From idea to a live website

Most websites stall because the idea was never turned into a structure. A sentence like “we need a site” is not a brief. Who is it for, what should happen, in which language, on which screens — that is the start.

Then wireframes. Not pretty ones. Ugly boxes that prove the order of information. If a landing page cannot be read as boxes, it will not be clearer with photography.

Visual direction comes after that argument is settled: type, color, material, motion. Development should not be a translation of a picture. If the designer and the frontend are the same person — or at least in the same conversation — the site stays itself.

Launch is a checkpoint, not a finish line. The first week of a live site usually teaches more than the last week of mockups.