Why I re-commited to Podia for the next few years



In this article, I share why I have decided to continue to use Podia for the next few years and the struggle I'm facing.

The growing problem with my content

Over the years with the Swiss Innovation Academy, I've created a ton of content. Courses, templates and tools on topics like Innovation, Service Design, Workshops or focused on apps like Miro and Notion. 

There are today 80+ products that run on this website. That's a lot of stuff for one guy doing this on the side. So much content creates several problems:
  1. More support: you have more touchpoints where people ask questions, see bugs, etc.
  2. More mental load: it's more things to think about and to have to put somewhere and make it easy to find for people.
  3. Lack of focus: it doesn't help me to know where to put the few hours I have for this project, and it doesn't help people to understand what's the main purpose of this platform.

So in the last year, I've slowly refocused my work on one main topic: Service Design. With one primary type of content, which are the Service Design Principles. The bonus content that's my community contribution is:
  1. The introduction Service Design course
  2. The Service Design Questions and answers

The growing problem with the platform

From the start of this project, I'm working with a tool called Podia. Podia has been a fantastic tool for me that allowed me to test many ideas quickly. But it has a few things that, over time make me a little bit less happy with it:
  1. I can't disable the trackers: Podia tracks things I don't care about or don't even know about, and I'd love to have a website without those trackers, but they don't give the option to disable them.
  2. Hosting: I'd love my hosting provider to run on clean energy. That's not the case with Podia.
  3. No search: Podia has no search feature, and to be able to add a custom code that would allow me to put such a search feature, I would have to pay five times the monthly price I pay now. With the amount of content, I have a custom search feature that would be pretty nice.
  4. Loss of UX: to my taste, Podia's UI and UX have lost their simplicity with the latest updates. Also, there are a few things that the old graphic designer in me hates, like the number of words per line which is way too high for a good reading experience.

The doubt phase

With all of this I've looked at other tools that could serve me better in the future. These tools should have:
  1. Values: Have a way of working that fits more my values (non profit, sustainable)
  2. Simplicity: Offer a simple UX and UI
  3. Search: Make it easier to find the content that answers the problem people have

At the time of writing, there are two solutions that fit these criterias. Moving the project on Ghost.org or creating a custom solution.

So I've spent a bit of time prototyping and testing how the academy could look like on Ghost:

There are a few things I particularly liked:
  1. The idea of turning the website into a knowledge base instead of a sales website for different "products", courses or books.
  2. The notion of membership that shows the community aspect
  3. The idea of having a site-wide search that would include content from different sources like a dictionary, a history book, Q&A and principles.

Still, the prototype also revealed that there isn't a base setup with Ghost that really fits my vision. And therefore, even with Ghost, I would have to heavily adapt a theme or even develop one myself so that it really works for me. This would take a good amount of time. 

Also, the transition to a new tool would be a shit load of work on three sides:
  1. Spring cleaning: deciding what to migrate, what not to migrate, what to update
  2. Content migration: migrating all the content
  3. User migration: that's maybe the hardest part. How do I migrate people who bought books in a system that doesn't have a "digital goods" selling feature but only a membership?

The decision so far

I've decided to stay with Podia for the next few years. I want to continue to develop the Service Design Principles Series and, on the side, simplify what I offer on this website. 

Once I'll get there, I'll re-evaluate what tool helps me best reach my goals. 

But I know that it will be much easier to migrate my content if I've already done the "spring cleaning" on Podia instead of having to do both the migration and spring cleaning at the same time. 

So for now, I prefer to invest my time in creating content in the Service Design Principles series instead of starting a migration project. Even if that means I have to live with a few frustrations that exist with Podia at the moment.

A positive frame

I'm an optimist. Once you know the frame, it's easy to make the most of it. So as I have re-committed to Podia for the next few years, I've started to work on the spring cleaning and the simplification of the UI/UX (at least the part I have power on).

So for example, in the last day, I've:
  1. Put as hidden drafts all the content ideas I've previously had in a "pre-launch" setting.
  2. Reworked the main navigation to focus on the important aspects
  3. Removed all the non service design content from the footer navigation
  4. Moved all the non service design content to an archive page that is linked in the footer
  5. Removed the newsletter form from the footer
  6. Simplified the main landing pages to stay short
  7. Clarified the difference between main actions (red button) and secondary actions (sand-coloured buttons).

I'm now excited to continue the spring cleaning of the academy in the next months.

Written by Daniele on Monday, 21st of November 2022.