Plinth

The Plinth blog

Essays on design, conversion, and craft.

Field notes from building websites that turn first impressions into revenue, for founders, SaaS teams, and growing brands.

Looking for the in-depth buyer's guides? Browse the guides →

FeaturedStartup

Your website is the first investor meeting you don't know you're having.

By the time a partner gets to your pitch, three associates have already opened your homepage in tabs, scanned it for under a minute each, and formed an opinion that's basically locked in. Here's what they're looking at, what they're judging, and what to fix this week.

Read the article →June 2026 · 7 min read

Design

Seven homepage mistakes that quietly drop your SaaS conversion rate to half of what it could be.

Median SaaS conversion is 3.8%. Top-quartile is 11.45%+. The gap isn't usually about traffic quality or product fit, it's about seven specific homepage mistakes that show up over and over. With fixes for each.

June 2026 · 9 min read →

Research

I audited 50 funded startup websites. Seven patterns showed up almost everywhere.

Two weeks. 50 sites. Pre-seed through Series C. The same mistakes over and over. Here's the aggregate data, the patterns, and what the top five sites did differently.

June 2026 · 10 min read →

Design

I redesigned 1Password's homepage. Here's every decision I made and why.

This is an unsolicited concept redesign. No affiliation. No briefing. Just a designer looking at a category-leading product with a homepage that hasn't kept up with how its competitors now look, and using it as a worked example of how I'd approach a SaaS homepage rebuild in 2026.

June 2026 · 11 min read →

Engineering

Webflow, Framer, or Next.js: the decisive call for technical founders in 2026.

If you're a technical founder, the comparison most people write is wrong for you. You're not optimizing for a marketing team that wants to edit copy without a ticket. You're optimizing for performance, control, and not getting locked into a tool you'll regret in 18 months.

June 2026 · 8 min read →

Process

How to brief a web designer so they actually build the right thing the first time.

Most web design briefs are too vague or too detailed in the wrong places. The brief Plinth uses is short, asks the right questions, and saves both sides from the worst kind of mid-project surprise. Here it is, with examples of what good and bad answers look like.

June 2026 · 8 min read →

Pricing

A $500 website, a $5,000 website, and a $50,000 website are three different products. Here's what each one actually is.

Web pricing spans two orders of magnitude. People assume the $50,000 site is just a fancier $500 one. It isn't. They're built by different people, ship in different ways, and solve different problems. Here's what you actually get at each tier.

June 2026 · 9 min read →

Startup

23 things to audit on your website before your next fundraise.

Investors check your website before they take the meeting, before they share your deck internally, and again before the partner meeting. This is the checklist I'd run before sending the first warm intro. Bookmark it, it's faster to use than to read.

June 2026 · 6 min read →

Agency

Your clients' websites are better than yours, and they noticed.

The cobbler's children problem is a meme in the agency world for a reason. Marketing agencies, dev shops, design studios, consultancies, most of them are walking around with a homepage that contradicts everything they're selling. Here's why it happens, what it's costing, and how to actually fix it.

June 2026 · 7 min read →

Strategy

Your website isn't converting because of positioning, not design.

Most founders assume the fix for a low-converting website is a redesign. They rebuild the homepage, swap the colors, redo the hero animation, and the conversion rate barely moves. Here's why, and what to fix first.

June 2026 · 8 min read →

Design

Ten SaaS homepages, five that convert and five that don't, with what makes the difference.

I'm naming names. Five companies whose homepages I've spent real time studying because they convert at the top of the category, and five whose pages have specific patterns that suppress conversion. With the pattern each one demonstrates.

June 2026 · 12 min read →

Process

How I built Plinth, the studio site itself, in 3 weeks for under $500 in tools.

A transparency post. Every tool I used. Every decision I made. What I'd do differently if I were starting over today. If you're building your own studio or startup site, this should save you weeks of decision fatigue.

June 2026 · 9 min read →

Design

The fonts every premium startup is using in 2026, with the real brands behind each.

The font landscape changed in 2024–2026. Custom typefaces went mainstream at the top tier. Pangram Pangram displaced Klim as the most-used "alt-Inter." Cormorant Garamond got quietly retired from serious SaaS. Here's what's actually being used now, with the brand you'll recognize behind each.

June 2026 · 9 min read →

Design

Seven principles from studying Stripe, Linear, and Loom in detail, and what they teach us about premium SaaS design.

These three sites get studied more than any others in B2B SaaS. There are good reasons. After spending hours dissecting each one, here are seven principles that explain what makes them work, and that you can apply to your own site this week.

June 2026 · 10 min read →

Process

How to write a website brief that doesn't waste everyone's time.

There's a separate article on the Plinth brief template. This one is about how to *think* about a brief before you fill in any template. The mindset matters more than the form fields.

June 2026 · 7 min read →