Omar Prado is a physical therapist. Full time, in patients’ homes, mostly with older people. Framer is what he does with the hours around that, and there he describes himself as a full-stack designer and developer.

What COVID made obvious

The spark was not a design course. It was watching businesses near him close, and noticing the pattern: they did not have websites. Once delivery apps became the only way anyone saw a menu, the places with no website simply stopped existing.

The lesson landed again from the other side when his own plumbing broke and he had four contractors to choose between, all with good reviews. He picked on the strength of the website alone, not knowing whether it was the right business, because it built the trust.

Five tools before the right one

He went looking properly, and worked through the options one at a time. WordPress meant plugins stacked on plugins. Wix was quick but hemmed in. Squarespace looked like a business until you hit its edges. Figma he could not finish a job in: you design it, he says, and where’s the website? Webflow was the closest and the furthest away at once, since it meant another year of learning to code.

Framer was the one he could learn over a summer, and he has a line for it better than most marketing copy.

It’s easy to learn and beautiful to deliver.

Aiming for client one hundred

The change he talks about most is not a feature. It is something he stopped doing: designing the whole imagined operation, the booking call and the schedule and the follow-up sequence, for a roster of clients that did not exist. Perfection, he says, meant aiming at nothing at all.

He also pushes back on treating a full-time job as the obstacle. Quitting it, in his account, makes you anxious, drops your rates, fills your calendar with the wrong clients, and removes the very stability that paid for the skills in the first place. The income from the other job is what fuels the knowledge, and the future.

Day one, on purpose

He is currently finishing a cleaning template, aimed deliberately at people at the beginning: cleaners working from family houses upward, who are never going to spend five thousand dollars on a custom build. It has a before-and-after slider, which he admits he built partly because it is satisfying to drag. What he wants that customer to have is not a beautiful file they cannot touch, a site that looks nice but where someone who has never seen Framer has no idea where to click.

His advice is the sentence he wishes someone had handed him at the start.

Don’t compare your day one to someone else’s day one hundred.