When we redesigned Piccalilli last year, our ultimate focus was on the web experience — specifically articles and links. The Index of course got some love, but we put a pin in giving it a full re-work until we had the capacity to give it our full focus. Y’know, iteration.
We’ve recently had that availability of full focus and given The Index that much needed design refresh from root to branch — and from web, to RSS, to [shudders] email template.
Some historypermalink
Did you know, Piccalilli started its life as a newsletter?
I’m a big fan of curating links, so I set Piccalilli up originally as a newsletter, then evolved it into a blog and newsletter.
Unfortunately, I had to stop curating the old newsletter because I just didn’t have the time for it anymore. The Index gives a massive nod to that old newsletter though, which I’m really happy with.
What were the problems we solved?permalink
The biggest problem was so many people didn’t realise we had a newsletter and if they did, they had little to no idea what they were subscribing to. Sure we always had an archive page and a sign up promotion at the bottom of the homepage, but it was still unclear what The Index was all about.
We combatted that will the following:
- A clear, short breakdown of the newsletter’s offering in multiple places (as seen above)
- A specific landing page that presented that breakdown and acted as a navigation page
- Moved the archive to a sub page
- Gave the newsletter some proper branding
Branding the newsletter has done a great job of assisting with all of the above. The massive text creates some visual contrast, pulling focus at the end of articles and the homepage. It also creates a huge impact on the newsletter’s landing page as seen above.
Another, huge problem area was the email template. The emails were coming from Buttondown, so we had a modified version of one of their stock templates. Sure, it looked fine, but it didn’t match our principles of providing the best possible reading experience.
We’ve also stripped everything completely from the email template and fully redesigned it. There’s no distracting elements now and the typography is in a different league to what is was.
We’ve also changed how we send the newsletter. It now gets sent via Postmark. The list is still managed by Buttondown because they do a great job of that, but now, when a new issue gets published, our system picks it up, generates a template, then sends that to Postmark for sending.
We tried to get this working with Buttondown and their full template capability, but the post-processing done on the templates was messing stuff up. I get why they need to do that, but the template wasn’t looking like we wanted it to do. Postmark sends the template verbatim, which is exactly what we want. It’s also hugely simplified everything for us and still allows us to have a web-first newsletter that Buttondown enabled too.
Speaking of web-first, that was our main focus during this project. We’re obsessed with reading experience here and a problem we had with The Index issues was they inherited the article layout, without the sidebar, making them look awkward.
We wanted the newsletter to feel like a product in its own right, so we stripped out the Piccalilli header, created a narrower, central content layout and pulled the reader’s focus where it mattered: the links.
Off the back of this refresh process, we’re already thinking about making similar changes to the article layouts on the site too. Y’know, reading experienced obsessed.
I’m unbelievably happy with how it’s all turned out and I hope you are too.
We’ve settled on a format nowpermalink
The Index is very much my baby, even though Piccalilli has evolved from my blog to a publisher. A problem with the fact it’s my baby is I’ve had full control to experiment with no guardrails from the more qualified members of the Piccalilli team / Set Studio team 😅
But, I think I’ve finally landed on a format that works really well for The Index now:
- Around 5 links with very short descriptions
- No fluff around the edges
- A single sponsor
- Nothing else
I subscribe to a lot of newsletters and one thing I find is they are noisy. That’s all good — everyone has different tastes — but I find I miss a lot of the content because my brain is distracted by everything else, so I just bail out of reading them properly.
Something I’ve obsessed about with our newsletter issues is they should be read in less than a couple of minutes. This has been a principle from back when the old Piccalilli newsletter was around. My hope is it gives The Index a little bit of an edge too.
The twice a week frequency is also deliberate. One of the problems I had with curation is my backlog of links was huge, but I wanted to keep the amount of links per issue at a sensible level. Those two elements combined gave me a bit of paralysis — mixed with the ridiculous amount of time it takes to run an agency — meaning I often didn’t keep to any proper publishing schedule.
Now, with a specific format and the opportunity to publish more links over two issues a week, it makes the curation process really quite quick and enjoyable for me. I also book out time for myself to curate too, which is why over the last few months we’ve been extremely consistent with publishing.
I’m always open to feedback. I know I’ve experimented quite a lot over the last 12 months on format, so let me know if what I’ve landed on works for you or not! You can get in contact here.
Advertisingpermalink
In an effort to make Piccalilli as sustainable as possible, we’ve introduced ads:
- Simple banner ads at the start and end of each article and link article
- A single sponsor at the end of The Index issues
I know ads are extremely unpopular because they’re distracting, heavy and they’re often backed by incredibly creepy ad tech. There’s none of the crap on ours because we respect our readers above anything else. Our ads are simple, HTML.
The banners are short one-liners with a single link. The links are tracked because marketers need to see a return of investment on their ads, but that’s using a simple, bespoke system that we’ve built. It only tracks the amount of times a link has been visited and nothing else.
This is as far as we feel comfortable with ads on articles. Again, we’re obsessed with reading experience, so finding the right solution has taken a long time. Regular readers have probably spotted our experiments (sorry about that), but they were necessary to land on the simple banners.
My favourite aspect of those banners is that the booking process is really simple and companies get exclusivity in one month blocks across the 250+ pieces of content where the banners show up.
There’s no third party ad network involved either. You book direct with us and our team helps you get the most out of your investment, meaning we will happily help you with copywriting and refining your messaging. We’re part of a design and marketing agency at the end of the day!
Similar to the banner ads, the newsletter slots are exclusive to each issue. An advertiser has the opportunity to to write a brief message, determine a link and the button label for that link too. We really didn’t like the idea of multiple ads on newsletter issues because that goes against our principles of keeping the newsletter issues short and free of clutter.
That’s also why the ads across the site are text only. We’re really strict about the look and feel of Piccalilli and we don’t want to disturb that with distracting graphics that don’t match our design ideals.
The end-game of the advertising is we can spend more time on Piccalilli! The CSS Course and upcoming courses are going to help with that, but the more time we can spend on this publication, the better it is for everyone. Advertisers should definitely see that as an opportunity to invest in quality education for our industry.
Advertising will also enable us to fund more guest posts. The blocker with gust posts at the moment is we need to spend more time in the editorial workflow and filtering article requests for AI slop because we absolutely refuse to allow that to be published here. With a solid advertising revenue in place, we can do all of that, which again, will hugely improve Piccalilli.
Wrapping uppermalink
I think we’ve landed on a good spot for advertising that works for everyone — both advertisers and our much loved readers. We’d love to work with advertisers that feel like they’re not getting the most out of their spend elsewhere especially. We can definitely help you get the most out of that and put you in front of a highly engaged readership here in a really effective way.
Find out more about advertisingI think we’ve also landed on a good spot with the newsletter. It’s rightly becoming a key part of this publication and we’re in a position now where we can hopefully grow it exponentially. If you haven’t subscribed yet, you can subscribe by email or RSS. Give it a try and if you’re already subscribed, maybe share with a friend?
Thanks for reading this rather long post and most importantly, for reading Piccalilli 🙂