Lemon Tree Literacy
CASE STUDY — Education Business · USA · Squarespace
Full website development & brand application to an online literacy teaching and consultation business.
Lemon Tree Literacy · Brand identity · WEB DESIGN · 3 months
The Result
Lemon Tree Literacy launched with a website that matched the brand her 100K+ community already recognised from social media, and gave that community somewhere to go. The site brought together the business's services, teaching methodology, and booking flow in one place, turning a social-media-first business into one with a proper digital home. Parents could find and book reading lessons, educators could explore consultation services, and the founder had a platform to sell her own teaching resources through an integrated store.
What this project involved: brand identity development, audience research, user surveys, UX strategy, wireframing, web design, and user testing. Built from real follower data gathered directly from the business's own community.
Graphic Profile
Before
First Meeting
Wireframe Work
Finished Result
Testimonial
Before hiring Trixi, I had tried building my website on my own, and by the end of it, I was ready to throw my laptop out the window. I had a clear vision of how I wanted my site to look and feel, but I couldn’t get it there on my own. Enter Trixi.
From the start, she made the process feel so easy and exciting. She took the time to ask about my goals, my brand, and what I was hoping to communicate. She never once tried to change my ideas - she simply elevated them. Trixi brought a creative eye and technical expertise that made the final site significantly better than I had imagined. She even added thoughtful touches I didn’t know I needed, but now I can’t imagine the website without them.
She created a beautiful, functional home for my business, one that tells my story, welcomes current and future clients, and feels completely aligned with who I am. I couldn’t be happier, and I truly cannot recommend her enough!
Jordyn — Lemon Tree Literacy
The Brief
Lemon Tree Literacy is an online reading education business with a following of over 100K across TikTok and Instagram. The founder, Jordyn, had built a recognisable, trusted presence on social media, but there was nowhere to send people who wanted to go deeper. No website. No central place to learn about the services, understand the teaching approach, or book a lesson. She needed a website that could hold everything her social media presence had been promising, and make it easy for the right people to take the next step.
The Problem
The business existed entirely on social media, which meant Jordyn had no control over the customer journey. Someone who found her on TikTok and wanted to book a lesson had nowhere clear to go. Someone who wanted to understand her teaching methodology had to piece it together from individual posts. And someone looking to purchase her teaching resources had no dedicated place to do that either.
The website needed to do several things at once: serve parents looking for reading lessons for their kids, serve educators and administrators looking for consultation services, and eventually support an online store for teaching resources. Getting the structure right so that each of these groups could find what they were looking for without friction was the main design challenge from the start.
Discovery & Research
Before I got into design, I needed to understand who was actually using and following Lemon Tree Literacy. Social media followings can look like one thing on the surface and be something very different underneath, and I wanted the website to be built around real data, not assumptions.
The First Meeting
Going into the first meeting with Jordyn, she didn't have a brand identity on paper, no documented color palette, and no typography guide. What she did have was a consistent visual style across her social media templates and digital resources, which her community already recognised and associated with her. The decision to carry that through to the website rather than starting from scratch was straightforward: there was no reason to break a visual connection that 100K people already had with the brand. We formalised what she had been doing intuitively. Pulled the palette from her existing templates and used the font she had already been using for social media, and that became the foundation. Already recognisable.
She also shared inspiration sites and walked me through what she liked about each one. What came out of that conversation was a clear preference: warm, friendly, and clear. Not corporate. But also not so casual that it undersold the professionalism of the service.
Audience survey
I ran a questionnaire through Jordyn's Lemon Tree Instagram, which meant the responses came directly from people already in the Lemon Tree community. Around 127 people responded, and what came back was more interesting than I expected.
The audience was almost entirely women (97.6%), primarily between 26 and 42 years old, and based in the US or Canada. That part wasn't a surprise.
What was more interesting was the split in who these people actually were: the largest group by far were followers who were interested in Lemon Tree Literacy's work but weren't necessarily current clients. Many of them were teachers, reading specialists, literacy coaches, and educators. The second group was parents with children learning to read. Both groups mattered, but they needed different things from the website.
Within the questionnaire, I used a very simple form of card-sorting method, giving respondents options for what they wanted to find on the site and what would be interesting, as well as the category under which they would look for information. The data was very useful. When I asked what people wanted to find on the site, the top result by far was information on how the teaching works — 86.6% of respondents said yes. Information about classes and services came in strong as well. Contact information, interestingly, was a low priority — only 25.2% flagged it. That told me people weren't coming to the website to get in touch. They were coming to understand the product first.
The contact step would follow, but only if the methodology was explained clearly enough to build confidence.
User Testing
Once a version of the site was ready, I ran a user test to find out what was actually working and what wasn't. The feedback pointed to a few specific things I needed to fix.
The sign-up flow for the reading list was one of them. The button was easy to find and placed well on the homepage — the tester had no trouble locating it. But it took them to the general contact page, which, according to them, felt too broad for what they were expecting. When someone clicks "sign up for the reading list," they expect a dedicated, specific experience — not a general web form. That mismatch between expectation and reality was something I went back and looked at.
The summer packages flow had a similar issue. The package pages themselves were working, and the links were functional, but the tester felt they had to read the page title to confirm they were in the right place — the visual cues weren't strong enough. And the booking flow for packages also ended up at the general contact form, which the tester felt was impersonal for what was a specific purchase decision. These findings pointed to the same underlying issue: the contact and booking architecture needed to be more specific.
The tester also mentioned that the internal navigation links under the Services section, while technically clear as links, weren't drawing people in naturally. They were a bit small and easy to overlook. That became a layout refinement.
Overall, the feedback confirmed the design was heading in the right direction: the feel, theme, and structure were all landing well. What needed work was the specificity of certain flows.
The Thinking Behind the Work
Designing for two different audiences at once
The data made it clear early on that this wasn't a single-audience website. Educators and teachers were actually the dominant group in the community, even though the business's services are primarily for parents and kids. This meant the website had to serve both without one group feeling like an afterthought.
For parents, the priority was clarity about the service itself: what age the lessons are for, how the teaching works, what to expect from a session, and how to book. The research confirmed that the methodology was the thing people most wanted to understand, so I made sure that wasn't buried. The "how we teach" needed to sit alongside the "what we offer," not be hidden in an about page.
For educators and administrators, the consultation offering needed its own clear pathway. These visitors weren't looking to book a reading lesson; they were looking for professional support, which is a different kind of decision. Separating that journey from the parent flow made both experiences cleaner.
Building on what already existed
One of the early decisions, and one I think was the right one, was to use the visual identity Jordyn had already established on social media rather than starting over. When a business has built genuine recognition with a community, you don't throw that away. You formalise it and give it structure. Her color palette, which came directly from her social media templates and the resources she sells, was already doing the job of communicating warmth, approachability, and professionalism. My job was to bring that into a website context and make sure it translated well. Keeping the colours as accents against a clean, creamy base so the content stayed readable and the design didn't overwhelm the information.
Usability as the primary design requirement
The client's most important requirement for the design was usability, and the research backed that up. The audience was coming to understand and decide, not to admire a design. Everything needed to be findable quickly, with no hidden features, no long scroll to find basic information, and no friction at the points where someone was ready to take action.
The wireframe stage was where a lot of this got worked out. Mapping the content to the right pages, deciding what needed to be immediately visible versus what could live deeper, and making sure the navigation reflected the way people actually thought about the site (which the card sorting data helped with significantly).
The Outcome
The website gave Lemon Tree Literacy a central digital presence that her social media had been building toward without having. Parents could find the lessons, understand the methodology, and book a session. Educators could find the consultation offering. And the store gave Jordyn a place to sell her teaching resources directly, without relying on third-party platforms.
The user testing confirmed that the overall feel and structure were landing well: warm, clear, and on-brand. The areas the test identified as needing refinement (the sign-up flow, the package booking experience, the visual signposting on individual pages) gave me specific, actionable things to go back and improve rather than a vague sense that something wasn't working.