From Design Scaredy-Pants to Fearless Launcher

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Fearless Launching was my very first online program. When I launched it for the first time back in Spring 2012, I didn’t have the resources or time to build a beautiful site for it.

It lived in the shadows on my main site AnneSamoilov.com. A simple text sales page that did bring in sales (surprisingly enough!).

My membership area lived on a simple page too for that first round.

Looking back now – I see that I make bare bones sound glamorous!  But part of my thinking was always – do what you can and CBB (could be better) and just get out your minimum viable product.

That was it.

However, over time my MVP became my signature offering.  So – I’ve made loads of improvements to the content, the structure of the course, and even how it’s delivered to the community. The work has expanded so much… while still maintaining it’s simple quality.

My Half Baked Attempt To Go Pro

By the end of the first year offering the program I started to make additional changes to the sales site.  I turned my plain wp page into an Optimize Press based sales site.

Can you say shaded boxes and bullet lists?

I still am no designer, no one to take the brand or the site where I wanted it to…but I did my best in that time.

I continued making small tweaks to this same page throughout 2013…and though 2 more launches went by that did make sales, I could feel my own excitement waning a bit.  I knew I needed to update the site – get a clear makeover.

Making The Decision To Change

Image by 6gasix / shutterstock.com

I’ve got a history of dragging my feet when changing anything to do with design and look. In addition to that, I’m always asking, does this really need to be changed?

I already had my sensors up that I wanted the site’s visual style to change… meaning: I wanted a visual style!

I knew that the course deserved attention.  I needed to bring the visual quality up in everything I delivered.  I knew that my graphic-lacking, no-personal-style sales site would have to go.

Honestly – I didn’t know what I was looking for.  And at that point I even thought I was going to pick a theme that got me most of the way there design wise and do the rest myself.

I discovered lots of buzz about Divi and decided to try it out myself.

I started to set up the pages for my sales site… and I could see the skeleton of something greater…but that’s where it ended.

I needed a professional on the job.

When discussing the new sales site, we never intended to use Divi, but we discovered that it really did give us all the functionality we wanted…and my designer/developer was happy.  This is a big deal when you’re working with someone.

Even half way through the design process, I knew that Divi was going to stick.

So easy to use, so elegant and honestly – that’s all I ask for.  If you give me those things, I’m in for life!

But That’s Not Where The Fun Ended

Customers and friends and colleagues shared their feedback for the new site and I was thrilled that it was going over so well.

I let the excitement for the site fuel me to update my members area. We brought some of the visual style right inside the program…and though we’re not using the same theme in there, we’re using the style we established with the Divi site.

Divi fueled me to start making micro changes to every aspect of the Fearless Launching brand.

Fearless Launching is about putting your big ideas forward into the world.  And I really feel like finally with the new site on Divi helped us leapfrog the bigger idea we’re trying to spread.  Finally I have a site that not only feels more like me, but now I am looking for ways to bring those elements into the rest of my biz.

Stay tuned for another chapter in this story…

Article thumbnail image by venimo / shutterstock.com