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Web Design
A website design is a commercial instrument that happens to be visual. It has to load quickly, work on a mid-range phone, communicate what you do within seconds, and keep working when the content changes and the marketing team adds three sections nobody planned for. Design that only looks good in a portfolio screenshot fails all four.
Overview
Design that survives contact with real traffic, real content and real conversion goals.
Design with real content, not placeholder
Layouts designed around neat placeholder text break the moment real content arrives. Headlines that were two words become nine, product names run long, and a design that looked balanced starts collapsing in ways nobody anticipated.
We design with actual copy, or with a genuine approximation of its worst case. That means testing the longest realistic heading, the shortest paragraph, the product with a name twice the length of the others, and the state where a section has one item rather than the three it was drawn with. It produces less immediately impressive mockups and a site that survives its own content.
Hierarchy earns the scroll
Visitors decide within seconds whether a page is relevant, and they decide from a glance rather than a read. What they take in is size, contrast and position — not the carefully written second paragraph.
So the first screen has one clear job: say what this is, who it is for, and what to do next. Every subsequent section should answer the question the previous one raised. Where we see conversion problems that look like traffic-quality problems, the cause is frequently a homepage that describes the company before establishing whether the visitor is in the right place at all.
Performance is a design decision
Most of what makes a site slow is decided in design, not development. A full-width video header, four custom font weights, a carousel of uncompressed images — those are design choices with a measurable cost in load time, and by the time they reach a developer the expensive decisions have already been made.
We treat performance as a constraint during design rather than an optimisation afterwards. Image budgets per template, font subsetting and weight limits, and layouts that reserve space so content does not shift as it loads. This is considerably cheaper than designing freely and then asking someone to make it fast.
Accessible by default
Accessibility is often treated as a compliance exercise added at the end. Treated as a design constraint from the start it costs almost nothing and improves the site for everyone.
Colour contrast that meets standards is also more readable in sunlight on a phone. Proper heading structure helps screen readers and search engines equally. Focus states, adequate touch targets and forms that work with a keyboard are simply better interface design. The overlap between accessible and usable is large enough that treating them separately is mostly a way of doing both worse.
What's included
The scope of the engagement, stated plainly so there is nothing to discover later.
- Discovery covering audience, conversion goals and existing analytics
- Sitemap and page-level content structure before any visual design
- Wireframes for key templates, reviewed before styling begins
- Visual design across desktop, tablet and mobile breakpoints
- Design with real or worst-case content rather than placeholder
- Component and state library, including empty and error states
- Performance budgets set per template during design
- Accessibility standards applied from the start, contrast verified
- Developer handoff with specifications, assets and interaction notes
How we run it
The order matters more than the individual tasks. Doing these out of sequence is what wastes months.
Understand the job
What the site has to achieve commercially, who it serves, and what the current one gets wrong. Existing analytics usually name the problem faster than any workshop.
Structure first
Sitemap, page structure and wireframes agreed before visual design. Rearranging boxes is cheap; rearranging finished pages is not.
Design against constraints
Visual design across breakpoints, with real content, performance budgets and accessibility applied as we go rather than checked afterwards.
Hand off properly
Component specifications, every interaction state, and assets exported correctly — so the build matches the design without a fortnight of clarification.
What you get
Concrete artefacts you keep, whether or not the engagement continues.
- Sitemap and page-level content structure
- Wireframes for all key templates
- Full visual design across three breakpoints
- Component library including empty, loading and error states
- Editable source files, owned by you
- Developer handoff documentation with interaction specifications
- Performance budget and accessibility notes per template
Common questions
The questions that come up most often on discovery calls.
Do you design and build, or design only?
Either. Design-only handoffs go to your developers with specifications complete enough to build from without guesswork. Where we build as well, the two run together, which removes the translation step and usually produces a closer match to the design.
How many revision rounds are included?
Two structured rounds at each stage, which is normally sufficient because we agree structure before styling. Most projects that spiral into endless revisions do so because visual design started before anyone agreed what the pages needed to say.
Can you redesign without changing our brand?
Yes, and it is a common engagement. The site can be restructured for conversion and performance while keeping the existing identity intact. Where the identity itself is causing problems — illegible colour combinations, a logo that fails at small sizes — we will say so and let you decide separately.
Will the new site rank better?
Not automatically, and a redesign can easily rank worse if URLs change without redirects or content is cut. We plan for that explicitly: URL mapping, redirect testing before launch, and content parity checks after. Improvements to speed and structure help, but the protection against loss matters more.
What do you need from us?
Content, or a decision about who is writing it, and this is the most common cause of delay by a wide margin. Also access to analytics, a clear decision-maker, and honesty about what has not worked on the current site. Projects stall on content far more often than on design disagreements.
Related work
This sits inside our Branding practice.
Want this done properly?
Start with a discovery call. We will tell you whether web design is actually your bottleneck, or whether something else should come first.