There is a particular kind of meeting where a redesign gets decided. Someone has been shown a competitor’s site. Someone else has a number that is not moving. Nobody in the room owns the actual cause, and the website is the one asset that can be changed without anyone’s job being on the line.
What is really being decided
A redesign is the most expensive way a company has ever found to avoid a difficult conversation. The pricing is wrong, or the product is undifferentiated, or the sales team does not follow up for four days. None of those get fixed by a new grid.
We are not above this. We have built sites that looked considerably better and did nothing at all, and taken the money, and felt fine about it at the time.
The test
Before agreeing to a redesign, we ask for one sentence: what will be true in six months that is not true now?
If the answer is about the site (cleaner, more modern, on-brand), it is not a business case, it is a preference, and preferences are allowed but they should be priced as such.
If the answer is about a number, we go and look at whether the site is the thing standing between you and it. Sometimes it is. More often the site is fourth in a queue behind three cheaper problems.
Saying it out loud
The studio version of integrity is telling a client the thing they have already half-decided is wrong, before they have signed. It costs revenue in the quarter and buys the only kind of reputation that compounds.
A redesign is the most expensive way a company has ever found to avoid a difficult conversation.