When clients ask for a redesign and need a rewrite

Half the redesign briefs that land in the studio inbox are actually positioning briefs in disguise.

The conversation usually starts the same way. The client comes in with a website that they say does not “feel right” any more. The pages look dated. The brand looks tired. The conversion rate has slipped. Could we redesign it.

Sometimes the answer is yes, the website is genuinely tired, and a redesign will fix the obvious problems. More often, the website is fine. The thing that has changed is what the company is selling, or who the company is selling to, or how the company wants to be understood. The pages still describe the company that existed two years ago. A redesign would produce a more attractive version of those same pages and would not fix the underlying problem, which is that the writing is now wrong.

The honest answer, in those conversations, is usually: “The website does not need a redesign. It needs a rewrite. We can run the rewrite and refresh the visuals at the same time, and the visual update will be the cheaper half.” Most clients are surprised to hear this. Most clients then proceed with the rewrite, and the redesigned pages are noticeably better than they would have been if we had skipped that step.

A small set of signs that the brief is a positioning brief in disguise:

The client cannot describe, in one sentence, who the website is for. (If the client cannot, the website cannot. No amount of visual redesign will fix this.)

The client mentions, in passing, that the company has changed in some way over the last twelve months. New product line, new market, new team. The website has not yet absorbed the change.

The client uses the word “tired” or “dated” without being able to point at a specific page or component that is doing badly. “Tired” is, more often than not, the feeling of looking at a piece of writing that is no longer true.

If you are running a small business and reading this with a redesign on your mind: try the rewrite first. Pull each page apart. Ask whether each sentence is still true about the company you are running today. Most of the time, the redesign you thought you needed will look obvious once the writing is settled.

The studios that handle this well bill for the positioning work as a separate, paid engagement before any visual design starts. The studios that lose money on redesigns tend to be the ones who fold the positioning work into “discovery”, do it for free, and then spend the rest of the project debugging a brief that was wrong from week one.

The companion post on when a brand outgrows its system covers the next-door problem (the brand has materially changed, the system has not). Marty Neumeier’s Zag is the cleanest single book on positioning for small businesses; April Dunford’s Obviously Awesome is a more recent treatment of the same territory.