You have the work. You have the testimonials. You have the social media presence that took years to build.
But your website? It's still falling short.
Maybe you've been on a discovery call, things are going well, and then the prospect asks for your link — and you immediately start typing a disclaimer. "It's a bit outdated, I'm working on it." And then you spend the next ten minutes explaining things your website should have already said.
Or maybe you've been meaning to raise your rates for six months. Your results are there. Your clients back it up. But every time you get close to pulling the trigger, you go to your website and lose your nerve. The site doesn't look like someone who charges what you want to charge. So you wait.
Or maybe you opened your website builder last Sunday to make one small update — swap a photo, tweak a headline — and an hour later you'd fallen into a rabbit hole of broken formatting and half-finished edits. You closed the tab without saving. You told yourself you'd deal with it next weekend.
You won't.
This is why I built the Untemplate Site for coaches who want a website that feels like you, communicates what you do clearly, and actually supports your business. And in this post, I'm going to tell you exactly what it is, who it's for, and why I built it the way I did.
I'm not your typical web designer
Growing up, I thought I'd be a lawyer, but after enjoying my history degree in undergrad, I went on to earn a master's instead. During grad school, I landed an internship at the U.S. Department of State — and never left.
After graduating, I joined full-time as a web editor. Four years later, I became the team lead and product owner of state.gov — a site that has hit over 47,000 pages and 79 million annual visitors. In early 2026, my role evolved again, now I focus full-time on design and strategy as State.gov’s creative lead.
That's not a typical background for a web designer (I never took any art or design classes in college). But it's exactly the background that shaped how I think about websites — and why I do this work so differently.
You see, as a historian, I'm trained to take messy, scattered, contradictory source material and find the coherent narrative inside it. Turns out that's exactly what web strategy requires, especially for coaches.
You don't need someone to hand you a prettier template. You need someone who can take everything you bring to the table — your voice, your clients' language, your market — and build something that makes your vision real. Not just structurally. Not just visually. Narratively.
When I started thinking about offering web design services outside my government work, I assumed I'd build basic websites for small businesses. Simple, low-stakes, high-volume.
But that's not the work I enjoy. And honestly, it's not the work I'm best at.
The work I do best — and enjoy most — is diving deep. Discovering a new niche market, mining a client’s voice, and building a strategic foundation before a single pixel is placed. That kind of work doesn't come cheap. And it's not needed for every business.
But coaches? Coaches are different.
The coaching market is oversaturated. There are more coaches than ever, and most of them sound exactly the same. If you want to stand out as a coach, you need to deeply understand your market and own your unique voice and point of view. That's exactly the kind of work I do best.
The moment it all clicked
The first website I ever tried to build was my own wedding website on Zola.
Spoiler: I failed. Hard.
Zola is supposed to be user-friendly. Pick a template, plug in your info, boom — wedding website. But I hated every template. None of them felt right. The colors were wrong. The fonts were blah. The vibes weren't vibing.
I wanted to tweak them, but Zola wouldn't even let me add a simple block of color behind some text. And because I’d been working on a complex WordPress site for years, I knew how to manipulate code to do it, but Zola wouldn’t let me. I knew what I wanted was reasonable, and exactly how boxed in I was.
Thirty minutes and a lot of swearing later, my partner convinced me to let him build it (before I chucked my laptop out the window). He did a good job, but it wasn't what I envisioned.
That experience stuck with me — not just because I was annoyed (I still hate Zola and vow to never touch the platform again) — but because it taught me something that's become the foundation of everything I do:
Templates are great until you outgrow them. Then they just get in the damn way.
Three problems the Untemplate Site is built to solve
1. The credibility gap between your work and your website.
You've grown. New offers, higher prices, more experience. But your website is frozen at an earlier version of your business. That gap is costing you clients who would be a perfect fit — if only your site told the real story.
2. The inability to articulate yourself clearly in writing.
You know what you do and why it works. But translating that into website copy that sounds like you and actually converts visitors — that's where most coaches hit a wall. They go blank, go generic, or go so deep into explanation that they lose the reader entirely.
3. The fear that the process will be chaotic, expensive, and leave you with something that still isn't right.
You've either tried DIY and hit a wall, hired someone cheaper and been disappointed, or avoided the whole thing because it felt too risky. You need a process that feels safe — not another project that spirals out of control.
Why these problems are getting harder to solve
It's not just you. Three things are making this worse right now.
First, the template trap is getting worse, not better. AI website builders, Squarespace's latest campaigns, and the "launch in a day" culture have made it easier than ever to have a website — and harder than ever to have one that's actually differentiated. The bar for "looks professional" has dropped so low that everyone clears it. Design alone no longer separates anyone. The problem isn't that your site looks bad. It's that you look and sound like everyone else.
Second, coaching is an increasingly crowded and skeptical market. The pandemic-era coaching boom created a lot of noise. And as a result, buyers are more skeptical than they were a few years ago — they've been burned by coaches who looked good online and underdelivered. A generic site doesn't just fail to convert. It actively creates doubt. Your ideal clients are looking for reasons to trust (or not trust) before they ever get on a call with you.
Third, AI is creating a copy crisis hiding in plain sight. More coaches are using simple AI prompts to write their website copy. The result is websites that are grammatically correct, structurally sound, and completely indistinguishable from each other. You either know your copy sounds AI-generated and hate it — or you don't know, and your visitors do.
What makes the Untemplate Site different
Most designers at my price point either handle design only and expect you to supply the copy, or they hand you a generic content questionnaire that, in turn, produces generic copy.
I do neither.
Here's what's actually different about how I work:
Voice Mining — the copy is written for you, not by you. Every word on your website is written by me, in your voice, built from your language, your clients' language, and independent market research into your niche. You don't write a first draft and hand it over for cleanup. You hand me raw material — existing content, social posts, client testimonials, audience language — and I give you a first draft to fine-tune. The end result? You get copy that reads like you wrote it on your best day.
This is possible because of how I'm trained to think. A historian's core skill is taking fragmented, incomplete, contradictory source material and finding the coherent narrative inside it. In other words, we give a voice to people who cannot speak for themselves today.
That's what Voice Mining is — applying the tools used to extract someone’s voice from the random shit they left behind. I'm not asking you to hand me a finished story. I'm pulling it from what you already have. (And honestly, you’re still alive and able to answer direct questions, which makes the entire process a hell of a lot easier.)
The Untemplate Playbook — strategy before a single pixel is placed. Before anything else begins, I build a comprehensive strategic document covering your page archetypes, sitemap, content architecture, and conversion goals for each page. You sign off on it before anything else starts. This isn't a mood board session. It's a documented foundation that every subsequent decision is anchored to.
Phase-by-phase milestone sign-offs. You approve the strategy before design starts. You approve the design before the build goes live. Nothing moves forward without your sign-off. You're never handed a finished website and told to live with it.
Done-for-you end-to-end. Strategy, copy, design, and build — all of it, by one person, in one project, with one coherent vision running through all of it. Nothing gets lost in translation between departments because there are no departments (or worse, multiple freelancers who’ve never worked together).
A recorded site walkthrough custom to your build. At handoff, I record a walkthrough of your specific site — how it works, how to update it, anything quirky about your particular build. Not a generic platform tutorial. Not a 50 page user-manual. A video made specifically for your site.
What becomes possible
When your website finally catches up to your work:
You send the link without a disclaimer. No more "it's a work in progress." No more over-explaining on sales calls. You send it because you're proud of it.
You raise your prices — and mean it. When your site reflects your level, your prices make sense. To them and to you. The website becomes the permission structure you needed to charge what you're worth.
Discovery calls arrive from people who already get it. The right clients find you, read your site, and show up warm. The wrong ones self-select out before they ever hit your inbox.
You get your brain space back. You stop managing a website that doesn't work and start running a business that does.
Livi North of Unfuck Your Coparenting came in with one specific fear — that I wouldn't be able to capture her voice. Her niche is specific (co-parenting with narcissists), her approach is distinct (she focuses on systems over relationships), and she'd seen enough generic coaching websites to know exactly what she didn't want (like not being able to say ‘fuck’).
Halfway through the copy draft, she told me she'd stopped sending people to her old site. She'd seen enough of what was coming to know something better was on the way.
"I was like, I'm gonna wait a couple more weeks till it looks good."
When it was done:
"You took the time to really understand how I think, how I speak, and what I'm trying to build — and then you translated that into something that feels completely aligned. Not just 'good design,' but actually strategic and intentional. You don't just build websites — you translate vision into something real."
Where this is all going
AI is going to put a lot of designers and copywriters out of work. But not all of them.
Strategy will become the major differentiator. AI can output a tremendous volume of basic work — but it can't produce original thinking. It can't make the kind of intuitive connections a human makes when they're deep in someone's story. The designers and strategists who succeed will use technology to speed up the grunt work so they can focus on the parts that need human ingenuity.
That's exactly what the Untemplate Site is built around. Not templates. Not AI copy. Not a questionnaire and a prayer. A human-led, story-first process that produces something no algorithm can replicate — a website that actually sounds like you.
Ready to see what's broken first?
If you're not sure whether you're ready for a full build, the right first step is the Template Trap Audit.
It's a full diagnostic of your site — design, content, tech, and strategy — written in plain English, with a prioritized plan for exactly what to fix and in what order. The audit covers much of the strategic groundwork that goes into the Untemplate Site's first phase. So if you move forward with a build, you're already ahead.
Curious what a full build looks like?
