It’s been a long-time coming. The task of updating the website, modernising its look and extending its functionality has been on the to-do list for over 12 months. Work has finally come to an end with some good outcomes but with some missed objectives as well.

Key improvements

The home-page brings together several pages into a one-page experience where you’ll get to know what the workshop is about and who I am as its owner.
We’ve given more prominence to the online store with the ‘hero’ section at the top of the home page taking you straight to the store, and featured products further down leading you towards popular items.
The navigation has been simplified to Home, Shop and Blog. Once again focusing on the 3 important and commonly accessed features of the website. A lot of analysis has been done to understand where visitors land, and where do they go from there and what do they do.
Enable new features to be added without adding complexity. Starting with ‘fact-sheet’ downloads, and then plans, there’s a lot of content which has been linked in social media posts and youtube videos that need to live on the website as the primary source. Landing pages are done and you’ll see more over the next couple of weeks.
Navigating the store has been simplified and made consistent and work to improve the pictures and user instructions has started.

There have been some missed objectives. The original plan including moving the whole site to a new platform however this was abandoned after weeks of testing indicating that the experience for the user would be worsened especially when buying from the store, and consequently I felt the risks arising from any disruption would have been too great.

So here are the things that didn’t happen are yet to come:

Courses. The new platform would have enabled me to offer extended versions of my YouTube plans as courses, or how-to guides. The first course was filmed in the summer and is ready to go, but will now wait while. The associated YouTube videos will be out in November though.
Members Only areas. With over 1500 subscribers and 2000 customers with accounts, I had planned to offer a landing page for them to get a bit more out of their accounts. A basic service will happen, but a more tailored experience will have to wait.
An easier way to maintain the site. There are plenty of people around me who help with the running of the strawbyte workshop business and the new platform would have allowed them to work directly within the site and store. It’s a small inconvenience but easier admin just means more time making and doing.

It’s worth saying that this experience of trying, partially succeeding and partially failing has been been rather positive overall with a better website available right now!

Tonight I’ll be back filming a sequence for the video that should be out this Friday - no website work today!

At last.

Website Refresh - Modern Website for a Modern Workshop