The studio site, rebuilt with the process it sells

The old site had started on Webflow and been migrated to WordPress on SiteGround. It listed services. It did not say who they were for, and a site that speaks to everyone is a site nobody recognises themselves in.

The niche came first

On 2026-07-13 the studio became a health and wellness studio only. Vietnamese salons and real estate, two audiences I had served, were dropped rather than de-prioritised. Two weeks later the positioning narrowed to therapists first. On launch day it widened again, deliberately, to the whole circle of healing: physical, mental, spiritual and energy work, plus mission-based organisations. The audience wall on the live site names that circle.

Nobody holds the line on your own site

A client brief comes with constraints. A founder's own brief comes with none, and every direction stays available until someone rules. So the constraints were written down before the first concept: transparent pricing on the page, no fabricated proof or quotes, an ordinal process with no promised durations, accessibility measured rather than assumed, and a reduced-motion branch that is a complete page, not a broken one.

This is the same process I run for a client, on myself, with the receipts kept. A moodboard before any build. A concept field wide enough that the winner is chosen against real alternatives, not the only option on the table. Then a ruled convergence, where every round after the decision carries the same facts.

• Moodboard first. An Obsidian canvas with reference wings and the wireframe spine, 65 nodes, before the first scroll-journey build. Palette and type were ruled there, not in the browser.
• A wide field. 36 landing concepts, page drafts, labs and metered-tool swings across July and August, each with a recorded verdict. None deleted.
• A parallel identity track. 19 logo rounds, from six first lockups to the Culm Tie, with every round's own review board kept and the rasters checked at 64, 32 and 16 px.
• One spine. Lucky bamboo is gifted in counted stalks and the counts mean things. The visitor grows the arrangement by scrolling. Booking the call adds the ninth stalk.
• The ruled facts on every round. A $9,999 signature build and $300 / $600 / $900 care tiers stated on the page. No fabricated numbers or quotes. Six ordinal steps with no durations. No em-dashes in visible copy. No "AI" anywhere client-facing.

Design variations are never deleted in this studio. Rounds stack; they supersede, never remove. That rule is the reason this section can exist: every board, atlas and landing concept below is the file that was reviewed at the time, labelled with what happened to it.

click any card. self-contained concepts open as working pages in a new tab. the heavier builds, the review boards and the six concepts that only ever lived as hosted artifacts open a full capture.

Launch day was also review day. Five rounds landed from live trackpad reviews between the first deploy and the last: the hero said the service, the proof cards went dual-action, the nav got real section links, the footer was rebuilt, the positioning broadened, and the first trial identity went into the masthead. Four more rounds and a privacy page followed the next day; the Culm Tie lockup and its ratio correction followed on the 21st.

The ruled facts held

The $9,999 anchor appears exactly twice on the page and was recounted every round. The proof chapter is four live client sites, not a testimonial wall. The process is six ordinal steps with one duration on the whole page: a 30-minute intro call. No "AI" client-facing. No em-dashes in visible copy, verified with the comments stripped.

Accessibility measured, not assumed

Contrast was measured in both tone states, not eyeballed: the nav label at 16.8:1 on paper and 18.5:1 on the dark chapters, the closing quote at 18.5:1, its attribution at 13.7:1, the button labels at 10:1 or better. The reduced-motion branch creates no animation at all; it renders the completed nine-stalk arrangement, roots out, ribbon tied, numeral 9.

Performance kept honest

Round four found the page killing its own renderer after sitting open: nine permanently promoted compositor layers. That was fixed by measurement, and every round since has re-checked it. Heap flat at 9.54 MB across two full scroll passes, one animation frame per canvas, transforms and opacity only.

Identity, in three ratified states

The Round 12 cohesion lockup was ratified on 2026-08-03 and carried into the first Nine Stalks rounds. Four trial identities then went into the live masthead one at a time, each fully reversible from a dated snapshot. The Culm Tie with the Rootline Roman wordmark was ruled in Round 19 and has been live since 2026-08-21 at the ratio I set: icon ink height 2.40 times the cap height.