The firm is large and well known. The UK had grown organically for years on the same Drupal platform. The home page scored 26 out of 100 on PageSpeed. Most of the content was indexed but unread. The agency relationship had drifted into reporting cycles that flattered the numbers without telling anyone whether the site was working.
The leadership team agreed they needed a new website. Nobody had been given the time to write the brief that would let an agency build one properly.
That was the engagement.
Six months. Eight workstreams. One document at the end.
Audit and define scope. Three weeks of quantitative, qualitative and technical audit across the UK and US sites. The deliverable was a working document the marketing lead could take into a partner meeting. The conversation that followed replaced three vague objectives (brand awareness, inbound enquiries, SEO rankings) with four measurable ones: quality lead generation, engagement, automation and brand awareness with KPIs that came from the firm’s own brand tracker.
Competitor and best practice. Thirteen competitor sites benchmarked on page count, domain authority, SPAM score, Core Web Vitals and readability across the Flesch reading ease scale. The firm sat at the hard end of the readability field, with 71% of pages classed as hard or very hard to read, and tied for the lowest PageSpeed score in the set. That gave the design brief a target rather than an aesthetic.
Personas. Five, named, built from BD team input, brand tracker data and real client data rather than aspirational sketches. The high net worth landowner. The in house general counsel. The three more that filled out the picture. Each one with priorities, statements and the channels they’d use.
User journeys. Three per persona. Fifteen journeys mapped to four page types: the lawyer profile, the sector landing page, the case study and the contact form. Every other page on the site had to defend its existence against those four.
Content matrix. Every existing page audited and tagged for reuse, migration or retirement. Most of the 17,000 indexed pages were old articles, news items or event listings that wouldn’t survive the cut.
Site structure. A new map built around the four priority page types. Two clear user paths above the fold on the home page. Services for businesses on one side, services for individuals on the other. Insights and thought leadership moved to the lawyer bios.
CMS evaluation. Four platforms (WordPress, Statamic, Umbraco and Drupal) scored against the firm’s real requirements. The recommendation wasn’t a particular CMS. The recommendation was that the choice belonged with the agency picking it, not ahead of them.
The RFP. Sixteen pages, forty one questions, hard word limits, an appendix carrying every piece of discovery work. The document that went to a shortlist on 17 April. Responses landed on 13 May. Presentations happened 19 June. The agency was appointed 30 June.
What it cost. What it saved.
Consulting days at a fixed fee. A build project that would otherwise have been priced blind, scoped late and changed three times after kick off.
The downstream build budget will land somewhere between £200k and £600k depending on the agency. The discovery cost less than a week of a senior consultant’s time at most agencies. The work paid for itself before the new agency raised an invoice.
The full case study runs through the audit findings, the personas, the user journeys and the RFP in detail. If you’re a marketing lead at a firm being asked to commission a new website, it’s the version of this story with the working papers attached.
If you’d like a confidential conversation about a similar engagement at your firm, get in touch.