Interviews with the people behind your website

What's the first thing you look at when a client sends a brief?

The gap between what they say they want and what their audience actually needs. Most briefs describe a visual preference, but the real question is always about behaviour - what should a visitor do, and what's stopping them from doing it right now.

Where do most landing pages quietly lose people?

Somewhere between the headline and the second paragraph. The headline earns a click, but if the next line doesn't confirm that the page is worth reading, people leave. It's rarely a design problem - it's a sequencing problem.

How do you handle a client who has strong opinions about colour?

I take those opinions seriously and then test them. A preference for a particular shade of blue is a useful starting point, not a final answer. We run it against contrast requirements and look at how it interacts with the rest of the palette before committing.

Clients rarely ask about page speed, but you always bring it up. Why?

Because a beautifully designed page that loads in four seconds on a mobile connection is a beautifully designed page that most of your audience never sees. Speed isn't a technical detail - it's a fundamental part of whether the work does its job.

What's something designers ask for that's genuinely hard to build well?

Smooth animation that also works on low-end devices. Most animation looks fine on a fast laptop and then judders on a three-year-old Android phone. Getting that right requires a different approach to how the motion is constructed, not just reducing the effect.

How do you approach accessibility on a tight deadline?

I treat it as structure, not as a checklist at the end. Semantic HTML, proper heading order, and keyboard navigation take almost no extra time when you build them in from the start. Retrofitting them later is where the cost comes from.