When discussing major updates to your existing website, there are two paths: refresh or rebuild. Wendy Simmons and Kyle Davis talk through each option in detail, exploring what makes them different, when you might prioritize one over the other, and how to optimize your time and budget when renovating your "digital storefront."
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Podcast Transcript
Ready to go?
Welcome to The Shortlist.
We're exploring all things AEC marketing to help your firm win The Shortlist.
I'm your host, Wendy Simmons, and each episode I'll be joined by one of my team members from Middle of Six to answer your questions.
Today, we're chatting with Kyle Davis and we're going to talk all things website rebuild versus website refresh.
Hey, Kyle.
Refresh or rebuild?
Which one will you choose?
I know, the big question there.
Well, why would we even have this conversation?
Yeah.
Clients come to us, they have an idea in mind.
Website skeptical perhaps, maybe even?
Yeah, totally, exactly.
So why did this come up as the topic you wanted to explore today?
Well, selfishly, this is some of my most enjoyable work at Middle of Six.
I really like diving into a client's website.
I even like diving into our own website, but for whatever reason, the way I'm wired, I really enjoy getting in there, the mix of design, the mix of content writing, the mix of strategy and branding.
It's just a very fun space to work in.
But that being said, it is kind of typical to hear from clients sometimes, well, you know, we don't even win work from our website, so like, who cares?
Why were we even having this discussion?
Oh, yes, so true.
They don't win work from their website.
Well, we like to say, okay, that might be true, but how much work are you not winning because of your website?
Or the dreaded losing work.
Yes, right?
I wouldn't blame folks, especially people who are rolling up their sleeves and doing AEC work day in and day out.
It's totally understandable that the website might not be at the top of your priority list, but we do like to say that it is your digital storefront.
The same way you wouldn't submit a proposal with a bad photo on the cover and an incomplete table of contents and an org chart that's inaccurate, you also want to take care of your digital presence that way where I guess I'm mixing metaphors here, but if your store has a broken window and the awning is falling down and maybe you have like hours of operation on the front of your door and they're not even right, customers are quickly going to dismiss you, not take you seriously, or they're just gonna feel apathetic.
They're gonna close the window and they're gonna move on to something else.
So that's why I like working on the website.
I like grabbing people's attention and showing a user the unique story and the unique capabilities of clients.
Yeah, I like that metaphor.
I feel like that absolutely works.
Tortured as it may have been.
You know, it works, it works.
We're gonna go with it for a little bit.
You wanna welcome your customers and your clients in, and to hit on that part where, you know, someone may say to us, I don't win work from my website.
I mean, because you are a B2B organization and you're not necessarily getting leads from your website or you don't have e-commerce on your website.
I mean, there are different types of websites out there that are more workhorses in that traditional sense, but absolutely your storefront with a broken window is telling a story about your brand.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, pretty obviously makes you, as a customer, think, hmm, well, I guess maybe this is the cheap option or the old option or whatever it might be.
And hey, maybe that is the reflection of your brand you want to put out there.
Doubt it.
There are probably more effective ways of doing it.
Exactly.
Than having kind of a broken website.
But let's be intentional about that.
Whatever your message is that you want to communicate.
Yeah.
And considering that we probably have some marketing folks listening to this podcast, I mean, we're all going to everybody's website all the time, right?
I mean, I am like if I get an email from somebody and they have their website in their email signature, oh, I've never heard of that firm.
I wonder what their website looks like.
Maybe you're on LinkedIn and you see something interesting and you're clicking through.
I mean, I'm clicking through to check out the website.
Maybe I'm a strange person, but I don't think so.
I mean, you're not you're not you're not a strange person, Kyle.
Yeah, people are checking out websites for a variety of reasons.
They probably fall into a few buckets.
Well, what do you do and where do you fit in that space, right?
We kind of make some quick judgment calls on credibility based on either the clients they're working with, the types of projects they've done, who's in their kind of circle of influence.
And, you know, that shows up on your website.
And for me, I'm just like, is your stuff cool?
Like, are you taking pride in your brand and are you excited and innovative and cutting edge?
Like, I'm always excited to check out someone's website and see something awesome.
And if you're not packing that punch on your website, it might be time to think about a refresh or a rebuild.
Yep.
Because I mean, it's like you don't think that your industry partners or proposal judges aren't going to www.yourbusiness.com and checking you out.
Like, I would think 90 percent, if not higher, are at least going to take a quick look.
And the question becomes, what are we showing people when they land there?
Does it reflect our company and our values and our people and our culture and what makes us cool and unique and special and all those wonderful words?
Yeah.
Let's think about a selection panel for a project.
You're going to have some folks that know you, invited you, you're well positioned with because they have a relationship with you.
Great.
They maybe aren't going to your website.
Okay.
I get that.
But then there's everybody else.
Everybody else.
There's the owner's rep who maybe isn't as knowledgeable about your experience.
There are committee members who maybe are from the community or not in AEC, or just are providing their expertise in a certain area, and they just maybe don't have an intimate knowledge about the type of work you're doing or what your business does.
Potentially, an architect is a partner on the project, and they are from a different region of the country, so they are not familiar with you providing the scope of work.
There are going to be plenty of people on a selection committee that will go to your website right after they get the information out of the proposal to get a better understanding of who you really are as a firm.
Absolutely.
What is the difference between a refresh and a rebuild, Kyle?
Such a good question.
It's such an easy one.
Softball.
But it's worth taking a look at the distinction because there is going to be a difference in scope and budget and time and energy.
And if you're evaluating your website and you're choosing between one or the other, you want to make sure that you have a clear understanding of what these two things are, because then you'll be able to use your time and your resources most effectively.
Right.
Deciding that your website might need some attention doesn't mean it only needs a refresh, or doesn't mean you just need a new web to rebuild it, right?
Right.
It's not black and white like that.
You need to take a critical eye and understand the differences and what you can accomplish in both areas.
Exactly.
And so when we were talking about a refresh, it is just that.
It's call it a fresh coat of paint for your metaphorical proposal or your metaphorical storefront that we're talking about, you know.
You're probably keeping the same platform.
You're probably keeping the same back end, assuming that it's functional and it's serving your needs.
Maybe you're just fixing some technical problems.
Maybe you just need to get some plugins updated.
Another thing that you're taking care of are probably just the really glaring issues of typos, broken links.
If information is inaccurate, you're going to want to rectify that.
And then there are those next level considerations in a refresh of how deep do we want to go on updating design and imagery.
And that's where maybe you start flirting with the rebuild, depending on some of these factors.
But on the refresh side, do we want to update our headshots?
Do we want to get new project photography?
I want a new image on the homepage because we've evolved in the last few years and we want to make a different impression really quickly.
So the refresh is kind of high level, kind of cosmetic.
You are getting your hands on the content and the design, but you're not starting from scratch.
And then when we go rebuild, we are, where are we on our metaphor?
We're knocking over our store and we're rebuilding it from the foundation.
So maybe you don't like the platform that your website's on.
Maybe you don't like your hosting provider and you're always getting issues or you're you call them for tech support and they don't answer the phone or they don't respond to your emails.
Maybe you want to start with a whole new theme or a whole new design scheme.
Or maybe you're considering relaunching your brand.
And if you decide to go that route, that's when you might start thinking about the more in-depth endeavor of a rebuild.
Yeah.
And we talked a little bit about paying attention to the goals in the episode about the website audit.
But I think it's important to kind of...
Right.
We would be remiss to not mention, of course, the goals and the audience.
Absolutely.
I couldn't agree more.
Put that at the top of every episode we ever record.
We're thinking about the goals and the audience, and then we'll get into the nitty gritty.
It's not just on a whim like, hey, I think this would be cool if we could add some blue here or whatever.
No, we want to be acknowledging that you're thinking, is your website doing what it needs to do?
Communicating the brand in the right way and reaching the audiences.
Kyle, what do you think is, as far as scope-wise and effort, the difference that a marketing team might expect from a refresh to a rebuild?
Yeah, the refresh is going to be smaller in scope.
It's probably gonna feel a little less overwhelming.
Like we said, it's sort of the surface level, quick, low-hanging fruit, and there is nothing wrong with that at all.
More simple or less complex does not mean that it's less valid of an avenue to take.
Especially when you're considering time and budget and being cost-effective, you might audit your website and go, you know, there's really just like a dozen things here, and we feel really confident that we can take care of them, and we also feel confident that the impact is going to be large.
We don't have to bog down and spend months on a rebuild.
I would never shy people away from a quote-unquote simple refresh if you feel like that's where you're going to get the most bang for your buck.
You know, I feel like it would be kind of fun and interesting to our listeners if we could just share a tiny bit about Middle of Six's website strategy internally.
Yeah, great.
I think as marketers, we all want to do what we recommend, right?
We want to like walk the talk in that way.
And so just to give some insight to how we manage our website, so our company currently is five years old and we've had two websites in that time, ground up websites.
And obviously the first one was built very specifically to a young startup company and we really were just figuring out our positioning and how to communicate our services.
And knew that that was a bit of a temporary element, but like that metaphor, we needed the storefront to be out there when we launched.
So that was strategy step number one.
And now we're in version number two, which has really evolved.
We went from essentially a single scrolling page to a multi-paged website with quite a bit of detail.
We are very deliberate in making significant updates to the website on basically a quarterly or biannual schedule, which means really kind of digging into the people and the photography and the content we're putting out there.
Yep.
Obviously with the podcast, that's a whole new addition to our website in that way.
And we feel really good about that strategy that we're checking the box and like adding new content and being really involved in the website.
I would say it's been iterative refreshes.
We changed a lot of the design elements and we really thought through the content buckets and how we wanted to convey our services.
We reached out to clients and got testimonials and sort of strategically place them throughout the site.
That is an example of how you can refresh your website.
You don't need to stick with exactly how it is.
You might be adding pages, you might be adding functionality.
But if you're not tearing it down and starting from scratch, then you're still in that refresh mode and it's within your grasp to accomplish.
Potential items that are next on our list is really changing the way we show our team.
As we've grown and we'd like to present them in kind of a more detailed way, that's on our list and it'll be something that'll be fun to build out even further.
Yeah, I like thinking about our website as an example, because we went from three team members to six and keeping our eye on that, of course, that makes a huge difference.
We do a pretty good job of engaging a professional photographer once a year, once every two years, making sure that the imagery on our website reflects the current team and the current culture that we have.
And going from three to six, that's a huge difference and that's something that's worth refreshing the website to reflect, of course.
I just want to like echo your comment on the photography.
We love photography.
Put that at the top, too.
Hire a professional photographer, take a ton of pictures of all your people and all your projects all the time.
Thank you.
Signed the Marketing Department.
Yes.
Everyone's cheering for you saying that, Kyle.
You can just play that tidbit in your next marketing meeting.
We do have someone come in every year or more frequently as we need for additional team members to make sure their headshots are just, you know, branded on point with everything.
It looks very cohesive.
And I'll tell you that spending, I don't know, $1,000 or $2,000 every year is so worth it.
It's the smallest amount of money we pay for anything with just a huge bang for its buck.
Now, again, for every firm, it's going to be a different price level.
But it's a pretty low investment to just get so much content and really help reflect the personality of your firm.
Yeah, absolutely.
Okay, so we've covered the refresh pretty well.
We're big fans of that.
We think you should be doing that at interim milestones, no matter where your website is at.
But when is it time to take the leap towards a rebuild?
One that really jumps out at top of mind is when your content management or CMS system is out of date, or the function is compromised, maybe your site is really slow, maybe it's crashing or you have bugs.
Oftentimes, we see websites that have a lot of third party apps or plugins installed, because you're kind of putting a band-aid on things and you're trying to add functionality quickly, and now all of a sudden, your website is sluggish and you can't update it, and it might be on a rickety foundation.
Oftentimes, you're throwing good money after bad if you're just trying to patch those things up, and if it's really gotten into a poor tech state, it might be time to start fresh.
Yeah, what about the functionality of the website?
What areas are you looking for to make sure?
I think when you start talking about functionality, you're looking at how many pages do we want to add?
Are we adding pages?
And if the answer is yes, then that is going to be part of your decision-making process.
How are those new pages going to interact with your existing top level navigation?
Are we adding sub-pages, giving people deeper avenues to engage with maybe our projects or our content or biographical information about our team?
And then there's a more exciting avenue to explore, which is do we want to start embedding video on our homepage?
Do we want to develop a whole new blog area or a whole new area where we're presenting our thought leadership?
Maybe you have a podcast and you want to start promoting that in a new, innovative way.
Maybe you're collecting leads or you're collecting information about your visitors.
When it starts to feel like you're having a lot of new and exciting ideas and maybe you're reinventing the wheel a little bit, that's where you're going to get more bang for your buck, just starting fresh and really coming out of the gate strong.
Rather than picking around the edges, you're probably not going to get the impact that you want.
We talked a lot about the benefits of a refresh and how you can add content.
You can be, of course, very thoughtful and strategic about it.
But you do run the risk of having your website be a little bit Frankenstein together and not have just that perfect cohesive architecture that you would like to see in any website, whether it's been refreshed or rebuilt.
So consider that.
You might need to kind of restructure it, right?
And that's a good reason to do the rebuild.
Yeah, if your website has sort of lost the plot in that way and you feel like you're kind of piecing things together, there is, I think there is going to be an efficiency to starting from scratch, especially if you're diving into more of a branding exercise, starting fresh that way, getting all your color schemes in order, selecting fonts, making sure everything is holistic.
You have a narrative and a story to tell.
You're cutting out all of those work arounds and band-aids and like, well, this is how we do it.
It's our trick for making this work right.
Like, awesome opportunity to get all that garbage out of there.
It happens.
Websites get out of date.
Plugins get funky, whatever.
Oh, yeah, I love work arounds.
I spent my entire professional career working on websites with work arounds and, oh, nobody knows how to do it but this one guy.
And you got to go talk to him, but he's not here today.
Yeah, it's a seven step process.
It happens very easily where you're in the day to day, you're just trying to accomplish one single task.
Why fix it when you just have 10 minutes and you just got to make it happen?
And then that spirals into months or years, and then maybe you're thinking about website rebuild.
It just happens.
It's the name of the game.
What happens when that person who has all that historical knowledge, knows how to work on it, leaves the company for whatever reason?
Congrats to them.
They got a promotion.
They're not doing that anymore.
And you are locked out of your website, or not technically locked out, but a lot of that knowledge is gone.
What are your thoughts there, Kyle?
Yeah, I'm a broken record on this, but you can't be locked out of your own website.
You need to be able to get in there and make changes yourself.
It needs to be relatively painless and efficient.
If your tech is getting out of date or it's buggy or you have a bunch of workarounds, now is the time to get ahead of that and get your hands around your own website content.
Yeah, content management systems have gotten so good in the last decade.
You do not have to be a programmer or developer.
Yeah, that wall is starting to come down a little bit.
Our advice, if you're thinking about redoing your website, is that you can have so much more control.
You'll be well served by having familiarity and freshness with your content.
And worth it when you're doing that rebuild is to feel great about your platform.
There's one other large factor.
When you're thinking about a redesign or rebuild, you want to take a look at your mobile site and the way that your CMS or your platform allows you to edit and present your site on mobile.
If you are out of date in that area, at least half, if not more folks, are going to go to your website on their phone these days.
If that's not responsive, if it's not resizing elements to fit cell phones and tablets, and you don't have the ability to optimize for mobile, then that might be a deal breaker in and of itself at this point.
Okay, that leads us to this week's listener question, which is, what is the best process for selecting a web developer for a new ground up website?
When do you have some experience in this area?
Yeah, yeah, let me just kind of start with some of our kind of firsthand experience.
First of all, Middle of Six does websites and helps our clients with that, but we also support our clients in the selection of a web developer if the project isn't the right fit for us based on our experience or the scope of work.
So we get to sit on both sides of the table and help our clients select a web developer partner.
The web developer is a very specific role in this process, and we're kind of thinking about the whole web design creation, that agency that might support that effort.
So where I would recommend firms start when they've decided that they want to rebuild their website and they don't know how to select their partner in that process is to reach out to your network.
I would guess that your marketing counterparts at different firms or within the industry have recently explored this themselves.
Absolutely.
You can also look at something like the SNPS awards submittals to see who's recently refreshed their website.
Often they'll post their work there and maybe win an award for it, and then you can see who their web developer partner was, if they used a creative agency as part of that effort.
You can kind of understand because there's not just one answer to building a new website.
It could even be done in-house for that matter.
So you can do your own intel, and I would look around at your competition, other people in the AEC space that you really like their website, respect their work, have similar types of services you want to communicate, and then do a little digging to see maybe who did their website.
That would give you a good shortlist of firms to at least consider.
The Shortlist.
That's right, the Shortlist.
A lot of vendors also do a pretty good job of presenting case studies.
So maybe you're googling around local development agencies or design agencies, and I've had a lot of success finding a whole host of case studies when evaluating those vendors.
So that information is out there for you to find what you like and dislike.
In our industry, we sort of find comfort in a proposal process for selecting qualifications and proposal process for selecting vendors comes naturally to us.
And it gets scoring criteria and whatnot.
Like we want to we want to know all the details of like it presented in a really clear, easy to digest way.
And I'd say keep that option in your back pocket.
But if you think about your firm from how you like to win work most often, like literally your own firm likes to win work because they have built a relationship with a company.
They have a level of trust.
They've tested the talents and expertise in small ways so that you can ramp up and do even more complicated, scary things together, so we're thinking about design and construction in that way.
Same thing goes for any of your marketing partners out there, videographer, photographer, web developer, proposal support, whatever that looks like.
You can put an RFP out, but there is no replacement for having a relationship.
If your website rebuild is far enough out, like it's not an emergency moment, then you have time to get to know their team, maybe visit their offices, talk to some of their references, or find those connections that within the industry, you know people so you can say, hey, how was that to work with them?
And just get to know them better.
To me, I think that's my golden rule for finding a fantastic partner you can work with for the long run.
I couldn't agree more with that.
I mean, when you're talking about rebuilding a website, the partner that you use, it's gonna be a pretty large communication and logistical effort.
There's a lot of back and forth, there's content migration, there's design discussion, there's aesthetic preferences, there's reworking or rewriting content.
You just wanna find that cultural alignment where this is a team that I enjoy speaking with, we see things creatively the same way, or maybe I view them as very innovative and visionary and I really value their perspective.
You wanna have a good relationship and be able to communicate openly and honestly with whoever you decide to go with.
I would recommend the hierarchy of relationship, reputation, past experience, and then please consider folks in this space who have some AEC experience because they will be able to make recommendations and these subtle details and they won't lead you off track because of their knowledge of that market.
So it is worth it.
And there are great partners and agencies now who are focused on AEC, so you don't necessarily have to educate your agency.
Yeah, exactly.
You don't have to lay all that groundwork.
You're already speaking the same language right from the jump.
Okay, that was a good conversation about whether to refresh or rebuild.
I hope that gives everyone a few things to think about.
Kyle, any lessons learned that you want to share before we wrap up today?
Yeah, one thing that I like about either of these options, you can't go wrong, is that either one gives you the opportunity to really take a hard look at your story or your narrative, how you're presenting, what your company is about, what you value, whether you're refreshing or rebuilding.
I would always recommend that folks take a hard look at that and make sure that it is reflecting your authentic mission vision values, things like that.
So, you know what's best for your business and for your brand.
And I would say, don't overextend yourself.
Don't commit to a rebuild if you think a refresh is all you need.
Those options are always on the table.
And if you bite off more than you can chew, what you're going to end up doing is sending a bunch of emails back and forth, trying to chase down information.
It's going to become a slow stilted process.
You might lose momentum.
It might be less satisfactory.
Yeah, knowing when is the right time to keep it in house and really focused.
And then when is the right time to engage with an outside firm for perspective or ideas, or even just to start that relationship building.
I mean, I guess I can speak from the way we handle this type of thing is like we're building a relationship.
We want to use your resources in the best way possible.
What can we do with what we have?
And so find a relationship like that where you've got a partner that can help you make those strategic decisions.
Absolutely.
Well, Kyle, thank you so much for the good download.
That was fantastic.
I can't wait to talk to you more about websites.
We'll dig more into the nitty gritty of our own website and other digital marketing strategies in future episodes.
But for today, I think that's it.
Thanks so much.
Absolutely.
Thank you for having me.
The Shortlist is presented by Middle of Six and hosted by me, Wendy Simmons, principal marketing strategist.
Kyle Davis is our producer with Graphic Design and Digital Marketing by Alison Rose.
If you have a question or topic you'd like us to discuss, send an email or voice memo to theshortlistatmiddleofsix.com.
If you missed anything or want more info, check out our podcast page at middleofsix.com/theshortlist.
And follow us on LinkedIn and Instagram at Middle of Six.
Thanks so much for listening.
We hope you'll tell your friends and colleagues about the show and be sure to subscribe so you don't miss any of our upcoming episodes.
Until next time, keep on hustling.
Bye.
Later.
The Shortlist is a podcast that explores all things AEC marketing. Hosted by Middle of Six Principal, Wendy Simmons, each episode features members of the MOS team, where we take a deep dive on a wide range of topics related to AEC marketing including: proposal development, strategy, team building, business development, branding, digital marketing, and more. You can listen to our full archive of episodes here.