Web Development
Website Design That Converts: 9 Things We Check Before Opening Figma
A website that looks beautiful and converts nobody is a common and expensive outcome. The difference is decided before any design begins. These are the nine checks we run first, and the questions they answer.
Most website redesigns start with a mood board. Ours start with a spreadsheet. That is not because we do not care about how a site looks; the HomeNest furniture site is as spacious and image-led as any retailer could want. It is because the look follows from decisions that have to be made first, and when they are skipped the result is a lovely site that does not do its job.
These are the nine checks our website design service runs before a single screen is drawn.
1. What Is the One Thing Each Page Is For?
Every page gets a single primary action: enquire, buy, book, call, download, read on. If a page has three equally weighted buttons it has none. Writing the action for each page in a list, before design, is the single most useful hour in the project. It also reveals the pages that have no purpose and should not exist.
2. Who Is Actually Visiting?
Analytics for the current site, where they exist, tell us the device mix, the entry pages, the searches that bring people and where they leave. A site that gets 70% of its visitors on phones from search results about one service is designed differently from one that gets desktop visitors from a sales team's emails. We ask for this data before anything else; without it the design is a guess.
3. What Proof Do You Have?
Testimonials with names, logos you may use, numbers you can stand behind, awards, accreditations, case studies, photographs of real work and real people. Proof is what converts, and it is usually scattered across emails and old brochures. Gathering it is a project task, not a design afterthought. Where none exists yet, the design leaves honest space for it rather than filling the gap with stock photographs of handshakes.
4. What Must Visitors Be Able to Do?
Book, pay, upload, filter, compare, calculate, log in. Each of these is a feature with its own design and its own technical work, and each changes what the site is. A brochure site with a booking form is a brochure site. A site where booking is the main event is an application, and our custom web development team joins the project from day one.
5. How Fast Must It Be?
Design decides speed more than code does. Full-screen video, six fonts, a carousel of ten high-resolution images and an animation library will produce a slow site no matter how well it is built. We set a performance budget with the client before design: the largest image, the number of fonts, the weight of the page. The speed work we do on existing sites is mostly undoing design decisions that nobody costed.
6. Is It Designed for the Phone First?
Not "does it shrink", but "is the phone version the primary design". Thumb reach for the main action, forms that use the right keyboard, menus that do not need precision, text that is readable without zooming. The desktop version is then an expansion of something that already works, rather than the phone version being a compression of something that does not.
7. What Content Exists, and Who Will Write the Rest?
A content inventory lists every page, what will be on it, where the words and images come from and who is responsible. Sites stall at the point where "the client will supply copy" meets reality. Deciding early whether we write, you write, or we write and you edit removes the most common cause of a late launch.
8. Where Does an Enquiry Go?
A form that nobody answers is a design failure as surely as an ugly one. We map every form and call-to-action to a destination: whose inbox, which CRM, what the auto-reply says, how fast a human responds. If the answer is "nobody is sure", that is fixed before launch, often with the email set up properly so the enquiry actually arrives.
9. How Will We Know It Worked?
Goals in analytics for the actions in check one, a baseline from the current site, and a date to compare. "The new site looks much better" is nice to hear; "enquiries up 40% at the same traffic" is the evidence that the money was well spent. It also tells us what to improve next, because a site is never finished at launch.
Then We Open Figma
With those nine answered, the design brief writes itself, the first concepts are usually close, and the build goes to our front-end developers with no surprises. The checks take a week or two of conversation and cost a fraction of the project; skipping them costs the project. If you are planning a redesign, send us the current site address and we will run the first three checks for free. For what the technical side of a launch needs, keep our technical SEO checklist to hand.
