Seven rules, including the expensive ones.

1. Every number is countable

If the site says “2,600+ products”, that figure is read out of the live catalogue when the page is built — and it counts what we can actually print on, not how large our supplier’s catalogue is. There are no users-served counters, no orders-shipped tickers and no logo wall of companies that have never heard of us. The cost of this rule is that the home page has fewer impressive numbers on it than a competitor’s, because we only have the ones that are true.

2. No manufactured urgency

No countdown timer that resets on reload. No “3 people are viewing this”. No “only 2 left” on a made-to-order product, which could not be true — nothing exists until you order it. The only deadlines on this site are the holiday cutoffs, and those are calculated from the partners’ real production windows rather than chosen to create pressure.

3. The light is drawn, not photographed

Everything that glows on this site is CSS and SVG: gradient stops, masks and blur radii. We tried generated imagery and threw it out. A generated hero is soft at the edges, carries compression artefacts, weighs megabytes, cannot move, and looks subtly wrong on a screen it was not rendered for.

Drawn light is crisp at any pixel density, costs no download, and can be animated. The practical test: zoom this page to 400% and the beams stay sharp. An image would not.

4. Show the real thing or show nothing

The dashboard on the home page is the actual application shell, rebuilt in code rather than screenshotted, so it cannot go stale when the app changes. Product photography is the partner’s photograph of the real blank. There is no stock photography anywhere on this site — no smiling team in a loft, no unrelated desk. Where we have nothing real to show, there is a drawing or there is space.

5. The expensive moment is free

Designing is free and unlimited. No account, no card, no credit meter, no watermark on the preview. You can run a hundred sentences and leave. This costs us real money per visitor and it is the single most important rule here: the moment to find out a design is wrong is while it costs nothing to change, and a product that charges for that moment is selling regret.

6. Accessible is not a setting

The site is built to WCAG 2.2 AA and tested against it at desktop and phone width on every deploy, with zero serious or critical findings as the condition for shipping. Every interactive target is at least 44 by 44 pixels. Nothing conveys meaning by colour alone. Every animation on the site stops under prefers-reduced-motion, including the hero.

The accessibility statement names what still falls short, because a statement that lists only successes is marketing.

7. Leaving is as easy as arriving

Cancelling takes one click from the order page, not an email to a retention address. Deleting an account removes the designs, not just the login. There is no interstitial asking if you are sure you want to miss out, and unsubscribing from email works from the first click rather than loading a preference centre. See data requests.

What these cost

Rules one, two and seven each reduce conversion. Urgency works; invented social proof works; a friction-filled cancellation flow retains people. We are not pretending otherwise or claiming the honest version performs better. It performs worse and we would rather hold the rule.

If you find this site breaking one of these, that is a bug and worth reporting to hello@makevessim.com. The changelog records when we have had to fix one.