A website is never just a website

But, after 20+ years of making things for the web, I can confidently say: a website is never just a website.

When done right, a website has the potential to become the center point of a vast network, the main hub where all your efforts can be focused towards reaching a goal. Working tirelessly to spread your message, services and products.

It’s not just another item to be checked in the long list of musts of this digital era. It’s your home on the web. The only place where you have full control of how things work, where no algorithm dictates whether your content is seen by the audience that follows you or not.

Though you might think of a website as merely an interface to showcase a product or a service, there is a great deal that goes in the background for it to land in anyone’s browser.

The foundations

Before even getting to the design part, you must have a clear idea of what it is that you’re designing in the first place. And a good way to know the what, is by asking why are you building something in the first place.

It’s not uncommon for me to walk together with my clients from the beginning of this process. Helping them bring down to earth their ideas and motivations, and come up with the right words for expressing their gifts in a way that attracts their ideal clients.

Particularly for those at the very early stages, this is a journey of self-discovery as much as it is about designing a website.

The engine

If you’ve ever tried to build a website, you might be aware of the thousands of different options out there; ranging from the fully-custom to templated builders, “free” alternatives, and even AI generated.

After having tried most options available — the good, the bad, and the ugly — and even though I do have my preferred building method (hint: fully-custom coded), I must admit:

How a website is made doesn’t matter if there’s no strategy behind it.

Nothing is sadder than releasing the most beautiful website in the world, only for it to gather digital dust until the domain expires.

That’s why, besides designing pretty interfaces for my clients, I also make sure they have a full business engine running under the hood. Content optimized to attract the right prospects, emails that nurture their audience, payments that go straight into their bank accounts, and automations that reduce the amount of manual labor.

The work

So if I had to answer again the question, “what do I do?”, I’d put it this way:

I design and set up the systems that make an online business actually run.

The website is the front door, but what I really build is the foundation — the strategy, the content, the automations, and the tools that keep it working behind the scenes.

Because at the end of the day, it’s not about having a nice site. It’s about having a system you own, that consistently brings in clients, sells your products, and frees you to focus on the work that matters most.