I’m done building websites just to make websites

For a long time I measured a project by whether the site was good. Fast, well-built, nicely typeset, responsive, the interactions considered. I got reasonably good at that, and it took me longer than it should have to notice it is roughly half the job.

A website is not a deliverable. It is an instrument for doing something. And a surprising proportion of the industry — me included, for years — optimises the instrument while staying carefully incurious about what it is meant to do.

The symptom

You can spot it in how projects are scoped. A client asks for a website. They get a website. Nobody involved asks the uncomfortable question, which is: what has to be true for this to have been worth doing?

Sometimes the honest answer is that a website is not the constraint at all. The offer is unclear. The pricing is wrong. Nobody knows the company exists. The sales conversation breaks in a specific place that no amount of typography will fix. Building a beautiful site on top of that is a way of looking busy while the actual problem sits untouched — and it is easier to sell, which is exactly why it keeps happening.

Why this was easy to miss

Because the craft is genuinely satisfying, and because craft is legible. You can see a good grid. You can feel a well-tuned transition. Awards are given for it. Other designers notice.

Business outcomes are much less legible and much slower. Nobody gives a prize for a site that is visually unremarkable and doubles the number of qualified enquiries. So the incentives point at the surface, and the surface is where most of the conversation stays.

I also think a lot of us avoid the question because we are not confident we can answer it. Asking what this is for invites a conversation about business, and if you cannot hold that conversation it is safer to talk about the header.

What changed for me

Working across disciplines. Once you have also run the ads, written the copy, built the funnel and watched what people actually do, it becomes impossible to believe the site is the project. You see how much of the outcome is decided before anyone opens a design tool, and how much of it is decided after launch.

That is genuinely uncomfortable. It means the thing I am best at is not the thing that matters most. But it is a better place to work from.

What I want instead

Fewer projects that start with a page and more that start with a problem. Work where I am allowed to say the site is not the issue. Enough involvement to see whether it worked, rather than handing over files and never learning the ending.

And for my own things: build the smallest version that answers the question, put it in the world, and improve it against reality rather than against my own taste.

None of this means craft stops mattering. Craft is how something earns trust in the first two seconds, and I am not interested in shipping ugly work in the name of pragmatism. It means craft is the price of entry, not the point.

The goal was never a good website. It was a thing that works, which happens to be well made.