If you’re reading this I salute you: I know no one really cares about website redesigns except the owner of the website, so I appreciate you casting your eyes over this!
I’ve had a website since 2010 and have re-done or updated it several times over this period. At the same time I’ve done a lot of UX work around updating the website of the Library I work at - and I realised I’d failed to apply those user insights to my own site… It was built around all the things I wanted to say, rather than around the user experience or what the audience actually wanted to know. I also looked at Analytics and realised some pages just didn’t get viewed at enough to earn their keep. So I spent a quite painful day rebuilding it - and took the opportunity to tweak the visuals a bit and make the whole thing feel a little more modern, and have more teal in it, because teal is my favourite colour.
Kill your darlings
One of the main things I’ve done is take pages away. There was a Drums page linked from the About page, because I’m a drummer and I love drums, but it just isn’t really relevant so it’s gone. There were pages with detailed breakdowns for orgs about each workshop - tech requirements, reviews etc - but I provide that info via email to interested parties anyway, so those have all gone. Other minor pages have gone too: the more you prune the stuff people don’t need, the better the remaining content actually works for people.
The Home Page
With the exception of a few blogposts, the Home page is unsurprisingly the most popular page on the site - but it was really just a signposting page, meaning the user didn’t get much use out of it in and of itself. I noticed that other people who provide freelance training and consultancy really use their homepage to provide a full overview of what they offer - topics and themes, testimonials, clients etc. So I’ve reworked the homepage with this in mind.
The Blog, About and UX pages have received minor quality of life improvements.
The publications page
I used to have a separate page for the Library Marketing Toolkit and my other publications - this is needlessly granular so I’ve turned them into one page. I also realised I had links to buy the Toolkit on Amazon, set up over a decade ago before I’d realised quite what Amazon represent…
The Events page
Again I had a separate page for past and upcoming events - I’ve now hidden the events calendar and just include future talks and workshops in the same page.
The training and workshops page
In many ways this is the most important page for me - as a freelancer this is how people find out about what I offer. I’ve given the three broad areas I cover - social media, strategic marketing and presentation skills - more space, updated the descriptions, added some feedback and moved some other info off the page.
I hope you find what you need on this refreshed site, and if you have any training or speaking requests (or suggestions for website improvement…) get in touch!