This article is written by Alicja Colon, a UX strategist at GraVoc. She leads cross-disciplinary team and UX/UI projects for clients like MIT and Nationwide. With 20+ years in design, she focuses on building digital experiences that feel effortless.
Before you redesign a website, there's one question worth answering: what job does this website actually need to do?
Many businesses will say they want the site to “look more professional” or “generate more leads.” Those are great goals but they are only starting points. What you really have to think about is who the site needs to serve, what those people need to understand when they land on the site, and what should happen when they show up.
Our UX strategist, Alicja Colon, puts it this way: imagine hiring someone, giving them no job description, and then six months later being disappointed that they aren’t generating leads, supporting sales, or helping customers. “But they look professional. Everyone else has one. We thought they’d figure it out.”
Sounds ridiculous. And yet businesses do something surprisingly similar with their websites all the time. They know they need one, and they usually know when the current one isn’t working. So they redesign it and hope the new version performs better.
After 20+ years of running web strategy projects, Alicja has landed on 3 key questions she asks before redesigning a website. Here they are, in her own words.
Who does the website need to serve & what do they need to understand?
I recently worked with a client who knew their website wasn’t representing the business well. They wanted something more polished, more credible, and more reflective of who they actually were. All very reasonable goals, but once we started digging into how their business worked, it became clear that the website needed to do much more than simply look established.
Their initial sales conversation often happened with one person, while additional decision-makers entered the process later. Those people hadn’t necessarily heard the full pitch or had the opportunity to ask questions directly. So the website had an important job to do after that first conversation was over: it needed to help continue the story, build trust, explain the process, and provide enough proof for someone else to feel confident moving forward.
At that point, we weren’t just talking about a visual redesign anymore. That business need started informing the sitemap, content architecture, hierarchy, and even what supporting materials belonged on the site in the first place.
What is each piece of content on the website supposed to accomplish?
Case studies are a good example of how quickly this thinking can change the work.
Without strategy, the conversation might be, “We should probably have some case studies.” And sure, maybe you should. But what are they actually supposed to do? Does the reader need to understand your process? See measurable outcomes—and understand why those outcomes matter? Recognize that you’ve handled a similar challenge before? Are photos really necessary?
Those answers affect everything about the case study: how long it should be, what information deserves emphasis, what kind of proof matters, and even whether it makes sense to spend money on things like custom photography.
Otherwise, you’re just creating content because websites are supposed to have content. Strategy gives that content a reason to exist.
The same thinking applies to almost every other decision on a website. Pages, calls to action, navigation, messaging, photography, they become much easier to evaluate once you know what job the site is supposed to do. And that’s really the point.
How will you know if the redesign worked?
If you can't say what success looks like before you build, you won't know whether the new site is working or just newer.
Success should follow from the job. For instance, if the site's job is to help people self-serve, fewer phone calls is a win, not a drop in engagement.
Same goes for content. If a case study exists to show proof of work and expertise to a skeptical second decision-maker, the question isn't how many people read it; it’s whether it worked on the people who did.
"It looks better" isn't something you can act on six months from now. It's also not much of an answer when leadership asks what the investment bought. One client summed it up well once they understood what web strategy was for — without doing that work first, they said, we'd essentially just be "putting lipstick on a pig." Their words, not mine. But I'm keeping that one.
Defining the job is the first step. Turning it into an actual website is what happens during web strategy.
