Our Design Process: Discovery Call to Launch Day

Every agency says 'we have a process'. Most of them mean 'we send you a questionnaire and then disappear for three weeks'. Here's our actual 6-phase process — what happens in each phase, how long it takes, what we need from you, and where projects go wrong when clients and agencies don't align on expectations.

Phase 1: Discovery call (20 minutes, free)

This is not a sales pitch. We ask you six questions: What does your business do? Who is your ideal customer? What's your current website doing wrong? What's your timeline? What's your budget range? Who makes the final design decisions? If the answers tell us we're not the right fit — wrong budget, wrong timeline, wrong scope — we say so and refer you elsewhere. We turn down roughly 40% of discovery calls. That's not a flex. It's how we protect your time and ours.

Phase 2: Research and strategy (3-5 days)

We audit your current site (PageSpeed, SEO, accessibility, mobile UX), analyze your top 3 competitors' sites, and interview 2-3 of your existing customers if possible. The output is a one-page strategy brief: what's working, what's broken, what your competitors do better, and what we recommend. You approve the strategy before any design work starts. This is the checkpoint that prevents 'I thought you were building something different' conversations later.

What we need from you in this phase

• Access to your Google Analytics and Search Console (viewer permissions are fine).
• Names of 2-3 customers willing to do a 10-minute phone interview.
• Your top 3 competitors — the ones you actually lose deals to, not the ones you admire.
• Any brand guidelines, logo files, or color preferences you already have.

Phase 3: Design (5-8 days)

We design the homepage and one interior page as high-fidelity mockups. Not wireframes — finished designs with real copy, real images, real colors. You see exactly what the site will look like before we write a line of code. Two rounds of revisions are included. 'Revisions' means adjustments to what exists — moving a section, changing a color, rewriting a headline. It does not mean 'start over with a completely different concept'. If the direction is fundamentally wrong, we go back to Phase 2, not forward to revision 3.

Phase 4: Development (7-12 days)

We build in Next.js with Tailwind CSS, deployed on Vercel. The site is responsive from day one — we don't build desktop-first and then 'make it mobile'. Every page is built mobile-first and expanded upward. You get a staging URL on day 1 of development. You can see progress in real time. We push updates daily. If something looks wrong at staging, you flag it immediately — not at the end.

What's included in every build

• Core Web Vitals optimization — LCP under 2.5s, CLS under 0.1, INP under 200ms.
• SEO fundamentals — meta tags, Open Graph, sitemap, robots.txt, schema markup.
• Accessibility — WCAG 2.2 AA compliance, keyboard navigation, screen reader testing.
• Analytics setup — Google Analytics 4 + Search Console, configured before launch.
• Contact form with spam protection (honeypot + rate limiting, not CAPTCHA).

Phase 5: QA and client review (2-3 days)

We test on 6 device sizes (iPhone SE, iPhone 15, iPad, iPad Pro, 1440p laptop, 1080p desktop), 3 browsers (Chrome, Safari, Firefox), and 2 screen readers (VoiceOver on Mac, NVDA on Windows). We run Lighthouse, axe-core, and a manual keyboard-only walkthrough. The client gets a QA checklist with pass/fail for every test. Any failures are fixed before launch — no exceptions, no 'we'll fix it after go-live'.

Phase 6: Launch and handoff (1 day)

DNS cutover, SSL verification, redirect map for any changed URLs (critical for SEO — broken redirects tank rankings), and a 30-minute handoff call. The handoff call covers: how to update content, how to check analytics, who to contact if something breaks, and what maintenance looks like going forward. We also submit the new sitemap to Google Search Console and request indexing for the top 5 pages.

Total timeline: 3-5 weeks

Most delays come from Phase 3 — design approvals. If you respond to mockups within 48 hours, the project stays on the 3-week track. If approvals take a week each round, you're at 5 weeks. We can't control approval speed, but we can tell you upfront: the single biggest thing you can do to keep your project on time is respond to design reviews within 2 business days.

A good process isn't one where nothing goes wrong. It's one where you know exactly where you are and what happens next at every point.