You want a website that’s genuinely you. A website that a complete stranger can look at and instantly get your vibe.
So you change the colors. Try different fonts. Swap in better photos. This Sunday afternoon’s adjustments will surely fix it this time.
But when you open your website the next morning… it still doesn’t look like you. (Sigh.)
It’s not broken. It loads. The links work. Someone who didn’t know you might even think it looks pretty good. But you know it’s off.
Perhaps the most frustrating part is that you can’t explain what’s wrong. It just… is.
Time and time again, you open the builder with good intentions:
Change the accent color — it looks worse…
Change it back, try a different font — that doesn’t feel right either…
Swap in a new hero photo — now the colors feel off again…
An hour later you’ve made twelve changes, undone eight of them, and the site looks approximately the same as when you started.
Your tastes aren’t bad, but you are missing a key piece.
Here’s what’s actually happening.
The problem isn’t the choices you’re making. It’s that you’re making design choices without a strong foundation.
Isolated design decisions focus on one element at a time: Does this color look nice? Is this font professional? Does the photo fill the space? Individually, each component is fine, but together they create chaos.
Piecemeal decisions aren’t how you build a coherent brand (and yes, even as a solo coach, you do have a brand). But those disconnected choices are how you end up with a site that’s been carefully adjusted but never actually aligned.
This isn’t a taste problem or a design skill problem (I told you your tastes are fine). It’s a sequence problem.
You see, professional designers do one step first — before colors, before fonts, before anything visual — that most DIY guides skip entirely. Without it, no amount of customization produces a site that looks and feels authentic.
In this post, I’m going to walk you through three things that are missing from your current approach — and why getting them right is the difference between a site that looks like a template someone customized and one that looks like it was built specifically for your business. Let’s get into it.
Strategy 1: Start from brand personality, not design preferences
Your design decisions feel arbitrary and don’t cohere, because you don’t have a reference point for them. You keep making choices without any context.
You’re evaluating every element against the same question: does this look good?
That’s the wrong question.
The right question is: what should my brand feel like, and does this choice serve that?
Without a clear answer to the first half, the second part is unanswerable. So every choice becomes a guess — and a collection of independent guesses doesn’t add up to a coherent brand.
Understanding the difference between you and your brand.
Solopreneurs are in a fun place. In many ways, you and your business are inseparable. This is even more true if you’ve built a following on social media.
The lines between your personal brand and your identity as a person can get fuzzy.
It’s easy to think your personality is your brand. And to some extent it is, but that line of thinking can be a trap.
Your brand isn’t just about you. It’s also about the people your business serves.
Just as your brand would feel inauthentic without you, it won’t resonate if you forget to include your people.
With that cleared up, let’s get into it.
Design preferences aren’t the same as brand personality.
Design preferences are aesthetic — you like earthy tones, you’re drawn to serif fonts, you think minimalism looks sophisticated.
Brand personality is functional — it describes how your brand should make someone feel when they encounter it, and why those feelings are the right ones for your specific audience and offer.
The two overlap, but they aren’t the same thing.
You can have a personal preference for earthy tones that’s completely wrong for a brand that needs to feel energetic and bold.
You can dislike minimalism personally but run a business where clarity and simplicity are the most important things to communicate.
Design preferences are about you. Brand personality is about what your brand needs to do for your visitor.
Designing from preferences without first establishing personality is why the site ends up looking like your tastes — but not feeling like your business.
Why most coaches skip the foundation — and what happens when they do.
Brand personality work isn’t sexy. It doesn’t produce anything you can see or click on. It’s hard to know when you’ve done it right. This might be your first time learning about it.
It’s natural for you to want to skip it and go straight to visual decisions, because those feel more concrete and more productive. But that would be a mistake.
When you jump straight into design, you end up with a site that looks designed but doesn’t resonate. You change the colors, fonts, and photos, but each element answers a different question. It feels off because it lacks a foundation. The individual choices changed, but they’re still not connected to anything.
This is also part of why picking a template to start with can be so hard. The designer picked elements that work well together, but because they didn’t make those choices with you in mind, there’s a disconnect.
How brand personality actually gets established.
Graphic design, and by extension web design, is not about making the most attractive visual — that’s art. Design is about communication. Each design decision should support the message.
To that end, the best design questions to start with have nothing to do with aesthetics. For example:
- What do clients say about working with you — not the results, but the experience?
- What tone do you naturally use when you’re at your best?
- What do you want someone to feel when they land on your site before they’ve read a single word?
- What’s the gap between how you actually show up and how your current site represents you?
That’s a completely different starting point from what colors you like or whether you prefer serif or sans serif fonts.
One practical tip: pick three to five adjectives that describe how your brand should feel. Not aspirational adjectives like “successful” — descriptive ones. How you actually show up at your best, translated into a filter. Evaluate every design choice against those adjectives.
For example, let’s say “warm” is one of your adjectives.
- Should you use the sophisticated, serious serif font or the rounded, friendly sans-serif one?
- Should you use your favorite shade of dusty blue or a cozy burnt orange?
- Should you use the photo of you smiling at the camera or you sternly looking off to the side?
The answers are obvious, right? The serif font, blue palette, and serious photography could be an attractive combination for a brand that commands authority, but they’re wrong for one that needs to convey warmth.
How this works inside the Untemplate Site:
The Untemplate Playbook isn’t just a strategy document for page structure and conversion goals — it’s also the foundation for every visual decision in your project. Before design work begins, in your strategy session we surface what your brand actually needs to communicate and who it’s communicating to. That work produces a clear brief that we can measure every subsequent design choice against.
If all you have right now is a Pinterest board and vibes, the Playbook process replaces that with something more useful. You get a clear articulation of what your brand needs to feel like and why, grounded in who you are rather than what you find aesthetically appealing in other people’s work. Design decisions stop being guesses and start answering a specific question.
Livi North of Unfuck Your Coparenting kept her original colors and fonts — neon yellow, hot pink, teal, bold typography. Those elements were never the problem. What changed in her rebuild was how they were applied. The same elements that felt chaotic or out of place on the old site feel intentional on the new one — because they now answer the same question instead of just filling in a template’s placeholders. The focus shifted from random choices to her voice, her methodology, her audience’s emotional state, and what the brand needed to communicate to that specific person.
Strategy 2: Every visual element needs to be in service of something
Even with a foundation in place, a second layer is where most DIY sites fall apart. Most people still evaluate design elements in isolation. This color looks good. This font feels professional. This image fits this section. Each individual choice passes its own test — but fails the collective test, because none of them are talking to each other.
A coherent visual brand isn’t a collection of good individual choices. It’s a collection of choices that are all supporting the same goal.
Why visual elements fail when evaluated in isolation.
Color, typography, and imagery each carry emotional weight — but that weight is only coherent when all three are pulling in the same direction.
Picture a warm, earthy color palette paired with a cold geometric typeface and editorial lifestyle photography. The combination creates a visual contradiction the visitor feels but can’t name. Nothing is wrong with any individual element. Everything is wrong with how they relate to each other.
Sometimes tension between elements can work, but only if the designer knows what they are doing and has a good reason for it. In most cases, that kind of mismatch looks amateurish or downright wrong.
For example, imagine a wellness coach with a soft, muted palette and flowing serif typography — and then stock photos of women in power suits in corporate settings. Each element might be fine on its own. Together they’re arguing. A non-designer may not be able to name it, but they feel the contradiction. That unease may then cause them to question the coach’s abilities.
Now that you understand what can go wrong when the elements are mismatched, let’s explore what you need to consider for each one.
Color isn’t decoration — it’s your fastest signal.
Color tells people how to feel before they’ve read a word. Color psychology is its own discipline for a reason. I won’t dive into it now, but here are some basic concepts:
Warm tones communicate approachability and intimacy.
Cool tones communicate authority and precision.
Saturated colors communicate energy and confidence.
Muted tones communicate calm and sophistication.
None of these are inherently right or wrong — they’re only right or wrong for a specific brand communicating to a specific person.
The mistake most coaches make is choosing colors based on personal preference or trend rather than on what those colors communicate to the person they’re trying to reach.
Typography carries tone, not just text.
Fonts do two jobs simultaneously: they carry both information and tone. The information job is obvious — the words have to be readable. The tone job is less obvious but equally important.
A high-contrast serif with elegant thin strokes communicates something completely different from a friendly rounded sans-serif, even if both are perfectly readable.
The question isn’t whether a font looks professional — almost any font can look professional in the right context. (I said almost any, Comic Sans will never be professional — looking at you King County, WA.)
The question is whether the tone the font carries matches the tone the brand needs to set.
A coach whose whole approach is direct and no-nonsense probably shouldn’t be using a delicate editorial serif. A coach whose work is warm and relationship-focused probably shouldn’t use a cold, geometric sans-serif.
The font communicates what the brand is. That message should be intentional.
Imagery does emotional work — or it’s undermining everything else.
Photography is the most emotionally powerful element on most websites, and the one most people treat as the most interchangeable.
The result is usually a site where the copy is pointing one direction and the imagery is pointing another or all over the place. Your visitor’s subconscious registers the contradiction even if they can’t articulate it.
Imagery needs to do specific work:
- it sets the emotional tone of the page before anyone reads a word,
- it signals what kind of person this brand is for, and
- it either reinforces or undermines everything the copy is trying to say.
When imagery is treated as filler, it usually undermines the message.
Tangent: why I use cats in my brand.
I should probably take this as an opportunity to explain the cats. You may have noticed my website has a cat photo or two. This is intentional.
First, I’m betting that you’ve never seen another brand leaning into the dark academia cat aesthetic before. It’s a weird choice. I fully recognize it’s weird. But that weirdness makes it memorable and very authentic to who I am.
Second, my fellow neurodivergent weirdos and cat enthusiasts will get a kick out of it. They might even find inspiration to do something similar with their own brand. These are exactly the type of fun-loving, unserious people I love to work with.
Third, the cat photos aren’t random. They either carry an emotion or vibe directly related to that section, or they are reinforcing my brand aesthetic. These cats have a job: make you feel something.
If that feeling is cringe, that’s fine; I’m not the web strategist for you. I wish you well on your more conventional marketing efforts.
If that feeling is delight, consider me an example of how to make authentic design choices that resonate.
Okay, back to what you’re here for.
A simple coherence test.
Look at any page on your site and ask: if you removed all the words, would the visual elements still communicate something coherent about the brand?
If the colors, fonts, and imagery are all answering the same question, the answer is yes.
If they’re each doing their own thing, the page may feel aesthetically assembled but emotionally empty. That emptiness is what you’ve been feeling without being able to name it.
How this works inside the Untemplate Site:
As I mentioned earlier, the design phase doesn’t start with aesthetic decisions — it starts with the Untemplate Playbook. The Playbook defines what your brand needs to communicate, who it’s communicating to, and what your visitor should feel at each stage of the site. We then evaluate every visual design element against that brief, not aesthetic preferences or trends.
We choose colors based on what they communicate to your specific audience — not what looks good on a mood board.
We choose typography based on the tone your brand needs to set — not what looks professional in the abstract.
We define your imagery direction based on what emotional work each image needs to do on each page — not what fills the space attractively.
And if anything you already have aligns with the Playbook, we keep it, just like Livi did.
The result is a site where every visual element earns its place. Not because each individual choice is objectively good, but because all the choices are pointing in the same direction. That’s what makes a site feel intentional rather than assembled.
Strategy 3: The structure has to fit the business — not the other way around
Even with a clear brand personality and cohesive visual elements, there’s a third layer where templated sites fail — and it’s the most structural one.
A template’s visual layout was designed around assumptions about what a generic business needs to communicate and in what order. Those assumptions were never about your business specifically. So when you drop your content into the template, something always feels slightly generic. You adjust and compensate, but you’re still working within a container that was built for someone else.
Even paid templates designed specifically for coaches fall into this trap. They’re better than the catch-all templates you can find for free, but it’s still designed for a generic coach. With a template, your unique value and message always come second to the visual structure.
What a template’s visual structure is actually encoding.
When a template designer builds a layout, they’re making decisions about visual hierarchy — what’s biggest, what comes first, what gets the most visual weight, what gets pushed to the bottom.
Those decisions encode assumptions.
The hero section should be a full-width image with a headline overlay.
The services section should be three equal columns.
The about section should be a two-column split with a photo on the left.
None of those are neutral choices. Each one makes a claim about what matters most and what the visitor should notice first.
When those claims don’t match the reality of your business, the site feels off in a way you can’t quite identify — because the visual structure is arguing with what your content needs to say.
Why compensating within the template never fully works.
You can change the content inside a template’s sections, but you can’t easily change the assumptions the sections make.
For example, if the template gives equal visual weight to three services and you have one signature offer that’s clearly more important than everything else, you can try to make that offer look more prominent. But you’re fighting the template’s inherent structure to do it. At best, the visual hierarchy keeps pulling back toward the template’s original logic: three balanced offers. At worst, you unintentionally broke the section’s balance and violated basic design principles.
This is why careful customization still feels slightly off if you’re not a designer. You’re overriding specific choices without knowing how to override the underlying structure those choices were built to serve.
Visual hierarchy — why it matters and what goes wrong.
Visual hierarchy is the design principle that tells a visitor what to look at first, second, and third on any given page.
On a well-designed page, the hierarchy guides the visitor through the content in the order that makes the most strategic sense for that specific page’s conversion goal.
On a templated page, the hierarchy guides the visitor through whatever order the template designer thought made sense for a generic business.
The two are rarely the same.
A life coach whose business runs entirely on trust and personal connection before any transaction needs a completely different visual hierarchy than a business coach whose audience arrives already research-ready.
A template can’t know which one you are. It can’t know your business, your market, or your goals. That’s why you can’t fully reconfigure it. You almost have to start from scratch to make the right message fit, and that defeats the point of using a template.
How structure and visual design reinforce each other.
Structure isn’t just about which sections exist and in what order — it’s about how the visual design reinforces the importance of each section.
A section that’s visually prominent, with large typography, generous white space, and a strong image, communicates that this is what the visitor should pay attention to.
A section that’s visually compressed with smaller type and less space is communicating that this is supporting information.
When the visual design is built around the business’s actual hierarchy of importance, every section’s visual weight matches its strategic weight. That alignment is what makes a site feel considered rather than assembled — and it’s not achievable through customization. It requires starting with what the site needs to say and do, then building the structure to serve that, rather than starting with the structure and fitting everything else into it.
How this works inside the Untemplate Site:
The Untemplate Playbook defines what each page needs to accomplish for a specific visitor at a specific stage of awareness. The page’s conversion goal justifies its layout. All the content is there because it needs to be, not because a template had a section there.
When we get to the build, I can work within your current platform — whether that’s Squarespace, WordPress (I know this best), Showit, or something else — but I’m not working within your current template’s assumptions. I rebuild the visual structure around your business’s actual needs. When the template’s default hierarchy doesn’t serve the conversion goal, I ditch the template and design a new section that works. The platform stays. The inherited structure doesn’t.
The result is a site where the visual and strategic structure align. The design guides your visitors through each page in the order that makes the most sense for moving them toward the next step — because the design was built to do exactly that, not adapted from something built to do something else.
“This sounds like I need a full rebrand. I don’t want to start over.”
You probably don’t need to.
Livi North kept everything — her colors, her fonts, her brand name. None of it changed. What changed was her message and how she used those elements to support it.
A significant part of what made her old site feel chaotic wasn’t the palette or the typography — it was the execution.
Inconsistent spacing. Poor grouping of related content. Weak visual hierarchy that gave equal weight to everything, which meant nothing stood out. These are design fundamentals that have nothing to do with brand identity. They’re also extremely easy mistakes to make when you start fiddling with a template. Fixing them made an enormous difference.
The same is probably true for you. Some of what feels off is a foundation problem — design choices that aren’t connected to anything. Some of it is an execution problem — basic design principles that weren’t applied consistently. And some of what you have is probably working fine and doesn’t need to change.
The goal isn’t to throw everything away. It’s to figure out which is which — and fix the right things in the right order.
Your site doesn’t look like you because it was built for someone else.
Your template was built for an imaginary average business. No amount of customization can make it fit yours completely.
When you start from brand personality rather than aesthetic preferences, every visual choice has a reference point.
When every visual element serves a purpose, the site stops feeling assembled and starts feeling intentional.
When the structure fits the business rather than the other way around, the visual hierarchy finally matches the strategic hierarchy — and the visitor’s experience of the site finally matches the experience of working with you.
That’s when the gap closes. Between who you are and what your site says about you. Between the version of your website that exists in your head and the one that actually lives online.
You’ve been trying to close that gap through customization. It hasn’t worked because customization can only change what’s on the surface. The gap lives underneath. You have to go deeper to fix it.
Ready to fix the right things?
The Untemplate Site is made to bridge the gap between “I love coaching” and “I effing hate marketing.” It focuses on fixing your messaging and voice, first and foremost, but all that is for naught if the design falls flat.
You don’t need a better template. You need to escape the template trap that keeps you looking and sounding like a generic, average coach. That’s exactly what the Untemplate Site is made to do.
If you want to make your vision real and impossible to ignore, you’ve come to the right place.
