B2B Advisory Website Redesign

A B2B growth advisory founder was openly frustrated with his Squarespace site: hard to maintain, off-brand, and invisible to search. I designed and built a custom, fully interactive redesign mockup that won approval on the first pass and greenlit a full rebuild, paired with a strategy to take the brand from noindexed to discoverable across both Google and AI search.

Challenge

GrowthWays is a San Francisco growth advisory firm that helps founders scale and exit their companies, built around founder Michael Bush's Guardrailing® framework and book. The brand was established, but the website worked against it.

• Invisible online. The existing Squarespace site was noindexed and turned up nowhere in search, with no path to rank or get cited by AI answer engines.
• Hard to maintain. The firm was hiring a dedicated content person who needed to manage the site without touching code or fighting a clunky editor.
• Off-brand and generic. The design did not reflect the firm's positioning, the Guardrailing framework, or the founder's book and credibility.
• A launch to support. A cohort program was planned, and the site needed to convert visitors into discovery calls and applications.

Approach

A clickable mockup, not a static comp

Rather than send flat design files, I built a fully interactive, responsive prototype so the client could click through the real experience before committing to a build. It established a dark, editorial aesthetic and told the brand story end to end: a clear hero and value proposition, the Guardrailing framework laid out as five pillars, the founder's story and book, social proof through client logos and testimonials, and direct CTAs to book a discovery call.

The mockup runs on pure HTML, CSS, and JavaScript with zero dependencies. Custom scroll-reveal animations, animated stat counters, and a sticky navigation give it the polish of a production site with no framework and no build step, which made it trivial to host as a shareable preview link the client could open from any device.

Built for search and AI visibility

Alongside the design, I scoped the production build and the strategy to make the brand findable:

• A headless, server-rendered production stack (Next.js on Vercel) with a no-code editing dashboard, so the new content hire can manage pages and posts without a developer.
• An SEO, GEO, and AEO strategy grounded in keyword and competitor research, semantic markup, and structured data (Person, Organization, Book, Article, and FAQ schema) so the brand is legible to Google and to AI answer engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews.
• A conversion path mapped around the discovery call and the upcoming cohort program, with the book linking out to retail rather than carrying a storefront.

Results

• Approved on the first pass. The client loved the mockup, and the redesign direction was greenlit into a full rebuild.
• A clickable, shareable preview that let the client experience the new site before any production code was written, removing the guesswork from sign-off.
• A clear path off Squarespace to a search- and AI-discoverable presence, with the SEO, GEO, and AEO foundation defined up front.
• A maintainability plan that hands day-to-day content control to a non-technical hire through a no-code dashboard after launch.

Tools Used

HTML, CSS, JavaScript, responsive design, structured data (JSON-LD), SEO architecture