my friend ash recently commented that i’m picky, choosy, and apparently unwilling to work with just anyone.

he is not entirely wrong.

of course i need the money. i have bills, businesses, unfinished ideas, and a suspicious number of domains that keep renewing themselves. but i have realised there is a certain kind of website project i genuinely do not enjoy.

there are two types of websites.

the first is a brochure. it is built once, approved after several meetings, launched with some excitement, and then ignored for the next five years. the contact information slowly becomes outdated, the last blog post remains dated 2021, and everyone quietly forgets the website exists.

the second is a shopfront.

it is continuously improved. it is built for distribution, discovery, and capturing value. the copy changes when it does not convert. pages are added when customers keep asking the same questions. search data informs what gets written next. analytics reveal where people lose interest, what they click, and what is quietly wasting everyone’s time.

i love building the second kind.

i loathe building the first.

this probably leaves money on the table, and i’ve made peace with that.

for a long time, i thought i could explain brochure clients into becoming shopfront clients. i thought that once they understood the website was an asset, they would naturally want to keep improving it.

they usually do not.

they want the project completed. they want the invoice settled. they want a nice homepage, a company profile, a few photos, a contact form, and perhaps some animation moving across the screen for reasons nobody can adequately explain.

then they disappear.

there is probably a failure in my own thinking here. i also struggle to understand why so many small and medium-sized businesses insist on having a call before sharing enough information for someone to prepare a quote.

maybe i am too technical.

but half the time, “let’s jump on a call” feels like a request for blind reassurance. someone wants to hear that the project will be easy, cheap, fast, beautiful, profitable, and somehow exactly what they imagined, even though they have not yet explained what they imagined.

i do not respond well to that.

send me the technical details. tell me what currently exists, what is broken, what you are selling, who the customer is, what systems are involved, what the budget range looks like, and what outcome you expect. i can then estimate the work and decide whether it is worth both of us spending time in a meeting.

this probably explains how i build.

i like sharing enough detail that nobody has to suffer through ten meetings just to understand what is being made. i would rather document the logic, expose the assumptions, define the moving parts, and let the work speak clearly before the meeting begins.

the same thinking applies after launch.

a website does not become a sales machine because the owner approved the copy and fell in love with their own words. it becomes useful because someone keeps reading the analytics, testing the pages, tracking the search performance, studying customer behaviour, fixing weak points, and improving the system.

painfully. repeatedly. sometimes obsessively.

the original copy might not sell. the homepage might be aimed at the wrong customer. the navigation might make perfect sense to the company and no sense to anyone outside it. the service page everyone argued about might receive almost no traffic.

you only discover this by watching what happens after launch.

that is the work i enjoy. not simply producing pages, but building an increasingly effective distribution system around a business. a site that learns from real behaviour. a site that gets sharper over time. a site that eventually does some of the selling before the owner enters the conversation.

that is why ash thinks i am picky.

he is probably right.

i want to work with people who understand that the launch is the beginning of the work, not the end of it.