The Upgraded Web

The Upgraded Web with Aaron Trank was a podcast that I made in 2015, alongside consulting work, and alongside a job at a non-profit.

The show described itself in this way:

The Upgraded Web is a podcast helping Brick and Mortar businesses, churches, charities, and Non-Profits use the Web better!

That is a real audience, and it has a real problem attached to it. The people who most need a decent website are the very people least likely to have anyone on staff who can build one, and in 2015 the gap between what the web could do and what a small church or a small charity actually had was an enormous gap.

Everything, by one person

A podcast episode looks like one file, and it is actually a small production pipeline, and I owned every part of that pipeline myself:

• The audio, which was multitrack Audacity sessions. I cut Episode 1, "Origin Story," 4 separate times before it ran the way that I wanted it to run, and there were 9 minutes and 48 seconds of it in the end.
• The sound design, which was custom power-up cues, and power-down cues, so that the show had transitions of its own rather than borrowed stock stings.
• The artwork, which was cover art rendered at 1400px square for the podcast directories, and channel art sized for Twitter and for YouTube, and a wordmark for the site, and all of that artwork was built in GIMP.
• The business, which was an affiliate arrangement with a web host, and the banner inventory, and the placements that go along with such an arrangement.

What it was actually for

It was for teaching, and it was for being findable. Brick-and-mortar businesses, and churches, and charities, and non-profits are precisely the customers that the prospecting work was built to find, which is to say they are small organisations with a website that needed help, and with nobody in-house to do it for them. That overlap is not a coincidence, because I was thinking hard about that customer at the time, and a podcast was a plausible calling card in 2015 for somebody doing this kind of work.