Blue Hills Website Refresh: Introduction

Modified from an email sent to The Digital Landscape list on May 20, 2025. View past emails and subscribe here.

Over the next couple of months, I’ll be working on a different kind of website project. Unlike my client projects I can give you a behind-the-scenes view of this one, since it’s a refresh of own business website, at bluehillsdigital.com.

Pick your metaphor:

• The cobbler's children have no shoes

• The carpenter's roof is leaky

The website consultant's website is getting outdated and has needed improvements for 2-3 years (I could probably get ChatGPT to make that sentence a little punchier).

For a client website project, I'll typically work behind the scenes for weeks or months – planning, building, reviewing, testing – and then when we're ready to launch, I'll flip the switch the the brand new website replaces the previous version.

In this case, I have a business to run, so I need to work on this slowly; incrementally.

Today, I'll share some goals for this overhaul. And in the coming weeks, in emails to The Digital Landscape list, I'll focus on specific improvements as I deploy them. Some of these improvements might have parallels for your own website.

Think of this as my own little experiment – several years late – with the #BuildInPublic trend.​

What's wrong with the Blue Hills website?

Overall, it just feels cobbled together over time.

I know this isn't an uncommon feeling at all. I hear this from clients all the time.

As new needs arise, new content or features have been added on, without zooming out to think about how the latest addition impacts the website as a whole.

Much of the cobbled-together feeling, for me, relates to the business' evolution, from a side project serving all kinds of clients while I still had a full-time, in-house job, to a niched-down nonprofit-specific web consultancy today.

Some of the content on the website is still hanging around from those early days, and needs to be cleaned up.

There's also a long list of improvements waiting for implementation. In no particular order:

• More client testimonials and case studies

• Organize all the products into a "Resources" area

• Adjust my approach to cookie consent and privacy

• A list of accessibility improvements

• Mobile navigation updates

• Retiring reliance on some WordPress plugins I no longer want to use

• Image optimization

... and a lot more.

What are my goals for this website refresh?

Overall, I need to align the website with my current positioning. That means that it:

• Matches how I present and talk about my work, in these emails, and on LinkedIn (and anywhere else I show up online)

• Provides an easy gateway to resources I've developed (free and paid)

• Introduces my services and allows potential clients to start a conversation about working together

Here are a couple of examples of how I'll operationalize these goals:

OLD: in places the website still uses "we" language to talk about how the business works. Since I'm comfortably positioned as a solo consultancy without a team of employees, I stopped using "we" language some time ago, since it just felt weird. ➡️ NEW: I'll review copy on every page to ensure all that "we" language is updated with copy that feels more personal, and is coming directly from me.

OLD: I don't introduce myself and my background until you navigate to the About page. ➡️ NEW: If you work with Blue Hills, you're working with me! I want to introduce myself right on the homepage, so visitors know who they're talking to 🙂

OLD: Resources like free downloads, worksheets, templates, etc. are scattered around, embedded in various articles and guides. ➡️ NEW: I'll organize all these resources into one central library where visitors can request links, delivered by email.

A teaser

Of course, the visual aspect of a refresh often feels like the most exciting part.

I'm actively trying to avoid sinking a lot of time into visual design, but I do want to arrive at a cleaner, less cluttered approach that makes accessibility and adapting to mobile devices easier.

Here are a couple of sneak peaks at work-in-progress layouts from my Figma project:

Concepts of a new homepage

A revised layout for articles, work-in-progress