Discovery starts with what is already on your website

At an event in April, the president of a higher ed web agency described what his team builds before pitching a university redesign.

It isn’t a proposal. It’s a crawler that maps what the university already has: subdomains, content management system, third-party tools, and page components. He found one university running five different form tools across its site. Nobody there knew.

That one detail told him more than the RFP did.

Universities describe what they want. They don’t describe what they have, because they don’t fully know. The admissions team doesn’t know what the registrar is running. Marketing doesn’t know what integration IT set up a few years ago. Everyone works from their own part of the picture.

So he built a tool that shows the real situation before the first conversation.

I see the same thing in my own work. A client comes with a request: we need a new website, our messaging isn’t landing, can you redo the homepage. The request is real. The diagnosis is usually incomplete.

Most of what I do in discovery is finding what’s already there: the assumptions built into the current site, the internal language that has leaked into the copy, and the value proposition the team has argued about for years without naming the argument.

He uses a crawler. I use interviews. Either way, the work starts with what you already have, before anyone plans what comes next.