A new coat of paint is not a brief

The request arrives as taste. The site feels dated. The type is wrong. A competitor launched something smoother. None of those is a job. Nielsen Norman’s research on how people read, going back to the 1997 study and repeated since, is that users scan and take in a small fraction of the words, often cited around 20 to 28 percent. If the first screen does not say what you sell and what to do next, a new typeface will not fix the bounce. It will make the same confusion more expensive.

Ask what the redesign is supposed to change that a person can count. Enquiries. Time to publish a page. A checkout a keyboard can finish. A URL that still resolves after the move. If the answer is ‘it should feel more premium’, you do not have a scope. You have a mood. Moods expand. Scopes ship.

Sometimes the right job is smaller than a redesign. The offer is unclear, so rewrite the first screen and leave the template. The theme is indexing spam, so replace the theme. The paths changed, so ship redirects before you ship the new look. Google’s site-move guide treats a path change as a move even when the domain stays. A redesign that renames URLs and hopes is how equity gets dropped. That failure has its own guide on this site.

Sometimes a redesign is the right job, and it is still not a visual one. The content model cannot express the service. The component that every page copies has forked. The person who edits the site cannot edit the site. Those are rebuilds of the system, and they should be sold that way, with a list of what will be deleted.

We will talk you out of a redesign when a paragraph and a redirect would do. The prototype screenshots are there so you can see the difference before you pay for the wrong one.