How To Design A Website That Feels Like Home
My first attempt at designing my own website was not pretty. You might look at my website now and think it looks nice and not quite believe me, but I’m telling you, it was ugly. It had a border at the top that looked like wood, on it was a logo involving a turquoise feather, and some of my headings were hot pink. It was a mess, but it was a website, and I used it for a couple of months before I redesigned it into something slightly better.
As a creative human sharing your work online, your website is your digital home. And it should feel like one - your own, comfy, cosy and beautifully decorated home. It should reflect who you are, and invite others to hang out and get to know you better. Your website is where everything comes together.
Perhaps because of this central role a website has, I see many of my coaching clients struggle with theirs. The pressure rises, it propels you into existential questions like well who am I? and you can end up getting stuck. So today I want to take you through designing your own website to make it feel like your very own, cosy digital home.
Start with your why
Your website is there to help you communicate your creative work to the world. At the core of your work is your why - your broader message and values behind what you create. Your why will guide you in both the visual design of your website and in the messages you sprinkle in your texts.
Let’s take an example. There are two artists, both are painting forests. The first one’s why is that art is a way to reconnect with your inner child. The second one’s why is that nature holds great wisdom. You can already imagine two very different websites, right? The first one might involve invitations to playfulness and have a design that is a bit quirky. The second one could have lessons from nature and a design with a more bookish vibe.
See how a why gives the art a context? That context is sort of what your website is - a landing ground and environment for your work to live. If you want to dig into your why, I have a video and worksheet for you.
Here comes the big caveat though! If you’re not sure about your why yet, don’t wait to design your website until you are. This can be an organic process, where you start with a simple website that you build upon the more you discover about yourself and your creative work.
Shape your visual identity
This is the fun part! Your visual identity is everything that goes into how your website looks - from colours, to font choices, to your logo, to pictures and illustrations. Making all of these choices can be pretty overwhelming, so just take it one step at a time and remember - there is no one right way.
Start by gathering visuals that inspire you and that gives you a feeling of this is me and home. Easiest to this is with a Pinterest board, and you can save a multitude of pins, from pictures to illustrations to designs you like. If you have a why, try searching for some keywords that relate to your why and see if anything interesting comes up.
When you have gone wild on Pinterest, refine your board a little and select a smaller amount of images that stand out as the best ones. Now study them closer - what colours do you have? What is the mood? What is the style? What kind of fonts do you have? Describe you images in a couple of words and let these guide you.
At this point, I would encourage you to start experimenting. If you’re using Squarespace like me, it’s very easy to make design changes quickly. Even if you have a website, you can choose a different theme to make your experiments on and it won’t affect your current website. Or you can use Google Drawings or Canva to gather things like fonts, pictures and colours to see how they look together.
If you’re a visual creative, like an artist or photographer, use your own visuals in your design. Your website should harmonise with your work and highlight it.
Finally, don’t get too hung up on a logo. You don’t need a complicated logo so if you’re getting stuck there, choose something very simple. Mine is just my name in a script font. It works just fine.
Tell your stories
When you have a visual base for your website, you can start filling that website with content. There may be people online telling you that you have to structure your website in a certain way - you don’t. Your website is yours and you have complete creative control over it.
Think about what the purpose of your website is when you decide your structure. What is its most important job? Is it to point people to your shop? Is it to get them to sign up for you newsletter? To introduce them to you or to learn more by reading your blog? Likely your website will do multiple things, but knowing what is most important can help you decide how to structure it and what to put on the start page.
What kind of texts and how much text you have is of course dependent on your work. When writing, there are three things I would encourage you to think about.
1. Weave in your why
As we’ve seen, a why helps give context to your creative work, and by weaving in your why a little here and there on your website you help people understand what you and your creative work is about.
2. Tell your stories
When people come to your website, your online home, they do so to learn a bit more. We want to get to know you and see your perspective. The best way to do that is through your stories. If your why is the core of your creative work, your stories are like a flock of pigeons carrying the message. Tell stories about you and your creativity and your view of the world.
3. Consider your right person
You right person is the person who gets you and your creative work, and appreciates it. Understanding who this person is will help you answer things like - why are they coming to your website? What are they interested in? You can talk directly to them on your website. Then the right people will know it’s for them, and the wrong people can go somewhere else.
If you get writer’s block around your website texts, remember that websites has this very nifty feature - you can change them anytime. You can launch your website one day and change the texts the next day. I’ve tweaked my texts many times and there’s nothing wrong with that. Start simple and improve as you go.
See it as a work in progress
I don’t regret starting my online creative journey on an ugly website. In fact, I’m kinda proud of it. It means I didn’t wait for perfect but went ahead with what I had. Since then, my website has gone through many redesigns as I’ve slowly figured out who I am as a creative human and what my creative work is really about.
It’s easy to get stuck with a website, either because you don’t know exactly what you want it to be, or because you struggle to get it to look as you want. It can feel like that just-moved-out-from-my-parents kind of home, that has an at best eclectic collection of furniture and 10 wine glasses but no garlic press. And just like our first physical homes, it’s okay that your online home is a work in progress.
Embrace a playful, experimenting mindset and have fun making your website. Ultimately you want it to be a representation of you and your creative work, and you want to feel at home on your website. But sometimes it will take a couple of iterations before you’re fully there. At least, it did for me.
Save this blog post on Pinterest
