A lot of web agencies use templates. It's faster, cheaper to deliver, and most clients don't notice — at first. I've made a deliberate decision not to work that way, and the reason comes back to what a homepage actually needs to do.
What a template homepage can't do
A template is designed for everyone, which means it's optimised for no one in particular. It might look professional. It might even look good. But it's built around someone else's assumptions about what the most important information is, how it should be presented, and what kind of business it's for.
Your business is not the same as the last business that used that template. Your customers have specific concerns. Your services have specific selling points. The way you work is different to your competitors — and your homepage should reflect that.
A template can't capture any of that. It's a starting point at best, a liability at worst — because if your competitors are using the same template, your homepage looks like theirs.
How we approach homepage design
Every client starts with a discovery call. I find out what the business does, who their customers are, what they need the site to achieve, and what they like and don't like in terms of design.
That brief goes to our in-house graphic designer — someone with many years of experience who works with me specifically on homepage designs. We're not subcontracting to someone who doesn't know the project, and we're not picking from a library of pre-made layouts. We're designing something from scratch, for that client, based on what we learned in the discovery call.
The result is a homepage that no other business has. Not because uniqueness is the point, but because being built specifically for your business is the point — and uniqueness is the natural outcome of that.
We won't move forward until you're happy
Once the initial design is ready, we present it to the client. If it's not right — if the colours are off, if the layout isn't working, if something doesn't feel like the brand — we revise it. There's no charge for revisions and no limit on how many rounds we do. We won't start building the full site until the client is completely happy with the homepage design.
The same applies when the full build is complete. We won't put it live until they're satisfied with everything.
That's not the fastest process. But a homepage done properly is one of the best investments a business can make — and doing it properly means not taking shortcuts.
Read more about what happens during a website design project or get in touch to talk about what we could build for your business.