What working on both sides of the brief taught me about bad websites

Before I ran a design studio, I spent fifteen years in editorial. Commissioning content, editing copy, shaping stories for clients including Economist Impact, BBC StoryWorks and MIT Technology Review. It was, in many respects, a long education in clarity: in how to take something complex and make it accessible, relevant and worth someone’s time.

When I moved into web design and branding, I expected to learn a whole new skill set. What I didn’t expect was how clearly my editorial background would help me see something that a lot of designers — and a lot of business owners — tend to miss.

The most common problem with small business websites isn’t the design. It’s the communication.

The brief that makes sense to nobody but you

In editorial work, one of the most consistent challenges is the brief that makes complete sense to the person who wrote it and very little to anyone else. The writer has been living with the idea for weeks; they know exactly what they mean. The editor reads it cold and has no idea what the story actually is. The words are all sensible; the structure is broadly coherent; but the central point keeps sliding out of reach.

I see the same pattern constantly in small business websites. The copy makes sense to the person who wrote it because they wrote it. They know their methodology, their process and their positioning. But a visitor landing on that homepage cold — with no context, no reason yet to give the benefit of the doubt — reads the same words and feels vaguely unsure whether this is relevant to them.

This is sometimes called the curse of knowledge: the more deeply you understand something, the harder it becomes to explain it to someone who doesn’t. With editorial work, you learn to work against it deliberately. In branding and web copy, it tends to go unexamined.

What clarity actually requires

In editorial work, the test for clarity is straightforward: can someone who knows nothing about this topic understand it after reading the first two paragraphs? If not, you rewrite until they can.

The equivalent test for a homepage is equally simple: can someone who’s never heard of you understand what you do, who you do it for and why it might matter — within the first few seconds? If not, the copy is doing something wrong.

This doesn’t mean simplifying your work or stripping nuance. It means starting from where the reader is, not from where you are. Leading with their problem before you introduce your solution. Using their language rather than your industry’s.

The best-performing pages I’ve worked on aren’t the most eloquent or technically sophisticated. They’re the ones where you can feel, immediately, that the writer has thought carefully about who they’re talking to.

The design half of the equation

The other thing editorial work taught me is that good design is doing the same job as good copy, just in a different register. A well-chosen visual hierarchy, a colour palette that signals the right thing to the right person, a font pairing that feels authoritative rather than amateurish — all of these communicate something before a single word is read.

The difference between a website that converts and one that doesn’t is often not the quantity of information; it’s whether the visual and verbal elements are working in the same direction. When they’re not — when the design is warm and the copy is cold, or the copy is clear but the design is cluttered — visitors feel a friction they might not be able to name but will act on by leaving.

I started this studio because I think that intersection between what’s said and how it looks is where the most useful work happens. And because most small business websites don’t get both right at once — and that’s usually what’s working against them.