How the work
actually runs.

Before any design or development happens, we sit down, in person where possible, on a call where not, and work out what your business actually needs the website to do. Not what websites usually look like. Not what your competitor has. What customers do when they land on your site, what you want them to do, and what currently stops them.

By the end of the conversation, I write up a one-page brief. Pages, content responsibilities (what you supply, what I draft), the timeline, the price, and the success criteria. You sign that brief before any design work begins. That document becomes the contract, anything outside it is quoted as a separate change.

I plan the structure of the site. Sitemap (what pages exist), URL structure (where they live), page briefs (what each page needs to say and to whom), and the local SEO map, what searches each page should be findable for, what schema markup it needs, how it ties into your Google Business Profile.

Almost no agency shares this map with clients because it looks too simple. We share it with you because the simplicity is the point: if the structure makes sense to you, you will be able to maintain the site after launch.

Copy gets drafted before the design. This is unusual, most agencies design pages first with lorem ipsum then 'add the copy' later. The result is layouts that do not fit real content, copy retrofitted to fit boxes, and a site that reads like it was designed for a different business.

I shape the page brief and, where you want it, draft the copy from a short interview with you. You answer a handful of questions, I write the pages, you approve. Either way, the words come first.

Visual design happens on the actual website, not as a separate Figma artefact you have to imagine on a website later. By mid-week 2 the homepage exists in your browser on a private preview URL. You scroll it, click it, see it on your phone, and respond. We iterate. The design is shaped by how it actually feels, which is how the visitor will experience it too.

We focus on the four jobs a small business website needs to do: explain what you do, prove you are credible, make it obvious where you work, and tell the visitor how to get in touch. Decoration earns its place by helping with one of those four jobs.

Most of the build is happening alongside the design, modern static-site tools (Astro, in our case) blur the line between 'design' and 'build' to the point that they are nearly the same activity. By the end of week 3, every page is real, every link works, every form submits, every image is sized correctly, every page has the right schema markup and metadata.

Performance is baked in at this stage, image optimisation, font loading, code structure. The target is sub-2-second mobile load time, and we hit it before launch rather than treating performance as a fix-it-later problem.

Final QA on real devices (not just browser dev tools, actual phones, actual tablets). Redirects from your old site mapped out so existing rankings and any incoming links keep working. Google Analytics and Search Console connected. Schema submitted. Domain switched, SSL verified, indexing requested.

Then the 14-day snagging window opens, anything you spot in those two weeks is fixed under the launch price. After that, the site moves into Care (if you are on a plan) or you have a clean, documented site that can run itself for years.