Eleanor Dove 🍂

ɪɪ. ᴡʜᴀᴛ ᴀ ᴡᴇʙꜱɪᴛᴇ ᴀᴄᴛᴜᴀʟʟʏ ɪꜱ

Let us be precise about this, because precision helps. A website is, at its most fundamental, a set of files that live on a server and can be accessed through a browser. A domain is the address you purchase to make that server findable the difference between a house and a house with a street address. Hosting is the land the house sits on. These are not metaphors. They are the literal infrastructure of having a presence online that belongs to you.

But a website is also something more than its infrastructure. It is the answer to the question: what do I want someone to experience when they come here? That experiential design what you put on the page, how you organize it, what you invite people to do is the part that takes not hours but months, sometimes years, to get right. And getting it right is not a one-time event. It is an ongoing process of paying attention to what is working, what is not, and who is showing up.

A website has pages. A home page, which functions like a first impression, the thing someone sees in the first three seconds that determines whether they stay or go. An about page, which is quietly the most important page on any personal or creative website because people need to know who they are dealing with before they trust you with their time or their money. A blog or writing archive, if you are a writer. A shop, if you are selling something. A portfolio, if you are showing work. Every page has a purpose, and the navigation between them should feel intuitive, like moving through a space that was designed with the visitor in mind.

"Your website is the only place on the internet where you write all the rules. That is terrifying. It is also exactly the point."

Maintaining a website is a different kind of work than building one. Building is a sprint: intense, creative, full of decisions. Maintaining is a marathon. It is writing regularly enough that people have a reason to return. It is updating your shop inventory so it reflects what you actually have. It is checking that your links still work, that your pages still load quickly, that the thing someone loved six months ago is still there and still good. Maintenance is the part of website ownership that nobody romanticizes and everybody underestimates.

ɪɪɪ. ᴛʜᴇ ʀᴇᴀʟ ᴇᴄᴏɴᴏᴍɪᴄꜱ ᴏꜰ ɪᴛ

Here is what it costs, honestly. A domain name runs somewhere between the price of a coffee and the price of a nice lunch, per year, depending on the extension and the registrar. Hosting, the server space where your files actually live, varies enormously. Shared hosting is cheap and fine when you are starting out. As you grow, you may want something faster, something that can handle more traffic without slowing down. That costs more.

Then there is the design. If you are using a website builder: Squarespace, Wix, Showit, WordPress with a theme, you are paying for convenience, which is a legitimate and reasonable thing to pay for. If you want something more custom, you are either learning to build it yourself, which has a time cost, or hiring someone to help, which has a money cost. Neither option is wrong. They are just different bets about where your resources are.

But the real economics of a website are not about the domain or the hosting or even the design. They are about the attention economy the invisible ledger of time and trust that determines whether the people who find you keep showing up. And that ledger is built slowly, through consistency, through giving people something they actually want, through being the kind of presence online that makes someone think: yes, I want more of this.

That is not free. It costs you time. It costs you the discipline to write when you do not feel like it and to post when the timing is inconvenient and to keep going when the numbers feel too small to justify the effort. The financial investment in a website is the easy part. The investment of sustained creative attention over months and years, that is the real price of building something that lasts.

ɪᴠ. ᴀᴜᴅɪᴇɴᴄᴇ, ʟᴏʏᴀʟᴛʏ, ᴛʀᴜꜱᴛ

There is a version of this essay where I tell you that if you build it, they will come. I am not going to tell you that, because it is not true, and you deserve better than comforting fiction.

Audience does not migrate automatically. When you build a website and announce it on a platform, some percentage of your existing audience will follow. Some will not, not because they do not like you, but because the friction of going somewhere new is real, and people are busy, and habits are sticky. The ones who follow you are the beginning of something important: they are demonstrating loyalty. They are saying, with their click, that you matter enough to seek out.

Loyalty, in the context of a website and a creative brand, is built through three things: consistency, which means showing up regularly enough that people can count on you; quality, which means giving people something genuinely worth their time when you do show up; and trust, which is the accumulation of both of those things over long enough that someone stops questioning whether you will deliver and simply expects that you will.

"Brand loyalty sounds like a marketing term. It is actually just a relationship built the same way all relationships are built, through showing up."

Brand loyalty is a term that gets used a lot in marketing and means something slightly different in every context. For a small creative website, it means this: the reader who has your tab bookmarked. The customer who checks your shop every time you announce new stock. The subscriber who reads every post not because the algorithm pushed it to them but because they have decided, consciously, that your voice is one they want in their life. That kind of loyalty is slow to earn and hard to lose once you have it. It is also the only kind worth building toward.

A young brand, which is what this is, honestly, should not rush that process. The goal right now is not to have a thousand loyal readers. It is to write well enough and consistently enough that the readers who do find you have a reason to stay. The scale takes care of itself, eventually, if the foundation is solid.

ᴠ. ᴡʜᴀᴛ @ᴊᴜꜱᴛʟɪꜰᴇᴡᴇʟʟᴇ ɪꜱ ʙᴇᴄᴏᴍɪɴɢ

@justlifewelle is getting a real home.

I am building a dedicated website for Eleanor Dove a proper space for everything that lives here: the blog, the moodboards, the shop, the wallpapers. All of it, together, in a place that I actually control.

For readers who want to go deeper, there will be a paid subscription tier: blog drafts, the behind-the-scenes of how posts come together, and hand-drawn wallpapers that will not be available anywhere else. If you run a small business, there will be an affiliate marketing option too.

The spam flagging on this platform has been a headache lately, and honestly, it accelerated this plan. I want a space I can count on and I want you to have a better experience reading here. That is the goal. This is not a goodbye. It is an expansion.

This is what I mean when I say a website is an architecture. What I am building is not just a new URL. It is a consolidation a single place where all the different things that live in different corners of this platform can exist together, legibly, in a form that makes sense to someone who is encountering this brand for the first time.

The blog is the heart of it. That has always been true. Writing is the thing I come back to, the thing I do even when I am not sure anyone is reading, the thing that feels most essentially mine. But a website lets the blog sit alongside everything else; the visual work, the shop, the collaborative relationships with small businesses in a way that a Tumblr archive never quite can. It lets the whole picture come into focus.

The paid subscription tier is an interesting thing to think about, because it changes the relationship between writer and reader in a small but significant way. It introduces an exchange that is more explicit than the one that exists when reading is free: I am giving you something specific and valuable, and you are choosing to pay for it because you trust that it is worth your money. That kind of trust is not demanded. It is earned, over time, through all the free work that came before it. The behind-the-scenes content: the drafts, the process, the timeline of how a post comes together. It is an invitation to understand how this works, which is its own kind of intimacy.

ᴠɪ. ᴡʜʏ ᴛʜɪꜱ, ᴡʜʏ ɴᴏᴡ

Someone will ask why now. Why not wait until the audience is bigger, the brand more established, the bank account more comfortable with the investment? It is a fair question and the honest answer is: because waiting for readiness is a form of avoidance dressed up in practical language.

There is never a perfect time to build something. There is only the time when you decide that the thing you are building toward matters enough to start, imperfectly, with what you have. I have seen the neuroscience of vision boards he way that articulating what you want primes your brain to move toward it and I believe in the principle even outside the literal practice of making a board. You write toward what you want. You build toward what you want. You make the decision, publicly and on the record, that this is where you are going, and then you go.

This blog has always been, in some sense, written on dreams. That is not a weakness. It is a strategy. The life I am writing about the, one that is worth sharing, the one that someone else is quietly dreaming about too, is being built in real time, and the writing is both the documentation and the doing. The website is the next chapter of that. It is the decision to stop existing in borrowed space and start building something that is, genuinely and durably, mine.

If you are reading this on Tumblr, thank you. Truly. This platform gave me something real: an audience, a habit, a reason to write consistently and I am not leaving it behind. But I am building something alongside it that is going to be better, more complete, and entirely on my own terms. And I hope you will come with me when it is ready.