The five phase process: discover, derive, design, build, deploy
Every ThatDeveloperGuy engagement runs through the same five phases. Discover your business in a 30 minute call. Derive every design decision from a real constraint. Design and ship a working demo to staging inside 48 hours. Build hand coded with schema and performance tuned. Deploy with Lighthouse verified and IndexNow submitted. No taste debates, no scope creep, no Dribbble aesthetic for its own sake.
Phase 1: Discover
A single 30 minute video call. You describe your business, your target customer, and the top five searches you want to win. I ask about current pain points and constraints. By the end of the call we have a written one page brief that describes what success looks like.
Phase 2: Derive
This is the unusual phase. Most web design starts with taste. This one starts with constraints. Every element on the page must be derivable from something: a ranking factor, an accessibility requirement, a specific user journey, a business metric. If a color, typeface, or headline cannot be derived from a constraint, it does not ship. Derivation is why every TDG site reaches v2.3 binding thresholds without heroics.
Phase 3: Design
Within 48 hours of the derivation brief, a working demo of your homepage is live on staging. You click through it, iterate with me on anything that does not feel right, and confirm direction. This is the review that matters because it happens before you pay anything.
Phase 4: Build
Hand coded HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. No page builder, no framework overhead, no drag and drop. Schema first: Organization, Person, WebSite, Service, FAQPage, BreadcrumbList wherever applicable. Mobile first: every page rendered on a 360 pixel viewport before a desktop viewport. Accessibility: 48 pixel touch targets, focus visible, reduced motion support, skip link. Core Web Vitals: LCP under 2.5 seconds, CLS under 0.1, INP under 200 milliseconds.
Phase 5: Deploy
Production deployment happens off hours to avoid any user impact. Lighthouse run on five sample pages confirms v2.3 thresholds. IndexNow fires to notify Bing, Yandex, and partner engines that the site has changed. Google Search Console verifies new URLs. Full documentation handoff: where every file lives, how to edit copy, how to swap images, how to renew TLS. You own the site completely from launch day one.
Then what?
If you stopped at the one time build, you keep everything you paid for indefinitely. If you continue into a monthly retainer (Basic, Full Visibility Stack, or Premium), we layer in engine optimization month by month. Rank tracking, content additions, schema refinements, and AEO citation work happen on a predictable monthly cadence.