Hi Reader,

I want to share a website redesign before-and-after with you today! People often ask me how to balance many facets of a single business. In this case, we have a stationery brand that sells cards, stationery, and art prints, but she also does custom wedding designs, has shows and events to share, and she invites wedding clients to her studio to make plans.

Ellen Braley is the creative half of the two-person wife-and-husband, artist-and-production manager team that makes up El’s Cards. A self-taught watercolor artist and calligrapher, El started El’s Cards in 1999 and has been hand-painting and hand-lettering every El’s Cards creation ever since.

Please take a look at her website before we got to work:

Website BEFORE

El came to us ready to redesign her outdated site and make things easier for her customers while improving her back-end operations. It was important for her to be totally autonomous when updating the new site, which is important for us, too!

We paid special attention to details on her product pages and order forms. We also designed a custom About page, Weddings page, and Services page, while developing wholesale functionality to replace her standalone wholesale site.

Want to see her site now?

Redesigned website

Our work for this site focused on the product pages. For instance, take a peek at the options customers can use to personalize wedding invitations here.

I'm so proud of the work my team did on this! You can accomplish so much more (and so much more quickly!) when you have an expert designer, experienced developer, ecommerce strategist, copywriter, SEO expert, and project manager guiding your brand through a single project.

But let's hear from Ellen herself. She says:

It had been over eight years since we redesigned our website, and it was time for a refresh. This project was scary for us–the investment came out of our savings. Our friends were like, "Why are you getting the website redone? It's good!" After our redesign with Aeolidia, I showed them the new homepage and the response was, "omg now I see why!"

“I was also concerned because I'm not that tech-savvy. Sometimes, I have a hard time articulating what I need and what things are called. My project manager was able to do instructional working meetings with us in the Shopify admin, so we appreciated that. I can't say enough good things about Caitlin!

After having the new Aeolidia site up and running, we have seen a significant increase in the number of wedding clients who are ordering their invitations directly from the website. That was one of our biggest goals with the creation of the new website. Because of that, I have more time to be creative, painting new artwork for all of our products-with less time spent on wedding client admin. Our wedding clients have called the ordering process "simple and intuitive", and that is a direct result of the beautiful website created by Aeolidia.

We needed many special customizations, and the new site is seamless and runs a lot smoother now. I especially appreciate the way the navigation is set up now. 10/10—we are happy with everything!”

Ellen Braley of El's Cards

Can we do something similar for you? Here are some signs that it's time to redesign your website:

The look is outdated compared to your business today
You plan to invest in marketing or advertising, and want a good ROI
Your conversion rate is lower than average (for your industry)
Your website isn't easy to use on mobile devices
The backend admin work takes up tons of your time
Problems for your customers and you are snowballing
It's over three years old, AND you haven't been keeping pace with updates, upgrades, and improvements

My team can help with all of this! Please get in touch, and we can chat about needed improvements and create a smart plan for you.

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Q&A

Here's a reader question about email subscription forms, from Shamik, as answered by Helen Hulskamp, Director of Ecommerce Strategy on our team:

Q: You recommended removing the first name from our subscription forms. Isn’t the first name required for the Klaviyo workflows and campaigns for the automated Hi {first_name}?

A: We recommend a strategy called progressive profile enhancement. Start by capturing only an email address. Every additional field on your popup will lower your form submit rate, even if the fields are optional. The primary goal of your popup is to capture email addresses so you can remind visitors to come back to the site. The first name can come later.

A lot of profiles will have their first name automatically populated when they abandon a cart. In your welcome flow, you can send subscribers to a form to enter their birthdate and first name to sign up for a Happy Birthday flow. A Manage Preferences form is another opportunity to collect first name and other information about your subscribers.

When you personalize your emails, it's important to always have a fallback such as “Hi Friend!” for those profiles that do not have a first name yet. Personalization can be very effective, but it is most important to simply get people on your list first.

Question: Answered

Our team includes experts in branding, design, development, email & SMS/text marketing, search engine optimization, copywriting, conversion optimization, ecommerce strategy, business growth, and more. Have a question for us? Email back, and I'll consult one of our experts and share one weekly response over email.