Is "step 1" really "blow up the website"?

There’s a common trope that when joining a firm as CMO, you shouldn’t make your first order of business blowing up the website. People say that when you first get there, you don’t have enough info to decide if the website should be touched immediately, and taking that project on “right away” can feel rushed to the team, especially if they have pride of ownership of the existing one.

I am as sensitive to “nobody wants to hear their baby is ugly” issues as the next marketing guy. However, I have a different point of view: if the CMO immediately sees that the website is broken and not telling the story the right way, they don’t just have an opportunity to fix it; they have a responsibility to do so. Besides, anyone who’s worked through these projects knows that fixing a website “right away” is still a 6-month process!

On Friday, March 1, we hit “deploy” on the new Hazeltree.com, a project that started shortly after I joined the firm in August! I had lived through .com redesigns at other companies, so I knew some of the pitfalls, but it was still a nailbiter… all the usual questions from multiple stakeholders, all the “now that we’ve changed THIS, there’s an impact to THAT” scope creep, all the “wait, why are we using THAT color” brand questions… But it’s live, and we couldn’t be prouder of the result. I’ll lay out some of the project as a case study below because it may help other practitioners (and because it’s therapeutic ??)

The goal of our project was 2-fold:

1. Create a modern, engaging, and clear communication of what we do and who we do it for, and
2. Fix/enhance many technical/operational issues with the site, to make it effective for lead generation, tracking, and measurement.

The first point coincided with a long-overdue product rationalization. The old site had grown up in an era of little-to-no product management involvement in the product marketing. Hence many “features” were added to the website as “products”, complete with “tm” symbol. Whether the features were good or bad was irrelevant… looking at the old website, a visitor would have seen over a dozen individual products matrixed into 8 separate markets. On my list of cardinal sins for marketing and sales is not being able to answer “what do you sell?”, and this level of complexity served to obfuscate our value, not explain it.

Now, our website has a clear message of what we do for our 4 distinct types of clients, and separately describes how our (now) 6 well-thought-out products deliver value (not to mention a new naming system to solve “that functionality you described, what’s that called”?)

The second goal involved the challenge many marketers continue to face: tracking, measurement, and ROI. Assume you redo your website: new tech, new copy, new information architecture… how do you know if it worked? Did you achieve your awareness and lead-gen goals? Can you track outcomes at all? The new Hazeltree.com will make getting those answers much less painful for me (and really for the team that has to deal with me continuously asking for metrics and dashboards ?? – sorry, Matthew Jago ).

We also got to move to a different CMS and new hosting provider, transforming the way we’re able to curate the site, which was CRITICAL. The old site was built on WordPress templates that had been so twisted and customized over the years, that they were stretched far beyond their initial design and scope. So we were down to ONE person who knew how to manipulate them without breaking something else (thank you, Chrissy Doremus ); as a “hands-on” CMO, I was -- more than a few times -- guilty of making a seemingly innocuous edit on some product page that mysteriously broke all the other copy on that (and other) pages!

We started in a model where if I wanted to change “their” to “they’re” on a page, it would be a multi-day deployment involving the designer who touched WordPress, “requests” from the marketing team to IT, an IT team that would deploy it in addition to their day jobs of maintaining the other systems… far from the agile fintech process we wanted to have. Our new headless CMS lets the team rapidly create, reuse, and adjust content – something many of you might take for granted but something we needed to explicitly build. Marketing can move faster, and IT is thrilled to have us out of their hair for such mundane tasks.

The site is live now (we gave it the weekend as a soft launch but announced it today). We’ll be keeping an eye on old vs. new organic/SEO metrics, lead conversion metrics, and all the rest. Of course we’ll analyze, adjust, and extend this work as much as we need to, but for now it’s a big sigh of relief getting this project done, and a public thank you to everyone involved: Matthew Jago , Milkshake Studio , Sanity , and the entire Hazeltree team!

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