A website in days, without the shortcuts

Timelines on small websites stretch for one reason, and it is rarely the building. It is the deciding. A project waits three weeks for a sentence that should take ten minutes to write, and everyone remembers the wait as the build being slow.

The fix is to front-load the decisions. Before a single page is designed, answer the questions that everything else depends on: who is this for, what is the one thing they should understand, and what should they do next. Those three answers determine the page order, the copy and the calls to action. Without them, every layout is a guess you have to revisit.

Copy is the other half. A page cannot be finished while the words are placeholders, because the words decide the length, and the length decides the layout. Writing the real sentences first — even roughly — removes the most common cause of a page being designed three times.

What is left is genuinely fast: structure, build, and the unglamorous work of making it hold together on a phone. None of that needs to be slow. It only feels slow when it is happening before anyone has decided what the site is for.