Cycle 1 - Building a welcoming place

Context

I have limited time to invest in building the app and making the content. Probably a couple of hours per week.

Thus, it is essential to be very strict with what I build and where to put my effort.

So I am going to maintain a list of things that I work on for this project and I will group them under a theme or cycle.

Cycle 1: Building a welcoming place

The theme

The central theme of this first cycle is to make the website learn.shortruby.com a welcoming place for visitors.

There will be two metrics that I will watch for this:

1. PageSpeed insights (looking at performance, accessibility and SEO)
2. Number of visitors

The focus of this cycle will be on improving PageSpeed Insights.

Here is the current report: link

Small projects

Here is a list of small projects to achieve the goal of this cycle.

1. Add RSS feed for the blog
2. SEO: Add meta-tags gem to the app - see as the source of inspiration Hotwire.io source code
3. SEO: Transform images to webp format
4. SEO: Fix issues from PageSpeed report
5. Accessibility: Fix issues from PageSpeed report
6. Feature: Add subscribe to get course updates - when they launch, pricing …
7. Remove the empty state buttons: Buy Now and See More. Replace them with CTA to subscribe when the course is launched.
8. Add automatic Sitemap generation

Decisions to make

I have to decide the following:

1. How do I manage the list of people that want to know when I launch? Is this a good time to list more general subscribers so that I can share what I work on and not be specific to a product?

2. What analytics to add to the website? So far, I have used Plausible for all my websites. I like it and there is no reason to change. I still ask myself the question: Is there something else to add? Should I spend time to look around?

That’s it for now. Let’s build and share!