Originally published November 2024. Updated October 2026.
A good website is judged by what it does after launch, not by how it looks on launch day. Most redesigns are approved in a conference room based on taste, then never measured against anything.
Here are the principles we hold a site to, and how to tell whether yours is working.
1. Start with the buyer, not the org chart
Most company websites are organized the way the company is organized: a page per department, a page per service line. Buyers don’t think that way. They arrive with a problem and want to know whether you solve it for companies like theirs.
Organize the site around the questions your best customers ask before they buy.
2. Write before you design
If the design comes first, the words get squeezed into boxes. Decide what each page needs to say, and to whom, then design around it. A beautiful page with vague copy loses to a plain page that answers the buyer’s question.
3. Make the next step obvious
Every page should make it clear what to do next, and that step should match how ready the visitor is. Someone reading a case study might not be ready to book a call, but might want to see more examples of the work. Give them one clear option, not six.
4. Speed and mobile are table stakes
A slow site loses people before they read a word. Most visitors will see your site on a phone first. Neither is a design detail. Both are part of whether the site works.
5. Build measurement in from day one
If you can’t see which pages lead to inquiries, and which inquiries lead to revenue, you can’t improve the site. Analytics, form tracking, and a connection to your CRM should be part of the build, not a later project. That’s the work our analytics and RevOps team does on every site.
6. Be findable by people and by AI
Search engines and AI tools both need clear pages that say what you do, who it’s for, and where. Clean structure, descriptive headings, and pages built around real questions help with both. More on that in our SEO and AI search work.
7. Plan for updates
A site that only a developer can change will go stale. Your team should be able to update copy, add a case study, or publish a post without opening a ticket.
How to judge a redesign
Give it 90 days after launch, then compare against the old site on the numbers that matter:
- Inquiries per month, and how many were qualified
- Conversion rate on your most important pages
- Revenue from leads the site produced
Traffic alone is a weak signal. One manufacturer we worked with saw sessions fall after a rebuild and more than doubled its all-time conversion rate in the same period. Fewer, better visitors beat more of the wrong ones. That result and others are on our evidence page.
Good design still matters, and we take it seriously. But an award isn’t the measure. The pipeline is.
In 2020 our team built a deliberately bad website as an exercise, breaking every rule on purpose. It was a useful reminder that most of the rules exist because buyers leave when you break them.
See our web design approach, or start with a Revenue Diagnostic to find out whether your current site is the problem.