2ND EDITION | ISSUE #170

The part of launching a new website that I don’t think we talk about enough is that it challenges you to embody a new version of your brand and your identity as the founder of that brand.

This week has been a bit of butterflies in my stomach, and a whole lot of trusting myself after publishing the launch content on Monday.

​(Don’t forget to take the Scenic route & enter to win your choice of a FREE icon for your brand or a Studio Session)​

This new edge is something I’ve seen shake many entrepreneur when it comes time to publish their website.

You’ve been so inside this project for so long, and now that it’s over, you have to figure out what’s next & how to make the most of that website.

It’s sooooo easy to use your website as an excuse - but what happens when you can’t do that anymore?

It’s new territory.

As a designer and someone who manages brands & websites that I’ve designed inside my Brand Bestie Retainer, I get to see how other brands’ websites perform.

I just so happened to be doing a deep dive on all of the data behind my Brand Bestie client Painted Horse Wineries website in the last month, and seeing that data created something tangible, that I could grab on to - a reason to get my website working for my brand again, beyond just *i’m a website designer so I should have a website*.

Seeing those numbers and evidence was the motivation I needed in the final weeks leading up to my own website’s launch.

Your website is the foundation of your digital presence - it is the strong foundation that you can build on.

What would happen if your SEO, your content strategy, and your website worked together?

That’s exactly what we are digging into in this week's newsletter - a case study all about Painted Horses' website one year later.

The challenge - and what made Painted Horse an ideal client for The Signature Site process - is that they do a lot of different things.

• They are a multifaceted, multi-passionate founder-facing brand.
• They host private events and have 8 different spaces you can use,
• They have themed tastings ranging from wine & artisanal cheese pairings to wine and potato chips - or even wine tasting with a baby cow - not to mention floral workshops, mahjong nights, a book club, a wine club - beekeeping, farm tours, horse camps
• Phew - did I mention they have a vineyard and on-site winery?

That is a lot to communicate, so the website needed to filter users based on their search and convert them in different ways.

That took not just their website - and me, but also moving their email marketing over to FloDesk - as well as the help of a developer that I subcontracted, and an event CRM company that they brought on in the background.

When it comes to content, Painted Horse has:

• An email marketing strategy & weekly newsletter.
• A Social Media team that helps them create content.
• They're publishing a blog post every month.
• They're hosting events constantly.

The website isn't working in a vacuum — it's the central hub that everything else feeds into.

You can have both substance and style when it comes to your website (in fact, you need both)

When I took over site management, the first thing I did was pull all baseline data from the old site—SEO rankings, traffic patterns, sales reports, the works. In order to make the most of their website, I wanted to know what was already working & where we could grow.

Their old site wasn’t optimized for SEO, and missing a lot of important pages .

84% of all organic traffic was landing on the homepage and stopping there. Meaning - that people who already knew who they were could find them online - but people who didn’t know who they were couldn’t.

The biggest gap - and the main reason that Pamela wanted to update the website was there was no way for someone to inquire or learn about a private event online. No landing page. No lead form. No structured intake. Every event inquiry required back and forth emails - and at the end of the day another reason Pamela needed a new site was so that it could take more off her plate (a founder who still prioritizes travel and has left her onsite winery to travel to a handful of countries and all over the US since in the year and a halfs time we have been working together) Her team, and her website make that possible.

So the strategy wasn't just to make the website look better from an aesthetic standpoint." It was:

1. Build an SEO optimized website that shows up in the right kind of web searches.
2. Create a private event lead capture system and feature Private Events on the website
3. Make event pages individually discoverable so people searching "wine tasting atlanta" or "winery near me" actually find them

And to make that site reflect more of the in-person experience.

Building a brand beyond fonts and colors - how to immerse people in your world

Painted Horse had an existing Brand Identity, including a logo that was staying, and packaging design for their wine labels. So my job was not to create a new brand - it was to build on that - and edit it. My goal was to bring more of the in-person experience to the online experience.

I pulled in cues from the label design, paired them with brand photography, and layered in custom illustrations I created to highlight the animals, the land, and the warm, welcoming feel of the all the different event spaces.

I also expanded the core color palette and built a small sub-palette for the farm side of the business, so the site could flex between “event venue” and “working farm” without feeling like two totally different brands.

We built the visual identity around their actual story — Pamela as Georgia's first woman to found a farm winery, their farm-to-glass philosophy.

The biggest structural shift was moving from a homepage-dependent design to one where every key page could stand on its own as a landing page.

This meant building out content that the old site was missing entirely — a dedicated visit page with clear tasting tier descriptions, a blog ("Pour Decisions") for ongoing SEO, and a private event page with an integrated lead form that walks the visitor from "I'm curious" to "here's my event date and guest count" without Pamela having to be involved whatsoever.

The numbers behind how your website pays off over time

In the last year since launching Painted Horse Winerys website:

• The website became the #1 source of event inquiries. Over 60% of all private event leads now come through the site's lead form.
• Online ticket sales more than doubled. The old site was doing ticket sales, but the new site's improved structure and searchability drove a 121% increase in online ticket revenue and five figures in organic sales from google.
• Google Search Console data shows the brand appeared in search results over half a million times in its first year. The new site ranks in the top 3 for local target keywords & the monthly blog posts and ongoing content are part of what's fueling that.
• Over 436,000 non-branded impressions. That's 436,000 times someone searched for things like "winery near me" or "wine tasting atlanta" — had no idea Painted Horse existed — and saw them in results. That was not happening AT ALL before.
• The website generated a five-figure return on a five-figure investment — multiple times over. The initial website investment paid for itself before summer.

And this is the part I really want to land: none of this happens with just a website. And none of this happens with just a newsletter, or just social media, or just events. It happens when all of those things feed into a website that's built to capture and convert the attention they create. Painted Horse was already doing the hard part — showing up consistently. The website just finally gave all that effort somewhere to go.

• Your website isn't a standalone thing. It's the hub that every other marketing effort feeds into. Your newsletter, your social posts, your networking — all of it is generating attention. The question is: when people land on your site, does it lead them to where they need to go? And is there a way to convert them when they get there (and here’s the kicker) without you having to do a thing?
• If someone lands on your services page directly from Google — not from your homepage — does that page make sense on its own? Or does it assume the visitor already knows who you are? Every key page should be able to stand alone as a landing page. That means clear context, clear value, and a clear next step — without requiring the visitor to click "home" first.