How I Built My First Website Template

Still & Scene Studio is built around one idea: helping small, founder-led brands get campaign-ready product visuals, AI-assisted and human-directed, without booking a full photoshoot. It's still early days there. I haven't landed a client yet, but the site is live and the offer is real.

The templates side of things actually grew out of building that site.

Where the idea came from

I was deep in Framer putting together my own homepage, the hero, the product grid, the before-and-after section, and somewhere in the middle of it I realised I was enjoying the actual building far more than I'd expected to. It wasn't just that I liked having a website for the studio. I liked making the website. That was the moment the idea for a line of templates started forming, well before I had any clients to point the studio site at.

Once I noticed it, the logic was hard to ignore. A service business, even one that hasn't started yet, is a treadmill by design: every client means a new project, a new deadline, a new round of edits. A template doesn't work like that. Build it once, and it can sell in the background while I'm doing bedtime or debugging something at work. I run all of this alongside a full-time engineering job and solo parenting, so anything I take on has to survive being picked up for six or eight hours a week, mostly evenings. Templates fit that life in a way an active client roster wouldn't have, at least not yet.

Picking the niche

Before opening Framer for the templates, I spent time on the marketplace itself, looking at what actually sells rather than just what looks nice: pricing, section structure, how listings were written. A generic "business website template" felt like the wrong place to compete. What I do have is a clear visual style, Still & Scene's whole offer is built around warm, editorial, AI-assisted campaign visuals for exactly this kind of brand: candles, skincare, jewellery, stationery. Brands that need to look considered and a little quiet, not loud and corporate.

So Template 1 became a single-product, waitlist-style landing page for that kind of brand: no cart, no multi-page shop, just a clean launch page a founder could point people to before their product even ships. It's the simplest structure to build well, and it's the closest relative to my own site, which meant I already had a component library and a design language to build from instead of starting blank.

Building it: Aurelle Signet

Every template needs demo content, and buyers need to be able to picture their own brand in it, so I built the whole thing around a fictional jewellery label called Aurelle Signet. The headline promise, "the piece you reach for on every good day," a hero product collage, a waitlist offer section, testimonials, an FAQ, all dressed in the same warm, editorial styling as the studio's own visuals.

Reusing my own site's structure saved real time. It also meant I had to go back through carefully and scrub out anything that was clearly mine and not Aurelle Signet's: a caption listing my own studio's niches that had quietly survived the copy-paste, a small monogram stamp left over from my own branding sitting in the hero image, even a stray comma at the end of the headline that read like a sentence cut off mid-thought. None of it was hard to fix once I found it, but finding it took actually going section by section rather than trusting that a reused layout was clean.

I also spent time on the parts a buyer never sees directly but definitely feels: making sure every nav link and button actually pointed somewhere real, giving the site its own clean web address instead of a random auto-generated one, fixing the page title and meta description so it reads properly if it ever shows up in search, and writing a short customisation guide so a buyer can swap in their own brand without needing to ask me how.

Where it stands now

Template 1 isn't listed for sale yet. The build is done and the fixes are done; what's left is mostly business plumbing, setting up a proper checkout and pricing it sensibly, and one small piece of Framer housekeeping I'm deliberately leaving until just before launch. None of that changes the template itself, it's just the last stretch before it's actually buyable.

What I've taken from building it is fairly simple: reusing your own work is a genuine shortcut, but only if you're willing to slow down at the end and check what actually made it into the final version. The unglamorous 20%, the stray commas and leftover captions, is usually the difference between something that looks like a demo and something that looks like a real product.

If you're building a website for a candle, skincare, jewellery, or stationery brand and want something that looks considered rather than templated, Template 1 is close behind this post. In the meantime, you can see the kind of work that led here on the Still & Scene Studio homepage.