Who I am
Design is the work, and writing is what it carries, so yours is built around an argument, not a placeholder.
Strategy, design and build stay with me from the first conversation to the day it goes live. That is deliberate. What a site has to say is worked out in the writing, and it rarely survives being handed to someone who was not in the room when it was decided.
The order
The words come first, so the design has something to work with.
I started as a copy and SEO writer. Half the work was listening to a business describe itself. The other half was reading the words its buyers actually typed into a search bar, and the two rarely matched. Most businesses can’t say plainly what problem they solve, who they solve it for, or why it should be them. A site built on that just produces a more expensive version of the same confusion.
Design does the other half, and the reader meets it first. A page is read as a shape before it’s read as words: what’s large, what’s quiet, what the eye lands on first, how much room each thing is given. The same sentence reads as a boast or a plain fact depending on what sits above it and how much air surrounds it. Hierarchy, type and spacing aren’t decoration added at the end. They are the argument, made visible.
The third part is being legible to a machine. A search engine reads the same words and structure you do, and what Google calls experience, expertise, authority and trust is, in practice, the same evidence a careful buyer looks for. Clean markup and fast pages matter, but none of it is a trick, and none of it works if the writing underneath is vague.
Good writing can make an ordinary offer look valuable. Put it on a genuinely good offer, in a design built to carry it, and there’s little left to argue with.
The real job
What people actually buy is somewhere to put the responsibility.
Nobody wants a website. What they want is to hand the thing to somebody and stop carrying it. That is what is really being decided in a first conversation, and it is not whether the design is to your taste. It is whether you can put this down.
In practice, that means three things. You won’t have to become a website person: turning what you know into something your audience can follow is my job, not another item on your list. I’ll look at the site the way a potential client sees it for the first time, which you stopped being able to do long ago, and tell you what’s losing them, even when the answer is a price or lead time you’d rather not print. And when the date comes, the site is finished, working, and yours.
A site is where all of that gets confirmed or quietly disproved, usually within seconds, by someone who will never tell you which. That’s also why launch isn’t the end. What persuades a buyer shifts by sector and by country, and a page that was right three years ago is now making the case for someone else.
The work is making it difficult for the right person to talk themselves out of you.
Who it is for
These four were chosen, not collected.
Family businesses, showrooms and studios, independent advisors, practices and practitioners. Four groups that look unrelated but share one thing: the buyer decides before making contact, based on evidence the business was never taught to present. I know how that failure plays out in each of them, which is a narrower claim than working with everyone.
I also have people in each of these fields. When a client is mid-season, mid-case or mid-quarter and can’t spare three hours, I can ask someone who has spent a career in that trade what a buyer really asks first. So the research still gets done properly, even when the person paying for it is too busy to sit through it.
There is also work I turn down. If what you need is an app, a marketplace, a rebuild of something that already works, or fifty pages by Friday, I am the wrong person, and saying so in the first reply costs us both less than discovering it in week four.
The next step is a conversation, not a proposal.
Write and tell me what is happening. I read it myself. If I am not the right person for it, I will say so and point you somewhere better.