Strategy
Clients arrive asking for a website. What they need is a decision about who they are for. The site is just where that decision becomes visible.
Almost every enquiry we receive begins the same way. We need a new website. Sometimes that is exactly true. More often the website is the visible symptom of a quieter problem: the business has grown, or changed, or never quite decided what it is, and the site is the first place that uncertainty shows.
Who is this for? Not everyone. Not anyone with a budget. The specific person whose problem you solve better than the alternatives. When a client can describe that person in a sentence, the site practically structures itself. When they cannot, no layout will rescue it.
What should they do next? A site with six equal calls to action has none. Choose the one thing a first time visitor should do, whether that is book a call, request a quote, or read the one page that will change their mind, and build the entire site to lead there.
What would make them trust you? Usually it is not the thing the client is proudest of. Builders want to show the biggest project; homeowners want to see one like theirs. Agencies want to show awards; clients want to see whether you answer email. Trust is specific, and the site should be specific about it.
Design is expensive to change and strategy is cheap to change, so we do the cheap changing first. A week of honest conversation before we open a design tool routinely saves a month of revisions after. It also produces the thing clients actually wanted when they said website, which is clarity about the business they run.
Our projects start with a short document, rarely more than two pages, that answers the three questions above and lists what the site will and will not do. Everyone signs it. When a request arrives in week five that contradicts it, we can point to the page instead of arguing about taste.
The site that results is smaller than the client imagined and better than they hoped, because every page is there for a reason someone can name. That is the project. The website is where it ends up.
Bring this to your own site
If a note here names something your brand or website is quietly getting wrong, the scorecard will tell you how much it matters and what to fix first.
bring the question you are stuck on. we will tell you what we would do.