Brief
Abigail spent seven years at Charlotte Tilbury before going freelance. She came out the other side of that with the technical chops of a luxury beauty brand and the audience of a working makeup artist — bridal, editorial, prom, party. Her old website was thin: a contact email, a handful of Instagram screenshots, no narrative, no funnel. It wasn't winning enquiries; it was hiding from them.
The brief was to build a marketing site that did one thing well: turn site visitors into enquiry-form submissions. Not a portfolio for fellow MUAs to admire, not a shop, not a blog with weekly posts she'd never write. A booking funnel, dressed up in a brand that looked as expensive as her work.
Approach
The site is built as a photography-led marketing funnel. Every page is structured around a single conversion path: see the work, read the testimonials, fill in the enquiry form. There are six pages total — Home, Services, Enquiries, About, Blog, Instagram — but four of them exist only to lead to the fifth.
The platform is Squarespace with the defaults torn out. The right tool for a sole trader who needs to update copy and add new portfolio shots without a developer in the loop — and a deliberate constraint that forces every design decision to live inside a tight system. Most of the work was in the brand styling, the page rhythm, and the editorial restraint, not the stack.
The visual system is restrained on purpose. A warm taupe backdrop, an editorial serif for headlines, a clean sans for body, and full-bleed photography doing the heavy lifting. No accent colour, no gradients, no animation tricks — Abigail's work is what should command the screen. Whitespace is generous because luxury beauty sites look expensive when they breathe and cheap when they don't.
The enquiry form is the most considered interaction on the site. It captures everything Abigail needs to give a fast, accurate quote: event type (bridal / shoot / prom / party / other), date, location, number of faces, additional notes. The fields are sequenced so the easy questions come first; the harder ones come last when the visitor's already invested.
A few deliberate omissions:
- No pricing — bridal makeup is sold through consultation, not a price page. Pricing on the site would attract the wrong leads and kill the right ones.
- No automated booking calendar — same reason. Abigail wants to triage enquiries by hand and quote against availability.
- No "About me as an artist" essay — the testimonials and the work do that job better than a 600-word bio could.
Outcome
Real metrics belong to Abigail, but the brief was satisfied: every page rolls into the enquiry form, the photography is the hero, and the brand finally looks like it belongs in the same conversation as the names on her CV.
This is the smallest project in the portfolio. It's also the clearest demonstration of the principle I keep coming back to — most websites get ruined by what they include, not what they leave out.
