My Website Had an Identity Crisis. All Five Identities Were Mine.
My branding was woefully inconsistent.
The website worked, technically. It just looked as though five different people had built it—and unfortunately, all five were me.
Every version of my business was still in there somewhere. Different colours. Different fonts. Different images. Different ways of explaining what I do.
Nothing was necessarily terrible on its own. Together, it felt like a village where every building had been designed by someone who refused to attend the planning meeting.
It was time to rebuild.
Before the website came the brand
I could’ve started moving boxes around and choosing prettier colours. That would’ve been fun for approximately twenty minutes. Then I would’ve created another page that looked lovely but had no particular relationship with the rest of the website.
So I stopped and worked on the brand first.
And I mean really worked on it.
I wanted to understand more than which shade of teal belonged on a button. I wanted to know what TechAlchemy should feel like to the people who arrive here.
The people I work with are often neurodivergent founders, makers, and creative business owners. They know their work. They care deeply about what they’re building. They’re not incapable of using technology.
They’re usually dealing with technology that expects them to remember seventeen steps, six passwords, and one setting buried under a menu last seen in 2019.
I don’t want my website to add to that feeling.
I want it to feel welcoming. Interesting. A little playful. Knowledgeable without looming over anyone in a suit and demanding to know whether they’ve optimized their funnel.
Most importantly, I want people to understand that their brain isn’t the problem.
Once I had a brand profile that reflected all of that, I loved it.
Then I looked at the website again.
Well.
The buildings began attending planning meetings
I started with the main pages: the landing page, How I Help, The Village, and About Me.
Slowly, the website began to look like one place.
The typography matched. The colours belonged together. The images felt as though they came from the same slightly peculiar world. The words sounded more like me and less like something assembled from several years of business advice.
It wasn’t simply prettier.
It was easier to understand.
People could move from one page to another without wondering whether they’d accidentally wandered into a neighbouring business.
That’s one of the things I’ve come to appreciate about branding. It isn’t just decoration. A good brand removes decisions.
I don’t have to choose a new heading style every time I build a page. I don’t have to wonder whether a button should be teal, orange, lime green, or something I found while unsupervised in a colour picker.
The brand remembers those decisions for me.
That’s useful because I have other things to remember. Allegedly.
Then I reached the blog
I wanted the blog to match the rest of the site.
This seemed reasonable.
The blog became Notes from Artemis’s Worktable, which feels much more like what it actually is: things I’ve learned while trying to make technology, AI, fiber arts, creative work, and business coexist peacefully.
The design came together beautifully.
Then I discovered the editor had developed a hobby.
Whenever I published a post and began writing another one, the previous post turned up again.
Not in a useful “Here’s a clean template for your next article” way.
More in a “Hello, I’m your last blog post and I live here now” way.
Titles, excerpts, layouts, and content had become tangled together. Some posts had images. Some didn’t. Some had titles and excerpts but appeared to have misplaced the actual article.
This wasn’t a blogging system. It was a junk drawer with a publish button.
The website was making me remember too much
The more we untangled it, the clearer the real problem became.
The website relied on hidden rules.
Use this editor, except when you shouldn’t. Duplicate this, but not that. Change this setting first. Don’t touch the other one. Remember which parts belong to the post and which parts belong to the template.
I’m sure this system made perfect sense at some point.
Many questionable systems do.
The trouble is that a system isn’t very helpful if it only works when I remember all its private rituals.
That’s especially true on a low-energy day. Or a busy day. Or a perfectly ordinary Tuesday when my brain has decided that remembering where I put my tea is already enough responsibility.
The system should remember how it works so I don’t have to.
So that’s what we rebuilt.
The website template now handles the title, date, featured image, typography, spacing, and everything else that should remain consistent.
The ordinary WordPress editor holds the article.
When I start a new post, I get a blank page.
You wouldn’t think a blank page would feel like a technological achievement, but here we are.
Some things were missing
While fixing the publishing system, I discovered that some older articles were missing their content.
The titles were there. The excerpts were there. WordPress knew that something had once existed.
But when I checked the revisions, the article itself had been replaced by a Divi placeholder.
It was the website equivalent of finding a carefully labelled storage box with absolutely nothing inside it.
I could’ve kept digging.
I could’ve searched through older databases, hosting backups, cached versions, abandoned files, and every digital cupboard I’ve used in the past five years.
For a moment, I considered it.
Then I remembered that I have a business to run and a finite number of hours in which to run it.
I’m not going to spend time I don’t have chasing posts I may never recover.
Some might be worth rewriting. Others can stay wherever missing blog posts go when they wander off unsupervised.
I’d rather build something that works going forward.
What I’m keeping from all of this
The website finally feels like the business I’m building now—not every version of the business I’ve ever considered building.
The brand gives me a way to make decisions without starting from scratch each time.
The templates handle the repetitive parts.
The editor lets me write.
And I’ve been reminded that stopping is sometimes part of fixing a problem.
Not every old thing needs to be recovered. Not every mystery needs to be solved. Sometimes the useful choice is to close the backup screen, make another cup of tea, and carry on with a better system.
This post exists because I stopped trying to recover an old one and wrote something new instead.
That feels like a decent trade.
Until next time friends...
