Warm up Donors Before Asking: Email First, Donate Later
Asking someone to donate the first time they hear about you is roughly the same as proposing marriage on a first date. It doesn't work, and everyone involved knows it doesn't work, but we keep doing it anyway. Cold advertising that leads straight to a donation page is one of those things that looks logical on a spreadsheet and falls apart in the real world. You're asking people who've never thought about your cause, who aren't sure they believe you need money, to hand over their credit card details to a stranger. Of course the conversion rate is terrible. The fix isn't complicated. You replace the direct ask with a landing page that earns attention first. It explains the cause, makes the case for why it matters, and asks for an email address instead of a donation. Then you build the relationship over time through a nurture sequence before you ever ask for money. This is not new knowledge. Every decent direct marketer has known it for decades. Yet I keep running into organizations that are pouring money into cold paid media and measuring success purely by immediate donation conversion, genuinely confused about why the numbers don't add up. The ads aren't the problem. The funnel is. #CharityMarketing #DigitalFundraising #ConversionOptimization
Shorten Mobile Donation Forms, Front‑Load Pay Options
Sixty percent of donation traffic on a site I am reviewing comes in on mobile. Seventy-five percent of those people start the donation process and don't finish it. That's not a small leak. That's the bucket having no bottom. The frustrating...
Organizational Silos Stall Implementation of Clear Recommendations
Good recommendations and implemented recommendations are two very different things, and the gap between them is almost always organizational rather than technical. I keep running into the same dynamic. A team identifies a problem. An audit gets done, often a thorough...
APIs, Not UI, Will Drive Future Digital Products
Big business analysts are predicting that by 2029, 60% of websites and apps will be architected primarily for agent consumption rather than human use. I've been thinking about this one for a few days, and I'm not convinced. Not because agents won't...
Stop Counting Screens; Measure Real User Success
Gartner's latest UX research includes a line I want to needlepoint onto a cushion (yes, I like needlepoint, don't judge) and send to every product team I've ever worked with. "Counting screens generated tells you nothing useful." I've sat in more meetings...
Baymard Launches Private Community for E‑Commerce Professionals
Oooo... The Baymard Institute has started a community for those involved in ecommerce. Its private but anybody can ask to join if they work in the field. If you do work for an ecomm company this is definitely something you should...
Merge CRO and UX: Optimize Post‑Conversion Experience
CRO wants to know whether users converted. UX wants to know whether it was easy. These get treated as separate questions requiring separate teams and separate presentations to management. But they're two lenses on the same problem, and keeping them...
Use Quiet Times to Build Systems, Avoid Burnout
I've been thinking about the boom-bust rhythm of agency life this week. Not in a despairing way. More in a "why do we keep getting caught by this?" way. The cycle is familiar. A quiet stretch where you're panicking about the...
Turn Sent Emails Into AI-Powered Knowledge Base
I was working with a client this week on connecting their email to Notion, and they mentioned something I hadn't quite considered. They spend two hours every morning answering customer support emails. Same questions, over and over. How does delivery work?...
Standardize YouTube Descriptions with a Simple Affiliate Template
I've been helping a client audit their content marketing strategy including their YouTube setup, and the description problem jumped out immediately. Five hundred videos with descriptions that were either bare-bones or wildly inconsistent, and an affiliate links program they'd barely...
Build Reusable AI Toolkits, Not One‑Shot Prompts
The thing I keep coming back to with AI is context. If you dump everything into one giant prompt, you get a confident mess back. If you break work into reusable skills, you get something closer to a system. On this month’s podcast,...
AI Boosts Output, but Multiplies Management Fatigue
I had a conversation recently where someone said AI has made them more productive but also somehow more exhausted. I know exactly what they mean. The promise was that AI would take things off your plate. And it does. But what's...
AI Can Draft UI, But Designers Remain Essential
So I’ve been playing with Google Stitch, which is one of those AI tools that turns a text prompt into a UI. It’s good. Not "replace every designer tomorrow" good, but definitely "maybe don’t hire a UI designer for this one"...
Best Conversions Come From Fixing Off‑Site Friction Early
Most of my CRO clients come to me in a panic. Sales are down, someone has asked a difficult question in a board meeting, and now we need to fix the website. Fast. So we do. We work through the usual...
Start Low, Build Trust, Then Upsell with Tiered Courses
I spent part of a call this week helping a client structure their course pricing, and one question kept coming up: how do you charge a reasonable amount for something when you're still building trust with new students? Their default was...
Documented AI Skills Turn Assumptions Into Speed
I was pulling together my library of AI skills recently and realized I now have over 60 of them, covering everything from how I write reports to how I run a top task analysis. When I started, I treated them...
Merge CRO and UX to Close Conversion Gaps
I was reading an article this week about how CRO and UX relate to each other, and it put into words something I've been circling around for a while. Most organizations run these as separate disciplines with separate teams, and...
Invest in Setup, Get Reliable AI Automation
Most of my routine admin now runs automatically, and it costs me about £20 a month. I've been building out a set of AI agents over the past few months. One archives client emails and links them to the right project...
AI Design Tool Replaces Figma for Fast, Affordable Wireframes
I cancelled my Figma subscription a few months ago, and I haven't missed it once. I've been using an AI design tool instead ([https://t.co/W5sOEuK90l](https://t.co/W5sOEuK90l), if you're curious), and the workflow is genuinely different. You paste in your content, it generates complete...
When New Beats Old: Start Fresh Over Full Migration
A client I'm working with is moving their online course community to a new platform. The instinct in that situation is always to migrate everything. Every post, every discussion, every piece of historical content carried across intact. After talking it through...
Transparent, Phased Recommendations Balance Speed and Risk
I was talking through a project with a colleague this week and something came up that I've been chewing on since. A client is generating significant revenue right now and wants to get a new platform live as quickly as possible...
Show, Don’t Tell: Prototypes Win over Process Explanations
I was on a client project this week where someone kept trying to jump ahead in the content process. They had tools they wanted to use, ideas they wanted to implement, and absolutely no patience for the foundational work that...
Limit Content Review to Two People for Speed
I work on a lot of website projects, and one of the most reliable ways to stall the content phase is to involve too many people in deciding what each page should say. I mentioned this to a client today...
AI Skills Library Turns Playbooks Into Instant Outputs
The UK Government Digital Service manual is probably the best digital playbook ever produced. Comprehensive, well-structured, genuinely useful. It also presumably took hundreds of hours to write and is read by a small fraction of the people it was intended for. That's...
Launch Fast, Refine Later: Only Avoid Errors or Embarrassment
I gave a client some advice in a meeting today that felt almost reckless to say out loud, but I stand by it completely. When you're reviewing content before a website launch, ask yourself one question: is this factually incorrect,...
Too Many Products? Group Navigation, Not a Wall
I was in a meeting this week with a client who has over 90 products on their website, and we hit a familiar problem. They wanted to list everything under a single "Products" navigation item, which sounds logical until you...
Thin Catalogues Need Browse, Not AI Search
I had a conversation recently that reminded me how badly empty search results can damage an early-stage ecommerce site. The team was excited about adding AI-powered search, and the logic was hard to argue with on the surface. Modern feature,...
Senior UX Roles Demand Leadership, Strategy, and Advocacy
I was facilitating a leadership session recently when someone asked a question I didn't have a clean answer for. "What's the actual job? Because nobody seems to agree." They weren't wrong. Senior UX roles are often titled 'lead' or 'head of' but...
Retention After Learning Hinges on Community, Not Content
I've been thinking about the point at which a community member has essentially got what they paid for. They've completed the course, they know the fundamentals, and there's no obvious reason left to stay. How do you retain them? It's a...
Accepting Platform Lock‑In Can Be a Strategic Bet
I was working with a client this week who was wrestling with a decision I see a lot of teams avoid confronting honestly: whether to build on a third-party platform and accept the lock-in, or build something more flexible that...
Your System, Not the App, Drives Productivity
Someone I was coaching this morning asked me which app I use to stay on top of everything, and I could tell by the look on their face that the honest answer was a bit disappointing. They'd been quietly hoping...
Check Platform Restrictions Early; Docs Save Headaches
I was scoping requirements for a client project recently when I hit a constraint I hadn't anticipated. The client had assumed a major ecommerce platform was the obvious choice. It's popular, well-supported, and most developers know it. Then I checked their...
Dynamic Discounts Demand Complex Purchase‑history Integration
I was working through requirements for a client project this week and hit a pricing structure that sounds completely reasonable until you try to implement it. The client sells an introductory course, an advanced course, and a set of individual topic...
AI Workflow Could Finally Make Tiny Web Projects Profitable
There's a type of project that makes most agencies uncomfortable: the small website job. Good enough to take, because the client relationship matters or the referral came from someone important. Too small to profit from, because design and build time eats...
AI Generates Full Landing Page and Theme in 20 Minutes
I gave an AI design tool a rough brief and a screenshot of a website this week. What came back was a polished, interactive landing page. Not a rough wireframe. An actual design with relevant copy, hover states, and responsive layouts....
Fix Functionality First, Then Redesign to Measure Impact
A client asked me this week whether they should tackle their website's usability problems and their visual design problems at the same time. My answer was to do it in stages, even though that approach might cost slightly more overall. They had...
Luxury Goods Need Digital Experiences that Match Their Quality
I did a UX audit for a luxury ecommerce client recently. Beautiful products. Genuinely beautiful. Handmade, carefully crafted, the kind of thing that photographs well and costs accordingly. Then I looked at the website. It wasn't terrible. Nothing was broken, the checkout...
Guide Shoppers One Choice at a Time
I was reviewing a luxury ecommerce site recently and counted the number of decisions a customer had to make before they could add a single product to their basket. Eleven. Eleven separate choices, all presented at the same time. Colour, size, finish,...
Separate Design Roles: Creativity Needs Humans, Rules Can Be Automated
I was talking with someone recently about making a design hire, and it led somewhere I didn't expect. There are, I think, two quite different things that get grouped together under the label of "design." There's aesthetic, visual, brand design. The stuff...
Build Your AI Skills Library for Compounding Advantage
This week's newsletter is out, and it's about something I've been building obsessively for the last few months. I now have over 50 AI skills covering recurring parts of my work. Not prompts I've found online. Documented processes I've written myself,...
Clear Decision Authority, Not More People, Speeds Projects
I’ve seen teams try to “go faster” on a website rebuild by throwing more people at it. It rarely works. Speed usually comes from one boring thing. Decisions that get made on time. If you want a faster project, I’d look at these...
AI Empowers Yet Undermines Creative Control
Am I the only one that is blown away by what AI can enable me to do but find myself left with a feeling of being slightly less in control of my work than I used to be. When you're...
Skip Research, Skip Success: Diagnose Before You Optimize
I had a sales call this week where the client wanted to skip research and jump straight to recommendations. I get it. Research feels like the part that delays the “real work.” But when you skip it, you’re basically asking someone to...
Human Voice Beats AI-Generated Content in Marketing
I had a planning call this week and we ended up talking about the "content marketing is dead" idea. I think it’s the opposite. AI makes average content cheaper to produce, so average content gets ignored even faster. If you want your...
Automating Entry Tasks Risks Losing Essential Skill Training
I have been thinking about the impact of AI on junior roles. If AI can handle the entry-level work, the obvious question is where people learn the craft. In a lot of careers, the “boring” tasks are also the training ground. You...
AI Transforms Website Rebuilds with Better Content
The dirty secret of most website rebuilds is that nothing really changes. You take content written by people who don't know how to write for the web, drop it into a shiny new design, and wonder why the metrics don't improve....
Simplify Complex Options with Calm, Step‑by‑Step Flow
I keep seeing teams panic about product pages with lots of options. Size, finish, accessories, delivery choices. Suddenly the page looks like the cockpit of a small aircraft. The options aren’t always the problem. The problem is making the customer do all the...
Human Stories Turn Luxury From Cold to Warm
I was on a call with a high-end ecommerce brand this week, and they said something that stuck with me. They wanted the online experience to feel like walking into a luxury store. Calm. Confident. Easy. What they didn't want was the...
Practical UX Leadership: Influence Without Unlimited Resources
So I've been running workshops for Smashing Magazine for a while now, and each time I put one together I ask myself whether I'm actually teaching the right things or just covering the topics I find interesting. (Probably a bit...
Chaos Reveals Opportunity: Optimize During Organizational Transitions
I've noticed something about the organizations that tend to bring me in for optimization and strategy work. They're almost always in some state of chaos. Restructures still working their way through the system. New leadership with new priorities. Strategic pivots that...