SolarRoof.Cool
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SolarRoof.cool is my website about the Tesla Solarglass Roof, Powerwall, and (probably) everything you’d ever want to know about Tesla’s clean energy products.

The Inspiration

I was lucky enough to have one of the first Tesla Solarglass Roofs installed at my house. It’s still the early days for the wider ramp-up of this product, and Tesla’s marketing website for the Solarglass roof is, well, confidently understated. (The information is all accurate, of course, but there’s also not gobs of information out there to satiate people like me that can read complex detail for hours and hours).

The limited early information available on the internet about this product left a lot of interested customers—even those who had already placed down deposits on it—with a wide variety of open questions. It’s not unusual for Tesla customers to share newly discovered product details by word of mouth by early owners.

So, there was an opportunity.

The Plan

My plan as a new owner was to put together an evergreen resource that balanced a lot of the following:

• Share really nice photos of my roof and related hardware.
• Be openly transparent and share real-time metrics from our roof.
• Try to answer a lot of the open community questions specific to the solarglass roof—information I could glean from my install process that hadn’t yet been shared on the internet.
• Assume no existing knowledge—give anyone just finding out about the Solarglass roof (and Solar as a whole) a crash course in why you would want this on your house.

The Result

Over a few weeks, I built SolarRoof.cool. I wrote the essay from the ground up, went spelunking with the Tesla API to get real-time data from my roof (which I’m rate-limiting and caching responsibly), took beautiful photos of my newly painted house, and built all this into a new site on top of my now well-established hobby CMS.

Analysis

I think I executed well here. I probably wrote too-long of an essay—it came out to just over 9k words—but I surely achieved my goals. SolarRoof.cool got a lot of attention, thanks to traffic pushes from Reddit and Electrek. I’ve served up hundreds of gigabytes of content, and based on my numbers, there’s no end to the traffic in sight.

As far as design choices go, I chose to publish initially as one long-form essay with images inline. I presumed that I was going to hit a lot of “general” eyes vaguely interested in Tesla as a whole, but probably not an audience interested in enough detail to click around aimlessly on a website, no matter how nice it is. So my goal here was to try to have a bounce rate of zero by putting everything on one page—you could keep scrolling if you just wanted to see a different section or a new picture.

The Future

As initial traffic is slowing down, I’m going to refactor site to target a different visitor—one who is specifically interested in the Solarglass roof.

I plan to separate the website into topically-relevant pages, to allow for better organic search accessibility. Someone interested in how Powerwall works with Solarglass should be able to get straight to the section on Powerwall from search results—not just generically get to the page and have to search for the information within. Another person wanting my installation story should quickly get straight to my install timeline. I’m making this decision to serve my hypothesis that a spread-out page structure will make the site as a whole a permanent evergreen resource, bringing more organic search traffic—and more long-tail eyes in general—onto the site.