Do you ever look at something in your business that just isn't quite right? It doesn't sound right, doesn't look right, doesn't feel right, but you can't put your finger on what it is or why?
Your website is one of your most important marketing assets and your primary online communication with your customers. In most industries it's also one of your main sales tools and a real contributor to your bottom line.
Having worked on countless websites across a broad range of industries, we've noticed the same handful of things coming up again and again. These are the ones that make a site look unprofessional, and therefore stop it converting visitors into paying customers.
Templates are genuinely useful and they have a real place. If you're starting out and not yet ready to invest in custom design, a good template saves you hours and gets you to something respectable far faster than doing it yourself.
The problem isn't the template. It's the untouched template.
Two things have changed here. Templates have got dramatically better, so the old giveaways of a cheap site have mostly disappeared, and AI site builders now produce something clean in minutes. Which sounds like good news, except it means an enormous number of businesses in your category are launching sites that look competent and identical.
So looking professional is no longer the bar. Looking like yourself is. A site a visitor could mistake for three of your competitors isn't failing on craft, it's failing on distinctiveness, and that costs you more.
Consistency across a business creates a sense of predictability, and predictability is what people read as trustworthy. It also builds recognition, which is the thing that makes you come to mind later, when someone is finally ready to buy.
This comes down to details that feel too small to matter. Pick two to five brand colours and two typefaces and use them everywhere, without exception. Make sure your photography carries those colours through as well.
One addition worth making. Consistency is only half of it. Being consistently generic still leaves you forgettable, because the thing people need to recognise has to be distinctive enough to be worth recognising. Consistency is how a brand sticks. Distinctiveness is what gives it something to stick to.
User friendliness is one of the most important parts of any website. That means communicating clearly and making it effortless for a visitor to find what they came for. A cluttered, confusing site doesn't just look unprofessional, it feels overwhelming, and overwhelmed people leave.
There's a failure in the opposite direction that's become just as common, though. Sites so stripped back and minimal that they never actually say anything. Enormous type, a lot of white space, three words per screen and no answer to what you do, who it's for or what it costs.
That's not sophistication, it's evasion, and visitors read it as either expensive or vague. Neither one gets you an enquiry. Simple means easy to understand, not short on information.
Website software moves fast, so rather than get into specifics that will be out of date shortly, here's the useful version.
For large ecommerce, Shopify remains the sensible choice and isn't close. For service businesses and smaller ecommerce, Webflow and Framer have become the serious options, offering proper design control without needing a developer for every change. Squarespace is still perfectly good for simple sites where speed and low cost matter more than flexibility. Full disclosure, we build in Webflow, because the control it gives over design and the ease of ongoing updates suits how our clients work.
But the platform is rarely the actual problem. The real question is whether you can update your own site. If adding a case study, changing your pricing or publishing a post means emailing a developer and waiting a fortnight, your website will slowly go stale no matter how good it looked at launch. A site you can maintain beats a technically superior one you can't.
Imagery drives more of how a site feels than almost anything else, which makes it one of the biggest contributors to how your business is perceived.
The old advice was simply that phone photos let you down. That's no longer quite right, because phone cameras have become genuinely excellent, and there are contexts where slightly raw, real imagery outperforms polished stock.
What actually lets sites down is direction, not equipment. Bad lighting. No consistent treatment. Backgrounds that fight the subject. Images shot with no thought for the shape they need to fill or the message they need to carry. A phone photo that has been properly lit and art directed will beat an expensive shoot with no plan every time.
Professional photography is still worth investing in, and the images earn their keep across every other marketing touchpoint you have. Just brief it against what the site needs to communicate rather than simply booking a shoot and hoping.
Most sites that feel off aren't badly made. They're just built without a decision at the centre of them.
Every point above is a symptom of the same thing, which is a website assembled from reasonable choices rather than built to say something specific to a specific person. That's why it's hard to name what's wrong when you look at it. Nothing is broken. It just isn't about anything.
Do any of these resonate with your site? Send us an email at hello@formecreative.co.nz. We'd love to hear what you'd change.
Design as Strategy
Design as art
