s666chez
Junior Member
- Jan 24, 2024
- 122
- 22
This is going to be a journey thread about building a web design and local SEO agency from scratch, but with a specific approach I haven't seen many people talk about.
The goal is to build websites that are actually fast, actually rankable, and not dependent on any particular tool or platform. The way I do this is by building each section as a standalone vanilla HTML/CSS/JS block that gets deployed through WordPress Gutenberg. Over time these blocks become a library, which means each new site gets faster to build and more consistent in quality.
First of all, I look for reference websites to reverse-engineer their design principles and distill them into something coherent and original. This step is what separates a website that looks intentional from one that looks generated if you ask me.
Then Lovable for prototyping, then Claude to build the actual blocks: HTML, CSS, vanilla JS.
Then WordPress as the CMS, with each block inserted as a Gutenberg custom HTML block. The client gets a manageable backend, I get full control over the frontend.
For SEO I do proper local keyword research before touching the design. I live in a small city (80k inhabitants) and one thing I'll say about working in a mid-size city is that local SEO competition is genuinely low, same for GBP. Most local businesses either have no website or have something embarrassing. The bar to rank is not high if you know what you're doing.
I am about two months in. I built a plumbing company website (yeah no brainer) in the first month as a test of the whole process. I wanted to share some of my projects but last post got taken down for it. Anyway, since then I've been heads down refining the stack, studying references, and working on other projects in parallel, so I haven't been looking for clients. I have been working on the studio's/agency's site for the most part, although I tried reinventing the stack and will most likely delete the site and start all over again.
What I actually need from this thread
I want to find people doing something similar or close enough to have a real conversation. Not people selling $200 Wix sites, not people doing dropshipping with a side of web design. People building actual products with some "craft" behind them.
The problem I'm currently stuck on is designing the agency's own website. It's the one site I can't just reverse-engineer from references, because it has to represent what I actually do and how I actually think about design. I'm not a trained designer. I know what looks good and what doesn't, I have strong taste, but translating that into an original design without copying anyone is where I keep getting stuck. If anyone has gone through this and has thoughts, I'd genuinely appreciate it.
More to come, thanks for reading!!
The goal is to build websites that are actually fast, actually rankable, and not dependent on any particular tool or platform. The way I do this is by building each section as a standalone vanilla HTML/CSS/JS block that gets deployed through WordPress Gutenberg. Over time these blocks become a library, which means each new site gets faster to build and more consistent in quality.
First of all, I look for reference websites to reverse-engineer their design principles and distill them into something coherent and original. This step is what separates a website that looks intentional from one that looks generated if you ask me.
Then Lovable for prototyping, then Claude to build the actual blocks: HTML, CSS, vanilla JS.
Then WordPress as the CMS, with each block inserted as a Gutenberg custom HTML block. The client gets a manageable backend, I get full control over the frontend.
For SEO I do proper local keyword research before touching the design. I live in a small city (80k inhabitants) and one thing I'll say about working in a mid-size city is that local SEO competition is genuinely low, same for GBP. Most local businesses either have no website or have something embarrassing. The bar to rank is not high if you know what you're doing.
I am about two months in. I built a plumbing company website (yeah no brainer) in the first month as a test of the whole process. I wanted to share some of my projects but last post got taken down for it. Anyway, since then I've been heads down refining the stack, studying references, and working on other projects in parallel, so I haven't been looking for clients. I have been working on the studio's/agency's site for the most part, although I tried reinventing the stack and will most likely delete the site and start all over again.
What I actually need from this thread
I want to find people doing something similar or close enough to have a real conversation. Not people selling $200 Wix sites, not people doing dropshipping with a side of web design. People building actual products with some "craft" behind them.
The problem I'm currently stuck on is designing the agency's own website. It's the one site I can't just reverse-engineer from references, because it has to represent what I actually do and how I actually think about design. I'm not a trained designer. I know what looks good and what doesn't, I have strong taste, but translating that into an original design without copying anyone is where I keep getting stuck. If anyone has gone through this and has thoughts, I'd genuinely appreciate it.
More to come, thanks for reading!!
