DIY Squid
From Reno Chaos to a Blog With Serious Personality: The DIY Squid Transformation
Sydney, aka Squidney, wasn’t short on personality. Six renovated houses, a mother-daughter win on HGTV’s Battle on the Beach, and an audience who shows up for the mess as much as the makeover, she’d built a brand people genuinely love. But her website wasn’t quite keeping up with her.
Our goal? Build a blog that feels as fun, warm and slightly chaotic as Sydney herself, without losing an ounce of the SEO strength her content deserves. Here’s how we did it.
The Challenge: A Blog That Undersold the Fun
Sydney had the content, the community, and a national TV credit to her name. What she needed was:
- A site that didn’t default to the beige, stiff “lifestyle blog” template
- A design personality-forward enough to match her humour and her floral, hands-on aesthetic
- Imagery that felt like her, not stock photography
- A build with proper room to grow, so it could stretch and change shape as her content does
Just like a fixer-upper with great bones, there was a lot of potential here. We just needed to let it out.
Aesthetic & Branding: A Little Bit of Mischief, Everywhere
We leaned straight into her fun, hands-on brand and let it actually move. Flower animations thread through the site rather than sitting there as static decoration, her squid logo gets its own little dance, and a handful of silly, unexpected touches sit throughout the page. Scrolling feels alive rather than like scrolling through a brochure.
The imagery got the same treatment. Instead of boxy, cropped photos, we hand-outlined her cutout images, pulling Sydney and her projects out of their backgrounds so they sit on the page like stickers rather than stock shots. It’s a small detail, but it does a huge amount of the personality-carrying, and it pulls straight through from her social content, so the whole brand feels joined-up.
Website Design: Built to Grow With Her
The site was built on a custom Showit and WordPress blog, giving Sydney a design that’s as flexible as her content calendar. As DIY Squid grows, whether that’s more brand partnerships, more video content, or a whole new category of tutorials, the site can expand and shift with her rather than needing a rebuild every time her audience or ambitions grow.
The Result
A blog that reads like Sydney talks: funny, a bit chaotic, but genuinely useful. It gives her the credibility badge of a national HGTV win without ever tipping into corporate, and it gives her readers a site that matches the “messy buns and crooked shelves” energy she’s built her whole following on.
You can check out her site here: diysquid.com