Building a website and brand for Starflower Environmental's niche audiences
Published on Aug 24, 2025
My client started an environmental consulting firm servicing communities across Michigan and requested help building his online presence. As a landscape architect, my client had experience using design software, but after drafting a logo and starting to build a website, I took the reins and rebuilt his brand styles and website to improve the professionalism of the firm’s online presence, and most importantly, make it easier for potential customers to learn about the services he provides. See the finished product at starflowerenvironmental.com.
The team
UX Designer & Content Strategist (that's me)
Myles, Client & Founder
The process
I scheduled a couple of conversations with Myles to get an idea of who his intended customers are and what he wants to offer to each of them.
My plan was to refine what he had already made, rather than totally reinvent the company's brand. A two week timeline made that the best option as well.
My main goal was to construct a site architecture that caters to each audience the company intends to reach.
Myles’ original site structure was inspired by commercial environmental consulting companies. While I loved that he found inspiration from other websites, there was one missing piece of his strategy - his intended audience was far broader than the companies he was inspired by. The original site structure left it up to the user to figure out what services were relevant to them - increasing their cognitive load, and likely decreasing contracts.
After those initial meetings with Myles, I rebuilt the structure of the site to show paths for different user identities in addition to service categories.
A paper showing the results of a meeting with Myles where we defined a more user-centered site structure. Things still shifted from here, but it was a great starting point.
Building the brand
Myles gave me his original logo and permission to change it up a bit as I rebuilt it as a vector drawing. I stuck with the colors he initially selected, but provided some guidance about color contrast in regard to visual accessibility, letting him know which colors could be used with black or white text and how to check for color contrast issues using the WebAIM contrast checker. I also designed social graphics, yard signs, business cards, car decals, and more with this new brand identity.
Brand guidelines for Starflower Environmental
Yard signs, designed and printed for Starflower Environmental. Myles asked for a yard sign with space to add unique numbers showcasing the improved environmental impact his designs had on his clients' properties.
Building the site
I built Starflower’s site using Framer. I added content in the order that Myles drafted it, and suggested content edits and different layouts as I built, since he was hoping to get the site published within a couple of weeks. I tracked my tasks, content requests, and client reviews with a detailed spreadsheet to ensure we launched a professional, responsive, and minimally viable website in Myles’ ideal time frame.
The site includes plenty of authority-building content in the form of testimonials and case studies, clear paths based on user identities, and we aren’t done yet! Myles plans to showcase his expertise in data science by publishing a data dashboard that celebrates the environmental impact of all of his client work, in aggregate, and I look forward to creating his vision.
View the live site at starflowerenvironmental.com.
How I’m measuring impact
I set up Google Analytics and Google Search Console for the domain, and I am continuing to offer design and content support as Myles builds his social media presence on Instagram and LinkedIn.