Does building a website have to be hard?
There is a deeply rooted tradition in website development – call it the craftsman ideal. It feels honourable to build everything from scratch. Code gets written in complex, convoluted ways, rather than first identifying what actually matters and choosing an approach that delivers a quality result efficiently.
A first-timer sometimes falls into the trap of reinventing the wheel. The wheel starts out oval and angular, and then – after testing, fixing, and iteration sprint after sprint – it eventually, truly, becomes round. Everyone involved, from the client to the UX designers and especially the developers, has been shouting from the rooftops, schedules have blown, and the budget has gone well over.
The better approach is to accept from the outset that a round wheel is the best current practice (because it is a convention, and conventions support established habits), go straight to that solution, and spend the time, resources, and creative energy on design and content instead.
Why does reinventing the wheel happen so often? Rarely out of bad intentions – more often out of inexperience. There can also be a temptation for the vendor to turn a coding project into a bigger engagement: if everything is built from scratch with plenty of bespoke solutions, there is simply more billable work. And more billing opportunities arise when you iterate a lumpy wheel into a rounder one, one development sprint at a time.
So how should websites be built in the 2020s?
The first priority is transparency. This is not, in the end, a particularly mysterious undertaking. What matters is that the whole team shares a common understanding of the goals, methods, and tools that will guide the project. The key points are described below.
What is modern website development?
Modern website development requires a systematic model, the right methods, and the right tools.
1. Growth-Driven Design and a systematic development model
Work must be driven by objectives, and managed on the basis of facts. It is essential to define the fundamentals upfront: who the site is being built for (buyer persona definitions), in what use context (customer journey mapping), and why (concrete, measurable goals for what the site should achieve).
Growth-Driven Design refers to a goal-oriented development model in which you can agilely test and verify what works, and steer the work accordingly. Ongoing development must also happen goal-first. If the objective is, say, to improve conversion efficiency, it is genuinely important to have documented hypotheses and metrics that define how that improvement will be pursued. When you can verify that A works better than B, it becomes easy to continue developing in the right direction.
Too often, things are done on thin reasoning or for the wrong reasons. Decisions are guided not by facts and expertise, but by position in the team hierarchy (HiPPO – highest paid person's opinion), the loudest voice, or the biggest ego. When such a figure delivers their views with the full weight of their authority, the threshold for challenging the received "truth" is high.
A better approach is to lean on metrics and verifiable data. It doesn't require magic to verify how things are actually going. If you do random things in random ways, you get a random result.
2. Design methods and design system
If the wheel isn't worth reinventing every time, there is equally little point in dreaming up user interfaces from thin air. Visitors navigate a website guided by established conventions. That's why a link must look like a link, navigation must be found in the header, the logic of use must be consistent, and the experience should be guided by visual hierarchy. It would be counterproductive to invent an entirely novel way of placing navigation, purely because no competitor has done the same.
Certain things are a certain way for good reason. A large proportion of UI elements are partly or wholly standardised. That is why design must be grounded in a professional design system – a systematic model for the foundational design elements used to build the site's structure.
A design system defines the commonly used UI components: the hero element, content columns, buttons, listings, forms. The exact form those components take depends on the project – what fits the brand and serves the purpose.
Colours, image sizes, column counts, spacing, and page template styles are defined to suit each specific need. The elements themselves are not invented from nothing; rather, parameters (colours, fonts, widths, shapes, effects, etc.) are defined for existing conventional elements.
The power of a design system lies in this: by defining primary colours and fonts in line with the brand, they propagate automatically through every module and component. Figma, for example, is an excellent tool for the practical implementation of a design system.
Design is comparatively fast, efficient, and structured – even in large and complex web projects. Individual elements don't end up with incorrect specifications, and no time is wasted on confusion, corrections, or hesitation. Once the components have been designed and defined, they are "transferred" into code.
3. Tools: Customisable website development theme Blink Runway
The customisable development theme Blink Runway is a collection of page templates, modules, and components used to build the site. Rather than coding every component from scratch, an existing component is given the values defined during the design phase. The plan thus moves seamlessly into implementation.
Each component has been tested multiple times and optimised to work across all devices and browsers. This means years of accumulated work can be leveraged, and the implementation can be completed in record time – while also achieving meaningfully higher quality than traditional "craftsman" development.
Sites are built on modern web technology (HubSpot), making them secure, fast, and agile to develop. The site is not left isolated in its own silo – it becomes a seamless part of the cycle of marketing, sales, and customer experience management.
What about migrating content from an old platform?
Migrating content from an old site to a new one is often a surprisingly laborious step, and organisations are rarely prepared for it in terms of resources or scheduling – unless the right tools are in place that allow most or all content to be transferred programmatically. A quality implementation model includes smart migration tools for content transfer. This is worth clarifying upfront, so you don't discover only at the end that you were expected to copy-paste everything yourself.
Blink Runway also includes an AI-powered migration tool, which allows content to be transferred almost entirely programmatically. This saves a significant amount of time and money.
Does the development theme constrain the appearance of the site?
No. All style settings and modules are fully customisable.
What if a client wants every link to look different? That too is possible – though not recommended. The development theme does not restrict any bespoke implementation. The theme does not include every conceivable quirk, because it is a collection of the page templates, modules, and components on which the vast majority of high-quality, usable sites are built. That said, anything can be coded into the site outside the theme, should the need arise.
From the user's perspective, a site built with a customisable development theme differs from a traditionally developed site in only one way: it is significantly higher in quality and considerably faster to build.
Sounds great. Why hasn't it always been done this way?
Because a customisable development theme requires a substantial amount of development work to create. The theme distils years of experience in high-quality programming and best practices, as well as a measurable, fact-based understanding of website usability.
A second reason is the economics of traditional website development. The more time spent fumbling at the design stage, the more gets coded (bespoke solutions included) – and the more billable work is generated. There is also a temptation to let things slide into a mess and then charge to fix it. Eventually, the whole contraption is held together only by adding more duct tape – and more costs.
In such situations, it is often wisest to clear the table and rebuild. With a customisable development theme, a new site can be up and running quickly and without complications.
Am I locked into the development theme if my site was built with it?
No. The development theme is a way to get a high-quality site published quickly. It does not constrain how the site is developed afterwards. Development can continue with the theme or without it, if that becomes the more appropriate path.
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