There are already a lot of agencies out there that produce stunning websites for their customers, so how is this going to be any different?

Well, I’ve spent the past decade (and then some) working in digital design agencies across Australia, and have become very familiar with “how the sausage gets made”. In that time, I’ve come to realize some truths about web design studios that they’d rather you didn’t know.

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:

• Win web design awards
• Gain respect from their colleagues and industry peers
• Add to their impressive looking portfolio
• Get promoted due to said portfolio

Meanwhile, their clients’ actual customers – 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 and large hero images to load, and then scrolling straight past 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 their fellow 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. Repeatedly, I’ve watched the same process play out time and time again:

1. Client arrives with a clear problem
   • Their website is not getting enough leads / bookings, and ultimately revenue
2. The agency says, “yep we can fix that”
3. 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 the client 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: they’re 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’s the best practice, they will often reiterate that it just is.

Web design often becomes a matter of taste and internal consensus, not evidence.

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 an agency programmer. I studied computer science with a double major in video games design and internet software development, with a minor in audio engineering.

I didn’t start by making websites, I started by building games and interactive applications like audio books before I built a single website for a business.

This taught me something the web design industry seems to have either not noticed, or does not prioritize: if a game is slow, or if players don’t instantly engage with them, they doesn’t ship. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for websites.

Solid performance and a thorough testing process aren’t nice-to-haves in game development – that’s most of the job.

In that industry, the designers must build, test and measure ² their product iteratively ³ until it clicks, because the alternative is that it simply doesn’t work. 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.

Performance isn’t just speed, it’s everything between a click and a customer

When we talk about website performance, we usually refer 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?

Professional services firms and allied health clinics who 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. Generic contact forms. Long-unclear customer journeys. A site built to look credible 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 – for instance, your website might look great but it doesn’t seem to be working as hard as you are, I’d like to help close that gap.

Let’s talk.

1. I assume that some agencies actually do run comparison tests on their designs – but I have not yet seen it proposed ↩︎
2. I heard that game designers at Valve Software weren’t allowed to go home on a Friday until they’ve run and analysed at least one playtest – I cannot verify this to be true, but you can read about how Valve considers testing its secret weapon and usually treats Fridays as a dedicated day for playtesting ↩︎
3. Interestingly, this is the same principle as the “Lean Startup” methodology ↩︎