5th June 2026
It’s been a pretty momentous week for me: I have a new website! I’m extremely happy with it. The IA and user experience is better, it’s faster and more accessible, and it looks infinitely more slick and professional than the hot mess I had before.
I’m very grateful to Simon, Darren and Adrian from Bureau for their work on this. Their ThirdPress platform has been really easy to work with and I would definitely recommend it.
The main changes to the site are:
- I have a new IA, with a new ‘Resources’ section that gathers up all the former blog posts and toolkits I had and makes them easier to find and gives them the longevity they deserve as evergreen content (I written a case study about how I did this)
- There’s no login for toolkits – they’re delivered by email now, which makes everything so much simpler to access and manage
- I’ve deleted, consolidated or refreshed a lot of the older content
- There’s no cookies, because I got rid of the login and also swapped out Google Analytics for Perplexity (I’m starting to switch away from Google products – more on that in a moment)
I’ve got more work to do and refinements to make (a website is never done) but this feels like a big relief and a step forward.
I also spent a little bit time on other parts of of my move away from Google products, by ditching Chrome as a browser and Google as a search engine. I’m trying Firefox and Ecosia for now. Seeing reports of Chrome sneaking an an AI model onto devices was pretty offputting and I’m finding Google search results are increasingly poor. Plus the new changes that were announced recently to search don’t appeal to me as a user. I’ve been using ‘ -ai’ as a modifier for pretty much every search for some time, and I don’t want or need an AI chat bot for every search.
I still use Google Suite for email, calendar, calls, and Drive. I also have a Google Pixel phone (lol) so making the full shift away from Google will take me a bit longer to work through.