THE STUDIO BEHIND THE WORK

A client came to me prepared to spend nearly $500 a month on ongoing marketing because their website wasn’t performing. Before taking the contract, I wanted to understand why. A deeper audit uncovered incomplete SEO, unindexed pages, incorrect heading structures, multiple H1 tags, and copyright concerns that needed attention first. Rather than selling them a recurring service, I corrected the underlying problems at my hourly rate. Within six months, they saw a significant turnaround and no longer needed the monthly marketing plan, leaving that budget available for advertising and continued growth.

I’m four years into this business, and I can readily admit that some of the websites I built in my first couple of years are not websites I would build today. Those early clients trusted a much less experienced version of me while I was still learning how to balance beautiful design with a website that genuinely works. As my skills and standards grew, I started reaching back out to clients whose original sites were still live and offering to redesign them at no charge. They gave me the opportunity to become better at what I do, and correcting work I had outgrown felt like one small way to thank them for taking a chance on me before I had four years of experience behind me.

One client came to me after building her business from the ground up with such a specific vision that handing any part of it to someone else felt genuinely frightening. I could have spent the project reminding her that I was the professional and asking her to trust my process, but that wasn’t what she needed from me. So I changed the process. We met weekly and built portions of her website together in real time. I delivered early when I knew waiting created anxiety, welcomed pivots without making her feel difficult, and when decisions became overwhelming, we took breaks, moved meetings, or found another way through them. Most importantly, I never treated how deeply she felt about the project as something I needed to manage out of her. She had spent years caring for this business before I ever arrived, and I respected that. Some clients need me to take the wheel completely; she needed to keep her hands on it. Being the expert in the room sometimes means having enough confidence in your own ability to know when not to be the one in charge.

I was designing for a distinctly masculine brand whose owner came in with high standards and a clear vision. While studying the physical space, I noticed a tile pattern used throughout the store and, without being asked, recreated it as a digital asset woven into the website. During our final review, he stopped scrolling when he recognized it. It took him a second to realize I had taken something from his physical space and carried it into the digital one, and his reaction completely changed the energy in the room. He told me he never would have thought to do it, but it made the entire brand suddenly feel more connected and made him even more confident that he had hired the right person. I still chase that moment in my work: finding the detail a client never knew to ask for, but immediately knows belongs there when they see it.

One client has been coming back to me for four years, and I genuinely look forward to her call every time. Each year, her property management business is a little bigger, her properties more impressive, her clients more valuable, and what she needs from me more advanced than the year before. I’ve redesigned work I once considered finished, added functionality we never needed before, strengthened her SEO, and helped her reach increasingly specific audiences. I’m never offended when she outgrows something I created. I’m proud of it. Every new request is evidence that she’s gotten a little closer to the business she has always imagined, and I’ve had the privilege of being there at each stage to help her reach the next one. There’s something incredibly special about knowing a business well enough to remember where it started while still being excited about how far it has left to go.

An e-commerce client once came to me wanting to “change the way online shopping worked.” She wanted customers to slow down, browse curated collections, and experience the beauty of the brand rather than rush toward a purchase. I understood the vision, but customers weren’t behaving that way. They struggled to find sizing and product information, couldn’t relocate items they had previously loved, and abandoned their carts. Eventually, I had to give her an uncomfortable choice: protect the aesthetic at the expense of sales, or let me preserve what made the brand special while rebuilding the experience around how people actually shop. She wasn’t ready to hear it immediately, and that was okay. Months later, she came back ready to make the changes. I’m a designer, but I’m also a marketer, and sometimes serving a client well means being willing to challenge an idea I know they care about when the health of their business is asking for something different.