Lorem ipsum is a beautiful lie. It has an even texture, a predictable word length and no awkward German compound nouns. Real copy has none of those things, which is why layouts designed around placeholder text fall apart the week before launch.

Write the ugly first draft

You do not need a copywriter to start. You need somebody who knows the business to answer five questions in plain sentences:

• What do you sell, in the words a customer would use?
• Who is it for, and who is it explicitly not for?
• What is the one thing you want a visitor to do?
• Why should they believe you — proof, not adjectives?
• What is the objection that stops most deals?

Those answers are the homepage. The design job becomes arranging them, which is a much better brief than “make it feel premium”.

Then design against the real lengths

A headline that runs to three lines on a phone is a design problem you want to discover in week two, not week nine. So is a nav label that is two words longer than the space allows, or a testimonial that is four sentences when the card was drawn for two.

If the layout only looks good with text that does not exist yet, you have designed a poster, not a website.

Edit last, together

Once the design is real, the copy always gets tighter. Headlines lose a clause. Paragraphs lose their throat-clearing first sentence. That final pass, done with the designer and the writer looking at the same screen, is where most of the quality arrives.