Marketing sites built for the brands behind them
Everything you should know about modern website design
A practical guide to where website design earns its money in 2026.
Why most “beautiful” websites underperform
Award-winning design and conversion-optimised design overlap, but they're not the same job. We do both at once on purpose.
The website-design industry produces an enormous amount of work that’s genuinely beautiful and quietly useless. Hero animations that delay first paint, illustrative components that make scanning harder, fashionable layouts that ignore the question every visitor is actually asking. These sites win design awards, then fail at the only metric that matters for their owners.
The fix isn’t to make design uglier; it’s to design with conversion engineering treated as a first-class concern. Hierarchy informed by reading behaviour, CTAs placed where decisions happen, social proof positioned at trust gaps, copy and design developed together rather than handed off. We design every project that way — and the visuals usually end up stronger because they’re anchored to a real job.
The false choice between brand and CRO
You will hear "we go bold or we convert" pitched as a tradeoff. It isn't — and the brands that win in 2026 have both.
A flat, by-the-numbers conversion-optimised site converts well from the right traffic and forgettably from everyone else. A purely brand-led site builds preference with the few who arrive ready to buy and loses the majority who needed proof. The expensive brands you admire — the ones that feel like a product even on a marketing page — do both at once: distinctive type, considered colour, real photography, and ruthless conversion structure underneath.
We treat brand and CRO as constraints on the same project, not phases of separate ones. Every design review answers two questions: would the people who already love this brand respect what we shipped, and would a brand-new visitor understand what to do next?
AI in our design workflow
Generative AI changed how we work in 2024-2026. It hasn't changed who the work is for.
We use Midjourney and Sora for early-stage moodboards and texture exploration, Claude and ChatGPT for copy drafting and content modelling, and v0 / Lovable for quick component sketches that anchor a Figma session. None of it ships unedited. The shift isn’t “AI makes the design”; it’s “designers explore three times more ground before locking direction.” The actual design judgment stayed firmly with the humans on the team.
The risk we watch for: AI tools have a strong centre of gravity. Used carelessly, they pull projects toward the same fashionable look. Our job — increasingly — is to push design back out toward what’s distinctive for this specific brand.
Transparent fixed-scope pricing
Quoted off the brief, not the conversation. No surprise invoices.
Marketing-site design projects typically run $14K-$35K depending on page count, illustration ambition, and motion work. For brands needing parallel brand and product-marketing work, we offer fixed-scope packages from $25K. Monthly design retainers from $8K cover ongoing pages, A/B tests, illustration, and component-library work.
Fresh writing on web design
Fresh writing from our design + product team.
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