A Showit template built for wedding photographers gets a thoughtful customization for a family photography business.
Project Overview
When Hannah from Hannah Doster Photography first reached out, she was feeling overwhelmed. She’d purchased the Brooke and James Showit template from With Grace and Gold, drawn to its design, but the template had been built with wedding photographers in mind. Hannah’s business is different. She’s primarily a family photographer, with a strong secondary focus on couples, maternity, and portrait sessions, plus the occasional elopement. Taking a template designed around one niche and reshaping it to represent a completely different one is no small task, and it’s exactly the kind of challenge I love helping clients work through.
Understanding Hannah’s Business
Before diving into design, it was important to get clear on what made Hannah’s business unique. She wasn’t trying to attract engaged couples planning a wedding day. She needed a site that spoke to families, to parents looking for someone to capture their kids growing up, to couples wanting timeless portraits, and to expecting parents looking for a maternity session that felt just as special as her family work.
Hannah also has a real advantage in her market: she’s based in a popular tourist destination. That meant her website needed to do double duty, appealing not just to local families but also to visitors and vacationers looking to capture their trip with a professional photographer. We built that positioning directly into her site strategy so the copy and layout could speak to both audiences.
Brand Foundations Already in Place
Hannah came into this project with her logo and color palette already established from previous branding work, so my role wasn’t to build a brand from scratch. Instead, it was about finding the right supporting details to bring everything together cohesively. She needed fonts that would work well within the structure of the Brooke and James template while still feeling true to her existing brand identity. I suggested a new font pairing that complemented her established colors and logo, giving the site a polished, cohesive feel without clashing with the template’s built-in design elements.
Copywriting That Set the Foundation
Before we could customize the visual layout, Hannah needed website copy that reflected her business accurately, spoke to her ideal clients, and set the tone for the whole site. She used my copywriting guide to work through her own website copy page by page, which gave her a clear framework for writing content that fit naturally within the template’s existing structure while still sounding like her.
Once her copy was finalized, I brought the entire project together: customizing the template’s layout, typography, and design details to fit her brand, her niche, and the copy she’d written, so the final site felt intentional rather than templated.
The Result
The finished website feels light, airy, and elevated, a far cry from the wedding-focused template it started as. It now clearly communicates what it’s like to work with Hannah as a family photographer, while still leaving room to showcase her couples, maternity, portrait, and elopement work. Most importantly, the site finally feels like a true reflection of the caliber of Hannah’s photography: a high-end, custom-feeling experience that matches the quality of the images guests will find inside.