A website that looks great but talks to the wrong person won’t get you anywhere. Before anything gets built, we figure out what yours needs to do, and who it needs to do it for.
Before I write a line of code, we talk through two things: what the site actually needs to accomplish for your business, and who’s going to be looking at it. That’s not a formality but rather decides everything downstream, from what pages you need to what your homepage has to say in the first five seconds. This comes standard with every project, no extra charge.
Every project starts with two questions: What does this site need to do? Who does it need to do it for?
Going Deeper (For Bigger Projects)
If your project has more moving parts such as multiple audiences, real competition to stand out from, an online store with a lot of considerations, we can go further before anything gets built. That might mean a look at what similar businesses are doing and where they’re falling short, mapping out how someone actually moves through your site step by step, or working out messaging for more than one type of customer. Most projects don’t need this. The ones that do, it’s available. The payoff isn’t just more research — it’s a design built around who you’re actually trying to reach, not a template.
Plenty of web designers skip straight to the pretty part. I’ve watched that go sideways. It might be a beautiful site nobody could figure out how to use, or one that answered questions nobody was asking. Planning first isn’t bureaucracy, it’s just doing the thinking before the doing, so revisions don’t turn into rebuilds.