Mashley — founder & advisor
A personal brand site built on a bold single-colour identity, with a fractional program and a pitch deck living inside it.
What changed
What they have now
- A strong single-colour identity — tangerine, navy, and editorial type — that doesn't look like a template
- A dedicated page for the Fractional CMO program, separate from the general advisory pitch
- A self-contained pitch deck as part of the site rather than an attachment to email
- A book positioned as a quiet credibility anchor instead of a hard sell
- Structured data connecting author and book, so search and AI answer engines get the relationship right
A personal brand site for a founder, advisor, and author — the advisory side of Michael’s work, kept deliberately separate from Ashcafe.
Committing to one colour
Most personal sites hedge: a safe neutral palette, a headshot, a short bio. This one commits instead. A full-bleed tangerine hero, navy as a sparing dark anchor, and light editorial headlines with a single heavy accent word.
Committing to one strong colour is riskier than hedging and far more memorable. The site is recognisable from a thumbnail, which for a personal brand is most of the job.
Layers of commitment
Not every visitor wants the same depth, so the site has three levels: the homepage for someone orienting, a dedicated Fractional CMO page for someone seriously evaluating, and a full pitch deck for someone ready to take it to a board.
Building the deck into the site rather than sending a PDF means it’s always current, works on a phone, and can be opened from a link mid-conversation — which is usually when it’s actually needed.
Structured data doing real work
The site describes the author-to-book relationship in machine-readable structured data, not just prose. That’s what lets a search engine or an AI assistant answer “who wrote What Holds Up the Roof?” correctly.
It’s an unglamorous detail that’s rapidly becoming one of the highest-leverage things on a personal site — increasingly, the first description of you that someone encounters is generated by a machine reading your markup.
More of our work
Elizabeth Greenfield Functional Wellness
Stuck on Squarespace with content she couldn't update and services nobody could find. Now she runs the site herself — and it's bringing in bookings.
João de Brito, painter
Squarespace was raising his renewal for services he didn't use, and he couldn't get in to update his own gallery. He kept the design he liked and left anyway.
Inspiring Founders
A community site that had to sell a serious annual commitment — and screen out the wrong applicants before they applied.
No cost, no pitch
Want yours to look after itself like this?
Thirty minutes on a call. Tell us what's wrong with it, and we'll tell you straight what it would take to fix — whether that's a small repair or starting over. If it's not a fit, we'll say so.