Katie Rich

Five years of publishing had left Katie with five websites on one domain: a homepage, a shop, two blogs and a podcast that each spoke a different language. None of them was wrong. Together they were noise — a visitor landed, met a fragment, and left without ever meeting the person.

The brief was not a redesign. It was a decision: one voice, one funnel, and a publishing system Katie could run without a developer. Everything else — templates, taxonomy, tone — would follow from that decision, and the site would be judged on whether it made publishing feel effortless.

A week of interviews and a content audit collapsed the noise into a single positioning — a personal brand that publishes. From there, everything came from one editorial template: a cover, a kicker, a pull quote, and a clear next step. Essays, podcast episodes and products all sit inside the same taxonomy, so any entry point leads deeper into the same story. A reader who arrives for an essay can leave subscribed; a visitor who arrives for the shop meets the writing first.

The build is a custom WordPress theme with structured fields. Katie writes, adds a cover, hits publish: design stays intact by construction, and the site cannot drift no matter how often it changes.

The outcome was structural, not cosmetic. With one story to land on, bounce fell 42%. With a reason to keep reading, pages per visit doubled. And with a publishing flow that doesn't need a designer in the loop, the site finally grows at the speed Katie works — which is how inbound enquiries reached 3.4× without a single ad.

The lesson generalises: a personal brand is not a homepage. It is a system for turning attention into a relationship, and it only compounds when publishing is effortless.