r/web_design

Took on a marketing site for a B2B SaaS startup back in January. Five pages: home, features, pricing, about, contact. Webflow build, their existing brand, copy provided by them. I quoted $4,500 flat which is roughly where I land for a small marketing site and the scope sounded tight. Founder was responsive on the discovery call, had a Figma file from a previous designer, knew what they wanted. Green flags everywhere.

Here's how it actually went.

The Figma file was 60% done and the other 40% was "we'll figure it out in build." Fine, I can design in Webflow, no big deal. Then the copy they "had ready" arrived as a Google Doc with three different voices because three different people had written sections. I ended up rewriting headlines on four of the five pages just so the site didn't read like a hostage note.

Pricing page turned into its own project. They wanted a toggle for monthly/annual, then a comparison table, then a third tier got added halfway through because they were "testing positioning." Each change was small. Each change was an hour. None of them were in scope.

Then the integrations. "Can we just hook up HubSpot forms?" Sure. "And Calendly on the contact page?" Sure. "And can the pricing CTAs go to Stripe checkout instead of a contact form?" That one was a full afternoon because their Stripe was set up wrong and I ended up debugging their product config.

Launch day they asked for a blog template. Not in scope. I said yes anyway because we were "almost done."

I tracked nothing during the build because fixed fee, why bother. After launch I went back through my Webflow project history, my Loom recordings, the Slack channel timestamps, and my own calendar. 118 hours across nine weeks.

$4,500 divided by 118 is $38.13 an hour.

My posted day rate works out to about $90/hr. I tell prospects $90. I believe I'm a $90/hr web designer. On this project I was a $38/hr web designer who also does free copywriting and Stripe debugging.

The part that's eating at me is I have no idea if this was the worst project of my year or an average one, because I've never tracked any of the others. Every fixed-fee site I've built in the last two years is a black box. I could be losing money on half of them and I literally would not know.

So I'm asking the room: do you actually track hours on your fixed-fee builds? Not the ones where you're billing hourly, the flat-rate stuff. And if you do, what was the project that made you start?

What started as building out a mockup for our new website turned into a fully vibe coded (Claude Code) site that I have spent way too much time on -- and yet is still lacking the sophistication and elegance that I had hoped. I'm looking for guidance on where to go from here. Do I hire a developer to finish it? Or need to start over with like Webflow developer? I don't mind spending several thousands for quality work, but would hate to totally start over too.

I think the overall site content and structure is there but the problem is that this feels like a generic AI site to me. There is not really an overall relationship of each section relates to the next - both on same pages and the following pages. Text and pictures are all laid out in different formats, with different hierarchies, and formats.

The site wants to be modern, simple, "less is more" approach and let the projects speak for itself, while also educating our market on what we do and how we help.

This is not a tech website so don't need wild transitions and animations.

I really like how it turned out on mobile, but the desktop version is not there. And not well versed enough in this to understand why!

Any guidance would be appreciated.

Show It would be so much better if websites showed password requirements on the login or reset page, not just during signup.

Right now, every site has different rules — some need a capital letter, some need a symbol, some don’t. But once you’ve created the account, those rules just disappear. When you come back later, you’re stuck guessing what your own password variation was.

This leads to people reusing the same base password and just tweaking it slightly to fit each site’s rules… which honestly feels less secure, not more.

Wouldn’t it make more sense if websites simply showed something like: “Password must include at least 1 capital letter, 1 number, and 1 special character” right on the login or reset screen?

New RoyalSlider displays as a dark gray box with no photos or navigation on my current theme which is NeoMag version 2.2 by ThemesIndep.

Does anyone have any guidance of how to fix this issue with New RoyalSlider?

I've been using it for over a decade so we have a lot of embedded sliders, so I'd rather not use a new plugin. If I have to get a new theme, I will but I'd rather not.

Let's say I'm shopping on a clothes website, I want to see everything made by Nike, but I know I definitely don't want to buy any shoes. Why is there never a tickbox to "exclude" a category... rather than tick every single other category box.

I would have thought from a conversion point of view that it would be better for people to see more stuff than less?

I’m practicing web design and want to avoid beginner mistakes early. If there’s one core UI/UX principle every new designer should understand, what would you choose and why? Looking for practical advice more than theory.

We hire freelance designers for short projects all the time. Sometimes just 1-2 weeks.

Need them accessing brand assets, working in Adobe, collaborating with team.

Can't ship laptops for 2 weeks of work. VDI performance isn't good enough for design work.

What do creative agencies do for freelancer access?

I have finished my first web-studio website, exporting it and publishing it via Cloudflare. Most of it went smoothly and correct. However even though I specifically set a favicon on web-studio for my page, it does not show on all the pages of the website after publishing it from Cloudflare.

How can I fix this?

I am using Claude for some design copy and some development part..

How are you using?

Our design team spends hours perfectly organizing our Figma files, we label every single layer and we create beautiful specification documents with all the hex codes and spacing variables clearly defined.

Then we hand it over to engineering and without fail a developer will immediately message me asking for the svg file of the logo or the exact font weight for the header.

They completely refuse to actually open the design files and look for the information themselves.

It makes me feel like my organizational work is completely disrespected.

Why do developers insist on treating designers like their personal file retrieval assistants.