You're better than your website says you are.
The thing you think is common sense is actually uncommon. I find it and put it on the first screen.
You’ve walked someone through your homepage rather than trusting it to do the work.
You’ve heard your client describe you in words that you’ve never used.
You’ve paid for a redesign and got back a prettier version of a site that didn’t say anything new.
None of that means the site is out of date. It means the part you’d actually say if you were in the room isn’t on the page.
What your clients buy is not what your site says you sell. They chose you for something that happened in the first fifteen minutes, or for the thing you caught that four other people had missed, or for a way of working they'd struggle to name but would recognize instantly. You consider it basic, because for you, it is. It's the sentence missing from your website, and you're the one person who can't see it.
While that's been happening, the field has filled up with people who describe their work confidently and don't do it the way you do. From where your best client is standing, there's nothing on the page telling you apart.
The correction isn't copy and it isn't design. It's finding out what your best clients already know, and then saying it clearly enough that the people you are talking to can hear you.
Who I work with
Established businesses where the work is better than the website: service firms, agencies, consultancies, professional and clinical practices, anyone whose clients stay and refer and whose site doesn't explain why.
Who I am
I'm Jessica Del Grande. I’m a website positioning strategist, and I've spent fifteen years across strategy, UX, design, and engineering.
I started in agencies: four years of CRM and campaign strategy for large financial and consumer brands, the last two of them mostly in the numbers behind that work, finding out which messages actually moved people and which ones had only sounded good in the meeting. Alongside it I ran my own consulting practice for seven years.
Then I went and learned to build properly. I spent three and a half years on both UX and engineering of enterprise software, where what I designed is used every day by six of the world's top twenty financial institutions. After that, at Huge, I made products for Google that shipped into more than a dozen markets, including work for Chromebook Plus that took Bronze at Creativepool and was a Webby Nominee and Official Honoree.
I started Partial History because I got tired of watching good work get undersold by the site meant to represent it, usually because the sentence that would have fixed it seemed unremarkable and was never written down.
Most people selling you positioning have never built the thing the positioning has to survive. Most people who can build it have never had to answer for a number.
Services
An assessment of your website, read the way someone finds it at eleven at night when she's deciding whether to write to you in the morning.
I read your site before you've told me anything about what you meant by it, because the moment you explain it I've lost the only thing I have in common with whoever finds you next. What comes back is one document, ranked: where the site describes what you do instead of why people pick you, what a first-time visitor really meets and in what order, the things costing you money that you can fix this week without hiring anybody, and the good writing you already have that's hiding four screens down.
The Review gives you the information you need to stop guessing at what's wrong, and to see your site the way the person deciding whether to hire you sees it.
The thing your clients see in you that you’ve stopped noticing, found and written down so you can use it.
I ask you to tell me about your business, and I check it against a small handful of your clients. I’m listening for the things that you declare proudly, the things that you dance around, and the things that your clients all notice but that you would never think to say. I turn that into a document that gives your business clear direction: who is your client, why does she choose you, how do you speak to her, and what is your proof. The document gives you your points of differentiation, headlines, metadata, a page map for every page on your site, and a reference that any copywriter, designer, or developer can use to build from.
The Positioning Intensive gives you the words and the shape of a site that couldn’t belong to anyone but you.
A live website that loses nothing in translation.
Most of what a website gets wrong isn’t a design problem, it’s a strategy problem with a different outfit. I take the strategy and positioning that we built and create a website that carries it through to the people who need to find you.
A typical redesign hands you back a better-looking version of the site you already had. A strategy document given to a builder doesn’t capture the depth of the decisions behind it. The amount of room a sentence gets to breathe, how much prominence a credential deserves, whether a statement belongs in the hero or three sections down. To somebody else those are taste decisions; to me, they’re strategy, in the only form your clients will ever encounter it.
The Complete Website Engagement gives you a site that introduces you the way your best client would.
If your business isn't telling the whole story, let's fix that.
Send me your URL and a sentence or two about what you think isn't landing. I'll reply within two business days and tell you which service, if any, makes the most sense. If none of them are the right fit, I'll say so and tell you where I'd look instead.