Last week, I wrote about what to consider when redesigning a website. Today, we’ll put that post into action by using it as a guide to redesign PitchBook’s corporate website. For those that are not familiar, PitchBook is an online research tool that helps private equity and venture capital professionals make better business and investment decisions. Their product is valuable but their website can use some work to better communicate with their audience and customers.

So, let’s jump right in and discuss our first point of identifying why it’s necessary for a redesign (if at all):

Considering the Why & Purpose

Before doing anything, I made sure there was a clear purpose to redesign PitchBook’s website. Exploring these reasons helped to see if their current website is doing it’s job or not.

In order to get to the bottom of this, I posed questions to myself and answered them like I was PitchBook. These answers were derived from the knowledge and research I did online about the company. Here are a couple questions:

• What goals do we want PitchBook customers and prospects to achieve?

  • Learn about the benefits of the PitchBook platform and how it can solve their pain

  • Come for the resources that we provide on private equity and venture capital industry

  • Sign up for the newsletter containing industry related resources

• What job does my website do?

  • Provides a knowledge base for private equity and venture capital professionals

  • Communicate that PitchBook understands their audience’s pain and shows the benefit of PitchBook’s product offering

  • Generate leads by requesting a demo and enter their information.

  • Discovering and downloading PitchBook reports

Defining the Audience

This was pretty self explanatory. From recent interviews and the company’s website, I gathered information about PitchBook’s audience. PitchBook serves private equity and venture capital professionals. Also, they provide resources and a knowledge database of reports for their industry.

Knowing the audience allowed me to critically think about the website’s copy. At this point, since I had an idea of who their audience was I reviewed their current copy.

Below you can see some initial edits and ideas I made about their copy:

After understanding their audience, I had the knowledge to read the copy as if I were in their target audience’s shoes. Overall, they had useful information about their product but lacked messaging that spoke to their audience.

One example to illustrate my point is to look at  the most prominent headline, “The New PitchBook Platform”. This copy does nothing to resonate with their prospects and customers. Yes, I understand they’re trying to communicate that they’ve released a newly designed platform but why should their audience care? How does it solve their pain? This type of update can really do it’s job in a blog post describing the benefits and reasons why they’ve arrived at those decisions.

Identifying Goals to Achieve

Without looking at any of PitchBook’s internal site data or speaking to them about what their goals were, I came up with a few goals to achieve after a successful redesign.

• The copy should speak to Private Equity and Venture Capital Professionals / Industry better

• Prospects can submit contact information for demo of product

• Prospects and customers can become a subscriber to PitchBook’s newsletter

Putting It All Together

Let’s take the above information and use it to start writing new copy for the website.  Here’s a link to the doc where I brainstorm a draft of PitchBook’s new copy. (These are preliminary ideas that gives you a sense of the approach I used).

I used a three part formula to write and structure their new copy:

1. Stating their audience’s pains

2. Presenting their audience with what the world would look like if they didn’t have their pain

3. Showing how PitchBook’s platform can solve their audience’s pain

Then, I used the newly written copy to guide the mockup of the landing page. I’ve included the new mockup below. Keep in mind that this mockup serves as an idea and to demonstrate my process.

In Summary

This is the process I take when redesigning a website like PitchBook. The next steps after launching a redesign would be to loop back to our goals to see if we’ve achieved them. This is critical because it places emphasis on getting to a result rather than just designing and launching without any consideration about the affects on your business.

Let me know your thoughts about this redesign in the comments below.