Design that answers the visitor’s question.
Planned around what people are actually trying to do when they arrive — then made to look like it was made on purpose.
Website design gets talked about as though it were decoration: colours, fonts, a nice hero image. That is the last ten percent. The other ninety is a series of decisions about what a visitor sees, in what order, and what you want them to do about it.
A template has already made every one of those decisions, for a generic business that is not yours. That is fine until your business does something a template did not anticipate — an unusual service mix, a customer who needs reassuring before they call, a product that needs explaining. Then you spend the next two years fighting the layout.
Custom design makes those decisions deliberately. Clause 02, the build that follows, turns them into code that stays fast and stays maintainable.
The four decisions design makes
In this order. Each constrains the next, which is why doing them out of order produces a site that looks good and works badly.
- 01.1
What goes on which page
Information architecture, before any visual work. Which questions deserve their own page, which are sections, and what a visitor should find within two clicks. Get this wrong and no amount of visual polish rescues it — people leave because they could not find the thing, not because the gradient was wrong.
- 01.2
What a visitor sees first
Content hierarchy on every template. The first screen has to answer what you do, who for, and what to do next. Everything below it earns its position by supporting one of those three. Anything that supports none of them is decoration and comes out.
- 01.3
How someone gets from interested to in touch
Conversion paths. Every page ends somewhere deliberate rather than trailing off. One clear primary action per screen — a page with four competing buttons has no call to action at all, it has a menu.
- 01.4
How it behaves on a phone in one hand
Responsive design, drawn mobile-first rather than squeezed down afterwards. Most small business traffic is mobile, often on a mid-range Android on a bad connection. That is the design target, not a 27-inch monitor.
What people come to us with
Four symptoms, and what is usually underneath them.
- Visitors land and leave without doing anything
- Usually the first screen does not say what the business does in plain words, or there is no obvious next step. Sometimes there are five next steps, which is the same problem.
- People phone to ask things the site already answers
- The answer exists but is buried three levels down, or written in language the customer does not use. A content hierarchy problem, not a content problem.
- It looks fine on your laptop and broken on a phone
- A desktop layout adapted downward. Tap targets end up too small, text overflows, and forms become unusable exactly where most of your traffic is.
- Every new page looks slightly different from the last
- No design system. Each page was designed in isolation, so spacing, type, and buttons drift. The site stops looking designed and starts looking assembled.
Accessible by default, not on request
Colour contrast, focus states, real form labels, sensible heading order, and a layout that survives someone bumping their browser text size to 150%. These are design decisions, made while designing — retrofitting them later means redoing the design.
It is also not a niche concern. Text that clears contrast is easier for everyone to read outdoors on a phone, and a keyboard-navigable form is a form that works when a tap misses.
Brand consistency without a brand manual
Most small businesses do not have a brand guide, and do not need one. What they need is for the site to be internally consistent: the same spacing, the same button, the same type scale on every page, so nothing looks bolted on.
You get a documented design system as part of the work — a short reference covering colour, type, spacing, and components. It is what makes page eleven look like it belongs with page one.
- 01Real content firstDesigns are reviewed with your actual copy, never placeholder text. Lorem ipsum hides every problem a headline will cause.
- 02Mobile before desktopEach template is drawn at a narrow width first. If it works there, widening it is easy; the reverse rarely is.
- 03Two review roundsStructured feedback on a shared link, consolidated into one round of changes each time — not a drip of one-off requests.
- 04States, not just screensHover, focus, error, empty, and loading are specified before build. They are where most sites quietly fall apart.
What you receive, and what you do not
Named artefacts on the left. On the right, the limits of this clause — printed beside the scope rather than in a later document.
- A sitemap and page-by-page content plan — included
- Designs for every template the site needs, at mobile and desktop widths — included
- A documented design system: colour, type, spacing, components — included
- Annotated states — hover, focus, error, empty, loading — included
- Source files and full ownership of the design — included
Everything above is handed over in your own accounts and stays yours. See when each piece arrives.
- Copywriting — you get a brief per page saying what it must cover — not included
- Logo design, brand identity, and naming — not included
- Photography, illustration, and video production — not included
- Stock photography licences, unless quoted as a line item — not included
- Print, packaging, or any non-web collateral — not included
- Design for a platform we are not also building — not included
If you need one of these, say so at discovery and it gets quoted as its own line — never absorbed silently and billed later.
No references yet
Case studies are published as projects finish and clients approve what can be shown. Nothing is invented in the meantime.
Read first
- 01How much does a website cost?What actually drives the price of a business website — scope, page count, content, integrations, and custom design — and how to read a quote you have been given.
- 02What pages should a small business website have?The pages a small business site genuinely needs, the ones that are usually a waste, and how to structure them so both visitors and search engines can follow.
Start a design project.
Describe the business and what is not working. You get a straight answer on whether clause 01 is the right fit, what it involves, and what it costs.