Practice what you preach
Alright, so, you know how I have a consulting firm? Through which I work with a variety of clients on their digital needs? Like (re)design a website, creating a newsletter, posting things on Instagram, things like that? And how I always try to advise consistency, clarity and agility? Well, until this week, my consulting firm’s website was pretty much anything but what I preached…
In French, the saying goes — Les cordonniers sont les plus mal chaussés. Literally, shoemakers are the worst shod. Interestingly, the English equivalent goes — The shoemaker's children always go barefoot, implying that the shoemaker himself does have proper shoes and is therefore incredibly selfish in his priorities. The point is this: my website (I would argue) is the typical case of the expert not following his own advice. Although I love helping clients find the best way to present themselves, their product and/or their services, I somehow find it annoying when it comes to my petty little self. Or rather my products and/or services. And so, right until this week, my website was little more than an online business card, with a few lines that would fit on a LinkedIn profile, a couple of logos for companies I work with… and that’s about it.
I long knew that this was just not good enough, but always had a good reason not do anything about it: we had to move, my wife was expecting, I wanted to get ice cream… However, there are limits, even to my laziness: if my wife managed to deliver a baby, surely I could apply myself the advice I give others and come up with a decent website. And so I started working on overall structure and the key services I wanted to showcase, on company and project presentation, on design — always the most fun part… And, a couple of days ago, the work was pretty much done.
Except I forgot about the homepage. You know, that annoying — but key — part of a website. The one most people don’t actually scroll past. Unless it’s brilliantly designed and makes you want to read further. Well, I’d completely forgotten about that. I quickly worked out the way I thought made most sense to highlight key elements from the rest of the website — as one does, or rather should. Friday, I was done, the page was all cleaned up. I double checked on my phone — mobile first, except when you’re actually designing the website: the main layout at the top of the homepage automatically shrunk to a fraction of the page’s height. Not what I had in mind.
Yesterday, I spent a couple of hours (more than I care to admit, really) trying to fix that. The problem was this: I was working on Squarespace, the platform I do most of my personal projects on (including this wonderful blog, you guys!), more specifically on version 7.0, i.e. not the latest because I opened my account a while back (I’m faithful, you guys!). Unlike the newer version 7.1 where you can basically do what you want, 7.0 features templates that are quite specific to a particular use. And my website was based on a blogging template (incidentally, the same as this website, because, once again, I’m lazy when it comes to personal projects). And that blogging template didn’t come with full page banners on non-blog pages. Such as my homepage.
The most logical thing would have been to switch templates and spend a couple of hours adapting existing content pages: I would have had a clean banner, on a template that was actually designed for businesses. Obviously, I didn’t do that: I chose instead to tweak the template’s CSS to effectively cheat my way into having a banner on a blogging template.
I succeeded. After my brother helped.