Lesley Miller has been hand lettering for years—teaching students, addressing envelopes for weddings, creating custom pieces for clients across the US, and building a loyal community of letterers through her classes and free resources. But her website had been DIY-ed since the beginning, and over time it had grown into something that no longer reflected the quality and care she brings to every single piece she creates.
When Lesley came to us, she was looking for a site that worked for her and her business, one that put her custom services front and center, guided visitors clearly, and gave her the kind of polished online home her business deserved. We were thrilled to help her get there!
About This Recent Project
Lesley’s site had some really good bones. She had great product photography, a genuinely warm voice, loyal Pinterest traffic driving visitors to her free resources, and an established email list. What it was missing was organization and intention—a website designed around where visitors needed to go, rather than where things had accumulated over the years.
Our goal for this redesign was simple. We hoped to simplify everything, prioritize her custom services, and make sure every page had a clear next step for whoever was reading it.
Brand Design
Lesley came to us without formal branding. She had a logo she had lettered and a lot of heart. Carol developed a full brand kit from starting with her hand lettered logo, and included a refined color palette anchored in coral, royal blue, lime green, and turquoise, typographic pairings, and logo variations she can use consistently across her website, her Etsy store, and her printed materials going forward.
The brand kit became the foundation for everything, from the color values in the Kadence theme to the visual consistency across every page of the new site.
Sitemap and Content Planning
The new sitemap is clean and intentional: Home, Custom Work, Classes, Shop (linking to Etsy), Free Resources, Blog, About, and Contact. Each page was built to serve a specific visitor need, with copy developed in close collaboration between Lesley’s own voice and our content team, led by Mandy.
The Custom Work page brought together everything Lesley offers—envelope addressing, weddings and events, greeting cards and gifting, and certificates—into a single services page with a portfolio gallery and a primary call to action leading directly to the contact form.
The Classes page functions as a landing page for both her in-person classes and her online courses. The courses are now housed as Etsy listings rather than WooCommerce products, since we removed bulky WooCommerce during our work. Her free Be a Better Letterer five-day email class is featured on this page as well, with a signup form connected to her newly migrated email list.
The Free Resources page consolidated what had previously been spread across multiple separate pages. Now all of Lesley’s recommended supplies, as well as her free downloads, live in a single, navigable hub.
Website Design and Development
The original site was running on WordPress with Beaver Builder and Astra. This combination had served its time and was adding significant overhead, making the site harder to manage. WooCommerce was powering a full product shop, even though most of Lesley’s product sales were better suited for Etsy. A members area, conflicting security plugins, and a handful of legacy plugins rounded out a backend that needed a serious cleanup before any design work could begin.
Our team performed a deep database cleanup, removing 75 bulky and unnecessary database tables, and fully replaced the existing page builder setup with a Kadence child theme built to Lesley’s new brand kit. WooCommerce was removed entirely, with redirects in place to preserve existing links. The site went from 21 plugins and 32 pages down to just 16 plugins and 10 pages, running on the latest version of WordPress.
Lesley also had run her Be a Better Letterer email automation through MailChimp for years. With pricing and plan changes affecting her lists, we migrated her full list to MailerLite and recreated her five-day welcome automation, giving her a cleaner, more affordable platform with the same functionality she’d relied on before.
It was a full project—brand, design, development, content, and email migration—and we loved every bit of it. Lesley brought her warmth, her trust, and her patience through every phase, and watching her site come together into something she’s genuinely proud to show off made all the work worth it.
Visit Lesley at letteringwithlesley.com to see the full site—and if you’ve ever wanted to learn hand lettering, her free Be a Better Letterer mini-class is a wonderful place to start.
What Lesley had to say…
“The whole site looks amazing and I am so thankful and appreciative of all the work you and your team put in. I love it so much and I feel like it is something I am excited to show off! Thank you again for all of the hard work you put in and I could not be more thrilled!“
Services Included in this Project
- Brand Identity Design Package (Logo, Brand Board, Social Media Branding, Email Template)
- Sitemap and Content Development
- Custom WordPress Design and Development
- Google Analytics 4 Setup
- MailChimp to MailerLite Migration & Automation Recreation
- Etsy Shop Integration
- Basic On-Page SEO
Team Members Involved
Carol Poortvliet
Christa Hutchins
Mandy Roberson
Find out more about these ladies and the rest of the team here at MRM: Meet the Team
This post may contain affiliate links. Read our full affiliate disclosure here.
