Leonie Marsh
Edits like a gardener: prune hard, water daily. Writes the sharpest 404s in the southern hemisphere.
- Role
- Content Lead
- Based
- Hobart
- In the journal
- 43 articles · 7 case studies
Verdigris Archive: 80,000 botanical plates, searchable in a blink
A botanical museum put 80,000 plates online with fast faceted search, a deep-zoom viewer and public-domain downloads. Search success rose 63%.
Quillon Games — a community platform for a two-studio indie label
A two-studio indie label trades a scattered Discord for a community hub: patch notes that rank, roadmap voting, and a moderated fan-creation gallery.
Fernway College: admissions journeys without the paper cuts
One editorial platform for a school's admissions, alumni and news — with an enrolment journey that saves progress and a CMS the comms team actually runs.
Willow & Wren: the bookshop site that reads like a bookseller
An independent Tasmanian bookshop went online without going generic: shelf-talkers as a content model, honest stock states and a newsletter that outsells the algorithm.
Copperline Mutual: a community bank that sounds human
How a voice overhaul and an accessibility-first platform rebuild helped a fictional mutual bank turn plain language into its sharpest competitive edge.
Sundial Travel: slow travel, planned properly
How we rebuilt a slow-travel planner's booking flow around honest pricing and itinerary craft — and why moodboards beat search boxes for dreaming customers.
Easement Legal: a law firm site without the mahogany
A community legal centre replaced mahogany-and-gavel clichés with a plain-language service finder, honest fee tables and interpreter-first design.
Editorial copilots that don't flatten the voice
Editorial copilots should sharpen a voice, not flatten it: drafting vs polishing modes, house-style injection, fact hygiene and honest review flows.
Citation design: showing the AI's working
Citations are how AI answers earn belief. Inline sources, confidence without fake precision, expandable evidence, link rot, and how provenance UI measurably builds trust.
Founder-led content when the founder has forty minutes a week
A realistic operating model for founder content: capturing raw material in minutes, ghostwriting that keeps the voice, cadence math, and honest measurement.
Shipping 'sometimes wrong': communicating AI features
Launch copy for features that are sometimes wrong: setting accuracy expectations, changelog phrasing, support macros, and the trust maths of underpromising deliberately.
Content pruning: the unglamorous SEO lever
Dead-weight URLs drag the whole site down. How we audit, decide merge-redirect-delete, protect traffic through the change, and monitor the next 90 days.
The trademark reality check your naming process needs
The thousand-name funnel from brainstorm to survivor: linguistic screens, trademark classes, domain compromise positions, app-store collisions, graceful exits.
Announcements inside the product, minus the noise
In-product announcements without banner blindness: an announcements centre, targeting by behaviour instead of blast radius, and expiry rules that stay honest.
Review your content like a portfolio
A quarterly content benchmarking ritual: sort every article into winners, flatliners and sleepers, then give each piece one of three decisions — prune, refresh or expand.
Voice-of-customer mining for pages that convert
Mining sales calls and research notes for conversion copy: consent, tooling, tagging pains vs goals, verbatim headlines, and feeding it back into tests.
Employer brand: write the job ad your team would share
Employer brand isn't a perks page — it's the gap between the hiring story and the studio floor. Write job ads your own team would forward, with receipts.
HTML emails in 2026: engineering for a hostile medium
Table layouts without despair, the dark-mode inversion lottery, bulletproof buttons, image-off rendering, and a testing matrix a small team can actually run.
Podcast growth: show notes, transcripts and episode pages that rank
Turn a podcast into a search asset: episode pages with real titles, full transcripts, chapter markers, guest cross-links, and a distribution loop without paid.
Brand is the small moments: gestures worth systemising
Your brand lives in invoice footers, app icons and 404 pages more than in any campaign. A gesture audit method, what to polish, and the upkeep cost of whimsy.
Employer brand: your careers page is a brand page
Your careers page is the most-read brand page nobody designed. Photography policy, salary transparency, voice parity, and the metrics that prove it works.
Growing a newsletter without becoming a growth-goblin
Newsletter growth the honest way: sign-up pages that convert without tricks, welcome sequences, referral mechanics, list hygiene and metrics that don't lie.
Related-content modules that readers actually use
Most 'related articles' modules are decoration. Here's how we design, rank and measure recommendation modules that readers genuinely click — and when to delete them.
PDP design: the page that pays for everything
Product detail page anatomy for conversion: image sequence logic, buy-box hierarchy, review integration, delivery honesty, and mobile-thumb ergonomics that matter.
Pricing pages that convert quietly
A pricing page is a sales conversation at maximum scepticism. How anchoring, plan naming, honest toggles and well-placed proof sell without shouting.
Running a content model workshop before the design starts
A two-hour workshop format that produces a real CMS content model — index cards, cardinality questions, naming rules — before anyone draws a single page.
404 pages with personality (that still get people home)
A 404 has three jobs: orient, recover, charm — in that order. The anatomy of an error page that rescues sessions, and how to measure whether yours works.
Brand voice in the bad moments: errors, churn and apologies
Brands break character exactly when character matters. Voice principles for error states, downtime, price rises, cancellations and apologies that aren't theatre.
Brand voice that survives the handover: writing guidelines people use
Most voice guidelines die at handover to a busy marketing team. The fix: decide who's protecting the voice, write for the rushed reader, and test in 15 minutes.
Newsletters as a growth engine, not an afterthought
The newsletter is the only growth asset you own outright. How to design the promise, architect the issue, build referral loops, and do the cadence math honestly.
Information architecture for marketing sites: the growth lever in plain sight
IA decides what buyers find, what search engines index and what survives a redesign. The nav-to-journey map, the three-level ceiling and URLs that outlive themes.
AI and brand voice: keeping the robot on-script
Models drift toward LinkedIn-speak. How we write voice specs machines can follow — exemplars, register maps, persona rules — and test them with real readers.
Cookie banners: an honest design guide
Consent banners are the most-seen, least-designed UI on the web. Dark patterns, layered consent UX, CMP performance costs, and compliance that converts.
Upgrade prompts that don't feel like ransom notes
In-product upsell timing and tone: moments of demonstrated value, honest limit nudges, the dismissed-state contract, and measurement that doesn't lie to you.
Content clusters that compound: planning in public
How we build topic clusters that compound: pillar economics, keyword-to-intent mapping, link graphs, refresh cadence, and the planning spreadsheet we use.
Your error pages are a system: design them like one
404s, 500s, offline and maintenance states are one family with one voice. Design them together, give each a real recovery path, and log what users hit.
Content ops: the editorial calendar that survives contact
Editorial operations for small teams: ideation-to-publish SLAs, briefs that prevent rewrites, refresh loops, and the capacity math that keeps quality non-negotiable.
Conversion copywriting: clarity beats clever
Copy is the cheapest conversion lever you own. How to build a message hierarchy from customer research, map objections, and test copy without twelve variants.
Your search box is a research department
Nobody lies to a search box. Mining internal site search — zero-results reviews, synonym dictionaries, query taxonomy — into a content roadmap that compounds.
Naming features and tiers: clarity beats poetry at checkout
Feature names and pricing tiers live in the hardest-working UI you own. Rules for naming what your product does so users buy faster and support sighs less.
Help at the point of need
The user manual nobody opens, the tooltip that shouldn't exist, and how to design help that arrives where the question does — and gets out of the way.
When the founder IS the brand (and when to stop)
Founder-led brands convert brilliantly and scale terribly. How to harvest founder voice into systems, manage the handover, and spot personality gone toxic.
Voice charts: making tone teachable
Adjective lists don't teach tone; charts do. How we build voice guidelines that survive handover: axis sliders, rewrite tables, error-state voice and real-copy audits.
Reviews that earn trust instead of renting it
A five-star wall of praise converts nobody. Review systems earn trust via solicitation timing, proud 3-stars and merchant replies that de-escalate.
Content handover: getting real words before design ends
Lorem ipsum is a launch delay in a fake moustache. The workflow we run: working inventories, voice alignment, reviews that don't sprawl, and editor-phase checks.
Naming: our field guide from brainstorm to trademark check
Naming is a funnel, not a lightning strike. Our studio workflow: brief axes, generation volumes, screening and pronunciation tests, and committee-proof presentations.
Keeping AI output on-brand: voice guardrails that hold
Brand voice survives generation only if it's engineered: voice charts as prompts, example banks, style evals, review lanes, and a graceful drift fallback.
The cart is a negotiation, not a spreadsheet
Cart UX that closes: drawer vs page economics, threshold cues done honestly, gift and quantity design, save-for-later rituals, and mobile-first cart anatomy.
Onboarding that activates: patterns we keep, patterns we've banned
Activation-focused onboarding: value-first flows, honest commitment devices, the checklist patterns that still work, and the seven anti-patterns we refuse to ship.
The footer is a sitemap with manners
Footers are the most neglected designed surface on the web. A taxonomy of trustworthy footer patterns — navigation, reassurance, colophons — and what each one earns.