Not quite. Try again.
Amy and Keith have the passphrase. If you need it again, email chris@innovativedesign.us.
What to do first once the brand foundation is live, in the order that matters, with a name against every line. Plus a website playbook Candice can work through on her own, built from an audit of what is actually on studiockd.com today.
The sequence matters more than the list. Phase one makes CKD say one thing. Phase two makes CKD easy to find. Phase three builds the habit that carries you to the anniversary. Doing them out of order is how firms end up with beautiful marketing nobody can maintain.
Every line has an owner. IG means we do it and it costs you nothing but a review. CKD means Amy or Keith. Mark is social. Candice is the website.
We audited studiockd.com on 17 September. It is a Squarespace site with 25 pages in the sitemap. Some of what follows is awkward reading, but all of it is fixable, most of it quickly, and none of it requires a rebuild. Candice can work straight down this list.
You have eight project pages. Five of them are published at two different addresses at the same time, and both versions return a live page. Google treats those as two competing pages and splits the credit between them, so neither ranks as well as one would.
Fix: keep the /portfolio/ version of each, redirect the other to it. The complete list of pairs is written out for you below.
The live page is /freemonthighschool. It is in your sitemap, so it is what search engines have indexed, and it is one of the strongest projects in the portfolio.
Fix: create the correctly spelled address, move the page, and redirect the old one so no link breaks.
/portfolio-2/project-one-f5w4d-z9nem-s3jda-x8w73-nzmgk is a template placeholder that was never removed, and the portfolio page links to it.
Fix: delete the page and the link.
Not the homepage, not About, not Portfolio, not Team. When there is none, Google writes its own from whatever text it finds first, which on a Squarespace page is often the navigation. Six descriptions are written for you below.
It is also the page's main heading, so it is the single strongest signal on the site. It contains two of the most crowded words in the category and nothing a competitor could not also say. It does not mention landscape architecture, Oakland, or the Bay Area.
Fix: replace with the positioning line once Amy has chosen the version.
/cart is live and linked from every page. Squarespace adds it by default.
Fix: disable commerce in the site settings.
Portfolio, About, Contact and Team have no H1 at all. Only the homepage and Careers do. The heading is how a page tells a search engine what it is about, and four pages are currently silent.
Twelve of twenty-nine homepage images are the same. Alt text is what a screen reader announces, so this is an accessibility problem first. For a studio whose work is about universal access and ADA compliance, it is also a slightly uncomfortable inconsistency.
Your About page title is +ABOUT — Studio CKD and Careers is +CAREERS — Studio CKD. The plus is a navigation flourish that has leaked into the titles, which is what shows up as the clickable blue line in Google. The homepage title is just Studio CKD, which says nothing.
The only structured data on the site is the generic block Squarespace adds to every customer's site. There is nothing saying CKD is a landscape architecture practice, in Oakland, serving the Bay Area, founded in 1988, woman-owned.
Fix: we will supply one block of code to paste into the site header. Ten minutes, once.
There is /portfolio, a separate /portfolio-2 with healthcare, education and housing sections, and project pages sitting at the root of the site. Visitors will not notice. Search engines do, and so will you the next time somebody tries to add a project.
/about-1 and /contact-1. The suffix means the originals were deleted and rebuilt. Worth tidying when the portfolio structure is consolidated, not before.
The canonical tag is set correctly, the sitemap generates and is complete, the site is mobile-responsive, a social sharing image exists, and the language is declared. None of that needs touching.
Paste these straight into Squarespace under Page Settings, SEO. Titles are under sixty characters and descriptions under 160, which is what fits in a search result.
| Page | Title | Description |
|---|---|---|
/ | Landscape Architecture in Oakland | Cupples Keller Designs | Cupples Keller Designs is a woman-owned landscape architecture studio in Oakland. We design everything outside the building, across the Bay Area. |
/portfolio | Projects: Schools, Parks and Civic Landscapes | CKD | Schoolyards, parks, civic plazas and healthcare campuses across the Bay Area. Selected work from a landscape architecture studio in Oakland. |
/about-1 | About CKD | Woman-Owned Landscape Architects, Oakland | Founded in 1988. A woman-owned Oakland studio designing public space, from K-12 schoolyards to civic plazas and healthcare campuses. |
/team | Our Team | Cupples Keller Designs, Oakland | The landscape architects and designers behind CKD. Three generations of Bay Area public space design, based in Oakland, California. |
/careers | Careers | Join Cupples Keller Designs | Join a small Oakland studio designing public space across the Bay Area. Current openings, and what it is actually like to work at CKD. |
/contact-1 | Contact | Cupples Keller Designs, Oakland CA | Talk to Cupples Keller Designs about a landscape architecture project in the Bay Area. Public and private work, from an Oakland studio. |
Every one of these leads with what the firm does and where it is, because "landscape architect Oakland" and "landscape architecture Bay Area" are what somebody types when they are looking and do not already know your name. Right now the site does not answer either.
Squarespace, Settings, Developer Tools, URL Mappings. Paste the block below exactly as it is, one rule per line. The arrow and the 301 are part of the syntax. Verified live on 17 September, both sides of every pair currently return a page.
| Delete or redirect this | To this | Why |
|---|---|---|
/441pagemill-2 | /portfolio/441pagemill | Duplicate |
/alamedahealthservices-2 | /portfolio/alamedahealthservices | Duplicate |
/eastoaklandsportscenter-2 | /portfolio/eastoaklandsportscenter | Duplicate |
/vapaloaltomedicalcenter | /portfolio/vapaloaltomedcenter | Duplicate |
/freemonthighschool | /portfolio/fremont | Duplicate, and misspelled |
/home | / | Duplicate homepage |
/portfolio-2/project-one-f5w4d-z9nem-s3jda-x8w73-nzmgk | Delete the page | Squarespace demo content |
/441pagemill-2 -> /portfolio/441pagemill 301 /alamedahealthservices-2 -> /portfolio/alamedahealthservices 301 /eastoaklandsportscenter-2 -> /portfolio/eastoaklandsportscenter 301 /vapaloaltomedicalcenter -> /portfolio/vapaloaltomedcenter 301 /freemonthighschool -> /portfolio/fremont 301 /home -> / 301
Optional, and worth doing while you are in there. /portfolio/fremont is a thin address for one of the strongest projects in the portfolio. Renaming it to /portfolio/fremonthighschool and adding one more line to the block would be better, but it is a nice-to-have rather than a fix.
There is a second portfolio section at /portfolio-2 with its own education, healthcare and housing pages. Visitors will not notice. It doubles the work every time somebody adds a project, and it is where the demo page has been hiding.
Fix, once the redirects are in: decide whether /portfolio-2 is the future structure or the old one, move anything worth keeping, and redirect the rest. If the category pages are useful, keep those and fold them under /portfolio/.
This is the code I promised. It tells search engines that CKD is a landscape architecture practice in Oakland, founded in 1988, serving the Bay Area, rather than an unidentified website. Paste it into Squarespace under Settings, Advanced, Code Injection, in the Header box. It goes in once and applies to the whole site.
Three fields need filling before it goes in. They are marked in capitals. We do not have the street address, phone number or public email to hand, and it is better to leave them out entirely than to guess.
<script type="application/ld+json"> { "@context": "https://schema.org", "@type": "ProfessionalService", "name": "Cupples Keller Designs", "alternateName": "Studio CKD", "url": "https://www.studiockd.com", "description": "Woman-owned landscape architecture studio in Oakland, California. We design everything outside the building, across the Bay Area.", "foundingDate": "1988", "founder": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Amy Cupples" }, "address": { "@type": "PostalAddress", "streetAddress": "STREET ADDRESS", "addressLocality": "Oakland", "addressRegion": "CA", "postalCode": "POSTCODE", "addressCountry": "US" }, "telephone": "PHONE", "areaServed": [ { "@type": "AdministrativeArea", "name": "San Francisco Bay Area" }, { "@type": "AdministrativeArea", "name": "Alameda County" }, { "@type": "AdministrativeArea", "name": "Contra Costa County" }, { "@type": "AdministrativeArea", "name": "San Francisco County" }, { "@type": "AdministrativeArea", "name": "San Mateo County" }, { "@type": "AdministrativeArea", "name": "Santa Clara County" } ], "knowsAbout": [ "Landscape architecture", "Public space design", "K-12 schoolyard design", "Parks and recreation design", "Civic and justice landscapes", "Healthcare campus landscapes", "Streetscape design", "Community engagement", "Site planning", "ADA and universal access" ] } </script>
How to check it worked. Paste the homepage address into Google's Rich Results Test. It should report a ProfessionalService with no errors. Takes a minute and it is worth doing before you move on.
Sites drift. This is the smallest routine that stops it, and it is written so Candice can hand it to somebody else if she ever needs to.
/portfolio/, never at the root, using the four-sentence structure from the brand platform.One thing to set up if it is not already. Google Search Console, verified for the domain. It is free, it takes ten minutes, and it is the only way to see what people actually searched for before they arrived. If it is already connected, add Candice and Amy as users.
Squarespace adds a rule to every site it hosts that tells the major AI crawlers not to read it. Yours is switched on. That covers the crawlers behind ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and several others.
It was not a decision anybody made, it is a default, but it now has consequences worth understanding. A growing share of the question "who does landscape architecture in the Bay Area" is being asked of an assistant rather than typed into a search box. If your site is blocked, you are not in the answer. Neither are your competitors unless they have changed it, which means this is currently open ground.
Our recommendation is to open it, because visibility is the problem the whole studio named and this is the cheapest available fix. But it is a values question as much as a marketing one, so it is Amy and Keith's call, not ours. Twenty minutes of conversation.
These are not the same job and most firms lose money by running one playbook across both. Public work is regulated, competitive and cumulative. Private work is referred, visual and decided quickly. Here is what we would actually do in each.
School districts, cities, counties, agencies, public healthcare. Roughly 90 percent of the book today.
The constraint that decides everything
Keith said it plainly: public agencies cannot sole-source. However well they know you, it still goes to a competitive process. So no amount of awareness removes the submission, which means the submission is the sales channel and the only number that matters is win rate.
Developers, private healthcare and senior living, hospitality, multi-family, and the architects who bring you in. The lane Keith wants to grow from two or three regular developers to ten or twelve.
The constraint that decides everything
There is no process to enter. Work arrives because somebody already knows you or was told about you. That makes it a relationship and visibility problem, and it is why your current contact list, which is architecture and engineering firms and existing clients, is the first thing that has to change.
Thirty-eight years of bond budgets, regulation and public schedules is the trust signal that tells a developer their project is in safe hands. The design ambition in the private and commercial work is the ambition signal that tells a public client you do not do generic.
That is why we would keep one brand with two clearly named practice areas rather than splitting into two identities. Splitting would throw away the thing that makes each half credible.
This document is yours outright. Print it, mark it up, forward it, edit it. The Word version is there so you can change wording and keep going without us.
The ninety days are not the point. They are the first ninety of about eight hundred, and everything in them is chosen because it compounds.
One set of words, a site that says them, a posting habit that runs, and the award projects chosen. Quiet work, and the only year where nothing visible has to happen.
Award submissions in by late February and results through the year. The 40-for-40 campaign runs, one item at a time, each one also a project page and a post. Conference submissions on a schedule. By December there are forty pieces and, if the awards land, a reason for people to look at them.
The party Amy asked for. The book the forty items became. The press, the event, the clients and the allies in one room. None of which has to be invented in 2028, because it was collected across 2027.
The reason to do any of this properly. The ownership plan puts the studio in the team's hands eventually, and a brand that only works when Amy is in the room does not survive that. Everything here is built to be said by somebody else.
The first thing on the list is still the smallest. Amy picks a line, and everything else has something to point at.