Here’s something a web designer isn’t supposed to admit out loud: my own website is embarrassing.
I build strategy-first websites for other people. I tell business owners, with a straight face, that the website is the last thing you should think about. You have to get clear on your business first, then build. And meanwhile, my personal site, marioseijo.com, has been sitting there dusty and outdated for longer than I’d like to confess.
It’s like a mechanic driving a broken-down car. It happens to the best of us. But when your whole job is fixing exactly this for other people, a dusty site stops being a cute irony and starts to sting.
So I’m going to fix it. In public. Using the exact method I sell. And here’s the part that’s going to be hard: I’m going to start by refusing to design anything.
Why a dusty site actually costs you
It’s easy to tell yourself a tired website doesn’t matter. It does.
People form a first impression of a website in about 50 milliseconds, faster than a blink. When someone meets me at an event and looks me up that night, my site is the second handshake. Right now, that handshake says “this guy hasn’t updated his site since the last decade.” Not exactly the message I want to send as someone who builds websites for a living.
If it’s costing me, it’s costing you too. When your website doesn’t match the quality of your business, people trust it less, and some just leave.
Strategy first means I’m not allowed to open the design tool
Here’s where I have to take my own medicine.
Every instinct says: open the design tool, start pushing pixels, make it look cool. That’s the template-shortcut trap, the exact thing I tell clients to avoid. It feels like progress, but you’re just decorating before you know what you’re decorating for.
So before I touch a single layout, I’m answering the only question that matters: what is this site even for? Who’s it for, what do I want them to feel in ten seconds, and what’s the one thing I want them to do next. No colors, no fonts, no animations. Not yet. Just the thinking.
That’s strategy first. It’s me with a blank document and some hard questions. I know it’s not glamorous, but it’s the difference between a site that looks fine and one that works.
What’s coming
I’m going to document the whole thing, start to finish, messy middle included:
- Figuring out what the site is for (before any design)
- Cutting five messages down to one
- Making it feel futuristic without making it confusing
- Writing the whole site in plain text before it’s ever a web page
- Letting AI agents build it, and why strategy-first is what makes that safe
- The launch, and what building my own medicine taught me
If you’ve ever looked at your own website and cringed a little, follow along. I’m about to do the thing I keep telling everyone else to do, and show you exactly how.
This is how I work at Minimo Studio: strategy first, design later. Now I get to prove it on myself.
Less noise. More clarity. Let’s see if I can practice what I preach.
