Insights
Essays and shorter notes on brand, product and web design. The thinking we charge for, written down for free.
Seven questions that sort a shortlist of UK design agencies in an afternoon, how to score the answers, and the three replies that should end a conversation. Written by an agency, which is why it includes the questions we would rather you did not ask.
Not a list of deliverables. The seven things a redesign has to settle, in the order they get settled, and the two most agencies leave out: the content and the rankings you already have.
Lists of the best B2B websites tend to rank the prettiest. The ones that sell share four habits above the fold, and none of them is a design trend.
A brief is not a list of pages. It is the five things a designer cannot guess, written down before anyone quotes. Here is what goes in, what stays out, and a tool that drafts one in a minute.
Almost right is the expensive kind of wrong. It moves the work from doing the task to checking whether the machine did it, and most products have not designed that part at all.
Somebody has run the brand palette through a contrast checker and something came back red. The checker was not testing your brand, and the fix is almost never a new colour.
Ask hosting companies why customers leave and most say price. Two in five are also being told the customer has gone to Wix or Shopify, and that is not a loss you can discount your way out of.
From January, UK subscription rules mean a reminder before every renewal and an exit as easy as the sign-up was. Most hosting companies will send that to Legal, when it belongs to whoever owns the billing screens.
Since 2 August 2026 the EU AI Act requires you to tell people when they are dealing with a machine. Most teams will answer that with a footer, which is the one place nobody looks.
Most case studies are written as a record of what the supplier did. Buyers are scanning for a situation that looks like their own, and most case studies never describe one.
A UK website costs anything from £10 a month to £30,000 or more, and the word "website" is doing a lot of hiding. Template or custom is the real question. Here is how to tell which you need.
A UK rebrand runs £5,000 to £50,000, but the number is set by how much strategy sits behind it, not the size of the studio. Here is where the money actually goes, and when not to spend it.
AI assistants send about one visit in seven hundred, and those visits convert better than anything else you have. That changes what a B2B website is for.
Rebrands are rarely lost at the design stage. They are lost in the meeting where nine people are asked what they think.
Design and build are the predictable part of a website project. The words are not, and the words are yours.
Every hosting website leads with the same three numbers and the same speed claims. Here is why that stopped working, and what technical buyers read instead.
Most of your buyers decide before they fill anything in. The useful question is not how to capture them, it is what they cannot find on the site.
