In today’s installment of my redesign project, we’ll discuss the second bullet point of content the site needs to contain: “What I can do.”

I can do a lot of things. I can sing bass. I can write fiction. I can do voice acting. But even people looking for a “generalist” really aren’t looking for a laundry list of all the things I am capable of doing well enough to get paid to do.

What potential clients are looking for is a short and succinct list of the skills I can bring to bear to solve their problems. The list of what I can do is long, but the attention span of the average reader is very very short. It’s critical that I focus mainly on the things I do best and/or those things that are going to give me the highest return (from greater demand or from being most efficient uses of time or most effective solutions). As in the target audience discussion, that doesn’t mean I would necessarily turn away a request for something not in my advertised list, only that I’m not focusing on selling it. Continue reading →

In this installment of my Redesign series, I’m going to discuss contact methods.

For a services site like mine, contacts from prospective clients are necessary to close a sale. For an ecommerce site, contact will mainly be geared toward support or providing additional information to existing customers after or during the sale process. For informational or brochureware sites, contact is most likely to take the form of a conversation between the author and their readers. There is a great deal of overlap between these three categories of contact, but there is no one single right way to provide contact that applies to every website. Continue reading →

Now that we’ve defined the problem for the redesign of this site and summarized the solution to the problem, it’s time to build out and implement that solution. Continue reading →