What Happens Before Design Day: Inside My Squarespace Web Design Process

Website In One Day

Oct 21

People are often surprised by how much happens before I ever open Squarespace with a client. A full website build in a single day sounds like it shouldn't be possible, but the reason it works has very little to do with the day itself. It's what happens beforehand.

Here's exactly what that looks like.

Step one: a content workbook built for your business

Before we get anywhere near a design call, every client works through a content workbook designed to pull together everything their website actually needs to say. It used to be one generalised workbook that worked reasonably well for everyone. These days, I customise each one to the specific business and industry it's for, because generic prompts get generic answers, and questions built around your actual clients get the thinking so much sharper.

It genuinely works like a strategy session disguised as homework. Clients often go in expecting to ramble through some questions and come out the other side with a clearer picture of their own business than they had going in, sometimes surfacing things about how they talk about their work that they hadn't fully articulated before.

It's just a simple Google Doc, no fancy software, no logins to remember. You write directly into it, it autosaves as you go, and you can dip in and out whenever you've got a spare ten minutes.

Step two: sharing design inspiration

Alongside the workbook, clients share a bit of visual inspiration, sites they like the feel of, colours or styles that feel like them. Combined with the completed workbook, I've usually got a strong sense of the direction before we've even sat down together.

Step three: no wireframes, no mock-ups

This is the part that surprises people most. I don't design a mock-up or wireframe before the real build. The time it takes to design a proper mock-up in something like Adobe XD is genuinely more than it takes to just build the actual website in Squarespace. If that time went into a fake version instead, the real thing could already be built.

There's also a practical reason. A mock-up is a flat image trying to represent a website. A live preview in Squarespace shows exactly how the site looks in reality: the mobile version, the animations, everything working properly, not a static approximation of it. It also means we can tweak and revise things together, live, on a call, rather than waiting through another round of mock-up feedback before the real building even starts. Mock-ups tend to create more room for procrastination too, more rounds of feedback, more decisions to second-guess, more chances for the whole thing to drag out.

Step four: the day itself

By the time design day arrives, the thinking has already happened. You know what you want your website to say and roughly how you want it to look, which means the day itself is spent building rather than figuring things out on the spot. Every decision that's already been made on the page or in a conversation is one less decision slowing the day down.

Why this order matters

The clearer the content going in, the smoother everything runs on the day. Less time spent working out what to say, more time spent actually building the site properly. It's not about working faster for the sake of it, it's about removing the gaps where projects usually stall, so a genuinely well-built website is finished in a day instead of dragging out over months.