Foundry

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Level.Foundry · How it works

Website work, run in the open

Foundry is how Level runs website engagements: every claim backed by evidence, every step reviewed by a person before it counts, and all of it visible to you as it happens. It ends in something you can act on, never a slide deck about it.

Two ways in

Foundry runs two kinds of engagements on the same discovery, the same standards, and the same human checkpoints. They differ only in destination.

The redesign

Your site, rebuilt on evidence: discovery through structure through visual design, ending in a complete styled specification of the new site.

Ends in: the design specification, ready for the build.

The conversion program

Your current site, made measurably better: the same discovery aimed at a ranked testing program, with split-test variations designed against your live pages.

Ends in: the Test Kit, ready for your testing tool.

Below: the redesign path in full, then how the conversion program differs.

Phase I · Interrogate

Discovery & context

Before anyone sketches anything, we establish what is actually true: about your brand, your market, your site, and your visitors. Thirteen investigations, each producing a reviewable document.

Brand profile

your identity transcribed into a testable specification, colors checked against accessibility standards

Data analysis

twelve months of your analytics read line by line, against the prior year

Technical discovery

your platform, integrations, and risks, mapped before they can surprise the build

Search benchmark

where you rank today, where your rivals outrank you, and what the new site must protect

Industry & competitor analysis

the market's buyers and your rivals' websites, examined first-hand

Accessibility scan

your current site graded against WCAG 2.2 AA, page by page

Questionnaire & interviews

your team and your customers, asked the questions the data can't answer

Heuristics & conversion mapping

every key page judged against named usability principles; every journey to an inquiry traced

Content inventory

every URL you own, catalogued and weighed

What you get: A shared, evidenced picture of where you are, and the agenda for what the new site must fix.

Phase II · Ideate

Content, structure & wireframes

Discovery's findings become decisions: what content stays, how the site is organized, what the design stands for, and how the key pages work, before any pixel is styled.

Content strategy

keep, combine, or retire: every page's future decided, with redirects planned

Sitemap & information architecture

navigation your visitors think in, not your org chart

Design point of view

the creative thesis the whole site will argue

Template & component plan

the reusable building blocks the site will be assembled from

Messaging strategy

what each audience hears, in words tested against your positioning

Wireframes with journeys

the key page structures, each one walking a real visitor path

Copywriting

the words for every key page, written from the messaging before design begins

Imagery direction

the photography and art direction the brand will live in

What you get: A blueprint you have approved, so visual design starts from decisions instead of guesses.

Phase III · Implement

Visual design & handoff

The blueprint becomes the site's actual look: explored in competing directions, refined through review rounds, and delivered as working, styled pages.

Moodboard

the visual direction, agreed with you before any page is designed

Homepage concepts

multiple full designs generated and compared, not one take defended

Major & minor templates

every significant page type designed against the approved wireframes

Pattern library

the complete component system, consistent across every template

The handoff artifact

styled, working HTML of the new site: a specification a build team can execute without interpretation

What you get: A complete design specification: real pages, real interactions, ready for the build.

The conversion program

The CRO campaign

When the goal is lifting the site you already have, the same discovery feeds a different second half: instead of designing a new site, Foundry devises and strategizes a testing program.

Discovery & baseline

The relevant discovery investigations, with your analytics elevated to required: tests are undesignable without a real baseline. When a Foundry redesign already exists, its discovery is imported instead of repeated.

Hypotheses & test strategy

Findings become ranked, testable hypotheses, and every one must cite its evidence: an unevidenced hypothesis is a defect, not an idea. The test plan then does the honest math: what your traffic can actually support, in what order, and which measurements must exist first.

Variations & the Test Kit

Each approved test gets variations designed against your live page, changing exactly one variable so a result teaches you why it happened. The Test Kit packages every test for your testing tool: hypothesis, variation, what changed, what to track, and what win, lose, or flat each mean.

The rules: Two rules are absolute: a variation changes one thing or it is not a test, and no experiment ever uses manufactured urgency, hidden costs, or any other dark pattern. Fixes that need no experiment (a broken control, an accessibility defect) ship as fixes: we never hold a repair hostage behind a test.

The detail we go to

In a typical discovery:

Every

URL you own, crawled and catalogued

Sites of a thousand-plus pages are read in full, never sampled.

12^months

Of analytics, read line by line

Against the prior year where tracking allows, with bot traffic identified and set aside.

Every

Brand color pair, contrast-tested

So the new design is beautiful and accessible by construction.

2^viewports

Desktop and mobile, every key page

Each one loaded, read, and graded against named usability principles.

Human judgment, built in

Nothing reaches you that a person hasn't signed.

Two checkpoints on every step

Before a step runs, Foundry confirms its inputs are in place: the brief, the sites, the data it needs. After it runs, a second expert pass critiques the result and a person reviews it. Work advances on approval, never on momentum.

Standards are checked by machine, taste is judged by people

Objective bars like WCAG 2.2 AA accessibility and Core Web Vitals are verified automatically and must pass. Everything subjective, from tone to layout, passes a named human reviewer.

AI drafts, people decide

Foundry uses AI to go deeper and faster than a manual process can. Its self-assessment is only ever a ranking aid: it cannot approve its own work, and unreviewed drafts never appear in anything you receive.

Every claim carries its evidence

Findings cite what they were observed from. When something is unknown, it says so, and joins a punch list instead of a guess.