A shift in focus

Posted 11th November 2017

It has been a while since I’ve written a blog article. In fact the last significant content update my website had was back in September 2016, in the Resources section.

Since then, a lot has changed.

Around the time that last article went up, I bumped into a friend-and-long-time-client who had recently moved jobs. During our conversation, we got talking about a user experience design position that they were looking to fill and how I’d be perfect for the job.

But I was very happy doing what I had been doing for the previous seven years!

Another chance meeting and a few persuasive chats over coffee and I was sold. It was a massive decision for me and my family and—I’ll be honest—I’m still adjusting to employment. But it was the right decision.

Why no blogging?

My blog used to be focussed on my clients – tips, tricks and resources to explain foreign (and often technical) concepts to them in layperson’s terms. It also served as a good point of entry for potential clients who were searching for solutions to problems I might have answered on my blog. Marketing, of a kind!

So I was now an employee, and while I still continued to work with a clutch of my favourite clients, I wasn’t taking any new work on. So the resources-style blog wasn’t something that needed much attention.

Any energy I put into my site was spent converting the then-blog into a stand-alone Resources section, freeing up the blog for more traditional blogging. This was no small task!

A shift of focus

So you’ll notice a huge shift in focus on this website. It’s no centred on freelance and on-person-agency work; instead it’s all about me as a designer and frontend developer. I’ll be writing about my opinions, things I’ve been up to, design and development challenges I’ve overcome, that kind of thing.

The Resources section will always be there for my clients and small website owners, and I don’t plan to abandon it!

It’s just that other designers’ and developers’ writing has been instrumental in my getting to where I am in my career on the web, so hopefully this blog can be of some use to them in return.

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  2. The accessibility conversations you want to be having

    In most companies, accessibility conversations centre around WCAG compliance, but that’s just the start. Thinking beyond that is where you want to be!