How Shorter Website Projects Can Lead to Better Design
Guest post by Clare Butler. Clare is a UK Squarespace designer creating elegant, SEO-friendly websites for creative and wellness businesses.
How tighter timelines, clearer boundaries and fewer options can produce more focused, creative work.
When I first started designing websites, I was so excited to be working with new clients that I said yes to pretty much anything that came my way.
A four-page website? Absolutely. A 25-page website? Yes, I could do that too.
At one point, I quoted for a 100-page website. I then joined a call with the head honcho, who casually mentioned they had another 95 products to add, each needing its own page. They were rather surprised to discover that an extra 95 pages would cost significantly more money.
I came off that call and took a good, hard look at myself. Did I actually want to do this? The answer was no. I didn't want to spend my working life building enormous websites with a never-ending timeline and it certainly wasn’t how I was doing my best work.
For the first few years of my business, I worked on websites of every conceivable size. Some were straightforward. Others seemed to grow arms and legs the moment we got started. One particularly drawn-out project nearly made me give up web design altogether.
On those longer projects with never-ending scope creep, I felt the creativity drain out of me - I didn't feel like a designer anymore. I felt like someone servicing an ever-expanding list of requests, with no finish line in sight. By page five, I'm still inspired. By page 34, not so much. True, I could outsource, but I never really wanted to get into managing anyone, and I personally prefer to deliver all my websites from start to finish. And that shift in energy isn't neutral. There's a real difference between a “let's get this done" mentality and a “let's do this beautifully" one, and the client on page 34 deserves that just as much as the one on page five.
Now of course for some projects, a longer timeline is essential. But for many small-business websites, particularly those built by a freelance designer doing most or all of the work, I've come to believe the opposite is often true.
You work differently when something has your full attention
You aren't opening one client’s website for an hour, switching to somebody else's, then trying to remember where you were three days later on the original job. You stay immersed in the client's business, their audience, their words, their imagery. One decision leads naturally into the next, and the finished website feels like one coherent piece of work rather than a collection of decisions made weeks apart.
The hours needed to produce a five-page website are broadly the same whether spread across 30 days or brought together into one week. A shorter timeframe doesn't mean rushing. It means concentrating the work into a defined period when the project takes centre stage.
For the client, it means having a designer properly focused on their business. There's far less opportunity for momentum to disappear. Longer projects can become exhausting for clients too, and when weeks pass between stages, even they start to lose sight of what they originally wanted. A shorter process gives them a clear roadmap and, perhaps most importantly, a launch date they can actually see.
It does ask something of them. They need to be prepared, available, willing to make decisions. But in return they get their designer's concentrated attention at exactly the point when their enthusiasm for the project is strongest.
Inspiration tends to arrive early
I'm quite an instinctive designer, and an instinctive person generally. When somebody enquires, I often start to get an excitable feeling for their website even before the discovery call, before they've decided to work with me.
Over the years, designers build up a mental library of things we love: a gorgeous colour palette, a lovely custom font, a particular way of using imagery. Then a new client arrives and we start joining the dots.
A designer's gut feeling is usually backed by years of looking, learning and experimenting, and a focused project means I can act on that energy while it's still fresh. When the work stretches across weeks or months, there's much more chance of rethinking, reconsidering, and gradually losing touch with that feel for how it should come together. Sometimes more time just gives us longer to talk ourselves out of a good decision.
None of this works without proper preparation
If everybody turns up on Monday morning and hopes for the best, a condensed process falls apart. It relies on both designer and client being ready: a clear content deadline, final copy and imagery arriving with enough time for the designer to take it all in before the build begins.
That deadline is useful for the client too. When someone has a fixed place in your calendar, they tend to get their act together, completing the questionnaire, gathering images, thinking properly about what they want, rather than still making fundamental decisions halfway through the build. Meanwhile the designer gets a run-up: days beforehand to read, think and formulate a direction, perhaps followed by a strategy call to agree the look and feel before any pages are built.
The visible production period may be shorter. The thinking behind it isn't.
Fewer options, stronger idea
When you're starting out, it's tempting to prove your value by showing the client lots of options. But more choice doesn't necessarily make people feel more certain. Quite often it does the opposite.
Fewer options doesn't mean less thought went into the design, usually it means more thought went in before the client saw anything at all. Our job is to take everything the client has shared about their business, their personality, their audience, their ambitions, and use our experience to give them a clear recommendation.
Boundaries protect the work
Clear scope matters as much as a clear timeframe. When a five-page website becomes a 10-page website halfway through, it doesn't only affect that client. The designer has already promised their time to the people booked in afterwards, and is suddenly expected to find capacity that doesn't exist. That stress follows into other projects and ends up affecting clients who were organised and ready on time.
This matters especially when you're a freelancer doing everything yourself. An agency can divide a large project between a strategist, a copywriter, a developer, an SEO person, an account manager. When you're a one-person business you're doing all of it, and if several open-ended projects run at once, your attention fragments. You're not fully immersed in any of them. You're constantly servicing all of them. Over time the job you once loved starts to feel less like designing and more like managing an endless workload.
I know this because I tried it. It very nearly broke me. Protecting your creative energy isn't self-indulgent, it's essential to doing a good job. If one sprawling project leaves you burnt out, it's the next client who ends up with the frazzled version of you.
Shorter isn't right for everything
I'm not suggesting every website should be built in a week. Some businesses genuinely need large, complicated sites, with longer timelines and bigger teams. I'm talking from the perspective of freelance designers building for small businesses, many of whom came to this work wanting flexibility, a second or third career, work that's creatively satisfying without swallowing their whole life. We're allowed to build businesses that support that. We're allowed to structure our services around the conditions where we actually do our best work.
If you're choosing a web designer, a shorter timeframe shouldn't be mistaken for less care or lesser design. A well-run week may give you far more of your designer than a longer project where you're one of several people competing for their time.
I began this business assuming that being a web designer meant saying yes to projects of any size or scope. What I learned instead is that I didn't have to accept work that drained the creativity out of me. And that shorter timeframes and stronger boundaries really can lead to creating better and more beautiful websites for our clients.