A decade ago, companies adapted to an explosion of devices. Today they’re confronting an explosion of platforms—and the challenge isn’t simply being found. It’s being recognized.
I had a familiar conversation with last week with a potential client. They had just revamped their website for the first time in a decade. It looked great, but with all the SEO and visual updates it still wasn’t pulling in traffic.
This is becoming a big problem for a lot of companies. Look at the footer, the design, or sometimes the source code, and a surprising number of corporate websites seem to trace back to roughly the same period: 2015, 2016, and 2017.
There’s a reason for this. In 2015, Google changed its search algorithm to favor mobile-friendly pages. Smartphone ownership had exploded. By late 2016, mobile and tablet traffic surpassed desktop internet usage worldwide for the first time.
Organizations weren’t redesigning their websites because everybody suddenly got tired of their fonts. The were adapting to new was in which people were finding them.
A decade later, companies are facing a similar evolution in consumer behavior. But this time, instead of device expansion, it’s platform expansion.
People aren’t just finding companies through Google and clicking through to a homepage. They’re encountering them in social feeds, newsletters, podcasts, YouTube videos, media coverage, Reddit threads and increasingly through AI-generated answers that may summarize a company without sending the user to its website at all.
That creates a very different communications problem than the one companies were solving ten years ago.
Back then, the challenge was accessibility: Can people find us and use our website on the device in their hand?
Now the challenge is coherence: When people encounter us in a dozen different places, will all of those encounters add up to a clear idea of who we are?
The woman I spoke to last week really did have a nice website. It had easy navigation, updated SEO, nice visuals. After spending some time with it, I found some great data storytelling based on a report the organization had released.
But when I got on the phone, I asked her a number of questions that weren’t about the website at all.
Who are you trying to speak to with this website?
What makes you meaningfully different from the alternatives?
What do you want people to do when they encounter your organization?
At one point she said, essentially, “Well, shit. My developers didn’t ask me any of that.”
It’s not the first time I’ve heard some version of this. And that doesn’t mean the developers did anything wrong. Developers build websites. Designers create visual systems. SEO experts help search engines understand and surface information.
But a beautiful website, a strong visual identity and technically perfect SEO still can’t answer the more fundamental question:
What should all of this make someone understand about you?
None of this means companies shouldn’t redesign websites. Many absolutely should.
A decade is a long time in digital life. Technology changes. Accessibility standards change. Search behavior changes. Design conventions change. Companies themselves change. But if you are rebuilding a website because the way people find and evaluate companies has changed, the first conversation probably shouldn’t be about fonts, menus or page layouts.
It should be about the story, the journey you want someone to take from their first encounter with your organization to your call to action.
That path should lay the foundational architecture underneath the website. And unlike a layout or a search algorithm, that architecture can travel. It can shape the website, but also the sales deck, executive messaging, social media, content strategy, press interviews and every other place someone encounters the company.
Ten years ago, companies rebuilt their websites because the internet had moved from the desktop into our pockets.
Now the internet has moved everywhere.
The next update isn’t just making sure people can find you wherever they are. It’s making sure that, wherever they find you, they know it’s you.
Before your next redesign, make sure you know the story it needs to tell.
COJA helps organizations build the narrative architecture underneath their communications—so the website, social content, leadership messaging, sales materials and everything else your audience encounters add up to one clear, credible, recognizable idea.
If you’re thinking about a website redesign—or recently finished one and still feel like something isn’t connecting—let’s talk.
