Dance Wire
Web Strategy & maintenance
The Challenge
Dance Wire came to Hopewell needing someone to help manage their website. Their previous developer was moving on so finding a long-term partner was important.
After performing an in-depth website audit, we realized the site was not built from a strategy-first approach. The site was mish-mashed together with 100s of plugins to do basic things. This resulted in a bloated website that took over 30 seconds to load!
Aside from the technical aspects, the site was very confusing to use as a visitor. Visitors to the site didn’t really know what Dance Wire was. Were they a dance studio? A technology hub? Messaging wasn’t as clear as it could be, and important info was hard to find.
The lack of a cohesive brand identity made it hard to guide visitors through the site or to take action.
Our Strategy
Our short-term goals were to immediately reduce the number of plugins, the duplicated and bloated code, and reduce load times as much as possible. We stressed the importance of fixing these things before doing anything else to the website.
Long-term we highly suggested a complete re-design. Not just because the look and feel could use a little TLC, but because the backend was convoluted. Experience told us that when a site is this mish-mashed together, it takes 5x more time and money to undo everything. It’s better to start from scratch with a strategy-first approach.
Because Dance Wire didn’t have a large budget, we worked on a monthly maintenance plan and did as much as we could to optimize the site.
“When a site is this mish-mashed together, it takes 5x more time and money to undo everything. It’s better to start from scratch with a strategy-first approach.”
The Results
We were able to drastically reduce the load time of the website from 9+ seconds down to 1 second, while getting A’s across the board on our page speed tests.
As much as we’d like to take all the credit, moving their hosting from GoDaddy to our premium, managed service helped a lot with the initial load times and time to first byte.
