Web Design

Web design is not decoration. It decides how many visitors become clients, how long someone stays, and whether they even understand what you offer. LAPA Studio designs websites for Rīga-based and European brands so that every decision — from the first screen to the colour of the contact button — serves a specific business goal.

In practice that means we ask uncomfortable questions before we design anything. Who is your client and what does their decision path look like? Why do they pick a competitor? Where exactly do they drop off on the current site? Without those answers, design is a matter of taste, and taste does not sell.

We work on a small number of projects at a time. Your project is not a ticket in a queue — the same people who start it take it from strategy through launch and beyond.

Web design is more than the visual layer. It is information architecture — how content is organised and how easy it is to navigate; content hierarchy — what matters most on each screen; a typography system that stays readable on every device; and a visual identity that makes the brand recognisable.

On top of that sits conversion design: where the calls to action live, how many steps stand between interest and enquiry, how objections are removed, and how proof is shown — testimonials, client logos, concrete outcomes.

And finally the technical layer. A design that looks great in Figma but loads in four seconds is a bad design. We design with technical constraints in mind: image weight, font loading, the cost of animation, and mobile as the primary case rather than an afterthought.

We do not use Wix, Squarespace or off-the-shelf WordPress themes. Every LAPA Studio website is drawn from scratch — type scale, palette, rhythm of white space, micro-interactions and the mobile version are tailored to your brand and your industry.

A template always carries weight you do not need: dozens of plugins, generic layouts and code written for thousands of other sites. The result loads slower, looks like a hundred competitors, and is harder to adapt when the business changes.

Custom design costs more in the first step and less in the third year. You do not rebuild the site every time you add a service or a language — the system is designed to grow.

Every site is built on a modern stack — React, TanStack Start, Astro or static HTML depending on need — with Core Web Vitals above Google's Good threshold. In practice our sites land a Lighthouse performance score of 90–100 on mobile.

Semantic HTML, schema.org markup, hreflang for bilingual sites, a sitemap, correct canonical tags and WCAG AA accessibility are standard, not upsells. SEO is not a service bolted on at the end — it is a consequence of design and code structure.

Accessibility is not bureaucracy. Sufficient colour contrast, keyboard navigation and clear focus states make a site more usable for everyone, including someone reading a phone in bright sunlight.

A few signs repeat in almost every project that reaches us. The site takes more than three seconds to load on mobile data. On a phone you have to pinch to read the text. You cannot change a sentence or an image without emailing a developer.

Or: the site looks decent but nobody enquires. That is usually not about beauty but structure — no clear message on the first screen, no proof, and a contact form hidden in the footer.

The fourth sign is brand mismatch. You have grown, your pricing is different, your client is different — but the site still speaks the way you spoke five years ago. In that case a redesign is cheaper than the trust you are losing.

After launch we set up analytics to answer one question: is the site doing its job. We track enquiry volume, completion of the conversion path, bounce on key pages, search visibility in Google, and Core Web Vitals from real user data.

In the first month after launch this data usually reveals two or three places where wording or ordering needs a tweak. Those fixes are included — we do not call them a new project.

Longer term, the same measurement tells us when it is worth adding a new page, a blog or another language. Decisions come from data rather than from a feeling.