Hi friends ๐๐ป
Hard to stay focused and write about my own little website refresh project when there's so much big AI news happening. If you want a deep dive into Google's AI Mode announcements at I/O 2025, go read Mike King's article here. It's fascinating.
When I have some brain space, I'll write more about what this all means for how we do SEO and communications more broadly. It's a fast changing landscape, that's for sure.
This is part of a series in which I'm writing about the process of refreshing the Blue Hills Digital website.โ
I introduced the project in my Digital Landscape email on May 20. If you missed it, read that email here! |
Want links to recent emails or a sign-up link to share? Go to The Digital Landscape sign-up pageโ
Basic page redesign in progress...
โLast week I wrote about building a Google Sheet with a row for each URL on the Blue Hills website. Once I had that sheet, I sorted out which pages on the site need a redesign, before I can switch over to new site-wide features like the header, footer, fonts, and colors (more on those next week I think).
This view is filtered to show just the URLs that need a redesign (URLs where the layout isn't controlled by a template, like Articles).
Like many nonprofit websites I work on, I've added pages on the Blue Hills website one at a time, over a number of years, without any really consistent style guide or set of building blocks ๐คฏ
Fixing that situation is one of many motivations for overhauling the website now โ the messiness is actually preventing me from updating the site with new content!!
And this is what makes this stage of a website redesign project so exciting! You get to see new page layouts start to come together, and you can visualize what those most-important-pages on your website will look like once they are rebuilt.
Progress is slow, because this project has to take a back seat to client work!
But here's a snapshot from Figma of a new model page layout on the left, with the corresponding current page on the right.
Still lots of work to do there, but I have an evolving list of components to build with, including:
- a new hero page section
- a quote block
- an image grid
- various column width sections
- accessible color combinations
In the coming weeks, I'll finalize these design elements (so hard to stop tinkering and let them be final ...) so I can start deploying these page updates IRL!
Before I go, a correction: In last week's email, I described how you can use your website's sitemap file to help populate a content audit sheet.
I incorrectly wrote that you need a plugin to generate a sitemap for a WordPress site, and a kind reader replied to remind me this isn't the case! WordPress Core does in fact generate a basic sitemap on it's own. I've just become so used to the Yoast SEO plugin to fine-tune sitemaps I'd forgotten it isn't technically necessary.
Until next time โจ
โ Ed Harris (your digital strategy guide)
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