New Hello Web Books website

After a few weeks months of work, I'm super excited to release the new Hello Web Books website design to the world!

Video/vlog of this post. In it, I go through a bit of why I updated everything and before/after screens.

In Hello Web Design, one of my biggest points for a nicer looking website design is to reduce clutter. And then I'd come back to this website and get annoyed at past-me for creating such a clutter-y website.

When I originally designed this website, I stepped out of my comfort zone and added a lot of photos, banners, fonts, and colors — I'm terrible at designing the "little details" so I relied on a lot of extra things to make the website feel more polished.

In this design, I stripped most of that out. No more Typekit (oh man do I love Freight Text Pro but Typekit was just a bit too slow for me), no more custom fonts (Mrs Onion was fun, but in the end, a bit hard to read) — all hail Lato, the only typeface used now. It's plain, but pretty, and comes with tons of weights.

The landing pages for the books also have been improved. A lot of the imagery has been removed and a lot more text content added, like FAQs and more descriptions of the package contents.

Last but not least, I've increased prices on all my products. This was a hard decision, but the last couple years I've had really low income for the amount of work I put into the videos/books. I've been severely undercharging for the amount of work I've put in. Of course, existing buyers will still get all product updates for free.

Things aren't done though! I am thisclose to launching my next announcement but not quite yet, which is why Hello Web App isn't available to be ordered right now (it might be a big obvious what the announcement is about). Gotta get my ducks in a row before I can turn that back on. I know this website has some bugs and kinks to work out, so I'm launching it sooner rather than later.

On the topic of bugs! If you see anything wonky, please let me know! I appreciate anyone who can help me test and debug the website.

What do you think? See anything you like or dislike? Let me know in the comments below or on Twitter!