So I started a web design agency based in Perth. But there are already hundreds of agencies across Australia that produce stunning websites, so how is what I’m doing going to be any different?
Well, I’ve spent the past decade (and then some) working in digital design agencies across the country, and have become very familiar with “how the sausage gets made”, so to speak. In that time, I’ve come to realise some truths about web design studios that I think they’d rather you didn’t know.
Quick caveat: the following is entirely based on my experience. I’m sure there are some agencies out there that don’t do all of these things, but what I’m referring to are the general patterns that I’ve seen across several different studios, big and small, which makes me think it’s the norm rather than the exception.
Your website was built to impress the wrong audience
Somewhere along the way, web designers chose to build products based on their own artistic expression. In my opinion, this is because their goals are to:
- Gain respect from their colleagues
- Add to their portfolio
- Get promoted (due to how impressive their portfolio looks)
- Maybe win a web design award or two
Meanwhile, their clients’ customers – that is, the people trying to book appointments, request quotes, or work out if this firm can actually solve their problem – are left waiting for swishy animations, large hero images and multiple tracking scripts to load, and then scrolling straight past the sliders that they never engage with.
This is not because web design agencies are bad at what they do – on the contrary, most are very good at what they’ve chosen to optimise for. The problem is what they’re aiming to improve isn’t their clients’ revenue – it’s the industry’s applause.
Aesthetics comes first, performance is an afterthought
In most agencies, websites are first and foremost designed to look good, and any business success is a secondary by-product.
I’ve watched the same process play out time and time again:
- Client arrives with a clear problem
- Usually it is very clear: the website is not getting enough leads / bookings, and ultimately revenue – but this is rarely, if ever, part of the conversation
- The agency says, “yep we can fix that”
- The project quickly turns into a design exercise
- Wireframes get approved based on how they look
- Large, full-width full-height images (or videos, or sliders) are placed on the home page above the fold
- Important pages like the About or Contact pages are built from generic, cookie-cutter templates
- More time and energy is put into purely decorative elements than into optimising the user journey
Only once the website is built and the design is signed off does anyone think to ask the programmer, which has historically been me, to “make it faster”.
But by then, it’s usually too late – the images or videos are already chosen, the design is already “locked in”.
The agency then needs to play damage control after the developer mentions that there’s nothing they can do without drastically changing the design. But that design was “already approved”, and it’s too embarrassing to go back and tell them that we made a mistake. So the inefficiency remains, until the client can be convinced that a redesign is necessary, hopefully within a couple years.
Hero sliders are a perfect example of this: slow to load, and the vast majority of users only ever see the first slide because they start scrolling before it’s even finished loading. It looks impressive in the pitch deck and on the agency’s case studies listing, but does almost nothing for the customers sitting there, waiting for it to load.
Nobody tests, everyone just assumes they’re right
The deeper issue isn’t the slider, it’s that none of this is tested 1.
To avoid project delays and rework, agencies tend to produce only one instance of each page – and then it’s referred to as a “best practice”. But if you try to ask someone how they know it is actually the best practice, they will often reiterate that it just is.
Web design often becomes a matter of taste and internal consensus, not evidence.
How this problem keeps happening
When inside an agency, everything is done without consideration to how things are experienced from the real world.
Websites are designed on a large, reviewed on a large monitor, and signed off on a large monitor – on fast office internet, by people who already know where every link goes. Under those conditions, the site works fine.
But when a website visitor sees it on a three-year-old phone with two bars of reception, in a car park, deciding whether it’s worth waiting for – they’re going through a very different experience than anyone in the agency has ever seen before.
And why it will keep happening
Design agencies are judged on how the work looks – which is a real skill, and I’m not dismissing it – but it means the parts of a website that determine whether it earns anything (whether it can be found, whether it loads, whether every visitor can use it, whether anyone actually enquires) are left to whoever happens to care.
Often that’s a developer, at the end of the project, with no authority left to change anything that could genuinely help.
Nobody in this chain is being dishonest, they’re just not seeing the same thing that the customer sees, and nothing in the process forces the question.
But that’s not what I was taught.
I didn’t learn this in a web design agency, I learned it making video games
My background isn’t the typical path for a programmer at digital agencies – I studied computer science with a focus on video games development.
I started by building games and interactive software long before I built a single website professionally.
This taught me something specific to that industry: if a product is slow, or if players don’t instantly engage, it doesn’t ship.
Solid performance and a thorough testing process aren’t just nice-to-haves in game development – that’s the job.
When making games, designers must build, test and measure their product iteratively until it clicks, because if nobody wants to play it, there’s no point in packaging it up for sales. You can’t afford to assume you’re right – the data decides what you’re allowed to ship. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for websites.
Performance isn’t just speed, it’s everything between a click and a customer
When we talk about website performance, we usually refer to load times. But if you look at it holistically, we’re actually talking about the full picture:
- How fast a site loads
- How fast subsequent pages are loaded
- How smooth a site feels during navigation and scrolling
- How easy it is to find the things we need
- How technically sound it’s been implemented
- How visible it is in search engines – which determines whether anyone can even find it in the first place
- Whether the website is continually optimised for conversion once visitors arrive
While website aesthetics still matter, they should be secondary to its business goals.
That’s the web design studio I’m building: not an agency that treats speed as a box to tick right at the end of the project, and not a developer-for-hire that ignores how a site looks or feels – a performance studio, in the full sense of the word.
Who does this help?
I’m helping professional service firms that already have a strong revenue foundation and a clear ambition to grow it further, but whose websites are not performing as well as they should.
Often this is because of several things in combination: generic contact forms that ask for more than a first contact needs, long and unclear customer journeys, and a site built to look fancy rather than convert.
Most business owners already sense that website speed and performance matters, but don’t know exactly how to get it or who to ask.
If this sounds like you – if your website looks great but doesn’t seem to be working as hard as you are, I’d like to help close that gap.
- I assume that some agencies actually do run comparison tests on their designs – but I have not yet seen it happen ↩︎