Methodology

Every CanvasWebsites project — Professional, Therapist, or Small Business — follows the same six steps, in the same order. Skipping any of them is exactly how a site ends up generic, indistinguishable from every other template site in your field.

1. Discovery

Precise answers before any structure or design work: what you actually do (and what you don't), real differentiators vs. assumed ones, licensing/credentials where they apply, service area or target audience, and what already exists worth preserving. Nothing downstream gets built on a guess.

2. Sitemap

The information-architecture decision: one strong page, or a hub-and- child structure with real depth. This is matched to what you actually have to show — not a default template size for your tier. A Professional site is often one page; a Small Business site usually needs a real services hub and service-area hub.

3. Wireframes

A section-order skeleton for every page type, before any visual design. Every page of the same type (every service page, every condition page) follows an identical skeleton, so a visitor orients instantly moving between them.

4. Scaffolding

The technical build: layouts, data files, navigation — structure and wiring, no real copy yet. See Process for exactly what this means technically (11ty, static output, GitHub, Cloudflare Pages).

5. Styling

A palette derived from something real — your logo, an existing brand color, a truck wrap — never eyeballed. Every text/background color pairing checked against WCAG AA contrast before shipping. One signature ornamental element, not five competing ones.

6. Content

Real copy only. The hard rule that governs every build: nothing is ever invented on your behalf — no fabricated credential, no invented review, no stock "handshake" photo presented as real. Where a fact is missing, you'll see a clearly flagged placeholder asking for it, never a confident guess filling the gap.

Why This Order

Content before structure produces a site that reads like a brochure with no bones. Design before wireframes produces a beautiful page that doesn't convert. Skipping discovery produces a site that could belong to any competitor in your field. That order matters because each step depends on the one before it being done.