Case Studies

The reasoning behind the work, not just the screenshots.

Most agency work pages are a wall of thumbnails. That tells you a project exists, but it tells you nothing about whether the thinking behind it would transfer to your business.

These breakdowns cover the brief, the page architecture, the search structure, and the design decisions behind five live StillAwake Media projects across travel, digital product, finance, AI software, and outdoor retail. If you want to click through the sites themselves, the interactive portfolio opens each one in a live preview.

Start a Project →See Services →

Website · Brand · Lead Generation

Lisa Travel Design

lisatraveldesign.com →

The brief. A travel designer selling bespoke itineraries needed a site that read as premium before a single price was mentioned, and that turned interest into a qualified inquiry rather than a generic contact form fill.

Positioning before layout

Travel planning is sold on trust. The page order was built to establish credibility first — who plans the trip, how the process works, what the client actually receives — before asking for anything. Pricing pressure gets deferred until the value is legible.

Lead-focused page structure

Rather than a single catch-all contact page, the inquiry path is threaded through the journey: destination context, planning process, then a structured inquiry that captures trip type and timing so the first reply can already be useful.

Mobile-first brand experience

Travel research happens on phones. Type scale, image cropping, and section rhythm were designed at mobile width first and expanded upward, so the premium feel survives the screen most visitors actually use.

Digital Product · Website · UX

Navtrl

navtrl.com →

The brief. A digital product that needed to be understood in seconds. The risk with product sites is explaining the mechanism before the visitor knows why they should care.

Product-style landing structure

One idea per section, in the order a new visitor forms questions: what is it, who is it for, what does it do, what happens next. No section carries two jobs.

Clean interface direction

The visual language borrows from the product itself, so the marketing site and the thing being marketed feel continuous. Restraint does more work here than decoration.

Fast visual scanning

Short line lengths, high-contrast headings, and generous spacing let someone extract the value proposition without reading in full — which is what most first-time visitors actually do.

SEO Platform · Content Architecture · Tools

BankDeMark

bankdemark.com →

The brief. A finance content platform competing in one of the most authority-dense niches on the web. Publishing more articles was never going to be enough on its own.

Calculator-first SEO architecture

Calculators answer a query completely and give people a reason to stay and return. They anchor each topic cluster, and the supporting articles explain the numbers the calculator produces.

Finance content structure

Content is organised by search intent rather than by category convenience — one page owns one question, so pages support each other instead of competing for the same result.

Internal linking system

Links run deliberately between tools and explanations in both directions, so authority concentrates on the pages meant to rank rather than leaking evenly across the site.

AI Software Brand · Positioning · Identity

Zylx AI

zylx.ai →

The brief. An AI software brand covering workflow systems, agents, and automation — a category where nearly every competitor sounds identical and the language is exhausted.

AI product positioning

The messaging is anchored to the operator's job rather than the model behind it. What the software removes from someone's week is more persuasive than the technology powering it.

Software brand system

A visual system built to stretch across a product surface, marketing pages, and documentation without being rebuilt each time — components and type scale defined once.

Workflow-focused messaging

Copy describes concrete workflows instead of abstract capability, so a visitor can place themselves in the product immediately.

Outdoor Brand · Editorial · Website

Northground Bushcraft

northgroundbushcraft.com →

The brief. An outdoor and bushcraft brand where credibility is everything. In this audience, a site that looks like a generic template reads as inexperience.

Outdoor identity direction

Palette, texture, and type were drawn from field equipment rather than software design trends, so the brand feels like it belongs to the environment it talks about.

Editorial brand feel

The layout is built for long-form field content, because in this niche depth of knowledge is the trust signal — and long-form content is also what earns search visibility.

Trust-building layout

Experience, method, and practical detail are surfaced early rather than buried under brand statements.

What Stays Constant

Five things every build gets, regardless of industry.

The industries above have nothing in common. The underlying system does. These are the decisions that carry from a travel site to a finance platform to an AI software brand.

01

Search intent is decided before design

Every page gets one job and one primary query before a layout exists. This is what prevents two pages on the same site from competing for the same result later.

02

Custom code, not page builders

Builds ship as custom-coded sites so page weight, markup structure, and Core Web Vitals stay under our control instead of being dictated by a plugin stack.

03

Internal linking is designed, not incidental

Links between pages are planned as an architecture so authority flows toward the pages that are supposed to rank.

04

Technical SEO is part of the build

Metadata, canonical tags, schema, sitemap structure, and crawlability are implemented during the build rather than retrofitted after launch.

05

The conversion path is explicit

Every page has a defined next step. Traffic that has nowhere to go is a cost, not an asset.

Questions

Common questions about this work.

What is the difference between this page and the portfolio?

This page explains the reasoning behind each build — the brief, the page architecture, and the structural decisions. The portfolio is the interactive showcase where you can preview each live site directly.

Do you work with businesses outside Montreal?

Yes. StillAwake Media is based in Montreal and works with clients across Canada and internationally. The projects covered here span travel, finance, software, ecommerce, and outdoor brands.

How long does a typical project take?

It depends on scope. A focused service or landing page build moves quickly; a full site with an SEO content architecture, brand system, and custom components takes longer because the structure is planned before anything is designed.

Do you rebuild existing websites or only build new ones?

Both. Redesigns need more care, because rankings and existing URLs have to be preserved through the migration rather than reset by it.

Go deeper on the strategy.

The reasoning in these builds is written up in more detail across StillAwake Times, including technical SEO, why custom-coded sites outperform templates, and how to redesign a site without destroying its rankings.

Metric-Driven Case Studies

TravelDesign By Lisa

0 organic clicks to page 1 in 8 weeks — sourced and dated.

Read the numbers →

BankDeMark

#1 Google positions with a perfect 100/100/100 Lighthouse.

Read the numbers →

NAVTRL / Stalkr

A real-time location app built to beta in 24 days.

Read the numbers →

Blackwater Aquatics

Education-led Shopify: an 8.6% CTR product page and 27.8% repeat customers.

Read the numbers →

Hire the services behind this work.

Web Design MontréalShopify DevelopmentSEO MontréalCustom SoftwareWebsite RedesignBranding

Keep exploring.

See the work, read the strategy, or start a project with StillAwake Media.

AboutPortfolioCase StudiesServicesPricingProductsMontrealStillAwake TimesContactFR