Good reasons and bad reasons to overhaul your website

For engineering & software development companies

If you work for or run a small’ish (<100 employees) engineering or software dev company, you’ve probably already had a website for many years. There’s also a decent chance that your website is out of date and needs to be overhauled….. or so you think.

I suggest you pause for a minute and think it through. If you don’t have a good answer to why you need to overhaul your site, you should take a step back and re-examine why you’re spending your money on this.

A few bad reasons to overhaul your website:

  1. It’s not as pretty as you want it to be.
  2. Your competitors are doing it.
  3. You think leads will magically start flowing in.
  4. You think “I need to optimize it for SEO”.

If you’re actually more interested in website strategy, check out this article that provides tips and insights for website strategy for engineering companies.

Why overhaul your website?

Why should you even bother overhauling your website? It costs time and money. You generally want to consider overhauling your website when:

  1. it becomes unmanageable to update,
  2. it’s providing a poor user experience,
  3. you’re embarrassed to have it associated with your company.

Your goal for an overhaul should NOT be: to magically start generating leads. Of course that’s probably something you want to strive for in the long run, but if you expect that an overhaul will accomplish this by itself, there’s a good chance you’ll be very disappointed. In general an overhaul is just a starting point, not an ending point. To set your expectations, there is no ending point in sight. The environment is currently too dynamic.

You want to overhaul your website to provide a workable foundation for you to be able to start trying to achieve some good goals.

What are good goals for your website?

Here are good reasons for a tech services company to have a website:

  1. Attracting people to you
  2. Validation
  3. Supporting the sales process

These are very different objectives, and while there’s overlap for sure, how you approach this will depend on how many of these objectives you care about. They aren’t usually in conflict with each other. For example, validation is generally a required necessary but insufficient condition for sales-ready lead generation.

Using your site to attract people to you

This can come in one of two forms: (1) building awareness or (2) sales-ready leads.

If what you need is to just have more people in your world become aware that your company exists, your website can often facilitate. There are both organic and paid methods to work toward this, and in most cases, your website will be the focal point for where to guide people to. Of course you’re going to need some solid content to engage these people and start to build trust. See Building awareness with digital marketing for more detail.

Sales-ready leads essentially amount to new business opportunities knocking on your digital door. It doesn’t matter so much how they got there for the purposes of this discussion, but it does matter if they exist or not. If you’re not currently using your site for this, you probably should be considering it (see Website overhauls – considerations for sales-ready lead generation for more on this). Reach out if you’d like to chat about building a marketing machine to try to obtain sales-ready leads through your site.

Using your site for validation

Another very reasonable use case for your website is to allow people that’ve already heard about you (either they were referred by someone or they’re an existing customer) to validate that you can help them with their problem. Your messaging, proof points, and UX are going to help them self-qualify.

Using your site to support the sales process

Maybe you get leads in through some other source, but your sales team needs help selling to those leads. In this case, the sales team is going to want to point your potential customers to specific pieces of relevant content. This might be a case study, an article, a targeted landing page, or an FAQ page. The goal is to help build trust that your company knows what they’re doing within the realm of the customer’s problem. See Digital marketing for sales support for more.

What if you don’t know where you stand?

How do you know if you’re getting what you want from your site? The first thing to do is to make sure you’ve got reasonable analytics set up to track this (reach out if you’d like help). There are very strong indicators available utilizing analytics tools that can help inform this.

How often should a website be overhauled?

A website should be overhauled when it’s no longer able to accomplish what you want out of it. For smaller B2B companies, the typical range seems to be on the order of every ~4-8 years.

An overhaul involves things like:

  • Modernize the look and feel of your site (including core design elements),
  • update the site’s structure,
  • maybe change the CMS software,
  • update security protocols.

This is in contrast to content updates, which are more focused on updating and creating new content: landing pages, articles, case studies, videos, etc.

How long does it take to overhaul a website?

While a minimal overhaul could likely be accomplished in something like a week or so (of effort, not calendar time), a more decent size overhaul might take more like a month or two of effort. How long it takes to overhaul your website depends on how much you want to change. Some of the key drivers for how long it will take depends on:

  1. The number of pages on your site that need to be ported.
  2. How customized your site needs to be as opposed to utilizing an existing CMS (eg. WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, HubSpot) along with existing themes/templates and plug-ins.
  3. The number of new design elements created.
  4. The number of structural updates made.
  5. The amount of messaging tweaks made.

Note that an overhaul often doesn’t include major content updates like heavily re-worked or totally new pages, articles, white papers, case studies, or videos. That’s a different category of effort (addressed below).

How often should you update your website content?

Updating your website content is a pretty different thing than overhauling your site.

For one thing, updating your content is a pretty continuous process.

Why?

Because you’re trying to improve the way customers view the ways in which you can help, and because the world around you is evolving. This is especially true if you’re trying to attract people to you (for inbound or search marketing).

Content updates are often triggered by:

  1. Analytics information analyzed.
  2. Direct conversations with a customer/potential customer.
  3. Company positioning tweaks.
  4. Strategic direction changes.
  5. Target topic content creation.
  6. The completion of a solution that enables case study development.
  7. Capabilities updates.
  8. Sales support requests.

Next Steps

Deciding whether or not it makes sense to overhaul your website can be challenging. RocLogic doesn’t do website overhauls. There are plenty of website development companies with graphic designers and website developers that do this all the time are better suited to help you with that. If you’re looking for help with your overall website strategy, feel free to reach out for a chat.

Yes, let’s chat

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