Part 11: Email, a Support Button and Listening to Readers

From late September into early October, the work shifted from building features to running a real site. That meant three things: sending email properly, giving readers an easy way to support the Den, and rethinking the home page.

Real email

Until now, the site's login emails had gone out through Supabase's built-in sender, which is fine for testing but not for real members. I split the job in two. A GoDaddy mailbox handles my personal addresses on the domain, and Resend handles the email the site itself sends. I verified digitalden.com with Resend by adding DNS records, the same kind of setting I'd added for Netlify back in Part 4, and switched Supabase's login emails over to it. HTML templates for those emails were drafted too.

A visible way to support the Den

Buy Me a Coffee had been on the site for weeks, but easy to miss. I decided on two placements: a "Support" pill in the header on every page, and a "Found this helpful?" card at the end of articles, projects and videos. Each one reports clicks to Google Analytics separately, so I'll know which placement actually works instead of guessing.

Listening to future readers

Then I did a design review with some of the people I hope will use the site. Their feedback led to a home page plan that cuts more than it adds. The "Explore the Workshop" section and the Workshop menu item go away. The rows of projects, videos and articles fill themselves automatically with the latest three of each. The Reading List and the Store merge into one "Recommendations" page. The Front Desk is retired, and a scrolling box of the latest news goes in below the Info Strip.

Two small decisions in there were mine over the AI's suggestions. Claude proposed calling the merged page "Referrals." I renamed it "Recommendations," which sounds like advice from a friend rather than a sales pitch. And for sorting articles and videos, Claude first suggested ordering by when something was last edited. I chose the publish date instead, because readers care about when something came out, not when I fixed a typo.

The lesson

Overrule the AI when you know your readers better. Naming and sorting look like small technical details, but they're product judgments, and those are yours to make.

Try it yourself

Before you redesign anything, show it to a few real people and watch what they ignore. And when the AI proposes a name or a default, ask yourself how it will sound to your least technical reader.

Next time: thinking through automated social media posts before building any of it.