Redesigning a Website Now That Search Gives Answers
If you are rebuilding anyway, this is the cheapest it will ever be. What actually changes in the build, and what should not change at all.
Vertical: Any business. Category: Design.
If you are already rebuilding the site, this is the cheapest version of this work you will ever buy. Almost all of it is decisions about structure and language, and a redesign is making those decisions anyway.
Doing it later costs more than it sounds, because the expensive part is not the technical layer. It is what each page is for and what it says, and changing that means rewriting the pages.
One page, one question
The biggest change is that pages get given a job. Instead of one services page covering five things at medium depth, each real question a buyer asks gets its own page and a proper answer. That is better for a person, who lands on the thing they were looking for, and better for anything trying to quote you, because the page is about one thing and says so. It also exposes the parts of your offer you have been describing vaguely, which is uncomfortable and useful in equal measure.
The answer goes first
Marketing writing is normally built to withhold: set the scene, build to the point, deliver it near the end, push towards a call. This inverts that. The answer opens the section and the detail follows. Better for anything lifting a line out, and better for the reader, who was scanning for that line anyway. You do not lose the persuasion. It moves into being specific about the things your competitors are being vague about, which was always more convincing than a slow reveal.
- Open with the claim, plainly.
- Put the real details on the page: where, who for, how long, roughly what it costs.
- Keep the atmosphere in the photography and let the words do the work.
Something has to be said out loud
This is where expensive redesigns most often go wrong, because saying very little has signalled quality for twenty years. A page can be visually restrained and still contain substance; the two are not in conflict, and the fix is usually in how the page is organised rather than how it looks. Keep the top of the page clean, and give the real detail somewhere further down. People who need it find it, people who do not are never bothered by it, and anything reading the page finds a business that actually described itself.
The technical layer belongs in the build
The part that spells out who you are and what you sell is far easier to get right while the pages are being designed, because it is describing something that already has a shape. Added afterwards by a plugin reading finished pages, it tends to be generic at best and contradictory at worst.
Speed is not just polish now
Words that only appear after a lot of code has run are words some systems will not see. That makes how the site is built a question about being found, not only about performance. And the ordinary reason still applies: most of your buyers are on a phone and will leave. None of this is new advice. What is new is that failing it now costs you a mention as well as a visitor.
What should not change
None of this is a reason to make the site worse. Do not stuff it with keywords, do not generate piles of thin pages, do not flatten the writing into corporate mush because it feels safer, and do not let the design go generic in the name of being readable. Being distinctive is still why someone picks you over the other two names in the answer. The goal is a site that is unmistakably yours and completely unambiguous about what it is. The second half of that was always supposed to be true.
Do the before first
Before anything starts, put your buyers’ real questions to Google and ChatGPT and keep what comes back. It tells you what is currently believed about you, which competitors are getting named, and which gaps in the current site produced that. It also gives you something to measure against later. A redesign judged only on whether the owner likes looking at it has no way of knowing whether it worked.
Frequently asked questions
Do we need a full redesign, or can we just fix what we have?
If the site is structurally fine and the only problem is that it does not say enough, that can be fixed on its own and is worth doing. If it is built on a template that fights the structure you need, or the writing has to be redone to say anything specific, you are most of the way to a redesign already and doing it twice costs more.
Will this make our site look generic?
It should not, and if it does something has gone wrong. Nothing about being clear requires a common layout, a common palette or a common voice. The only requirement is that the substance exists in words somewhere on the page. How it looks is still entirely a design decision.
How much writing is involved?
A fair amount, and it is most of the value. The words are what convince a person and what can be repeated by anything else. It is not a job to hand to whoever has a spare afternoon.
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