It’s launch day for your brand new website. You’ve been looking forward to this for months. Adios to that outdated, ugly website—hello good-looking new one!

You type your website URL into the search bar. It loads within 3 seconds. Crisp design, inviting colors, smooth scrolling, snappy responsiveness—everything you wanted.

Now all you have to do is wait for the leads to come in.

And wait.

And wait some more.

…

Where is everybody?!?!?

“If you build it, they will come” may work for baseball. But far too many business owners shell out serious cash for a fresh-looking website that never produces leads. Few visitors show up; fewer stick around; even fewer say hello.

It’s not that you did web design wrong. It’s that you don’t know what web design actually is.

And it’s not just you. Business owners hire a “web designer”—and that phrase makes the job sound like decoration. They expect to pick colors and approve mockups. So they don’t realize something is missing when they never get asked, “Who are your prospective clients that will visit this website? What do they need to know?”

They hired a decorator when they needed an architect.

A decorator makes things pretty. An architect asks: What does this structure need to do? Who lives in it? How do they move through it? Then the architect makes design decisions in service of the building’s purpose.

Like houses, websites must be constructed in the proper order. Skipping the floor plan destabilizes the entire structure—even if the paint color is gorgeous. Here’s how to construct a website phase by phase, so you end up with an ROI-generating asset instead of an empty showpiece.

#1. Ask “What Must Be True?”

When you’re ready to start, stop.

Don’t rush. As you begin, “begin with the end in mind,” as I like to say (borrowed from Stephen Covey).

The end is your objective. At the outset, either you dislike your website, or you don’t have a website at all. The question I ask is, “What would need to be true for you to have a website that you like, and one that does what you need it to do?”

A website you like looks and feels good. To help your web developer see what you’re picturing inside your head, collect an Inspiration Pool of websites you admire. Maybe there’s that one competitor with a website that looks like it’s from the future. Maybe you love the uncluttered look of Apple’s website, or the inviting design of Etsy. Maybe you appreciate how easy it is to navigate around Reddit forums. Gather those sites and share what you like about them.

A website that does what you need it to do helps your business. At minimum: It tells visitors what you do, and who you do it for. It persuades them that you’re the real deal. And it gives them an easy way to get in touch.

This phase’s deliverable is a detailed site map. “Site map” is web-designer speak for a diagram of your site’s planned pages, why each one matters, what they say, and how they relate to each other. It will also break down each page into its sections. You should look at it and say, “Yes, this is everything my website must include. Nothing is left out.”

Now you can…

#2. Write the Right Words

For the longest time, I didn’t provide messaging (web copy) with my design services. But my clients consistently struggled with what words to put on the page. Copywriting is an unskippable part of the website construction process—lorem ipsum never persuaded anyone. But the reality is that most small business owners just don’t have the skill on their team to write excellent website copy, let alone the time to do it themselves. So I began to include messaging with every project.

What are the right words?

The right words are specific, not broad. Don’t say “Forming Outdoor Spaces that Last.” Say “We Build Privacy Fences That Never Fall Down.”

The right words are clear, not clever. Don’t say “Reimagining Marketing for Forward-Thinking Sellers.” Say “I run paid ads for e-commerce companies.”

The right words are human, not corporate. Don’t say “Innovative design solutions tailored to your brand architecture.” Say “I design logos people remember.”

The right words are reader-focused, not self-obsessed. Don’t say “Our team has five decades of combined expertise.” Say “You’ll work with someone who’s solved this problem before.”

The absolute best way to get the right words for your website is to work with a professional copywriter. If that's not in the budget, any web agency you choose should be able to explain how they write clearly and persuasively for your website. (We combine research and client interviews.)

The must-have deliverable for this phase is a copy framework. That’s a Google Doc with headings derived from the sitemap, containing the copy for each section. What you receive should be “publish-ready” copy, where if you’re short on time you can just click Approve. But it’s best practice to read through it and revise as needed.

Once you have the right words, you can…

#3. Design to Serve Visitors, Not Win Awards

The websites that win design awards are, quite frankly, often really bad websites. For instance, you visit one and start scrolling, and the page moves sideways instead of down (because the design team thought that would be cool). Or your cursor is a butterfly instead of a simple pointer. Or there are so many whirling animations that you can’t get your bearing on the page. 

Award committees love these “fresh, innovative, forward-looking” websites. Visitors hate them.

I call these over-designed websites. They treat design as an end in itself, instead of a tool that exists to serve the visitor. Proper website design sits between over-designed and under-designed (out of date, ugly, hard to navigate), in that “just right” Goldilocks zone.

This question must govern the design process: How will visitors experience this design? For example, a site that tries to do too much in a single area becomes very overwhelming to view. I see it on nearly every small business homepage. There’s so much going on. It’s so busy that everything loses its value. The user doesn’t know what to pay attention to. Amid a flood of calls to action, the user ends up doing nothing.

In contrast, good experiential design guides the user. The headlines are large and skimmable so they can find what they need to right away. The design uplifts the whole brand, communicating that this is a company that pays attention to the details. The calls to action are clear, so visitors can get in touch or request a resource—take that next step.

The deliverable for the design phase is a static homepage. This is a full mockup of what your homepage will look like, including the words. It won’t be interactive—you won’t be able to click buttons and be directed around the whole site—but it will show you what visitors to your website will see. You’ll want to go back and forth with the designer until you’re fully happy with this, because the rest of your website design will be based on the homepage. 

Once you’re happy with the website it’s time for development.

4. Enjoy Development Ease

Web development is a nightmare when there has been no strategy, no thought of messaging, and a focus on design for design’s sake. But if you’ve followed the steps so far, the development phase nearly runs itself.

For the first few weeks of the web development phase, you get to sit back and relax. The team will be working to build out the full website based on all the discussions you’ve had so far. You should be getting updates every week or two along with an estimated completion date. 

The development phase’s deliverable is a link to a hidden, non-public version of your site. You finally get to interact with the website you’ve been working toward for weeks. Open it up on your phone; check it out on your wide-screen monitor. Interact with the site in the way that your visitors will.

You’re nearly done. Sure, you’ll want tweaks. But you won’t have to have the dreaded “this is not at all what I wanted” conversation with your web developer.

Time to…

5. Launch!

Launch is the shortest (and most exciting) phase. The designer performs a final quality control check: No broken links. Contact Us forms work. Analytics are set up. All the little stuff is right.

The deliverable here is a live URL that anyone in the world can access. The next time a prospective customer types your URL into their browser, they’ll land on a site you’re proud to share.

Are we done yet? Not quite…

6. Stay Excellent

A good friend of mine says, “Anything that you want to run with excellence requires maintenance.” A car fresh off the assembly line will need an oil change within 5,000 miles. Skip that, and its performance will degrade slowly—then suddenly and for good.

Excellence requires maintenance. “Launch” is a milestone, but it’s not the finish line. To keep your website in good working condition calls for active management.

Active management simply means that your web agency doesn’t vanish once the initial job is done. They stick around to keep your site humming with maintenance and improvements.

Maintenance tasks include: Monitor website uptime (and get it back up ASAP if it ever goes down). Scan for and replace dead links. Optimize site speed. Run security checks. And send you a report every month, summarizing what they detected and what they did about it.

Improvement tasks cover everything from “please update my headshot” to “we need an additional page for our new service.”

Some web agencies charge by the task. Others charge a flat monthly fee for whatever work you need done. I prefer the latter approach—too many owners let their sites go stale because every small change came with an invoice. “Unlimited edits and updates” is a cleaner solution.

That’s how your website stays excellent.

Launch Day Redux

Once again, it’s launch day for your brand new website.

You type your website URL into the search bar. It loads within 3 seconds. Crisp design, inviting colors, smooth scrolling, snappy responsiveness.

Now all you have to do is wait for the leads to come in.

You scroll the homepage while you wait. Each section flows into the next. The photos show your team in action, and your happy customers too. The writing is clear, informative, unpretentious. 

On your Mail app, you see the Unread Email counter tick up by 1. You open it: “Andrew Amoreno has opted in to your free guide.”

The first of many.