Episode #1: We designed an ugly website on purpose

May 28, 2021

What's this episode about?

Timestamps

0:00 Introduction

3:01 What does “ugly” mean + which design tools do we use

7:15 Going through the original wireframe for the website

8:39 Why did we create koalatative.com 

12:33 Visually minimalist vs maximalist web design + example

13:58 Why everyone should have a website

16:13 The importance of email marketing

19:08 Why you shouldn’t use a website builder for your site

27:43 Tour of koalatative.com

30:50 Email management software options

35:33 How to optimize the hero area of your website

37:15 Content layout of koalatative.com

47:36 Optimization services

52:35 Are about pages important?

54:08 How to showcase social media accounts on a website

55:08 Conclusion

56:48 Bloopers

In the first episode, we talk about how we went about the design and development process for our website, what tools we used, and what you should think about when creating a website for your own small business. We’re two Conversion Optimizers who started a company last year. Since we work with websites, it’s only fitting that we create one for our business. 

When we work on clients’ websites we usually do a lot of research first to find hurdles and come up with solutions that would actually make the website better. In our case, we had to create everything from scratch leaning on our previous experience. We decided to treat this process as an ongoing case study and document our thought process behind it. As experimenters, we’re going to make a ton of changes to this site and try out different solutions all the time so this is just the first crack at it.

Some resources we talked about:

Alegria Design Style - https://eyeondesign.aiga.org/dont-worry-these-gangley-armed-cartoons-are-here-to-protect-you-from-big-tech 

The tool we used for wireframing - https://balsamiq.com/

Email marketing software we use: https://convertkit.com/

Website architecture: https://jamstack.org/