Why are B2B website projects so hard?

Because a website is where every decision a company has already made gets tested at once, in public. Positioning, pricing, category choice, who you sell to and what you say to them all surface on the site. The design and the build are rarely the hard part.

Five things have to be settled before design starts, and most of them are not website questions at all:

• Strategy. Is the positioning actually agreed, or does the website project become the place it finally gets argued out
• Market. A new category has to be explained. A crowded one has to be differentiated. Those are opposite jobs, and your competitors' sites set the floor.
• Buyers. The user and the buyer are often different people, persuaded by different things, arriving with different amounts of prior knowledge and urgency.
• Architecture. Which pages you genuinely need. Product, solution and industry pages are sometimes three versions of the same argument.
• Execution. The build, plus the redirects and 404s that decide whether a migration keeps your search traffic or quietly loses it.

There is also no playbook, and anyone selling one is overstating things. Different buyers arrive at different points in the buying journey and want different things from the same screen, so no fixed rule about heroes, headings or button placement serves all of them. Experience does not give you a template. It gives you the ability to notice when a project is drifting and bring it back before it costs three months.

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