It’s time to refresh our website. We need a new look, a new focus and some serious updates to our content.  How will we do it?

One page at a time...

We are handling the entire project in-house. What does that mean?  It means working within the HubSpot Content Optimization System to create a site that speaks directly to our buyer personas, at each stage in their individual buyer journeys. 

We’ve been Inbound Marketing for over 3 years now, as a HubSpot Partner Agency.  We’ve learned through trial and error, so we know what works.  However, as is often the case, we have neglected our own marketing, while working tirelessly to deliver top quality marketing strategy and execution to our clients. 

This ends now. 

We decided to adapt our original copy and create new imagery, rather than starting over completely, from scratch.  We will be using an existing template, purchased from another HubSpot partner agency.  This is convenient for several reasons, the biggest of which is that it takes the leg-work out of the programming process. I have a tendency to be semi-dangerous, when it comes to coding. 

Let me give you an example of a fairly common conversation in our office:

Me: “I broke it…” 

Boss: “Broke what?”

Me: “The site.  I made one little edit to the CSS and the entire homepage isn’t acting right”                                                                                                                                                                                 

Ever been here?  I have, several times.  I’m not a coder.  Therefore, when building a site into a purchased template, I learned a valuable lesson early on:

CLONE EVERYTHING IMMEDIATELY!

Make sure you have a sacred, master version of the original templates and coded files. Save them where you know how to find them, in a place where you never touch them (except to clone).  This way, if you are struggling to figure out where you went wrong and can’t figure out which revision to default back to, you can always re-clone the original and begin with a fresh, unaltered file or style sheet. 

By cloning the originals, you also have the opportunity to make use of these templates for future projects.

Now you have cloned your original files, it’s time to make the necessary CSS Updates to match your site to your brand standards.  Documenting your brand standards ahead of time will make this process much more efficient.  Elements like colors, typography, visual aesthetics, etc.

In our current redesign, this is about as far as I have made it.  I am actively entering content into the template, one page at a time, refreshing the copy, updating our offers and giving the website a completely new look and feel.

Stay tuned for additional updates…