How we ship a marketing site in three weeks — without cutting corners

Most marketing sites don't take months because they're hard. They take months because nobody decided what "done" means. Our three-week process works because the first two days are spent doing exactly that.

Week 1: decide, then design

We start with a one-page brief: who the site is for, the one action we want them to take, and the pages that support it. Everything else is a nice-to-have for phase two.

• A sitemap with every page and its single job
• Real copy, not lorem ipsum — design follows words
• Two homepage directions, reviewed together on day 4

Write the copy first — Designing around real headlines surfaces problems in days that would otherwise show up in week three.

Week 2: build on a boring stack

We build on Next.js with a headless CMS so the marketing team can edit without a developer. Boring is a feature: fewer surprises, faster pages, easier handover.

npx create-next-app@latest acme-site
cd acme-site && npm run dev

Components are built once and composed into pages, so adding a landing page later takes an afternoon, not a sprint.

Week 3: test, speed up, launch

1. Cross-device QA on real phones, not just resized browsers
2. Performance pass: images, fonts and third-party scripts
3. Redirects mapped from the old site so no ranking is lost
4. Analytics and conversion events checked before the switch

A launch date is a design constraint, not an afterthought.

Marcus Webb

What we deliberately leave for later

Blog migrations, complex integrations and personalisation all land in phase two — once the site is live and we can see how real visitors behave.