Content week <3
Some of you might know that I have a pretty sweet contract gig with a custom printed sportswear shop in The Midwest. For those of you that didn’t know, surprise, I’m doing what I love for my favorite people; screen printers.
This contract started 6 months ago as a hard UX and design strategy gig focusing on helping this small & scrappy team pick the pieces of their platform back up after a massive ransomwear attack a few years ago. The recoup efforts have been, let’s just say “not ideal” so when I stepped in to support, I was fully expecting a full on left-brain data synth and UXR daydream scenario (don’t ask, I love spreadsheets and grid systems. It’s a problem.).
Turns out Areswear actually has like, never had a consistent designer? The sum of their platform efforts can be explained as “CEO tells a few contract devs to ‘just do it’ and it gets done.” No one making the calls had a technical, design, or technical design background.The PM (bless him, he’s amazing) grew into the role over time. He started as a cashier at their brick & mortar a decade ago, and is learning how to do technical oversight and ops for what, honestly, should be handled by a team of a few seasoned pros. Since our needs have been so varied, I’ve essentially absorbed the roles of Brand Manager, Content Creator, UX Writer, UI Designer, and Design Strategist. There’s a lot going on behind the scenes, to put it lightly.
One of the biggest (if not the biggest imo) issues on the site was the fact that new users had no clue what the business model was. Even the 45% of new users who scrolled to the bottom of the page were left scratching their heads like “huh?” Ares had gotten so wrapped up in pushing marketing that supported their existing customers that they lost the plot on attracting and retaining new users. For a platform that is consistently pulling in anywhere from 2,000 - 5,000 new users a day, that’s a hell of a lot of botched first impressions.
All that is to say we’re getting to the part of the project I love; rolling out the designs. We’re re-skinning the home page to address the marketing and brand identity issues (see also: crisis lol) and pushing incremental rollouts on content. The biggest issue with our prime real estate was that we were featuring 5 slides of nearly identical content that established users would immediately understand as “team store content” but new users who were just looking for a custom set of jerseys for their team might not understand.
SO the last two weeks have been all about banners. Moving away from “here’s 5 team store banners” and diversifying content with visual cues and language that would help direct new and existing users alike to our product catalog, bulk order designer, and spirit wear campaigns.
Sourcing and editing assets, writing copy, getting messy in Figma, tapping in the devs to make sure I wasn’t about to make their lives a living hell? I’d call that a successful week, for sure. It’s been great, and has really affirmed that I might actually not only know exactly what I’m doing, but I might actually be like, really good at it? Wild.
Ok that was a lot of text. Look at these pictures! It’s a bit of a good old fashioned “before and after".” Y’all know I’m a sucker for the classics, so go on, git.
