Most Website Redesigns Start in the Wrong Place (Here’s Where to Start Instead)

When it’s time for a website redesign, most of us start in the same place. We browse templates, rewrite the homepage headline, or pick new brand colors. It feels productive. But it’s a bit like packing your gear before you’ve decided which trail you’re hiking.

The homepage, the copy, and the design all matter. They just aren’t step one. Before you change any of them, you need to know what your website actually needs to do.

I’m Kate, founder of Dear Kate Brand Strategy. I help service-based business owners build websites that book clients, and the redesigns that work best almost always start with strategy. In this post, I’ll walk you through the order I’d use to rebuild a small business website, using a real example: Angela Serafin, who’s shifting her business from counseling toward creative coaching and workshops.

Prefer to Watch Instead of Read?

In the video, I walk through Angela’s site and show how I’d coach her through the rebuild:

Why the Homepage Is the Wrong Place to Start a Website Redesign

Your homepage is a summary of everything else on your site. And it’s hard to summarize decisions you haven’t made yet.

Angela’s homepage has some lovely lines about guided creative experiences and taking time to breathe. Her strongest sentence, about discovering new things about yourself and finding clarity through creativity, is in there too. But a first-time visitor has to work to piece together the big idea behind all her different workshops and sessions.

That’s not a copywriting problem. It’s a strategy problem. A website redesign that starts with a new headline won’t fix it until the bigger questions are answered.

Step 1: Name the Big Idea

Before you touch a single page, write down the one idea your whole website needs to communicate.

For Angela, after reading her site and what she shared about her business, it’s this: she helps people use creativity to quiet the mental noise, understand themselves differently, and find new possibilities when they’re feeling stuck.

That one sentence becomes the backbone of every page.

If you’re not sure what yours is, two places to look:

• Your own site. Your strongest line is often already there, just buried halfway down a page.
• Your clients’ results. Ask what actually changes for people after they work with you. The answer usually points straight at your big idea.

Step 2: Organize Your Offers Around How Clients Decide

Angela has a page called “How Do I Choose?” Just the fact that it exists tells me something. Her visitors are being asked to understand her business well enough to pick between neurographic drawing, painting experiences, and relational coaching before they even know if she can help them.

But that’s not how people show up. Nobody lands on a website thinking, “Which creative modality do I need?” They’re thinking:

• “I feel stuck.”
• “I’ve thought about this thing to death.”
• “I don’t feel like myself, and I need a different way to work through it.”

So instead of a separate page for each offer and a “how to choose” page that people might skip, I’d combine everything into one Work With Me page.

Here’s a quick rule for deciding which setup fits your business:

• One Work With Me page works when your offers serve the same kind of person and lead to the same shared outcome. That’s Angela.
• Separate service pages make more sense when each offer serves a different kind of person or leads to a different result.

Step 3: Build That Page as a Path

A good Work With Me page meets people where they are, then answers their questions in the order they’ll have them. Here’s how I’d lay out Angela’s:

1. A header built on the shared outcome. Something like: “When thinking harder isn’t helping, try creating instead.”
2. A before-and-after. Where visitors are now, and what becomes possible. Angela already has a section on what changes through her experiences that works well here. Honestly, I’d move it much higher up.
3. What makes this different. Why creative work reaches places that talking alone doesn’t.
4. The offers. Each one leads with who it’s for, then the details.
5. How it works. A simple one-two-three of what to expect.
6. About Angela. This is a big opportunity. She spent about 20 years helping people through conversation as a therapist. That gives her new approach real credibility, and it lets her speak to people who’ve tried talk therapy before: this is different, and here’s why, from someone who’s seen both sides.
7. Testimonials throughout. Short pull quotes are easy to skim. For longer stories, use bold and italics to break them up.
8. FAQs, trimmed to the essentials.
9. One clear final call to action. Right now, the bottom of Angela’s page offers a waitlist, a class purchase, and upcoming events. That’s a lot to decide at the end of a long page. Pick one main goal and guide people there.

Step 4: Simplify Your Navigation

We tend to forget this when we build our own sites: not everyone starts on the homepage.

Someone might Google a question and land on a blog post. A friend might text them a link to one specific workshop. Any page on your site could be the first place someone meets your business, which means every page needs to help them get their bearings.

That’s what your navigation is for. It’s not a list of every page you own. It’s a trail map that helps visitors quickly figure out what you do, whether there’s something here for them, and where to go next.

Angela’s menu currently lists each modality and takes up a lot of space. I’d simplify it dramatically:

• Work With Angela: the new combined offer page
• About: her philosophy and experience
• For Professionals: content for other therapists, kept separate from content for her clients
• Blog: helpful content that reaches people where they’re searching
• Contact: on the far right, where people expect it

Home doesn’t need its own menu item. Your logo already does that job.

Step 5: Now Rebuild the Homepage and Design

Once your big idea is clear, your offers are organized, and your navigation makes sense, the homepage becomes the easiest part of the website redesign. It’s just a summary of decisions you’ve already made. Here’s the homepage framework I use once you get to that point.

The same goes for design. Fonts, colors, and layout come after the message is clear, and their job is to support that message and guide people through the site.

Before Your Website Redesign, Answer These First

If you’re planning a redesign, work through these questions before you open a template or rewrite a word:

1. What’s the one big idea my website needs to communicate?
2. What does my client need to understand before they’re ready to choose an offer?
3. Do my offers share one outcome, or serve different people with different results?
4. How do people find my site in the first place?
5. Wherever someone lands, how do I help them get where they need to go?

Then make your decisions about pages and navigation, then copy, then design. (Still deciding whether to tackle your redesign yourself? Here’s my honest take on DIYing your website vs. hiring a designer.)

Because your website isn’t a collection of individual pages. It’s a system for helping the right people find you, understand why you’re the right fit, and know exactly where to go next.

Want Help Rebuilding Your Website the Right Way?

This is exactly how we start inside Brand Base Camp, my done-with-you website program. If Angela joined, I wouldn’t hand her a homepage template and say “fill this in,” or start by debating font sizes. We’d figure out her big idea and how her clients make decisions first, then build pages, copy, and design on top of that, together.

Explore Brand Base Camp

Not ready to dive in yet? Start with a plan.

The DIY Website Planner is a free, workbook-style guide that walks you through three phases:

• Strategy: plan your offers, brand voice, and content so your right-fit clients know they’re in the right place
• Design: build your site so every section has a job, and it still looks great
• Launch & SEO: set up your SEO so Google can send ready-to-book clients your way

It’s the roadmap I wish I’d had when I built my first site.

Get Your Free Planner