A site I built myself

The situation

The problem was not that I had nothing to say about typography. It was that I was saying it in the wrong place.

Typography enquiries got lost on a web design site. Visitors landed on the page and could not tell whether they were looking at a design service, a type service, or one person doing a bit of both. The bounce rate told the story. People arrived and left again.

Nothing broke. No money went missing. It was quieter than that. The offer was just weaker than it should have been, and it had been weaker for a long time.

Why a new site and not a better page

I already had the sub-page. That was the point. The sub-page was not the fix, it was the problem. You cannot solve a diluted offer by writing better copy inside the thing doing the diluting.

So I stopped trying to make one site do two jobs.

What I built

WordPress, Divi and custom CSS. The same stack I use for client work, which felt right. If I recommend it to other people I should be willing to run it myself.

Four pages. Home, services, recent work, contact. Nothing else. Every page ends in the same place with the same call to action, "Let's talk type", rather than a mix of different asks.

The type had to hold up, because a typography site gets judged on its own typography before anyone reads a word of it. Momentum Extended at black weight for headings. Calibre 400 for body text. Fluid sizing so reading stays comfortable on a phone as well as a wide screen.

Four services sit on the site: a type audit, a brand typography system, type-in-use design, and an ongoing retainer. The audit is deliberately the low-commitment way in, for people who are not ready for a full project. I do not publish prices there. Every job gets a proper look before I quote, because scope varies far more in typography work than it does in a five-page website build.

I moved three pieces of recent work across, and I redirected the old typography sub-page to the new site so nothing was left stranded.

It was a straightforward build. No plugin fights, no migration headaches. The hard part was the decision, not the work.

The result

The site went live in July, so it is too soon to judge properly. I am not going to claim numbers I do not have yet.

What I can say is that it ranks well for "typography consultant Yorkshire", which is the phrase that matters most for this offer. Both sites now rank for their own keywords instead of competing with each other for attention. That was the whole idea.

What I would do differently

Split sooner.

The honest reason I did not is that splitting meant admitting the sub-page had not worked. That is an uncomfortable thing to accept about your own site, particularly when you build sites for a living. It is easier to keep tweaking a page than to accept the page was never going to do the job.

I sat with it longer than I should have.

The wider point

I see this with clients often enough to think it is a pattern. A business does two things well, puts both on one website, and weakens both. The plumber who also fits bathrooms. The photographer who also runs workshops. Visitors cannot tell what the business is, so they leave.

My view is that each offer deserves its own site. There is a cost to that, and a second site means more to look after. But a clear offer that people understand is worth more than a tidy arrangement that confuses them.

When someone asks me what I do now, I say I am a web designer. The typography work has its own front door.