A Fractional on yesterday’s Fractional CTO and VPE Lean Coffee - we’ll call him Neil - requested a website teardown. I won’t share his name or website publicly, but I bet this applies to a lot of folks out there. You’ve seen it before.
It’s clean. Professional. And completely forgettable.
And that’s the problem.
Honestly, overall, it’s fine - generic CTO, but fine as a starting point. This is peak “professional services template” - clean, competent, and completely forgettable. You could probably delete 50% of the content and be just as fine. Your name is clear, access to your LinkedIn (which is your primary source of truth right now) is scattered around.
But there’s no real positioning or focus. There’s no content, no opinion, absolutely nothing to make you stand out from a crowd of CTOs who are fractionalized.
Services page (and the non-overlapping engagement options on the home page) - that’s….a lot of services. How big is your team again?
The 12-Service Disaster: Strategic Staffing, Team Leadership, Innovation & Growth, Interim CTO Support, Technical Strategy, Engineering Best Practices, Architecture Review, Scalability Strategy, Security & Compliance, Product Alignment, Vendor Management, and Technology Budgeting. You’re one person. This isn’t a consulting firm of 50 people.
But wait - are these actually services, or just a list of everything a CTO eventually touches? The shotgun “I can do everything” pitch might work… but that’s not a service. That’s just being a CTO.
And the “value delivered” blurbs? They don’t land. Without a clear audience, they collapse into filler language that could apply to any company, any decade.
Each card has the same structure, the same length, the same bland corporate tone. By the time you hit “Security & Compliance,” the reader’s already checked out.
Content and opinion wise - looking at LinkedIn, you have both. Videos, text, proper opinions. Why isn’t this reflected in the website? I might not agree with your opinions - but that’s the point. You want clients who either agree and say “Yay Neil!” OR you want clients to say “WTF Neil? are you crazy?” and then they keep thinking about what you said.
Your about me blurb skips all the important stuff and just buzzwords. Exactly like every CTO. “I help senior leaders navigate complicated technology decisions.” This sentence could describe literally any CTO in America.
It’s not until the 3rd section that it starts to talk about what you achieved and even then…you neutered it. If I want to find out who that music tech startup was, I have to go look at LinkedIn. This isn’t secret information… Same with all of the other roles. You’re clearly not under NDA since the names are all over LinkedIn. Name the companies, talk about the actual problems you solved.
The client logos - if they make it to the bottom of your testimonials page - are left to do heavy lifting for credibility.
The 4th panel on the home page - your “Build-Phase Accelerator” - is the only thing on the site that looks and reads like a real service offering.
It’s not just a capability list. It’s a packaged solution.
It names the stage (build), the structure (CTO + Dev Team), and the buyer (a company building fast but not ready for a full tech org). It even sketches out the pain: needing execution and technical oversight without hiring.
Is it perfect? No. It still plays a little safe - “trusted,” “experienced,” “quality” - but structurally? This is the shape. This is what an offer looks like.
So why is it buried in your homepage like a leftover CTA?
Why does the “More” button take me to your About page?
Why not a dedicated landing page - with pricing, timeline, case studies, and a clear sales process?
If this is your wedge - your one true offer - everything else should serve it. Instead, it’s an afterthought.
You’ve got a service. Name it. Package it. Sell it like it’s your lead product - not a half-hidden idea buried at the bottom of your homepage.
Contact form psychology: “Ready to transform your technology strategy?” - this could be copy-pasted from any B2B SaaS website. Though “What’s Your Biggest Tech Challenge?” is actually smart - it gets people thinking about problems rather than just sending “Hi, I need help with stuff” emails.
Testimonials page: Scroll down, and click to the side? It’s 3 testimonials….is scrolling down so bad? Poor navigation for no reason.
FAQ navigation disaster: FAQ is only at the bottom of the expertise, and it’s got too many navigation paths (is it a puzzle or a faq?) - tabs, tab scroll, and unfurls?!
You have the content and opinions on LinkedIn that could differentiate you. The website just doesn’t reflect any of it. It’s a generic CTO template when you clearly have more personality and expertise than that. You’ve built a competent, professional website that does absolutely nothing to differentiate you from the 10,000 other fractional CTOs who launched this year.
Even if you don’t publish everything to your website (tip: you should.) at least align it to your opinions - a few highlight pieces, some embeds of your video series, whatever.
There’s also an exit popup - “Get Your Free Tech Score” - that tries to catch people before they leave. In theory, this could be a clever hook. In practice, it’s just annoying.
I didn’t see it naturally - probably blocked by uBlock, or maybe because closing tabs is how I leave websites like a normal human being. Neil had to send me a direct link to it.
The form itself isn’t awful. It’s got decent segmentation: stage, team size, leadership presence, tech challenge. That’s actually a smart way to qualify leads if the follow-up is good. But a popup? On exit? That’s pure friction. And unless the output is truly valuable (spoiler: it’s probably not) - it’s just a speed bump on the way out.
Instead, a lot of folks use something like this on lead-magnet content - a free ebook PDF, access to whitepapers, a short teardown, something that aligns with your actual target audience. (You have one, right?)
The goal isn’t to guilt someone into filling out a form as they’re trying to leave. It’s to offer something they might actually want while they’re still paying attention. A popup at exit is just noise unless it delivers something useful enough to make the interruption worth it.
You’re trying to start a relationship. Not throw a clipboard in someone’s face on their way out the door.
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