Our Website Redesign: Better Really Is the Enemy of Good

Something that’s often said in this business is, “the hardest client to work with is the one who doesn’t know what they want.” Well, in the process of working on our own website redesign, Zach and I have learned that the hardest client to work with is the one who knows exactly what they want.

I’ll let you in on a little secret. We’ve been working on redesigning our own website for about two years. It was in the summer of 2024 that I sent Zach a photo of a truck with a paint job I though looked good and thought would be an inspiration for the redesign of our website. We haven’t been working on it the entire time. We’d work on it for a little bit and put it down for a couple of months and go back to it for a day or two. But it’s taken us almost two years since we said, “it’s time for a redesign” to get to the point where we were ready to launch then new version of our website. We knew one thing though: we wanted a website that look great on the surface and performed as great as it looked, under the hood.

When we started thinking about redesigning the website, we were already starting to look at the tools we were using and how we were building sites, and how our clients were using their websites for their businesses, and how their site visitors finding and using websites. WordPress Gutenberg and or block-based themes had been released a few years prior, but aside from a few blog posts, we weren’t using them. Two years ago, AI still was in the early adopter stage and far from mainstream.

Today, things have changed. Block themes have matured and as a result the reductions in in build time and the improvements in website performance have been significant. Even more significant is the use of AI becoming more prevalent. It’s changed expectations about what people can do when it comes to building websites, but even more important AI has changed the way the people interact with websites, and if they even interact with them at all.

At the time when we started talking about our website rebuild, we already built websites with SEO principles in mind. With today’s widespread use and adoption of AI by consumers, it’s become even more important. More and more, website traffic generated by lists of links in search is being replaced by AI overviews and direct recommendations. One our considerations for this website update was the need to prepare and optimize for AI search, taking consideration AEO (answer engine optimization) and GEO (generative engine optimization).

What WordPress Theme is the Best?

There’s no easy answer to that question. It’s like asking what flavor of ice cream is the best. We think that best theme is the one that fits the project and the workflow. The latest version of our website is built on the Kadence theme by Liquid Web. Over the years, we’ve used many different WordPress themes and page builders as a foundation for our clients sites, including DIY Themes Thesis, iThemes Builder, Elegant Themes Divi, and Beaver Builder. The last time we redesigned our site we used Elementor. The list of themes may seem like a lot, but each of these themes and page builders reflected an improvement in the technology and flexibility available as we built sites to meet the needs of our clients. Turning to the Kadence Theme is the continuation of that evolution.

Kadence from Liquid Web is a WordPress theme that takes advantage of the existing Gutenberg block framework and pairs it with its own blocks which add increased precision and functionality. While it offers great flexibility from a design perspective, it is light-weight and loads quickly, providing benefits for user experience and SEO.

As with our last website, we used PODS to build the custom post types for the portfolio and enhancing the layout of the blog. We use custom post types to augment the basic WordPress functionality and to make projects easier for clients to maintain on their own. We could have used the basic blog functionality, but of course there’s that “better is the enemy of the good” thing that I mentioned. Similarly, we customize the look of the back end of our website. It’s something that only Zach and I will see, but it’s a bit of added detail that makes this project and website our own.

Building a Website for AI Search

AI Search is “new” but the principles necessary to create a search-friendly website remain the same. Simply, search engine optimization is what it says on the tin: optimizing website content so that when people are searching, the content is presented in the results because it was exactly what they are looking for. This means creating content that answers questions that visitors are asking, presents product and service offerings clearly, and demonstrates the ability to fulfill on the “promises” that your website makes. To attract customers and clients, your website needs to project credibility.

As the most frequently used search engine, Google relies on a framework known as E‑E‑A‑T — Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness as part of how it promotes websites in its search results. It’s intent is to provide searchers with information that is accurate, safe, credible, and helpful.

We’ve always been focused on providing good, reliable information in person and online. Google’s take on this makes sense. If you have been doing the work, you should be able to create good content for your website that demonstrates your unique knowledge and experience. As we worked on this version of our website we focused on specifically highlighing this. Our normal posture is to think about our clients, in this instance it forced us to talk more about ourselves. As you look through our new site, you’ll see some of these signals.

But even while some things have changed, some things remain the same. The need to focus on clean, semantic web design remains. Creating high quality content that is industry relevant and relevant to users is still important today, if not more important when it comes to demonstrating the E-E-A-T characteristics that search providers are looking for when promoting websites.

I don’t see things slowing down anytime soon. Based on the way things are likely to continue moving, Zach and I will probably take a week or two before we start planning our next redesign.