The new Lowecom.com: an updated resource for you

Key takeaways

• Lowe Group’s redesign focused on the needs of investment communications executives charged with growing their businesses
• Case study proofpoints and videos give visitors a sense of the team and the solutions offered
• Web analytics influenced redesign, will guide tweaks

While we ordinarily reserve the blog to talk about the outside world, today we’ll share a few thoughts about what we’ve been up to lately. Given that we’re in the visibility business and a website can be central to that, we’ll use this work as a brief case study. We can be fully transparent and share our own process In implementing best practices to an extent we can’t about client work.

The goal: maybe something we encountered can help you. Or maybe you're interested in our approach and want to learn more. That would be more than fine, too.

The website redesign took place in five stages.

Stage 1: Acceptance

When you know, you know. After four years, the design of lowecom.com was starting to show its age. We’d been making incremental changes, but we wanted to make some structural improvements for SEO. One example: to drop the publication dates (2024/12/17) from our URLs.

Was there any reason not to redesign? None, but all knew it would represent significant additional work for an already busy agency.

Stage 2: Reflection

Who are we? What do we do? Who do we best work with? What do they need to see? The website redesign started appropriately with consideration of who we build the site for.

Clients visit the website regularly. They access reports on restricted pages on the domain, and if they see one of our posts promoted on LinkedIn, they’ll click through on what interests them. But most often they reach out by emailing, calling or even texting. That means our site may be primarily for people we don’t know and might like to.

This is not unlike sites we build for financial advisors who want to grow their client base. Asset manager sites, of course, are a different animal, with the amount of product information they publish on their site and the reliance of both distributors and investors on it.

And so, as we do with others, we took ourselves through an extended “right fit” client discussion to crystallize our positioning. One result was the rethinking of a very powerful statement that sat on our home page for years: Your story, expertly told.

As a client, I'd loved that line. But I thought it undersold what Lowe Group does. There’s a lot more to Jody and the team than telling clients’ stories. There’s strategic guidance, for one. There are the industry insights offered and the deep connection to the investment community.

The creation of LG Digital two years ago put a further point on that. Yes, we can help tell the story, but we can create a demand for it, a framework to serve it up, and we can implement state-of-the-art ways to measure it.

At the highest level, our clients work with us because they value our partnership in helping drive business growth.

That’s what we wanted to acknowledge on the home page. This thinking resulted in a line you’ll see us use going forward as it reflects both what we know clients want and what we strive to deliver: Further. Faster: Financial PR and digital strategy at the speed of you.

And, there’s another concept that we wanted to reflect straight away, and that is our participation in the investment community. The investment industry has a noble purpose: It helps people make homes, grow families, retire comfortably, etc. We’ve been fortunate to be a part of this community, we couldn’t do our jobs without our relationships in it, and it deserves a nod in the top-level presentation of our firm. This explains why our investing podcast directory remains in the top nav of the new site.

As all our soul-searching was going on, of course, we turned to our analytics. Every redesign is disruptive, including to a website’s search rankings. We wanted to fully understand what we needed to take extra care with—the content our visitors currently valued—as well as where the opportunities were.

One example: When you’re in the PR business, many of the outcomes you produce for clients are public—and that can inform prospective clients doing due diligence. From an information architecture perspective, it made sense that our Clients in the News page was tucked under Public Relations, but the analytics demonstrated that visitor discovery was low. Such an important feature needed to be given prominence on our new home page. You’ll see it’s teed up there and jumps to a sub Public Relations pages.

Similarly, our case studies were often overlooked. Now they appear as proofpoints on our pillar pages (see PR, for example). Years ago, we’d know better than to present them as tabbed content, today no worries—the spider can easily find them.

Stage 3: Pick the partners

Stage 3 involved no deliberation. We knew who we wanted to work with, and they more than met the challenge.

Let’s start with Wendy Pressley Jacobs, principal of Pressley Johnson Design. When asked to provide a reference for Wendy’s firm over the years, I’ve always said the same thing: You think that as the client you know best, but when you collaborate with Wendy, she digs in and makes your business her business. At some point you realize that Wendy’s thinking about your project just as much as you are, and she often has better ideas!

After a two-hour session with us, Wendy understood the energy, spirit and aspiration of Lowe Group. There was one design round and away we went! Even after months of looking at it, the design still makes me smile. We needed to be as bright and energetic as the most aggressive ETF issuers, and PJD got us there.

Scott Paulus, team photographer for the Milwaukee Brewers, is also the Lowe Group team photographer, having taken our headshots over the years. Candids are different and can be awkward, but Scott knew exactly what to do, how to achieve Wendy’s vision while adding his own zhuzh. The team committed to a single morning photo shoot, and we were thrilled to be done—and then so pleased with the results.

On any given day LG Digital is working on a handful of website projects and navigating through challenges that are byproducts of working with a variety of developers selected by clients or clients’ bosses. Yeah, we didn’t have time for that with our site—so we went straight to DigiSage, a preferred partner on client work. They’re problem-solvers of the highest order. When they say they’ll look into something, you can relax.

Stage 4: Ring out the old, bring in the new

What stays? What goes? Those decisions are the most treacherous in a website redesign. Every content management system vendor will tell you that content migration will be the greatest risk to a project. Knowing this, we tried to be as ready as possible, with our Screaming Frog reports and our redirect mapping. Half of our 250 blog posts (the earliest of which had been on the site since 2013) we took with us, the other half needed redirects.

What we didn’t expect: the implementation of sidebars and featured images on our older site would not lend itself to a one-for-one migration to the new WordPress site. Do you know how most house moves involve moving trucks and professionals to pack up the trucks, leaving you to need to worry about only the most fragile pieces that you transport on the front seat of your car? Because of the conflicts between the old and the new, every darn blog post needed a personal escort to the site.

Once here, every blog post then needed a new featured image and meta description. That was a lot, but the silver lining is that we had an opportunity to upgrade the look—even if we needed to default to text in the images. In many cases, the photos or charts featured in the original images were long gone. Fortunately, our creative director Bob Quast is both talented and patient.

Going forward, resolved here and now: we will do our best to use more graphics and rely on text less in our featured images. We love to blog and see it as an opportunity to offer a perspective that may not be available elsewhere. Would now be a good time to invite you to subscribe?

It’s also part of the story that our Client Services team needed to migrate four quarters of client reports from the old to the new site, just as the team was busy compiling year-end data. If you’re in the industry, you know that the ideal scenario is to schedule extra work during down periods when the data is not in the process of being updated. In this case, we couldn't wait and we did it all at the same time because that's just how good our team is.

But all of that was about the old stuff. In 2025, a professional services website needs video, so we’ve added that too (see our videos at the bottom of every pillar page and aggregated in our video gallery). Never has the saying “try to act natural” meant so much.

The discomfort of learning a new content format was worth it. Our overall goal, after all, is to give people a better sense of who we are and what it might be like to work with us. There’s another consideration, too. By serving the videos on YouTube, we’re asserting ourselves in yet another way that AI search in particular values. It’s important to be present on other sites, for the corroboration of Lowe Group authority. Also, the schema markup on the site drives the point home.

You’ll also find that all the videos are accompanied by transcripts. That’s important both for users and for search.

Our focus with the redesign also was in optimizing the site to perform both in acquiring visitors and engaging visitors. In that vein, we’ve been purposeful both about what we say and how we say and present it. This starts with the content planning—it’s important to stay on topic so Google has no confusion about our specific domain expertise. The key takeaways you see at the top of this post reflect recent understanding that AI search draws meaning from what’s offered up top. We’ll be including takeaways from now on.

Oh and lowecom.com now has Search.

Stage 5: Ready for you!

Yep, today’s the day. Ready for you, ready for Google, ready for our AI friends, ready for the world—we’ll be watching the analytics to see how the site delivers!

Please don’t mistake our enthusiasm for misplaced belief that the site is perfect. It isn’t, and that’s never the goal anyway. Digital work is all about the art of what’s possible and incremental improvement.

Thanks for reading as we share our excitement and replay the major transformation we’ve undertaken over the last several months. We love what we do and hope you will understand us better now.