A Website Doesn’t Start with Design.
“You are so talented.”
I’ve heard that for fifteen years. I no longer think talent has much to do with good websites. A good website is not a stroke of inspiration. It follows a sequence: strategy → brand → structure → design → build → SEO → automation → launch.
In fifteen years the tools have changed, the trends have looped twice, and my process has been refined more than once. Here’s what each step actually involves.
1. Start with strategy, not design
I sit with the client and ask the questions nobody expects from a web designer:
If your business disappeared tomorrow, who would actually miss it, and why?
If I covered your logo, could anyone tell your website from your competitor’s?
What are you not willing to compete on?
What would you hate to be called?
Clients often arrive with answers that sound right but fall apart after one or two follow-up questions. I challenge those assumptions and pull them out of their day-to-day bubble. When you’re too close to something, it’s hard to see clearly. Strategy needs perspective.
Then I research the market: where everyone else sits, visually and verbally. Standing out only works if you know what you’re standing out from. By the end of this phase, we have the brand strategy: the positioning, the brand promise, and the target audience defined as a clear user persona. This is the foundation. If it’s wobbly here, no amount of beautiful design will hold the website up.
2. Define the brand visual language
Once the strategy is clear, the visual brand system follows from it. Not the other way around.
Typography. I can spend hours on a single pairing. The body font has to be invisible — comfortable to read for a long time. The heading font has to do all the personality work without making the body feel out of place.
Colour palette. A primary brand colour, supporting colours, a neutral, and a clear accent for buttons and calls to action. Each colour given a role and used in that role consistently.
Imagery. Photography style, illustration approach. The rules for what an on-brand image looks like and what does not belong.
Supporting assets. Patterns, textures, graphic devices — this can be the main asset that gives a brand its own visual fingerprint.
All the rules and assets go into the brandbook. The brandbook is the standard the website is built against, the reference anyone working on the brand in the future has to follow to keep the brand consistent across every touchpoint. Doing the brand visual language first means the website is an application of the brand, not the source of it.
3. Map the content and the site structure
With the strategy and brand visual language in place, I still do not open the design tool. I map the site first.
A sitemap is just the list of pages and how they connect. We determine what each page actually needs to say, in what order, and how the user flow moves from one page to the next. The content does not need to be written yet, but the shape of it has to exist — otherwise I am designing empty containers and the client is filling them later with whatever fits. That always ends badly.
A few things I always work out at this stage:
What pages will the client update regularly? Those pages get a CMS, so the client can manage them independently without breaking the design.
What is the most important action — book a call, buy, sign up? I make sure it is reachable from every page in one click.
Does every page have a job? If a page does not have a clear purpose, it does not belong on the site.
This is also the moment to decide what not to build. Most websites have too many pages, not too few. A focused 5-page site will outperform a sprawling 15-page site every time, because visitors can actually find what they need — and because every page on a website is a page somebody has to maintain.
By the end of this step, I have a sitemap, a navigation structure, CMS, and a content plan for each page. Now I am ready to open the website builder.
4. Design the home page as the system
Now, finally, I open my design tools. Here is my creative stack:
Wix Studio My main design and development environment, where the website comes to life with responsive layouts, interactions and animations.
Affinity For graphic design, image editing and creating custom visual assets.
Brik
AI tool for creative interactions and adding unexpected details to the website.
I always design from scratch. It is the slowest, most expensive route, and the only one that produces work nothing else can match. But I know that is not the right answer for every business, but neither am I.
The home page is the most demanding page on the site. It has to introduce the brand, communicate the offering, show the personality, surface the most important content, and lead the visitor towards the main action, all on one page.
It is the page where the visual decisions are tested and where the design system is set. Once it works here, every other page is built using the same rules.
What I am actually deciding at this stage:
Type scale and heading structure. I choose the right sizes for H1, H2, H3, body, captions.
Buttons. This is my favourite part, the little things I like to design to perfection, adding branded micro-interactions.
Spacing rules. A baseline grid for gaps between sections, padding inside sections, and the rhythm of the page.
Layout logic. How sections stack, how content sits inside them, where the page breathes.
Visual hierarchy. In every section, the most important thing is the visually loudest thing. If everything is loud, nothing is.
Every screen the visitor scrolls into should communicate one thing. The job of a good UX is to make decisions easily — what to read, what to click, what to do next.
Copy is a big part of the design process. I read it, shape it, and make it work with the design — adjusting for clarity, flow, and tone of voice.
I do not move on until the home page is genuinely finished on all screen sizes — desktop, tablet, mobile. Each breakpoint is its own design decision: the layout is rearranged, animations are adjusted, hover interactions too, and everything should scale properly. Once the home page works across all breakpoints, the rest of the site inherits those rules — every page already knows how to behave on every screen.
5. Apply the system to the rest of the site
By the time the home page is finished, most design decisions have been made. Each page has its own job and its own content, but the visual language is shared. That is how we keep consistency — another main principle of website design.
This is also the stage where I work on the CMS, install and adjust all necessary widgets and plugins, so the website stops being a set of static pages and starts being a functional system.
I prefer systems that reduce complexity instead of adding to it. The less patchwork behind the scenes, the easier the site is to maintain, scale, and hand over confidently to the client.
Wix is an all-in-one platform: CMS, forms, bookings, store, email marketing, automations, and analytics are all native and connected. There is no patchwork of third-party tools to break, no plugins to update, no compatibility issues to manage. I want my clients to be able to manage their website themselves after launch, and that matters more than any individual feature. Here you can find more reasons why I chose Wix Studio among other platforms.
6. SEO and accessibility
Once the site is built and the content is in, I take care of SEO and accessibility. The same things that make a website readable to a search engine make it usable for someone navigating with a screen reader:
Clear headings in the right hierarchy — one H1 per page, H2s for sections, H3s underneath.
Descriptive alt text on every image.
Clean URLs that match the page content.
Meta titles and descriptions on every page, written for humans first and search engines second.
Colour contrast that meets accessibility standards.
I use Claude to draft the meta titles and descriptions — it scans each page and gives the right summary, which saves a lot of repetitive work without compromising on quality.
I make sure all pages are indexed and visible to Google.
I do not play the keyword-chasing game. My focus is on meaningful content that connects with real people, which is also what Google rewards.
Accessibility is not optional, and it is often overlooked. A site that is not accessible excludes a significant portion of its potential audience, fails legal requirements in many countries, and quietly tells visitors with disabilities that they were not considered.
None of that is acceptable on a professional website.
Anything beyond this is a separate job — ongoing SEO, content marketing, audits. Those are separate budgets.
7. Automations
This is the step where I set up the automations that connect the site to the rest of the business. The goal is simple: remove friction, reduce manual work, and make the system run itself. A good website handles the routine work, so the client can spend their time on the parts of the business that actually need them.
A few examples of what I set up by default:
Email automations. Confirmation emails, follow-ups, thank-yous, abandoned-cart reminders if it is a shop, lead-nurture sequences if it is a service business.
Internal notifications. Every new lead, booking, or order pings the client where they actually work — usually email, sometimes Slack or a project tool.
Content sync. A blog post or new portfolio item published once, appearing across the site, the newsletter, and the social channels without anyone touching it again.
CRM and calendar connections. New contacts go straight into the client's CRM. New bookings appear on their calendar with the right buffer time around them.
Done well, the client launches the site and immediately gets time back. That is a different kind of value from how the site looks and often the kind clients appreciate most a few months in.
8. Testing and launch
A website is never ready the first time you think it is. Honestly, there is always something: a broken link, a form sending to the wrong inbox, a section that looks fine on desktop and breaks on mobile.
Before anything goes live, my team and I run through a full pre-launch checklist we have built and refined over the years. It is a studio standard now — every project goes through it, every time.
Nothing launches without it.
I made the checklist available as a free resource — you can download it here if you want the full version.
Fun fact: most of our launches happen on a Friday. It just keeps working out that way. And I think Friday is the best day for it — weeks or months of strategy, design, content, builds, and revisions, all landing on one afternoon.
I have launched hundreds of websites, and it is the same bittersweet moment when the client opens the live URL for the first time. For the client, it is day one. For me, it is goodbye. You spend weeks inside someone else's brand — thinking about it, sleeping on it, fixing it in your head on the way to the coffee shop — and then one Friday, you hand it over and walk away.
