Web Development

Ask ten agencies how long a website takes to be built, and you’ll get ten different answers. Most of them will be wrong. Not because anyone’s lying to you, but because a single number was never a great answer to begin with.

In 2020, a four-person development team at Agrofy, an online agribusiness marketplace serving Latin America, noticed their bounce rates were running well above industry benchmarks. Instead of blaming the content or the offer, they looked at how the site loaded. This article looks at how leading web design companies approach SEO during design, and why the strongest ones treat it as a design decision from day one rather than a fix applied after launch.

A client asks for a “simple integration” between their new website and their CRM, inventory system, or email platform. Six weeks later, the project is still dragging on. It’s not necessarily because anyone gave them a bad estimate or skipped a step.

Most redesigns start with an idea that sounds great in a meeting. Everyone agrees it’s worth doing, the project gets the green light, and then the team spends the next three months turning that idea into a website. The problem is, the people who actually use the site often don’t get a say until the end when the budget is spent and changing direction is a lot harder. 

Most homepage messaging fails before design even enters the conversation. Not because teams don’t try, but because they try to say too much at once. There’s a pattern you see everywhere: headlines stacked with services, subtext that reads like a pitch deck, buttons asking for commitment before trust is built.

No matter how clean a site’s images look or how impressive its animations, if it doesn’t point out what the company offers or where users are supposed to go, then it falls short. Visitors should be able to understand the basics without having to search through the page for answers.

Design presentations are where good ideas either land or fall flat. Most agencies lose work not because the design is weak but because the thinking behind the design is unclear, or the presentation doesn’t guide the client through it properly.

One example is IDEO’s shopping cart redesign project.

Most website problems get missed because nobody checked them. A button gets missed. A page looks different on mobile. A form works during testing but breaks once real people start using it. None of these issues are particularly interesting. That’s probably why they get overlooked.

The first version of a website is rarely the version a business keeps forever. As the business changes, teams add new services, launch campaigns, publish new content, and update pages to support new goals. Without a clear system behind the website, those updates can slowly create a mix of one-off designs that become harder to maintain.

Most blog templates are built like empty showrooms. Clean, shiny, and kind of lifeless. Then real users show up and things get messy fast. Scroll behavior changes everything. Attention drops in seconds.

There’s a reason for that. People don’t read web pages like books.