HomePostsApr 02, 2016

Redesign on JoshCanHelp

Working on your own stuff is hard. And it doesn’t get much easier the more you do it. My theory is that, just like looking into the mirror and seeing how other people see you, it’s very difficult to make something that reflects who you are as a person/company/organization while also appealing to who you need to appeal to. You want to appear a certain way but is that the same way that will vibe with your customers?

Is there any possibility to get the theme of joshcanhelp.com? I fell in love with that site

– Nice dude trying to buy my theme

This is the 5th iteration of my site and I wanted it to last for a long while. While I really love to tinker and build fun things, spending too much time on my own stuff feels a bit … selfish? Navel-gazing? Boring? So I came up with a few high points for what I wanted to accomplish with the site to keep my itchy dev fingers in check:

Beyond that, everything else was a nice-to-have.

So, I started with my ever-evolving starter theme and went to work blocking out how I wanted everything to look and function. Here’s a few things I think I did right:

screenshot-2016-10-27-10-23-26

Because completely redesigning your site and re-writing all the sales copy isn’t a big enough job, I also decided to correct pretty much every other issue I could find. This site was built in WordPress for the first time in 2008 and I’ve changed the link and category structure at least twice as many times as I’ve rebuilt the site. So all kinds of things needed attention:

While this was definitely more of an OCD exercise than a directed task to improve site usability, it turned out that it made a huge difference in traffic to the site, almost double:

screenshot-2016-10-26-16-37-10

What’s next? Well, let me consult my overly-ambitious Trello list of internal projects:

I’ll just knock all that out this weekend.

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