Stop calling it a refresh

A refresh, in this industry, usually means new colors, new fonts, new stock photography, same words.

Then everybody is surprised when nothing changes.

The words are the site. The design is how comfortable the words are to read and how much you trust the person who wrote them. Both matter. Neither substitutes for the other. If the homepage said "quality service you can trust" before and says it now in a better font, you have improved the typography of a sentence that was never doing any work.

Here is the test I run before quoting anything described as a refresh. I take the homepage copy, paste it into a plain document, strip the styling, and read it. Then I ask: if I handed this text to a stranger, could they tell me what this business does, where, and why they would call rather than the next result?

Most of the time, no. There are four paragraphs and none of them contain a fact.

That is not a design project. Redesigning it produces a handsome page that communicates nothing, which is worse than an ugly page that communicates something, because now it has also cost money.

So the order is: fix what it says, then fix how it looks. In that order, always, because the second one is much easier once the first is done. You cannot lay out a page well when you do not know what it is trying to say. Half of what looks like a design problem is an unresolved argument about the message, showing up as a layout that will not settle.

When somebody says refresh, the honest response is a question. What is the site failing to do? If the answer is "it looks old," fine, that is legitimate and we can do that. If the answer is "it does not get us calls," a refresh is not the work, and taking their money for one is close to malpractice.