Most web projects go wrong before a single design is opened. Not because the designer wasn't good, or the developer wasn't skilled, but because nobody spent enough time understanding the problem before trying to solve it. At What IF Web, a Webflow Premium Partner based in Christchurch, New Zealand, every project starts with a discovery and strategy phase. Here's exactly what that looks like and why it changes the outcome.
Strategy first, or pay for it twice
We've seen it happen too many times. A business invests thousands into a website or rebrand, it launches, and it doesn't resonate. The team went straight to solutions without understanding the problem.
Discovery isn't an unnecessary step we tack on to inflate project costs. It's the difference between building what you think you need and building what the customer wants. It prevents costly revisions, keeps the project on track, and produces work that actually does its job.
The stakeholder workshop: where every project starts
Before any design work begins, we get the key voices in your business in a room. Not to present at you, but to dig in together.
We want to understand your business goals, your frustrations with what exists now, and where the opportunities are. The questions that matter most at this stage: what does success look like six months after launch? Who are your competitors and what are they doing well or poorly? What assumptions are you making about your customers? What constraints are we working within on timeline, budget, and technology?
Most clients find this session useful beyond the project itself. Ideas that had been floating around in different people's heads get written down and agreed on for the first time.
User research: finding out what your customers actually need
Your customers are the real experts on what they need from your website. Through interviews, surveys, and analytics review on existing sites, we uncover how people interact with businesses like yours in practice, not how you assume they do.
This step regularly surfaces surprises. The audience turns out to be different to who the business thought it was targeting. Content that the internal team assumed was important gets ignored. Pages that nobody prioritised turn out to be where buying decisions happen. Getting this wrong at the brief stage means building the wrong thing confidently.
Competitive and market analysis: finding the gap
We look at your competitive landscape not to copy what others are doing, but to find where the differentiation opportunity sits.
That means understanding who your main competitors are and what they do well, tracking what's shifting in the market, and identifying where the gaps are that your positioning can own. A site that looks and sounds like everyone else in the category is invisible regardless of how well it's built.
Getting clear on what the brand needs to say
All the research in the world doesn't replace the harder question: does this feel like you?
What you're building will carry your personality, your values, and the way you want to be perceived. So before we get into layouts and copy, we get clear on what the brand stands for and how it should sound. When a customer lands on the finished site, you should be able to say with confidence: yes, that's what we believe and how we want to show up.
What IF Web's position on this
Every project we take on starts here. Not because it's a box to tick, but because a brief that isn't properly understood produces a site that doesn't solve the problem it was built for. Discovery is where we earn the right to make recommendations, and where clients get clarity they often didn't expect.
If you want to understand what this looks like for your specific project, our website strategy service covers what's included and how it works. Or if you'd rather just talk it through, we're happy to have that conversation.
