A new website, and a focus on small business

For me, looking back through this website’s version history is like watching the final scenes of Interstellar. Years fly by; visuals of who we were two, three years ago. Three years feels so close but then you see this page and: no, it just can’t be! That page looks so old.

And so it is again. What started as an ID born in Japan – 41.14 New design language – became an all-consuming project. As they do. I don’t even remember when it happened. One day I wasn’t rewriting all of our websites, the next day I was, and the git history tells me that was about 10 weeks ago. Time has lost all meaning.

The major change is that there’s just one website now: johnnydecimal.com. Last year I created JDHQ as its own thing because at the time integrating it with the main site would have been impossibly difficult. But the goal was never to have two websites.

I still like the term ‘JDHQ’, and will continue to use it to refer to the interactive parts of the site: the bits where you sign in and do a thing. (You can create a free account now.) It has a bright future; more below.

A focus on small business

Before I talk more about the website, a point that I think is more important. We’ve made a decision to focus all of our efforts, as a business, on helping other small businesses.

There’s so much overhead when you run a business, and when you’re small, you have to do it all yourself. With last year’s Small Business System (SBS) we hoped to give you a space to put everything: a hundred less decisions to make. Our dream was always to expand to become your ‘operations layer’, to provide you ops manuals and guidance and support. So that’s what we’ll be doing from now.

You’ll find a calendar you can subscribe to in the sidebar of your SBS. The first events – 4× welcome Zoom sessions spread across timezones – are scheduled for next week. There’s also a WhatsApp group for our small business customers. Our job now is to support you: to make your life easier. Tell us what you need to succeed.

Information will still flow to the rest of the system. Problems solved for small business are problems we all face; tools built to help them will help you at home.

No more numbers

The previous site assigned an ID to every page. This was a cute affectation – and that sidebar table of contents was a crowd favourite – but ironically limiting.

The Johnny.Decimal system wasn’t designed to hold a preset list of pages in a specific order, but that’s what the old site did. This is in direct conflict with one of the major benefits of the web over print: you can update a website whenever you want. By giving each page a number, I inadvertently made the old site behave like a book.

As a result, it scarcely changed. There’s content that I haven’t published because I would have had to figure out how to fit it into the structure. That’s no way to run a website. So the numbers have gone.

(Technically, we do still have an ID for each page on the site. These are IDs in my own SBS and they allow us to store the artefacts for each page, e.g. the diagrams. You’ll see these IDs in the figure reference numbers. They’re meaningless and confer no order; which is how it’s meant to be.)

‘Aspirationally calm’

Our design goal was to make a place of calm. The internet is very shouty these days. There’s a lot competing for your attention. I wanted our place to be somewhere you could relax.

So there’s a lot more room. And maybe less of what gave the old site ‘character’? The ▒ shade characters at the start of headers have gone. The thick borders have gone. The line-drawing ‘brackets’ around navigation items have gone. We did try adding some of that back, but every time we decided: no. Too busy.

I’ve been using this design for a month or so and when I go back to the old sites they’re jarring. We refer to them as ‘the old clunkers’. The new place is cohesive, I hope. It’s simple. Because Johnny.Decimal’s job isn’t to get in your face and be all clever. It’s to help you get your work done and then get out of the way.

I have a lot of plans for JDHQ. This section got long, so I recorded a roadmap video. I’ll do these at the start of every month from now.

Housekeeping

Until an hour ago, there were 4 mailing lists: the ‘public’ list that anyone could sign up to, and a list for each of our products. These latter lists were intended for product updates, but I never used them.

I’ve collapsed the lists. There’s just one now and if you got an email today, you’re on it. If you don’t want to be, there's an unsubscribe link in the footer.

The site now has a version history whose entries appear in the RSS feed. The RSS feed remains the best way of keeping up to date – see RSS: a public service announcement if you don’t know how it works.

Thank you

We can only do this with your continued support. Thank you – especially to those of you who become lifetime members. It makes a massive difference.

I say it every time, and I’ll say it again: tell us what you need. You ask, we make.