I joined Maple Creative!

Today I announce…

Snare drum emoji, please!



🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁

I am joining Maple Creative as a website designer!

Welcome to my new design home: Maple Creative

After a call a couple weeks ago, I’ve joined the team and have started as a part-time website designer and support agent for the Maple community.

I thought I’d take a moment to spell out why Maple Creative is my trusted web design partner and collaborator.

This is not just another platform or web design agency.

What makes Maple different, and why I choose this agency

Here it is, folks. Let’s get into it.

The top 5 reasons for Maple Creative

Snare drum emoji, please! 🥁🥁🥁

💜Community.

Above and beyond a basic hosting care plan, this agency invites you to join a community of Maple Creative website owners!

• This is a web design team that hosts almost weekly webinars, plus open drop-in office hours. I don’t know of any other website care plan service that builds a community and offers real, live in-person support.
• I've been a member of the Maple community for years, and I feel the camaraderie in coming together and tackling our various problems and visions. Pllusss there are truly a ton of very cool people (e.g., herbalists, educators, activists, organizers, herbalist schools, herbalist guilds—and healers of all stripes, but did I mention herbalists—service providers and business owners of all types) from all over!
• All the workshops are recorded and available as replays, so the webinars provide a lasting value-added resource. We all keep in touch and stay connected on the platform Circle.so, known for connecting tens of thousands of worldwide communities.
• Events, workshops, resources… These are all points of connection.

💜Connection.

The soul of this agency is to connect connectors. They love connecting people like facilitators, teachers, and course creators who are building online communities, organizing, prioritizing group learning, and focusing on their members.

AKA community builders and super connectors.

And community care and collective healing is what the world needs—cliché to say, but now more then everrrr (I can hear my boyfriend now making fun of my accent and those English r’s).

“I believe the future of the human internet is connection,”  writes Ryan Clover, founder of Maple Creative.

Websites and courses that bring people together for embodied experiences and group learning are the ones that will matter to us. The rest of them? It's just a race to the bottom.

In a recent email, he wrote about “predicting the future” of websites, as people constantly ask him what will happen to online courses and the online environment in the time of AI.

Yet, Ryan writes, “I’ve been following these shifts for a long time—since before YouTube even existed.”

He concludes that bringing connection into Maple’s sites and courses will make members’ work resilient, with many tools available to achieve that.

It's connection that will create valuable experiences for your audience, and make sure your work is resilient to the turbulent changes in media and the internet.

💜Generous Marketing.

What is generous marketing, you might ask? Ryan Clover could write the book.

• The way I look at it is, service built on the values of community, transparency, and connection—which, believe it or not, is exceedingly scarce in the web design industry.
• They teach everything they know: They share their knowledge and don't hold back.
• Their practices are based on consent, connection, and providing value, instead of pressure, power, or performance. They don't rely on the conventional marketing tactics of urgency, FOMO, or pain points. Even all their (thorough and thoughtful) internal choices reflect this: from software that protects data privacy, to extensive in-house documentation on process, to generous care plans with unlimited edits.
  (Did I just say unlimited edits? You can read here about Maple care plans.)
• They share resources openly and reference where to find more information, being genuinely helpful.

💜 Trust.

Finally, this one is big. Arguably #1, the most important by far. Ryan has been designing websites since 2003. I trust this team. And with a design team, a support team, a mission, and a community behind you, you can relax and trust.

You're not just gaining a website. You're joining a community of aligned long-term marketing partners and experts who remove the technical barriers to your vision and cheer you on.

…And yes, here I suppose I can spell out that if it weren’t for knowing Ryan and Friede personally on the ground in Ithaca, New York, for a ridiculous amount of upstate winters (and springs), I wouldn’t be able to trust so completely.

(Yes, Shayla and Shayna… it was meant2B!)

We were buddies.

El destino, the destiny.

Alex Cattoni of YouTuber copywriter celebrity fame (yes, I watch her videos de vez en cuando) has a refrain that Trust is the second most important currency for marketers, trailing closely behind Attention.

These days, however, I think Trust is catching up to the number one spot.

When people trust, they pay attention.

The last one I’ll say is Growth  💜

The sky is the limit. With Maple, you have the agency and ability to scale a website however you might need. Should you ever desire some funky integration, E-commerce support, creative retainers (copywriting, brand strategy, marketing, email marketing, etcetera etcetera), or technical wizardry, you'll have those skills, tools, and capabilities available.

Or you’ll have the vetted referrals of developers, creatives, designers and strategists who could be a better fit.

But seriously, if you haven’t caught the gist by now, a website—whether a dream, an experiment, or a deliberate and weighted investment—is in good hands at Maple Creative.

Obviously I’m a fan 🥳🥳🥳

The experience is far beyond website design, creation, launch, and ongoing care. There is some initiation to something rare, precious, and so special.

Although I’d like to elucidate that point, I don’t quite have the words for it.

A reminder of another beautiful ethic of the Maple playbook of values: that of practice orientation and iteration.

A core value at Maple is a practice orientation – always iterating and learning, not trying to be perfect. Easier said than done – but a worthy cause.

I’ll practice the wording.

The living metaphor of Maple (let’s get sappy)

For a different perspective on growth, I invite you to read The Reluctant Captialist™

Marisa Guthrie’s post on The problem with endless growth. She cites a Liberatory Business podcast episode by Simone Seol that I admittedly haven’t listen to.

Yet the framework of upward growth, lateral growth, and downward growth resonates strongly with the Maple Creative metaphor.

The agency is, after all, named after a maple tree.

Like a tree balancing the weight of its branches with distribution among roots and access to sunlight… So does this design agency take what it needs while providing a ton of value.

It’s sappy🍁 (pun intended), but true: A maple tree is generous, creative, and clever. It responds to and optimizes the whole.

Like a balanced permaculture garden, Maple's profit comes from the pursuit of elegance in systems working together in harmony.

Truly all parts of the metaphor are utilized as a business:

• Maple takes a permaculture approach to website traffic - digital systems design, slow, spread, sink value in everything
• Tree rings (its logo) represent the iterative process of growth that comes through practice and experience.
• The shape of the tree represents the direction and bigger vision that can only be seen with perspective.
• The colors of the leaves represent expression, boldness, and standing out by being beautiful.

Not to get too sappy, wink wink 😉🍁

There’s honestly too many gardening metaphors to cite when it comes to Maple Creative. Workspaces and projects are tended to, etc. Leadership here is less about “making things work” and more about nurturing, tending, and supporting.

With all that said…

Thank you for reading today’s announcement and endorsement. Hopefully you now have a little insight into why I’m bringing all this up, so that we can celebrate this together!

What this means for me

Currently, I’m getting settled and integrated on the Maple side of operations. But in the long term, know this means I'll be able to provide much more value to you, my audience, and my clients.

I’ll elaborate another day ;)

Yours foreverrrr (with the Spanish r’s),