Portfolio: An expressive Squarespace website for a purpose-led brand
Why this brand needed a custom website redesign
You know that awkward stretch after graduation when you’re suddenly supposed to know how to build a career from scratch?
Jade Walters created The Ninth Semester to close that gap for Gen Z students and recent grads - offering practical job search advice, curated opportunities, workshops, and honest conversations about post-grad life :)
And the platform she built has already been thriving for years! With a massive community through LinkedIn, social media, and her newsletters; she’d been featured in major publications, partnered with recognizable brands, helped hundreds of thousands of students navigate their early careers - and even delivered a TEDx talk. (!)
Unfortunately her website was nooot keeping up with all that street cred. The old WordPress site felt very bare-bones and outdated. It didn’t reflect its massive reach, the authority she’d earned, or the energy of the brand she’d built.
Here’s the good news: she already had a strong, recognizable brand! (Scroll down to see the brand board we used as our foundation.)
The branding worked worked great in bite-sized formats like Instagram posts and brochures. BUT… translating that playful identity into a cohesive website experience is a whole different ballgame. Which, lucky for us, is kinda our thing.
We needed to build something that felt substantial, confident, and expressive. A digital home base that could:
Grow and nurture her community
Highlight press features, partnerships, and impact
Support her speaking opportunities
Organize a growing library of career resources
And still feel inviting instead of corporate
THE Preexisting Brand:
Organizing a growing website without losing SEO
First & foremost - we started with the structure! (Not glamorous… but the part that makes the design actually function.)
When a website grows organically over time, it’s easy for things to get layered on bit by bit and create confusion. Our job was to untangle the navigation and connect the dots seamlessly, so visitors could quickly understand what The Ninth Semester offers and where to go next.
We needed to give everything its own spot: blog posts across multiple categories, two newsletters, speaking services, media features, free resources - basically a lot o’ good stuff that just needed better organization.
So before we touched design, we mapped out what pages actually needed to exist and how it flows as a whole. We also provided a customized content outline to guide what belonged on each page - helping shape the messaging so it all made sense together.
And since this was a full migration from WordPress to Squarespace, protecting her existing SEO was a big priority. Updating your website shouldn’t undo the traction you’ve worked so hard to build; so we handled the transfer carefully, preserving URLs and keeping her search visibility intact.
Then it was time for the fun stuff: bringing it all to life visually!
The Site in Squarespace:
Designing an expressive Squarespace website
Her existing brand already gave us a fun starting point for the design: with saturated primary colors, little arrows and hearts, “A+” style marks, doodles that felt like they came straight from the margins of a notebook.
Plus, Jade had already chosen a heading font that felt slightly more polished (still cute & current, just with a lil’ more structure), so we chose the rest of the font suite to complement it.
We kept the paragraph font super simple so the site wouldn’t feel busy. Then we introduced a handwritten-style accent font to lean into that composition notebook vibe :)
From there, we expanded on the theme in subtle ways; adding highlights, underlines, and little circled moments throughout the design to add emphasis.
We balanced the color-blocking with lots of white space for balance, layering in a faint notebook-paper texture in the background for another subtle touch of character!
And because the blog is such a huge part of the platform, we added a custom mega dropdown menu so visitors can browse easily without getting lost in the scroll.
What do you think of the final result?!
Here’s what she had to say about working together!
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
“It was amazing watching the ideas I had in my head come to life.”
"I had the pleasure of working with Emily on my website, and I can confirm, she's incredibly talented! I highly recommend her and I'm happy to have a go-to website designer that I love."
— Jade Walters
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