What I'd tell my first client if I could go back
Somewhere around 2005, a small business in Johannesburg, South Africa (I was living there at the time) asked me to build their first website. I built it in tables, because that's what you did in 2005. I put their logo in the top left corner, listed their services on a single page, and added a phone number at the bottom. I was genuinely proud of it.
It was, by any standard I'd recognise today, terrible. Not because of the tables or the layout. Because I didn't ask a single question about who would actually visit the site or what they'd need when they got there.
If I could sit down with that client now, here's what I'd say.
Your website is not for you
This is still the most common mistake I see, twenty years on. A business owner sits down to plan their website and starts with what they want to say. Their history. Their qualifications. Their mission statement. All perfectly reasonable things to care about, and none of them are what a visitor is looking for.
Your visitors want to know if you can solve their problem. That's it. Everything else is background.
I learned this the hard way when I rebuilt my own website. I spent hours writing headlines about what I do, when the real question was: who am I talking to, and what do they need? Once I answered that, the rest followed.
Every page on your site should start with the visitor's question, not your answer.
Build for where you'll be, not where you are
The websites that age badly are the ones built for exactly this moment. You're a sole practitioner today, but you're planning to hire next year. You offer two services now, but a third is coming. If your site can't accommodate that without a rebuild, you've paid twice.
This doesn't mean overbuilding. It means thinking two years ahead when you make structural decisions. The cheapest website change is the one you plan for before it's built.
Content matters more than design
I'm a designer telling you that design isn't the most important thing on your website. The words are.
I've seen well-designed sites with vague, generic copy sit there doing nothing. I've seen plain sites with clear, specific content bring in enquiries every week. The pattern is consistent enough that I stopped being surprised by it years ago.
Write your content first. Know what you want to say before you worry about how it looks. If you struggle with the writing, hire a good copywriter. That investment will outperform a fancier design every time.
Maintenance isn't optional
Early in my career, I'd hand over a finished website and move on. Job done. What I didn't think about was what happens six months later when the SSL certificate expires, or a plugin update breaks the contact form, or the CMS hasn't been patched and someone exploits it.
Maintenance isn't an upsell. It's protection. A website without someone keeping an eye on it is a website waiting to break at the worst possible time. That's usually a Friday afternoon, in my experience.
What twenty years has actually taught me
The technology I used in 2005 is gone. The tools I use now will probably be gone in another ten years. But the things that actually matter haven't changed at all.
Listen more than you talk. Ask who the website is for before you start building it. Be honest when something isn't working, even if the client doesn't want to hear it. That's why I stopped trying to look like an agency and started being straightforward about what I do and how I work.
The best projects I've worked on weren't the ones with the biggest budgets. They were the ones where the client trusted me enough to be direct, and I trusted myself enough to push back.
I've been doing this long enough to know what works. If you want that experience on your side, you know where I am.
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