Natasha Chatur
A coach repositioning her practice; a WordPress template that hadn’t kept up; years of Google rankings that had to survive the move. We rebuilt it as a custom Next.js site that keeps her yellow, her navy and her monogram — matured, not replaced. The homepage went from 66 to 98 on mobile, all 189 of the old site’s addresses still resolve, and she edits every word of it herself.
Before · WordPressAfter · Next.jsThe brief came from her, question by question.
Before anything was drawn, Natasha answered the studio’s design intake — all 23 questions. Her five words were “quietly confident, clean, grounded, modern, calm”. Her anti-list: salesy, floaty, like a therapist — and, unusually, too premium, which is why this site never reaches for gloss. Two of her rules rewrote the type system: no overuse of italics, no exclamation marks. So emphasis became a yellow marker sweep behind roman navy words — the device running under “the space between” in her headline.
The problem
Natasha Chatur is an ICF-accredited coach — fifteen years in corporate marketing and advertising first — moving her practice from “career coaching” to transitions work for senior professionals and the organisations they work in. Her site hadn’t moved with her: a template on ageing WordPress with no H1 anywhere, a meta description trailing off in “etc.”, images with no alt text, and a robots.txt politely asking Google to wait thirty seconds between pages. It also carried 36 articles, years of accumulated ranking and a Harper’s Bazaar feature — and the domain sat in an outgoing supplier’s account, with notice served that everything would be switched off on a fixed date. The brief: rebuild it, lose nothing, get out before the lights go off.
What we built
Forty-seven pages, thirty-six of them the migrated articles — every one at its original address, character for character. Around them: a page each for the free first conversation, the £300 clarity session and the £2,700 six-month programme, so the ladder is visible rather than negotiated; a separate route for organisations, because her intake demanded a homepage that forks into two audiences; and a testimonial archive carrying 41 quotes — the strongest asset she owned, and the old site was hiding it. Underneath sits a git-backed CMS: she edits every page and article in her browser, and each save lands as a real commit. No page builder, no plugins, nothing to keep patched.
The migration
Before touching anything, we photographed the old site — raw HTML, screenshots, all seven WordPress sitemaps, the DNS zone, the Search Console exports — so every claim afterwards could be checked against what was actually there. Then the inventory: not the 61 URLs in the sitemaps but 189 addresses, pulled from everywhere the old site had ever been referenced — down to five orphaned testimonial pages and 66 old image files other people had linked to. Every one was classified by hand, alongside six invented paths that must always 404 — because a migration that sweeps every stray URL to the homepage looks tidy, and quietly tells Google the old site was worthless. Today all 189 resolve, the invented paths still 404, and the domain came out of the supplier’s account into hers without the site going dark for a minute.
Her brand, matured — not replaced
The old homepage was a yellow painted-brick wall, a white NC monogram and a photograph — the most distinctive thing she had, and most rebuilds would have thrown it away. We kept her two colours and gave them room: a crisp paper ground, navy carrying the structure, the yellow cut back to punctuation — just as loud, simply less of it. The monogram wasn’t touched, and everything with her face in it comes from a real shoot — a rule she set in the intake, and we didn’t argue. Before production she chose between five complete design directions: not flat mockups, but working, clickable versions of her whole site, each with its own type, structure and colour behaviour. She picked the one we’d named “Yours”.
The result
The old site is still running on its original server, so this is measured rather than remembered: the same Google PageSpeed test, same machine, same day, three runs each. The homepage goes from 66 to 98 on mobile and 86 to 100 on desktop, loads its main content three times faster, and carries 83% less weight. Accessibility, best practices and SEO all finish at 100 — and you can run the test yourself; Google will show you the same card. One number we won’t claim yet: rankings. The site is days old, the pre-migration Search Console export is archived and waiting, and that comparison will be published in a couple of months — whichever way it goes. Meanwhile she runs the site herself: no retainer, no ticket queue, no one to ask before changing a sentence.
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