How 2xN Finally Rebuilt Its Own Website

There's an old joke about the cobbler's children having no shoes. Turns out web developers aren't immune either. We'd spend weeks perfecting every pixel of a client's site, agonising over load times and whether a button should be teal or slightly different teal, then go home to our own website. The one that had been quietly limping along, untouched, for far longer than we'd like to admit.

Not a great look. Eventually, you have to do something about it.

Why our website stopped working

Here's the uncomfortable truth: agencies are often terrible at practising what they preach. You get so absorbed solving other people's digital problems that your own pile up in the background. Nobody rings to complain about your navigation, so you ignore it. But silence isn't approval. It's often just visitors leaving before they bother telling you why.

Our site had grown the way websites do when nobody's paying proper attention. A few years of adding a page here, a case study there, a new service bolted on wherever it fit. Suddenly the site supposed to demonstrate our expertise in website design was doing the opposite. Too many pages competing for attention. Navigation that made sense to us because we knew where everything was. General clutter no client would ever have let us get away with.

That's the irony of this job. Your own problems quietly pile up while you're fixing everyone else's.

Treating ourselves like a proper client project

The brief we gave ourselves was refreshingly blunt: streamline it. Not a reinvention. Not a rebrand. Just a proper, honest tidy-up, rebuilding our own website from the ground up. Fewer clicks to find anything that matters. A clearer path from 'who are these people' to 'here's proof they know what they're doing' to 'right, I'll get in touch.'

We stripped out pages nobody was reading. Tightened the navigation down to what people actually look for. Made sure the whole thing loaded fast and worked properly on a phone, because we'd be hypocrites lecturing clients about mobile responsiveness while our own site lagged on 4G.

It's strange, sitting down and treating your own website exactly like a client project. No favours. No 'oh it's fine, we know what we meant.' Just the same honest scrutiny we'd apply to anyone else's SEO or user experience, which unsurprisingly turned up plenty we'd have flagged immediately for a client and quietly ignored for ourselves.

What streamlining actually means

Streamlined gets thrown around a lot in web design. Usually it means very little beyond 'we removed some stuff.' For us it meant something specific: every page earning its place, every piece of navigation answering a real question visitors actually have, and nothing left in simply because it had always been there.

Content that sprawled across several thin pages got consolidated into fewer, stronger ones. Case studies got pulled together properly rather than scattered across the site like an afterthought. According to Nielsen Norman Group research, users typically leave web pages within 10 to 20 seconds, so we made those seconds count.

The result does less shouting and more showing. Fewer distractions between a visitor landing on the homepage and understanding exactly what we do, who we've done it for, and how to start a conversation through our contact page. That's the entire job of a website, and it's remarkably easy to lose sight of when you know it too well to see it clearly.

Why agencies need to walk the walk

Here's where I get properly opinionated: an agency that can't be bothered to fix its own website has no business telling anyone else how to fix theirs. Every site we build for a client is a promise that we understand what makes a digital presence actually work. Not just in theory, but in the unglamorous, ongoing maintenance of it.

Letting our own site slide made that promise a bit hollow. Fixing it wasn't just cosmetic housekeeping. It was a reminder of exactly what we ask clients to trust us with through our services: the discipline to keep questioning whether a website still serves the people using it, long after launch day excitement has worn off.

Easy advice to give. Turns out it's just as easy to forget to take.

Building ongoing discipline into the rebuild

This rebuild isn't a one-off tidy we'll forget about in three years. We've built the same ongoing discipline into our own site that we build into every client's: regular review, fresh content writing, and honest willingness to ask whether something's still earning its place on the page.

If we're going to keep telling clients their website is never really 'finished,' we'd better be living that ourselves. The UK Government Digital Service emphasises continuous improvement in digital services, and that applies just as much to a small agency as it does to public sector platforms.

What we learned from finally practising what we preach

Rebuilding our own website was useful. Slightly humbling, too. Expertise doesn't exempt you from the basics. Everyone's digital presence needs the same honest attention eventually, including the people whose job it is to give that attention to everyone else.

A streamlined site isn't about looking fashionable. It's about making sure the thing working hardest for your business, day and night, isn't quietly working against you instead. When you come back to your own website with fresh eyes, you see all the friction you'd spot immediately in someone else's.

If reading this made you wonder when you last properly looked at your own website, that's probably worth doing before it becomes a bigger job than it needs to be. Trust me on that one.