Reviewing your websites: my first YouTube video

After years of overthinking it, I finally pulled the trigger: I started a YouTube channel for my business.

My first video is live.

In it, I review three real websites submitted by business owners. I spend just a few minutes on each site and give a few ideas of what works, what doesn’t, and some simple fixes and insights that anyone running a business can steal for their own site. It’s part teardown, part free consulting, and part ​“wait, why did they put the navigation there?”

My goal with this channel is pretty simple: I want to demystify the design process and introduce clients to my processes (both thought process and working process). If I can make any part of a web design or product design project with me (or any other professional designer) less mysterious (and maybe a little entertaining), great.

I learned a ton making this first one (more about that in last week’s Studio Missive), but I had a blast. Talking out loud to a camera isn’t totally natural for me (at least, not yet), but talking through even something like this forces a level of clarity that I hope will also make me better at my job. (I walked away from those website reviews with my own takeaways for my own website, and for my clients’ sites too.) 

If I can keep up the pace, I’d love to make one video every week. That being said, there are only so many hours. For now, I’m treating this as an experiment, and I’m going to do my best to be consistent.

I hope this video helps you make your website a little better.