The biggest focus has been on wrapping up a long-term content strategy project with Battersea. I’ve been working with them since October and it has been a challenge — in the genuinely positive sense of the word! I’ve learnt a lot and it’s helped me sharpen up in a few areas. Looking back and bringing together the final deliverables, I’m feeling — dare I say it — pretty proud of what we’ve done together. Working with Joe Mateo throughout has been a delight, too.
The other big focus has been my website redesign, rebuild, and content refresh. You know that saying about how the cobbler’s son goes barefoot? Well, this content strategist/designer has a crappy website. I leapt straight into rebuilding it a while back, but have since slowed down. I realised I really needed a design system and a content model to give me a proper foundation. This extra step has been worthwhile, but I have to be pragmatic. I want it to be perfect, but I’m just one person. I’m not a designer or a dev, and I have no budget. I still have a lot to do, but I made big progress in June. The IA is done, the homepage and services pages are all written and built, I’ve updated all my toolkit content, and completed a few other big milestones.
This week I finished the next 10 Things, with help from Ruth Oliver. (It’s about heursitic frameworks for content and out on Monday. Sign up here: https://lapope.com/emails/). I also made a new free toolkit to go with it, and having to publish it on the existing site is painful and embarrassing. Hopefully this will motivate me to keep pushing with the new one, though.
Finally, I’m still mulling over the question Sara Wachter Boettcher posed at Lead With Tempo last month: Who are you outside work? My life has changed dramatically since 2019, and now I don’t do a lot of the things that used to be my answer to that question. But I’ve realised that I am A Person Who Really Loves Plants.
I’m not talking about gardening. I’m talking about weeds and wildflowers. I walk the dog in the same few places each day, and I’ve become more tuned in to the cycle of the year. We’ve had a lot of forestry work over the last few years to remove diseased trees. It created all this space, which looked so grim in the winter. But for the last few months, it’s been gradually filling up and now it’s overflowing. We went through the cycle of ground elder, lords and ladies, anemone, celandine, violets, periwinkle, forget me not, wild garlic, bluebells, comfrey, campion, alkanet, ragwort, and now the teasels are 6 and 7 feet tall. The fields are full of life too. So many types of grass and clover, birds foot trefoil, yarrow, ox-eye daisies, creeping bell flower, pyramidal orchid, meadowsweet, yarrow, goosegrass, german chamomile, ladies bedstraw…
But I’ve been waiting – pretty impatiently – for one plant in particular. Pineapple weed.
This little plant makes me so happy:
- It’s cute and sunny: chubby round flower heads and feathery frond-like leaves.
- It’s modest and resilient: no time for showy petals and grows best in poor, disrupted soil.
- It’s surprising: it has a strong, juicy smell and taste that it just like pineapple
- It’s calming: this really is the icing on the cake, it’s a relative of chamomile and has the same calming qualities.
You can make it into tea, eat it raw in salads, or make it into a syrup. But because I’m decadent, I’m steeping it in rum for cocktails and sleep-inducing sunny nightcaps throughout the winter.
