A business website redesign you’ll be proud of (and your next employee will admire as much as your next client)

When your team feels proud of your digital presence, everything changes

There’s an undeniable, resonating drumbeat I’m hearing from marketing managers: “We want to recruit the best people for the firm, but they decline interviews because our branding and website gives the wrong impression.”

It’s an audience you never considered. It’s also the future of your business.

The nature of my job means meeting a lot of people to discuss new work, receiving briefs full of problems with current setups, functionality issues or outdated logos. Our design ethos has always been ‘put the user first,’ so we always ask who the target audience is. Til recently, this has always, always been new business-led.

But that’s changing. Today your website needs to work as hard for talent as it does for clients.

When talent judges your business by your website

Let’s say you’re a growing law firm who’ve sourced a brilliant associate you want to poach. Perhaps you’re at a VC or family office who need a sharp analyst, but they’ve got a few offers and are trying to decide which firm to go with. Maybe you run a tech firm badly in need of a talented developer. All these candidates are doing their research and comparing your digital presence against the other jobs on the table. Turns out, it’s central to their decision-making process.

Things go your way: they agree to the interview. There is always that awkward moment where your website comes up at the sit-down. They’d look unprepared if they didn’t mention it. After all, they want to understand what kind of business they might be joining.

For marketing directors thinking long-term about brand whilst everyone else focuses on immediate delivery, this moment is particularly painful. But… imagine if the opposite were true. What if you actively encouraged people to explore your website because you were genuinely proud of what they’d find?

The L&O transformation

Our longstanding client Mark Cannell from international real estate consultancy L&O experienced exactly this shift: “I am proud of every page. It is simple, striking and professional and so easy to navigate.”

When L&O first approached us in 2019, their website worked: prospects could find information, understand their services, but they had major aspirations to evolve. L&O operates in high-value property development where clients often make multi-million-pound decisions based on confidence in L&O’s capabilities. Those were never in question, but they felt the digital backup needed to be sharper.

Initially, we sat and brainstormed with the team, understanding what their business represented and how that could be translated better, digitally. Every project they embark on is completely bespoke, so our work, from the branding to the custom photography and video we commissioned for them, was too. The aim was to make a site that wasn’t just functional but genuinely exciting to show clients and new prospects.

The result? The team tells us of their pride in the refreshed brand and website, and that they actively encourage leads and prospects to explore L&O’s site. I believe that shift from indifferent to confident has the power to change every business development conversation.

How pride in your brand transforms performance

What invariably separates firms who simply use their websites as ‘a digital bookmark’ from those who feel proud of them are the compound returns of investment in ideas and vision.

Experience suggests that pride in the way your brand looks translates into confidence, and that positive feeling and attitude goes on to usefully affect every business interaction.

• Business development becomes easier
  When your website becomes stand-out and considered (rather than some sort of liability), every interaction on which it relies starts from a position of strength. You and your team have the potential to perform differently.
• Talent attraction improves
  Just last week I met with a senior partner at a law firm who’d placed three talented new partners to his practice following the rebrand we did for them. Talent gravitated toward the firm as our fresh look combined with a move to modern offices signalled growth, quality, and attention to detail. On that basis, we received a follow-up brief for further work expanding the site.
• Internal dynamics shift
  It’s fascinating to see the ways the people we deal with at our clients react to business change. For marketing directors given autonomy to source professional design work, there’s real authority provided by the blend of a strong team combining internal guidance with external expertise. In turn, managing directors and senior partners sense a real shift in attitude and confidence. They have their own satisfaction in seeing dignified modernisation without reputational risk. Then, for the business development teams we work with, usually in the rollout of a new brand to sales decks and related LinkedIn marketing materials, it means operating with confidence and a fresh story to tell in a competitive marketplace.

Why this matters now

What transforms a website redesign from professional service to personal investment? I’d suggest moving beyond the usual ‘formal brief to creative execution’ client/designer model to one of genuine strategic partnership.

Our most successful design projects empower client teams to not only manage the process, but then maintain and evolve what they’ve built. L&O is a case in point. Mark’s pride in “every page” wasn’t the conclusion of the project. Since then, we’ve had an ongoing working relationship that continued with work such as print design and ongoing website evolution.

Great partnerships between firms and their consultants indicate how well all aspects of the business are run. This insight empowers us to tailor our work and create the right brand and website for your firm. It means we’re thinking about every user, not least the talent evaluating your business before they consider joining.

Confidence in who you are as a firm and how you present yourself to the world is transformational. In today’s deeply competitive business environment that includes talent conversations. I’ve seen this time and again: businesses that invest in great design have a sustainable competitive advantage in both client acquisition and talent retention.

So why not tilt the odds in your favour?

Ready to feel proud of your digital presence?

If you’re ready to feel genuinely proud of how your business presents itself digitally rather than simply making do with ‘merely functional’, we’d welcome the conversation.

The shift from apologetic to confident isn’t just about design. It’s about business performance and it starts with pride in getting it right.

Call us on 020 7351 4083 or email us direct.

Find out more about our work

Visit the L&O website

Our portfolio page about the project

More of our work for:

• Financial services companies
• Real estate businesses
• Law firms