Guest speaker, Alex Helling, Senior Marketing Technology Manager at Harneys, talked us through the firm's website transformation.
Last week we hosted senior marketing leaders from law firms and professional services organisations for dinner. Our guest speaker was Alex Helling, Senior Marketing Technology Manager at Harneys, who talked us through the firm's website transformation – not the highlights reel, but the decisions, the surprises, and what the team would do differently.
We came away with far more than we expected from what was billed as a straightforward platform story.
Alex opened with where Harneys began, and it was a picture most of the table recognised: an outdated platform nearing end of life, two separate systems spread across four servers, duplicate content across languages, and rising security risk. What struck us was the framing that followed – the brief was never just to replace the technology. It was to build a single, modern foundation the team could actually manage day to day.
We also noted the decision not to treat this as a straight migration. Rather than moving content across as-is, the team used the project to review and clean it up along the way. Slower going in, but it meant they were not carrying old problems into a new system.
This was the part of the evening that generated the most conversation around the table. A "new website" turned into a people-and-process change. "Simple migration" became a content optimisation exercise. And the gains that mattered most did not appear at launch – they showed up afterwards, once teams had adjusted how they worked.
Alex closed with five takeaways, and we suspect most of the room left with at least one written down somewhere:
Harneys is not treating the launch as the finish line. Search is a current focus, alongside refining page templates and exploring closer connections with other systems, and the firm has moved to a retainer model so improvement keeps happening rather than waiting for the next big project. That last point felt like the real headline of the evening: the work does not stop when the site goes live; it just changes shape.