Why You Need a Digital Strategy Not a New Website

We get frequent requests for a quote on a new website project with the aim of rebuilding or building a completely new website. The problem with this request is that it often leads to wasted money and bad results.
Building a new website can be a massive project, and even for smaller companies drain a lot of internal resources and financial resources spending money on third parties. After all of that, the results might not give the company the boost they expected after such a major resource investment.
So how is it that building a website is such a frustrating and difficult process for most businesses when there is an abundance of great technologies out there? WordPress, Magento, Shopify, Squarespace, etc…

The answer is simple: a lack of understanding.

Companies go through an RFP (request for proposal) process or simply call up agencies and third parties trying to get a quote for building a website. The problem with this is sometimes they don’t even now what platform is right for them, and if they do know what platform is right for them, they don’t know how to architect the platform for their situation and resource constraints.
Thus, they go around blindly getting quotes from companies trying to figure out which quote and company are the best to build the website. The worst part about this is that the agency incentive and sometimes sales rep commission incentive is to get the sale which often means misleading clients into unrealistic deadlines or budgets that won’t accomplish their ultimate goals of increasing revenue for the business.

Your website is not necessarily the problem! Your strategy is.

We get many requests for companies that want to rebuild their site, however, in most cases I think they might be better off improving their existing website or looking further into improving their existing infrastructure rather than a complete rebuild.
Rebuilding is expensive and should be an absolute last resort, however, you do need the proper infrastructure on which to grow and prosper with so it can make sense in the right situation.

So rather than jumping into a new website project, ask yourself these questions:

How is this new website going to be architected? Is this new website going to be something that I can grow with for the next 3 to 5 years? Is it going to be architected in a way that makes it scalable and easily improvable?
What is my strategy around improving my website, adding new features, adding new content, promoting that content, driving more traffic, and converting more traffic into leads or eCommerce sales?

Finally, is this investment going to be worth it?

Your website is simply the vehicle in which to improve sales, marketing, and potentially other things like operations and other backend parts of your business.
Therefore, if building a new website with a new infrastructure is part of your bigger picture digital strategy, then it most likely makes sense. However, if you’re just thinking that building a new site will lead to more business, you are sorely mistaken. I would strongly argue that a long-term digital strategy of continuous improvement will improve sales versus building a new site.
In fact, launching a new site often leads to short-term SEO loss while Google has to crawl the new site so it can actually be a short-term hit to the business, therefore you have to be confident the long-term value is there.

Building a mindset of continuous improvement:

Rather than trying to rebuild your website all the time, what is your plan for improving your website? Aside from rare cases in which a platform like Magento rebuilt their version requiring essentially a rebuild, your platform should allow you to grow for the next 3 to 5 years or you have most likely made the wrong platform decision.
Incrementally improving your site is much more effective and economical. It allows you to reap the benefits of small changes and improvements and also measure those small changes and improvements to better understand what is and is not working.

• Minor / major design improvements and changes
• New content and content enhancements
• Hosting infrastructure improvements
• Dev ops improvements
• Upgrades and patches
• New features
• New apps and extensions
• New or improved third party integrations

Your strategy should include some or even all of these elements:

• Infrastructure Roadmap (website, hosting, platform etc) that can scale for 3 to 5 years
• Feature / functionality improvement roadmap
• Design roadmap for future design enhancements
• Content roadmap
• Marketing roadmap via:
  • Social Media
  • SEO
  • Local
  • PPC
  • Email