How long will it take to refresh my website?

Define a clear brief

Take some time to write down what’s not working for your current website, and to define what success would look like – more visitors? More newsletter sign ups? Increasing the time that visitors spend on your site? If you haven’t defined what is wrong and what the results could look like, then you won’t have any framework to deliver upon.

If we look at the Abingdon project, from the outset they’d highlighted a number of issues with their previous site. It was a sparse, single page site, and lacked the necessary content to give visitors a full picture of what the business did. As such, it didn’t have the gravitas of competitors.

As a creative team, our first steps were to look at their site from a design and technical standpoint. We found these challenges as set to work to address them:

• The design was inconsistent.
• The brand needed to pivot from a very blue competitor set.
• Imagery didn’t support what the business does.
• This was an opportune moment to retain the logo but reset the brand’s visual identity.
• Previous build left no way for the team to track the performance of their site.
• Best practice design for SEO was not in place.

Make quick decisions (and stand by them)

If you need a website (or any project) to be delivered quickly, you’ll need to be prepared to make fast, effective decisions.

This means ensuring all the key stakeholders have time set aside to review creative work, that team needs to be kept purposely small and that someone on your team has been assigned to:

• Collate and consolidate feedback.
• Gather any relevant content that is needed to complete the site.
• Be the ultimate decision maker in the event that you can’t reach a consensus.

After our initial audit and immersion session, we developed two clear visual directions, explaining the merits of each so that the Abingdon felt they could make a choice of direction.

As a client, they were quick to make decisions, and provided very clear feedback. There may have been a difference of opinions between their team at some points, however a consensus was quickly reached and the project moved on.

Trust the process!

Once steps one and two are in place, it’s critical to follow the project plan and stick as closely as possible to the timelines. It’s worth considering anything that might slow the project down – for example getting together the necessary content and proofing the copy before the site is finalised.

With Abingdon, once the creative route had been chosen we worked at pace to demonstrate how this could come to life. We weren’t too precious about using the exact content — this was being finalised in the background by our copy director — instead we developed styled wireframes that gave an idea of how much content would be needed. Alongside this, a mini site map ensured the client could see the correct flow of content and pages.

This made the process faster, as our copywriter was working in parallel to edit the content that we knew would fit the site.

Results

Abingdon’s new website is by no means huge, but it is a significant elevation from before. It tells a far more rounded story of the company, the team and highlights a number of software case studies.

Although this wasn’t a rebrand project, the new website has ensured consistency. This, in turn, has elevated Abingdon’s brand, and to ensure this consistency continues, we provided a style guide for the team at the end of the project.