[fr] Où Stephanie se prend la tête avec le contenu de son site professionnel et se demande comment elle va bien pouvoir faire.
I’m itching to try WPML and clean up stephanie-booth.com, my professional site. It’s a mess. Worse than that, it’s an out-of-date mess.
Each time I start thinking about how to reorganize it, my head starts hurting. What belongs here on CTTS, and what belongs there? How do I present what I do to potential clients, when I’m not even sure what to call myself? I do I deal with the fact that I’m talking to very different clients (schools, individuals, freelancers, small and bigger businesses, conference organizers…)?
How do I keep it simple when I do so many things?
Should I change radically and do SB.com blog-like? In that case, does it make sense to keep it separate from CTTS?
Here is a feeble attempt to try and think this headache out loud. Help is very very welcome, as long as it’s not along the lines of “stop doing so many things and pick one”.
So, first there is the “about me” stuff. Bios, CVs, about stuff. Here’s what I have:
- http://stephanie-booth.com/en/
- http://stephanie-booth.com/fr/
- http://stephanie-booth.com/fr/bio/
- https://climbtothestars.org/about/
- http://stephbooth.weebly.com/who-is-she.html
- a couple of PDF CVs (one focused on strategic consulting, the other on teenagers an research)
A contact page (this is not too much of a headache):
Stuff I’ve done:
- http://stephanie-booth.com/en/speaking/past/
- https://climbtothestars.org/about/presse/
- http://going-solo.net/
- and more stuff that I should showcase or list as accomplishments or something
Stuff I do: the big headache. Maybe I should use three entry points:
- delivery mode (training, speaking, consulting, doing)
- theme (teenagers and social media, social media as communication and marketing, improving one’s online presence, blogging, events, freelancing, coworking)
- audience (individuals, businesses, schools, non-profits, freelancers, events)
I’m not sure how useful this is… Also, my francophone audience and my anglophone audience have different interests, so my content does not overlap perfectly in both languages (not a problem, but it probably means I have to think the FR and EN sites separately).
There is also content on SB.com which I think does not belong there. It’s more CTTS-like, and might have been good at the time, but it’s a bit dated. I might retro-publish it in the blog so it doesn’t just disappear. And there is content on CTTS which is a little “business-oriented”
- http://stephanie-booth.com/fr/pourquoi/
- https://climbtothestars.org/focus/experiential-marketing/ (this never took off and is completely out-of-date)
- https://climbtothestars.org/focus/multilingual/
Right, so, how can I make sense of all this? Although with most of my clients I feel like a site architecture and content wizard, I’m aware that I’m really not that good at it (particularly with my own content, unsurprisingly).
So, help welcome. Thanks in advance.
I agree, you should differentiate the english and french part, using WPML to link articles that are useful to the two parts. Eventually, you could provide a link to Google Translate or whatever for the other articles, just in case someone would want to read them.
The can’t-do-without are the about pages in both languages, one contact page, one page about your realisations (all of them, in both languages), maybe lifestream-like, but with archives so that people can check the past activities.
One page for each language to explain what services you provide, since they are not the same for different audiences you can just mention the things in passing when it is not of interest, and be a little more detailed for the services the audience is interested in.
Whilst I might be not the best to advise on this here are some ideas:
– merge everything under CTTS (and have SB.com redirect here),
– use categories and/tags to arrange your content (take this opportunity to add an “abandonned projects” category)
– change the CTTS landing page to be your about page (who you are, what you are doing) instead of the stream of posts and offer visitors a directory of the different categories of content they can find here, depending on who they are, like “you are a school, here is what I do for schools and here are some related posts”
my 2cts 🙂
Thanks to both for your ideas! Thinking about them (apart from the landing page… that will remain the blog, sorry Claude ;-)).
In the meantime I’m trying to map out what I do to make a little sense of it: http://www.mindmeister.com/36173064/my-work-what-i-do-what-i-ve-done