10 Website Mistakes to Avoid and How to Have a Killer Website - Designers Show #102

In this Designers Show, we have the pleasure of hosting the talented Joleen Emery, an esteemed guest who will dive into the topic of "10 Website Mistakes to Avoid and How to Have a Killer Website."  

awesome all right here we are hey everyone welcome to the designer show show number 102 and we got on here uh Renee and John Robin and our special guest Jolene which you may have seen before because she's a website Rockstar and she does all my website stuff so we've got some cool things to talk about and I will have some fun with that so we are going to start out um with Renee Renee is so excited he got some of his wishes come true I mean yes yes when you're a Chief Architect geek and you get a Chief Architect uh request done it's pretty exciting so it's very exciting yeah so we're uh we're gonna talk Renee's got some things he wants to show you guys for about 10 or 15 minutes and then uh Jolene is going to hop on and we're going to talk about the 10 biggest website mistakes everybody makes it doesn't matter where we are I'm just kidding it's just 10 things that a lot of people uh need to be aware of on their websites and there's probably we could probably expand that list to about a hundred or a thousand or whatever you know it depends on what you look at or how you look at it but there's some basic things that you need to do and then Julian's going to talk a little bit about the course that she's got coming up so we're excited about that I I love talking about websites and marketing it's just part of part of our business that we have to do right right Renee yeah capture those names those leads you just tripled your on-page uh on page uh click rate or whatever you call it so it's pretty cool it's been a great week yes that's awesome so I was excited to see your email about um you've got all your products updated and the new X15 release is uh is working and it's all together I went I went through the list of new things that they fixed or things they fixed and a few things they added it's a big list they did a lot of things on this last patch a lot of little tweaks a lot of little fixes yeah so you might not even know it needed but yeah I wonder if um if I go into Chief can you show my screen John or Renee um okay so if I go to help when you open Chief you should get a a message that there's an update available if you don't you might check it just by going to the help menu and download program updates and that will tell you if you're up to date or not in your Chief Architect program um if you're up to date um do I have the wrong version open I have x14 open oh I do shame on me I have a client that uses x14 yet so um not everybody's up to date let me go open next thank you all right come on all right let's just go open a new plan and you go to help and check for program updates and it'll tell if you're up to date now um Along on this page when if you are about to update there will be a link to download or to uh look at the latest uh fixes uh where do you really did you know where that is is that no I had to ask people to send it to me because they hide it after you clear that page it just disappears uh yes and it is I know where it is I don't remember I've been I've found it before um I think you just have to type X15 updates oh on their side search on their site okay good good luck they just left it there it'd be great but this is the upgrade yeah yeah I I know um what's new next 15 that's a video I always had to find it by going on the web not going on their website but actually going to the web then I can find it through Google it's so weird because yeah if you if you um are on quality controls a little off yeah that's right we all have and you get to it from going to help and then something so here's the X15 new features list but not the bug fixes what's the date um it was yes two days ago I think let's not worry about it right now but um there's there's it's there we'll find it I'll put in an email somewhere uh you know what someone shared it to me through Dropbox so I'm just gonna paste it um in our private chat to you all right cool so let's not get into that right now um let Renee why don't you take your uh some time and show us the things that you wanted to share with us or did my where did my screen go here it is uh I took it off thank you very much going over to the right side there we go um so we've got some new cool stuff in libraries uh one is going to be really specific to me and and what I love about it um but maybe you do something similar to me which is that I share content I share stuff that I make and so maybe you have an office environment where you're sharing stuff that you make as well or maybe you have friends you want to share stuff that you're making as well you're talking uh symbols things like that symbols stuff that you're adding to your library materials maybe that you made something that you imported anything any number of things some modifications you made and so the great thing about this new version is that when we export a item from our library and let me just grab a couple things here I'll just grab two items from my library I can group select these things and then I can export library right here so once I export those two items well something happens if these items happen to have a tag attributed to them well that tag will transfer to the person that is importing your items so that's a really awesome thing because that's cool yeah because as we apply tags we create a system for our tags it's really easy for us to find exactly what we need very quickly so if I want bathroom faucets I now have a tag it gets me to specific faucets that I've tagged that I like to use so bathroom sinks for instance very easy for me to do that I'll show people I could take something real quick sure absolutely so I'm gonna again I'm just going to group select all these and I'm going to right click and when I right click we've got this section down here tags down at the bottom if I don't have a tag already available to me that I want to use for this I can go ahead and click on manage tags that's going to bring up this dialog box and then I can type to start searching and this will search my active tags well if I have no active tag that falls within that search parameter then it gives me the option to click on this to create a new tag called sync example and all I need to do is press ok now that added that tag to my library and I'm able to click on that and locate that item so that go alphabetical then when you there we go and there's a sync example yeah okay so it is alphabetical then yeah so that's awesome you turn tags on with a little gear icon down there right uh yes down at the bottom of your screen we've got a little gear icon here just make sure that this tags is checked if you're using Tags I'm starting to use them and I actually do really like it it's just one less click very easy for me to click on it so if you've got screen real estate you have to you have to copy the thing to the user library before you cannot edit the tags right uh let's see that's a great question so let's just grab something from the user library and we'll right click and you can see that no in fact we can add a tag here too so you can add tags to anything in the library I'll be damned yeah I would have thought that wouldn't work because if you update your libraries and they're replacing the items with something new well that's so that's a that's a great question and I'm not sure if um if that updates you know and keeps the core some some kind of ID that updates with it I think it does so okay we'll have to check that over time cool the the really big update that um I think I get to say that I had a hand in in helping and discuss really really really really really really big one the really really really big one for me is group editing of search attributes and that's just that's something I've been asking for for a very long time and we finally caught it and I'll just show you how this works um so here's a tag that I've created for these items but maybe I want to be able to add Search terms to these items and now this is only in our user catalog so if you've got a really robust user catalog like I do um then I I'm going to add a bunch of Search terms so that I can get to my items very very quickly maybe I have too many items in my library to just use tags I want to be able to just search them and so I'm going to shift select all these items I'm going to right click and now which we didn't have before now with the group selections and you can do a control click to remove or add other individual items to it yeah yeah just like everything else okay and control deselect exactly yeah and so here's our new dialog box this is completely new we've never seen this before right and we're going to take a little bit of time going over how this works maybe five minutes or something like that all right that's all you got you better hurry okay so in our keywords here we have a selection right now what's selected is a keyword that it's picked up from all these group selected items that says appliances okay it's telling me that just these checked checked items here these checked row items here have that keyword appliances now if I wanted to I could go through and click on where it says no change and it will add the appliance tag to everything there okay so I'm going to go ahead and do that now keep in mind it wouldn't let me do it and there's one specific reason why not and I'm going to talk to Chief about this it's because something in this group if I want to just click on one of them and show in folders something in this group is from Chief so they can't add attributes to a chief item it's something that's not in the user Library yes okay now notice every icon here is just a blue dot that means it's in my user Library so I'm okay to select these items so let's try that again search attributes and we're going to show what's going on here and now when I click on appliances you can see the check worked and it checked every item in here has appliances now when I search the key term Appliance that's going to come up and it could be any shortened version of Appliance it's not it doesn't have to be appliances as the full search term so another one that's common is I'm going to put RAB on mine so here's the next part I might want to delete this keyword we do have that option maybe you want to clean up this stack maybe there's some things in here that I don't really want to have associated with it items I can get rid of maybe I want to remove some of these Search terms that don't make sense to me and so I'm really just cleaning this up and limiting the Search terms that I have so this is pretty powerful now let me add a search add a keyword and I'm just going to type in Rd item I like to put Rd as a prefix to any search term it makes it really easy with no character space it makes it really easy to find my stuff so I'm going to press that and now it's checked to all these items now if I don't want it on a particular item I can control select items and uncheck that and you can see there now it's removing that search attribute for those items so this is a really really powerful and fast way to organize your library and I'll tell you now if I go into my search here it's going to take a second to apply those changes and now I can type in Rd item hit enter there we go now we know from some of our previous videos we can search by type classification any number of different things Chief also fixed a few things if I go back to my user catalog here and we and I'm just going to collapse everything collapse all I'm going to remove all my filtered searches and what you see here is I have two items that are not contained inside of a folder well because I have this search subfolders checked when I select this this root user catalog it's going to show me everything that lives in all my subfolders now they fixed this when I uncheck this it's only going to show those two items that are not contained within a folder this is a really useful tool if you want to search the local folder only for items that are contained within otherwise you're going to go back and check that search subfolder if you want to search all subfolders as well so it's a really great way to filter down the things that you need to find the next one and we're moving fast I know the next one is a really powerful one this is new to me as well this little icon right here include folders in text search what does this mean well when I type in materials and just hit enter and don't wait for any other prompts what's going to happen here is it's going to show me any folders that might be named with that search term so that's a really good one because then I can just double click on this materials folder and it's going to take me right there so the library browser is getting really really fast and I'll just end with one more awesome tip which is that we have Boolean operators in our text Search terms this is something I didn't know until last week so I can type in Rd brick and what's going to happen here is we're going to see a bunch of my brick textures show up now I'm also going to type in Rd Stone all my brick textures disappear and it shows me all my stone textures what if I type in Rd Stone Rd brick well it's going to only show me textures that have both of those search attributes applied to them what if I type in Rd Stone and let me just get in nice and tight here and I type in and RD brick all capital okay so it has to be caps okay all caps now it didn't work it's not quite right there's an extra space in there or something what did I do I don't know maybe two separate well now oh I know what I did I removed the tags well let me show you this as well okay it does that does work as an as an operator here's a here's a really powerful one if I was in yeah I was just trying to do that this morning and I wish I could have that searched more than one thing yeah it will the capital okay oh you know what it's not and I'm sorry I'm being a goofball Artie brick or Rd Stone thank you ah there we go there we go and there we go now I have both my brick and my stone you could do four or something else or something or yes just remind you that it's all caps and then there's one more I'll tell you about I'm going to type in poll well something in the online catalogs has Appliance polls in here okay so there's Appliance poles that are interested search result if I type in capital not for not and then appliances this is a negative prompt meaning that it is not going to include those Appliance folds or anything with that search attribute Appliance so you can limit your searches by removing not nice cool show them one more thing when you go click on a library folder and you haven't downloaded the library just go click on the manufacturer catalogs okay uh sorry just go into your click on the word manufacturer and then um I can barely see that uh at the bottom of that you should have a we now have a view view online catalogs this is new as well yes so now you can see which catalogs you don't have downloaded and you could actually can you group select those and download some if you want no just one at a time or can you it's one at a time okay it wasn't group selecting but still it's a nice way to to you can just run down lists or use this all the time I use this all the time download it but now you have access to all of the library's Chief has without having to go online so I really like that feature that's kind of nice yeah nice nice anyway thanks Renee cool those are some when you told me that those were there and I noticed that on the sheet I went yes because I know you've been asking for these things for a long time and hopefully they fixed all of your things you were having problems with oh man my library is so buttoned up now it's just awesome it's been an entire day doing it yeah awesome well I'm excited to talk to you more about that so we'll get the we'll get together on that anyway let's jump into jolene's presentation here all righty um Joanne thanks for joining us today and um we've been talking for quite some time now about doing something um for everybody here that has to do with websites and marketing and that kind of stuff and we keep going round and round thinking about this and that the other thing we finally landed well let's just let's do a quick course on um how to improve your website and without getting too deep into it because part of what I think people don't want these days are these massive courses that you have to attend for 25 000 days and and just yeah it gets kind of crazy so uh on the uh did we get that link fixed are you talking about like your courses yeah like my courses that's different though that's Chief Architect those are fun those are fun where you're headed let's go there in a minute because it's being fixed right now oh awesome okay so why don't you talk about you you uh got a little list here together um of um the 10 mistakes that people make on their website or 10 of the mistakes people make on their websites and let's let's just run through that and I want to explain some of those different things and what people do you have some solutions what people can do to fix some of those things I mean some of them are probably takes a little more than just a quick push of a button but maybe there's a few that they could do right away I sure do and I am also I have a little presentation deck for you but I want to jump before into just a couple of the comments that I've seen in our chat um a few folks have said I rely on Word of Mouth for lead generation and if that is what is working for you I think that that is incredible and amazing but I also think that it's putting a whole lot of eggs in one little baby basket and it leaves us vulnerable and a better solution is to have a strategy that your website is more than and a digital brochure that there are some simple things that you can do to effectively make it a lead generation strategy so that you're not doing what I call wish marketing which is just wishing that leads come from other people some people call it hope marketing too so hope and wish right yeah exactly so here are the ten if I can just go ahead and Jump Right In you bet a lot of websites suffer from poor navigation and okay so what does that mean as a user what is poor navigation so it's just the menu It's the structure of how people get around and find what they're looking for um if it is confusing or unclear or if you use language that means something to you but doesn't mean anything to user and a great example would just be the word blog some people say blog some people say Journal or our creative files or you know stuff like that just call it what it is and don't be cutesy right just say what it is so that that language appeals to the most amount of people um and then also that you want to think about your navigation as intuitive that you have you know sub folders or sub categories inside your navigation bar um but this is one of the things that turns folks off the fastest because guess how long guess how long we have before people get irritated and leave and bounce what is it about three seconds one second it used to be three seconds and now it's like two seconds or or a second and a bit so we have the attention spans of nats and so if it doesn't respond and if it doesn't respond quickly and if I can't just figure it out intuitively I'm gonna leave uh the next one is slow loading times and a lot of websites are getting better they are building in you know intuitive logic that you know shrinks down large files it makes it easier for people to get around but if you have like really large videos or really large files it could certainly be affecting your loading time um again about gnats naps and just flick flicky attention is how I describe it you don't have them for all too long um so there are some things that you can do you can compress images you can minimize code you can utilize some of the caching techniques um it probably will just take a few minutes of looking into whatever the logic of your website is and usually it's a pretty quick fix but it's one that is often ignored and we don't really really think about it because we just assume the platform WordPress kajabi Shopify Squarespace whatever it is that you have is going to automatically do that for you but there are a few things that you need to do to make it better hey Jolene you mentioned it as a key term to me that I don't think a lot of people understand which is cash and something I I tell people when they're developing a website is that they make sure that to get someone to clear their cache and and search their website or search their Search terms because once you've I mean this may be different now but my understanding was once you've searched something and clicked on it before it's in your cache so it's you're more apt to see that in your search results so it's almost like a biased search when you're researching for your new terms so you almost have to clear your cash out definitely definitely and I think that one of those things that we that we write and so a simple reminder of like some general housekeeping will definitely help with those things but you're absolutely right Renee it's going to skew towards your history right so for some of us who are not as geeky as other people say that lovingly okay so is that something that I need to do to my website or is that something I need to do to my search to my Google whatever I'm using to search so in your browser right so in your Chrome oh which is what I assume that you're using um you want to clear it there um but then how do you do that how does one that's another I'm asking the question a lot of us don't know how to do that it's just a couple of quick clicks um it's another show sorry it's another show but it's it's easy um it's up in history uh and it's it's really pretty simple um but you know the cash feature on websites though is different than your personal browsing history right it's too it's two elements of you know kind of a housekeeping technique that we all should be taking care of so if you go I mean the simple answer is if you if you go to Chrome and you look at history and then you scroll all the way to the bottom it's going to say clear cache and can I also try to give a really brief just um Layman's reason thank you Robin if you if you search um beds and I search beds we're not going to come up with the same search results because we have a huge history of searching beds and we clicked on different things so when you clear your history and you clear your cache then maybe it starts us back to Ground Zero Maybe maybe it might be little fragments so okay so the next one that makes sense that I know you understand what you're saying now yeah thank you thank you for teaching it appreciate that I appreciate it good questions um the other one is lack of mobile optimization and that's just a big fancy way of saying not all platforms will intuitively resize change or optimize what your website looks like on desktop to what it will look like on mobile and so you might have to go in and you might have to manually change some things kajabi does a pretty good job and Shopify does a good job Wix does not in my experience um Squarespace is a little hit or miss and so they say that their websites are they have built-in mobile optimization but that's not always the case so whenever you're building and changing you have to check in on mobile um just like you're looking at it you know on desktop because the lack of optimization is what leaves people to bounce and you've all been on websites like that right where you're looking at something but you can tell that like the titling is just going off of your screen right or it's weird and wonky formatting that is a lack of mobile optimization does that make sense yeah okay so you want it to be responsive to your user and you want them to feel like they're in a spot that has been curated for them it makes sense it's not an afterthought like it was a deliberate intentional thing that you did to build a really beautiful mobile website as well as a desktop or tablet or any of the other versions so it's just another housekeeping thing you got to check it in all of those spaces and most website Builders will allow you the view you can have your preview in desktop tablet and mobiles of different sizes so I think the best practice is just to check it check it and make sure that you are optimizing um another mistake and this is a big one this is huge it's overwhelming and cluttered when you get there it's almost like you feel wildly over stimulated by all of the options it is a lack of white space it is a lack of breathing room I call it it's almost like we try to get every important thing that we have to say above the fold I'm guilty of that and right good advice and you just you don't even know what your first step is like your first step isn't intuitive and you know Renee there's something to be said that above the fold right and that if you don't know what I mean by that it's like as you are looking at and let's say let's take desktop we're looking at desktop and what I'm talking about is the stuff in your view before you scroll down pretending it's like a newspaper right above the fold and so we try to get all of it out because we're worried that people won't scroll down but what we've created is an overwhelming and cluttered experience that removes the intuitive nature of what you're trying to build so I think that allowing for some breathing room is really really important when you're building your site I think uh be true for mobile doesn't it isn't it kind of uh what look at your web but when you're looking at your website what's the first thing you want your clients to do and that's what should be above the fold the fold is the first part of the screen people see and then they scroll down to the other stuff so you know what's the main thing you want people to do and I've seen some really good websites where you know they want people to you know make an appointment or make a phone call or sign up for a list or get something or go buy something you know what's the main thing you want your clients what's the first thing you want your client to do that should be the the big overarching right in your face right it's the bam in your face but for I am seeing some of your comments which I really appreciate which is that you know um some of us are saying that we are guilty of this and it's okay though I mean it's okay to recognize it and then give yourself some breathing room um but your your hero area or that area above the fold we're still in the less than three second rule we're still in the what are we saying right away and so you know some of the techniques are to give a little bit of more white space spread things out a little bit just let people breathe while also being very succinct in what's going to happen first um and and I'm sure everyone's capable of looking at it and making that decision and they're real right because along with that comes having really clear ctas or a really clear call to action and I also believe that not every call to action should be the same right there are other things that we want to do other than read more or click here or buy now I think there is a wide variety of ways that you can be really creative in your calls to action and of course your calls to action the buttons need to be different they need to stand out they need to be clear but also I think you need to this is an okay space to be emotional like make you know for Dan since I helped Dan some of the things that I like to use are make more money grow your business learn how you know stuff that feels a bit more emotional so in your businesses what is that it's probably get the solution let me show you how how we help right something that has some feeling attached to it because this is where you can have creativity but you also need to be really clear like we don't want to make it cutesy right you don't want to call your blog your Journal but you want it to be clear and succinct any other any thoughts on that any thoughts on those calls to action well yeah I'm looking at a website the client of mine new spaces.com and and Bam right in your face Twin City design better modeler scheduled consultation or see our project so two call to actions however when you click see our projects the first button you see is schedule a consultation and then you can scroll down to see the projects I thought that that's really that's really a well done call to action right that's clever because it it's a it's a little in that two for one situation there exactly well and Dan to that example too um you know the lack of contact information I think in the industries that you're in I think the phone number should be in the nav bar I think that you're a way to get a hold of you right away is really important we don't want folks to have to go dig in for that because some people you know especially in your industry they just want to talk to a person they don't necessarily want to go you know down to the bottom of your page find the contact information you know fill out a form and if you don't have a person answering the phones then you might need to think about that differently but I think a phone number is really really important especially in talking about the assets of homes so I just realized last week that my contact us buttons have been gone for almost two months I don't know why I wasn't getting as many calls well and I I think another thing about that too is like just make it easy right um I don't think that's a phone number online will lead to daily spam calls and spam texts um I mean if you've had experience with that happening um I can't really speak to that but I do have all of my clients and myself with our phone numbers listed right on our websites we have captions and other ways to dial down spam um but I'm going to take the spam if it gets money in my pocket with a customer so any other thoughts on that Panda right yeah I'm gonna I'm gonna stop it's um just add something there there's a bunch of services to automate things so right now I have anytime anybody um contacts me through a contact form it automates and adds that context to my contacts list and then I have phone filtering on where I only accept calls from um context that are in my list otherwise it just sends them to voicemail and my voicemail says hey I have a filtering system so that works really well for me just comments on mm2s yeah well you know and I have I have quite a few customers that are design build outfits and they just want to talk to their customers and they they want the phone to ring and so they are willing to put up with but they also haven't reported that it's been an issue so I guess I don't have a specific answer on it will definitely happen or it definitely will not um but my clients tend to want to run the risk so that they can talk to their customers as fast as possible all right the other one then is a lot of us ignore SEO and I feel like in all the things that we talk about with our websites SEO is probably one of the most misunderstood components of how our websites work so in very basic terms search engine optimization is website crawlers it is the AI behind all of it that indexes what we are about so Google and all of the others they have web crawlers and they crawl through our websites and they index what we are about so that when people consumers go to The Well of wisdom Google Google can then provide a reasonable answer so on your blogs and on your pages you have to feed the machine you have to tell it what you are about now I don't think it's a good idea to create text and then hide it you know like back in the day people used to say you know put all of your keywords on your page and then turn the text White don't do that like do it do it in a way that makes sense for the web crawler but it also makes sense for your consumer I don't think this is an area where you're going to hurt anything you still just want to you gotta feed the machine you gotta tell it what you're about so that it can spit you out as the answer to someone's problem well a good a simple way to do something like that one one simple way to do that is when you put pictures on your website you'll have a place to add an ALT tag alternative tag or a description of the picture um don't put you know this is uh xy234 100 jpg okay Google doesn't know what that is but if you put in this is a kitchen remodel in name your city by your company now when people search for your business Google will have all those pictures indexed as well and they'll know that they came from you it's because you told Google that they are and what they are so I mean Google keeps track of everything so yeah definitely and there are Google penalties as folks are talking about in the chat like this old technique of turning text white like that's a penalty not having a mobily responsive site that's a penalty which means you are less likely to come up in search right that's that's all that that means well Google will send people the really nice Pages you know they want to you know get people in the right way we also have a few comments about Ai and how AI will change SEO yeah that potential exists but we're not there now right it's certainly up and coming but I wouldn't rest on my Laurels thinking to myself it's all going to change pretty soon anyway well the changes are fast but they're not that fast like they're not within a sales cycle of your business so you know the whole Crux of the conversation is turning your website into an opportunity for lead generation and getting folks to know who you are and what you're about I mean checking the box to say that your website is done in my opinion is a really bad idea your website is almost like another member of your team it's living breathing and it evolves it needs to change it cannot be static the more you touch it and the more you play around with it the better you're going to do especially if you are getting rid of these like top 10 mistakes I was just going to add my own personal take on where AI is heading with search results is um Bing has already included their sources when they give you information so I think SEO is going to be even more impactful down the line yeah I don't think it's going to go the other way I don't think it's going to go into it's not something you have I think the opposite is true I think if you're already in the best practice of doing everything that you can you're in a better position like your head because the indexing and the you know labeling and tagging is going to be even more important as AI catches up so thank you Renee I appreciate that um then the other thing which is about SEO and it's also about you know what's happening some websites just have poor content and by poor content I mean you know stock photos that look stocky or um articles yeah the guy on the yellow hard hat exactly or articles that don't have thought about time on page like we all should have what's called Cornerstone content like something so incredibly interesting juicy that it keeps people on the page like there's so much value in it for them that they stay longer and I am sure you all have something like that the next question then is have you put it on your website have you put it somewhere where it is shareable do you have something on your website that will keep people there for minutes rather than seconds because time on page is a very good quantifier of Google since we're talking most about them Google sending people to your site that your site will continue to rank higher and ranking higher means you're shown more you get to play more so well you know I hook people with this one they sit there and do this over and over again ride the slider yeah I like that one and um these designer shows are are not done for fun by the way they're a good way to get people to stay on my site because we post the show on my website so the more you guys come back and watch the show from my site you stay on the page and then you go look at other Pages it's all SEO stuff so of course it's fun to share good content absolutely and and traffic helps traffic right is that yes yeah well it's kind of like um you know in especially in digital marketing we say that consistency compounds so your consistency in your social media on your website with your SEO with your email marketing with all of your tactics and strategies like the more you do the more it compounds and you know if you don't have a partner like me and if it's you know maybe someone on your staff I think it's a really good idea to figure out what are your daily weekly and monthly tasks with regard to this consistency so that you can have a compounding you know effect of all of your effort and this one here plays right into it and that is lack of regular updates your digital brochure if it just stays the same and it never changes there's no energy in it right it's almost like think about think about um when you go to like if you go to a clothing store and they are always re-merchandising they are always moving things around because it creates energy it's right in the front maybe it's in the back then they move it over to the side they don't ever leave everything in the exact same spot and there's a reason for that the reason is is that one with website visitors your visitors get used to what they see and so they assume they've already seen it so if you are not updating there is that glossing over effect right like oh I've seen this there's nothing new so you have to have a perpetuation to your website like you need to remind yourself that your website can be a member of your team living breathing evolving so you need to update your website nobody's going to fight with me on that right like we all agree like you just need to update it and then finally a mistake that we all make is neglecting our Analytics like not taking a look and you can there are so many ways to get analytics on your website lots of platforms have content like this built in but there's always Google analytics and you can take a look at where people are going thank you and what they are doing Renee you said that recently you ignored analytics and what happened and I wasn't getting anything done yeah and and you can see a spike starting the day that I was working on it and then after that it just kept improving day over day so and this is just from last week right well and I see your question uh Marnie about does your website need to be perfect no it doesn't need to be perfect but these are like these are like maintenance and housekeeping things that we all should be thinking about you know like you get it you get chances like I said I think what we do is we think it's done and we check it off a list like it's done my website's done check when really it needs to be a part of the team it needs to be like I said I consider it living breathing it's a part of the team I can't even tell you how many times a week I am messing with Dan's website like it's it's almost every day granted he's got a different you know product and does things in it differently but we are making changes daily so you might not need to be daily but I would imagine you should probably be at least weekly so I feel a lot of deers deers and headlights do you have how can I be helpful yeah I'm thinking about like Mike's comments about word of mouth and stuff like that yeah um when I was doing construction I had so much time available and so many resources available to do uh a certain amount of work yep so if I was to that point and had some lined up yeah marketing didn't seem like such a big deal so why would I need to spend a time every week working on my website if I'm if that's the case well I think that that makes a lot of assumptions I think that's assuming that that will always be the case and what happens when it's not right like I think it's risky and maybe in that example weekly might be a little strong but you should still be adding content or you know taking a look at your analytics I mean if you are not using your website as a lead generation tool then the things that I'm talking about probably don't pertain to you as much as folks who do use it as a lead generation tool and should I've got a colleague that I work with named Melissa Nunes and um she um she's rebuilding her site so she's got no sight right now and she's missed probably about five or six really large leads that she would have wanted to send to a site as a landing spot right even just capture right like lead capture I would say like do you have a form do you have a place for people to say I was here um I think that's really important especially connecting it to contact information can can you mention a couple different types of we're getting a lot of questions about changes can you imagine a few different types of changes that people could do simply just to keep think of the word change as in it could be blog content right it could be headlines it could be if your calls to action if nobody is clicking the stinking button to take an action change the call to action right like I'm not talking about changing the scaffolding or changing the fundamental nature of it change also means adding right you are changing something about it that's what I mean you know you've just finished a project you've taken something right you've taken some pictures post some pictures of the project in your in your um in your sample projects uh section just always little things like that you're always adding to so you know you look at a page go away from it for two weeks and come back and look at it again you'll see stuff you go oh yuck I'm going to change that change it I'm thinking Jolene what if you have your Instagram page linked to your website and sure editing your Instagram page and it's Scrolls dot bottom that kind right is that is that a way to upload it it is so it for a lot of us when that happens that is like a it's a link right that populates the images and so it's going to change as you change that content in the overarching indexing of your site it doesn't change because that link stays the same right it was like feed my Instagram here so that's not exactly what I'm talking about that's exactly what I'm doing here and you're right it doesn't add any additional traffic this is an automatic feed but from a client point of view from a client point of view it does it does something new all the time got it so it's really about having keeping an updated thing like one of the things that I used to have on my website when I was focusing on design clients was um on the boards page it was a project that I was currently working on so it might be a cad drawing it might be like a little update about what's happening on that project and that that's something that's new and fresh is having like an on the board on I called it on the boards yeah it was just something that was changing relatively regular not so regular it's hard when you're a single person right unless it's really a little jazz on this kind of stuff well solopreneurship is you know a real thing for a lot of us and I can see some of your uh concerned comments right but but let's think about it this way let's go back to talking about SEO so some folks have an amazing blog with an incredible RSS feed and the example I like to use is Sally's Baking Addiction have any of you heard of Sally's Baking Edition no it is a humongous website with thousands and thousands of people who follow this website and sadly updates it every stinking day and her content shoots out to her followers like hey I've got a new blog post because of her RSS feed that is not what most of us strive for nor do we need to worry about there is also blog content that feeds the machine of our web Crawlers so it is perfectly reasonable to create content where you're not thinking about the the your customer but you're thinking about Google or you're thinking about making sure that the indexing machines can find you so a lot of marketers what we like to say is write one for them write one for your followers Dan Dan does this where he talks about something personal and he talks about you know the sauerkraut would be an excellent example right Dan's family makes an amazing sauerkraut dinner and Dan did a blog post about it do we want Google indexing and sending people say for sauerkraut maybe but what we want more is we want it to index who he is and what he's about so every week if you can blog about something in your industry and because you're not Sally's Baking Addiction you can talk about the same things again right like you are not held to I just did chocolate chip cookies last week like that isn't really about us also like sauerkraut people that eat sauerkraut that's a Nish Market he's got a bunch of people that want to remodel their home now yeah you got it man that's right it's always a method to the madness you know well and Doug I agree with you I totally agree with Doug is saying is that like the stuff that I'm talking about it's kind of like my best analogy is I really hope none of you are cutting your own hair right like you don't cut your own hair that's not a thing you do you go to a professional and to cut your hair so I kind of feel like like your digital marketing is like that too right like you don't some of you in the comments are saying oh my gosh I didn't know this well yes you don't have you you do your business like you should do your business and if you are able to have a partner we can help you with these things yes so don't cut your own hair if you don't well unless you're Renee and then they do your own website so Doug's comments is perfect right um all right so you guys uh speaking of that getting some help with your website um Jolene has put together a course coming up and if you're on the let me just share my screen here real quick um if you're if you're on the website and you clicked on the scroll down the page here and if you don't see this picture on the bottom of the video page um hit F5 on your computer or hit the refresh button and it'll pop up but that'll take you to uh uh now I'm just going clicking on the wrong screen that'll take you to uh the information about the course that Julian's doing it's a we're going to do a three session course and we'll probably throw in some Zoom calls or something too we're just kind of working out some of the details now but Julian's got a ton of information this year I've been through her courses before I've worked with her from a long time now and she knows what I do and she knows what you guys need because she works with a lot of contractors and designers out there and she's got some great information coming up so you just scroll through here um super fun to hang out with Dan absolutely you are um thank you brother thank you thank you so yeah so just scroll down the page I'm not going to get into it right now but it's going to be a fun course lots of information you're going to come away with all sorts of tidbits that you can do to help beef up your web presence we'll give you some strategies so if you rely on um referrals for your entire business yeah you really should clean up your website too so you want to do this and so we're going to do the whole course 297 so it's almost a no-brainer um we want to get as many people involved in this as possible we need you thinking about your website and get you making those little changes that can make a big difference in your in your uh in your business plus you have a place to come and ask a ton of different questions that you might have about this you know what's AI doing we have like five minutes right now yeah well go I ask one of them um I always want to I'll just I'm going to share mine we'll take it right back to yours um there's Pages where I don't want my website to take over the ability to zoom in like this and and sometimes I can't zoom in on a page and that's a huge frustration especially if I've got some kind of you know issue seeing so like there's one and then the other one was you you already mentioned that you know don't call it a journal call it a Blog that's a common name but I want to know all the the very common names I should be titling my headers that's a big one too yeah there's some little things you can be doing in the background that make a big difference for getting found online well I just think I think cutesy is always quite risky um because it's kind of like if if Google doesn't call it the cutesy name then you are completely missing out and for your user if they're not understanding your cutesy names that doesn't make any sense either like I've I'm sure you've all seen them too where they're you know like in the words just don't make any sense like they're probably on brand and like they're esoteric but your website as a member of your team needs to be as straightforward as possible it can still be aesthetically pleasing but sometimes you just have to call a spade a spade for navigation purposes for Google and also for your customers um but Dan I also wanted to say that right now like what we're gonna do for the first 10 people who sign up is I'm gonna do a website audit and provide a list of things that are broken or that you need to change cool nice all right um I'm going to respond to this question Jeffrey lives over by me so I'm going to relate an experience here but I'm a single guy Jeffrey and uh and so if I just dated in the dating pool that I think that I should be dating in then might be missing out on much better dating so go on to all the dating apps instead and then I then I run into a whole new caliber of people that I didn't know I wanted so well and and Jeffrey I would say too that like does every business need to do social media I don't think so and and I'm a digital marketer but I do think that every business has to have a very strong website presence that is more than a digital brochure like I think that we have to have it be a receptacle for lead generation we have to have easy ways for people to get really valuable content and it's really it's your opportunity to tell your story if you can't talk to them on the phone right away or spend time we need to let our websites do that for us so you might not have a product problem you might have a story problem yeah I mean what's the one thing that everybody does before they call you everybody's going to do this they're going to look for your website right yep you're vetted okay yeah and your website is that that the last landing page before they get to the phone number to the pick up the phone and call you or then maybe they contact you through the website they're even browsing the website while they're talking to you exactly yeah well and I have just one more example I know we're out of time I'll make it quick but I do have a design build client where they were just they weren't getting gigs because they were considered to be a little too Mom and Pop like just didn't have the quite the right polish for the numbers that they were charging so we took their website we took their branding and we flipped that Beast completely around so that their Visual and their online brand matches what they're charging and so it's been a whole lot easier for them to close their design build agreements and contracts because they don't have this mom-and-pop vibe that they no longer wanted to have yeah they're killing exactly they're killing it yeah yeah and the answer to Marnie she definitely needs you definitely need um a personal website I mean it let's be really clear what type of business do you want and how much work do you want yeah right I mean if you don't want a lot of work don't get a website but you know years ago I used to spend a lot of money on um a yellow page ad if I wanted work I mean some of you don't even know what a yellow page ads what yellow pages are but way back when in the old days there was this thing that that's how people shop for you it was a book book full of names and ads it's weird oh my God it cost me a thousand dollars a month and you signed up for a year and if you closed your business because we did close our business in the middle of the Year you still had to pay so you still can't still pay for the whole year so you do need a website I mean Marnie it really depends upon how much business you want what do you want or if you're in this website if you're getting leads from where you are and if you're satisfied with that then absolutely no right it just depends to Robin well some people are really involved in like um personal associations and you get a ton of business from that and that that's where you get your business and you're happy then we'll focus on that but if you need cult calls you need if you need cold calls you need people feeding that pipeline you've got to have a website yeah and it could be a whole nother course and discussion but I would like to say too that there is you know there's digital marketing there's online marketing there's content marketing but there's also relationship marketing right and relationship marketing is a whole different thing and you know it's a whole other thing to talk about but I I do think that some elements of relationship Marketing in this day and age are risky because you're putting all all those really valuable eggs in a basket with one handle so anyway we're gonna get going okay uh the course doesn't start till the 13th of next month yep so we're announcing it kind of early but um you'll you'll have a chance to ask questions in between here and then too as well uh and yeah check it out I think you'll enjoy it it should be a fun course and you're going to get a ton of great information of jolene's classes they are always valuable yes always valuable thank you thank you very much well you know your stuff yeah and you give it in very easy bite pieces it doesn't it's not like you don't have to do all of it you don't have to look at all 10 of those right today you can choose little pieces and I agree with Doug and Jolene is a good member of people's teams so consider it cool everybody thanks for being on the show today um reach out to us if you have questions um join the course look forward to having you there we'll see in a few weeks uh where we'll talk about um I think Kevin is going to dig deep into some of his business things so I believe that's what we're going to talk and we'll do a little bit more Chief Architect stuff too so I think we need to probably throw a Chief Architect class in here now and then yeah anyway you guys take care thanks for being here we'll see everybody thank you guys bye now have a great day yeah take care everybody