Why discovery conversations matter before design ever starts.
The most important conversation on any project happens before I write a single line of code. Not the one about colors or layout — the one about what the business actually does, who it's actually for, and what someone visiting the site needs to walk away understanding, or doing.
Skip that conversation, or rush it, and it doesn't matter how well the site gets built afterward. A beautifully coded, cleanly designed site built around the wrong understanding of the business is still the wrong site. It'll look right in a screenshot and quietly fail to bring in the right work, answer the question prospects actually have, or explain what makes this business different from the twelve other tabs someone has open right now.
I've seen this in my own early work. A site that felt like a real step up when I built it, and then a couple years later looked dated — not because the code had aged badly, but because the understanding underneath it had never gone deep enough to begin with. The visual problems were downstream of a conversation that hadn't happened, or hadn't gone far enough.
So that first real conversation, before I ever open a design file, is where most of the decisions that actually matter get made. Those aren't design questions. They're business questions — and the design only turns out good if the business questions got answered first.
By the time I'm making visual decisions, the conversation that actually determined whether the site works is already finished.
Whether it happens on a call or in writing — email, a Loom walkthrough, a written proposal — I want that first conversation to go deep either way. A written answer to "what do people misunderstand about your business" often turns out more specific than what comes out live, because there's actual time to think about it. But if you'd rather just talk it through on the phone, that works too.
The format can flex. The substance of that first conversation can't get skipped, compressed into a form, or replaced with a questionnaire nobody actually reads. Design is the visible part of the job. But skip the conversation, and no amount of polish in the execution fixes what never got figured out in the first place.
What hasn't changed is who's responsible for what ships.
Decisions that endure versus trendy choices that date quickly.
Call, email, or a written note — tell me about the business and what the site needs to do.