I learned an important lesson tonight. Rather, I learned that I had not been appropriately applying a lesson I learned long ago: to be my own customer, to periodically treat myself as a customer of my own services to see what it is like.
You may have noticed that I temporarily switched to a different site design. The reason for this is that tonight I was poking around on my site, looking at different pages (like the “About” and “Downloads” pages) and noticed that they were really screwed up. What irks me is that I do not how long they had been this way, so I do not know how many readers were turned off by the poorly formatted pages (the content was bleeding badly over into the sidebar, making everything unreadable).
What I take away from this is that I need to be more thoroughly checking the site, as a customer, more often. I have been doing it from time to time, but obviously not often enough.
So, I share this experience with you with the intention that it might cause you to think about whether you are playing the role of the customer often enough (and thoroughly enough).
I am not sure at this point how things are going to settle out with the design. I will spend some time tomorrow trying to diagnose what caused the problems. You may see me switching between designs as I debug this. Regardless of how it shakes out, your reading experience, and overall customer experience, is my primary focus in making decisions about this site.
If I don’t get a chance to tell you before the Thursday: I wish you a safe and joyful new year!
Update: Problem solved, and now back to using the Thesis Theme. The problem came about as a result of a few “tweaks” I tried to implement several days ago … apparently did not copy the code correctly and it messed up several pages. The lesson learned still applies. I hate to think of the number of people who must have been dissatisfied when they viewed those messed up pages.