Useful tidbits from around the web that are sure to help you in your digital product design ventures. Have a wonderful week!

Hey, everyone! Welcome to the second week of 2024 – and guess what? I’m dusting off my keyboard and bringing back the Weekly Web Find, something I haven’t done in over three years. Think of it as my new year’s resolution, but with a techy twist!

This revival is all about being open, thoughtful, and consistent in the digital treasures I share with you. It’s a fresh start, a new chapter, and I’m thrilled to dive into this with all of you.

At the beginning of the summer I began a project that I believed would take me about a month to complete. Now, at the beginning of November, I am finally shipping version one of this project. Join me for a retrospective look at making my personal site a Hugo generated static site.

What Have I Learned

First, Hugo’s ease of use is a bit deceiving. On the surface it seems to make short work of putting a static website together. You add content in the form of markdown files, and provide templates written in HTML, along with some Go Lang functions and methods peppered in there to provide the “automation” of static site generation.

If I start writing in here will it just go to the front of the damn thing and be part of the content that gets pulled in? Because if that is the case than I am sold. I mean that is yet another breakthrough in learning about Hugo.

Man, this has been a lot more difficult than I had originally thought. However, I am beginning to enjoy it. The learning curve is quit a bit but I think I am getting the hang of it now. The last trick to learn is how to add inline images and we are golden

I have been thinking about moving away from Wordpress and convert this site to static HTML generated by some kind of framework. There are many reasons for this, not least of which is the security leaks that come with using Wordpress. Going static will also mean virtually no updates needed to the server, no database updates or the need for any specialty plugins. So this month I have given myself the challenge of migrating this site away from Wordpress, and learning Hugo to generate a static HTML version of my blog. Before I get into this I want to just point out, this is not a tutorial or walkthrough. More of an opinion from a designer/front-end dev.

Wallpaper Wednesday is a practice I have not done for many years. In the early days of Indy Hall I would put out a digital wallpaper each week. This helped me stay fresh with design and the suite of tools I use on a regular basis. It also gave me the freedom to explore concepts I normally would not be able to while completing client work. I am humbly attempting to revive this practice with this initial release of the new Wallpaper Wednesday.

Been a minute since I published one of these. Below are some sites I found during my travels around the internet, that digital product designers and fellow technophiles may find helpful or interesting.

Haikei App

https://haikei.app/

Haikei App is the evolution of two web projects by Z Creative Labs (https://zcreativelabs.com/). It is a FREE web app that helps produce unique SVG design assets for use in your web projects.

Testing the viability of a product or service can be tricky. However, in my experience, I have found that if you explore the answers, provided by two fundamental questions, you can get to a final proof of viability. As well as gain a great foundation for the success of your business, its marketing goals and its customer support.

Question 01: What problem does your product or service solve?

The best products and services in history are supremely successful because they proverbially, scratch a certain itch, felt by enough people, to make a viable market. At times this market is well established, other times it is brand new. Either way, asking yourself if your product or service makes the problem easier to deal with or disappear completely, is a fundamental step.