 across these key dimensions:
1. Problem Importance (1-10)
- How critical is the problem you solve for them?
- What happens if they don’t solve it?
- Are there severe consequences or missed opportunities?
2. Current Solution Dissatisfaction (1-10)
- How unhappy are they with existing solutions?
- What key pain points remain unsolved?
- Which important goals are still unmet?
3. Transformation Potential (1-10)
- How significant of an impact can you deliver?
- What meaningful results can you help them achieve?
- How much better will their situation be after working with you?
4. Speed to Value (1-10)
- How quickly can you deliver meaningful results?
- What’s the time investment required before they see benefits?
- Can you create quick wins early on?
5. Budget & Willingness to Pay (1-10)
- How much do they value solving this problem?
- What’s their typical budget for solutions like yours?
- Do they see this as a cost or an investment?
6. Acquisition Ease (1-10)
- How easily can you reach and convert them?
- Do you have existing relationships or channels?
- Is the market size sufficient?
- Are marketing costs reasonable?
7. Lifetime Value Potential (1-10)
- What’s their long-term revenue potential?
- Are there opportunities for expansion?
- How sticky is the relationship likely to be?
8. Team Excitement (1-10)
- How energizing is it to serve this segment?
- Does your team find the work meaningful?
- Do these customers align with your mission?
The segments that score highest across these dimensions represent your ideal customers. During a website redesign, focus your messaging on speaking directly to them instead of trying to appeal to everyone.
Talk to your customers
Now that you’ve identified your ideal customer segments, it’s time to deeply understand them through meaningful conversations. The goal isn’t just to ask what they think about your solution – it’s to uncover the underlying jobs, pains, and desired outcomes that drive their decisions.
Here’s a framework for conducting effective customer interviews:
Before the Interview
Prepare a clear interview guide focusing on:
- Their role and day-to-day responsibilities
- The specific problem/pain point they face
- How they’ve tried solving it in the past
- What made them look for a new solution
- Their evaluation and decision process
During the Interview
Start broad and then dig deeper:
- Context Setting
- “Walk me through your typical day…”
- “What are your main responsibilities?”
- “What challenges do you face?”
- Problem Exploration
- “When did you first notice this problem?”
- “What triggered you to look for a solution?”
- “What solutions have you tried before?”
- Solution Journey
- “How did you find potential solutions?”
- “What was most important in your evaluation?”
- “What hesitations or concerns did you have?”
- Impact & Outcomes
- “What’s different now?”
- “What can you do that you couldn’t before?”
- “What’s been the biggest benefit?”
Key Tips
- Listen more than you talk
- Ask open-ended questions
- Focus on specific examples
- Probe deeper with “why” and “tell me more”
- Capture exact phrases and words they use
General messaging architecture
With deep customer insights in hand, it’s time to build your messaging architecture. This framework has four key elements that work together to create clear, compelling communication:
1. Point of View (POV)
Your stance on why things need to change:
- What problem inspired your solution?
- Why are traditional approaches falling short?
- Why does the world need a better way?
2. Positioning
Your strategic market position:
- What is it? (Category & primary use case)
- Who is it for? (Ideal customer profile)
- What does it replace? (Current alternatives)
- How is it different/better? (Key differentiation)
3. Messaging
Here’s the proven formula for translating features into customer value:
One Core Value Proposition
- The ultimate “big win” your customers achieve
- A clear, compelling statement of transformative value
- Something only you can credibly promise
Three Key Benefits
- Specific ways customers can do, be, or feel something new
- Tangible outcomes that support your value proposition
- Written from the customer’s perspective
Supporting Features (2-4 per benefit)
- Focus only on unique or differentiated features that support each benefit
- Leave out “table stakes” features that everyone has
- Save detailed feature lists for product pages
- If a feature doesn’t directly support your key benefits or differentiation, it probably doesn’t belong on your homepage
A critical note on features: Less is more. Your homepage and main sales pitch should only highlight features that make you unique or directly support your key benefits. Everything else can either:
- Live on dedicated product/feature pages
- Come up naturally in sales conversations
- Be left out entirely if they don’t strengthen your story
Think of it this way: Every feature you mention dilutes the impact of your truly differentiating features. Be ruthless about only highlighting what makes you special.
4. Copy
How you express everything in customer language:
- Avoid jargon and buzzwords
- Use your customers’ own words
- Focus on one key takeaway per page
- Make every word count
This structured approach ensures your messaging tells a coherent story, from high-level value to your most compelling proof points. Use it as your north star to maintain consistency across all customer touchpoints—but remember that not every touchpoint needs to contain every message.
Each element builds on the others:
- Your POV frames the problem
- Your positioning establishes your place in the market
- Your messaging hierarchy connects differentiated features to value
- Your copy brings it all to life in customer language
Remember: The goal isn’t to say everything—it’s to say the right things in the right way to the right people. Be selective about which features you highlight and when you introduce them in the customer journey.
Building the sitemap
Now that you understand who you are and how you can talk about yourself (using your customers’ words), it’s time to lay out the pages your website needs.
The sitemap is the foundation for every website redesign. Think about it this way: when authors write books, they need to have a grasp on the plot and its timeline. They need to make sure the story they want to tell is captivating chapter by chapter.
Where to start?
If you are a small to medium-sized business, I first want you to limit yourself to ten total pages. Working within this constraint will help you focus on what is actually important to your potential customers.
To define those ten pages, I want you to ask yourself one key question: If I’m on a sales call, is this a page that I would want to send a good number of potential customers directly to?
If the answer is yes, it belongs in the initial sitemap.
If the answer is no, this page may be a small-detail page that only a limited number of potential customers will find value in. It’s probably not worth being in the initial sitemap.
Growing the sitemap
Depending on your timeline for this website revamp, I may recommend stopping after you’ve defined these ten key pages. The process of launching a perfect, 100% complete website is delayed most often by an ever-expanding sitemap. Don’t fall into this trap.
With that said, there are a number of use cases where expanding past the initial ten pages is a requirement. When it is, I want you to now take all the pages you “put to the side” and place them under one of the ten pages already outlined.
There is a chance that a single page should live in multiple locations. There are two ways to deal with that:
Primary Location
Build the page under the heading it makes most sense, most of the time. This works when there isn’t unique information that would live under different headings (for example: the Tuition page for a school may live under Financials as well as Future Students. The Tuition information is all the same, it just needs to be accessible in a number of locations)
Duplicate and Refine
When the information on a page should have different content, I recommend duplicating the page and then refining the content. You do not want the exact same content on multiple pages of your site. However, it is a good practice to duplicate the page, and then edit the content in each section to be specific to the subsection a customer is in. For example: you run a services business and you help multiple industries. The services you offer will be the same across industries, but it would be beneficial to talk about how Service A specifically solves problems for Industry B.
Defining CTAs
I see this primarily worked on during the design phase of a project. However, bringing it in a lot earlier helps get everyone on the same page as to what the goal of every page should be.
Defining the primary CTA
Ask yourself this one question:
What is the ONE thing I want the vast majority of potential customers to do?
Throughout the entire website, this will be the default action. In order to trump this CTA, there has to be a logical reason to do so.
Honestly, keep it simple. It’s easy to over-complicate this aspect (“Well, this section is unique and, therefore, should have a different CTA than the rest of the site”). Don’t give in to complexity.
Defining the secondary CTA
Generally speaking, it is better to get a potential customer into your ecosystem than not.
What is the easy button to get a client into your ecosystem?
Your primary CTA is going to be something that requires a potential customer to spend their time or money with you. It’s a heavy ask.
This secondary CTA should be a simple conversion. How can you provide value to this potential customer without using much of your own time? But, the value of this “thing” you offer must be high enough to get them to give you their information.
At the time of writing, mine is a website analysis. I pitch it in different ways on different mediums, but it all comes back to: “I’ll exchange you some of my time and my ideas to increase conversion if you send me your email address and domain name.”
Laying out pages
When working through a website redesign project, the goal of the process is to segment our focus areas. If you dive straight into design work, there is a lot of new things to look at all at the same time:
- Pictures
- Content
- Colors
- General aesthetic
- Layout
- How the message plays out
Start simple. Start with a grayscale pencil sketch of those ten key pages. By doing so, it allows everyone to mutually focus on only two things:
- How the message is outlined (much like chapters in a book)
- Layout of the content
^ That’s it.
Conclusion
A solid website redesign is going to have the foundation of a solidified message that is backed by what your current customers say about you. Don’t dive into a website redesign without better understanding who you are.
If you are looking for someone to help guide you through your messaging, you should get in touch with Garrett.
