Jessica Haines Design | Website Designer & Squarespace Expert

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Before & After of a Design Day

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Feeling a bit lost and defeated because you want to revamp your website on Squarespace 7.1 and just can’t seem to find the time to do it alone?

That’s how my client, Marissa Abao, was feeling before our VIP Design Day, and it was causing her to procrastinate and get nowhere.

Now, she can happily say she is satisfied with her new website that showcases her online work as a Canva Creator and has a fun, bold new look.

Marissa was hesitating on hiring someone to help her with her website because she DIY’d her Squarespace 7.0 website and was concerned about the cost when she knew she should be able to revamp it herself to save some money. Instead of creating her Squarespace 7.1 website, she was left feeling overwhelmed, overthinking the process, procrastinating, and wishing she reached out back in 2021.

Here’s what Marissa had to say about working together:

Marissa’s Website Goals:

I’ve known Marissa since she was a Pinterest manager supporting bloggers to grow their website traffic on Pinterest. We connected over our love of blogging, Jason Momoa and cats.

Marissa pivoted to being a Canva Creator 2 years ago, and was ready to refresh her Squarespace 7.0 website by upgrading to Squarespace 7.1, the latest version of Squarespace. I highly recommend doing this if you are making any big changes to a Squarespace 7.0 website, since the current version of Squarespace has the best support, the most design options and gets all the fun new features!

Marissa’s goals with her new website are the showcase her templates, encourage her visitors to sign up to her email list so they get notified of new creations, and collect leads for custom design work through a simple contact form.

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Here’s what we managed to get done during our day together:

  • We dived into colour psychology to choose the perfect brand colours that she loves and will resonate with her ideal clients. The result is a fun, bold colour palette with fun wavy lines we can use as design elements

  • We created her home page with a focus on getting her visitors to check out her Canva creations, get them on her email list so she can share new templates with them, and to encourage people to reach out for custom work through a simple contact form

  • I designed and wrote a simple about page to share Marissa’s business journey so her visitors can connect with her story and easily check out her Canva designs

  • We created a blog where Marissa can show off her new designs and different ways to use them. We created an initial blog post that she can use as a template for future posts, which will save her time when she creates them

Here’s the home page before and after ⇩⇩

Home Page Before

Home Page After

Favourite Creative Features:

1 | The rotating text below the main banner and in her website footer. This is a fun feature in Squarespace 7.1 that Marissa never had access to previously, and it adds a fun touch to go with the bold colours. Plus, it helps highlight what she does and how to follow her on Instagram in a fun way

2 | The wavy section dividers that break the home page into sections, which also work as a way to draw your eye down the page. This can help keep visitors on the page for longer, while also giving visitors a chance to join her email list, enquire for custom templates, and have multiple opportunities to see her templates

3 | The underlined words throughout the text helps to draw attention to the important details on the page while adding a fun visual element. This is another Squarespace 7.1 feature that Marissa now has available to her by upgrading her website

4 | The wiggling mockups for some of Marissa’s designs is a fun way to showcase some of the templates that she has created. There aren’t many Canva Creators who focus on creating flyer templates, which is something that helps set Marissa apart since she has a lot of fantastic flyer designers, and the phone mockups are a great way to show them off

5 | The buttons change colour when you hover over them. This is an unexpected little detail on Marissa’s website that adds some extra depth to the design while showing off some more of Marissa’s fun brand colours

Here’s the about page before and after ⇩⇩

About Page Before

About Page After


Are you ready for a website that gets found in Google, grows your email list, books clients and shows off your authority so you stand out as the expert in your niche and raise your rates? I’d love to help you create some magic with your website!

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