Partial Website Redesigns: Make a Splash without Breaking the Bank

Brands decide to redesign their websites for all sorts of reasons. Maybe the site looks outdated, content is overgrown, the branding has evolved, or a series of acquisitions have created a confusing user experience that doesn't effectively speak to their audience anymore.

The ambition to make a big change is exciting, but a full website redesign often clashes with business realities, budget constraints, and available resources. So, how can brands focus their efforts on individual elements of their digital experience that will still make a big impact while staying grounded?

Here's the approach we take at Genuine:

 

Step 1: Start With a Comprehensive Audit

Before diving into design and development, it's crucial to understand what site sections or facets of your experience will deliver the most value to your business by improving them. You’ll want to answer questions such as:

• What's working from an SEO and analytics perspective? What's not? Where are the opportunities for improvement?
• How might the website be falling short of your overall business goals and objectives?
• Are your persona and journey maps still true to your current audiences and their use cases?
• What can you learn by interviewing internal stakeholders about their insights and pain points with content creation, lead generation, and design?
• What resources are available, and how quickly do you need to see results?
• Are there external catalysts that are driving a specific priority or timeline?
  
   

Step 2: Get Internal Buy-In

Sometimes, this step goes hand-in-hand with research, but we've found that leaders often need to see tangible proof before fully committing to a redesign. This might involve presenting research findings or, in some cases, bringing a key section of the site (like a homepage) to life to generate excitement.

For example, we recently worked with a pharma brand to enhance their Oncology and Neurology sections of their website with urgent content updates. At the same time, their overall site design was outdated and needed refreshing, and so we used the new Oncology and Neurology pages as a proof-of-concept for an updated design system, too. Once internal leadership saw where the new designs could take the rest of the website, they agreed that it made sense to extend the work to the rest of the site and make a full refresh come to life.

The key takeaway here is that a phased approach with a clear purpose is often easier to sell up the chain of command than attempting a complete overhaul all at once. A discovery phase can be incredibly helpful, delivering tangible results like a roadmap that can outline the action plan for the next phase of work.

 

Step 3. Prioritizing the Front Door

Once you have priorities clearly defined, it’s time to start with your most urgent projects. One trend we've noticed is for clients to prioritize updating key sections of their site that have the most business value. These are often referred to as the "front doors" of a digital experience – the areas where users first encounter your brand. These sections have a significant impact on brand perception and are often the first place users go when interacting with your brand. 

Last year we helped a regional health system put together a new homepage, as it was their marquee “front door” to their website. As a service-oriented business with thousands of patients, caregivers, HCPs, staff, job seekers, and community members coming to their homepage from search and media campaigns, the homepage is a crucial place to orient and direct users to various content. Simply updating that one page made a huge difference in their ability to present the brand and improve users’ experience! 

 

Step 4: Balance a Holistic Vision with a Surgical Approach

Whether we're refreshing a homepage or embarking on a larger, phased redesign, we always strive to understand the bigger picture. This ensures that our decisions align with both short-term and long-term goals. Documenting and prioritizing all the ideas you’ve identified and aligned with leadership into a roadmap can serve as a guide, ensuring that projects stay on track and deliver the desired results on your timeline. Once these are established, smaller workstreams can be planned in advance in a way that will serve the most urgent goals and also set the right foundation to build towards bigger impacts. 

That being said, the only thing you may know right now is that you need a new homepage, or a new recruiting website, or a campaign landing page, and that’s okay too. We can work together to pull off a small initiative while creating a roadmap to help us avoid duplicative work in the future.

A great example of this is a project we’re currently undertaking with a financial services company – we’re building them an “MVP” version of their new site to meet an initial launch deadline, and in parallel, we’re also building out an ideal-state site map, navigation, and design system. This both informs the work we’re launching with first and also sets the client up with a roadmap and system to continue building and improving their site post-MVP launch, too.

Looking for help prioritizing and chipping away at a mountain of work with surgical projects? Reach out to us and we can set up time for Katie and Ally to talk through your options and our approaches in more detail!
 

Genuine is a digital experience agency with an independent spirit and the global scale of an IPG company. For 20 years, we've created marketing campaigns, website redesigns, lead nurture CRMs, social content, microsites, and everything else digital for clients in almost every B2B and B2C category there is.