Website consultant for owners and leadership teams

Do we actually need a new website, and what should it cost?

A website consultant helps you decide what the site needs before you spend money building it: whether to fix what you have, restructure it or rebuild it, what that should involve, and who should do the work. On a full project, the consultant then holds the build to that plan through launch.

You need a new website when the problems run deeper than a few pages can fix: the structure fights how buyers look for what you sell, the platform can’t support how the business works now, or the site describes a company you no longer are. Plenty of sites need less than that. A clearer headline, better proof on the key pages or a reworked navigation can do more than a rebuild, for a fraction of the cost.

On cost, a B2B site can be done reasonably well for a few thousand dollars, especially with today’s tools. A site with lots of stakeholders, lots of content, integrations, a migration and real strategy behind it costs a great deal more. Before you sign anything, ask each bidder what drives their price and what the extra money buys. Then decide whether your company actually needs it. Sometimes the more affordable option is the right call.

What a website consultant actually does

Not every call comes before a redesign. Sometimes a site has launched and underperformed, or a project has stalled halfway. The work starts in the same place either way: what the site has to do for the business, and where it’s falling short.

What I look at:

• How buyers use the site. Analytics, the pages people land on and leave from, and the tasks a buyer is trying to get done.
• What sales hears. The questions prospects ask on calls that the site should have answered, and the pages sales does or doesn’t send.
• The technical side. Speed, mobile, forms, the platform and what it can and can’t support.
• How the site gets updated. Who edits it, how long a change takes, and whether the setup or the training is the bottleneck.
• What’s ranking. The pages and search terms that already earn traffic, so a redesign doesn’t throw them away.

What you get, depending on the engagement: a recommendation on fix, restructure or rebuild; a scope and brief a build partner can price against; a side-by-side read of the proposals you’ve received; and, on a full project, the launch requirements, including the migration plan.

My question for every site is the same: if I owned this business and had to spend my real money on the site, what would I spend it on, and why?

Fix, restructure or rebuild

Owners use “redesign” for three different jobs, and the price gap between them is large.

• Fix. Rewrite the headline, tighten the messaging, add proof to the key pages, repair forms and slow pages. The structure and the platform stay.
• Restructure. Change the navigation, how products or services are grouped, how pages link to each other and which templates exist. This can often happen inside the platform and design system you already have.
• Rebuild. New platform, new design system, new build. This makes sense when the platform can’t support the business, the site can’t be maintained, or the structure and the design both need to change at once.

TDI Packsys is a good example of a structural problem. The old site organized products by model number, which made sense internally and very little sense to a buyer with a problem to solve. Reorganizing around problems and applications touched more than 100 product pages, and in that case it went with a full rebuild.

Some signals worth taking seriously:

• The business has changed and the site hasn’t. New services, a new market, a different size of customer. An outdated site can give buyers the wrong picture of what you offer today.
• Sales avoids sending people to certain pages. If those pages are confusing or out of date, ask what they’re missing.
• Small changes take a developer and a week. That can mean the wrong platform. It can also mean a poor editing setup or missing training, which is far cheaper to fix.

What’s usually not a reason on its own: you’re bored of it, a competitor redesigned, or it’s been “a few years.” I’d want to see the numbers before anyone recommends a full rebuild, me included.

Why you’re too close to judge your own website

You know your buyers, your products and your objections better than anyone. That’s also what makes your own site hard to judge. Years inside the business can make unclear language feel obvious, because you fill in what the page leaves out.

You’ve stared at your competitors’ websites for years. You’re knee-deep in industry jargon, and most of the marketing you’ve read says roughly the same thing. So it’s worth asking why you like the things you like. Is it because it lands with your target customer, or because it’s what you’ve been conditioned to expect?

Sometimes the thing that works on a complete stranger feels too simple or too direct to someone on the inside. That’s normal. You might just be too close to it. That’s proximity, and it happens to anyone who’s spent a long time in an industry.

A quick first check: the 20-second test

Picture your actual buyer. They’ve barely heard of you, they’ve got a bunch of tabs open, and they’re a couple of seconds away from leaving. At their core, they’re asking three questions. Can these people actually solve my problem? Can I trust them to solve it? And what should I do next?

There’s a simple way to see whether your site answers those questions at a glance. Find three people who could reasonably represent your target audience. Put your website in front of them for 20 seconds without saying anything, then close it. Ask them what the company does, why they should trust it and what they’d do next.

This is a check for obvious confusion, and that’s all it is. A site that fails it might need a better headline, which is an afternoon’s work. A site that passes can still have navigation that hides the right product, forms that fail, missing information a buyer needs to evaluate you, or a platform your team can’t update. Treat the answers as questions to investigate before deciding what needs changing.

A story from a rebuild

The best brief I’ve heard for a website came from the marketing lead at TDI Packsys, an industrial equipment company that says more than 90% of its sales start on the website. She told my team: “I want us to look well established because a lot of customers are meeting us for the first time. And I want it to look like, ’Why haven’t we seen these guys before? They clearly know what they’re doing.’”

That’s the first two of those questions, put better than I put them: look credible to a stranger, and prove you know the work. So the rebuild organized more than 100 product pages around problems and applications, the way a buyer actually searches, and every product and application page had a mapped keyword target and an internal linking role from the wireframe stage on. Search was built in from the start.

The site became the hub for a website and marketing partnership that has now run more than four years. Across that partnership, qualified organic traffic is up 600% since 2021, and the site has generated thousands of qualified leads. Those results belong to the whole engagement, of which the rebuild was the start.

How to compare website proposals

Getting a straight ballpark on a website is hard, and two proposals for “a new website” often describe very different projects. Price reflects real differences in scope: how many page types get designed, whether it’s built from a template or custom, who writes the content, what gets migrated, which integrations are included, how much testing happens and how the project is managed.

It also reflects decisions. Take a homepage wireframe, a document that lays out the flow of the homepage from top to bottom and roughly defines the content and messaging needed throughout. With today’s tools, someone can whip one out in no time. Or a team can work through it over many days. What fills that time is all the decisions that go into the final product. Who are you actually talking to? What proof points are needed? Which visitors are you trying to guide where?

A cheaper quote can mean fewer of those decisions get made. It can also mean a capable team working efficiently from established components. Price alone won’t tell you which.

When I compare proposals for a client, I put them side by side on the same questions:

• Who writes the copy, and who supplies the photos and proof?
• Which page types and templates are included, and how many pages get built out?
• What content gets migrated from the old site, and who does it?
• Which integrations are covered (CRM, forms, search, analytics)?
• Who handles redirects and the search side of the launch?
• Who tests it, on which devices, before it goes live?
• What’s included after launch, and who owns the site, the hosting and the logins?

Whoever you talk to, ask what levers determine their pricing. They should be able to explain the trade-offs and what the extra investment buys you.

One more thing to keep separate when you budget: the build and the advice are two different costs. If I’m involved, my fee covers my time. Design, development and other outside work are scoped and approved separately.

Building it with AI

Building things with AI has made passable essentially free. A non-expert can get a decent first draft live with relatively little effort, and for a scrappy startup or a budget-sensitive company, that might be the move.

How a site gets made and how good it is are separate questions. An AI-assisted site can carry a real buying decision, and an expensive custom one can fail to. What’s changed is the signal. Decent-looking used to be a signal that this is a real company. Now it barely registers, because it’s so easy to reach that minimum bar. Most of the work I review looks polished and gives a buyer little specific reason to choose the company. The work that still needs a person is deciding why a buyer would pick you over the two tabs open next to you, and which claims on the page will actually read as proof.

I build with AI every day myself. I redesign pages on this site by talking through them with Claude Code, in real time, with Connective’s Chief Creative Officer or just with myself.

How to redesign without losing your search rankings

Any change to a whole site carries some search risk. Google has to recrawl and reindex the pages that moved, and rankings can fluctuate while it does. The goal is to reduce that risk, then check the results after launch.

The basics: keep the URLs that already rank wherever you can. Redirect each changed URL to a relevant replacement where one exists, and let content you’ve genuinely removed return a proper “not found” response instead of pointing it somewhere unrelated. Carry over the content that’s earning traffic instead of rewriting it blind, update internal links, and map search terms into the wireframes so the new structure is built for search rather than patched afterward. After launch, watch Search Console and investigate what changes. This is also the moment to make sure the site is easy for AI assistants to read, which I cover on the AI SEO page.

On an Ownership engagement, I oversee the migration plan and the launch checks, and how long I review performance afterward is part of the scope.

What sets the timeline, and which platform to use

How long a redesign takes depends mostly on decisions and stakeholders, more than on design or code. A site with one decision-maker and clear content moves quickly. A site with a leadership team, several departments and a hundred product pages takes longer, and most of that time is spent agreeing on things. The fastest way to shorten a project is to settle the strategy before design starts. Once I know the scope and the people involved, I’ll give you a realistic timeline.

On platform, start with the requirements: who edits the site and how often, what it has to connect to, who maintains it, and who owns it. Then pick the platform that meets them. Watch for two kinds of lock-in, which are easy to confuse. One is the platform itself, and how hard it is to move off it. The other is the agency, when only they can work on what they built. You want to be able to change either one without starting over.

Where websites connect to the rest

I’m based in Houston and work with companies across the U.S. A website usually connects to the brand, since the site can’t say clearly what the brand hasn’t decided, and to SEO, since a new site is the easiest moment to get search right.

If you’re unsure whether you need a rebuild at all, start with the cheapest step: look at how buyers use the site and where inquiries stall. That’s usually where the answer is.

Based in Houston, working nationwide

Connective has built websites since 2010, and I now advise owners on the decision before anyone builds anything. If you’re local we can walk through your current site and your proposals in person. Most of my advisory clients are elsewhere, and the review works the same over video.