Welcome to our refreshed Planted Sky site. We'll share the full story soon.

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๐Ÿ“ Blog Post

We rebuilt our own site. Here's what changed and why.

After years of building for clients, we finally turned the lens on ourselves. Phase one is shaped around content and the things we have been wanting to say. Phase two is where we turn up the design dial.

If you are reading this, welcome to the new site. We are glad you are here, and we are sitting on an unreasonable backlog of things we want to talk about.

This is the launch post. The point of launch posts is usually to celebrate a design refresh and link out to a Behance case study. This one is doing something a little different. The new site is not really about the design. The design will come. This launch is about getting our voice on the internet so we can finally say the things we have been saying in client calls for the last few years.

Why we launched in this order

For a long time the agency had a one-page site that pointed at a contact form. It served. It also said nothing. Every time a prospect would ask what we thought about some topic, we would write them a small essay over email, and that essay would die in their inbox. After enough of those we admitted the truth: we have a lot to say, and a website is the obvious place to say it.

So phase one of the new site is shaped around content. A blog with real opinions, not announcements. A guides section that explains how we think about the work. A scoring system we apply to every project. A proposal system clients can use without scheduling a call. The visual layer is intentionally calm. We will turn the dial up on that in phase two.

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Drake yes/no: top panel rejecting a fancy hero animation, bottom panel approving real opinions in plain HTML
Caption: ship the ideas first, dress them up later

We chose this order on purpose, and we wrote a separate post explaining why over at substance over style. The short version: a search crawler cannot see your hero illustration, and a human visitor scans for the sentence that tells them whether to keep reading. The words do the work. The design supports the words. Best to get the words out first.

For the longer read on shipping before perfection, the launch day is version one guide goes deeper into the same idea.

What is live right now

  • Service pages with real scope and price ranges. No request-a-quote gate on the basics.
  • A blog with the kind of post we wished other agencies wrote. Opinions, frameworks, and the occasional rant.
  • A guides section for the longer-form thinking that does not fit in a blog post.
  • A proposal system we use with every new client. You can look at one to see what working with us looks like before you book a call.
  • A scoring system we apply to every project in our portfolio, so prospects can see, in one diamond chart, what kind of work we did and how it scored across design, dev, execution, and consulting.

What is coming in phase two

This is where the design dial gets turned up. Custom illustration. Motion. The visual surface that proves we know how to make a website sing and not just talk. None of that ships on day one because none of it would change whether the site is useful to a visitor right now. It is the polish layer, and polish goes on last.

Alongside the visual phase, we are building out the AI-assisted client tools we use internally. Most of what we do at the agency is some kind of pipeline: take a client's content, transform it through several steps, push it out to the right channels. AI has changed the cost of running those pipelines by an order of magnitude. We are turning a handful of them into small, dedicated tools clients can use directly. The first few will quietly appear in the services area as they ship.

What we are using ourselves

The site is built on Astro, Sanity, and Vercel, which is the same stack we now recommend for most of our content-heavy clients. We wrote about why we land on headless setups elsewhere on the site. For the AI work, we are wired into Claude as our daily-driver model and a small spread of open-source models for the cheaper, lower-stakes jobs.

The point is that we are eating our own cooking. Every recommendation on this site is something we are running ourselves, in production, with our own work on the line.

A note on the voice

One last thing. The voice on this site is direct. It is not corporate. We use plain hyphens instead of em dashes. We crack jokes. We publish opinions we know not everyone will agree with. That is on purpose. The whole reason we launched was to have a voice somewhere on the internet, and a voice with no edges is the same as no voice.

If any of this resonates and you want to talk about your own site, the contact link is at the bottom of every page. If you just want to read more, the blog index is the next stop.

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About the author

Bobby McGivney

I run Planted Sky, a solo web studio out of Fort Myers, Florida. I have been building websites for over a decade - WordPress, Astro, Sanity, custom builds, the whole spread. I write here when I have something worth saying about the actual craft of running a small business online, without the LinkedIn voice.