Positioning vs a website redesign

How to tell which you need

Read the first screen as a stranger. Try to name the product, the customer and what a buyer would use instead. If those three are hard to name, the gap is positioning. A redesign is the right job when a stranger can already name them and the site is hard to use, slow, or too small for the story you have. Treat that split as a judgment from the page in front of you. The homepage messaging audit is a short way to check the first screen.

What goes wrong when you redesign first

A redesign spends the budget on layout, type and pages. When the story is still open, the new site publishes that story in a new layout. The risk is a second round of design. Once the team agrees on the market, the customer and the reason to buy, the layout may no longer fit, and the visual work gets done again. A second risk is that sales still opens calls by explaining the company. Acme Shift is fictional staff scheduling software for clinic office managers. It is not a client. In that example, a new layout that still speaks to everyone leaves prospects asking if the product is a calendar.

Order of operations

Write the positioning first. Name the alternatives, the best-fit customer, the value and the category. Then write the homepage from those choices. Then design the site around that copy. A positioning sprint does the decision and the homepage copy in two weeks, and it includes a wireframe your designer can build from. Your designer handles the visual design.