What I See in the First Two Minutes on Your Website

Most people who come to me with an existing website do not arrive because something obviously broke. They arrive because the site launched, the excitement faded, and then nothing happened. No inquiries from Google. No one saying "I found you online." Just the quiet, expensive feeling that the investment did not work the way it was supposed to.

I hear a version of this story more often than I should. And when I look at the site, within two minutes I can usually see exactly what went wrong.

This is not about bad designers. Most of the people who built these sites were doing their best with what they knew. But web design for a service-based small business requires more than making something look good. It requires decisions that most clients never know to ask about, which means they also never know when those decisions got skipped.

Here is what I find when I look.

The heading structure tells me everything

The first thing I do on any site is look at how the headings are structured. This takes about thirty seconds and tells me almost everything I need to know about whether the designer was thinking about search and accessibility or just visual appearance.

What I see most often is five H1 tags. Or eight. Or twelve. One on the hero, one on the about section, one on every service card, one in the footer.

I describe this to clients as wearing five nametags to a networking event. No one knows what to call you because you have introduced yourself five different ways at once. Google reads a page the same way. The H1 is the main introduction, the thing that tells search engines what this page is about. When there are five of them, none of them register. The page has no clear identity, and Google moves on.

The alt text is missing, or it says "image001"

This one shows up on nearly every site I review. Images either have no alt text at all, or the file name was never changed from whatever the designer's computer assigned it. "IMG_4823.jpg" is not a description. It tells search engines nothing and it tells someone using a screen reader even less.

Good alt text describes what is actually in the image, the way you would describe it to someone who could not see the screen. It takes an extra thirty seconds per image. Almost no one does it.

The site was built for the day it launched, not for the year after

This one takes a little longer to see but it shows up consistently. There is no clear place to add a new service. The about page was designed around one specific team structure that has since changed. The blog exists but was never properly set up to receive new posts without breaking the layout. The navigation makes sense for the five pages that exist right now and would fall apart if anything changed.

A well-built site has what I think of as shelves. Places designed to receive new things without reconstruction. Clients who come to me from a previous designer often have a beautiful room with nowhere to put anything new.

Accessibility was not part of the conversation

I work with clients across the Denver area and beyond, and I can count on one hand the number of sites I have reviewed where accessibility was genuinely considered. Not just contrast ratios and font sizes, but the things that matter to someone navigating entirely by keyboard or screen reader. Labeled buttons. Logical focus order. Headings that announce where you are on the page. Link text that tells you where you are going instead of just saying "click here."

This is not a niche concern. It is good design that benefits every visitor, and it is almost always left out entirely.

The designer disappeared at launch

This is the one that frustrates me most on behalf of clients. They went through the whole process, paid in full, launched the site, and then the person who built it became impossible to reach. No handoff. No explanation of how to make basic updates. No one to call when the contact form stopped working two weeks later.

And it does stop working. Forms break. Hosting renewals get missed. DNS settings get confused when someone tries to add a new email account. None of this is catastrophic if someone is paying attention. All of it becomes expensive when no one is.

The calls to action were never discussed

Every page on a website is working toward something. A button, a form, a phone number. But I have reviewed sites where every single call to action invited visitors to call, and the business owner had a newborn at home. Unexpected phone calls were the last thing she needed. A scheduling link or a contact form would have changed her day completely.

A CTA strategy is not complicated, but it requires someone to ask the right question before building: how do you actually want people to reach you? Some clients want phone calls. Some want email. Some want a booking link that lets them control their calendar without back and forth. Some serve clients nationally and want a form. Some need a different answer on their contact page than on their service page.

When a designer builds without asking, they make a guess. And the client lives with that guess every time someone follows the instructions on their site.

There is no analytics

Without tracking, there is no way to know how many people visited the site, which pages they looked at, where they came from, or when they left. The client has been making decisions about their marketing based on guesswork because no one set up the one tool that would have given them real information.

What this means for you

If any of this sounds familiar, none of it is your fault. These are decisions that happen on the designer's side of the project, and most clients have no way of knowing what they do not have until they go looking.

They are also all fixable. Sometimes a Design Sprint is enough to address the gaps. Sometimes the foundation has enough problems that a fresh start makes more sense. Either way, the first step is knowing what you are working with.

If your website has been quiet when it should be working, I would love to take a look. A Good Fit Call costs nothing and takes twenty minutes.