Audit & rationale
What’s wrong, what changed, and why
The findings behind this redesign — from a crawl of all 50 live pages, the WordPress admin, the theme, and the plugin stack. Every claim here is checkable against the live site.
The headline
The site is a library with no checkout desk
Power Sponsorship has an enormous content asset — 194 how-to articles, six white papers, video tutorials, two industry-standard books — and almost no mechanism for turning a reader into a client. Across 50 pages there are exactly two forms: contact, and newsletter. The white paper that has been downloaded close to a million times captures nothing at all.
Everything else in this audit is downstream of that.
2
Forms across 50 pages
0
H1 headings on the homepage
2
Words of content on /services/
12
Pages with no meta description
Findings
Structure & content
Critical The Services page is completely empty
/services/ sits in the primary navigation and returns a page with two words of content. The header renders, the footer renders, and between them is nothing — the footer floats halfway up an orange striped background. Anyone who clicks the main nav item for the thing you sell lands on a blank page.
Changed: services.html is now a real hub — every service grouped by consulting, training, and self-serve, plus a “start from the problem instead” chooser for people who don’t know the difference between a strategy session and a consultancy.
Critical The homepage has no H1 and no proposition above the fold
The homepage headline is styled text inside a div, not a heading. The only headings on the page are the ten H3s belonging to blog teasers. Search engines and screen readers both see a page whose most important content is a list of article titles.
Structurally, the page is: hero → ten full blog teasers → five service links at the very bottom. The services are below roughly 4,000 words of blog excerpt.
Changed: a real H1, a proposition, a primary CTA above the fold, an audience split (sponsor vs rightsholder) immediately after it, then services, proof, and finally three recent articles rather than ten.
Critical There is no route from “reader” to “client”
The free resources are genuinely excellent and completely disconnected from the commercial pages. A white paper page ends. A best-of collection ends. An article ends. Nothing suggests a next step.
Changed: every resource page now ends in a contextual CTA band, carries a newsletter block in the sidebar, and links to the service that solves the problem the resource describes. The homepage, service pages, and audience hubs all funnel to one primary action.
Critical Sponsors and rightsholders are never separated
Almost all the content is written for one audience or the other — the blog is even tagged “blogs for sponsors” (108 posts) and “blogs for rightsholders” (117 posts) — but the navigation, the homepage, and the service pages make no distinction. Every visitor has to work out which half of the site is theirs.
Changed: two new audience hubs — for sponsors and for rightsholders — introduced right below the homepage hero, and audience tags surfaced as filters on the Article Bank.
Significant Two pages are duplicates of each other
/sponsorship-systems-design/ and /sponsorship-capacity-building/ are the same page: identical H1, identical body, 408 words each. That is a straight keyword-cannibalisation problem, and neither carries a canonical pointing at the other.
Changed: one page, at sponsorship-systems-design. On the live site, capacity-building should 301 to it.
Significant Orphaned and near-empty pages
/kim-skildum-reids-sponsorship-blog/ contains six words and duplicates the Article Bank. Three testimonial pages exist but are not linked from the main navigation at all, so the strongest proof on the site is effectively invisible.
Changed: the six-word page folds into the Article Bank. The three proof pages sit under a new testimonials hub that is linked from the About menu, the homepage, and every service page.
Significant The two online courses are the only self-serve revenue, and they are off-site
Both courses link straight out to Thinkific. There is no outline, no inclusions list, no reviews, and no price anywhere on powersponsorship.com — so the decision to buy has to be made on a third-party platform with none of the credibility the site has spent years building.
Changed: two new on-site course pages — Getting to “Yes” and Corporate Sponsorship Masterclass — with outline, inclusions, outcomes, reviews, and a group-enrolment enquiry. Thinkific still takes the payment.
Worth fixing The white papers are ungated and unlinked to anything
Ungating them is the right call and this redesign keeps it. But a download that has run to roughly a million copies with no optional follow-up is a very large missed list.
Changed: downloads stay one click and no email. A soft newsletter block sits alongside them — offered, never required.
Findings
Design & front end
Critical The orange striped wallpaper fights everything on top of it
The page background is a full-bleed orange stripe pattern. Combined with full-saturation #660066 purple and #FF6600 orange used at equal weight, it produces constant visual vibration and leaves no neutral ground for content to sit on. On the empty Services page it is the entire experience.
Changed: the brand colours are kept but rebalanced. Deep plum becomes the dark surface, orange becomes the action colour and nothing else, and content sits on white and warm off-white. The brand is still unmistakably Power Sponsorship — it just stops shouting over itself.
Significant Footer links are orange on orange
“Design by Sherbert Lemon”, “Privacy Policy”, and “Terms and Conditions” in the footer are rendered in a colour close enough to the striped background to be effectively unreadable. Several other footer links sit at similarly low contrast.
Changed: the footer is a solid dark plum surface with light text, comfortably above WCAG AA at every size used.
Significant Most images have no alt text
13 of 21 images on the homepage, 14 of 24 on the Article Bank, and 13 of 14 on the media kit have no alt attribute. On the media kit — a page whose entire purpose is photography — that is close to total.
Changed: every decorative image is marked as decorative, and every meaningful image carries a real description.
Significant No heading hierarchy on the key pages
Beyond the missing homepage H1, headings are used for size rather than structure across the service pages, and the Article Bank has no H1 either.
Changed: one H1 per page, sequential H2s and H3s, section landmarks, a skip link, and a table of contents generated from the H2s on every long page.
Worth fixing Three font families load and the theme uses none of them
The site loads Montserrat, Poppins, and Open Sans from Google Fonts on every page. The stylesheet actually specifies Avenir LT Pro throughout. That is three unused font requests per page load, plus two DNS lookups.
Changed: one family, one request. Figtree is the closest free equivalent to Avenir for the prototype — if Avenir is licensed for web use, swap it back and drop the request entirely.
Worth fixing The floating social share rail overlaps content
The Monarch share sidebar is pinned over the left edge of the content column at most widths, and adds four scripts and a stylesheet to every page.
Changed: removed. Share matters on articles, not on service pages, and it does not need a plugin.
Findings
WordPress & plugins
| Plugin | Status | Recommendation |
|---|---|---|
| Advanced Custom Fields Pro | Active, update available | Keep — it drives every page layout. Update. |
| Gravity Forms + Mailchimp add-on | Active, update available | Keep. This is the tool that should be doing far more work than two forms. |
| Yoast SEO Premium + Duplicate Post | Active | Keep. Fill in the 12 missing meta descriptions and set the canonical on the duplicate page. |
| WP Rocket | Active, update available | Keep. Update, and re-check the minify cache after any theme change. |
| Wordfence Security | Active | Keep. |
| WPS Hide Login | Active | Keep. |
| Post SMTP | Active | Keep — form deliverability depends on it. |
| Monarch (social share) | Active | Remove. The floating rail overlaps content and costs five requests. |
| BJ Lazy Load | Active | Remove. WordPress has done native lazy loading since 5.5; this plugin is why the crawl found base64 GIF placeholders. |
| Classic Editor + Advanced Editor Tools | Active | Keep for now. Worth revisiting once the layout stops depending on ACF flexible content. |
| Shortcodes Ultimate Pro | Active, update available | Audit before removing — content may depend on shortcodes. Free version is also installed and inactive; delete that. |
| Ivory Search | Active | Keep, but the Article Bank filtering in this redesign covers most of what people use search for. |
| MonsterInsights | Active, update available | Keep. Set up goal tracking — there is currently nothing meaningful to track. |
| Disable Comments | Active, update available | Keep. |
| ASA2, Better Search Replace, Broken Link Checker, Disable XML-RPC ×2, List Urls, Real-Time Find and Replace, Shortcodes Ultimate (free), SU Extra Shortcodes | Inactive | Delete. Nine inactive plugins are nine attack surfaces that still need patching. |
The proposal
What this prototype is, and what it isn’t
What it is
- All 54 pages, built as static HTML with one shared design system
- Real copy, parsed out of the live site — not lorem ipsum
- Real testimonials, real client names, real download links
- Working navigation, filtering, accordions, and responsive behaviour
- A basis for costing the WordPress build accurately
What it isn’t
- Approved by Kim — nothing here has been shown to the client
- Wired to Gravity Forms; every form is a demo that does not submit
- Carrying real course pricing — that has to come out of Thinkific
- A WordPress theme yet — this is the design and IA decision layer
- Final on copy. Kim writes better than I do; this is a structure for her to write into
Go and look at it
Start with the homepage, then the Services page that used to be blank, then the Article Bank filtering.