MRM Project Feature: The Blythe Daniel Agency Website Redesign

Blythe Daniel has been a treasured MRM client for more than a decade, and when it came time to give The Blythe Daniel Agency’s website its second full overhaul in that time, we couldn’t have been more honored to walk alongside her and her team again. As a literary agency representing a growing roster of authors, Blythe’s site needs to do a lot to support the agency. It needs to showcase her clients well, make new author submissions simple, and reflect the same warmth and professionalism she brings to every author or publisher relationship.

Blythe and Stephanie worked closely with our team to reimagine theblythedanielagency.com from the ground up—moving off a deprecated theme and plugin setup and into a faster, more reliable foundation. The end result is an incredibly gorgeous online hub that functions and flows as much as it shines.

About This Recent Project

An advantage to working with long-time clients like Blythe is that our team is extremely familiar with the business behind the website as well as the pain points the dated website creates. There were months of pre-planning and preparation leading up to this project, to ensure the final product resolved as many of those pain points as possible and truly served Blythe’s agency as a valuable member of her team.

Sitemap & Content Planning

Before any design work began, we partnered with Blythe and Stephanie to rework the copy and user flow for every key page, not only updating the text itself but intentionally creating pathways to guide new visitors through the website. This foundational stage made sure the new site would be easier to navigate for authors, editors, and readers alike. BDA offers an abundance of author education and services, but that information was buried and difficult to find in the old sitemap. Warming up the language on each page, as well as planning specific calls-to-action throughout, helped the new site do its job well before the imagery and design items were added.

Swipe to See the Before & After!

Visit Live Site Here

Website Design and Development

The weightier work in this project’s scope was most definitely the backend details, addressing all of the individual author and book listings and cleaning up the outdated software and overloaded database. Knowing the development steps would consume most of our time and focus, it was important to keep the design tasks as smooth and efficient as possible. So we partnered with Erin again, for a VIP design day to establish the foundational look and feel for the site’s primary pages before the rest of the build began. This allowed us to keep the early design conversations focused, save the full site preview for later, and keep momentum going—especially once Blythe’s stock image preferences for the Home and About pages were settled.

Erin used The Blythe Daniel Agency’s established branding as the style guide for the site as a whole and incorporated welcoming photos of Colorado landscapes to help the visuals of the website make a great first impression. Adding simple touches of movement and animations throughout the key pages easily elevated the look and feel of the site so it is reflective of the professionals it serves.

From there, Mandy completed the build of the rest of the website in the unique Kadence child theme, developing custom pages for every service BDA offers—literary representation, marketing and publicity campaigns, critiques and coaching, and The Book Pod—along with an upgraded contact form and a brand-new events calendar to help Blythe and Stephanie keep authors informed about conferences and speaking engagements.

One of the most valuable (if invisible) parts of this project was a full database and website cleanup. Our team removed outdated, risky plugins and software left over from years of growth, cleaned up the sitemap, and streamlined the backend. The result is a site that’s significantly smaller in file size, and faster in load speed, than its predecessor—a win for Blythe’s team and for every visitor who lands on the site.

With nearly 200 represented authors and books to showcase, our team dug into updating every client and book listing on the site. Mandy, Hallie, Christa, and Jordyn worked together to organize headshots, book covers, and author information, making sure BDA’s full client roster was represented accurately and beautifully.

To round things out, we also provided Blythe and Stephanie with an email marketing strategy and action plan for using MailChimp, Substack, and the blog together, giving them a clear path forward for staying connected with BDA’s authors and readers beyond the website itself.

Blythe’s agency has grown a great deal since her first website redesign with us, and this project gave her digital home room to grow right alongside her. We’re so grateful for her trust and partnership throughout this process, and we can’t wait to see where her authors’ stories go next.