Need A Website Refresh? Here’s What You Need To Know

I relaunched my website AGAIN – this is the sixth time in less than nine years. Why? Because my website is my digital home. It’s a place where I greet people virtually, and where people come to get to know me better.

As a marketer and speaker, having a modern and up-to-date website evokes confidence and sophistication.

I did several things differently for this latest iteration based on what I’ve learned from past website launches.

Here are some key considerations I’d suggest focusing on:

• Site performance and UX trump design
• Selecting a solid agency to bring your vision to life
• Having a point of view on content organization
• Showcasing a mix of photos and videos.
• Making your copywriting crisp and search-optimized (SEO)
• Using SEO tools to complete post-site migration audit
• Continuing to conduct site performance auditing on a regular basis

Site performance and user experience (UX) trump design and aesthetic

Website performance (site speed) matters! My number one objective, for this time around, was site speed. I still value design, user experience, and aesthetics, but design and aesthetics are fluid, and they come in many forms.

When I saw some design elements were a little more complex, I immediately asked, “Will this impact the site speed or website performance?” If it would, I asked the designers to come up with another design option.

I was not sacrificing design, aesthetics, or user experience. I simply asked for different options to achieve the same design goals.

I use free tools like Google PageSpeed Insights and GTmetrix to analyze my site performance and identify areas for improvement. Then, I work with my developers to optimize it. I’d recommend you do the same.

Remember – website optimization is a journey.

Select a solid agency to bring your vision to life

If your website is simple, you can work using Wix or other templates. My website is packed with content, though, so I need a skilled partner.

I searched for an agency for a long time that was not just competent, but that would also fit with my budget. Let’s all be clear: a good website does not come cheaply!

I used Cross & Crown for design and implementation. My budget was not big, but the owner, Trevor Roberts, still assigned Dylan Denlinger as my PM, as well as Joel Davis as my designer. Of course, there was a team behind them to support me, too.

I am very grateful.

Here is the key thing about any marketing collaboration with agencies – you need to brief them well. I wrote a detailed brief to explain my priorities and objectives for the site. You can’t skimp on your brief. We also had a solid kickoff meeting for Joel to ask follow-up questions after reviewing my brief.

They shared the timeline with me, and I made sure that I answered their questions swiftly so they could stay on schedule.

A side note: the owner, Trevor Roberts, is fantastic. You can talk to him directly if you need to, but Dylan did a fantastic job, so I completely forgot Trevor existed! I appreciated his on-point assignment of Dylan to what I needed to have done, but I felt reassured that Trevor was readily available.

Have a point of view on content organization

Iva Ignjatovic, my social media manager, and I (mostly her) comb through all my content in blog posts, podcast episodes, and even videos. Our past content classification was a mess – a bunch of after-the-fact keywords without any logical reasoning.

Retrospectively, we implemented two sets of content classifications:

• My service offerings
• Categories based on keywords

The reason for these two categories was so that we would be able to showcase relevant content on each service page. It also helps our audience to be able to search based on our categories.

In addition, we went through the blog posts, deleted irrelevant and dated content, and determined blog posts that needed to be rewritten. I did the rewrites on these blog posts (a lot of work) during December, 2022. I was eating, writing, and that’s about it.

Since podcast episodes can’t be re-edited, we kept all podcast episodes the same.

Key takeaway: cleaning up, updating, and recategorization are a prerequisite of any website updates.

Showcase a mix of photos and videos

When you invest so much in a website, you might as well spend a bit extra to do a photo shoot and have some professional videos done as well.

Once I knew the copy for each page, I looked for opportunities to sprinkle in short videos. For example, a welcome video is fitting and proper on the home page. A short speaking reel makes sense for the event manager page. A short talk about my service offerings is a great fit for the services home page.

I scripted these videos and worked with my producers to record them. My producers also added an opening and closing that align with my branding.

For website images, I hired a photographer for a day. We did interior and exterior shots. We had a prep meeting first to discuss the shooting locations and the different outfits for different locations.

Since I also do social media posts, we also took photos of me having different facial expressions such as laughing loudly, hands up and hands down in different directions, acting surprised, hands crossed as the “NO!” emoji, and whatnot.

When you do a photo shoot, imagine the photos as images that you’ll use not just on the website, but on many other channels.

Since I often speak at different events, I also created a section with different photo selections as well as introductions for people to download.

Creating content for the website was hard work.

Make copywriting crisp and search-optimized (SEO)

Copywriting communicates who you are and what you do. On the website, it also informs visitors what to do.

I wrote the copy for all the pages, but Joel and his team also modified the copy and made it more concise. It was a collaborative effort. In addition, I also worked with an SEO agency, Fusion Inbound. Yosef Silver, Katherine Nwanorue, and Robert Molina helped out with my SEO. Katherine crafted H1, Meta data description, and other elements based on my list of keywords. We made sure each page had the right keywords and proper descriptions for search optimization.

Google didn’t like a page I had with few words, but I didn’t want to keep it lengthy for the sake of SEO. So, we found a balance between providing clarity and minimizing word requirements for SEO.

While you work on your website, you’ll learn to make trade-offs between performance and aesthetics, SEO, and concise copywriting.

Use SEO tools to complete post-site migration audits

What we did immediately after the site went live was to run a site audit to fix broken links, images, or other technical issues. We used Semrush to run the site audits.

Initially, we saw several hundreds of issues; some of them were fixed by our developers with code, while others were truly broken links and images that we needed to fix manually.

It took 6 weeks to fully clean up all the broken links and site issues. Then, it took another 6-8 weeks to go through all content and to further optimize it for SEO.

A lot of manual work went into this. Sigh. No shortcuts, unfortunately.

Monitor site performance and conduct site auditing on a regular basis

I could only say that the site was to my full satisfaction with a Semrush site audio score of 94, 3 months after we went live. The GTMatrix scored between 94 and 98.

From the time I briefed Dylan and Joel from Cross & Crown back in October ’22, it took until May ’23 for me to declare a green light. In short, it took 8 months. That was because I had a lot of content that needed cleaning up, plus we had to reclassify the categories, as well as fix all the issues post-migration all at the same time.

I continue to monitor the website performance, making sure that the site is pretty clean and information is easy to serve up.

In summary…

I always learn something new when I redo my website. As a modern B2B marketer, you need to understand the back-end as well as the front-end.

Learn as much as you can from your developers and agencies. The more you know about digital marketing back-end, the more you know how to connect the different dots that will ultimately make you a better marketer.

B2B Marketing march on!