A great website isn't decorated into existence — it's designed, step by step, from strategy to polish. Here's exactly how we take yours from a blank page to launch-ready.
Every WillowTree project moves through the same six stages. You're involved at each one, so there are no surprises — just steady progress you can see.
Before a single pixel is placed, we learn your business: your goals, your audience, and what you need the website to achieve. We look at what your competitors are doing and where you can stand out.
Modern design starts here — a site can only look "right" once we know exactly who it's talking to.
Next we set the visual direction: colour palettes, typography, imagery style, and the overall personality — crisp and corporate, warm and organic, bold and playful. You pick a direction from real visual examples, not abstract descriptions.
We sketch the skeleton of every page: what appears, in what order, and why. Wireframes are deliberately plain — they let us get the layout, hierarchy, and user journey right before styling enters the picture.
This is where modern design earns its speed: a clear structure means visitors find what they need in seconds.
Now the direction and the wireframes come together into polished, pixel-perfect designs. Generous white space, a clear type scale, purposeful colour, and consistent components — the hallmarks of a modern interface — applied to every screen size from phone to desktop.
The approved design is hand-coded into a fast, responsive, accessible website. No bloated templates or page builders — clean code keeps load times under a second and search engines happy.
We sweat the small stuff here: hover states, spacing, motion used sparingly and only where it helps.
We test across devices and browsers, tune performance and SEO, then launch. After that, your site is a living thing — we monitor, maintain, and improve it so the design stays modern long after day one.