Why This NGO's Website Failed at Two Previous Agencies

By the time they reached me, the site had already been rebuilt twice. Both by competent agencies. Both produced something good-looking — clean layouts, smooth animations, tidy mockups at every breakpoint.

And both failed to work. The interesting part wasn't the failure, but that nobody could explain why. Everyone in the room agreed the site was good. That was the most confusing part for them.

I re-read both agencies' briefs. Both contained the same thing: page structure, visual references, and a feature list. Neither answered three basic questions — who actually comes to this site, why they leave, and what this organisation needs from them.

Without those answers, the only criterion left to judge design is taste. And when the criterion is taste, the winner is the taste of the most senior person in the room — not the needs of the people who will actually use the site.

That's why two sites in a row could "succeed" in the presentation and fail in the real world. Both were built to make the founder proud, not to answer the visitor's anxiety.

I rebuilt it in reverse order. Not from page structure, but from a list of objections: what makes someone hesitate at the eighth second, and what they need to get past it.

The trade-off most often challenged: I actually added friction in a few places. Some steps were deliberately slowed, because a visitor who decides too fast there will regret it and leave. And I removed friction elsewhere that the internal team had long considered important, but was only important to them.

That's an uncomfortable decision. Adding a step sounds like a mistake to anyone who has read an article on conversion optimisation. But friction isn't the enemy — friction in the wrong place is.