Matt’s website is a personal blog and newsletter that serves as an educational resource for over 50,000 freelancers around the globe each year. In addition, the site offers paid products and affiliate links design to generate revenue.

Over the years, mattolpinski.com has gone through numerous iterations and refinements. Previously a portfolio website designed to generate project leads, the domain has since evolved to become a destination for both aspiring and veteran freelancers. When designing the current version of the website, special care was taken to ensure the content was fun, accessible, and engaging while establishing the first cohesive design system across all pages.

Some of the key design features with this iteration included modular components that can be dynamically inserted into any article via the custom WordPress theme. These can be used for upsells and cross-references. Within each article, users now benefit from a dynamically-generated and expandable table of contents that only appears for articles longer than 1,500 words.

Another fundamental improvement is the way topics are organized and presented to the end user. The blog has never benefitted from a unified topics page, which optimizes the browse experience. With over 100+ long-form articles on the site, it was historically difficult for freelancers to find the best or most popular articles in a given topic, see how many articles existed in a particular topic, and browse resources and products related to that topic. It was also difficult to manage the organization of topics in the WordPress backend. With the new and improved implementation, topics are consistently displayed throughout the site with identifiable icons — all driven by a single source of truth in the WordPress admin. The new top-level topics landing page allows users to quickly see all topics as well as access the top 3 curated articles in any topic with a single click.

The product detail pages also received a massive visual overhaul. Now all the key information about each product can be seen at a glance “above the fold” and the page leads with a hook + benefits rather than the product title. These pages are fully templated, modular, and support dynamic sales that can be at any time of the year. When a sale is running, the pages transition to support countdown timers and every instance of the product automatically inherits yellow badging across the site to promote the sale.

All of these amazing improvements and more elevated Matt’s online presence and drove tens of thousands of new visitors and hundreds of product sales annually. The design updates solidified Matt’s reputation as a veteran freelancer while making the site easier than ever to update and maintain.