Second post in the BLOOM series. First one covered Base, the foundation. This one’s about Look, and it’s a trickier one than it sounds.
If someone landed on your site with your logo hidden, would they still know it was you? [the same way you’d know which land you’re in from a single trash can]
A lot of sites fail that test. Plenty of them are pretty, but they’re a template with a logo swapped in. Templates don’t have a personality. They have a theme.
Pretty and “you” are not the same thing
I’ve built for clients who came to me with a site that technically looked fine, nice fonts, decent colors, nothing wrong with it exactly, and every one of them said some version of the same thing: this doesn’t feel like me.
Companies with consistent branding across their touchpoints can see up to 33% more revenue than ones with a scattered or generic presence. Consistency builds the trust that turns a visitor into a client.
So Look comes down to accuracy: does the site look and sound like the business behind it?
What “feels like you” means
This is where your “what should it feel like” question gets answered, and it’s rarely as simple as picking a color palette.
It’s the fonts, plus the tone of the copy, whether the imagery looks like real photos of a real business or stock photos of someone else’s life, and whether the whole thing holds together instead of looking like five decisions made on five different days.
I ask a lot of questions before I touch a design file, because I can’t build “you” without knowing what that looks like. That means vibe boards, past work you loved, brands you admire, and the version of your business you’re building toward instead of the one you started with.
The template trap
Templates aren’t the enemy. I use starting points all the time, and there’s no reason to reinvent a layout from scratch on every project. The problem is stopping there. A template with your logo pasted on top and nothing else changed is a placeholder wearing your name.
The fix: making a site feel like your business again
The fix doesn’t have to be a full custom build. Sometimes it’s smaller than people expect: real photography instead of stock, copy that sounds like you talk instead of like a business textbook, and colors and fonts pulled from your brand instead of whatever the theme shipped with.
Small, deliberate, and consistent beats expensive and generic.
Next up: Offer, and why “clear” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that word.
