Never Worked With a Web Designer Before? Here's What It Actually Looks Like

Most people picture it like ordering food. You describe what you want, someone disappears for a few weeks, and a finished website lands in your inbox. If that's how you're picturing working with a web designer, I want to gently correct that before you even start looking for someone. A good website isn't handed to you, it's built with you, and knowing that upfront changes how you should choose who you work with.

It starts with a conversation, not a brief

Before anyone opens a design tool, there's a getting-to-know-you conversation, followed by a questionnaire I ask every client to fill out. It's not a formality. I need to actually understand what you do, who you're trying to reach, and what success looks like for you specifically, not just "a nice website." This part takes longer than people expect, and that's on purpose. Rushing it just means redoing decisions later.

Once I've gone through your answers, we sit down for a meeting to talk through the visual direction, how your brand should sound, and a rough wireframe of what pages and sections the site actually needs. This is the part where your input matters most. You know your business and your clients better than I ever will, so this stage is a conversation, not a presentation.

Words come before design

Somewhere around here, the actual text for the site gets written. Some clients bring in a copywriter, some write it themselves using guides I share with them, and sometimes I help directly. There's no single right way to do it, but skipping this step and designing around placeholder text almost always shows later.

Once the content is settled, the actual design work starts, homepage first. As soon as that's done, we have a short walkthrough together before I move on to another page. If something's off, this is where we catch it, while it's still one page instead of ten.

Nothing lands in your inbox as a surprise

After the homepage is approved, I design the rest of the site, and before anything gets handed over, we go through the whole thing together one more time. I mostly work in Framer these days, and I've been adding AI tools into the process too, mainly to move faster on the repetitive parts, never to skip the parts that actually need a human paying attention.

None of this works, though, without something that's harder to put in a job posting: mutual respect for each other's time and expertise. I've had a client who didn't have that for me, and it made an otherwise good project genuinely draining, for reasons that had nothing to do with design skill. That's a story for another post. For now, the takeaway is simpler. When you're looking for a designer, don't just look at their portfolio. Pay attention to how they talk to you in that first conversation, whether they're asking real questions or just nodding along. That's usually a much better predictor of whether you'll end up with a site you're actually proud to open.