Case study
Bea Ballard
Helping a creative leader take ownership of her own search results.
TV executive producer · 2020 · Site design, blog, SEO · Squarespace · custom CSS
Live site: beaballard.com
The brief
I was delighted to be asked to design a website for Beatrice Ballard, television executive producer and creative head. The brief was straightforward: create a simple, contemporary website that would let Bea take ownership of her already extensive online presence, while providing a quiet platform to showcase her work.
When you've spent decades producing some of the most-watched television in the country, your name is everywhere — interviews, credits, archive entries, third-party listings. What's harder is having a place that's actually yours.
What I built
A clean, contemporary Squarespace site with a blogging facility for occasional long-form pieces, a simple contact page, and extensive SEO work behind the scenes — meta descriptions, alt text, schema, the unglamorous foundations that make a site findable.
The visual approach is deliberately understated. The work itself is rich enough; the site shouldn't compete with it.
Bea has reclaimed her own internet presence — her site sits at the #2 spot on Google for her name, just below her Wikipedia entry.
The full homepage
Outcome
The site has been live for several years now and continues to perform. Bea's site currently sits at the #2 spot on Google for her own name, sitting just below her Wikipedia entry. For someone with a public-facing career, that's the right outcome — Wikipedia handles the encyclopaedic, and Bea's own site handles everything she chooses to say herself.
What I'd take from this
For people with a strong public profile, a personal site doesn't need to do everything. It needs to do one thing very well: give them the ability to tell their own story, in their own words, on a domain they control. The SEO work is the quiet engine that makes sure that story actually gets seen.