Share The Container, Show The Contents

Landing pages are finicky. I was fine-tuning one for MAP Year Project signups today and hit a snag.

15+ years in marketing software has made me a website skeptic. Or maybe, a pragmatic cynic. A good website should strike a balance between user experience and the effort required to maintain it. You want something that's intuitive enough for people to navigate on their own, but not so simple that it strips the texture needed for them to stick with you. If you over-explain, or try to bucket info into its own chunk of web pages, you risk adding too many "clicks" for someone to reasonably follow.

Clunky navigation turns people off. That's why it's so important to connect the dots of the idea before setting up the scaffolding of webpages and URLs. I do a lot of trial and error. And that's why I shy away from working with big teams: because it's faster for me to break, find, and fix stuff before it's connected to everyone and everything. Luckily I know how to retrace my steps, cover my tracks, and rebuild things quickly.

Where I got caught with the landing page of The MAP Year Project is how it connects to everything else in the Becoming Unobstructed ecosystem—the daily emails, weekly newsletter, podcast, monthly calls etc...

My initial idea was to let people participate to the level of their comfort. That’s why I picked a low-ticket, paid newsletter as the vehicle for a typically high-ticket group coaching offer. I've made myself the focus of The MAP Year Project to alleviate the pressure of participants feeling like they have to consume everything.

The whole premise is that free daily BUDS accountability creates enough signal that people get results even if only consuming casually. Free monthly calls are optional places to dig deeper into creativity with others. Then paid-tier monthly calls put it into practice with live troubleshooting. At the end of a year, it’s impossible not to absorb the framework if you participate. My habit tracker and progress dashboard templates are even provided to paid participants to use so they can visibly see their journey.

The benefits of The MAP Year Project build themselves just by showing up.

With user experience in mind, this begged the question "where's the front door?" Said differently, where do I send people to start? Weekly essays and podcasts are published and hosted on Substack, though I've setup a custom subdomain so that it's integrated with theunobstructed.com. I've also tried to cloak the branding subtly enough that it doesn't feel like you're leaving the site when clicking over to Substack. Ideally, it just blends in.

These BUDS emails are managed via Hubspot. Which means that people who subscribe via Substack aren't enrolled here (I do, however, have an automation in place to consolidate one, centralized list of contacts). My reason for keeping them separate is to give people agency over their participation and limit inbox fatigue.

So, should BUDS be the front door?

Or a landing page that lays out all the possible front door options?

That's what tripped me up. User experience against upkeep on my part. Simple vs sensible. Right now, BUDS is the front door. But I am working on a consolidated landing page to act as the new front door.

• BUDS series (you are here)
• Weekly essays (free).
• Weekly podcast (free).
• Weekly bonus essays (paid).
• Monthly creative circle calls (free).
• Monthly tech troubleshooting calls (paid).

onward.

-dmac