From "just a yoga teacher" to sold-out yoga retreats in 48 hours!
How Bella Maldener finally got a website that matched the business she’d built
Where she was
Bella had been teaching yoga in London since 2018 but her journey started long before that. She'd lived on a tiny island in Indonesia, survived an earthquake, retrained in Reiki, discovered sound healing, started running retreats to South Africa and Finland and built a quiet but genuinely devoted community around her.
On paper, she was running several things at once; yoga classes, Reiki sessions, sound healing, retreats abroad, and a coaching membership for self-employed women in wellness called SheCReality. In practice, none of it had a home that made sense.
Her website was on Wix, and she was keen to move away from the platform and create something new. She was still introducing herself as a yoga teacher in conversations where she was clearly so much more than that. Every time someone asked for her link there was that familiar hesitation because she knew what they'd find didn't match what she'd actually built.
She came to me about to turn 40, stepping into what she described as a new era and wanting the outside to finally catch up with the inside.
What we worked on
The first thing we had to do was make sense of everything she offered. Not strip it back, but find the thread that ran through all of it. Because there was one. Bella's work, whether she's teaching a yoga class on a city farm, holding space in a Reiki session, or leading a retreat in the Finnish wilderness, is all about the same thing: helping people feel more alive, more connected, more themselves.
Once that was clear, everything else followed.
We moved her off Wix entirely so there was no more tech fighting back, no more inaccessible pages and built her a brand new Squarespace site in a week. Something that could hold all of it. Warm, grounded, joyful. The kind of site that makes you feel something the moment you land on it.
Where she is now
She sold out a retreat in 48 hours of launching!
A beautiful, high-demand retreat venue in Italy looked at her new website and reached out to say they'd love to work with her.
She started receiving enquiry forms from complete strangers — people who found her through search, not through anyone she already knew.
And this, from her Google review, says it better than I could:
"I don't stop showing off my new page to anyone. It really feels like I am running a professional business and it gave me a boost of confidence too. She has captured my essence and the voice of my business so well."
And then a few weeks later, a message from Italy:
"Your webpage has, AGAIN, done me such a big favour. I inquired with a very beautiful and in-high-demand retreat centre and they said: 'we had a look at your webpage and would love to work with you too.'"
That's the bit that gets me every time. Not the pretty logo. Not even the sold-out retreat. It's the retreat venue looking at her website and thinking — yes, she's one of us.
What actually changed
Bella didn't suddenly become more talented or more experienced when her website launched. She was already all of that. What changed is that the outside finally matched the inside and the right people could see it.
That's what a brand and website is supposed to do. Not make you look like someone you're not. Make you look exactly like who you already are.
If you're sitting on years of experience and a business that works, but your online presence is making you introduce yourself with an apology - it might be time for an upgrade!
