Notes on the Head of Web Design & Development role
How I’d Run Web & CRO at Wpromote
My take on how the Digital Experience team can pull more weight in Wpromote’s full-funnel work: better web builds, sharper CRO, and delivery that ties back to what clients actually care about.
What I think the role is really about
Make Digital Experience a real performance partner.
Wpromote isn’t selling one-off websites. It’s selling growth that runs across media, creative, data, and owned channels. So the job here is to make web, CRO, and technical account management dependable enough to carry their share of that.
Make sites answer for results
Build client sites and landing pages so it’s easy to see how they move media efficiency, SEO, lifecycle, revenue, and the numbers a CFO actually watches.
Give the other teams something solid to build on
Work closely with SEO, content, paid media, analytics, lifecycle, and client services so web work shows up with clear briefs, clean handoffs, and far fewer last-minute surprises.
Raise the technical floor
Set consistent expectations for architecture, performance, analytics, accessibility, QA, partner review, and post-launch work across every CMS and client setup.
How I think about it
The website is where the strategy has to actually work.
Wpromote sells brand and bottom line. Digital Experience is the team that has to turn that into sites that are fast, measurable, and built right.
What good looks like at Wpromote
- Every big build starts with a clear goal and a way to tell if it worked.
- We gather what SEO, paid media, analytics, lifecycle, and account teams need before anyone starts building.
- CMS and component decisions keep the site fast, easy to maintain, and profitable.
- Tracking and a real post-launch review mean we learn something, not just mark it done.
How I’d keep teams aligned
- A single intake that captures the goal, audience, the site’s job, CMS, tracking, and any constraints.
- Estimate reviews that catch complexity, partner dependencies, and scope creep before they bite.
- QA checks for design fidelity, responsive behavior, speed, accessibility, and clean data capture.
- Retros that feed back into better templates, specs, docs, and partner rules.
Technical quality
Catch quality problems before the client does.
This takes real engineering discipline without turning the agency into a slow enterprise software shop. Standards should be simple to check, easy to teach, and obviously tied to client results.
CRO and experimentation
Turn CRO into something repeatable clients can buy into.
Wpromote already lives in data and testing. Digital Experience should package CRO so clients see it as part of their growth strategy, not just fiddling with pages.
Research that actually uses the whole agency
Pull from analytics, heatmaps, paid-media intent, search queries, lifecycle behavior, customer objections, and whatever the account team is hearing, then go after the friction worth fixing.
Prioritization a client can follow
Score tests on the things that matter: likely impact, how confident we are, effort, traffic, where it sits in the funnel, platform complexity, and whether we can measure it cleanly.
A record of what we learned
Write down what we changed, why, and what happened, so it shapes creative, media, SEO, lifecycle, and the next round of UX calls instead of getting lost.
Nearshore partner management
Make the nearshore team feel like one team.
The role owns nearshore quality, scale, and efficiency. In practice that means fewer vague handoffs, estimates that hold up, and raising a flag fast when scope or quality starts slipping.
Ground rules I’d put in place
- Review estimates before account teams promise a timeline or budget.
- Clear acceptance criteria on every build ticket and QA item.
- Code review for shared components, tracking, and anything risky in the CMS.
- QA on staging before the client sees it, not after they complain.
- A clear path to escalate blockers, under-scoped work, and repeat quality misses.
Why it’s worth doing
- Clients trust the timelines, budgets, and quality.
- Smoother work between account, strategy, design, dev, analytics, and SEO.
- Less rework from missed responsive, tracking, content, or platform requirements.
- Better margins from clearer scope, fewer surprises, and people on the right work.
Margin and capacity
Treat the economics as part of the work.
This role carries the P&L, utilization, contractors, delivery quality, and client outcomes all at once. The way we work has to surface those tradeoffs early instead of at invoice time.
Hold scope without annoying the client
Spell out assumptions, dependencies, how many revisions, who owns content, platform limits, and what triggers a change order, all before production starts.
Reusable systems that protect margin
Build modules, estimate ranges, QA templates, launch checklists, analytics specs, and CMS patterns we can reuse, so we cut custom work without making everything generic.
Retainers worth more than production hours
Sell web retainers on performance gains, steady testing, funnel improvements, technical upkeep, and reporting an exec can actually use, not just hours shipped.
Being straight about fit
What I can do now, and what I’d pick up fast.
I’m not going to claim I’ve run every platform at enterprise scale. What is true: I understand the whole web delivery chain, I can set and hold standards, I can translate between specialists, and I know how to make delivery more measurable and margin-aware.
What I can do on day one
- Set WordPress and Elementor standards, QA, troubleshooting, and reusable page systems.
- Plan GA4/GTM events, CTA tracking, form attribution, hidden fields, and conversion reporting.
- Build CRO roadmaps from analytics, heatmaps, paid-media intent, UX friction, and what stakeholders are seeing.
- Sit in front of clients and connect the technical work to their goals and results.
Where I’d lead through specialists
- Shopify, Salesforce, and Magento decisions, where platform experts own the deep implementation.
- Complex engineering reviews, where my job is standards, risk, acceptance criteria, and escalation.
- Data-platform work, where analytics defines the modeling and web makes sure the data comes in clean.
- Enterprise accounts, where account, analytics, SEO, paid media, and lifecycle all have to line up.
What I’d ramp on quickly
- Polaris IQ and the web data it needs to be more useful.
- The current margin model, utilization targets, and contractor costs.
- The QA, estimation, architecture, and launch patterns already in place: what to keep, what to improve.
- Where web delivery causes the most friction in pitches, retainers, big accounts, and renewals.
First 90 days
Figure out where it hurts, then make shipping easier.
I wouldn’t show up with a reorg already drawn. The first job is to understand how delivery actually works today, protect what’s working, and fix the bottlenecks that cost quality, margin, and client trust.
- Sit down with the Digital Experience team, the SVP of Earned & Owned Media, and leads from SEO, content, paid media, analytics, lifecycle, client services, and the partners.
- Map how intake, estimation, resourcing, partner handoffs, QA, launch, reporting, and escalation work today, and where the P&L gets squeezed.
- Go through recent launches and retainers for quality misses, rework, tracking gaps, client confusion, and where margin leaks out.
- Put in place (or clean up) templates for intake, scoping, estimate review, QA, launch, and post-launch review.
- Sort out the handoffs between account, strategy, design, dev, analytics, SEO, paid media, lifecycle, and the nearshore partners.
- Set a regular partner review, a standard for acceptance criteria, and a way to keep estimates honest.
- Kick off a focused CRO and technical cleanup plan for a few priority clients or common page types.
- Build reusable page, QA, analytics, and reporting patterns that take drag out of production.
- Show early wins: cleaner scopes, fewer QA misses, better tracking, smoother partner delivery, and clearer proof the work moves the numbers.
Supporting proof
Three projects that back this up.
These aren’t design portfolio pieces. They’re examples of connecting the actual web work to tracking, client conversations, CRO, SEO, troubleshooting, and results.
Healthcare landing page CRO system
Built a landing page system for paid traffic, with reporting at the version level, CTA tracking, a secondary lead-capture path, Mouseflow review, and reporting stakeholders could actually read.
Agency web and SEO growth infrastructure
Put together a web growth roadmap aimed at better inbound lead quality: service-page strategy, SEO priorities, conversion layout, CRM and nurture thinking, and getting the other teams to run with it.
Local service business web build
Built a polished local-service site around SEO, conversion UX, hosting/DNS/SSL troubleshooting, sticky CTAs, FAQs, and service-area pages.
The note
I think I can help make Digital Experience a more scalable, measurable, margin-aware part of the business.
I came across the Head of Web Design and Development role, and it lines up closely with the agency work I’ve been doing: web builds, CRO, analytics setup, client strategy, and turning website decisions into something you can actually measure.
What caught my eye is that you’re not framing this as a production-management job. It’s about making web, CRO, and technical account management stronger inside a full-funnel model that ties together media, creative, data, and owned channels.
So I put together this short plan for how I’d approach the first 90 days: find the friction in delivery, standardize the basics, smooth out the partner work, and tie post-launch work more directly to client performance.