A web design studio that plans before it builds

Before starting the studio I worked in-house at a Japanese company, looking after design and web work inside the team. I saw a lot of websites in that period — ours, our clients', and our competitors'. The same thing kept showing up: sites that looked good but had no visitors, or had visitors who never got in touch.

When I looked closely, the problem was rarely the design. It was that nobody had planned before building. Nobody had asked who this business actually sells to, what those people type into Google, what the competitors on page one have written, or what this site needs to answer in order to win the work. Skip those questions at the start and no amount of good design makes up for it.

So I opened Daaistudio to do web work that always begins with research. Every project starts by looking at the market, at the competitors sitting on Google page one, and at what the business genuinely needs from a site — then that research turns into a page structure and a design. I handle both the design and the SEO myself, so nothing gets lost handing off between the two.

A fair amount of how I work came from that Japanese company: careful, on time, and attentive to small things like spacing, type size and consistency across the whole site. That does not mean every project is flawless. It means if I say a date, I deliver on that date, and if something goes wrong I tell you plainly rather than letting it slide.

Two- or three-language sites done badly usually end with an automatic translate button in the top corner, and that is treated as the job done. The problem is that Google does not see a script-translated page as a new page, because the URL has not changed. You have English or Japanese content on the site, but it will never rank in those languages.

The right way is a real separate URL per language — the Thai page at /about, the English page at /en/about, the Japanese page at /jp/about — with hreflang declared so Google knows these are the same page in three languages. Then Google sends Thai readers to the Thai page and Japanese readers to the Japanese page by itself.

The other thing machine translation cannot handle is tone. Japanese business writing has levels of politeness that read as unprofessional the moment they are wrong, and Thai translated word-for-word from English is instantly recognisable as not written by a Thai person. Content in each language should be written again for its readers, not converted word by word.

Search terms do not line up either. What a Thai person types to find something and what a Japanese person types to find the same thing are usually not translations of each other. If you want a multilingual site to work, the terms have to be researched separately per language and the content built around them.