Identity confusion
The homepage was an art collective, a basketball app landing page, a magazine store, and an agency all at once. A prospective client could not answer "what does this company do for me?" in the first scroll.
Case Study · Shipped & Live
Collective Minds Inc. Redesigned. Repositioned.
Transforming a 2019 GoDaddy template site into a modern digital agency presence. A full rebuild covering brand voice, information architecture, content strategy, and a WordPress platform the client owns.
01 · Overview
A decade-old brand.
A website stuck in 2019.
Collective Minds Inc. began as an indie art magazine in 2014 and evolved into a digital agency offering app development, web design, and marketing. The website never made that journey with them. It still spoke to a magazine audience while the business was selling engineering engagements. My job: close that gap.
Challenge
Reposition an art collective as a credible digital agency
Approach
Full IA restructure, copy rewrite, platform migration
Constraint
Preserve 10 years of brand history without the clutter
Outcome
One-click paths to every revenue line, analytics from day one
02 · The Problem
Four ways the old site
worked against the business.
The audit surfaced a site that was actively contradicting the company's pitch. If you sell premium digital services, your own website is Exhibit A.
Buried revenue
Development and marketing, the actual revenue drivers, lived behind a "MORE" dropdown. The digital marketing intake form sat three screens deep on the contact page, below unrelated content.
Content walls
The CEO page carried a full-length poem, a basketball biography, and a downloadable resume, framing the founder as a job seeker rather than an agency principal. Body copy ran 200+ word paragraphs with no hierarchy.
Template credibility
Broken image placeholders, duplicate stacked navigation bars, default cookie banners, and a third-party builder credit in the footer signaled a DIY build to every visitor.
Legacy
Legacy
Legacy
03 · The Process
Rebuilt from the
information architecture up.
01
Audit & IA restructure
I mapped every page and CTA on the legacy site, then collapsed a sprawling navigation of 10+ links and dropdowns into five top-level destinations: Development, Marketing, Pricing, Media, About.
Every page now sits one click from home, and a persistent "Start Project" button anchors the primary conversion path in the header.
10+ nav links → 51-click depthSingle primary CTA
2019 · 10+ links, 2 dropdowns
Home
About Us
ATH
ATC
Contact
Explore ▾
More ▾
CMi Blog
ATH Blog
Shop
Magazine
Services buried in dropdowns, no clear path to revenue pages.
2026 · 5 destinations + 1 CTA
Development
Marketing
Pricing
Media
About
Start Project
Every page one click deep, one persistent conversion path.
02
Brand voice & content strategy
The site copy was rewritten around a single positioning line, "Digital. Defined.", cutting homepage word count by roughly 60%. The magazine-era story was not deleted; it was reframed as an evolution arc, "From Stories to Systems", turning history into differentiation.
~60% less homepage copyScannable sectionsStory reframed, not erased
03
Founder page redesign
The poem, embedded resume, and basketball biography were replaced with a tight credential block: bilingual computer scientist, published author, iOS/Android engineer, founder at 19. Same facts, agency framing.
Bio → credentialsPrincipal, not job seeker
04
Visual system & migration
A restrained palette with strong typographic hierarchy replaced the orange-on-black template. Trust signals moved above the fold: awards bar, press mentions, named testimonials. Rebuilt on WordPress with Elementor, custom breakpoints, SVG icons, font-display swap, and analytics wired in from launch day.
WordPress + ElementorCustom breakpointsAnalytics at launch
04 · Before / After
Drag to see the shift.
Same company. Same history. A completely different first impression.
Before · 2019
After · 2026
Drag the handle · Arrow keys also work
05 · Results
Measured where possible.
Honest where not.
No legacy analytics existed, so results are reported in three tiers: verifiable structural changes, real data from the first nine weeks post-launch, and clearly labeled directional estimates.
Structural
0+ → 5
Navigation links consolidated
Dropdown maze collapsed into five top-level destinations, every page one click deep.
Structural
~0%
Homepage copy reduction
Long-form paragraphs replaced by scannable, single-message sections.
Structural
0+ → 1
Competing CTAs per page
Every page rebuilt around one primary action: Start Project.
Measured
0
Page views since launch
774 visitors and 1,101 sessions in the first nine weeks, with zero paid promotion.
Measured
1:0
Homepage view duration
Strong for an agency landing page whose job is routing visitors onward to service pages.
Estimated
0+ → 1
Clicks to project intake
Directional estimate: the conversion form is now reachable in one interaction from any page.
What the data revealed next
Post-launch analytics showed the 404 page receiving 24% of visitors, caused by inbound links still pointing to legacy URLs. I flagged it and scoped a 301 redirect map as the immediate follow-up, turning the analytics setup into an ongoing optimization loop instead of a one-time launch.
06 · Takeaway
The hardest decisions were editorial: what history to keep, cut, or reframe.
The magazine roots could have been a liability. Repositioned as an origin story, they became the one thing that separates CMi from every other dev shop. And the 404 discovery reinforced why analytics belong at launch: a redesign is not finished when it ships, it is finished when the data confirms it works.