01 — The position
A beautiful site that does not convert is an expensive brochure.
Three things we believe, all of which change what we draw.
Nobody reads. Everybody scans, and then scrolls.
The old rule was to cram everything above the fold. That rule died with the feed. People scroll for metres a day without complaint, as long as the scroll is guided. What kills a page is not length, it is sameness: when every section is built the same way, the eye stops scanning around section four. So we vary section shape on purpose, and we put the answer before the argument.
Too clean can cost you the sale.
This is the one clients argue with. In corporate and regulated categories, a page stripped down to a headline and a button can read as a shell company. The visitor is asking “is this a real organisation, and who authorised them”, and empty space does not answer it. The fix is not clutter. It is putting accreditation, proof and specifics into a hierarchy, so the page stays calm and still answers the question.
The menu is a map. The homepage is the guide.
People use a menu to find something they already decided to look for, and occasionally to browse. Burying a decisive page in a dropdown and calling it “available” means most visitors never see it. We treat the homepage as the summary of the site and the menu as the index of it, and we never let those two do the same job.
02 — Inputs
We read before we draw.
A redesign brief that starts with “we want something modern” is a brief about taste, and taste arguments have no ending. So the first two weeks of a project produce no design at all. They produce a reading of what is already happening on your site.
Behaviour
GA4: which pages people enter on, where they leave, which pages get abandoned in seconds, and where the journey breaks between two steps that were supposed to connect.
Demand
Search Console: impressions against position. A page ranking eighth on a term with real volume is not a content problem, it is a page waiting to be finished.
Language
Your CRM notes and an export of every message sent through your contact forms. This is the highest value input in the list and almost nobody reads it. Customers describe their problem in their own words, for free, at scale.
Inventory
A sheet with every URL, title, meta description and parent section, before anything is touched. It is the migration map and the reason nothing quietly disappears.
The keyword list gets ranked by commercial intent against the gap to page one, not by search volume. Volume tells you how many people are looking. It does not tell you whether any of them buy.
Row three is the point. A page sitting at position 44 on a term with 8,400 searches a month is invisible, and it had been invisible for years. No amount of visual redesign finds it. Reading the data does.
03 — Methodology
Eight phases, in this order, every time.
The order matters more than any individual step. Most failed redesigns are not badly executed. They are executed in the wrong sequence, with the visual language locked before anyone knows what the page has to say.
Inventory and preservation
Every URL, title, meta description and parent section into one sheet. Indexed pages checked against what is actually in the sitemap. Anything whose address will change gets a redirect entry before the change is made.
RuleNothing is deleted. A redesign relocates and restructures content; it does not remove it. Years of search equity live in pages nobody on the client side remembers writing.
Evidence
Analytics, Search Console, form exports, CRM notes, heatmaps where they exist. The output is a list of problems ranked by how much traffic touches them, not a list of opinions.
RuleA finding without a number attached is a preference. We label it as one.
Architecture and flow
What the site is routed by, what belongs in navigation, what belongs on the homepage, and what a visitor is holding in their head at each step. For business audiences we route by the concrete thing the visitor is — their sector, their product, their stage — not by how they feel.
RuleMotivation-based navigation fails for B2B. Buyers arrive with several motivations at once and one operational question.
Content and the CTA system
Every page gets the call to action that matches where its reader actually is. Someone reading a definition page is not ready to start; someone comparing requirements is. Same site, different ask.
Rule“Contact us” and “Learn more” are banned, and so is any CTA unrelated to the page it sits on. A generic button on a specific page is a defect, not a placeholder.
Interface and design system
Type scale for desktop and for mobile, spacing scale, colour set, button and link states with their hover behaviour, sticky header, breadcrumb, favicon, social share images. Defined once, before pages get drawn.
RuleIf 16px exists, 17px does not. Near-duplicate styles are how a design system dies in month three.
Build
Hand-off is a document, not a meeting: widths, states, typography, spacing, assets, the images that are painful to export, the videos. Changes made after the developer starts are marked on the design where they happen, so nobody builds last week’s version.
RuleWhen the mockup and the design system disagree, the system wins and the mockup gets corrected.
Test week
Humans first. Each of us takes five pages and walks them twice, once as a customer trying to buy and once as a tester trying to break. Then the faults we found by hand become a written prompt, and that prompt runs across every page on the site. Every process is repeated on a phone, because most of them will happen on a phone.
RuleMachine testing runs second, never first. It is very good at finding the twentieth instance of a fault and poor at noticing the first.
Launch and measure
Pre-launch: duplicate H1s, hreflang, the same content living at two addresses, empty links, form required states, error messages, confirmation emails, spam protection, clickable phone and address, social share images, analytics carried across from the old property. Post-launch: sitemap submitted, 404 log switched on and watched, redirects verified against what Google actually has indexed.
RuleA launch is a measurement start date. If we cannot tell you in month two what changed, we did not launch, we just published.
04 — What changed
AI did not replace the designer. It removed the sampling limit.
For twenty years, auditing a website meant auditing a sample of it. You checked ten pages out of a hundred and fifty and hoped the other hundred and forty behaved. That constraint shaped the whole craft, and it is gone.
Brief as a system
Written context, with an order of authority
Each client has a standing brief: audience, buying roles, banned claims, locked design decisions, the four hypotheses driving the work. It states which document wins when two of them disagree. Any figure the client has not confirmed is written as a literal PENDING token, so an unverified number cannot slip into a live page by accident.
Compounding
Every mistake becomes a written rule
We keep two rule files, one for design and one for development, and every recurring fault gets added to them. Do not define a new text style when a near-identical one exists. Do not put a dark background in a hero. Apply the button hover we built to every button you produce. The rules travel to the next project, so month one of a new client starts where the last one finished.
Noise control
We tell it what not to report
Our test prompt is mostly exclusions: skip alt attributes, skip heading hierarchy, skip filenames, skip minor grammar, ignore the stock photography, ignore the staging domain. Those are handled elsewhere. What we want back is contrast failures, contradictions between related pages, dead links, missing structured data. A report with 400 items in it reports nothing.
Discipline
The machine never gets the last word
Output is treated as a draft with an unknown error rate. We cross-check anything that will be published, we ask the same question framed positively and framed negatively to see whether the answer moves, and we ask it to defend the answer. Alt text written by a model gets reviewed by a person opening the actual image, because a plausible description of the wrong photograph is worse than no description.
The new channel
In 2026 a traffic source appeared that did not exist in 2024: AI assistants. 760 sessions so far this year, converting at 2.11%. Organic search on the same property converted at 0.43%.
Small volume, high intent, no search result page in between. So we build for a reader that is not a person: content in the HTML rather than loaded by script, structured data where the page answers a question, and headings that describe rather than perform.
05 — Case
American Halal Foundation, 59 months.
A US halal certification body serving manufacturers worldwide. We built their site in 2021 and have run it since, without a gap: 156 pages including Chinese and Spanish localisations, 290 articles, and a certification application at the end of it. In 2026 we rebuilt it on a new stack, and that rebuild is in final testing now.
Sessions by year — GA4
2026 covers 8.2 months to 8 September.
The paid search reversal, the year-by-year table, and what changed about the application form.
06 — Working together
Three shapes, and one of them is not a project.
One to two weeks
Read only
We do phases 01 and 02 and stop. You get the inventory, the evidence, a prioritised problem list and an honest answer about whether a rebuild is worth it. Some sites do not need one. Two of ours did not, and we said so.
Phased, fixed scope
Rebuild
All eight phases, delivered in phases rather than as one launch date. American Halal Foundation ran as two build phases plus separate work on its sister brand, so the site kept earning while it was being replaced.
Monthly, open-ended
Retainer
The one that actually produces the numbers on this page. A site is not a deliverable, it is a position that decays. Our longest retainer has run 59 months without a break, and most of the compounding above happened in year three and later.
Always
How we argue
We do not implement requests we think will hurt the site without saying so first. You will get the reasoning, an alternative, and then your decision carried out properly if you still want it. Technical things get explained in plain language, because a client who understands the trade-off makes better calls than one who is being managed.
