Back to Best Of

Redesign: How can my website better serve you? An invitation

It's time to redesign stage.scottberkun.com/. Yay!

I'm looking to hire a designer to work on a redesign of stage.scottberkun.com/ and have my own list of goals and issues. But before I go too far I wanted my make sure I invited you readers, the people this site is for, to speak up about your suggestions, complaints and things you wished the site did better.

Here’s my primary list of goals:

  • Coherent style: too many incremental  changes have been made over the years to fonts styles, colors, and highlights. The base text color should be black, and the various styles should be simplified and coherent with each other. It needs to be resorted from scratch and return the focus to easy readability.
  • Make first choices easier: There are 1500 posts and essays in more than 20 different categories but good luck finding them. There are also more than 20 full lectures you can watch, but good luck there too. The home page helps little, offering no framework for working by category or offering an easy first set of choices. I write about so many subjects it’s hard to find a way in if you’re not already familiar with my work. There is a best of berkun page, but it’s also hard to find.
  • Prioritize interactivity through Ask Berkun and comments: I’d love for this to be an anchor of the site, as it’s interactive and lets you readers drive the show. But it’s invisible in any of the navigation. Comments and requests fuel my work. The more engagement I get, the easier I find it to be productive.
  • Thoughtful conversions:  as a writer there are 3 actions that I benefit from the most: selling books, getting hired to speak, and getting people to follow me on twitter, the mailing list or Facebook. The site is intentionally not designed to hit visitors over the head with these three things, but without any  conversions there is no website. I’d like these three actions to be more prominent, but in a way that feels natural, not forced.  I have tons of free chapters, checklists  and resources, but they’re not tied to conversions in any direct way and they could be.

But these are my goals and I’m not the customer here – you are. Any comments, critiques or requests welcome.

What do you want more of? What do you want less of?

Cheers and thanks for reading.