Website Design & Build

A website that earns the second click

Design that looks expensive is easy. Design that moves someone from curious to convinced is the craft — and it starts by deciding what to leave out.

From $14,000Typical timeline 4–8 weeksSites people remember and finish
Median lift in conversion after redesign
+38%Median lift in conversion after redesign
Average Lighthouse performance score
96+Average Lighthouse performance score
Concept to launch for a marketing site
4–8 wksConcept to launch for a marketing site
The problem

You probably recognise at least two of these.

None of these are unusual, and none of them mean anyone did a bad job. They are what happens when a business grows faster than the systems holding it up.

Our first job is to work out which of these is actually costing you money — and to tell you if the answer is none of them.

  • The site looks fine but visitors leave without doing anything.

  • Your team needs a developer to change a headline.

  • It was designed for desktop and quietly falls apart on a phone.

  • It says what you do but never says why anyone should care.

What we do

Inside website design.

Six areas we cover in depth. You do not have to take all of them — most engagements start with two or three.

Messaging & structure

Before pixels: who is this for, what do they need to believe, and in what order. Most redesigns fail here, not in the visuals.

Visual identity systems

Colour, type, spacing, motion and imagery codified into a system your team can extend without it drifting.

Responsive design

Designed at three breakpoints minimum and tested on real devices. Mobile is the primary layout, not an afterthought.

E-commerce experiences

Product discovery, comparison and checkout flows built to remove friction at the exact points people abandon.

Editable by your team

A headless CMS with sensible field names and page-building blocks, so marketing ships pages without opening a ticket.

Performance & accessibility

Core Web Vitals in the green and WCAG 2.2 AA as a baseline — because slow, inaccessible sites lose customers quietly.

What you get

Everything listed here is in the contract.

No line items that turn out to be optional extras later. If it is on this list it is scoped, priced and delivered.

  • Sitemap & content model
  • Wireframes for every template
  • Full design system in Figma
  • Responsive high-fidelity designs
  • Motion & interaction spec
  • CMS-connected build
  • Analytics & event tracking
  • Editor training session
Tools & stack

We pick boring, well-supported tools on purpose. Everything below is something your next hire can already use.

  • Figma
  • Next.js
  • Tailwind CSS
  • Sanity
  • Shopify
  • Webflow
  • Motion
  • Vercel
  • Cloudinary
  • GA4

You own every account, repository and licence we set up on your behalf.

The process

How a website design engagement runs.

Fixed phases with a defined deliverable at the end of each. You approve one before the next begins.

  1. 01Week 1

    Positioning workshop

    A half-day with your team to pin down audience, differentiators and the single action the site must drive.

  2. 02Week 1–2

    Structure & wireframes

    Content model, sitemap and low-fidelity layouts. We agree on the argument before we agree on the aesthetic.

  3. 03Week 2–4

    Design direction

    Two distinct visual directions on a real page, not a mood board. You pick one, we extend it across the site.

  4. 04Week 4–8

    Build, QA & launch

    Development, cross-device QA, redirects, analytics and a launch checklist we run together.

Case study

What this looks like in practice.

Verity Analytics — B2B SaaS. 7 weeks of work, with the numbers to show for it.

Cutting a 40-page website down to 9 — and lifting demos 52%

Six years of accumulated pages meant four different descriptions of what Verity sold, three competing calls to action, and a homepage hero that could have belonged to any data company. Traffic was healthy; demo requests were not. The marketing team could not publish a landing page without a two-week developer queue.

Demo requests, quarter over quarter
+52%Demo requests, quarter over quarter
Pages in the core site
40 → 9Pages in the core site
Lighthouse performance score
98Lighthouse performance score
Developer tickets to publish a page
0Developer tickets to publish a page
Read the full case study
References

Clients who bought exactly this.

Every quote below is from a client of this specific service. We will happily put you on a call with any of them before you sign anything.

The first thing they did was talk us out of half the pages we asked for. The site is smaller, clearer, and demo requests are up 52% quarter over quarter.
+52% demo requests
Elena VasquezCMO, Verity Analytics
Our old site took twelve seconds to load on a phone in a warehouse. The new one is under two. Our field team actually uses it now.
Tom AldridgeDirector of Operations, Halden Industrial
I have worked with a lot of design studios. OnyxEra is the only one that handed over a system rather than a set of pages.
9 pages shipped in-house since launch
Rachel WuBrand Lead, Ardent Coffee Co.
FAQ

Website Design, answered straight.

If something is not answered here, ask us directly — you will get a straight answer rather than a sales call.

We write the structural copy — headlines, section framing, calls to action — because words and layout are the same decision. For long-form content and product detail we either work with your team or bring in a specialist writer, quoted separately and transparently.

Website Design

Ready to talk about website design?

Bring the messy version of the problem. Thirty minutes on a call is usually enough for us to tell you what it would take and roughly what it would cost.

Typical reply time: under 4 business hours