Web Design Still Isn't What You Think

Last Tuesday a client approved our homepage redesign. Took us 14 weeks. His feedback: "Looks clean." Then he asked when we were pushing it live.

That's it. That's the whole meeting.

I've been doing this for almost a decade and I still can't explain to my family what I actually do. My mother thinks I "make websites look nice." She's not entirely wrong, but she's missing about nine layers of obsessive decision-making that happen before anyone sees a single color on a screen.

Here's what those layers actually involve.

The Part Nobody Sees

A homepage isn't a picture. It's a negotiation between what a company thinks it is and what visitors need to believe in the first 2.8 seconds (Nielsen Norman's 2023 research on attention spans backs this up — people form impressions fast and they rarely revise them).

Every section we design forces a question nobody at the client's office has actually answered. What do you want visitors to feel? What do they need to believe about you before they'll trust you? What's the one thing you'd be embarrassed if a customer missed?

Most businesses have never had that conversation. So we end up doing it for them, usually during a Slack thread at 11pm on a Thursday.

Macy Future's breakdown of web design as corporate brand image and communication needs is solid as a framework. But the real work happens underneath that — in the arguments about whether the CTA button should say "Get Started" or "Talk to Sales," and what each choice signals about the company's relationship to its customers.

Mobile Is Still Broken and We Should Be Embarrassed

StatCounter's Global Stats show mobile accounts for roughly 62% of web traffic as of early 2025. We've been talking about responsive design since Ethan Marcotte coined the term in 2010. Fifteen years. And half the sites I open on my phone still look like someone tried to squeeze a desktop layout through a straw.

Hamburger menus with six nested levels. Hero images that take eight seconds to load on LTE. Forms designed for a mouse cursor, not a thumb.

Merak in Hong Kong at least treats responsive design as a genuine discipline — they're building across devices, WeChat integrations, and native apps simultaneously. But even they're swimming against the current. Responsive design shouldn't be a selling point. It should be the minimum requirement that every project ships with. The fact that agencies still market it as a feature tells you everything about where the industry actually is versus where it claims to be.

The JavaScript Problem

I need to get something off my chest.

We've turned the web into an application platform and we're worse at it than we were at making simple pages. Go visit any Dribbble darling on a mid-range Android phone. Wait for the JavaScript bundle to parse. Watch the layout shift three times while lazy-loaded components fight for space.

We've layered so much tooling, so much abstraction, so much framework complexity on top of what is fundamentally a document delivery system, and then we act surprised when Core Web Vitals tank. Google's 2024 report on page experience found that over half of mobile sites fail the interaction-to-next-paint threshold. Half.

I'm not anti-JavaScript. I build React apps for a living. But there's a point where the engineering needs of a development team override the actual experience of a person trying to read your client's pricing page on a train with bad reception. And we crossed that point years ago without admitting it.

So What Is Web Design, Actually?

It's not Figma. It's not code. It's not "making things pretty."

It's the act of compressing a business's entire reason for existing into something a stranger can absorb, understand, and act on — sometimes in less time than it takes to blink. It's architecture and psychology and negotiation and a strange kind of empathy for people you'll never meet.

And when it works, nobody notices. They just think the company seems trustworthy.

That six-minute meeting? Honestly, it might be the best feedback we've ever gotten. It meant the design did its job so well that it became invisible.

The trick is learning not to take that personally.