New today: I’ve built out an initial version of the header for the new website design, which you can see live on this Changelog page 👆🏻

The big change here is the flip to a light-color-background header, so I needed to use the inverted version of the logo and color scheme. For now, this new header is only visible on this page, but now it exists I can start flipping the design of other pages or sections of the website …

Old version:

New version:

[Project status: slowed down by Summer schedules and a couple of big client projects!]

The choice to update the brand font to use Hanken Grotesk means updating the logo. Sure, perhaps no-one else would notice if the logo continued to use Cabin, but I would see it every time.

Take a look at the header on this page right now. Today it’s still the old version. But if you’re reading this in the future, you’re probably seeing the new version (if you can spot the differences).

It’s a subtle change, but here it is:

Cabin on the left in the current version, Hanken Grotesk on the right in the new (coming soon) version!

The current Blue Hills Digital site uses two Google Fonts:

• Cabin, for headlines
• Open Sans, for body copy

At the time I’m writing this (June 10), you are reading these words in Open Sans, and the heading on this post is still Cabin. But at some point in the not too distant future, these words will change 🪄

First, why change? There’s nothing wrong with Open Sans and Cabin, I don’t think. Over time, however, I’ve come to dislike Cabin, and since this is my own website, I get to make changes based on a whim, without needing to build a business case for my boss 🤪

I’ve landed on Hanken Grotesk, an open source sans-serif typface that has a full set of weight variations and characters. It’s easily accessible via Google Fonts, and contains enough variety that I plan to use it across headings and body copy, unless someone persuades me that’s a terrible idea.

Here’s a preview that I shared with the Digital Landscape subscribers today:

Still working on page redesign, and I shared a sneak peek with the Digital Landscape subscribers this week.

Like many nonprofit websites I work on, I’ve added pages on the Blue Hills website one at a time, over a number of years, without any really consistent style guide or set of building blocks 🤯

Fixing that situation is one of many motivations for overhauling the website now – the messiness is actually preventing me from updating the site with new content!!

And this is what makes this stage of a website redesign project so exciting! You get to see new page layouts start to come together, and you can visualize what those most-important-pages on your website will look like once they are rebuilt.

Progress is slow, because this project has to take a back seat to client work!

But here’s a snapshot from Figma of a new model page layout on the left, with the corresponding current page on the right.

No visible changes yet, because PLANNING comes first. And that’s what I’m working on this week – building a spreadsheet with details of every URL — page, article, resource, etc — on the website, so I can plan and stage changes on the site.

Here’s a preview:

I send an email to the Digital Landscape list about this process today, with some recommendations for tools you can use if you’re doing something similar. Read the full email here.

This is an excerpt from a long email I wrote to the Digital Landscape email list today introducing this website refresh project! Click through to read about my goals for the project …

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, I’ll focus on specific improvements as I deploy them. Most of these improvements will have parallels for your nonprofit websites (or perhaps for your own business websites, for the business owners on the list too).

Read the rest of the email here.