The hardest part of the work is leaving things out.
Every page I build starts with more ideas than it needs. A hero section wants a headline, a subheadline, a button, maybe a stat, maybe a badge, maybe a second link — and if I let all of that in, the page ends up saying everything and meaning nothing.
Restraint isn't really a style choice. It's closer to math. Every element on a page is competing with every other element for the same few seconds of someone's attention. Add ten things and you haven't made the page richer — you've built ten weak signals instead of one strong one.
So most of my actual work on a page happens before I add anything to it: deciding what the page is for, and cutting whatever doesn't serve that one job. A page trying to explain the company's history, sell a service, and collect emails all at once usually fails at all three. A page that does one of those things clearly usually works.
People assume restraint means less work. It's the opposite. Keeping every idea that comes up is easy. Figuring out the one idea the page actually needs, and cutting the rest, is the hard part — but it's the job. A page with one clear job, said well, beats a page trying to say everything at once, every time.
So the hardest part of the job is almost never the part people notice — a good headline, a nice photo. It's the paragraph I write and then delete, because the page already said what it needed to say, and one more sentence would've just started saying it twice.
Most sites that feel wrong were never badly designed — they were badly organized.
What hasn't changed is who's responsible for what ships.
How templates make decisions on the user's behalf, whether you notice or not.
Decisions that endure versus trendy choices that date quickly.
Tell me about your business and what you need your site to do.