Visitors decide whether to stay or leave within the first few seconds, and they decide based on the first screen. If it doesn't show what you offer, who it's for and what to do next, no amount of polish further down the page will save it. That's why our website design work starts not with colour but with a question: what action should a person take, and what do they need to see to take it?
Conversion usually depends less on big ideas and more on small details that are easy to miss:
The mobile version is a scenario of its own, not a shrunken copy of the desktop. On a phone people scroll with one thumb, have less patience and ask questions in a different order, so blocks sometimes need to be rearranged rather than simply squeezed.
Judging layouts by whether you like them is the most common way to derail a project. Your taste matters, but the site is built for your customers, so the real discussion should be about whether a page does its job. Ask yourself a few questions:
Feedback like “I don’t like the colour” gives a designer almost nothing to work with: it's unclear what exactly is wrong and why it matters. It's far more useful to say “the button gets lost on this background” or “this looks too casual for our clients”. Then each revision fixes a real problem instead of turning into a hunt for the right shade. That's also why we agree on a colourless prototype first: it keeps the conversation on logic rather than taste.
A new design can easily wipe out what a site has built up in search over the years. Yandex and Google don't rank pictures; they rank pages with their URLs, headings and text. Change all of that at once and search engines effectively see a brand-new site, and traffic drops.
Three things should never be changed carelessly: page URLs, H1 headings and titles, and the volume and meaning of the text. A typical mistake is cutting copy for a clean minimalist look or tucking it away in collapsed tabs. If a URL really has to change, page-by-page 301 redirects are a must.
The best approach is to bring in an SEO specialist at the prototype stage, not after launch. They will flag the pages that bring in traffic and the blocks that can't be trimmed, and the designer will make room for them in the layouts. The refreshed site then looks new to people but stays familiar to search engines.