Website Relaunch

Michael Loistl /

I wrote the first revit-content site in 2009 and re-wrote it from scratch more than 2 years ago, which I shared in this blog post back in March 2018.

The first re-write...
... brought a more modern mobile responsive design
... structured the growing number of families, collections and bundles better
... and added this blog

Now after more than 2 years, I relaunch this site again with a new design, and various improvements that I want to get into more detail below.

Home Page

Previously, the home page featured a full width image for each family, which made it really long to scroll. The new 2 column design cuts the page length in half and gives a much better overview of the available families and bundles.

Home page - Before | After

The new site is also much wider than the old one which allows for more content flexibility as well as the new family documentation pages which require a three column design to be able to show a list of available topics in a side navigation, but more about that later.

Blog

This blog has been our new place of sharing updates, new content and anything in between. One feedback that we got over and over, was that our customers would want to go back to a particular post for some details or documented changes, but that became more and more challenging as the number of posts grew.

Previously, the blog was a feed of posts, which made it hard to directly go to a particular post. To make the navigation easier, I decided to change the format to a single post at the time with a list of other post below, which has so far been much easier to navigate. Hope that works better for you as well.

Facebook / Twitter / Youtube

I'm not using Facebook myself, but I understand that there is a portion of our customer base who actively use Facebook and want to get any news & updates via this social channel, which is why I've brought back our Facebook page.

Although I'm not a Facebook user myself, I'll do my very best to share official revit-content updates equally across Facebook and Twitter.

If you are interested in the progress of what I'm working on, follow me on my personal Twitter and/or my personal Blog.

Last but not least - Youtube - which hasn't seen any updates for years...
I'm currently in the process of completely rewriting the documentation for all families and part of this will also be a bunch of new video tutorials, which will mostly be around a specific topic following the new structure of what's coming for family documentations.

Analytics

I'm generally a privacy cautious person and when it comes to web site analytics, tracking etc. I'm very defensive of user privacy, even if that's a disadvantage for growing this business.

I'm not doing any paid advertisement as I believe in good quality work and word of mouth as an organic and more sustainable way of building and growing a business.

This site was using Google Analytics and had some previously used Facebook tracking pixel, which have all been removed and replaced by Plausible, a privacy friendly, lightweight and open-source website analytics tool, which doesn’t use cookies and is fully compliant with GDPR, CCPA and PECR.

If that's all technical gibberish for you, don't worry - all that this means is that I only want to know how the website and content does and that I have no interest in tracking user behaviour.

There are still Twitter & Facebook share links on every blog post, which kind of allow especially Facebook to track users, so I'll probably remove those as well and trust that it's easy enough to share a website by copying the web site address. That having said, sharing what we work on does help us, so please keep sharing if you genuinely love what we do.

New Documentation

Finally our new documentation, which is partly responsible for the redesign of the website.

I started revit-content more than 10 years ago and while the content was updated over the years, the documentation is massively lacking behind, so it was time to get that resolved as more content updates are coming soon.

The new documentation is online only (as it's much easier to update) and is structured based on the questions we've received through our customer support over the years.

The first few topics for the new documentation are already live for the All-in-One Window Family.