Hitting the Refresh Button: What We Learned from Our Own Website Redesign

Marketing agencies will tell you they’re all about transparency. After all, the good communication and honesty that stem from transparency lead to solid, long-lasting relationships. So, in the honor of complete transparency, we here at Pyxl have a confession to make. A website redesign is really freaking difficult.

After two years of talking about how badly we needed a new site, we recently (and painstakingly) carved out time in our busy production calendar to put ourselves through our own strategy and website development process.

After months of design and development work, our fingers are excitedly hovering over our mice, ready to hit the “Publish” button. For many of us, those fingers are also plugging our ears and rubbing our eyes and temples, trying to shake off the hangover caused by the entire process. Flashing back to our college days, we’re vowing to never do that again…write, design and develop our new website and a refreshed look and feel.

This all sounds terrifying, like we’re starring in our own digital marketing version of Scared Straight! Mostly, we just want to share valuable lessons we learned with those of you considering your own website redesign and convince you that outsourcing your digital marketing can be a good thing.

Website Redesign Lessons Learned

Objectivity

From the very first day of our old site’s audit, we found that it can be incredibly difficult to remain objective. In the not-so-distant past, those words were our co-workers’ words. Those designs were our co-workers’ designs. It felt rude to critique the site architecture and content with the same honesty we would provide a client without worrying about being a terrible colleague.

This struggle to find objectivity also came into play during the development of personas and goals—did we already know what the client wanted to hear or were we strategizing with no preconceptions in mind?

Whats more, with so many digital marketing pros under one roof (or four roofs, in our case), there were numerous opinions weighing in on every part of the process. From key messaging and navigation to a tone of voice and new brand colors, finalizing each element was like trying to answer a game show question with a million audience members shouting at you.

We would have benefited from using a third-party during this website redesign and brand refresh process. We needed trusted partners with marketing expertise and fresh eyes to challenge our status quo or preconceived ideas, bringing true innovation to the process.

Time

Oh, the things we could do if we had more time, right? I think anyone, in any field, in any industry would make this claim, and boy, did it resonate with us for this project. As a business structured around providing services, accommodating client requests is key, which makes prioritizing an internal project difficult. When new clients popped up or additional requests come in, members of the team jumped from our website project to accommodate those external requests. We’re not upset about servicing our clients. We’re just disappointed that we launched later than we intended to.

Confidence

From content to design to development, each project team member felt intimidated to create for a company that so inherently knows what we should be producing. The employees at our digital agency spend all day working on and learning about great websites. It was difficult to distance ourselves from the herd and be confident in our work.

Understanding

As with most things in life, there are always a few slivers of good mixed in with the bad. The benefit of doing a website redesign in-house is that everyone understands the process and the mission. Internal and organizational buy-in before a brand launch is essential, and having all employees easily on the same page was of great benefit.

Experimentation

Another plus? We could draw from each department’s experience to allow us to dream big. Often, clients like to play it safe (or are required to by their leadership), so we got to brainstorm and implement all the fun things we’ve been dying to try. We even got to switch up our brand colors, something a marketing agency almost never gets to do.

(Note: Going back to the whole transparency thing, while we were able to play with some fun digital functionality and illustrations, we weren’t able to implement a lot of what we intended to because of schedule delays. Womp, womp.)

Flexibility

Finally, another benefit is that we get to tweak things as we go. We have never-ending access to the content management system, so we aren’t completely bound to the final product. In three months, if we decide the blog page layout doesn’t work for us, we can spend a couple of weeks designing a new one.

This is an overarching benefit of digital marketing—it’s not permanent. All clients have access to their CMS after a website project ends and are able to add, delete and alter content. Some clients even have retainer agreements to let us do more time- and skill-intensive modifications for them.

The Results

You remember that we’re all about transparency, right? So yes, we would love the opportunity to work with your company, but the main goal of this blog isn’t to hit you up for business. It’s to pass along the lessons we learned from our website redesign. Sure, you know your product best and doing a new website in-house might save you money, but keeping the project in-house also brings countless unforeseen complexities. Allocating time and resources and remaining objective are two of the biggest lessons we can pass along.

We’re happy to share additional insights. If there are specific questions you have about website or rebranding projects, please feel free to reach out to us.

We read every response we get, so don’t hold anything back!

Updated: Apr 13, 2022