February 2019 Shortcuts website redesign

The brief

It sounds simple enough: rebuild a website from scratch, smooth over the SEO issues, fix all the known flaws, and create a brilliant user experience that will help generate leads and sales for years to come.

The approach

I had worked on websites before, and had even built a few, but nothing ever came close to the complexity of this particular project. I was faced with three distinct target markets worldwide, a global team with differing demands, and a 600-page mess of a website to somehow evolve into something compelling and user-friendly.

Throw into the mix integrations with our CRM and email marketing systems, the challenge of ensuring the agency we were working with understood and would meet the brief, not to mention the constantly-confounding Google algorithm, and it’s safe to say that with this project I bit off a just a little bit more more than I could easily chew.

Thankfully, there were also bucketloads of feel-good fuzzies on offer. The initial proposal from our web agency was enough to send us wild over the potential and possibilities, the design reveal made our white-space loving hearts sing, and when the time came to be handed the keys, there may have been a happy-dance or two in at the Shortcuts office.

The rush of pure adrenaline when we finally went live a risky – but exhilarating – three days before the Christmas break was very real. Professionally, it doesn’t get much better than that.

The results

Let’s face it, this project was never going to be a walk in the park, but it was always going to be 100% worth it.

I was incredibly gratified to see almost-instant results including:

• 260% increase in goal completions*
• 43% increase in average session duration*
• 18% decrease in bounce rate*
• 28% increase in the number of pages per session*
• 77 leads in the first 9 days of January**

*Compared with the same period last year.

**Compared with 88 leads for entire month of January the previous year.