I have been experiencing an ongoing process of re-invention and was inspired to redesign my homepage this week – something I rarely recommend others do.
Why did I do it?
Because I want to be more intentional about the people I work with.
About That Keyword-Optimized WordPress SEO Bullshit…
Rather than leading with a bunch of SEO-friendly, keyword-optimized “WordPress Designer & Developer in Minneapolis” bullshit, my homepage now leads with my core values (and a picture of Donald Trump with a “no” symbol…couldn’t help myself…).
Yes, I’m still a WordPress designer & developer. Yes, I still do all the WordPress security, speed, SEO stuff I’ve always done. But I also bring a lot more than that to the table and always have.
The people I’ve found I work best with are those that share these core values in common:
- I check my ego at the door.
- I help people answer big questions & solve problems (I don’t bring solutions – you’ve got the answers, we’ve just got to bring them out into the light).
- I own my work (mistakes, successes, happy accidents, all of it).
- I believe in shipping work quickly, iteratively, and often (rather than long “waterfall” processes).
So I figure if I can attract more of these people, then I’m feeling better about my limited hours on this planet.
I also wrote and linked prominently to a controversial new article about the ONLY THINGS YOU NEED TO KNOW about building your small business website. I had a frustrating experience with a customer last week that spurred that article and pushed my thinking forward on a number of fronts…
FWIW, I also made some minor layout and design changes (tightened up header spacing, changed the old blues to greens). And now my homepage is way more megabytes than it used to be, because I believe the new images I’ve created communicate important things about who I am and how I work and that the extra weight is worth the speed & seo trade-off.
From Toby’s Blog
- “Now THAT was a good meeting!”A single effective meeting can change the course of history for a company. Imagine if you could lead effective meetings EVERY DAY! You can, but it takes curiosity & practice. This article is a good place to start your journey to a more effective you.
- Never Respond to RFPs & Custom Proposal RequestsY'all who work at normal 9-5 jobs don't need to deal with the B.S. that is an RFP process (or rather you get paid to deal with it). But us freelancers gotta deal with a whole big bag of schtuff when it comes to custom proposals. Here's my quick-and-dirty RFP filtering process that I use […]
- What content should I put on my homepage?I see websites as one stop of many on the sales journey, useful to help get customers from Point A to Point B in the sales process (or maybe from Point D to Point E). If you are wondering about what to put on your homepage, start with these basic sales-related questions: Who, specifically, will…
More posts from themightymo.com
How to Connect a GoDaddy Site to ManageWP
GoDaddy owns ManageWP, and, strangely, they make it very difficult to add GoDaddy-managed WordPress sites to their ManageWP service. Thankfully, there’s a quick workaround: Visit https://yoursite.com/wp-admin/plugins.php?showWorker=1 — This will make the ManageWP “Worker” plugin visible. Copy the connection info from the ManageWP Worker plugin. Add the site per-normal on ManageWP. That’s it! I hope this…
How to check if your current page is the wp-login.php page
I realized this morning that my TMM Maintenance Mode WordPress plugin had a bug that was causing the wp-login.php page to be inaccessible. The solution was to write a simple function that checks whether or not we’re currently on a login page, and then add a call to that function in my code. Here’s the…
WooCommerce Product Image Gallery Not Loading with WP Rocket Active
Today I updated a WooCommerce site, and everything worked fine, except for the images on product pages – they were not displaying at all. After a lot of trial & error, I realized that WP Rocket was to blame. I’m not sure exactly what the issue was (though my hunch is that it had to…
From Toby’s Blog
- “Now THAT was a good meeting!”A single effective meeting can change the course of history for a company. Imagine if you could lead effective meetings EVERY DAY! You can, but it takes curiosity & practice. This article is a good place to start your journey to a more effective you.
- Never Respond to RFPs & Custom Proposal RequestsY'all who work at normal 9-5 jobs don't need to deal with the B.S. that is an RFP process (or rather you get paid to deal with it). But us freelancers gotta deal with a whole big bag of schtuff when it comes to custom proposals. Here's my quick-and-dirty RFP filtering process that I use […]
- What content should I put on my homepage?I see websites as one stop of many on the sales journey, useful to help get customers from Point A to Point B in the sales process (or maybe from Point D to Point E). If you are wondering about what to put on your homepage, start with these basic sales-related questions: Who, specifically, will…