Most of my earned income is made on the internet. I do some website work for local clients in the small town where I live, but most of it comes from resume editing, freelance writing and blogging and all of that gets done online.
Trying to monetize creative work online, like blogging, is a constant challenge. One of the biggest stumbling blocks I keep running into is just trying to make it easy for people to give me money.
It's surprisingly hard to make sure people can readily find that information.
This post was written because I had someone email me and tell me they couldn't find that information ANYWHERE. They had looked!
I verified my payment info for them and asked which of my many websites they had been on while looking for that information and they said it was my personal blog. I thought it was very prominently displayed on my personal blog.
Well, maybe if you are on a PC with a big screen. Not so much if you are on a laptop, tablet or smartphone.
They were on a smartphone, so, for them, that information was hidden behind a "hamburger" drop-down menu. They simply hadn't noticed the "hamburger."
This was someone I had reason to believe was fairly tech savvy, so this was concerning. If they couldn't readily find it, then I had a serious problem.
More than half of all searches these days are performed on a smartphone. So if your mobile website has a problem, you have a big problem because this is probably the primary way your visitors will view your site.
I promptly set out to remedy that. This was how it looked on my PC:
Desktop
But this was how it looked on my cheap smartphone:
Mobile view
You had to click into that "hamburger" menu icon to get to the sidebar where the payment info was:
Sidebar
I tried a few different things, including putting the payment info in its own section between the header and the page menu, which was really ugly and bad UI design:
I then decided to replace the descriptor -- The personal blog of Doreen Traylor -- with the payment information. This seemed to be the best solution for that issue, but it also prompted me to look at some other things going on with the main landing page.
I ultimately did more tweaks, including moving some lower traffic pages from the Page menu to their own section in the sidebar and putting a photo of me in the sidebar in place of where the payment info used to be. This made a big difference in moving important information to prominent positions and deprecating or eliminating other information that is just noise for most people, most of the time.
Final Layout (Mainpage)
Final Layout (Sidebar)
Final Layout, Desktop Version
Trying to monetize creative work online, like blogging, is a constant challenge. One of the biggest stumbling blocks I keep running into is just trying to make it easy for people to give me money.
It's surprisingly hard to make sure people can readily find that information.
This post was written because I had someone email me and tell me they couldn't find that information ANYWHERE. They had looked!
I verified my payment info for them and asked which of my many websites they had been on while looking for that information and they said it was my personal blog. I thought it was very prominently displayed on my personal blog.
Well, maybe if you are on a PC with a big screen. Not so much if you are on a laptop, tablet or smartphone.
They were on a smartphone, so, for them, that information was hidden behind a "hamburger" drop-down menu. They simply hadn't noticed the "hamburger."
This was someone I had reason to believe was fairly tech savvy, so this was concerning. If they couldn't readily find it, then I had a serious problem.
More than half of all searches these days are performed on a smartphone. So if your mobile website has a problem, you have a big problem because this is probably the primary way your visitors will view your site.
I promptly set out to remedy that. This was how it looked on my PC:
Desktop
But this was how it looked on my cheap smartphone:
Mobile view
You had to click into that "hamburger" menu icon to get to the sidebar where the payment info was:
Sidebar
I tried a few different things, including putting the payment info in its own section between the header and the page menu, which was really ugly and bad UI design:
I then decided to replace the descriptor -- The personal blog of Doreen Traylor -- with the payment information. This seemed to be the best solution for that issue, but it also prompted me to look at some other things going on with the main landing page.
I ultimately did more tweaks, including moving some lower traffic pages from the Page menu to their own section in the sidebar and putting a photo of me in the sidebar in place of where the payment info used to be. This made a big difference in moving important information to prominent positions and deprecating or eliminating other information that is just noise for most people, most of the time.
Final Layout (Mainpage)
Final Layout (Sidebar)
Final Layout, Desktop Version