Hey there! I’m Eleanor Dove (you can call me Elle or whatever seems good to you), your friendly neighborhood writer, moodboard maker, and Notion template alchemist. Whether you’re here for the vibes, the blogs, or just passing through, I’m happy to have you! 💛
This little corner of the internet is where I share my thoughts, create aesthetics, and build digital tools for fellow dreamers and planners. Feel free to explore, reblog, or just vibe!
💌 Request Tabs: follow the tag #eleanordoverequest 👇 and you'll find everything waiting for you there ˚ ༘ ♡
📸 My YouTube Channel
YouTube Channel: Eleanor Dove
✨ Where to Find Me:
📖 Words & Ramblings: @justlifewelle
📜 Deep Dives & Long-Form Musings: @doveslettersdelivered
I love reblogs, asks, and cozy community vibes—so don’t be shy! Whether you want to share thoughts, request a moodboard, or just say hi, my inbox is always open. Lurkers are welcome too—grab a virtual cup of tea and enjoy the scroll. 🍵✨
Hello. I just wanted to chat and ask if you want to be friends since you don't allow messages.
-🌼
💌: Hello! This is so kind of you — truly. I do keep messages off intentionally (a girl needs her quiet corners), but I'd love for you to feel at home here. Drop by the ask box anytime, and consider yourself part of the community. That's the kind of friendship I can offer, and I think it's a good one.
I'm here to have this special announcement that, yes, tomorrow is my last day and I have to wake up pretty early for that. (Insert giggling noises. 🤭)
And our holiday officially starts the day after tomorrow, and not only that, I'm very excited to announce that I have opened up an X account and it's mainly for my little musings if I want to just type on my keyboard and not have any format. Or to upload my (future) YouTube videos.
Our community is really overwhelming my heart, and even if I have been silent for a long time now, I'm very sorry for that, thank you for showing JUSTLIFEWELLE so much love!
I would like one related to a girl who study art history at college, along with drawing and painting in a Classical art academy and also who play guitar.
I would prefer a mix of Light academia, Dark academia and soft aesthetic.
Before you buy the domain and yes, you will buy the domain before you are ready, because that is the kind of decision that feels both impulsive and inevitable someone should sit you down and ask you one question: what are you actually trying to build?
Not what do you want to post. Not what do you want to sell. What are you building? Because a website is not a post. It is not a blog. It is not a shop or a gallery or a newsletter landing page, though it can be all of those things at once. A website is an architecture. It is the decision, made deliberately and out loud, to exist on the internet on your own terms with your own rules, your own layout, your own relationship with the people who find you.
That distinction matters more than most people realize when they are standing at the beginning of it, excited and a little overwhelmed and already Googling domain registrars. Because the question of what you are building determines every single decision that follows. It determines the platform you choose, the pages you create, the tone you write in, the things you charge for and the things you give away. It determines whether your website becomes something people return to, or something that quietly sits there looking pretty while collecting digital dust.
"A platform gives you an audience and a lease agreement. Most of us sign without reading the second part."
I have been on Tumblr for long enough to understand what a platform gives you and what it quietly takes. It gives you reach, the beautiful, almost accidental kind, where someone finds your post through a reblog chain and decides to stay. It gives you proximity to other people building similar things. It gives you infrastructure you did not have to design yourself. And in exchange, it asks you to exist within its rules, its algorithm, its flagging system, its decisions about what does and does not belong here. Most of the time that trade is fine. Sometimes it is not. And eventually if you are building something real, something that has a shape and a direction and a growing audience you start to feel the edges of the container you are living in.
That is not a reason to leave. It is, however, a very good reason to expand.
ɪɪ. ᴡʜᴀᴛ ᴀ ᴡᴇʙꜱɪᴛᴇ ᴀᴄᴛᴜᴀʟʟʏ ɪꜱ
Let us be precise about this, because precision helps. A website is, at its most fundamental, a set of files that live on a server and can be accessed through a browser. A domain is the address you purchase to make that server findable the difference between a house and a house with a street address. Hosting is the land the house sits on. These are not metaphors. They are the literal infrastructure of having a presence online that belongs to you.
But a website is also something more than its infrastructure. It is the answer to the question: what do I want someone to experience when they come here? That experiential design what you put on the page, how you organize it, what you invite people to do is the part that takes not hours but months, sometimes years, to get right. And getting it right is not a one-time event. It is an ongoing process of paying attention to what is working, what is not, and who is showing up.
A website has pages. A home page, which functions like a first impression, the thing someone sees in the first three seconds that determines whether they stay or go. An about page, which is quietly the most important page on any personal or creative website because people need to know who they are dealing with before they trust you with their time or their money. A blog or writing archive, if you are a writer. A shop, if you are selling something. A portfolio, if you are showing work. Every page has a purpose, and the navigation between them should feel intuitive, like moving through a space that was designed with the visitor in mind.
"Your website is the only place on the internet where you write all the rules. That is terrifying. It is also exactly the point."
Maintaining a website is a different kind of work than building one. Building is a sprint: intense, creative, full of decisions. Maintaining is a marathon. It is writing regularly enough that people have a reason to return. It is updating your shop inventory so it reflects what you actually have. It is checking that your links still work, that your pages still load quickly, that the thing someone loved six months ago is still there and still good. Maintenance is the part of website ownership that nobody romanticizes and everybody underestimates.
ɪɪɪ. ᴛʜᴇ ʀᴇᴀʟ ᴇᴄᴏɴᴏᴍɪᴄꜱ ᴏꜰ ɪᴛ
Here is what it costs, honestly. A domain name runs somewhere between the price of a coffee and the price of a nice lunch, per year, depending on the extension and the registrar. Hosting, the server space where your files actually live, varies enormously. Shared hosting is cheap and fine when you are starting out. As you grow, you may want something faster, something that can handle more traffic without slowing down. That costs more.
Then there is the design. If you are using a website builder: Squarespace, Wix, Showit, WordPress with a theme, you are paying for convenience, which is a legitimate and reasonable thing to pay for. If you want something more custom, you are either learning to build it yourself, which has a time cost, or hiring someone to help, which has a money cost. Neither option is wrong. They are just different bets about where your resources are.
But the real economics of a website are not about the domain or the hosting or even the design. They are about the attention economy the invisible ledger of time and trust that determines whether the people who find you keep showing up. And that ledger is built slowly, through consistency, through giving people something they actually want, through being the kind of presence online that makes someone think: yes, I want more of this.
That is not free. It costs you time. It costs you the discipline to write when you do not feel like it and to post when the timing is inconvenient and to keep going when the numbers feel too small to justify the effort. The financial investment in a website is the easy part. The investment of sustained creative attention over months and years, that is the real price of building something that lasts.
ɪᴠ. ᴀᴜᴅɪᴇɴᴄᴇ, ʟᴏʏᴀʟᴛʏ, ᴛʀᴜꜱᴛ
There is a version of this essay where I tell you that if you build it, they will come. I am not going to tell you that, because it is not true, and you deserve better than comforting fiction.
Audience does not migrate automatically. When you build a website and announce it on a platform, some percentage of your existing audience will follow. Some will not, not because they do not like you, but because the friction of going somewhere new is real, and people are busy, and habits are sticky. The ones who follow you are the beginning of something important: they are demonstrating loyalty. They are saying, with their click, that you matter enough to seek out.
Loyalty, in the context of a website and a creative brand, is built through three things: consistency, which means showing up regularly enough that people can count on you; quality, which means giving people something genuinely worth their time when you do show up; and trust, which is the accumulation of both of those things over long enough that someone stops questioning whether you will deliver and simply expects that you will.
"Brand loyalty sounds like a marketing term. It is actually just a relationship built the same way all relationships are built, through showing up."
Brand loyalty is a term that gets used a lot in marketing and means something slightly different in every context. For a small creative website, it means this: the reader who has your tab bookmarked. The customer who checks your shop every time you announce new stock. The subscriber who reads every post not because the algorithm pushed it to them but because they have decided, consciously, that your voice is one they want in their life. That kind of loyalty is slow to earn and hard to lose once you have it. It is also the only kind worth building toward.
A young brand, which is what this is, honestly, should not rush that process. The goal right now is not to have a thousand loyal readers. It is to write well enough and consistently enough that the readers who do find you have a reason to stay. The scale takes care of itself, eventually, if the foundation is solid.
ᴠ. ᴡʜᴀᴛ @ᴊᴜꜱᴛʟɪꜰᴇᴡᴇʟʟᴇ ɪꜱ ʙᴇᴄᴏᴍɪɴɢ
@justlifewelle is getting a real home.
I am building a dedicated website for Eleanor Dove a proper space for everything that lives here: the blog, the moodboards, the shop, the wallpapers. All of it, together, in a place that I actually control.
For readers who want to go deeper, there will be a paid subscription tier: blog drafts, the behind-the-scenes of how posts come together, and hand-drawn wallpapers that will not be available anywhere else. If you run a small business, there will be an affiliate marketing option too.
The spam flagging on this platform has been a headache lately, and honestly, it accelerated this plan. I want a space I can count on and I want you to have a better experience reading here. That is the goal. This is not a goodbye. It is an expansion.
This is what I mean when I say a website is an architecture. What I am building is not just a new URL. It is a consolidation a single place where all the different things that live in different corners of this platform can exist together, legibly, in a form that makes sense to someone who is encountering this brand for the first time.
The blog is the heart of it. That has always been true. Writing is the thing I come back to, the thing I do even when I am not sure anyone is reading, the thing that feels most essentially mine. But a website lets the blog sit alongside everything else; the visual work, the shop, the collaborative relationships with small businesses in a way that a Tumblr archive never quite can. It lets the whole picture come into focus.
The paid subscription tier is an interesting thing to think about, because it changes the relationship between writer and reader in a small but significant way. It introduces an exchange that is more explicit than the one that exists when reading is free: I am giving you something specific and valuable, and you are choosing to pay for it because you trust that it is worth your money. That kind of trust is not demanded. It is earned, over time, through all the free work that came before it. The behind-the-scenes content: the drafts, the process, the timeline of how a post comes together. It is an invitation to understand how this works, which is its own kind of intimacy.
ᴠɪ. ᴡʜʏ ᴛʜɪꜱ, ᴡʜʏ ɴᴏᴡ
Someone will ask why now. Why not wait until the audience is bigger, the brand more established, the bank account more comfortable with the investment? It is a fair question and the honest answer is: because waiting for readiness is a form of avoidance dressed up in practical language.
There is never a perfect time to build something. There is only the time when you decide that the thing you are building toward matters enough to start, imperfectly, with what you have. I have seen the neuroscience of vision boards he way that articulating what you want primes your brain to move toward it and I believe in the principle even outside the literal practice of making a board. You write toward what you want. You build toward what you want. You make the decision, publicly and on the record, that this is where you are going, and then you go.
This blog has always been, in some sense, written on dreams. That is not a weakness. It is a strategy. The life I am writing about the, one that is worth sharing, the one that someone else is quietly dreaming about too, is being built in real time, and the writing is both the documentation and the doing. The website is the next chapter of that. It is the decision to stop existing in borrowed space and start building something that is, genuinely and durably, mine.
If you are reading this on Tumblr, thank you. Truly. This platform gave me something real: an audience, a habit, a reason to write consistently and I am not leaving it behind. But I am building something alongside it that is going to be better, more complete, and entirely on my own terms. And I hope you will come with me when it is ready.
A year ago, I opened Tumblr for the first time in December 2025 with no real plan, just moodboards, a lot of feelings, and the quiet hope that maybe someone out there would find something to love in what I was making. I did not expect that within two or three weeks, a thousand of you would show up. And I certainly didn't expect that just over a year later, we'd be climbing toward five thousand.
So before anything else: thank you. Every reblog, every like, every request you've sent in, you've made this feel like a real place, and you've made Darling Miss Elle very, very happy every time she opens her dashboard.
ᴡʜᴇʀᴇ ᴛʜɪꜱ ᴀʟʟ ꜱᴛᴀʀᴛᴇᴅ
Eleanor Dove didn't arrive out of nowhere. To understand her, you'd have to go back to 8th grade. Me, phone in hand, trying to make my study corner look as beautiful as everyone else's on studygram.
I started as a book review blog. Quiet, small, genuinely mine. Then I pivoted to study tips, because I was a straight-A student and I had things to say about it, not curated things, but real ones, the actual habits and methods I lived by. The problem was Instagram. It was a hard place to exist as a student with just a phone, surrounded by accounts that looked effortlessly put-together and beautiful. I was trying to match an aesthetic I couldn't quite reach, and I felt it every time I posted. Eventually it wore me down.
But something good came out of that difficult stretch: I developed a sense of what works and what doesn't. What fits and what's just noise. That instinct is a big part of what Eleanor Dover is built on.
I took about a year away from social media entirely. And when I came back, I knew I wanted something different.
ꜰɪʀꜱᴛ ʏᴇᴀʀ ᴏꜰ ᴄᴏʟʟᴇɢᴇ
Coming into university undid a lot of what I thought I knew about myself. Your first year has a way of doing that. I lost the straight-A identity I'd built so much of myself around, and for a while I wasn't sure what I was creating for, or who I was creating as. I still wanted to make things. I also, honestly, needed to earn a little which is harder than it sounds when most jobs here require a bachelor's degree before they'll even consider you.
So I tried things. Notion templates, digital products, a whole small business experiment that started as StudyJoMarch and eventually became Briechyne Studios, hosted on Squarespace. I was still a teenager, figuring it out in real time. I learned what I could from that era. Then I archived it and stepped back.
Eleanor Dove came after all of that. I think she's better for it.
ᴡʜᴇʀᴇ ɪ'ᴠᴇ ʙᴇᴇɴ
I'll be honest with you, the way I always try to be: this year has been a lot. I'm a nursing student, and the uni-and-home routine has been relentless, summer classes folded in means there's essentially no breathing room before a new school year begins again. The burnout I mentioned in my last blog hasn't fully lifted. Writing ideas have been slower to come, and behind the scenes I've had to wrestle with this blog more than I'd like to admit.
The YouTube channel is another thing I owe you an honest answer on. I do film, little clips of my week, moments I want to keep but finishing the editing is a different story. Part of it is time. Part of it is imposter syndrome, if I'm being fully transparent. I'm working on it. I'm not abandoning it.
ᴡʜᴀᴛ'ꜱ ᴄᴏᴍɪɴɢ
Here's the part I'm genuinely excited about. This blog is growing, and I want to build something that grows with it properly.
I'm planning to launch a dedicated website for Eleanor Dove a real home for everything: the blog, the moodboards, the shop, the wallpapers. If you run a small business, there'll be an affiliate marketing option. And for readers who want to go a little deeper, I'm working on a paid subscription tier that includes blog drafts, the behind-the-scenes timeline of how posts come together, and hand-drawn wallpapers that won't be available anywhere else.
The spam flagging on this site has honestly been a headache lately, and it accelerated this plan. I want a space I can count on and I want you to have a better experience reading here. That's the goal.
In the meantime, you can already find my planners (paid) and wallpapers (free or pay whatever you'd like) over on Gumroad. I'll always have free things here for you. That part isn't changing.
ᴏɴᴇ ᴍᴏʀᴇ ᴛʜɪɴɢ
I started this blog because I needed somewhere to put the thoughts that wouldn't leave me alone. Writing has always been how I make sense of things and the fact that you choose to read along, that you find something in it worth your time, means more than I know how to say in a blog post.
Here's to whatever year two looks like. I think it's going to be something.
