Landing the Landing page
By David
For Project: ProjectGallery.Me
published: January 11, 2023
last updated: January 11, 2023

Yesterday was the first time in a while that I haven't made any code changes. While I did do a little bit of work on the site, I can't help but shake the feeling of not having been productive if I'm not writing code. It's one of those limitations of naturally being the "technician" of the entrepreneur/technician/manager business personalities that I need to break through.

As of now, coming to ProjectGallery.me is completely confusing because a new person has no idea what they are looking at. I am just vomiting data at them with no context. Up to now, I've had this idea that I want the site to be immediately useable by anyone who gets to the page. I'm basing this experience off of something like Twitter where you are immediately greeted with your feed.

There are two things I've missed by running with this goal.

  1. Twitter has a landing page when you are not signed in
  2. Twitter's has little use to a lone user.

Given this, it's obvious that I need to rethink what I want to do with the landing page and go with something more traditional.

And breaking this down, it's also apparent that I am waffling between two primary objectives. My stated primary use case is for ProjectGallery.me to allow users to showcase their portfolio of work and to attach context through journal posts. However, by wanting to immediately present stuff to an anonymous user, I'm simultaneously trying to solve for the discovery of interesting content, which is secondary.

Basically, I need to refocus and remember that I am my own first customer. Until I have a simple showcase that I'm happy to enter all of my toy projects as well as my bigger ones (such as this...) and I'm able to communicate this intent to others who have the same need, then I shouldn't be wasting time thinking about discovery.

As for creating a more traditional landing page, @remotejoeclark made the fantastic recommendation of checking out https://landings.dev/ by @nilansaha. My main task this evening will be to skim through and get some inspiration for how to communicate the intention of ProjectGallery.me.

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