Brutally Honest Advice About Web Design In 9 Mins

TITLE: Brutally Honest Advice About Web Design in 9 mins CHANNEL: Sam Crawford | Web Design Expert DATE: 2026-04-26 ---TRANSCRIPT--- When you’ve built over 750 websites for everyone from startups to Fortune 500 companies, you stop being polite about what works and what doesn’t. Most of the advice out there is either obvious or flat-out wrong. So, give me the next few minutes and I’ll give you the most honest web design advice you’ll hear all year. Number one, nobody is reading your website. I know that sounds harsh, but after 750 websites, I can tell you that it’s true. They skim headlines, they glance at images, they look for something that tells them [music] they’re in the right place. If your homepage is just a wall of text, you’ve already lost them. You need to write for scanners. Bold your key points. Use short paragraphs. Make the important stuff impossible to miss. Number two, people judge your entire business in about half a second based on how your website looks. It’s called the halo effect. If your site looks professional in that first half second, visitors automatically assume that your product, your service, your entire company is high quality. But if it looks cheap, that negative first impression colors everything from then on in. They’ll read your best copy with skepticism. They’ll second-guess your testimonials. They’ll find reasons not to buy. And the worst part is they don’t even know why they’re doing it. Ask yourself, does my site pass the blink test? Number three, those stock photos on your website, everyone knows that they’re stock photos. The team high-fiving in the boardroom, the group of professionals looking at the laptop, nobody believes that that’s your office. And the moment someone spots a stock photo, a little voice in their head just goes, “What else on this site isn’t real?” Don’t get me wrong, we’ve utilized stock imagery on client sites before as placeholders, but we always push every client to use real imagery. Because what actually works is real photos, even those imperfect ones. The slightly messy desk photo, the genuine team shot, anything that signals a real human touched this website. In a world where AI is flooding the internet with those perfect designs, that soulless imagery, the intentional imperfection is becoming the ultimate trust signal. Number four, pretty websites alone don’t convert. It’s the clear ones that do. And I know a lot of designers don’t want to hear that. You can have the most beautiful, award-winning website in the world, but if a visitor can’t figure out what you do and how to buy from you within seconds, then the harsh truth is that it’s failing at its sole purpose. Clarity itself isn’t the enemy of good design because it is good design. Your website’s primary job is to communicate your value and then guide visitors to take a specific action. So, if your design gets in the way of that message, then the design itself is the problem. Number five, you’re using way too many words. Businesses write their website copy like they’re writing an essay. They’ve got reams of text that no one’s ever going to read. Take your copy, cut it in half, and then cut it in half again. What’s left is probably closer to what your visitors actually need. Every single word on your website should earn its place. So, if removing a sentence doesn’t make the page worse, then remove it. Number six, stop hiding your pricing. Whether you show your prices or not, you’re filtering people. If you hide them, you’re wasting time on calls with people who can’t afford you. If you show them, or at least give a starting from number, you attract the right people who are already in the right ballpark for what you offer. Your website should repel the wrong people just as much as it attracts the right ones. And that’s not necessarily a flaw, that’s just good design. So, be bold about who you are, what you charge, and then who you work with. Number seven, if your website looks like every other business in your industry, then you’re going to be [music] priced like every other business in your industry. Your website is the single biggest opportunity that you have to differentiate yourself. Your process, your personality, your unique value. If none of that comes through, then you’re just a commodity. And I’ve said this before, but commodities compete on price. In a world where AI-generated sites are all around us, all with the same soulless, plastic look, the sites that stand out are the ones that actually feel human. What they have is a point of view, and that’s where the value is. Number eight, if your website takes more than 3 seconds to load, you’ve already lost nearly half your visitors. And most business owners have got no idea how slow their site actually is. Because what they’ll do is they’ll test it on their office Wi-Fi, on a MacBook Pro, and they just think, “Yeah, that that’s fine.” But your customers are going to be loading it up on a phone with two bars of signal while they’re walking down the street. Every unnecessary animation, every uncompressed image, every bloated plugin, they’re all costing you real money. And that problem is invisible to you, but it’s painfully obvious to every visitor who bounces before your homepage is even finished loading. Number nine, over-the-top animation is only impressive to other designers. For everyone else, it’s just a distraction. It slows down the site and it gets in the way of the core message. And here’s what makes this worse now, tools like Spline and Rive have made these complex animations accessible to everyone. So, now every single designer is adding wild 3D effects and parallax scrolls just because they can. Your clients don’t necessarily need award-winning websites, they need websites that help their businesses. A button that responds when you hover over it, content that fades in naturally as you scroll, that’s the good stuff. But if your animations are the thing that people notice instead of your offer, then you’ve got your priorities backwards. Number 10, you’re designing your website for yourself, and that’s a huge, huge problem. You’ve got business owners obsessing over the colors that they personally like, layouts that impress their friends, copy that sounds impressive to them. But you are not your customer. Your customer doesn’t care about your brand guideline document. care about your founder story. They care about one thing, can you solve my problem? The best website I’ve ever built with the ones where the business owner got out of their own way and let the data decide what the visitors actually click. Where do they actually drop off? What pages do they actually read? So, stop designing for the mirror and start designing for the person on the other end of the screen. Number 11, most websites don’t need more pages, they need fewer, better pages. Every page that you add on is another click, it’s another decision, it’s another opportunity for a visitor to get lost or just give up. Someone lands on your homepage and then next logical step isn’t clear. Do they go to services? Do they go to about? Do they just skip straight to contact? They’re confused and that confusion always costs you. Consolidate your content, focus on your core message, create a few powerful, high-impact pages instead of a dozen mediocre ones. Number 12, your about page is probably the second most visited page on your entire website and you’re wasting it. Most about pages, they’ll read like a resume. Founded in 2015, we believe [music] in no one cares. What visitors actually want from your about page is just reassurance. They want to know, are these people credible? Do they understand my problem? Have they solved it before? So, flip it. Instead of talking about yourself, talk about the transformation that you create for businesses. Show the data. Companies are putting metrics everywhere now because numbers themselves build trust way faster than paragraphs. Revenue generated, clients served, years of experience, specific, verifiable numbers. And then back up these numbers with real faces and stories. That’s an about page that actually converts. Number 13, a great website doesn’t attract the right customers, it actively repels the wrong ones. Be bold in your messaging about who you are, what you do. If you’re expensive, then don’t hide it. If you only work with a certain type of client, well then say it. Filtering out bad clients early saves everyone time and it saves them money. Too many businesses are out there trying to appear to absolutely everyone. And what happens is they end up resonating with no one. Number 14, launching your website is not the finish line, it’s the starting line. And this is where most people get it completely wrong. They spend months on the build, they launch it, and then they just walk away. But the real work itself, it starts after the launch. Gathering data, testing what works, optimizing for conversions, driving traffic to the site. Your website is a living thing, so you’ve got to treat it like one. And if whoever built your site for you just handed it over and then disappeared, that’s not a premium service, that’s just cutting a little running. And number 15, nobody wakes up in the morning wanting to buy a website. They wake up in the morning wanting more leads and more Your website copy and design should reflect exactly that. Stop listing features on your site and trying to sell the thing, just sell the result. What does someone’s life or someone’s business look like after they use your product or they hire your company? That’s what goes on the website. Because at the end of the day, the psychology of a great website isn’t based on tricks or manipulation, it’s just based on respect. Respecting the visitor’s time by being clear, respecting their intelligence by providing a thoughtful experience, and respecting their goals by showing them exactly how you can help them get there. Now you’ve got the honest truth about what actually works. But knowing the rules is only half of it. The other half is seeing them in action. So, click this video here because I break down exactly how to build a website that feels so premium, people are going to be begging you to buy. I’ll see you there.