My website redesign journey: 3 months, pain, lessons

I hope you had a great week and that your weekend is off to a good start. 😊

Last week, I sent you a pretty detailed breakdown of the AI SEO workflows I’ve been testing with Writesonic.

On the bright side, their team seems to have fixed the issue with the GEO feature constantly loading. I can finally test their AI search visibility tool after waiting for two weeks. 🎉

With my subscription ending soon, I still have a lot to test. More updates coming soon, so stay tuned. 😉

This time, I want to share why I spent so much energy redesigning my website and why I started this project at the end of 2025.

You’ll also learn:

I’m writing this after almost three months of working on my website revamp. The plan was to finish everything by the end of December 2025.

And here I am at the end of January, still fixing big and small website issues. 😅

At least my new website is live, and I’m genuinely grateful for that. 🙏

Now, let me explain why I did this in the first place.

When I launched my website back in July 2021, I had no clear idea what it was for.

I just knew I wanted a website. I also wanted to experiment with content and SEO.
I was really interested in writing side hustles, which is probably why my first posts were about my early and very messy attempts to make money online. 😬

Over the years, my writing improved, and so did the value of my content.

In early 2024, I started noticing some traffic coming in. I decided to monetize it with affiliate links.

No fancy design.

No clear message.

Just a cheap WordPress theme and honest thoughts from an SEO, content writer, and hustler.

My website was my creative space on the internet. I didn’t have big business goals for it at the time.

I wanted to write and earn a decent income, ideally passive, but I had no real plan for how to get there.

To my absolute surprise, the site made $8.8k in 2024. 🤯 I never imagined this was even possible.

I still remember sitting in the basement in January 2025, thinking about what to do next.
Back then, I had no idea this same website would triple the earnings in 2025!

So in January 2025, I created a very simple SEO content strategy.

The goal for Q1 and Q2 was straightforward. Increase the number of money pages on my site.

That was it.

I wanted to see if all the effort I put into writing high-quality, human content would actually pay off.

And it did. 🙌

In August 2025, the website made $4,199.25, followed by September 2025, the best-performing month with $8,102.18.

Once the site started making consistent income every month, I decided it earned more attention.

That’s when I chose to invest time, money, and energy into improving the user experience and design.

In a way, the Self Made Millennials website earned the right to look better.

If you’re wondering whether it’s worth investing money into a redesign, and a good one is not cheap, make sure you have strong reasons.

Ask yourself:

If the answer is yes, go for it.

If the answer is no, don’t do it. A redesign is a huge project that drains time and energy. That energy is often better spent elsewhere.

The hardest part is not knowing how you want your website to change.

That’s exactly how I felt in October 2025.

I knew I wanted improvements, both visually and structurally, but I had no idea where to start.

At the time, I thought about hiring a professional designer to explore UI ideas and logo concepts.

The problem was simple. I didn’t know how to explain what I wanted.

Hiring a designer is expensive, and it’s a great investment when you know what you’re asking for.

But what if you’re completely lost and only know that things need to be better?

That’s when I turned to AI. 🤖

I used an AI image generation tool to create hundreds of logo ideas. I picked one I liked, and it’s now live on my site.

I didn’t pay anything. Just a free trial and AI doing the heavy lifting.

The same tool helped turn my photos into images that look much more professional.

Figma AI helped me generate dozens of homepage designs in minutes.
I actually liked one, and it’s now part of my website.

If you don’t know where to start, Figma AI is a great way to turn ideas into quick drafts.

I did use Figma to generate designs, but I made a big mistake.

I didn’t realize my developers needed an editable Figma file with consistent design elements across the site pages.

Yes, shame on me, especially after almost three years at a UX design agency. 🙈

Even though I later figured out how to turn AI drafts into editable Figma files, everything was inconsistent.

Fonts, margins, padding, styles, layouts. None of it matched properly.

I spent days trying to align designs across pages, and it still wasn’t perfect.

I clearly remember wasting hours editing designs and asking myself why I didn’t hire a professional from the start.

I’m glad my vision made it onto every page, but I never want to go through this stressful process alone again.

I could have hired a designer after creating AI drafts in Figma and avoided most of these problems.

I would have saved hours and used that time for what I enjoy most, SEO writing. ✍️

Instead, I went through a long trial-and-error process. I gained knowledge and experience, but it cost me a lot of time.

If I had to do it again, I’d do this:

Create mockups with AI and then hire a professional designer before passing everything to a developer.

That would let me focus on my full-time job and my website, which honestly feels like another full-time job.

Every productive hour matters.

Use it wisely and don’t waste it on shallow work.

When working with a developer, don’t settle for less. Never! You deserve a clean and professional implementation.

Communicate clearly and politely, and expect the same in return. That’s the base of a strong working relationship.

I hope you learned something useful from my story and experience. 😊

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💰 My website earned $45,455.28 in 2025, to be precise — all from affiliate commissions, with zero brand partnerships.

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That’s all for now! Thanks for reading and being part of this journey — your support means the world. 💙

Victoria