Entertainment & EventsDidi Aurelia — Squarespace Editorial Redesign
Client: Didi Aurelia, Founder of Aurelia Collective
Project Type: Revamp — custom CSS/HTML/code build
Duration: All pages delivered live within 24 hours of project start
Didi Aurelia had already commissioned bespoke HTML/CSS page designs with a quiet, considered feel to them, and needed a Squarespace specialist who could carry that feeling through — matching the references as closely as the platform allows, without touching her live site until she was ready. Homepage, Why Not Me, The Collective and About were delivered in this scope, including a fully working sticky bio card, live within a day, ahead of a conference she was speaking at that week.
The Challenge
Didi arrived with a set of HTML pages already designed elsewhere — a quiet, restrained, editorial look she'd clearly spent real time getting right — and a previous developer's leftover code quietly working against her underneath the live site. Font overrides that didn't match her own Squarespace settings, paragraph alignment drifting off the page, a sticky-header script nobody remembered adding.
None of it obvious at a glance. All of it needed sorting before anything new could go up. On top of that sat a hard deadline: the new pages needed to be live and polished ahead of a conference she was speaking at, just days after the project began.
Strategic Approach: Rebuilding Trust Before Rebuilding Pages
Every new page went up as an unpublished draft — nothing published without a proper look first. Her existing Book and Connect pages stayed exactly as they were until she gave the go-ahead. When the legacy CSS turned up, it got flagged and explained before a single line was touched, and only removed once she'd confirmed. Small habits, but they're the ones that matter most when you're working inside someone else's live business.
Matching the Feeling, Not Just the File
The HTML references weren't just well laid out — they were quiet in a way that's genuinely hard to fake. Nothing shouted. Colour got used sparingly enough that a single gold accent still felt like an event. The type read like a magazine spread, not a browser tab. That kind of restraint is expensive to hold onto, because Squarespace's instincts run the other way: round every corner, pad every section the same, default to something safer and slightly generic.
Getting the pages to sit still instead took custom CSS wherever the platform pulled against the reference — the hover states and arrow animations on the homepage, two sections on The Collective page built from scratch, and a button style stripped back until it stopped looking like software. Small, unglamorous decisions, all in service of the same thing: a site that still felt like Didi, not a template with her name on it.
Building the Sticky Bio Card
The About page's sidebar bio card was designed to stay pinned in view as visitors scroll — a small thing, but the kind of small thing Didi would have noticed in a heartbeat if it slipped. It shipped built with custom code, matching the reference exactly, with nothing cut to hit the one-day deadline.
Key Features:
- Blog Setup
- Brand Identity
- Brand Strategy
- Contact Forms
- Custom CSS
- E-commerce
- Lead Capture
- Logo Design
- Migration
- Minimal Style
- Mobile Optimisation
- Organic Style
- Payment Processing
- Playful Style
- Positioning
- SEO Optimisation
- Target Audience Definition
- Third Party Integration
- Visual Identity
- Website Build
The Outcome
Every page — Homepage, Why Not Me, The Collective, About, sticky bio card and all — was live and matching the reference within 24 hours of the project starting, well ahead of Didi's conference, and still unmistakably hers rather than off-the-shelf. No conversion or traffic metrics were tracked for this project, though a visible spike in site visits followed her conference appearance once the new pages were live.
❝
The structure, the typography, the dark sections, the quote block — all heading in the right place… Thank you so much, I appreciate your work and speed.
❞
— Didi Aurelia, Founder of Aurelia Collective
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