Halfway through December!
Well, actually we’re almost 2/3rds the way through December. I intended to post this on the 16th, but between sickness and my awesome accomplishment from yesterday it got pushed to today.
It’s important to take time and look back at your progress (or lack there of) as you tackle your goals. In this case I’ve been very open along the way about the steps I’m taking towards evolving this site in bite-sized chunks, mostly at the end of other posts, but today is totally dedicated to looking back and evaluating the progress so far.
Posts:
I have posted every day without fail. Feedback has been positive towards the style of sharing the building of the site and personal stories, so I plan to keep intermixing that with high-level direction.
Posting every day has been a challenge, but one that has been worthwhile even during an unexpectedly busy month. Not every post has been stellar but they are out in the world and allow for evaluation towards the evolution of the overall theme.
Sign-ups:
So far I have 10 sign-ups, which is 10% of the way to my goal of 100 by the end of December. Through the one push I did do last week I got a 16.75% sign up rate, which I was pretty psyched about. If you haven’t signed up yet, you can do so at the top of the page.
Design:
I thought I’d be further along in this area, but it’s definitely taken a back seat.
I have update the theme to something more flexible and while plain, will be easy to add some flair to. I also played with some CSS to make the text more readable and update the link colors to blue from yellow…why would you use yellow?
I don’t have an About page yet…but I do have a Contact page set up. On Day 1 the About page was a priority for the first week and here, three weeks later it’s still on the back burner. Sometimes that’s the way it goes.
I did take the time to implement the signup collection through Sumome as well as throw in a favicon because that blank page in the tab kept shouting out like an eyesore to me.
My wife doesn’t like that the dates don’t show up on mobile so I’ll be tackling that at some point in the near future.
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Outside of these key learnings is that my initial hypothesis of having more content will translate to increased confidence in the blog itself. I was on a call today with a friend who asked about product vision and I pointed him directly to what I wrote on Defining Product Vision as well as Rapid Prototyping. Instant value to the conversation.
Moving towards the end of the month I have some fun posts planned and hope to round this all out during the week of January 1st with a look back on the overall experience and share the full analysis.
Which post has been your favorite so far? Let me know in the comments.