Jovinna
Jovinna Chan's Squarespace site confused the students it was meant to serve. We moved her to WordPress, rebuilt the brand and the user journey, and have kept the site current from the other side of the Pacific for five years.
Jovinna Chan now runs retreats, classes, donations and course sales from a WordPress site we built in 2021 and have cared for from Singapore ever since.
What we were solving
Jovinna Chan teaches embodiment: conscious dance, yoga, sound healing and land-based ritual. She runs retreats and workshops (Esalen among them), online classes, teacher training and a podcast from California. Her work makes spiritual practice available to people with jobs and families.
Her Squarespace site did none of that justice. It had grown without a plan and there was no clear flow through the content. The contact form often failed. Jovinna described it as feeling "dead". The new site had four jobs: be the point of contact between Jovinna and her students, carry her sales and marketing, bring in new leads and grow traffic.
The brand had to shift too. Jovinna wanted soft, simple, elegant and connected to nature, with none of the sharp elements that had crept into the old design. Her values (truthfulness, compassion, selfless service, discipline, surrender to the divine) were the brief.
How we tackled it
Get clear before building
The project started with our discovery questionnaire. Jovinna later singled it out as the part that helped her get clear on her vision and mission. From it came a content plan and writing guides for the home, about and services pages, so the words were ready before the layouts. We worked with her on positioning, imagery and branding, and trained her to run the site herself. Content went onto a WP Engine staging server and was reviewed over Zoom calls between Singapore and California.
One clear path, and the tools behind it
The design uses soft shapes and a simple flow. It presents one idea at a time and asks the visitor to do one thing: join a class, book a retreat, sign up, or give.
The build is a custom WordPress child theme with Beaver Builder. Gravity Forms replaced the failing contact form and handles workshop sign-ups. PayPal takes donations and sells Jovinna's yoga DVD. Retreat pages link to WeTravel for bookings, courses run through Teachable and Thinkific, and classes play on Vimeo. Each tool is off the shelf. Joined up, they read as one site.
The site went live on 10 June 2021, late at night California time. Jovinna's reply the next morning: "I will party tomorrow with the new web site!!!!! Thank you thank you thank you."
What we delivered
Jovinna now runs her practice on jovinna.com, with "Website by Chillybin Web Design, Singapore" in the footer. She joined our website care plan a week after go-live and has renewed every year since. An on-demand classes section followed within months, and banner and workshop updates have run through our support desk since. In 2026 we are still updating workshop pages as new Esalen programmes are announced, five years and a sixteen-hour time difference after launch.
What we learned
Discovery is a deliverable in its own right. The questionnaire did more than brief us. It gave Jovinna the language for her own work, and it is the part of the project she still mentions.
Distance is not a problem when the process is. Singapore to California is a sixteen-hour gap. Staging links, written feedback rounds and a handful of well-timed calls carried the build, and the same rhythm has carried five years of care since.
