A lot of designers do exactly one thing: design.

And then they wonder why the website doesn’t convert, doesn’t rank, and breaks the second you ship it.

To me, that’s the biggest trap founders fall into when they hire “a designer.” You get something that looks nice in Figma. And that’s it. Nice.

But a website needs to do a job, like an additional sales hire. And the job is to make people click, sign up, trust you, and come back. Design helps with that, for sure. But design alone doesn’t get you there.

When we take on a redesign at Grauberg, the design part is maybe half the work. Here’s all the other stuff we do that actually makes a website work:

1. Copywriting and content strategy

This is the biggest one. Highest leverage by far.

Before we design a single pixel, we figure out how to position the software in a way that people have to click the button. We do a positioning workshop, we write the copy, we build a content strategy around it.

I see so many freelance offers saying “we need a designer, you give us the copy.” And the thing is, the copy is what’s bad. So the designer designs around bad copy, the copy is still bad, and then the founder wonders why the shiny new website doesn’t convert.

You can have the prettiest hero section in the world. If the headline doesn’t land, nobody cares.

2. Website Development

Once everything is designed and ready, someone has to actually build it.

We usually use Webflow or Framer, so “no-code” tools. But sometimes you still need real code for integrations or custom animations. We also started building sites with Next.js now, using AI. Even Lovable, but that needs a proper AI setup to not turn into a mess.

Here’s why this matters: we do design and development. So we take the vision from Figma straight to code, with all the animations, the interactions, the moving pieces intact.

If you hire a designer and then a separate developer, a lot of things get lost in the handoff. I’ve seen beautifully designed sites in Figma that ended up static and boring on the web. All the life drained out of them. Because the developer didn’t know what was supposed to move, or breathe, or feel alive.

3. SEO and AEO

Your website is a chance to add a whole marketing channel to your GTM stack. But only if it’s set up properly.

That means a proper technical SEO setup. Real robots.txt, proper meta descriptions, the boring stuff under the hood. People love forgetting about this.

But if you skip it, two things happen:

1. Sharing your site on social looks funky and unprofessional (wrong preview image, weird title, no description).
2. And you have a hard time ranking, which means you’re paying for every visitor instead of earning some for free.

It’s not glamorous. Nobody screenshots a robots.txt file. But it’s the difference between a website and a marketing channel.

4. Analytics and optimization

It is impossible to build the best performing website on the first try.

I don’t care how good you are. You’re guessing. Educated guessing, but still guessing.

So you need analytics and A/B tests. Which headline works best? Which feature should you mention first? You only know by testing. We usually set up PostHog or Datafast (Framer also has its own A/B testing tool) and actually run the tests.

Normal designers don’t do this. They hand you a website based on assumptions from a month ago, and that’s it.

And as a startup, you change. Your positioning shifts, you finetune your audience, you launch new stuff. The website needs to keep up. A static site goes stale fast.

5. Guidance on how to convert

We’re designers. But the goal of a website is more customers.

Sometimes that’s direct, through a signup flow. Sometimes it’s indirect, with lead hooks, social proof, showing you’re credible and worth trusting.

We’ve built websites for 50+ startups now. And getting that conversion piece right is not always obvious. What works for a dev tool doesn’t work for a consumer app. What works at seed doesn’t work at Series A.

So every new client gets our best practices baked in from the start. Not guesses. Stuff we’ve already seen work, across a lot of different startups.

So, that’s the work

Design is the part you see. The rest is the part that makes it actually work.

As Steve Jobs said, “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” That’s the whole thing right there.

A designer who only designs gives you expensive art. We give you a website that converts, ranks, and doesn’t fall apart.

If you wanna see how the whole process looks, [watch the video here].

And if it’s time to redesign your website, [book a call] and let’s talk.

That’s about it.