Every new website starts with a wishlist. A booking system. A chatbot. Some slick animations. Maybe a bit of background music on the homepage (we’ll come back to that one).
Wishlists are fine. The trouble starts when nobody decides what actually matters, what can wait, and what shouldn’t be there at all. That’s how projects go over budget, miss launch dates, and end up with a website that needs half of it rebuilding six months later.
At Say Web Design, a Cornwall web design agency based in Newquay, we’ve been on both sides of this. Here’s how we help clients prioritise features, and what we’ve learned from the projects that didn’t go to plan.
A few years ago we worked with a client who knew exactly what they wanted, or thought they did. They didn’t want wireframes. They wanted functionality based on a competitor’s site, so we designed our own version around it.
Halfway through the build, the changes started arriving. The client hadn’t talked to their team about what they needed day to day, and they hadn’t asked their customers what they wanted from the site either. The features we’d built were the ones a competitor had, not the ones this business needed.
We don’t work that way any more. Now we wireframe any complex functionality before a single page is designed, so everyone can see which features are going where and how they connect to the rest of the site. It’s much cheaper to move a box on a wireframe than to rebuild a finished feature.
We also ask every client two questions before we go any further:
Have you asked your team what features they’d like? They’re the ones answering the phone, handling bookings and fielding complaints. They know where the friction is.
Have you asked your customers what they’d like? The website is for them. A feature your competitor has is not the same as a feature your customers want.
It sounds backwards, but the first thing we talk about isn’t the feature list. It’s timeframes and budget.
Those two answers tell us whether everything can be delivered in one go, or whether we need to put the essentials into phase one and schedule the rest for later. If a client already has a working website, we usually have a bit more breathing room. If there’s an exhibition or event on the horizon, the deadline takes over and the priorities become very clear, very quickly.
Once we know the constraints, we go through the wishlist together and put everything into stages.
We recently worked with a new business that needed two things: to start ranking in Google for its key services, and a full booking system.
Building both at once would have meant waiting months with no online presence at all. So we launched a smaller brochure-style site first. It gave customers the information they needed, started building up search visibility, and let the client capture and track leads through a simple contact form.
Meanwhile, we built the booking system on a staging site behind the scenes. The client had something working and earning its keep from early on, and the complex part of the project got the time it needed rather than being rushed to hit a launch date.
That’s the heart of good prioritisation. Phase one isn’t a cut-down version of the dream. It’s the part that gets your business moving.
Some features are popular because they look good in a pitch. Chatbots and animations are the usual suspects.
We’re not against them, but they come at a cost. Many of them slow page speed down significantly, and page speed affects both your search rankings and whether visitors stick around. So the question becomes: is this feature more important than being found on Google? Most business owners wouldn’t think to ask that, which is exactly why we do.
On the other side are features that rarely get requested but pull a lot of weight:
FAQs on the homepage. With AI-driven search growing fast, clear answers to real customer questions are more valuable than ever. They’re hugely underrated.
Schema markup. Behind-the-scenes code that helps search engines understand your business. No client has ever asked us for it by name, but almost every client needs it.
Testimonials. Most people look for proof from other customers before they get in touch. Testimonials are often an afterthought, and they shouldn’t be.
A good web designer in Cornwall, or anywhere else, should be telling you about the things you don’t know to ask for, not just building the things you do.
Sometimes a client really wants a feature we’d steer them away from. How we handle it depends on the feature.
One client wanted music to play automatically as soon as someone landed on the homepage. We advised against it, because visitors hate trying to work out where mystery music is coming from. But rather than dig our heels in, we suggested a trial: leave it on for a week and ask a few customers what they think.
Within the week, the client asked us to turn it off. Even they found it annoying.
That’s our general approach. We’ll give our honest advice and course correct where we need to, but the client has the final say. With subjective things like colour schemes, we’ll share our view, suggest they run it past their team, and offer alternatives. We nearly always land on something everyone’s happy with.
New ideas will come up after the scope is agreed. Often they appear after wireframes are done, when clients can finally see how the site will work. That’s normal, and it’s often a sign the process is working.
When it happens, our answer is simple: “No problem. That’s not in the current scope, so we can quote for it now or add it to phase two.”
Because what’s included is already set out in the proposal and contract, there’s no awkwardness. Clients usually know a new feature will cost more, and most appreciate us being upfront about it. If it matters now, we quote. If it can wait, it goes on the phase two list. Either way, nothing gets lost and nothing gets squeezed in without thought.
The most productive projects start with a client who has done a bit of thinking beforehand. We send the Cornish businesses we work with a short list to consider ahead of the kickoff meeting, including:
Coming prepared can be the difference between one kickoff meeting and starting work, or needing a second meeting because nobody’s sure what they want.
It also helps clients look past “I want something shiny and new.” The real problems are usually more specific: customers can’t find the products or services, the site is slow, or it simply doesn’t represent what the business does any more. Those are the things worth prioritising.
When someone in a meeting is fixated on a particular feature, we ask what it’s for. Which product or service does it support? What problem does it solve?
Even when the answer is “we’re not sure,” the question gets people thinking about what the website actually needs to do.
One of the most useful questions we ask is: what are your unique selling points? There might be five competitors in your area, so what makes you stand out? Is it price? The service you provide? The quality of what you deliver?
Once you know that, prioritising features gets much easier. The site should be built to prove your USP, and every feature should earn its place by supporting it.
The biggest cost of poor prioritisation isn’t the agency’s time. It’s the quality of your website.
Here’s a scenario we’ve seen more than once. The site has been carefully designed around an agreed set of features and a planned sitemap. Then, close to launch, a senior decision-maker who hasn’t been involved appears and insists on several new features. With the deadline looming, they get fitted in wherever they’ll go, and it shows. The site stops feeling cohesive and starts looking like things were cut and pasted in.
The fix is simple, if not always easy: get every decision-maker involved at the start, and research the project properly before design begins. That gives your designer the time to pull everything together into a site that feels professional, slick and consistent from top to bottom.
If there’s one thing to take from all this, it’s that building a website is more collaborative than most people expect.
A cheap, quick option is fine for some businesses. But if you hand a designer a couple of sentences and let them run wild, you probably won’t get the site you need, because nobody has taken the time to understand your business. Those early scoping conversations are where the good websites are really made.
At Say Web Design, our Newquay-based team works closely with every client from the first meeting to launch and beyond, and we’re always at the end of the phone. If you’re looking for web design in Cornwall, or you’re not sure what features your new website needs, get in touch for a free quote or simply a chat. We’re happy to share some advice.
