We designed 27 new looks for our site and shipped none of them

We showed famingu.com to a few people and the feedback was quick and uncomfortable: it looks AI-made. Nobody could say exactly why. It was the dark background, the glow, the fonts, the general feeling of having seen it before. For a studio that sells websites, that is not a small comment.

So we did what felt obvious and started redesigning. The first round was four looks built around photography. Rejected: the photos made it look like a stock template. The second round was four dark looks with different fonts. Better, but the fonts still had that familiar machine-made feel. The third round went light, with white backgrounds and new type. Two of the four were liked, so the fourth round combined them into one. That one was disliked more than anything before it.

The fifth round went the other way: four artistic directions with ink, woven lines, paper and a shape that morphs as you scroll. The morph was the first thing that got a real reaction, so round six was five versions built around it, and round seven was five more versions of the home page itself. Twenty-seven mockups in total, each one a working page with real animation, tested so it ran smoothly on a slow phone.

Somewhere around round six the honest answer showed up. Every new look was being compared to the current site, and the current site kept winning. It was not that the site looked AI-made. Some people simply wanted it lighter, and a few details, like the dark glow everywhere, pushed it towards a look that is everywhere right now. The structure, the films, the demos and the writing were not the problem.

So we changed one thing. There is now a sun and moon button in the top corner that switches the whole site to a light version. It remembers your choice, it applies before the page draws so you never see a dark flash, and it leaves the device mock-ups, code screens and the night film dark on purpose, because those are meant to look like screens. The workspace demo stays as it is. Nothing else on the site changed.

While checking the light version page by page, we noticed some client logos were simply not there. Blank spaces in the row of brands we have worked with. The cause was a sensible default backfiring: the logos were set to load only when they scroll into view, but they live inside a strip that moves sideways and is clipped at the edges, so the browser never decided they were in view, and some never loaded. The fix was one line telling those images to load straight away. We checked all 30 load, in both light and dark.

Then a tester went through the site and found two real bugs. In the workspace demo, if you tapped a button before the page had finished loading on a slow connection, the tap was lost and nothing happened. Those buttons now look greyed out until the page is ready, so a tap is never silently thrown away. In the voice agent demo, when one caller line ended, two different signals could both say move on, so the next line sometimes played twice. Each line now moves on exactly once.

The tester also noticed the first workspace open of the day could take 5 to 9 seconds. That is the server waking up after being idle. A free monitoring service now visits it every 5 minutes, which keeps it awake and emails us if the site ever goes down.

What we took from the week: 27 mockups were not wasted, because they are how we found out what was actually wrong. But the fix for a site that feels slightly off is rarely a new site. Ask what exactly is off, change that, and keep what works.

Written by Rushi Prajapati