Komal Gupta: a poet's website, rebuilt so her work comes first

Where they started

Komal Gupta is an award-winning poet and writer who publishes under the pen name tejaswiniaura. She has two poetry collections, founded Papyri Connect (a platform for poetry, wellbeing and cultural engagement), makes asemic art, and received the Lifetime Achievement Award from Pathways to Peace in 2025.

Her website was meant to hold all of that together. It wasn't. She came to me with a simple brief: a better look, and better navigation for her readers.

What was wrong with the old site

The menu had thirteen items spread across three rows, and several were long phrases like "The Lifetime Achievement Award by Pathways to Peace". A first-time visitor had no obvious place to start.

The home page opened on the word "Home" and a carousel of cropped images, and the same posts then repeated in a grid further down. Nothing said who she was or what to do next. Services were four photo tiles with no explanation, and the Awards page was a long bulleted list. The site felt older than the work it was showcasing.

How I approached it

I set three rules at the start. Keep her voice: her words stay hers, and where a page needed to be shorter I excerpted her own text instead of rewriting it. Keep her links: no page changed address, so nothing she had shared over the years would break. Keep it light: I replaced the old theme's builder markup with hand-coded pages and one shared stylesheet, with no sliders, and videos that only load when someone presses play.

Everything was built and tested on a private copy of the live site first, and the old site stayed up until each page was ready.

Her first reaction to an early design was that it was too big, too long and not joyful enough. I took that seriously and rebuilt the design from scratch around a warm marigold and teal palette, which she chose herself.

What we built

The home page now opens with Komal's own welcome and a portrait, then moves through short sections that each fit on one screen: four doorways into the site, her books, her art, Papyri Connect and her awards. The menu is down to eight items on a single row.

My Books gives each title its cover, a short description, the key facts and a direct link to buy it.

Services went from stock photos with a word on them to clear, colour-coded tiles, followed by the organisations she has worked with.

The About page and the Papyri Connect page were rewritten into short, readable sections, with the community links and her story video near the top of Papyri Connect, as she asked.

Awards became a grid of cards, led by the Lifetime Achievement Award, instead of a single long list.

Her asemic art now has a page of its own, The Art Odyssey, with pinned prints and a video.

The contact page now reveals her email address with a click, which keeps it away from spam scrapers. Every page was checked on phone, tablet, laptop and wide screens, and every colour pairing was tested for readability.

What it took

The project was live in three weeks. It was built on WordPress, hosted on Hostinger, and priced at ₹19,200: our Business Website package at ₹23,999, less the 20% we give artists, writers and other creators.

The hardest part was not the build. It was starting the design over after her first feedback, and the result is much closer to what she wanted. The theme's own styles also kept overriding mine in small ways, and I fixed each one at the source instead of patching around it. New material, including a fresh intro, a new portrait and new videos, kept arriving during the build, and none of it delayed the launch.

You can see the result at papyruswanderer.com.