Your website is not for you

The hardest part of a web project is almost never technical. It is that the client is the worst possible representative of their own audience, and they do not know it.

They know what every acronym means. They know why the process is done that way. They know the difference between the two services with similar names. All of that knowledge is invisible to them, and it leaks into every decision.

So they approve a homepage that says "Full-service polyaspartic and epoxy solutions for residential and commercial applications," which is precise, accurate, and meaningless to a man with a stained garage floor who wanted to know if you do garages.

They want the awards on the homepage. Nobody has ever chosen a contractor because of an award. They want the history section near the top, because they are proud of it, and they should be, and the customer will read it only after they have decided you might be able to help.

And they want to remove the phone number from the header because it looks cluttered.

This is not stupidity. It is the ordinary condition of knowing a thing well. You cannot un-know it to look at your own front door as a stranger.

Which is a large part of what you are paying an outsider for. Not taste. Not even skill, exactly. Distance. Somebody who is seeing the business the way a customer sees it, because they only just met it too, and who will say out loud that the first sentence does not explain what you do.

The best version of that conversation is short. What does a customer type into a phone at the moment they need you? Now let us make sure that sentence is the first thing on the page.

Everything you are proud of goes below it. It stays on the site. It is just not the door.