Process
How a website project runs.
Website projects go wrong in predictable ways: scope that was never written down, a first review that happens too late to matter, and a brand nobody agreed on. This is how I keep those three from happening.
Discovery
Before any design starts, I pull together what already exists: logo files, old guidelines, the current site, how you show up socially, and the competitors you’re measured against. Then a short questionnaire on mission, audience, and the language you’d use to describe your own voice. Then one conversation, 30 to 60 minutes, for the things a form never captures: who actually has final approval, what’s been tried before, and what went wrong when it was.
A Brand Snapshot: one document that settles what “on-brand” means for you. Every decision after this points back to it, and you stop re-explaining your brand to every vendor you hire.
Scope
An audit of the current site: what’s working, what isn’t, and what the analytics say if you have them. Then an honest call on what this actually is: a redesign, a refresh, or a specific set of pages. We map the sitemap, agree what’s in and what’s out, and you sign off before anything gets made.
A scope we have both approved in writing. Nothing gets designed that we haven’t agreed is in scope, which is the single biggest reason website projects run long.
Design & build
Structure first: sitemap and wireframes, so we’re arguing about the right things while it’s still cheap to change them. Then visual design, working against the Brand Snapshot rather than against taste. Then build. Copy drafts, image direction, and headline options arrive with the design instead of after it, so pages show up whole rather than as layouts waiting on words.
A site built the way it was designed, because the person who designed it is the person who builds it.
Review
Three scheduled reviews (wireframes, visual design, and build) instead of one reveal at the end. Each is a decision point with a specific question attached, not an open-ended reaction session. Feedback at the wireframe stage costs an afternoon. The same feedback after build costs a rebuild.
No moment where you see the work for the first time and it’s already too late to change it.
Your side of it
What I’ll need from you.
- Access to what already exists: logo files, any guidelines, the current site’s CMS and analytics.
- One 30–60 minute conversation early on.
- A questionnaire you can finish in a sitting.
- A named decision-maker who can actually approve at each of the three reviews.
The point
That’s most of it. The reason to bring in a fractional Creative Director is that the project stops living on your calendar. If you’re in every thread, something has gone wrong.
Where the work lives
One folder. One version of approved.
One shared folder, structured the same way on every engagement: the Brand Snapshot, the current-site audit, concepts in progress, approved assets, and an archive. You have view and comment access from day one. Nothing moves into approved without your explicit sign-off, so “approved” means something specific instead of something two people remember differently. When the engagement ends, the folder is yours: files, sources and all.