Emma Blomfield

Most of our clients have one business. Emma has a constellation of them: an interior design studio, a homewares label, a teaching platform, a design-and-construct venture, a niche styling studio, and the personal brand that ties it all together. For years, that constellation was crammed into a single website doing the work of five or six. The brief that emerged wasn’t really “rebuild a website.” It was “give a whole family of businesses the room, the structure, and the cohesion it had outgrown.”

We’ve grown up alongside Emma, in the business sense. We met years ago in the friendly chaos of a Facebook group and we’ve watched each other build ever since. So this was never a cold brief; it was a chance to do right by someone whose straight-shooting, big-dreaming, human-first way of working we’ve admired for the better part of a decade.

Emma is a rare thing: a designer who can also write. Her blog has drawn readers for years because she understands what keeps her clients up at night and tells a story that makes them feel seen. None of that was ever the problem. The problem was sneakier… one website was being asked to do five jobs at once. A design client, a reader, a mentee, a shopper, and a speaking enquiry all arrived at the same front door, and the site had to be everything to everyone.

So we didn’t rebuild Emma’s site. We gave her whole world room to breathe.

One Emma, many rooms.

Emma needed a calm, confident hub. A front door that introduces every side of her world and quietly points each visitor toward the right one, whether that’s her studio, her books, her mentoring, or her shop. The job was to untangle a decade of organic growth into something clear and intentional, and to do it without losing the hard-won SEO and the loyal blog readership built up since 2013.
Crucially, this site was the anchor of a much bigger move: splitting one overloaded website into a focused network of separate, purpose-built sites, each free to do its own job properly.

Brand Design was done by The Brain Child, and Emma provided her own copy for this project.

WEB DESIGN

MULTI-SITE NETWORK & DESIGN SYSTEM

Six sites, one unmistakable world.

We built all six sites fresh on a single modern platform — Bricks — so the whole network runs on one fast, consistent technical foundation rather than a patchwork of ageing page builders. On top of that we built a shared design language and let each brand flex within it — subtle differences in personality, anchored every time in a core of deep navy and soft white. Generous, deliberate white space gives every page room to breathe; nothing is crowded, nothing shouts.

At the heart of it is how we treat imagery. Emma’s photography is the hero, so we let it behave like one: templates that never lay text over an image, and never shrink a hero below half the page width; the single exception being the portfolio slider, where the work is meant to be browsed in sequence. The images are there to be explored, never crammed. And keeping text off the images isn’t only the prettier choice — it keeps every word real, so it stays crisp when zoomed, legible to screen readers, and translatable, rather than locked inside a picture. To break up the impressive image-led pages and let the eyes rest, we implemented a set of elegant animated line icons, each in its brand’s signature colours, and threaded in small interaction touches that reward exploration — like a cursor that expands into a quiet “view project” invitation as it passes over the work. Little moments of motion that add polish without clutter.

Tying the network together is a shared header running across the connected sites, borrowing the trick multi-brand retailers use to link their in-house labels, so wherever a visitor lands they can see the rest of Emma’s world and move between it in a click.

MAIN SITE REBUILD & SEO PRESERVATION
A digital home that knows who’s knocking.

We’d looked after this site for years, so no broken links, no junk plugins, kept clean and current on our watch the whole way through. But even a beautifully kept home earns a refresh after a decade, and a website is no different. So we rebuilt on a fresh WordPress foundation: not a rescue, a renewal: a clean, modern base to carry Emma’s world through its next ten years. Part of that meant moving off Divi and onto Bricks, trading a heavy old page builder for a lean, modern one: a big jump in speed, and far more freedom to design. We dressed it all in her signature palette of deep navy and soft white, warmed with gold — fast, sophisticated, and unmistakably hers. The home page now works like a good concierge, giving design clients, readers, mentees, shoppers, and speaking enquiries a clear path to exactly what they came for. And because Emma’s world is bigger than any single site, we built a shared network header — running across the hub, EB Studio, and Business of Decorating — that borrows the trick multi-brand retailers use to link their in-house labels: wherever you land, you can see the other facets of the business and move between them in a click. We also deliberately lifted a large amount of content over to its proper new home on EB Studio, leaving the hub leaner, faster, and easier to navigate, with Emma’s much-loved blog kept front and centre.

Because a decade of search equity is not something you gamble with, we protected it carefully;  mapping the site’s most valuable pages, putting redirects in place so nothing landed on a dead end, and watching traffic closely through the move. And because this rebuild and the wider network split were really one move, the traffic story only makes sense told together. By design, the main site grew leaner as it handed content to its new siblings. But the network it anchors grew the other way — total sessions across the family of sites are up more than half year on year, while the main site’s organic search dipped just over ten per cent despite all the content it gave away. A migration that usually costs traffic instead grew it.