About
The person behind the pixels.
I'm Paula, the designer and developer behind Renyx Design. I build websites that make businesses look as credible online as they actually are in real life.
Featured in CanvasRebel Magazine
I've been building websites since I was twelve.
That sounds like something people say to seem impressive, but it's actually kind of embarrassing. I was obsessed with Michael Jackson. Like, deeply obsessed. And I wanted to make a fan site, so I went on Angelfire and just started figuring it out. Dreamweaver. HTML tables. I made wallpapers, forum signatures, those terrible "click to enter" splash pages that everyone had in 2005. I didn't care that they were terrible. I thought they were incredible.
I didn't connect any of that to an actual career until college.
I got a degree in graphic design because I thought branding was going to be my thing. Logos, identity systems, all of it. And then I took a web design internship and something kind of just shifted. I liked the building part more than I expected to. Figuring out how a site should be structured, what goes where, why this page needs to exist and that one doesn't. It felt familiar. Because I'd literally been doing it since middle school. I just didn't realize it was a skill anyone would pay for.
After college I ended up on Upwork. Freelancing wasn't the plan but it became the plan pretty quickly. I did 41 projects over three years. 5.0 rating on all of them, which I'm still a little proud of honestly. I built for education companies, SaaS startups, food bloggers, nonprofits, law firms, a guy building an AI-powered real estate tool, pretty much anyone who needed a WordPress site and seemed like a decent human being.
But Upwork is a weird place to build a career. Your visibility depends on an algorithm you can't see. You can have a perfect track record and still wake up one morning to half the traffic you had last week. I got tired of that. So I left.
Renyx Design is the version of this that I actually want. I pick the clients. I set the prices. I focus on the industries where I do my best work: consultants, financial firms, law firms, service businesses. The kind of companies where a bad website isn't just ugly, it's actually losing them money. That's the work I care about and that's where the results show up the most.
What it's actually like to work with me.
I want you to walk away from this thinking two things: "How cool is my site?" and "She understood me perfectly."
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I do the design and the development.
Most designers hand off a Figma file to a developer and hope for the best. I skip that entire step because I do both. What you approve in the mockup is what ends up on the live site. No one's interpreting your design through a game of telephone.
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I translate what you can't explain.
This keeps coming up in client calls so I guess it's a thing. People tell me they've tried explaining their vision to other designers and it never quite lands. Then they work with me and somehow it's right. I think I just pay attention to the stuff most people skip over: the pauses, the "sort of like this but not exactly" moments. That's where the real brief is.
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I'm direct. No jargon.
I won't send you a Slack message that says "let's circle back on the deliverables." I'll say "the homepage draft is ready, here's what I'd change, let me know what you think by Thursday." If something's not working I'll tell you. You can do the same with me. That's the deal.
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You'll actually know how to use your site.
When the project is done, I record screenshares of your actual pages and walk you through every edit you're likely to need. How to change a headline. How to swap a photo. How to add a blog post. Not a generic WordPress tutorial. Your site, your pages, your buttons. You shouldn't need me to update a phone number.
When I'm not building websites.
I live in California with my husband, my dog Benito, and two cats named Harley and Shade. I don't go out much. Not because I'm antisocial, I just genuinely like being home. Benito agrees.
The one exception is horror stuff. My husband and I run a YouTube channel called Deadly Duvalls where we review horror movies and go to haunted attractions and basically act like two people who never grew out of their Halloween phase. Because we didn't. We also go to horror conventions, which are exactly as fun and weird as you'd imagine.
Other than that I draw, paint, garden, and cook. I like making things. Always have. The fan sites were the first version of that. The websites are the current version. Somewhere in between there were a lot of acrylic paintings that probably should have stayed in college.
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Josh and I living the best married life -
Harley Quinn (the boss) -
Ms. Shade (likes everyone and wants pets) -
Benito (a.k.a the baby boy)
Ready to talk?
Website rebuilds start at $6,000. I take on two to three projects at a time, and I answer my own email.