Your website says that you are the kind of person who is fine with your website.
You are not fine with it.
You send the link and immediately add a caveat for what it doesn't show. You've been meaning to fix it — and then you don't, because the work is good and the clients are good and the website is, technically, fine.
It's not fine. It was built for a version of you that no longer exists. That version was proving something, and you're not doing that anymore.
A website that doesn't reflect the practice behind it isn't neutral. It costs you — the inquiry that came in at the wrong budget, the prospect who couldn't quite work out what made you the right choice, the referral who looked at the site and came away uncertain, or the partnership conversation that never got started.
Partial History is a solo studio doing strategic work for the established practitioner whose site still belongs to an earlier version of her.
The Studio
Most website problems are not visual problems. They are strategy problems. The positioning that was never quite precise, the messaging that has gotten comfortable being vague, the architecture that reflects how the business was organized before you understood what you were actually building.
Redesigning without addressing any of that produces a more attractive version of the same problem.
The work begins with the business: what you do, why it is different, what the right client is actually hiring you for, and where your website diverges from all of that. We prepare a positioning document, a messaging system, and a site brief that specifies what pages exist and what goes on each one, in what order, and why.
The UX work decides how the reader actually moves through the site: what she encounters first, what belongs further down the page, and how the structure reflects the way she thinks about the problem (rather than the way the busines has organized its services).
The final step is the site itself. It's designed and built by one person, with the same strategic understanding that has been present in every decision.
Partial History is a solo studio. I'm Jessica Del Grande, and I do the strategy, UX, design, and development, from start to finish. There's no account manager translating your brief to a designer who hands it to a developer who has never spoken to you. The coherence you get from working with one person who understands all of it is not a nice-to-have, it's the thing that makes this work.
Who this is for
You have serious clients and a reputation that precedes you.
You are usually the most qualified person in the room and you have stopped needing to prove it. What you haven't done is build a website that reflects that.
Maybe you've been in business for a decade. Maybe you doubled in the last two. Maybe your reputation outpaced your marketing.
You are not in crisis. You are in a gap between what you have built and how it currently appears, and you are ready to close it.
About
I got tired of watching good work get undersold by the website meant to represent it.
I have spent more than a decade working across every layer of this problem. I have architected software used daily by major financial institutions, built award-winning Google products that launched across fifteen global markets, and taught UX and web development to hundreds of students at two different institutions. That range is present in how I read a site, what I find, and what I build to replace it.
Most studios separate the thinking from the making. I never have, and that's why Partial History exists.
When the site reflects the practice behind it, the inquiries change.
The client who arrives already understanding what you charge and why. The referral who looked at the site and didn't hesitate before passing it on. The prospect who has answered her own objections before she's written to you. And, just as usefully, the wrong client who reads it and decides this probably isn't for her.