The method
Six stages. Each one hands you something.
Process is how a website avoids becoming beautiful nonsense. Every stage below produces a defined output — not a status update, an actual thing you receive and can judge.
- 1
Diagnose
Establish what the current site is actually costing.
Before anything is designed, the existing presence is read the way a customer reads it: on a phone, in a hurry, with three competitors open. The output is a written diagnosis of what is weak, what is worth keeping, and what the gap is costing in enquiries.
Output
Written diagnosis
A short document you can act on even if you never proceed.
- 2
Structure
Decide the message and the journey before the visuals.
Hierarchy, page architecture, the order in which trust is built, and the path from arrival to enquiry. This is where most website projects go wrong — decoration applied to a structure nobody agreed on.
Output
Agreed architecture
A sitemap and page-by-page purpose you sign off before design starts.
- 3
Design
Art direction applied to a structure that already works.
Typography, colour, spacing, imagery and motion, developed as one system rather than page by page. Designed at mobile width first, because that is where most of the traffic will read it.
Output
Design direction
Real screens with your real content — never a template preview.
- 4
Build
Built as a system, not a stack of pages.
Components, accessible markup, and content that can be edited after handover without breaking the design. Performance and accessibility are constraints during the build, not a pass at the end of it.
Output
Working site
A staging URL you can use, share and pick holes in.
- 5
Refine
Tested on real devices, at real widths.
Keyboard navigation, screen-reader labels, reduced-motion behaviour, slow connections, small phones and large monitors. Every issue found is fixed and re-tested rather than noted and shipped.
Output
Verified build
The test results, including anything deliberately left as-is and why.
- 6
Launch
Migrate without throwing away what you built up.
Redirect mapping so existing search positions survive, metadata and structured data in place, analytics verified, and post-launch checks against the live site rather than the staging one.
Output
Live and monitored
A launch record, and a rollback path if anything needs reversing.
Standards
The rules the work is held to.
Nothing is added without a reason
Every section, animation and control has to justify the attention and the load time it costs. If it cannot, it does not ship.
Structure before surface
A beautiful site built on a confused structure is a more expensive version of the same problem.
Mobile is the design, not the adaptation
The small screen is where the decision usually gets made, so it is where the design starts.
The build has to survive handover
A site you cannot update without breaking is not finished, however good it looks on launch day.