Vandana Bhasin: a writer and artist's website, rebuilt so words and colours get equal weight

Where they started

Vandana Bhasin is a writer, author, editor, artist and life coach. She has written three books (Sabr Shukr Sukoon, The Gift of Self and Roads), her writing appears in more than three dozen anthologies, and she works across ten art forms, from mandala and Madhubani to acrylic and coffee painting.

Her old site, versesandhues.com, had grown around a shop. She came with a clear brief: a site where her writing and her art carry equal weight, and where she can keep publishing on her own without calling a developer.

What was wrong with the old site

The home page led with a portfolio slider and a "Shop my artworks" call to action, and her blog sat in a small block underneath. Her writing, which is half of who she is, came second.

Under the hood it was a ThemeForest theme with WPBakery, Slider Revolution and WooCommerce, plus a live chat widget. All of it loaded on every page, including a page that was only a poem, so a reader waited on a shop to read a verse. When I measured the old site at the start, it took about 7.9 seconds to load and ran 72 script tags. The new home page carries 13.

The shop was the other mismatch. Vandana decided it should go, and each artwork now ends in a WhatsApp enquiry instead. That left the cart, checkout and payment plugins with nothing to do.

How I approached it

I set four rules at the start. Equal weight: writing and art get the same space on the home page, in the menu and in the links between pages. Keep her links: every post keeps the same page address, and only the domain changes. Keep it light: no slider plugins and no page builder laying out the pages, only hand-coded pages and one shared stylesheet. Keep her in control: the blog stays on WordPress's own templates, so she can publish without touching any code.

Rather than re-upload anything, I copied the existing site to the new domain. That carried every post and the whole media library across in one move. Then I removed WPBakery, Slider Revolution and WooCommerce, and rebuilt every page by hand on top.

She already owned a Divi licence, so Divi holds only the header, footer and blog templates. Every page's design is plain HTML and CSS that I wrote.

The look is a deep rose ground, khadi cream and a turmeric gold, built around a full-width photograph of her drawing at her table, with a line of her own verse laid over it.

What we built

The home page opens on that photograph and her verse, with two buttons of equal weight: "Read my verses" and "See the artwork". Below it the page alternates between her two strands on purpose: a slider of her mandala work, her writing, the gallery, then her services. The one slider she asked for is hand-written, with no library behind it.

My Books gives each title its cover, a short description and a toggle for the full text, and lists her anthology work beneath the three books.

The Gallery shows 48 works across ten art forms, with a filter for each form. There is no cart and no checkout. Tap the WhatsApp mark on any piece and the message reaches her with that artwork's name already in it.

Services lists what she offers (copyediting, content writing, customised artworks and book cover design), and Accolades presents her certificates and awards as a clean set of cards.

Her blog is still hers. It runs on WordPress's own templates, and her latest posts appear on the home page on their own.

Most of her readers will find her on a phone, so every page was built to hold up on a small screen. This is the same site on a phone: the home page, the Gallery with its filters, and My Books.

The result

I ran Google's PageSpeed Insights on the home page on 7 October 2026. On mobile it scored 92 for performance, 94 for accessibility, 100 for best practices and 92 for SEO. On desktop it scored 94, 94, 100 and 92.

What it took

The main build took about six weeks, from 12 August to 22 September 2026. It is built on WordPress, and it was priced at ₹19,200: our Business Website package at ₹23,999, less the 20% we give artists, writers and other creators.

Two rounds of her feedback shaped the details: eight items on 7 September and nineteen on 15 September, covering things like cover crops, the wording on the book pages, and a new bio and portrait. I worked through every item in each round.

The hardest part was not the design. WordPress's editor quietly rewrites pasted HTML, so I had to find a paste method that left each page exactly as designed, and write it down so that she, or anyone after me, can repeat it.

You can see the result at vandanabhasin.in.