A redesign feels like progress. Sometimes it is. Often it is not.

The impulse to redesign usually comes from one of two places: boredom or frustration. Boredom with how the site looks. Frustration that it is not doing what you hoped. Both are understandable. But they point to different problems, and only one of them is actually a design problem.

If your website looks outdated and you are losing business to competitors who look more credible, that is a design problem. A redesign makes sense. But if your site looks fine and visitors are still not converting, the issue is almost certainly not the design — it is the strategy. The structure, the messaging, the clarity of what you are offering and who it is for.

Redesigning without fixing the strategy just produces a newer-looking version of the same problem. You end up with a site that looks better but still does not convert, and now you have spent money and time to get back to square one.

The question to ask before any redesign is: do we know why the current site is not working? If the answer is no, find out first. The answer might change everything — including whether a redesign is the right move at all.

Full article coming soon — check back shortly.