Most websites are judged on the wrong question. “Do you like it?” is easy to answer and tells you almost nothing. The question that matters is: does a stranger who lands here understand what you do, believe you can do it, and know what to do next?
Here are eight principles that separate sites that sell from sites that merely exist.
A visitor decides in a few seconds whether they’re in the right place. In that window, a clever headline that requires interpretation loses to a plain one that doesn’t.
Say what you do, for whom, and what it changes. “Brand identity for growing manufacturers” beats “Reimagining tomorrow, together.” The clever line feels like brand work. The clear line is brand work.
Every page should have one thing you most want the visitor to do. Every additional competing button reduces the odds of any of them being pressed.
This is uncomfortable, because it means choosing. A page offering “Get a quote”, “Download the catalogue”, “Subscribe” and “Follow us” with equal weight has effectively offered nothing. Pick the one that matters and let the rest be secondary.
A site that takes four seconds to load has lost a meaningful share of its visitors before they saw the design. And nobody who leaves tells you why — you just see a bounce.
Speed isn’t something you optimise at the end. It’s a series of decisions made throughout: how many images, how large, how many fonts, how much script. A gorgeous 8 MB hero image is not a design win.
Nobody buys from a stranger. The site has to answer the questions the visitor is too polite to ask: who are you, have you done this before, does anyone else trust you?
Real client names. Real work. Real photographs of real people. A physical address and a phone number that a human answers. Every fabricated testimonial and stock photo of a smiling call-centre model does the opposite of what it intends — buyers recognise them instantly, and recognition of fakery is recognition that something is being hidden.
Most of your visitors are on a phone, standing up, half-distracted, with one thumb. Your site was probably designed on a large monitor, sitting down, with full attention.
That gap is where conversions die. Small tap targets, forms that require pinch-zoom, menus that need precision — each one quietly costs you a customer. Design the phone version first and the desktop version becomes easy.
A visitor who is interested but not ready will not fill in a fourteen-field form. Every field you add reduces the number of people who finish.
Ask for the minimum you need to have a conversation. You can learn the rest in the conversation. And tell people what happens next — “we reply within one business day” removes the fear of shouting into a void.
Nobody reads a web page. They scan it, and read the parts that survive the scan.
That means real headings that describe what follows. Short paragraphs. The conclusion before the reasoning, not after. A wall of justified text may look considered; it will not be read.
A site that nobody can find has no conversion rate to optimise. Search visibility is not a plugin you install afterwards — it’s structure, speed, content and clarity, which are the same things that make the site good for humans.
And search itself has changed. People increasingly ask an AI rather than scroll through ten links. Being present in that answer is a separate discipline from ranking on Google — we cover it under AI search visibility.
Show your site to someone who has never heard of your company. Give them five seconds, then take it away and ask three questions: what do we do, who is it for, and what would you do next?
If they can’t answer, the problem isn’t the shade of blue.
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