Website strategy and project direction

If your last website went through three rounds of revisions and still nobody could say whether it was any good, it most likely never had a goal. Nobody wrote down who should land on it and what they should do there, so layout, copy and buttons were decided by taste. Website strategy answers those questions at the start, when a change costs an hour of conversation instead of a week of reworking wireframes.

We start with a conversation and analysis. We look at your business, your competitors and the people who are supposed to become your customers, and write the findings down in one plan that everyone working on the project uses. By the time we reach interface design that sells, every decision already has a reason behind it, and nobody has to defend it from scratch.

The document does not have to be long. What matters is that everyone, from you to the person writing the code, understands the same goal and the same audience. Then a conversation about the design stops being an argument about colours and comes down to which version gets the customer to the form faster.

We do not add strategy to every quote. It helps most when you have more questions than answers at the start, or when several people in the company picture the website differently. Start with it if one of these sounds like you:

If nothing on that list applies and the goal of the site is clear, we cut strategy down to one meeting, a review of your materials and a content map. We will tell you so at the quoting stage, because a phase the project does not need is money spent for nothing on your side and pointless work on ours.

• Your first company website

  you do not know yet which pages you need or what a customer should see first.

• Rebuilding your current site

  it works and looks fine, but it brings in no enquiries and nobody can say why.

• A new service or a new market

  you have to explain the offer to people who have never heard of you.

• Several decision-makers

  marketing wants enquiries, sales wants material to send out and the board wants the company to look good.

• A brief from marketing already exists

  we test its assumptions before they turn into wireframes and code.

The scope depends on what you are building. A business website usually needs one workshop and a content map. A store or an app takes us deeper: into customer journeys, user roles and the processes the site has to handle. Whatever the size, we almost always work on these six elements, and each one answers a different question about your website:

• Strategy workshop

  a conversation about goals, problems and expectations, after which everyone means the same thing by a site that works.

• Competitor analysis

  how the companies a customer compares you with communicate, and where there is room nobody has claimed yet.

• Audiences and personas

  who is looking for your offer, what they expect and what holds them back from getting in touch.

• Information architecture

  a content map and page hierarchy, settled before we draw the first screen.

• Value proposition

  the direction for brand messaging and a clear answer to why a customer should choose you.

• Measurable goals

  metrics you will check in analytics after launch instead of judging the site by eye.

On the first call we ask about your company, your customers, the goal of the site and what you want to avoid. Then we ask for material: your current website, analytics data if you have it, earlier briefs and everything you know about your customers. On that basis we analyse competitors and the market in Ahrefs, Similarweb and Google Analytics.

Findings go onto a FigJam or Miro board, and the content map and first structure sketches are drawn straight in Figma, so nothing gets lost when we move on to design. At the end we walk you through the strategy document. It takes the form of a working plan we return to with every design decision, all the way to launch.

Throughout the phase you talk to one person. Kacper Baranowski runs the project personally, from the workshop to launch, and replies to every message by the end of the next working day. What you say in the workshop goes straight into the wireframes, because nobody along the way summarises your words for another department.

The strategy phase usually takes 1–2 weeks. The pace is largely in your hands: how quickly you gather the material and whether the decision-makers can find time for the workshop. With one decision-maker and data ready, it goes faster. With several departments and different expectations, it is better to add a separate stakeholder workshop so disagreements surface now, while nothing has been drawn yet.

The cost depends on the scope and is given in the quote for the whole project. If you have a marketing brief, we start by reviewing it, which shortens the phase and lowers its cost. You get a free quote with the scope and schedule written out within 48 hours of our call. Three items can be added separately, each with its own starting price, the same as in our pricing:

• UX and conversion audit of your current website

  we review your site for UX, conversion and technical issues before designing anything. You get a report where every remark says what to change and why. From PLN 1,200 net.

• Stakeholder workshop

  a moderated session with the people who make decisions at your company. We set priorities, settle internal disputes about what the site should be and leave with a ready strategic brief. From PLN 1,800 net.

• Competitor analysis

  we check what your direct competitors do well, where their gaps are and how you can stand out in a way a customer will notice. From PLN 900 net.

At the end of the phase you hold a strategy document: a description of the target audience, the site's goals, the content hierarchy and the metrics that tell you whether the site is working. With it comes a content map and a scope recommendation, that is, what to build now and what can wait. The technology decision is made here too, because only once the goals and the scale of the project are known can it be chosen sensibly.

The document belongs to you, along with the content map and the accounts we used for the analysis. You can build the site with us or with another team; nobody will hold you back with a document or a tool. If you stay, nothing is done twice: strategy becomes the basis for the design and for building the website in code, and the metrics from the document go into the SEO and analytics setup. After launch you see in numbers whether the site does what it was meant to.

You decide on further work after the first phase, once you know how we work and what you are getting. If that phase has not convinced you, we stop at the document and the content map.

Strategy is part of three of our offers. For business websites it sets out which questions a customer should find answered on the site before they call. In online stores it organises categories, the path to checkout and the arguments on the product page. For a web application it turns a process that currently lives in spreadsheets and email into a list of features, roles and screens.

You can also order strategy alone as a separate stage and decide on the rest later. If you are not sure strategy makes sense in your case, describe the goal of the site in two sentences in the contact form at the bottom of this page. We will tell you whether to start with strategy or go straight to design, and you can see every stage of work on a website in the overview of our services.