A visitor arrives with a question and a limited amount of patience. Design's job is to answer that question in the order it is actually asked, on the device it is asked from. Everything else is decoration with a cost attached.
How we judge a design
Not by how it looks in a presentation. By whether a stranger can tell, in about five seconds, what this is and whether it is for them.
The hardest part of a website is deciding what goes first, what goes next, and what does not go on the page at all. We do that before any visual work, because a page that says the right things in the wrong order cannot be rescued with typography.
That work produces something you can argue with: an outline of every page, what it claims, and what it asks the visitor to do next. Disagreements are much cheaper at that stage than at the mockup.
We design a small system — type scale, spacing, colour tokens, a handful of components — and compose pages from it. It is cheaper to build, consistent by construction, and it means the twentieth page looks as considered as the first.
It also has to survive content. A design that only works with the placeholder copy is not a finished design, and long names, empty states and the awkward third item are part of the brief.
Most traffic is a phone, held one-handed, on a connection that is worse than the office. We design that view as the real one and treat the desktop layout as the variation, rather than shrinking a desktop composition until it fits.
Contrast, tap targets and reading measure are checked at that size rather than assumed from the large view, because that is where they usually break.
Not a matter of taste — each of these costs the visitor something and returns nothing.
Logos, testimonials, ratings and statistics that are not real. They are checkable, and being caught costs far more than the space saved.
A hero treatment that holds the first sentence hostage is a tax charged to every visitor.
If it matters it belongs on the page. If it does not, it does not need a slot to rotate through.
Tell us who the site is for and what you need them to do. Structure comes first, and it is the part worth arguing about.