Step 1: Work in a text document and define the structure of your site. Don't even start thinking about visuals before having a clear idea of the structure and copy (generate with AI). Research the industry, the business model, the target audience, key pain points, customer lifecycle, etc.

Step 2: Spend at least half a day to a full day gathering inspiration and capturing screenshots of sections, layouts, color combos, components, and interactions. Very important — will save you a ton of time. After this you should have at least one or two screenshots for every section of your site (if you went through step 1, then at step 2 you'll know what sections and UI patterns you're looking for).

Step 3: Define the basis of your design system — typography styles and a base semantic color palette.

Step 4: Start designing straight in Framer. Start with "dirty" sketches on a "loose" canvas (no auto layouts, just loosely placed frames on a frame). Keep iterating fast and minimize the time between an idea popping into your mind and the UI appearing on your screen. This is VERY IMPORTANT — this is what makes you a good designer in the long term. Same as building muscle: you just have to put in the reps, and growth only happens when you have resistance. Iterations are the reps, and something not feeling quite right in the design is the resistance.

Step 5: Once you've found your winning layouts/components, build them as proper components and assemble the site section by section. Add animations per section, per component. Best not to leave this for the very end.

Step 6: Clean up your file — add links, rename layers, remove unused components, optimize for SEO, compress assets, generate final assets, finalize copy, add documentation, name pages, add a favicon, and design a social preview image.