About 3 hours ago we launched a brand new website for my website design co, Studio Cotton. We’re about 2 weeks away from the business’ 9th birthday, and I reckon this is maybe the fifth iteration of our website – averaging about one major redesign/rebuild every couple of years.
Now normally I’m not the biggest fan of just shouting “HEY LOOK AT MY NEW WEBSITE” as a marketing message – it’s a bit “here’s what I’ve done for me” rather than “here’s what I’ve done for you”.
However, given we are a website design company, I thought it might be cool to peak behind our coral velvet curtain and share a little about why we made the update, what went right, what didn’t, and what comes next.
So let’s get into it.
Our previous website had gotten a wee bit tatty
We have GOT to stop experimenting on our own website. Seriously AIME. We currently host at least 60 websites – all with their own features, functions, amends, and fixes – and sometimes when we want to see if our new idea is a good idea, we’ll try it on our own website first.
If it goes tits-up, we won’t have a grumpy client call, and if it goes right, we’ll have an even fancier website. However, way more often these trials just make for small changes and inconsistencies, which really pile up over the years.
And the last version of our website had not only aggregated a lot of inconsistencies, but about a year ago I gave our technical director Alex the thumbs up to change how we connect the very useful and free Google Symbols library to our websites, which then killed about 95% of the icons on our website.
The change improved our Core Web Vitals in Google Search Console, but alas, I never spent the 2ish hours needed to manually reset all the icons, which is totally on me.
The website needed a lot of tiny, small, and one medium fixes, but given we also needed one big update, the site had just started to look way too tatty.
Containerising: the big technical update
We use Elementor Pro (along with a whole bundle of WordPress-based tech) to create and manage our websites, and about 18 months ago they made a big switch/upgrade to the way they handle a website’s architecture.
I could go into more detail, but I just shan’t today. Basically, an Elementor website was previously constructed using horizontal sections and vertical columns. This was fine, but had a few limitations that led to more design compromises and workarounds that I prefer to avoid.
Now, Elementor uses containers – these can run horizontally or vertically, and have a few extra benefits like requiring less code (leading to smaller, faster websites), getting rid of some of those previous design compromises, and giving us like a buttload more flexibility for tablet and mobile design optimisation.
Elementor Pro does offer a sections-to-containers converter which would’ve kicked off the technical update, but to really make the most of this new architecture and make our website more representative of what we can achieve for our clients, we needed to design with containers, not add containers to our designs.
Our messaging wasn’t off, but it wasn’t on either
This is a biggie – our website content wasn’t good enough. It wasn’t good enough at explaining our strengths or how we’re different to other website designers. I think it was pretty good at telling small business owners how much we care about making a great website for them…
…but…
…our audience has also shifted a bit. Of course we’re still THE small business websites specialists, but a few years ago most of our clients were businesses of maybe 1-4 people, and now it’s more like 5-20 people.
Still small businesses, but business where we might be speaking to a marketing manager rather than the business owner. Or, in the case of our highly specialised podcast website design package, we’re speaking to business owners who might not even call their business a business.
Our website copy needed a lot of work, and last year I just didn’t have time.
Good reasons to launch a new website
I’m a better website designer than I was 18 months ago, and I wanted to show off. The past 2-3 years, our website design and execution capabilities have grown almost exponentially, which is ludicrous given we’d already been building effective, lovely websites for at least 5 years at that point.
There were other positive reasons for a major website update too, like adding a dedicated page for ecommerce website design, and separating it out from our business website design page. This change will make us a lot more competitive SEO-wise, and also gives me space to directly address the specific needs of online shops and their shopkeepers.
And there’s the launch of our affiliate programme
In May 2024 we took our podcast website design package to The Podcast Show in London (check out our show review for more info), and to make sure we had something to engage and entice industry professionals, we added an affiliate incentive reward.
Podcast professionals could register as an affiliate, and then any referrals they’d send our way would come with a tidy monetary reward that they could keep, pass on to their clients, or splitsies.
After the success of the show, we wanted to find a way to extend the offer to encompass more of the small business community too, but needed to jiggle our packages to make sure the rewards and pricing still made sense.
We also wanted to speak directly to brand & graphic designers who might have clients with stunning new brand identities, and now need a website that not only makes the most of their new look, but also benefits from the wealth of technical capability, SEO expertise, UX, web accessibility and strategy that we can bring to projects.
Some of my absolute favourite projects have come from brand designer referrals, like our websites for Baa Wool, Silver Grey Foliage and the Building your Brand podcast with brand identities by Liz Mosley, or the very recently launched Barc Architects website with branding by Emma Arcanjo of ARCA.
If you want to find out more about our affiliate partnerships, check out the lovely affiliate page I put together for this exact gosh-darn purpose.
Making the website: my design time ran way over
Predictable, right? Creating something for yourself is always harder than creating for someone else.
But that wasn’t the only challenge with designing our new website – there’s just an ungodly amount of moving parts. Un. Godly. Each page on our website is made up of a whole heap of custom components/templates. Here’s the list for just this page you’re on right now:
- Website header
- Website footer
- Email pop-up
- Single blog post page template
- Author card (under the article title)
- In-blog ad (I’ve popped one in just below this section)
- Related blog listing with photo
- Related blog listing without photo
- Tiny blog listing with circle photo (in footer)
Each of of these starts life as a plain millennial-pink screen, and needs to be planned, created, hooked up to different types of data, and then optimised for desktop, tablet, and mobile.
The device design optimisation was a beast. For a lot of the past 3 months I’ve basically been constantly flipping between my monitors, our office iPad, and my phone scrutinising each pixel.
It’s actually one of the reasons why I regularly remove Instagram from my phone – I’d keep opening the app on autopilot and I’m far to susceptible to falling down a Reels hole.
Making the website: my copywriting time ran way way way way over
I am not a particularly fast writer. I’ve been blogging for years, sometimes I can boff out an article in one decent café sitting, other times we’re talking like 7 hours over a couple of weeks.
Website copy though – ho boy. Again, it’s trickier writing for yourself than others, but at times it felt like I was stretching cognitive creative muscles that had sat dormant for years.
I had a really clear idea of the content vibe – specific, descriptive, literal, playful – but it took me a good while to get into that flow. What’s more, that flow went straight in the bin as soon as I had to pivot onto a client project, or support a member of my team with their work.
In the end, I wrote most of our website copy on Mondays when I’m often the only one in central Bristol office, or after hours. This meant a lot of late nights over the past 3-4 weeks in particularly, but thankfully it is Married At First Sight Australia season, so I’ve had a glorious treat when I do get home at least.
This ‘process’ also made me a terrible delegator. Our wonderfully talented content producer Lyzi and our wonderfully talented freelance copywriter Ellie Kime both helped me out with excellent website content, and then I rewrote a bunch of it because I’m what… pernickety. Finicky. A total, shameless control freak.
And ya know what, I am proper proud of it. Some of the copy on this new site is wildly better than what I imagined, and I think it’s done a great job of communicating what I’d set out to achieve. And there are also a few parts I’ve totally phoned in for now, and will refine later. Which reminds me…
I don’t want feedback, at least not yet
I am a fiend for only hearing the negative, and then dwelling the heck on it. Like I’ve run workshops before where I’ll get 50 comments about how valuable and entertaining it is, and then one person will mention that the chairs weren’t very comfortable.
Cue my brain screaming “Aime you ditzy crudbucket gooseberry you FAILED how COULD you cause achy bum-bums you SHOULD have tried harder you SHOULD have though about this before”.
I’ve put so much energy and time and emotion and money and hours and lattes and probs some tears into this website. I know it’s not perfect – there’s literally no such thing. I’m sure I’ve got typos, and I’m sure one or two of our pages will wiggle side-to-side on a mobile. Heck, there’s probs a big boo-boo or two in there too.
Just don’t tell me, ok? Actually, just email Cai. Cai can deal with it.
That said, my Instagram DMs are always open to little compliments.
I still haven’t uploaded our project case studies
Aime Aime Aime. It’s been 9 years of business and you’ve literally only finished writing up one case study ever. You Toulouse sausage.
Past me was 100% convinced I was going to launch this iteration of our website with gorgeous, thorough, well-written case studies for at least 10 of our website projects. Well, I managed one.
So check out our project case study for the Building your Brand podcast, and maybe check back next month to see if I’ve not only made it to case study number two, and popped back all of the ‘All projects’ buttons that my team and I rushed to hide this morning.
And I haven’t finished these things, either
- The events page which would include a sign-up form where people could opt-in specifically to hear about our Bristol-based events
- Projects archive/page, but that’s fine since, ya know, I’ve only written up one ruddy project
- Plugin development page to chat about our WordPress plugins, like Flodesk for Elementor Pro
- Adding all of my press spots and podcast appearances to our about and media pages
- Creating optimal thumbnail/featured images for our key service pages
What’s next for Studio Cotton website
I want to do a big rebrand. I’m really happy with how Studio Cotton is looking at the moment, but I want more depth.
I want a sickenin’ sign outside our shop, I want cool merch I can give away, I want a really toight PDF we can send to prospective clients, I want to be able to book an exhibition or sponsor an event, and not think “Ah shit, now we have to clobber something together so we look sweet like chocolate”.
Ah when we do rebrand, I’m hoping I can keep at least 80% of my website work – and as a cool behind-the-scenes tidbit, I’ve built our website with this in mind. There’s a few cool shortcuts that added a hours to my workload now, but might save future Aime days.
This is the kinda strategic website work that really butters my toast. I’m all about websites as business tools – after all, what’s the point of a beautiful website if it isn’t reaching your audience and growing sales?
It’d be like buying the most gorgeous delivery van to deliver flowers, but it doesn’t have an engine or a steering wheel. That’s not a business tool – that’s just a nice-looking thing.
Anyway, I’ll skip the rest of that tangent for now and instead add in that I also don’t know what’s next. We’ll keep growing the site – adding pages and posts and cool stuff and typos – and maybe I’ll see you back here in 2-3 years where I’ll be chatting about our next website.
Also a quick thank you to Cai for putting up with me ignoring him whilst I build this website, and our new admin Rachel whose been picking up our processes and tidying up 9 years of blogs like a total pro.
PS. I love Georgia de Lotz
Georgia de Lotz is the phenomenally talented photographer who’s been shooting our Studio Cotton pics since 2015. Without her work, my business would literally not be where it is now. I just wanted to give her an extra shoutout as her photography is one of the reasons this website looks totes baller.
Thank you GdL x
