Web design with Ikaroa
Conversion-led websites for brands that take the front door seriously. Strategy, system, build, launch, optimise. One team, six weeks, one bill.
Token
brand/500
Type
Aa
Inter · 900
Easing
cubic 0.2 0.8 0.2 1
Radius
What design is for
Belief 01
Every visitor lands here first. Every paid impression sends them here. Every AI search citation points here. We design it like the asset it is, not the page nobody updates after launch.
Belief 02
A beautiful site that does not convert is a brochure. A converting site that is also beautiful is an unfair advantage. We refuse to pick one.
Belief 03
Half your future buyers will meet you through a model that read your site, not a human who scrolled it. We design pages an LLM can quote as confidently as a human can scan.
Belief 04
There is no "secondary" page anymore. Search, social, ChatGPT, email, visitors land everywhere. Every URL has to earn the next click on its own merits.
Belief 05
It is the surface you touch a thousand times more often than any other. Slack avatar to investor deck, all of it ladders back to whatever this page does for you.
Belief 06
A 1.2-second LCP is not a developer concern, it is a creative one. The fastest site in the category will out-convert the prettiest one. We refuse to ship a site that loses on either.
Anatomy
The headline has to say what, for whom, and why now, in the time a visitor takes to decide whether to keep scrolling.
Logos, ratings, or a one-line citation that earns the next 30 seconds of attention before the visitor has read a single feature.
What it does for the buyer, not how it is built. Features go below the fold, after they care.
A calculator, a slider, a demo, anything that makes the visitor turn the dials in their own numbers. Buying intent compounds when the user has done some of the maths themselves.
The eight questions every buyer is silently asking before they fill in the form, answered in the order they ask them.
Same offer, same words, same colour, three times down the page. Visitors decide at different scroll depths.
The system
A small system of tokens, components, and rules that compose into every screen your visitors and your team will ever see. Six samples from the kit below.
Component
Primary, ghost, destructive. Three radii, three sizes, every state covered.
Component
A six-step neutral, six brand hues, three signal colours. Tokenised, not picked from a colour wheel.
Component
A musical fifth ramp. Same family, four weights, balanced wrapping built in.
Aa
Aa
Aa
Aa
Component
An 8-point grid. Every margin, every padding, every gap divisible by four.
Component
Four easings, three durations. Slow-out beats spring-bounce for almost every interface motion.
Component
Three densities, comfortable for marketing, compact for app surfaces, tight for data tables.
How a site gets made
Most sites we build are running within five weeks. Bigger jobs (commerce, multi-language, deep CMS) run longer; the cadence is the same.
Day 0
You tell us the business, the buyer, and the constraints. You spin the wheel. We come back inside a working day with a recommended scope and how your prize applies.
Days 1–4
We map the buyer journey, build the sitemap, and rank every page by commercial intent. The site is sketched as an org chart before a single pixel moves.
Days 5–10
Low-fidelity wireframes for every key page. Copy is drafted in parallel because layout without words is just decoration. You see the bones before we paint.
Days 11–18
Full-fidelity comps for the homepage and three flagship templates. Type system, colour tokens, component library, built as a system, not page-by-page.
Days 19–24
A working clickable prototype. We put it in front of five buyers from your audience, watch them use it, and re-cut the things that confuse them.
Days 25–32
We build it ourselves on Next.js + Vercel, or hand it to your team with a Figma file your engineers will not curse us for. Performance budget enforced from the first commit.
Day 33+
We watch the analytics for the first 14 days, fix the things the data flags, and hand you a roadmap of the next ten experiments to run.
The maths
Drag the dials to your numbers. The site we build pays for itself the first time we move the conversion needle, which is roughly always.
Drag the three dials to match your numbers. The right column shows the annual revenue you would unlock by lifting your conversion rate by a half-point, a point, or two points. Conversion-led web design is the cheapest way to buy that lift.
Annual revenue at 1.6%
baseline$960,000
+$300,000
New annual revenue $1,260,000, $25,000 more per month, every month, while the site stays up.
+$600,000
New annual revenue $1,560,000, $50,000 more per month, every month, while the site stays up.
+$1,200,000
New annual revenue $2,160,000, $100,000 more per month, every month, while the site stays up.
What goes wrong
A static introduction is the lowest-converting kind of page. A homepage is a sales conversation, scripted for the visitor who will not read more than five sentences.
Type is the loudest brand signal on the page. If the typography is whatever shipped with the framework template, the brand is whatever shipped with the framework template.
Mobile is not a smaller desktop. Tablet is not a bigger phone. We design for the gesture, the context, and the screen, three layouts, not one breakpoint-squished compromise.
Half your search traffic in 18 months will be an AI quoting your page back to a human. Pages without FAQ schema, structured facts, and clear answer paragraphs will not get cited.
Every animation is a tax on attention. We use motion to show causation (this button did this) and direction (the next thing is here), and turn it off everywhere else.
The version that ships is never the best version. We design the homepage three times before we paint it, because the first idea is always the most obvious one.
The bar
Performance, accessibility, best practices, SEO. Four numbers we measure on every build, on every release, against every Lighthouse run. None of them is allowed below the threshold.
Performance
LCP under 1.2s on 4G
Accessibility
WCAG 2.2 AA out of the box
Best practices
No deprecated APIs, no console errors
SEO
Crawlable, structured, citable
What we build with
We pick tools that pay rent. Next.js + Vercel is the default because it earns its weight on every brief. The rest of the stack is decided by what your team can maintain after we hand it over.
Framework
App Router, server components, streaming.
Platform
Edge-rendered, global cache, instant rollback.
Styling
Tokenised design system, zero CSS bloat.
Design
Components mirror code one-to-one.
No-code
For teams that need to edit without us.
Commerce
Headless storefronts on the Hydrogen stack.
CMS
Headless when content velocity matters.
Content
Structured editorial for content-led brands.
The questions we always get
A standard marketing site takes 6 to 8 weeks from brief to launch. Bigger builds (eCommerce, multi-language, deep CMS work) run 10 to 14 weeks. We share a week-by-week timeline before you sign anything.
Both. The default is end-to-end on Next.js + Vercel, same team, same Slack, no handoff seam. We can also stop at the design and hand a Figma file to your engineers, with components your team can actually rebuild without guessing.
A high-craft marketing site for an established brand starts around $25k. eCommerce builds, multi-language sites, and headless-CMS work start at $40k. We share a scoped figure before any of the design work begins, and we never bill against an open-ended hourly rate.
Yes. Performance is part of the brief from day one, not something a developer wedges in at the end. Every site we ship targets a 1.2-second LCP on a 4G connection, perfect Lighthouse scores out of the box, and a Core Web Vitals pass under Google's thresholds. If you brought a third party to audit our work, they would not find a single low-hanging fix.
Yes, that is in the brief. Technical SEO (sitemap, structured data, OG tags, performance) is built in. FAQ schema and citable answer paragraphs are designed in so AI search engines can quote you confidently. We pair the design build with our AIO service if AI search matters to you.
Yes. The default build pairs Next.js with a headless CMS (Sanity, Contentful, or Webflow depending on the team's comfort level). Your marketing team edits pages, adds content, swaps imagery, without touching code.
WCAG 2.2 AA is the minimum bar on every build. Colour contrast, keyboard navigation, semantic HTML, screen-reader labels, motion-reduction support, all baked in. We will not ship a site that fails an audit.
Yes. Our brand-strategy and logo-design teams sit alongside the web team. If you need the identity before you can pick a typeface, we run the brand work first and bring it through. If your brand is already strong, we work to it.
This month only
Eight real prizes on the wheel. Four are free upgrades to your build, four are discounts on services we sell every day. Every visitor wins something. One spin per browser, locked into your enquiry on the right.
One spin per visitor
Terms apply. One spin per browser. All "free" prizes (website, eCommerce site, domain, hosting) are subject to an active monthly management retainer and standard hosting fees. Discounts apply to a single signed scope and cannot be combined. Prizes are non-transferable, hold no cash value, and expire 30 days from the spin date. Build and onboarding slots are allocated first-come-first-served once a scope is signed.