Use Our Design And Deploy Guide on Your Next Site
In November 2026 we rewrote how we design and ship every site we build. This lesson gives you the same guide as a free PDF, tells you how we made it, and walks your own site through the parts that move calls.
By November we had design rules from about fifteen places. Our best sites, a teardown of the top agency sites, the first screen method of the designer Marcelo Cedeno, and a pile of notes on every first screen that looked weak. They lived in four spots and they did not agree. So we stopped and built one guide.
First we ran a study. Designers in a Facebook group shared 95 of their own sites. We studied 27 deep and rebuilt 42. One site beat every other on the phone test and on access, a free tool by Elmir Mammadli that flags the looks that make a site feel AI made. His rules are open source, so we read every line against ours.
Most of his rules matched ours. A few fought things we do on purpose. On November 9 Anthony made three calls. Title Case stays, main words only, the way we have done it for twenty years. A site can keep up to three flagged looks if it writes down a business reason for each. And short three word slogans are out, our own home page line included, which is changing to We Make Local Businesses the First Call on Google.
The same night we counted pill shaped chips on two of our own live auto repair demos. 21 on one home page and 17 on the other. That turned into the six pill rule, and it is in the guide too. A site built to be looked at makes different choices than a site built to get a call. This guide is how we build the second kind.
✓ How To Do It
- Get the free Design And Deploy Guide as a PDF. Read How We Made This Guide and The Three Calls first. They take about ten minutes.
- Open your home page on a phone and count every pill shaped chip and rounded button you can see. If there are more than six, make the five swaps from The Pill Rule, starting with the chips in the top screen.
- Go through Which Looks We Allow and write down every look your site uses. Anything in the Never group comes off. Anything in the Kept On Purpose group stays only with a written reason tied to your business, and three at most.
- Search your pages for stock words like seamless, elevate and unlock, plus every exclamation mark and emoji. Swap each one for a fact a customer can check, such as a time, a price, a town or a name.
- Check every number, rating and award on the site. Each one needs a source you can point to. If you cannot find the source, take it down.
- Click every link, button and form on a phone and on a computer. Write down where each one went. Fix anything that goes nowhere before you touch the design again.
- Before your next change, fill in the design brief from Step 3 of the guide. Name the one thing on the first screen, the site you are learning from, and your Kept On Purpose line.
- Title Case means main words get a capital and small words like and, the, of and for stay lower case unless they come first.
- Do not strip a look you need. Write the reason down instead. Glass on the product you sell is a reason. Glass because it looks expensive is not.
- For a second opinion, run your home page through the free tool at deslop.elmir.dev and compare its flags with your list.
You Need a $15,000 Website?
What were you quoted for your last website, and did it make the phone ring? Leave the number in the comments.
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