Digital Readiness Assessments
How much of your website does anyone actually use?
Somebody’s pitching you something — a rebuild, a redesign, a booking system, a portal. Or your own team has a wishlist and no way to rank it. A Digital Readiness Assessment is the step before you commit money to any of it: we go through what your website has, what the traffic data says people actually use, and what it all costs you in attention to keep running. Then you get a plain-language read on what’s worth doing — which is not always the thing being pitched.
The inventory, the numbers, the sort
- 01 — What you have
First, the inventory. Every page, form, calendar, directory, and feature your website carries — including the ones that arrived with a template years ago and have been quietly along for the ride since. For each one, a simple question: did anybody ask for this, and does anybody look after it? Most websites are carrying more than their owners think, and every extra piece is something that can break, date, or confuse a visitor.
- 02 — What the numbers say
Then we stop guessing and get into the data. With read-only access to your analytics, we can see the history of every visit and every click — which pages carry the site and which ones haven’t drawn a dozen visitors all year. This settles arguments fast. On one assessment, a directory the office had been dutifully updating for years turned out to attract almost nobody; people just phoned, the way they always had. Nobody needed to have an opinion about that feature. The data had one already.
- 03 — What earns its place
Then the honest sort. A feature stays if it’s easy to keep current and it serves a purpose. If it’s a pain to maintain and nobody uses it, the recommendation is to not have it — which costs nothing and is, in our experience, the most under-used move on the internet. The same test runs the other direction: the assessment also surfaces the things you should have and don’t, because visitors keep looking for them and leaving.
Axiom IndustriesConstruction Companies
PDS IncHealth Care
ThorpeConstruction Companies
When the answer is a rebuild, this is the shop
Not every engagement ends in one. When it does, the work lands here — browse it before you decide who to call.
Keep, fix, kill, leave alone
What you get is a short written read, not a 40-page scorecard: keep this, fix this, kill this, leave this alone — each with a plain reason attached, and with what each item will cost you in ongoing attention if you keep it. Where a recommendation has a price tag, you’ll see the honest version of it, ballparks labelled as ballparks.
The goal of the whole exercise is not to create more work for you. Candidly, it’s not to create more work for us either. It’s to make sure the next dollar you spend on your website — with anyone — is spent on something that earns its place.
The useful answer is often “do less”
We design and build websites for a living, so every assessment we run has an obvious ending we’d profit from. Here’s the thing: a fair number of these end the other way. The site is fundamentally fine, three features should be retired, one page needs writing, and no rebuild is required — and when that’s the read, that’s the read you get. An assessment that saves you from a purchase is a better advertisement for us than the purchase would have been.
And if the assessment turns up real trouble — the kind that lives in the code, the back end, or the accounts that hold everything together — we’ll say so, and point you at the deeper engagement built for exactly that.
Planned first, built second
Most of this work is invisible by nature — the assessment is the part that happens before anything gets built. Northern Strands is the visible version: the expansion conversation came first, the planning happened on paper, and the Winnipeg site that followed was scoped before a pixel of it existed.
After the assessment
From here it goes one of three directions. Sometimes the list is short and you action it with whoever you like — we’re around if questions come up. Sometimes the site is sound but nobody’s minding it, and it moves onto our hosting and Enhanced Ongoing Services. And sometimes the assessment finds enough smoke that you want the full inspection — pages, code, back end, and keys — which is a Comprehensive Website Review, a different engagement built for exactly that.
If the answer turns out to be a new build after all, that work has its own side of the shop. Assessments live with the rest of the consulting under Digital Strategy.
Ask before you build
Send us your website’s address and whatever’s on the table — the pitch you received, the wishlist your team keeps adding to, the feature you suspect nobody uses. We’ll tell you whether an assessment would actually change your decision. If it wouldn’t, we’ll say that, and you’ve spent nothing.