Growth & Strategy
Personas
SaaS & Startup
Time to ROI
Medium-term (3-6 months)
I used to be the architect of what I now call "digital ghost towns." For the first few years of my freelance career, I poured my energy into crafting pixel-perfect websites—brand-aligned, modern, conversion-optimized. Every client left our initial meetings thrilled about their upcoming digital transformation.
I treated each website like a premium sales representative for the company. The messaging was sharp. The user journey was seamless. The design made competitors look outdated. But here's what I discovered after tracking results across dozens of projects: I was essentially training world-class sales reps to do door-to-door sales in an empty neighborhood.
After analyzing my client portfolio, a painful pattern emerged. Beautiful websites? Check. Professional brand presence? Check. Actual visitors coming to see it? Crickets. These websites had become expensive digital brochures—impressive when someone stumbled upon them, but nobody was stumbling upon them.
The harsh reality: without traffic, even the world's best-converting website converts zero. This realization forced me to completely restructure my approach, and what I learned will save you from the expensive mistakes that most startups make.
Here's what you'll discover in this playbook:
Why treating your website like a brochure kills growth potential
The fundamental shift from design-first to SEO-first thinking
How to build websites that actually generate traffic and leads
The platform decisions that make or break your marketing autonomy
Real frameworks for avoiding the "beautiful ghost town" trap
Industry Reality
What every startup founder believes about web design
The startup world is obsessed with beautiful websites. Scroll through any design portfolio, and you'll see the same pattern: stunning visuals, smooth animations, and "award-winning" interfaces that look like they belong in a digital art museum.
Here's what the industry typically recommends for startup websites:
Design-first approach: Start with wireframes, focus on user experience, and make everything pixel-perfect
Conversion optimization: A/B test buttons, headlines, and forms to maximize signup rates
Brand storytelling: Create compelling narratives that communicate your unique value proposition
Mobile-first responsive design: Ensure your site looks perfect on every device
Technical excellence: Fast loading times, clean code, and seamless integrations
This conventional wisdom exists because it's borrowed from established companies with existing audiences. When you already have brand recognition and traffic, optimizing conversion rates makes perfect sense. The design-first approach works beautifully when people are already finding your website.
But here's where this advice falls apart for startups: you're optimizing for visitors you don't have yet. It's like renovating a restaurant in a location with no foot traffic. You might have the most beautiful interior design, but if nobody knows you exist, all that effort goes to waste.
The fundamental flaw in traditional web design thinking is treating the homepage as the primary entry point. Most design processes start with mapping user journeys from the homepage, assuming that's where everyone lands. But in reality, SEO-driven websites have hundreds of potential entry points.
Consider me as your business complice.
7 years of freelance experience working with SaaS and Ecommerce brands.
When I started as a freelance web designer, I was building websites for SaaS and ecommerce clients using exactly this design-first approach. My process was meticulous: beautiful mockups, conversion-focused layouts, and premium positioning that made startups look like enterprise companies.
The main promise I sold was the idea of having a "24/7 sales rep." And technically, I delivered on that promise. The websites were good-looking, working great, conversion-ready, and focused on presenting the best offer. If someone landed on these sites, they had a high probability of converting.
But here's the problem I kept running into: that 24/7 sales rep was working in an empty mall. I love this analogy because it perfectly captures the issue. Your website might be a beautiful store, but it doesn't matter how great it is if your store is located where nobody walks by.
I remember one particular SaaS client who had invested heavily in a custom design. The site was stunning—it won a design award, actually. Clean interface, smooth animations, compelling copy. The conversion rate for visitors was impressive at 8%. But they were getting maybe 200 visitors per month. That's 16 signups monthly for a product that needed 100+ new users to hit their growth targets.
Meanwhile, I watched their competitor with a basic WordPress template but strong SEO strategy pulling in 10,000+ monthly visitors. Even with a lower conversion rate, they were acquiring 10x more customers. That's when I realized I was solving the wrong problem.
The harsh truth hit me: I was obsessing over conversion optimization for traffic that didn't exist. I was building world-class sales processes for companies with no distribution strategy. Every "beautiful" website I created was essentially an expensive business card that nobody would ever see.
Here's my playbook
What I ended up doing and the results.
This realization forced me to completely restructure my approach. Instead of starting with design mockups, I began every project with a fundamental question: How will people actually find this website?
Here's the framework I developed after years of trial and error:
The SEO-First Website Architecture
In a design-first website, you think like a physical store with one front door (the homepage). You map user journeys from that single entry point and optimize the path to purchase.
In an SEO-first website, you think like a shopping mall where every page is a potential entrance. Every blog post, product page, and resource becomes a landing page optimized for specific search queries. The homepage is just one of many entry points.
This mindset shift changes everything about how you structure content. Instead of asking "What should our homepage say?" you ask "What are all the different problems our ideal customers are searching for solutions to?"
The Content-Distribution Integration
Most startups treat content creation and website development as separate projects. They build the site first, then think about content later. I learned to integrate these from day one.
For every client, I now start with keyword research before touching any design tool. We identify 50-100 search queries their ideal customers are using, then build the website architecture around those queries. Each piece of content serves dual purposes: educating visitors and ranking for specific searches.
Platform Decisions for Marketing Autonomy
One of the biggest mistakes I made early on was choosing platforms that looked great but gave marketing teams no autonomy. I'd build custom WordPress sites or use design-focused platforms that required developer intervention for every content update.
Now I prioritize platforms that give marketers control. Modern website builders like Webflow and Framer allow rapid testing and iteration without bottlenecking every change through developers.
The Marketing R&D Approach
Instead of treating the website as a fixed asset to "get right" once, I approach it as a marketing laboratory. The site becomes a testing ground for finding what distribution formula works for each specific business.
This means building infrastructure for rapid experimentation: easy A/B testing, simple content management, and analytics that actually show what's driving results. The goal isn't perfection—it's systematic iteration toward what actually generates customers.
Technical Foundation
Building websites that marketers can actually use without constant developer intervention
Design Strategy
Prioritizing SEO architecture over visual perfection from day one
Content Integration
Treating content creation and website structure as a unified growth system
Measurement Framework
Setting up analytics that track real business impact not just vanity metrics
The transformation in results was dramatic once I implemented this SEO-first approach. Instead of delivering beautiful websites that generated 200-500 monthly visitors, my clients started seeing 5,000-15,000 monthly visitors within 6-12 months.
One SaaS client went from 12 trial signups per month to 150+ signups in eight months. Another ecommerce store increased from 300 monthly visitors to over 5,000, with revenue growing proportionally. The difference wasn't better design—it was building websites that people could actually find.
But the most important result was operational: marketing teams gained autonomy. Instead of waiting weeks for developer changes, they could test new approaches daily. This velocity of experimentation became their competitive advantage.
The shift from "build once, optimize forever" to "build for iteration" changed how these companies approached growth entirely. They stopped treating their website as a digital brochure and started using it as an active growth engine.
What I've learned and the mistakes I've made.
Sharing so you don't make them.
Here are the key lessons from years of building websites the wrong way, then learning to do it right:
Distribution beats design every time: A basic website that 10,000 people see will outperform a beautiful site that 100 people see
Every page is a landing page: Stop thinking about "the homepage" and start thinking about hundreds of entry points
Marketing autonomy is critical: If your marketing team can't make changes without developers, you're moving too slowly
Content and architecture must be integrated: Don't build the site first and add content later—they're the same project
Perfect is the enemy of launched: A testing infrastructure beats a perfect design every time
SEO thinking changes everything: When you optimize for discovery, the entire site structure changes
Velocity trumps perfection: The ability to test and iterate quickly becomes your competitive advantage
The biggest mistake isn't any single design choice—it's approaching web development like a traditional branding exercise instead of a growth engine. When you shift from "How do we look professional?" to "How do we get found by our ideal customers?" everything changes.
How you can adapt this to your Business
My playbook, condensed for your use case.
For your SaaS / Startup
For SaaS startups implementing this approach:
Start with keyword research before any design work
Build multiple landing pages for different user personas and use cases
Choose platforms that allow rapid testing without developer bottlenecks
Integrate analytics that track from search query to customer conversion
For your Ecommerce store
For ecommerce stores applying these principles:
Optimize product pages and category pages as primary entry points
Create content around product use cases and buying intent keywords
Ensure your platform supports easy content updates for seasonal campaigns
Focus on conversion tracking that connects SEO traffic to actual sales