People often ask me what I do, and it doesn’t exactly clear things up to say, “I help make the web less terrible.”
After more than 15 years working in digital, I’ve learned that the job rarely fits neatly into one box. Sometimes an organization needs strategic direction. Sometimes customers are getting lost in a confusing website. Sometimes an internal team is fighting a codebase that makes every change harder than it should be. And sometimes the right answer really is to build something new.
The common thread is problem solving.
I work alongside business owners, internal teams, and nonprofit leaders to understand what isn't working, get to the root of the problem, and find a practical way forward.
Here are seven ways that can look in practice.
1. I can help you establish a clear digital strategy.
Digital problems have an unfortunate habit of masquerading as technology problems.
You may think you need a new website, a different platform, another marketing tool, or a custom application. Sometimes you do. But before choosing a solution, it helps to understand what you're actually trying to accomplish.
Who are you trying to serve? What do you need them to do? What's getting in their way? What does success look like? Which problems actually deserve your attention now, and which can wait?
I can help you work through those questions, establish priorities, and turn a collection of ideas and frustrations into a practical plan.
I work to help you arrive at clarity and peace of mind.
2. I can help you understand the people you're trying to serve.
Chances are, your organization already knows quite a lot about its customers, members, donors, participants, or users.
The problem is that the knowledge is often scattered.
Marketers, customer service, developers, and organizational leadership all see with their own lens. Analytical data can help to reveal patterns, but doesn't always explain why something is happening.
I can help bring those perspectives together through stakeholder conversations, analytics reviews, surveys, user interviews, and other research.
From there, we can turn what we learn into something useful: customer journeys, process maps, user flows, prototypes, or simply a clearer understanding of the problems worth solving.
When you understand what people are trying to accomplish and where they're struggling, it becomes much easier to make good digital decisions.
3. I can help you find out why your website isn't working as well as it should.
Websites accumulate clutter over time: new pages, campaigns, navigation items, plugins, calls to action, and a microsite someone urgently asked for back in 2021...
Eventually, a website that was once carefully and strategically laid out can become difficult for both the organization and its users.
I can review your website from several angles: usability, content, conversion, accessibility, performance, analytics, technical implementation, and the business objectives underneath all of them.
The point isn't to produce an intimidating report containing a hundred things you're doing wrong.
It's to identify the most important issues, understand what's causing them, and give you a sensible order in which to address them.
Often, meaningful improvement doesn't require a rebuild. A handful of well-chosen changes can make an enormous difference.
4. I can help remove friction from the user experience.
Sometimes you know there's a problem but don't know what the solution should be.
People abandon a form. Customers can't find important information. Staff repeatedly have to explain something the website was supposed to explain. A workflow technically functions but somehow manages to annoy everyone who touches it.
That's where UX work becomes especially useful.
We can examine where people are getting stuck, simplify confusing processes, reorganize information, improve content, or prototype alternative approaches before investing heavily in development.
Prototypes are particularly useful because they let us experiment cheaply. We can make an idea tangible, put it in front of real people, learn from what happens, and adjust it before committing to an expensive build.
The goal is to make hte right thing easier to do.
5. I can help you make sense of a complicated digital service.
Some digital projects become overwhelming because the interface is only the visible tip of the problem.
Behind it are people, responsibilities, approvals, emails, spreadsheets, databases, business rules, exceptions, integrations, and years of accumulated decisions.
Before building anything, somebody needs to understand how all those pieces fit together. Who needs what information? Who is responsible for providing it? What happens next? Where can the process fail? Which decisions are automated and which require a person? What does a successful outcome actually look like?
I can work with you to map those processes, identify gaps and unnecessary complexity, and translate what we learn into clear action plans.
The goal is to provide you with a clear understanding of your own systems and a plan to deliver substantive improvements.
6. I can help you strengthen the systems you already have.
New development gets most of the attention in digital work because new initiatives are exciting. Quite often, it is more valuable to an organization to improve the state of an existing system to prevent it turning into a time thief.
Codebases and digital workflows accumulate technical overhead, workarounds, duplicated logic, outdated assumptions, and mysterious little corners everyone has learned not to touch.
Sometimes those problems show up as bugs. Sometimes they're slow performance, unreliable integrations, difficult deployments, frustrated staff, or seemingly simple changes that take far too long to complete.
I can work alongside your internal team, or investigate independently, to trace problems to their source, review architecture and code, improve troublesome workflows, and make existing systems easier to maintain and extend.
This is often a good place to begin working together because the engagement can be very focused.
You don't necessarily need a rebuild. Sometimes you just need an experienced second set of eyes.
7. I can help you build something new when new is actually the right answer.
And, yes, sometimes the answer really is to build something new.
Your organization may have an essential process that off-the-shelf software can't accommodate. You may need a digital service built around a particular audience or workflow. Your existing platform may have reached the end of what it can reasonably do.
I've spent more than 15 years developing websites, custom web applications, and SaaS platforms, so I can take a project beyond strategy and recommendations into implementation.
But I've found it is important to earn our way to that conclusion.
We'll first understand the people involved, the problem we're solving, the processes the system needs to support, and the simplest sensible way to accomplish it. Then we can design and build around those factors.
A digital system should serve your objectives and your people, not the other way around.
You don't have to solve it all at once.
One of the biggest assumptions people make about bringing in a specialist like myself is that it means committing to a massive project or an equally massive budget. It really doesn't.
Many of the organizations I work with start with something small: a conversation, a review, a stubborn bug, a difficult decision, a planning session, or a particular part of a website that simply isn't working.
That's often enough for us to understand the problem and determine what, if anything, should happen next.
So if you're facing a digital challenge and aren't quite sure what kind of help you need, that's perfectly fine. You don't need to diagnose it before getting in touch.
Tell me what's going on. We'll get to the heart of the problem together.
