In this article, I want to share with you the significant changes I made to the Swiss Innovation Academy website, the thinking behind these changes, and what might still change in the future.

Why am I doing a website makeover?

Over the last years, I've added a lot of templates, courses and resources to this website. But I haven't really changed that much how I present these resources. So lately, I had one big page called "Resources" where I showed all the templates and resources that weren't a book or a video course. And there were a lot of those.

I'm also preparing the website for the launch of my next big book called "Service Design Principles 101-200", with all the companion templates and resources that will come with this new book. So I really had to reimagine the structure of the website.

Doing a tiny bit of research

I started by asking in private messages on Linkedin to a few people to test some early ideas of the new navigation I had. From those early conversations, I noticed two things:

1. Not strong one lead: there wasn't one navigation that most loved in that small sample.

2. New ideas: Some people shared pretty bright thoughts, like presenting the content by experience level.

So I then did a little survey on Linkedin to ask people who follow my content what navigation would better fit them. Here are the results:

What's interesting here is not only the numbers but the conversations that this little survey sparked in the comments. Those conversations lead me to these learnings:

1. Topics first: structuring the site with topics as the first way to interact with the content makes a lot of sense for many people. But still, it isn't a considerable percentage where you can say: "Everybody feels like this".

2. Formats as secondary: Once people get in the pages, breaking down the content by format can make sense. So on a Service Design page, I can make a sub-section with "Service Design Books", "Service Design courses", etc.

3. Levels as landing pages: I decided to create two landing pages listed in the footer navigation of the website—one for beginners and one for the nerds. By doing so, I can easily share those pages on social media when I get asked questions by people from these different target groups. Also, those pages might be pretty interesting for google search once I get to write more content there.

These tiny research elements were already pretty inspiring, so I got to work.

The details that come when you build it

While I updated the main navigation structure, I obviously had to create new pages. This type of work feels to me like a domino chain. You start with one domino, and slowly there is a whole chain reaction of changes that happen. Just by changing the main navigation, I then got ideas and motivation to change a few other things. For example:

1. Help centre: I've updated the layout of the help centre and consolidated parts of it that were on different pages in just one.

2. Tag lines: My content uses a street like a language that is dear to me. I write as I speak, and I talk like I think. It's a simple language that can contain some swear words here and there. So I thought I'd make that clear from the start in the tag lines so that people who get offended by this language leave the website right away and don't get frustrated after spending a lot of time in it.

3. All products: I have so much content, so I thought, why not create one page where I just have everything listed for those people who are just extremely curious.

What's next?

Okay, I spent already a few good hours working on this. But it's still not finished completely. I have still a few ideas of things I could improve. Here is a personal wishlist of what I'd love to do the next time I get a few hours to work on the website:

1. Recommended neighbour content: I love the idea of not only showing my products but also those from friends and colleagues who also produce great content that is complementary to mine. I'll try to add those links to each page of the main navigation.

2. Create the principles landing page: I have to figure out how to present the books and resources around the principles series, which will become bigger and bigger over the following years. That's a big challenge.

3. Double-check the products: There are so many products today on the website that I have to check that I didn't forget to show one.

4. Grammar check: I should also do a general grammar check as I've updated many texts without much review.

5. Tiny visual stuff: I should adapt the images formats here and there for more consistency, but that's really the cherry on the cake for the end.

So that's it for now.

Written on Saturday 18th of December 2021