Quick Thoughts Re: Web Design

This is WordPress

Which recently added the Gutenberg editor. Now building layouts for pages is super easy, check it out:

These layouts / templates can be styled with CSS to look however we want. I recently built the marketing blog for Crunchbase with the same process seen above.

This allows their marketing team to build out content for pages without any dev work from me: the templates are styled for all breakpoints, so they can swap in whatever image/text/etc and it’ll all look right.

I’ve personally gotten really fast at using Gutenberg to build pages, so CB usually just asks me to build the page myself from a mockup, I publish a rough draft for them to QA, then we adjust a few rounds until it’s locked. I can also write custom UI stuff like we did for their Cybersecurity Research Report (the floating Table of Contents pulls chapter headings dynamically from the content, so we can add/remove/edit and the menu will auto-adjust without any code updates).

WordPress as a Content Management System is my first recommendation here because:

• It will put you in the driver’s seat publishing content almost immediately
• Everything you publish will be templated for SEO
  • Twitter/LinkedIn/etc blurbs will pull the right images / preview copy
  • Normalized URL structure w/ keywords
  • more stuff
• Publishing frequent content with solid interaction from social platforms is the only way a website can gain major traction
  • Personally I hate this because it means Zuckerberg et al. basically get first dibs on any marketing data, and get to leech their ads off the view
  • Ultimately we want to get users of these platforms and just going to your site because they know the name, but we have to start on social.
• Online publishers like Crunchbase need content- a lot of what gets posted on their blog is actually just submitted cold from random startup founders trying to get PR. It’s a symbiotic relationship: CB needs content, the Founders need eyes on their copy.
• We need to work a similar angle w/ blogs re: finance, poverty, social welfare systems, etc. etc.

Quick thoughts re: design

The look/vibe of the site should reflect your personal voice, so most of the decisions are your call, but I’m happy to guide you with the usual practices for building web content (fonts / layouts / headings / etc) to develop the design you see in your mind.

If you need somewhere to start, I usually ask people to poke around the web and send me some links to stuff that looks cool.

• This is an awesome blog for design ideas: https://httpster.net/2021/apr/
• My portfolio: https://adhdhttp.net/
• Free fonts from Google: https://fonts.google.com/

Some quick thoughts:

• People like stuff that moves, and video is easy to make personal. For this homepage, I just asked one of their scientists to take their iphone and shoot clips of the machines working.
• In addition to you speaking on the project, we could think of other related video to shoot, but more ambient / contextual, not to convey info.
• Long scrolls of block text turn people off, so we should start figuring out some relevant graphics (e.g. charts, pullquotes w/ bio pic) that we can use to pretty up the page. (The CB cybersecurity report is also a good example of this)