Written by Fernando Maciá
Jimena Catalina is an interaction designer for digital products and services.
Jimena Catalina begins her talk by recounting how what started out exciting, ended up being intimidating. As the pace of the Internet has increased, it has become more complicated. It takes time and money.
She is an interaction designer and has two personal projects.
He started by creating his two brands, choosing his CMS and his server, and started learning about SEO. Then he had to think about the information architecture, thinking about the users. He installed Google Analytics and started digging around to understand what data mattered and what didn’t. To increase visits, they continued to learn about SEO. And, when they had visitors, they started to monetize. Learned about Adsense, banners, social networks, etc.
They learned how to automate on social networks and had so many plug-ins that the web was running on pedals. They discovered performance, became concerned about WPO and moved to a cloud VPN.
Master Chef appeared in Spain and, every time a recipe appeared, many people searched for the recipe and took down the shared server. It was necessary to respond every time in social networks that the website was down. So they learned concurrent traffic and what a VPN or a cloud does.
Mobile-first arrived and they learned how to make the website responsive and then transformed part of the content into an e-Book.
Has all this helped? Yes, it generates traffic, it works and it monetizes.
And it has helped him grow professionally in other aspects:
- You improve your relationship with the team.
- You add variables to your decisions.
- You bring more value.
- Increase your credibility.
- You win tables.
It also helped him to better understand his work.
Many times, we try things in personal projects that are then valid in our work. They applied the recipe microformats to one of the agency’s clients: Gallina Blanca.
It generates credibility to propose things that we have already tested in our own projects.
Does it work for everyone? Yes, even for his mother. She became unemployed in 2011 with only some office automation experience. He set up a craft blog for her with its functionalities, plug-ins, etc. And he got to make a sponsored post with a few hits.
A few months later, Jimena discovered that there were new plug-ins, others deactivated… she thought they had been hacked. But no, it turns out that his mother had taken an online SEO course and had applied everything she had learned. Eventually he got bored with publishing and sold it. With what he got from the blog, he went to the Caribbean.
If it worked for his mother, it can work for you.
Jimena claims to be a better designer than she was ten years ago. It takes into account multiple aspects that it did not take into account before. He encourages us to develop our personal project.
