A design mentor once told me not to take UX courses I'd been designing since 2013. I could make things look good, but I wanted to learn UX properly. So I told him I was going to do the Interaction Design Foundation courses His answer.. what will you do with that Felt like he was trying to talk me out of it. Someone I looked up to I did them anyway. They started from the very basics, and that's where I actually learned UX Those courses helped me get my next job at a product company. That job led to the next one, designing for banks and fintechs I use what I learned there every day, on every website we make What's the advice you ignored that turned out right

Before you pick any site builder, ask 5 boring questions I read founders asking these under a builder's launch. One asked if they could take the site back to their own hosting. Another asked who owns the output - Can I export the code or the content - Can I host it somewhere else - Do my URLs stay the same if I leave - Who owns the copy and images it makes - What happens to my bill when I grow Easy to skip when you're excited about a new tool What would you add to the list

Earlier this month I audited a client's homepage. The first thing it loads is a video. 74 MB. With no poster image. A poster is the still picture that shows while a video loads. Without one, the top of the page is an empty block until the file arrives. On office wifi you might not notice. On a phone on mobile data, a buyer opening your link between meetings sees nothing where your first impression should be. It's easy to miss when you only ever open your own site on a fast laptop. 30 second check. Open your homepage on your phone with wifi off. Watch the first 3 seconds. If the top is empty, add a poster image and make the video smaller. Usually a quick fix. If your homepage has a video at the top, when did you last open it on a phone

In 2018 I designed website templates that nobody bought on their own The company I worked for sold WordPress plugins on a subscription. Small add-ons that give a website a new feature The problem was nobody could picture them. "Adds online courses to your site" means nothing until you see it working So my job was to design a full website around each plugin. The course plugin got a complete course website. Every plugin got a site that showed what it does That was the whole point of the templates. A buyer sees a finished website instead of a feature list I still start every website we build from that. Show the finished result first, explain the parts after If you sell software, does your homepage show the result or the feature list

Someone asked a website-builder founder: how is SEO impacted if I migrate Nobody answered. Here's the checklist I'd follow on any move Before anything changes, export every URL the old site has. Blog posts, old landing pages, all of it Keep the same URLs where you can. Where you can't, redirect each old URL to its closest new page. Not everything to the homepage Copy over page titles and descriptions, not just the content Submit the new sitemap the day you launch. Then watch Search Console for broken pages for a few weeks The usual cause of a traffic drop after a move is missing redirects, not the new platform If you're moving your site soon, what worries you most

I've spent 6 years designing for a fintech that sells to banks. Some of my designs got turned down. Not because they were bad. Because they were too flashy for a bank. Boxes inside boxes. Loud colours. Fancy fonts. The kind of thing that gets likes from other designers. A bank's team reads that as risk. If the website looks like it's trying too hard, they start to wonder. Fintech startups were the opposite. They liked bold. So it depends on who signs. Same product, different buyer, different design. A lot of AI startups sell to banks, insurers and hospitals now. Many of their sites look like they were made to impress other startups. If your buyer is a bank, show your site to someone who works at one before you launch it If you sell to banks, what did they say about your website

Working on your startup this weekend Drop your website below. I'll tell you the first thing I'd change, no pitch

I read the replies under a big website-tool launch a few months ago 17 people asked the same thing. Where's the pricing The founder didn't answer any of them. One person wrote "what are you hiding" Hiding the price isn't always wrong. It depends on how you sell If people sign up on their own with a card, show the price. A missing number costs you signups If every deal starts with a call, you don't need a price list. But say how pricing works. Per seat, per usage, a yearly contract, a rough starting point The worst option is saying nothing. People fill the gap themselves, and they guess expensive If you sell software, how do you handle pricing on your site

This week I checked a client's site before following up with them. The homepage had a nice share image. Every other page had nothing. So when someone pastes the pricing page or a case study into Slack, it shows up as a bare link. No picture, no title that makes sense. In B2B that matters more than people think. The person who finds you is rarely the person who signs. They forward your link to their boss, to security, to finance. Usually in Slack or Teams. That little preview is the first thing those people see from you. Try it now. Paste your pricing page and one case study into a Slack DM to yourself. If it looks broken, it's usually a quick fix. Every page needs its own title, description and image. If you sell to bigger companies, which page does your champion forward the most

One of my templates flopped. The exact same design later sold every single day It's called Mitchy, a website template for professional services firms On Framer's marketplace it never ranked. And if you don't rank there, buyers never see you Easy to blame the design at that point. Redo the hero, change the colors, try again I didn't touch it. I put the same design on Webflow's marketplace instead It sold 4-5 a day, every day, for about 2-3 months. Webflow was profitable for us from the first month On Framer it still doesn't rank, even today That's why we sell on both now. One design, two markets If you sell software, have you ever found your buyers somewhere you didn't expect

Same freight site on a phone. The 3D had to go small without losing the story

Earlier this month I went through 114 YC AI company homepages. About a third of them say "AI-powered", "AI-native" or "AI-driven". 39 of them. A test I like: cover the logo and read only the headline. On a lot of these pages, it could have been any company. Same words, same promise. Buyers at big companies see this all day now. AI isn't what makes you different anymore. They expect it. The headlines that stood out named the job instead. One accounting company just says "Month end shouldn't take all month." You know who that's for in two seconds. Try it on your own homepage. Put a competitor's logo on top and read it again. If it still works, the headline isn't yours yet If you sell to bigger companies, what's the one line you want a buyer to remember

Our best way to get clients was never a sales channel After the subscription flopped I had the problem every new studio has. Nobody knew my work. I was asking strangers to trust me with their website, and they just didn't So in 2024 I tried something else. I learned Framer and made a template called ClayAI Framer rejected it. They don't take one page templates. I turned it into a full site, fixed their feedback, sent it again. It went live July 4 2024 Then the second one, then the third. 100+ templates and components now Then the part I didn't plan. People bought a template, liked how it was built, and messaged us.. can you build our real website A football AI company found us that way. So did a building products company in Ireland If you run a startup, how did your first customers find you

Screen recordings of our 3D sites kept stuttering So we wrote a script that renders the page frame by frame on a fake clock. Every frame lands, 60fps This is straight out of it. Should I put it on GitHub

I almost quit Pentaclay in the first few months Nov 2023 I launched a design subscription. Around $2,500 a month, unlimited requests. Nobody signed up. Not one person So I cut the price. A 2 week trial for about $500 to $1,100. People finally said yes. 3 clients by the end of 2023, one of them took the trial 2-3 times in a row And it got worse. Less money, way more work. Every message was "one more small change". I worked all day and still wasn't making enough. By December I was burned out So I tried something different. I made one Framer template. Took me almost 2 months to build First month it made $134. Small money, but no calls, no revisions, and it sold while I slept If you run a startup, what was the moment you almost quit

One message, sent to 17 apps at once. Built the site so you see it fly

In 2023 I saw Designjoy. One designer, one monthly price, unlimited requests I loved it so I copied it. That's how Pentaclay started Built the site, set the price, waited Almost nobody came. I got a few clients and that was it Took me a while to see why. Brett already had people who knew his work. Nobody knew mine

AI builds a landing page in 10 minutes now. Nobody's stuck on that part anymore They're stuck on the first line. What you do and who it's for Most AI startup sites I open still can't say it