Copy first, layout second

Placeholder text is uniformly pleasant. It has no long words, no awkward client names, no three-line legal caveat. Design it and you have designed for content that will never arrive.

When the real copy lands, the page either breaks or gets quietly worsened to fit, usually by cutting the sentence that was doing the selling.

We write the page as a plain document first: headline, promise, proof, objection, offer. If it is convincing as text with no styling at all, the design job becomes emphasis rather than rescue.

Then layout does what layout is good at: making the order obvious, giving the important line air, and getting the eye to the button.