One of the first questions people ask when starting a new website project is:
“What do we want it to look like?” It’s understandable. Websites are visual things. People naturally start thinking about colours, layouts, imagery and examples they’ve seen elsewhere.
The problem is that websites aren’t there to be admired. They’re there to communicate and that’s where a lot of projects go slightly off course. Over the years, we’ve lost count of the number of times we’ve sat down with a business to discuss a new website, only to discover that the real challenge isn’t the design at all.
It’s the message. The business has evolved. The services have changed. The audience has grown.
The company knows exactly what it does and why it’s good at it, but translating that into clear, simple language is proving surprisingly difficult.
At that point, the design isn’t really the priority because if you’re not sure what you’re trying to say, it’s very difficult to know how the website should look.
Think about it this way. Imagine you’re designing a billboard. You wouldn’t start by choosing the colours of the background before deciding what the billboard actually needs to communicate.
You’d start with the message. Only then would you think about how to present it. Websites work in much the same way.
Yet it’s incredibly common for businesses to spend weeks discussing layouts before they’ve agreed on the words that will sit on them. The irony is that most website visitors aren’t arriving to admire the design. They’re arriving because they have a question.
Can this company help me? Do they offer what I’m looking for? Can I trust them? What happens next?
Every page on your website is either helping answer those questions or creating more uncertainty. And uncertainty is where websites start to lose people.
One of the most revealing parts of any website project is the copywriting stage. Not because writing is difficult, although it often is. Because it forces businesses to make decisions. Who are we trying to speak to? What do we want to be known for? How are we different from the alternatives? What do we want somebody to do after reading this? These questions sound simple, but they’re often where the real work happens.
We’ve seen businesses spend hours debating a single sentence, not because anyone is being difficult, but because the conversation uncovers something much bigger.
The sentence isn’t the issue. The lack of clarity behind it is. That’s why website copy often ends up becoming a strategic exercise rather than a writing exercise.
It forces people to stop and think about the business from the outside in. Customers don’t know your history. They don’t understand your internal terminology. They don’t know what your team discusses in meetings.
All they have is what’s in front of them. The words on the page are doing far more work than many businesses realise. A beautifully designed website with unclear messaging is a bit like a beautifully designed shop with no signs.
It might look fantastic, but visitors will still struggle to find what they’re looking for. That doesn’t mean design isn’t important. Far from it.
Good design helps guide people through information, creates confidence and shapes first impressions. It plays a huge role in how people experience a website.
But good design and good messaging aren’t competing priorities. The strongest websites are built when the two work together. One supports the other. One helps people understand. The other helps people feel confident enough to act.
That’s why, when we’re building websites, some of the most valuable conversations happen long before anyone starts talking about colours, imagery or layouts.
They happen when we’re trying to understand what the business actually wants to say because once you’ve got that right, the design becomes much easier.