Websites.
Fast, distinctive, conversion-focused sites — and the design decisions that decide whether they work.
40 articles · See the Websites & Brand service →
When your homepage has to serve two audiences
Buyers and existing customers want opposite things from the same page. Splitting it badly is worse than choosing.
Blog structure: categories, tags, and what to skip
Most blogs have too many taxonomies and too little structure. What a library actually needs once it passes fifty articles.
Writing a headline that survives a skeptical buyer
Most headlines are a category description with adjectives. Four tests that separate the ones that work from the ones that were approved.
Landing pages vs your main site
Separate landing pages win on campaigns and quietly build a second, worse website. Where the line belongs.
Which trust signals actually work
A wall of logos is decoration. What buyers are checking is narrower and easier to satisfy than most sites assume.
How to redesign without losing your search traffic
The traffic drop after a relaunch is almost always self-inflicted, and almost always the same four causes.
How to design a pricing page that doesn’t lose people
The most visited page on most sites, and the one most likely to be built as a wall of comparison. What buyers are actually doing there.
Microcopy: buttons, labels and error messages
The smallest words on the site do the most work, and they’re usually the only ones nobody was assigned to write.
Does a marketing site need search?
Under thirty pages, almost certainly not — a search box is a confession that your navigation failed. Past a hundred, it’s essential.
Which contact options should you actually offer?
Offering every channel looks generous and creates four queues you answer inconsistently. Choose deliberately.
What to actually measure on a marketing site
Sessions and bounce rate feel like measurement and change no decisions. Five numbers that do.
How to structure a site that sells several things
Five services on one page means none of them ranks or converts. The structure that lets each stand alone without fragmenting the brand.
The legal pages nobody wants to write
Privacy, terms and cookies get copied from another site the night before launch. Three reasons that is a bad idea, and what to do instead.
Does above the fold still matter?
People scroll now, so the old rule is dead. What replaced it is stricter, not looser.
Why your case studies don’t convince anyone
They read as advertising because they are structured as advertising. The fix is specificity that would be embarrassing to fake.
Why your site is slower for real users than in your tests
Your test runs on a fast machine, near the server, with an empty cache and no extensions. Almost none of that is true for your visitors.
Who should be able to edit the website?
Lock it down and nothing gets updated. Open it up and the design erodes in a quarter. The answer is different per type of content.
The URL decisions you can’t undo cheaply
URLs are the one part of a site that other people copy, save and link to. Four choices worth getting right the first time.
Photography, illustration, or neither?
Stock photography of people at laptops is a decision to look like everyone else. Three alternatives, and when nothing is best.
Your navigation is a positioning decision
The top-level items are the shortest description of what your company is. Most are an org chart instead.
Consent banners and what they cost you
The first thing most visitors see is a legal obstacle. You can’t remove it, but most sites make it far worse than it needs to be.
Is a newsletter worth it for a services business?
It is the one audience you own outright. It is also a recurring obligation most firms abandon by issue four.
The anatomy of a site that converts in 2026
Speed, clarity, and a point of view. A teardown of what actually moves the needle on a modern marketing site.
Writing a homepage, in the right order
Most homepages are written top to bottom, which is why the headline is vague. Start at the end.
Your homepage has one job. Most homepages have six.
Every stakeholder wants their section above the fold. The discipline of choosing one action, and how to survive the meeting where you defend it.
404s and the long tail of old links
People link to pages you deleted years ago. Those visitors are still arriving, and most sites greet them with a dead end.
The form is where you lose them
Every field is a chance to leave. What to ask, what to cut, and why your qualification questions belong somewhere else.
Is dark mode worth building?
For an app people live in, often yes. For a marketing site, it doubles your design surface to serve a preference most visitors won’t notice.
The about page nobody reads
Except they do — it’s often the second page a serious buyer opens. It’s just that yours is written for nobody in particular.
How often should you redesign your site?
Less often than agencies suggest and more often than you’re doing. The trigger should be a reason, not a birthday.
How to structure a services page buyers can compare
Buyers are comparing you whether you help them or not. A page that makes it easy wins more than one that makes it flattering.
When video helps on a marketing site
It is the heaviest thing you can add and occasionally the most persuasive. Three cases where it earns the weight.
Brand systems for companies that don’t want to look like everyone else
Category conventions are a safe way to be forgotten. How to build a distinctive system that still works at speed.
The pre-launch checklist
Fourteen things worth checking before a site goes live, ordered by how much damage they do when missed.
What actually drives the cost of a website
Quotes for the same brief vary enormously, and it is rarely about design quality. Six variables explain most of the spread.
What actually makes a site fast in 2026
Not your framework. Five decisions account for nearly all of the difference between a fast site and a slow one.
Design systems for teams that don’t have a design team
You don’t need component documentation and a governance model. You need eight decisions written down where people will find them.
What actually breaks on mobile
Responsive layout solved the easy half a decade ago. The failures that remain are about touch, text and what you hid.
Accessibility is a conversion feature
Argued as compliance it gets deferred forever. Argued as the reason people can complete your form, it gets done.
Images are the slowest thing on your site
And the usual fix — an on-the-fly transformation service — trades a size problem for a latency and billing problem.