This is day 9 of my 31 days of making.
I’ve always struggled designing my own site, so I decided to treat myself like a client and walk through the full site redesign process… on camera.
In this first video, I work through the goals of my site, review what’s working and what’s not on the existing site, and put together a rough project plan by breaking up the projected effort into logical chunks.
Video topics:
- Should I position myself as a generalist or a specialist? (on this site, probably generalist)
- Should I use this site as a reflection of my personal brand and let another site speak more specifically to the nature of my design/development work? (currently, yes)
- What are some external goals driving this redesign? (more emphasis on photography, eliminate bugs, feel more intentional and polished)
- What are some internal goals driving this redesign? (faster/simpler content creation workflow, better build process, more useful/intelligent post types)
- Do I have a wishlist of features or functionality (post types, editorial workflow, development workflow) for the site redesign?
- What are the specific things I’ll need to do or build to accomplish the stated goals?
- How do I break up the project effort into logical chunks?
Video Timestamps:
- 02:45 — Brief overview of the current site and some thinking behind the existing design
- 05:35 — Should I position myself as a generalist or a specialist?
- 07:15 — What are the goals of the site?
- 09:30 — More discussion of generalist vs. specialist.
- 13:45 — Should this site to be a driver for my web consulting business or rather an expression of my broader personal brand?
- 18:15 — How does the answer to that question fit with my stated goals? Reprioritize?
- 21:25 — What works on the site? What doesn’t work?
- 28:00 — Are there any invisible (or internal facing) goals for the project?
- 32:45 — What are the tactics (to do list items) needed to accomplish those goals?
- 34:00 — I give myself permission to be experimental with the site.
- 35:05 — Next steps
