“I love coaching. I effing hate marketing.”
The Untemplate Site bridges that gap.
Your website is how you can reach more people, help more people, and create the impact your business deserves — without sacrificing your integrity.
“Most coaches weren’t told this is part of the job.”
One night while on Reddit, I got sucked into a discussion on r/Coaching. It was about how people fall in love with coaching and helping people, only to find themselves doing the one thing they hate: hustle marketing.
As an introverted public servant who loves cats and despises social media, I immediately related to the coaches in that post.
Marketing yourself sucks.
Asking people for money sucks.
Networking and grinding on social media sucks.
It’s a struggle for solo business owners in all industries. But the more I thought about it, I realized this runs so much deeper for coaches.
As a coach, you aren’t just facing the typical “marketing your business is hard” bullshit — you’re facing a full-on identity crisis.
If you’re like the coaches I know and see, you aren’t driven by money. I’ve never met anyone who started coaching to become a millionaire.
They do it because they want to make a positive impact in the world.
They do it for the lightbulb moments that come from asking the right questions.
They do it to see people ignited by a conversation and using that energy to make progress towards a goal.
One coach described the experience as feeling almost like magic.
If you can relate, marketing probably feels like betrayal. And you’re right to feel that way.
Marketing betrays your motivations. Your values. Your heart. The very magic of what you do and why you do it.
But you can’t avoid it. If you don’t spend 98% of your time marketing and selling, you don’t get clients. And then you aren’t helping anyone.
It’s a catch-22 that you didn’t sign up for.
But it doesn’t stop there.
Coaching is a really hard sell, even if you aren’t repulsed by sales. It’s intangible. Difficult to guarantee results. People don’t understand what it is. And to top it all off, there are more coaches around post-COVID than there are people who need (and can afford) coaching.
What’s a gal supposed to do?
You just want to be a coach and make decent money.
If your dream looks like working as a coach who isn’t perpetually broke, you need new clients. And the BEST way to get new clients? It’s getting them to pursue you.
Easier said than done. But if this were easy, it wouldn’t be the dream now, would it?
Okay, so one way or another you need new clients, but ideally, they will come to you without you having to hard-sell them. How the hell are you going to do that?
The answer is marketing.
Hear me out. I know marketing feels bad. One coach on Reddit described it perfectly:
“I’d rather go to the dentist, gynecologist and have a mammogram on the same day instead of do “marketing” stuff. Yuck.”
(I told you I found some interesting discussions on there.)
But maybe, just maybe, the reason marketing feels so bad is that the way you’ve been doing it has you pretending to be someone you’re not.
It could be forcing yourself to make videos because “that’s the best way to get leads” even though you hate video. So. Damn. Much.
It could be that you think you have to present a certain image on socials, but that’s not what you’re like in real life.
Or it could be that, like most people, you aren’t good at sales, but admitting it feels like failure, so you just carry on and hope it gets better with time.
You see, marketing itself isn’t inherently bad. But the wrong marketing approach for your personality and business is.
The key is finding the right approach for you.
Treat people like people, not like targets, prospects, or leads
Traditional marketing, with its funnel optimizations and lead-gen strategies, comes across as sterile and uncaring. And don’t get me started on the “marketing bro” culture.
Good marketing is about understanding people. What are their struggles? What are their dreams? What holds them back?
These ideas are deeply relevant to coaching. They are not in conflict with your work.
If you know someone has a headache, and you have ibuprofen, offering it isn’t unethical. Asking for a fair trade, like I’ll give you an ibuprofen if you give me a breath mint, isn’t unethical either.
The same goes for coaching, even when money gets involved.
Listen to people. Have empathy. Do good work. In other words, be a coach. That’s your marketing message.
You need a platform that feels like you, shares your message, and supports your business.
Having clarity about what you do isn’t enough. You need a place to ground it.
Going viral is great, but depending on the algorithm isn’t sustainable. They are notoriously fickle.
You need to get people into channels you own. Your website is the anchor that grounds it all.
When people check out your profile on Insta, your website gives them a permanent place to find you again.
When you write to your email list, your website gives them a place to go deeper to learn more about what you do.
When you make pins for Pinterest, your website gives them an entry point into your world.
Just about every path someone can take to work with you will go through your website at least once. Often multiple times.
Very few people will be ready to hire you after one encounter. Most people take anywhere from 7 to over 50 touchpoints before they’re ready to buy.
Your website makes it easier to get those repeated engagements. You can try to get by without one, but it will be an uphill battle.
You’ll need to answer the same questions again and again and again.
You’ll need to explain what you do and how it works on every call.
You’ll need to justify your prices and convince them you are, in fact, a professional.
And if you already have a website and find yourself still doing all those things, you’ve likely fallen into the “template trap.”
A pre-made template and ChatGPT will never truly express you or your vision.
Templates are everywhere. We’ve all seen ads for Squarespace and Wix claiming you can build a stunning, professional website in a couple of hours.
The ads aren’t wrong. Making a website isn’t just easy; it’s ridiculously easy. Pretty much anyone can do it, especially with AI.
Pick a platform. Find a template. Use ChatGPT to write the copy. Boom, you’ve got a website in one afternoon.
Except… It’s a trap.
You see, when you take all those shortcuts, you end up with a generic, cookie-cutter website that is indistinguishable from every other coach in your field.
When a potential client visits your site, they need to see, feel, and understand why you are the best choice.
That doesn’t happen when you’ve fallen into the template trap.
Those time- and cost-saving shortcuts flatten and distort you.
The truth is, websites are deceptively hard to do well. You need to understand both design and copywriting.
Design is more than aesthetics; it speaks without words.
Professional designers know that design communicates a message. The literal words are only part of it.
When a template designer chooses colors, fonts, and image styles, they do it with an imaginary or generic business in mind. They are never picturing you.
This is a big part of why choosing a template is so hard. You keep scrolling, waiting for the perfect template to appear, but it never does. Eventually you settle on one and call it good enough.
But that “good enough” might actually do more harm than good.
If you aren’t making intentional design choices, the underlying design message may conflict with your brand. Not because the design is bad, but because the design says one thing, while you say something else entirely.
Take Livi, a parallel parenting coach with fiery energy and a bold brand who says “fuck” a lot. Now imagine her website uses elegant serifs, neutral earth tones, and desaturated images. That website could be gorgeous, but it would be completely wrong for her brand.
Her actual brand uses neon colors, chunky text, and harsh drop shadows. It’s edgy and not a look everyone could pull off, but it’s perfect for Unfuck Your Coparenting.
Because Livi’s brand is so bold, it’s easy to spot the mismatch between design aesthetics and brand message. But not everyone is comfortable going that extreme.
Even if the mismatch isn’t extreme, it’s still present. And most people can’t name or place what’s wrong. They just know that something feels off.
That’s the design half of the template trap. Then there’s the copy half.
AI writing sounds average because that’s exactly what it is: average.
Many people today use AI tools like ChatGPT or Claude to write their web content.
The output will sound like sales copy. It will sound professional. You might even prompt it well enough that it sounds like you (mostly).
But the results are always a bit… soulless. It lacks heart. It’s ever so slightly not human.
That’s because it’s not human. All it is is statistics and averages. That’s how the models work.
When you ask an AI tool to write for you, it will output the statistically most probable version of you. And the most likely version of you is the average of everyone else in your niche.
But you’re not the average of all other coaches. You are a unique person with an approach that no one else can fully replicate because they aren’t you.
That’s where AI content misses the mark. It erases your humanity and replaces it with mathematical probability.
You aren’t saving time. You’re trading clarity and genuine connection for a quick win on your to-do list.
Fortunately, when you escape the template trap, your heart, spirit, and the love you put into your work can shine through your website.
Say goodbye to the polished, generic website that doesn’t feel like you.
To escape the template trap, a real human has to do the work. That human doesn’t have to be you. In fact, you’ll get better results if you step back and get outside help.
Positioning and writing for your own brand is hard. It’s damn near impossible to do it well.
The challenge is that you are too close to your own work to see it clearly. You can’t experience what it’s like to encounter you for the first time. You can’t see your business from the outside in.
That missing perspective is how others see you. And it’s the perspective you need to understand most to truly connect with your people. An outside expert doesn’t have that problem; they’re already on the outside.
But an outsider can’t know you as well as you know yourself. How can they understand you and your vision if you don’t even have the words to describe it yourself?
My answer: by studying the religious beliefs of a 16th-century Italian peasant who was burned at the stake for heresy.
Yes, I am being serious.
Studying history taught me how to translate your vision into something real.
My educational background isn’t in graphic design, computer science, or business. It’s in history.
History isn’t about memorizing names and dates. It’s about narratives.
Historians are trained to analyze sources, pull out the threads that connect them, and then make an argument. That argument is often a story. That story often gives a voice to someone who can no longer speak for themself — like Menocchio, the Italian heretic.
(He’s the subject of a popular microhistory. Microhistories focus on everyday individuals and give history a human face, rather than on prominent individuals or larger societal movements.)
My history degrees taught me how to look at a collection of random-ass documents, extract someone’s voice, and turn it into a persuasive narrative.
That skill set is exactly what an outsider needs to understand you and your vision.
Voice Mining — how someone else can nail your voice and make your vision real.
So many people worry that if they hire someone to write their website, it won’t actually sound like them.
It’s a valid concern. And it’s something that I’m very conscious about. That’s what Voice Mining is for.
What is Voice Mining, you ask?
It’s my personal approach to copywriting using a historian’s methods. I don’t know anyone else writing websites this way.
Here’s how it works.
I look for ideas, words, and quotes from you and your audience and then reassemble them into compelling copy. It has two parts.
You are the first half. When a project begins, I ask you to answer my questionnaire and upload your existing content to a private Google Drive. Those sources tell me how you think and speak.
Your audience is the second half. I also do independent market research on your ideal clients. Those findings tell me how they think and speak.
Then, when it comes time to write, I pull from both sources. My job is not to write original words — it’s to heavily plagiarize you with the right framing.
I’m not changing your words or putting new ones in your mouth. I’m rearranging things you already say into the right order to resonate with your audience.
We’re probably strangers right now, but without knowing a thing about you, I am confident that you have good ideas. The problem is rarely the ideas — it’s the order, the framing, and knowing which parts to repeat.
That’s why you need a historian. We’re great at recognizing patterns and turning them into a convincing story.
Content always comes first, but neglecting your website’s other layers would be a mistake.
Every website has four layers. Most people recognize content, design, and tech, but they overlook strategy as the overarching layer that ties it all together.
While I believe you should always start with content, it can’t carry a website all on its own.
Design supports the content by making your message clear and easy to understand. It’s also the first thing people notice.
Fair or not, people make snap judgments about you based on your website. An amateurish or outdated design makes you look less professional, which makes you seem less legitimate.
Tech is how your website is built and works.
If it takes too long to load, people will leave.
If links are broken or your website doesn’t work, people will leave.
If it doesn’t resize to a phone screen, people will leave.
As you can see, bad design and bad tech have costs. If one area of your site is bad, it can be enough to push people away, even if the other parts are amazing.
Hiring a copywriter only fixes your copy. The design and tech could still be bad.
Hiring a designer only fixes the appearance. The content and tech could still be bad.
Hiring a developer only fixes the tech. The content and design could still be bad.
You need to hire three experts to fix each layer. But three different freelancers working independently won’t have the strategic vision to bring it all together with the fourth layer.
What you really need is a web strategist — someone who understands how content, design, and tech work together and what each layer needs to do to be successful.
Work with the lead strategist behind a 47,503-page website that gets 79 million annual visitors.
Earlier, I explained my background as a historian. That’s an admittedly weird qualification for someone who claims to be a web expert.
The truth is, I’ve never actually worked as a historian. After completing my master’s degree in 2018, I joined the U.S. Department of State’s web team as an editor for the agency’s main website, http://www.state.gov. After a few role changes, I’m now the creative lead, where I’m focused on major design and user experience improvements.
Everything I know about websites I’ve learned in the trenches of a massive government website.
Granted, my hands-on experience is at a scale your coaching website will never match. You wouldn’t be wrong to think that State.gov and your website exist in two completely different realities; there is no overlap.
To that I say: yeah, they’re very different, but after wrangling the monstrosity that is State.gov, a 5-page website is a piece of cake. Hell, a 50-page website is too.
So, why is a government web strategist helping coaches who hate marketing get more clients with a true-to-yourself website?
Why the Untemplate Site actually exists.
There are a number of reasons why I’m building a business and why this offer in particular.
Like most people, I value financial security. Federal employment isn’t what it was a decade ago — extra income and a possible fallback career feel more like basic survival than ambition.
That said, as a public servant, I’m more interested in helping people than making a huge profit. I have skills that can help coaches help more people. Keeping them to myself would be a waste.
As for why I want to work with coaches specifically, it comes down to alignment. The work I most enjoy is intensive and strategic; I’d rather create 3 to 4 high-quality websites than churn out 30 to 40 templated sites with AI slop. The coaching market is so competitive — coaches really benefit from the type of website I prefer to make.
This also leads into why I have a waitlist for the Untemplate Site, rather than letting anyone book a discovery call.
I only want to work with the right people. I’m not desperate for income; my job pays my bills. So if I don’t believe the fit is right, I don’t want your money. This could be because I don’t have the right skills for your needs. It could also be because I don’t believe in what someone does. If I think an offer is a scam or morally questionable, I don’t want any part in promoting it.
I also want to protect my time and my clients’ projects. I have a full-time job, which means I only have nights and weekends to work on client projects. That, combined with how deep I go with each project, means I can only take on 1–2 clients at a time. When I am working on your project, it has my full attention. I’m not half-assing anyone’s website to churn out an extra site or two.
When we work together, you are my focus, because that’s what your business deserves.
What you get with an Untemplate Site.
I could tell you that the Untemplate Site is a done-for-you website package that includes marketing strategy, copywriting, design, and implementation. But that stuff is boring.
Instead, I’ll focus on what you actually want: to stop wasting time on marketing tasks you hate, so that you can spend more time doing the coaching you love.
That dream is possible when you:
- Have people already sold and excited to work with you because your website read their mind before they ever met you.
- Guide people towards working with you as the obvious choice, without being pushy or using sleazy tactics. Once you understand this, all your content will start working for your business beyond collecting likes.
- Make your vision real and impossible to ignore, then watch that clarity change how you show up in your business.
- Stop feeling like your website is out of control and escape the social media algorithms with a marketing approach that is more calm, less hustle, yet still impactful.
- Share your website with confidence, because it feels like you, communicates what you do, and makes you look like a professional who’s got her shit together.
Remember Livi from Unfuck Your Coparenting? She was an Untemplate Site client. I’ll let her speak for herself.
“Tianna—
I am so sorry it has taken me so long! I really wanted to give this my all because you genuinely changed how I show up in my business.
I’ll be honest—my biggest hesitation going in was whether someone could actually capture my voice. My brand is very specific and my niche….unique, and I didn’t want a polished, generic website that didn’t feel like me.
What you did instead was the exact opposite.
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.
The biggest thing that stood out to me was your attention to detail. Nothing slipped. You caught things I didn’t even realize mattered, and you made decisions that clearly came from experience, not guesswork.
You were also incredibly patient with me—like, next-level patient. I had a lot of questions, a lot of back-and-forth, and you never made me feel rushed or like I was asking too much. At the same time, you kept me on track and moving forward, which is something I really needed.
That balance is rare.
Beyond that, you made the entire process feel manageable. You broke things down, walked me through decisions, and helped me actually see my vision more clearly than I could on my own.
The end result? A website that doesn’t just look good—it feels like me, communicates what I do clearly, and actually supports my business.
I would 100% recommend working with you, especially if you care about having a site that reflects your voice and not just a template version of it. You don’t just build websites—you translate vision into something real.
Seriously—thank you. You did a fucking amazing job.”
Frequently Asked Questions
How much does the Untemplate Site cost?
I’d love to give an upfront price, but the Untemplate Site doesn’t really work as a productized offer. The whole point is that it isn’t a cookie-cutter website. Since your site is custom to your needs, your quote should be too.
That said, I’m not trying to hide the price to bait you into contacting me; that’s bullshit, and I hate when people do that. As a rough baseline, a basic 5-page website starts at $3,497, with extra pages adding $200–500 each.
How long does each project take?
This is not a website-in-a-week offer. Voice Mining is not a fast process, but it’s well worth the effort. The research I do to fully understand you and the people you serve takes time. Every minute matters to produce messaging that sounds like you and resonates.
Research, planning, and writing take up most of the project time. Design and build move quickly once the content and messaging are sorted.
I typically plan for each project to take 2 to 3 months from start to finish. This allows me ample space to be thorough and gives you time to review everything and give feedback without feeling rushed.
If you have a tight deadline, we can discuss an expedited timeline for an additional fee, but we’d still be talking about weeks, not days.
How long will I need to wait on the waitlist?
It depends. I can give a more precise timeline when you reach out. If I’m not currently working on a project, we could get started within a week. Whereas if I recently started a new project, it may be a few weeks before we can kick off yours.
While I prefer to focus on one project at a time, projects naturally have breaks that create space to work on another. The waitlist isn’t to make you wait for no reason; it protects your project and ensures it gets my full attention.
How do you use AI?
I limit my use of AI for client work because you’re hiring me, not ChatGPT. In my personal use, I’ve found AI’s quality to be lacking, and the time savings don’t make up for it.
That said, I still keep Claude open. Here’s how I use it:
- Quickly identify competitors/top voices in your niche and analyze their positioning. This is pure context and background knowledge that can help with your positioning, but otherwise not part of any deliverables.
- Validate that my market research takeaways are complete. After I’ve sorted and categorized my notes, I’ll have it review them to see if there’s a pattern I overlooked.
- Act as voice guardrails. I will teach it your voice by uploading some of your public content, then I ask it to test my drafts against your voice. This can catch places where I start drifting out of your voice and into mine.
- Brainstorming to overcome writer’s block. I mostly do this for headings and page titles. Occasionally it produces something good that I’ll use, but more often it’s just inspiration.
- Tech support and troubleshooting. If something breaks and I don’t know how to fix it on my own, Claude is a great resource for diagnosing and fixing the problem.
I do not use it to generate entire sections or page drafts. And I never upload any of your gated proprietary information.
I’m interested in the Untemplate Site, but I’m not a coach. Can we work together?
Yes! With the caveat that I don’t do e-commerce. The Untemplate Site’s approach also works for consultants or service providers. If your business is high-touch and you’re central to the brand, this could be a great fit.
E-commerce is a different beast and not something I’m comfortable with. If you sell digital products in addition to a core service, that’s fine. A jewelry seller, not so much.
Do you offer support after a website launches?
Yes, Untemplate Site clients can opt into a maintenance plan if desired. We can negotiate what your maintenance plan would look like so that it fits your budget and needs. At a minimum, it would include basic updates (e.g., updating text, swapping photos) and site maintenance (keeping plug-ins updated, fixing broken links, etc.). At a higher price, it could also include regular strategy calls and new page builds.
Alternatively, if you don’t want to commit to a subscription, I’m happy to do occasional work at an hourly rate or for a project fee.
You can get clients without spending hours on icky marketing you hate.
You got into coaching to help people, not to spend all your time doing everything but that.
Your website can change that.
All it needs is your ideas, your voice, your personality. But you don’t have to do it alone.
Use this form to join the waitlist. I’ll be in touch soon.