As a digital marketing agency, our website is one of our greatest marketing assets. It’s the space where we make critical first impressions and introduce our services to prospective clients.
That’s why we routinely evaluate if our site requires maintenance, refreshments, or more extensive upgrades.
Recently, instead of doing a complete rebuild, we decided to give the site a major “facelift” through design improvements and architectural enhancements.
Let’s discuss the strategic rationale behind this decision and highlight the changes made.
Assessing Our Website’s Needs
Our website foundation remained strong, as we had fully rebuilt it from scratch just last year. The overall architecture and infrastructure was robust.
However, we saw opportunities to upgrade the aesthetic design, simplify navigation, and optimize performance. Some signs a facelift was the smart play:
- Site architecture was well-organized but needed reconfigured sections
- The visual design felt slightly outdated
- Some content didn’t reflect new service offerings
- Performance was good but could be even faster
The core elements of our site were solid thanks to the full rebuild last year. Because of this, a whole new redesign from the ground up would’ve been unnecessary.
Benefits of a Facelift vs. Redesign
Given we had completely rebuilt the site last year, undergoing another full redesign so soon would have been costly and time-intensive, so we determined a facelift was the optimal approach. This enabled us to make meaningful upgrades in a faster timeline with limited disruption to our established website traffic and SEO equity.
It also allowed us to thoughtfully build upon our proven site architecture. For websites like ours with a solid technical framework, a facelift is often a smarter and more strategic choice than complete redesigns starting from scratch.
Executing Our Facelift
Our facelift took a targeted approach focusing on key areas needing improvement. We worked to elevate the website through enhancements to the design, content, and performance.
Modern Typography
One change we made was implementing a clean, geometric sans font across the site. This significantly improved readability and aligned with our contemporary brand style.
Improved User Flow
We audited site navigation and optimized the organization of pages and sections. Related content was grouped more intuitively, reducing navigation tabs and simplifying flows for visitors.
Visual Enhancements
While keeping our core page layouts consistent, we introduced design details like rounded corners, more strategic white space, accent lines, and hover effects for visual interest. This helped modernize the aesthetic.
Redesigned Blog
Our updated blog layout incorporates larger hero images at the top, descriptive subheaders within each post, and prominent call-to-action buttons at the bottom. The goal was to draw readers in while making the content more scannable and actionable.
Content Refresh
In addition to design changes, we also took time to refine messaging, incorporate new stats, and better explain our competitive differentiation throughout the site copy.
Performance Optimizations
We thoroughly reviewed our website performance and identified opportunities to optimize image file sizes, minify CSS and JavaScript, and improve server response times. These under-the-hood improvements increased the speed of our site for visitors.
Key Takeaways
For well-built websites, a facelift can provide great value compared to full redesign. Carefully analyze your site metrics and know when to expand on existing foundations.
Strategic improvements can enhance your digital presence without rebuilding the entire site. Design, navigation, content, and performance upgrades can enhance the user experience. A facelift can strengthen foundations while introducing an exciting new look. We took this targeted approach to build on our hard-earned equity.
If your website needs a refresh, reach out. We can discuss whether targeted enhancements could meet your goals instead of a complete rebuild.
