I led the seventh iteration of their site—owning the experience end to end from UX research to visual design, all while collaborating with marketing and development to ensure execution stayed sharp and on-brand.

What we were facing wasn’t a broken site—it was a successful platform that needed refinement. But growth had introduced new friction points:

• Design elements were beginning to feel dated as the brand matured
• Content clarity needed tightening to support a broader range of users
• User flows weren’t keeping pace with changing client expectations
• Mobile experience was under-optimized for an increasingly mobile-first audience

With the trust already built, our focus was on sharpening the experience

making it smoother, clearer, and more aligned with where the firm was headed.

This wasn’t a single redesign it was the seventh, built on seven years of working with Joe and his partners through growth, a partnership change, and a slow evolution in how they actually acquired clients.

From the very first site, the research pointed in one direction: the real opportunity wasn’t recent dental graduates Cope Corrales’ original target it was older, established professionals across industries, where the money and the need for sophisticated financial planning actually were. At the time, Joe was running seminars for recent grads and selling services in person; the website was almost secondary. That advice didn’t land right away. It took him working through the limitations of the seminar model himself before he shifted strategy moving away from seminars entirely and toward generating clients through search rankings and online forms instead.

That shift came with its own fight. For years, Joe and his partners were reluctant to invest in SEO more content, proper meta tags, and structured data (Schema markup, which one partner eventually became genuinely invested in) all felt like spending money on something with no visible payoff. It took multiple redesign cycles before they fully bought in.

By the seventh redesign, the pieces finally came together. Working from years of accumulated data, I proposed the features that mattered most for this now-established audience: a student loan refinance calculator, dynamic risk/asset planning forms, and since the partner handling forms was fully bought in from day one a robust forms experience across the site. We also set them up with a consistent YouTube content process, publishing weekly (at minimum monthly), which fed directly into their SEO strategy by leveraging YouTube’s own search visibility alongside the site’s.

Seven years of data, a client who eventually trusted the process, and a redesign built for who the firm had actually become — not who they started out serving.