Shauli Zacks
Updated on: August 20, 2025
Karl Young, CEO of Lemon Head Design, has spent nearly two decades helping businesses strengthen their digital presence. What began as a side project while he worked in a data center has evolved into a full-service agency with over 50 employees and more than 300 clients. In this SafetyDetectives conversation, Karl shares the story behind Lemon Head Design, common mistakes businesses make with their websites, and his insights on balancing design, security, and usability in today’s digital landscape.
If you could tell me a little bit about your background and what led you to start Lemon Head Design.
My name is Karl Young, and I’m the CEO and part-owner of Lemon Head Design. The company started a little over 18 years ago with Adam McGee, who’s my business partner and our current President.
At the time, we were both working at a data center called Fibernet. Adam was the designer and developer, and I was a system admin and sales engineer. The idea for Lemon Head came because a lot of our Fibernet clients, who hosted their websites with us, would get hacked after a year or two. We managed server updates, but not the code updates. Most of them used WordPress, and they didn’t maintain or update their sites.
We’d tell them their designers needed to maintain the code, but the common trend was to hire inexpensive designers who would build the site and then disappear. They wouldn’t maintain it or handle server and firewall security. On our side, we helped with the servers, but clients didn’t know how to manage the code, and Fibernet didn’t have a design team to support that either.
When we first started Lemon Head, we were still working at Fibernet. We used little chatbots to build our site and even to schedule client appointments. During my lunch hour, my chatbot would automatically book meetings, and I’d use that time to sell services. I worked at Fibernet for about eight years and later moved to another company, all while growing Lemon Head on the side. Eventually, we reached a point where the business was big enough for me to go full-time. That was about six years ago, and today we have more than 300 clients.
What does Lemon Head Design do, and what types of clients do you typically work with?
We’re not just a web design and development company. We also provide online marketing services like SEO, Google Ads, and social media. More recently, we’ve been focusing heavily on advanced AI tools.
We’ve always used AI, but now we’re working with CRM automation, AI drops, AI voice numbers, and other cutting-edge tools. We’ve even partnered with ChatGPT. They share new developments with us to test out, and we run those with our team to see how they can help clients.
In addition to marketing and AI, we handle hosting and website maintenance. At this point, we have about 50 employees on staff. Our main client base is credit unions and banks — organizations that put a high priority on cybersecurity.
What are some of the most common website mistakes that you see businesses making?
One of the biggest mistakes is hiring a development team that doesn’t do proper maintenance. We run both online marketing audits and cybersecurity audits to check performance and security.
For marketing, that means looking at how much traffic they’re getting, reviewing their Google Analytics setup, and checking their online tools. For cybersecurity, we focus on whether code and plugins are kept updated. That’s the most common problem we see — businesses with WordPress sites that aren’t updated weekly.
What we do differently is run updates in a staging environment first. We use AI tools to test everything on Sundays. If the updates are safe, they get pushed to production on Monday morning. If not, the system holds them back and alerts us. It used to take an entire QA team to manage this process, but now it’s automated and far safer.
We’ve been refining this system for over 10 years. Because of that experience, we’ve built a strong reputation with credit unions and banks that are especially focused on best cybersecurity practices.
Is there anything else that you do to make sure that the websites you build stay protected?
Yes, quite a few things. Beyond code updates, we handle SSL certificates and renew them every 90 days with the latest security protocols.
We also have an operations team that monitors for DDoS attacks. If one happens, we notify the client immediately. In many cases, we’ll deploy a Cloudflare WAF firewall in front of the site, which can mitigate the attack almost instantly. We can usually activate this in about 10 minutes through DNS.
On top of that, we maintain off-site backups. The production environment is backed up on the server itself, and then another backup is stored off-site, sometimes across the country. We work with multiple data centers worldwide and partner with companies like AWS, Google Cloud Enterprise, and Digital Ocean. Whenever we need to spin up a new server, we get competitive quotes and then ensure redundancy through multiple providers. This gives our clients another layer of security and peace of mind.
How do you balance good design with real-world performance, SEO, and usability to create the ideal website?
There’s a balance to strike. For SEO, you want strong content on the site. But design matters just as much, especially with calls-to-action. We usually recommend having at least two to three clear calls-to-action on the homepage. That alone can improve conversion rates significantly.
We also do extensive A/B testing. For example, if we see 100 people reaching a client’s shopping cart but only two or three completing the purchase, we dig into the data. Sometimes the drop-off happens because the price shows up too late in the flow. By moving payment information earlier, we make the process more transparent and reduce abandonment.
We run annual audits for all our clients that cover SEO, speed, and usability. Our systems are updated regularly, which helps improve performance and keep everything optimized.
For small businesses with a limited budget, what’s the smartest first step towards improving their online presence?
The most common challenge we see is outdated websites. Many small businesses use old templates that aren’t responsive. That means they don’t look or work properly on mobile, and that’s a major problem since about 80% of traffic comes from phones. Step one is making sure your website is responsive across all devices. We guarantee this for all our clients.
Step two is running an online marketing audit. That tells us what keywords are on the site, how many people search for them, and where the business ranks. For example, if you’re on page two for a keyword with 400 searches a month, it may only take a few months of effort to rank number one. That’s a huge growth opportunity.
We also make sure sites are responsive not just for mobile and desktop, but for larger screens too. Sometimes people view sites on huge displays like projectors, and we design with that in mind. Responsiveness today isn’t just about phones and PCs — it’s about making the site work seamlessly at every scale.
