We Were the Client. It Went About How You'd Expect.
For thirteen years, Bowda has built brands for other people, and for a good chunk of that, websites too. Brand launches, web builds, handover guides, the whole thing. And the entire time, our own website was…relatively fine. It was DIY. It was always going to get done "after this client project wraps."
This year we finally did it properly. We built wireframes, brand strategy, a real design lead, a real designer, a real project manager. We ran it the way we'd run it for a paying client. It took seven and a half months and truthfully, the client (me) was the problem for most of them. This is the case study - the good, bad, and ugly, with the real timeline, because if we're going to tell clients that a website is a process, we should show you what the process looked like when the client was us.
Where we came from
Bowda's website has lived in three homes. The first several years were on Wix. I'm not going to say more about that than I have to. It was the right choice for a one-person shop in 2013 who needed a page that said "I exist and here's my email." It was never the right choice for an agency.
Then we moved to Webflow, which is a beautiful, powerful platform if you want to live in it. We didn't. It's built for teams shipping custom development every week; we build clean, brand-led sites that clients need to be able to manage themselves. We decided last year to move our own site off it. Part of that was fit, while part of it was wanting everyone's sites on a platform we felt confident about long-term.
Now we're on Squarespace, which is where we build most client sites these days and, frankly, where we should have been ourselves for a while. It's the Goldilocks option for a business our size: custom enough that it looks like us, simple enough that anyone on the team can fix a typo without opening a ticket. We tell many of our clients it's the right-sized tool for their brands, we just took a long time to take our own advice.
The timeline, honestly
The Asana task is dated February 2, 2026. The conversation is older than that by years. I can't tell you exactly when we first said "we need to do our own site" because we never wrote it down. It was end-of-call talk. "After this launch" talk. Nothing with a date on it and this is the part where I'd tell a client: an idea without a task isn't a project, it's a wish.
Here's the thing about being an agency doing its own website: we spend all day doing this for other people. Every hour on our site is an hour not on a client's. So our site always went to the bottom of the pile and stayed there. We would never let a client project run this long. Ours ran this long because nobody was paying us to finish it.
So here's what the project looked like once it was actually a project.
February. We flagged inspiration sites and I recorded a few Looms about what I wanted. This is exactly how we start with clients (with inspiration) and it felt good to do it for ourselves.
April Our Creative Director drafted a brand strategy and assigned me the review. She nudged me the day after it was due. The due date got moved once, then quietly ignored. It is, as of writing this, still open. The wireframes couldn't start until strategy was approved, so the wireframe task got pushed six times over six weeks, and then the due date came off entirely, which is the project management equivalent of a sigh.
June. Wireframes done and we started to build out the content library, wrote the list of blog posts we'd "need before launch" (far too many), and listed twelve portfolio projects to feature. We ended up picking six.
July. One of our designers started building the six case study pages. I got a copywriting task with a due date. A few weeks later the weekly check-in asked whether I'd done the copy yet. I had not. Meanwhile the design team hit a wall on photography because we'd never done a proper brand shoot for ourselves. We spent an embarrassing amount of time digging through old Drive folders.
August. Case study pages went through their edit rounds, which is normal and healthy. An under-construction page went up. The exec meeting notes from early August say it plainly: the Bowda website gets focus after current client proposals and the client presentations are done. It was always next, but never now. Mid-month I asked for an ETA because we had a presentation coming up and I wanted eyes on a real site. Design team’s reply, verbatim: "Bowda website is mostly you!! It's all the writing that's missing."
September. Launch date set for September 18 and we finally launched a week later. We wouldn’t push a client launch, but alas we did ours because it was an internal project.
Seven and a half months. A client build of this size usually takes us four to six weeks. The difference wasn't the team, it was the client.
What being your own client teaches you
The bottleneck is always the copy. We tell clients this on every kickoff call. Design can't finish until the words exist. I myself am a writer at heart and I was the one holding up my own website for months because client work always came first. If you're a founder trying to do your own site: block the writing time first, before you brief a designer, or you'll pay for a designer to wait. Or better yet, outsource the copy (yes, we can do that too).
Give it a PM who isn't you. The site moved when my team were allowed to nag me about it. Weekly check-ins, tasks with my name on them, a due date that got pushed and publicly noted. It was uncomfortable and it worked.
Scope will grow until someone says no. Twelve case studies became six. A long list of "must-have" blog posts became a handful. A whole section of the site got pulled from the nav in July because it wasn't ready and it wasn't needed to launch. Every one of those was a good idea, but none of them were the site.
Launch the working version. This is the one I'd underline. We didn't wait until every case study was written and every page was full. The site is up, it's accurate, it works, and it represents us better than a “coming soon” page ever would. Everything else gets added while it's live. A website is not a launch, it's a thing you maintain, and the only way to start maintaining it is to publish it.
Photography is not a detail. We build photo lists into every client project and we still got caught without one for ourselves. Plan the shoot with the wireframes, not after.
It's deeper work than you think. This is the one I'll carry into every client call from now on. I was the bottleneck and I'm not special: most founders are. A website isn't a design task you hand off. Same with branding, same with anything foundational. It makes you sit down and decide how you want to show up, what you actually stand for, what you're offering and to whom. That's not writing, that's deciding, and it's the part nobody budgets time for. I've said "this is more work than you think" to clients for years. Now I've lived it, and I'll say it with a lot more sympathy.
What we're proud of
The process held. We ran it the way we run it for clients: inspiration, strategy, wireframes, design, build, edit rounds, launch. Every case study page went through real edit rounds with real feedback in the task, not in someone's head. When I finally showed up with the copy, the machine was waiting for it.
The team ran it, not me. Design team led design and built the site. Our graphic designer built the six portfolio pages and made them cohesive without making them identical, which is harder than it sounds. Our admin team ran ops: the logo list, the domain transfer, the under-construction page, the "can I publish?" messages that kept things moving. My job was to be the client and get out of the way, and I was bad at the first part and worse at the second.
The designer's side
“Designing for your boss is one thing. Designing for your boss when she’s also the client and the copy is still coming is another! (Ha!) But honestly, the whole experience gave me a lot more empathy for our clients. When it’s your own business, every sentence and every decision suddenly feels much bigger, turns out we’re not so different from our clients after all!”
— Meaghan, Creative Director, Bowda Creative Co.
What's still coming
More case studies, more resources, more of this blog. We'll keep adding to the site now that it's live, which is the whole point of having one you can actually maintain.
Ready when you are
If you've been "talking about" your website for years, we've been there. Literally. Book a discovery call and we'll put a date on it