A Shared Landing Page for a New Summit

Cassandra's Roles:

Copywriter, Web designer, Project Manager & Creative Thought Partner

How We Began

Diona Reese Williams, a client of mine since 2021, partnered with Kyla Maciosek to host an on-site summit in Arizona called Nature Every Day Summit. They both have their own websites for their businesses (read all about how I redesigned Diona's) but they wanted to have a shared digital presence to serve as a landing page for the summit.

So, Diona asked me if I could design it for them. And the answer was, of course, yes!

Part of my work as a Creative Thought Partner is working with a client to determine which tech, app, SaaS (software as a service) is best for the project we're working on. I proposed Carrd as a budget-friendly option given they were purely needed a landing page and nothing more, at least at this time.

Two challenges along the way

We hit a snag early on in using Carrd because I hadn't realized that they had increased their pricing for the tier that allows users to take payments and link a custom domain, both of which they needed to be able to do.

We were in a meeting together when we realized this and I jumped over to GoDaddy and Squarespace as Diona uses GoDaddy for her websites and Kyla uses Squarespace. We looked through pricing together and we saw that both of those options were still substantially more of an investment than Carrd, even with needing to utilize the higher tier to have access to the elements we needed to use.

Kyla and Diona talked it through and came to the decision to still move forward with Carrd. I apologized for not updating my own knowledge of Carrd's tiers before our meeting and I felt good about going through alternative options with them in the moment so we could all be in the loop on pricing options.

Another bump in the road was Carrd's back-end user interface, specifically continual errors in saving. Carrd isn't set up to automatically save as one is creating a draft. I communicated back and forth with Carrd customer support to try to fix the saving error. I would click 'Save' multiple times and sometimes the first try, it would save successfully. But many times, I clicked 'Save' 20 times and then the 21st was when it would save. Customer support couldn't discern what was going wrong on my end.

I resorted to saving after every single change I made to the site. Slowing down in this way was the way I made it through. A silver lining in this experience was moving to an iPad and realizing that creating a website on a touchscreen is a very enjoyable process!

Focused topic about the project

What I love most about this project was how the project supported Diona and Kyla filling in all the pieces to their hosting puzzle. My request for the timing so that I could add it to the website prompted them to finalize the timing. My request for more details about their schedule prompted them to clarify the elements of the day. By handing over the web design and the copywriting to me, they were able to focus on the Summit's experience design.

We all were able to experience the joys of delegating work, they could focus on what they needed to, and I could focus on what I was tasked with.