Leslie Johnson
Leslie, also known as “Sursee Gal”, has a way of writing about recipes, meal plans, and hospitality that make them feel easy and fun.
Initial conversations
Leslie had a few things she initially wanted help with. She wanted her site to look cleaner. She had picked out some colors and fonts she liked. She wanted to move her website from Wordpress to Squarespace.
Old site
She wanted me to design a new cohesive look from the colors and fonts she had chosen. One of the recommendations I made to her after designing some initial ideas was to simplify down to one font.
The font we went with (Montserrat) was cleaner and I suggested using different font-weights to distinguish headers and paragraphs in order to create clean, readable pages. This also went with here theme of keeping things simple, and it made the website faster.
Simplifying the content
We had a conversation about her favorite things to write about, her most popular content, the top interests of of readers, and she realized she wanted to focus on three main categories:
Recipes
Meal plans
Hospitality
Therefore, we structured the home page into these three categories, linking out to a custom page for each. We also had custom icons for each of these categories, courtesy of Ryan Painter Design.
Custom page displaying hospitality posts
Whereas Leslie’s old homepage was a list of posts from newest to oldest, her new homepage has clear sections for her top categories, linking out to the pages where readers can find posts in that category.
For the recipes and meal plans pages, we added a special section at the top where she can display featured posts (whichever ones she wants).
For recipes, the biggest and most complex category, we also used a gallery block to show a grid of sub-categories.
Sub-categories on recipe page
Coaching and Illustrations
We also gave her Coaching page a section on the front page, since she is wanting to highlight that more. I used a photo of her and the ACC certificate badge instead of an icon to differentiate it from her writing categories.
Lastly, I sourced some fun professional illustrations from Blush to give the site a pizzazz that matches the spirit in which Leslie writes and shares.
One of our video calls!
Kind words
“My old website was scattered and cluttered and I felt overwhelmed about doing anything on my own to tweak it.
Ben’s gentle questioning helped me to arrive at the message I wanted to share, and narrowing my focus has really simplified my whole blog and made it very powerful.
Now I have more time to write about what I enjoy. Ben’s guidance and web design has freed me up to do what I am good at.
Ben also listened to me and added the special touches that represented me and sound and feel like me.
His gentle, yet thorough work, and his thoughtfulness about all the aspects of my website made the site sing!
I am so proud of the new website.”
