Since hiring Tonic Site Shop in 2018 to redesign my website, my brand has shifted quite a bit. As business owners, and especially creative business owners, having a visually appealing site is pretty important. And these days, it’s more important that you focus on building a brand over a business. The business is all the systems and finances—the boring stuff—while the brand is YOU. It’s your personality, the way you write your captions and copy on your site, the photos you use and the face behind the brand.

As my brand has grown and shifted over the last four years, I’ve felt the need to upgrade my web presence and create a new website. Instead of going the custom route like I did last time, I decided to just use a couple of Tonic’s ShowIt templates to get me going on the major refresh for my website facelift. And I thought it’d be fun for me to break down the process here!

Related: Which Website Platform Should You Use? ShowIt vs. WordPress vs. Squarespace

The Jenna Rainey New Site IS LIVE!! 

A Good Website Drives Organic Traffic

If you’re reading this and you either a) don’t have a site or b) aren’t proud of your site…you’re leaving money on the table with your business.

A good website that’s visually appealing is not only there for you to direct people who slide into your DMs asking if you have a website, but it also drives organic search traffic. When someone types in keywords into Google Search and your website comes up, are they going to have an enjoyable, easy time scrolling your site? Or is it clunky? Too cluttered and filled with broken links?

Designing a website is a lot of work, so that’s why I KNEW I needed to start with a template. I use Showit as the host for my website because there’s no code and it’s SO intuitive and easy to use on the backend. I’ve had both a Squarespace and WordPress site before and let me tell you, NOTHING. NOTHING COMPARES to Showit. With that, I went to my favorite website slingers, Tonic Site Shop, website templates and got myself a couple templates to get the bulk of my core pages built, so let’s break it down…

Beginning the Site Refresh Process

The main core of the redesign began with the cornerstone pages of my website:

• The home page
• About page
• Courses page
• Community (our Patreon)
• The Blog
• Contact page

After building the Home and About pages, I was able to mostly just add canvases and rearrange images and text for the other pages. But to get those two main pages designed, I used the “Manhattan” sales page template and the “Digital Marketing Essentials Kit.” Lead Generation is incredibly important to me and what we do with the business, so having stunning pages and canvases for free guides like our “Complete Beginner’s Guide to Watercolor Ebook,” for example, was CRUCIAL. 

I started the Home page by just playing around with the layout, fonts and colors that I was leaning towards for the rebrand. But I was having trouble combining my love of bright, vivid colors in my work with the neutral tones of my studio, the way I dress and everything else in my life. And because of what I said in the beginning of this post, I wanted to make sure to showcase both because building a brand means showing my face, and showing a little bit of my life (not every personal detail of course!). Plus the photos I had for the new brand shoot definitely incorporated a lot of that style direction for our studio.

So then it clicked! I was browsing around websites to do some research and came across Anthropologie’s website. Their icon is this bright yellow-green, which is pretty dominant in my floral watercolor paintings. Their home goods website, Terrain, also used a dark green that I love, and that was it! Using those as my core “bridge colors” between my vibrant artwork and my more neutral and clean site design, the ball really started rolling. 

Related: Showit Website Launch Guide

The Core Content

While dialing in, trimming up and redesigning the core pages mentioned above was the main bulk of the site refresh, I also wanted to be more strategic about where we placed our “Core” or sometimes referred to as “cornerstone” content. This is mostly our free offerings like guides, worksheets, or highlighting some popular blog posts and YouTube videos. Core content is a great way to beef up your home and about pages (the most trafficked pages of any website). And that can entice them to stay a while! With my audience in mind, we created our freebies and highlighted them on the new website in a way that grabs attention, but isn’t obnoxious.

I also wanted to clean up the copy that I had written for my website (yes I write ALL OF THE COPY!!). Condensing each page and being more short and concise with the messaging was a huge part of this process, especially around our core offerings and freebies!

If you’re looking for a site refresh, or are starting from scratch…trust me. Go with Tonic Site Shop* and use code JENNA for a discount at Tonic!! They have full website templates or the single pages (like what I used!) so, check them out! And for Showit, the code JENNARAINEY can be used for a free month when getting a Showit subscription.

*This post contains affiliate links which means I may earn a small commission and it costs you nothin'. It just helps support all the free content I share. Thank you!