Crafting Your Website Framework!

No problem standing is good.

So now are you guys seeing the slides? I want to make sure not seeing the slide sorter view here. Yeah, I can I can see your screen. And also I'm going to take my camera down so that's not distracting for people. But yeah, I can see it. So you're seeing the this slide presentation itself and I need do you need to remind me Angela how to I can minimize myself because I don't need to see me.

You've been marked up for just cut your camera off and your control panel. So good morning everybody. And thank you Angela for inviting me to make this presentation today. It's obviously a topic that's near and dear to both of our hearts as we work with clients all the time who asked for assistance in creating new websites, and they want to expand their presence as you said and today, I'm not going to talk about how to build a website or any of those elements. This is really going to be your homework assignment. So no matter who you go talk to to build your site, if you have done your homework and you know what you want before you get there. It's no different than if you decide you're going to go have a new house built. You're not going to go to a builder and say build me a house. Hopefully, you're going to have an idea of what you want whether it's “I want a two-story home and I want to master bath on a master bedroom on the first floor”. You're going to have an idea in your head of exactly what you're looking for. And it's no different with your website. You need to really plan ahead so that you can build a site that your visitors are going to love.

So before we even get into some of the questions that you ask yourself, you know, we need to begin with the end in mind and this is all about your elevator pitch. I'm sure you've heard that term before. How would you describe your business to somebody if you had 5 minutes on the elevator and you were going up 10 floors? It doesn't give you a lot of time.

So, you know, it's very important to be able to answer some of the questions that I have in front of you here, so what is it that your company does? You know, that is a first fundamental question you need to answer. Who do you do it for? Who's the audience? And why do they care? If you can answer those three questions, you've got a great start to being able to articulate what your business is about. Now the bonus question “What Makes You Different?”. It’s even better if you can articulate what is different about your business? That's only going to help you further draw in your audience and make them see. Hey, why do I want to work with you instead of somebody else? That's not always possible. Sometimes that's a little harder to do. So again, that's why I consider it a bonus question. So why do you want a new site? It's important to really define your objective. Angela talked about this earlier and there's lots of different answers in there may be more than one reason you want to add and you know create a new site. Maybe you want to add e-commerce capability. You know when covid hit a lot of people had to pivot with their business. Ecommerce was a big ask for a lot of people. Maybe you're going through a rebrand and updated your logo. You've updated your messaging and your site just feels dated. It doesn't reflect what you're doing today. Perhaps your site isn't as mobile-friendly as you would like it to be. Clearly more and more people are viewing sites from their mobile phone. So making sure that someone has a great experience when they're visiting your site on a phone can be really important.

Oops, I'm going with my slides. This does it to me every time I have to be home. Give me a second because there is an option here. I think so that my slides don't auto advance or I may just have to keep hiting the key. Anoother big reason you may want a new site is to get more leads. I mean, we're all looking to grow our businesses. Maybe you want to launch a new product, you know, the answers the possible answers are endless and only you know what it is that you're looking for. So this is probably the first fundamental question before you even go into you defining anything else.

It's really important when creating a new site that you're putting your audience first. We all very quickly fall into talking about our business in terms that makes sense to us and how we think about the business. But, we have to remember we're speaking to visitors. They might speak a different language than we do. They might use the same words. So and we might have multiple different audiences who are visiting our site. It's great to make a list. You're not going to be all things for every audience, you know, we all have budgets and we all have, you know finite resources. So, you know again your answers might include “I'm trying to attract people who want to purchase IT Services” or “I'm looking to use my website, you know as a recruitment tool so candidates who might be looking for jobs.” “I'm trying to gain investors.” That might be another reason another audience for my site.

So once you've identified each of these audiences, it's important to really make them into real people. It's really in the abstract. It's easy to forget that, you know, these are specific people with specific needs. We always recommend once you've looked at your list of different types of visitors that you prioritize them.

Who is the most important audience you know and in what order? Because you can't have your site  focus on everything simultaneous. There's a primary audience who is going to get the Lion's Share of attention particularly on your homepage. So when you're thinking about your visitors, it's really good to describe them in detail. If you can describe your demographic, maybe you're dealing with elderly people who are not as computer savvy.  Maybe you're dealing with

millennials. And I am really struggling with the fact that my slides keep jumping ahead of me. I apologize for that.

What is the primary reason they're visiting your site? What type of information are they looking for? So you want to do this for each of your audiences. Once you've done the first one you may discover that some of your other audiences are actually looking for the exact same information. So it really helps you narrow in on what sort of information you need to be providing.

It's always a good idea to size up your competition know what you're comparing against, know what people are seeing when they visit other sites. Because your goal here is to make your site one that you makes you stand out and when you're looking at other people's sites identify the good and the bad. You may discover that you know, a lot of your competitors have kind of lackluster sites, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't set your sights high. Your goal may be to crush the competition and just wow your audience.

In addition to looking at competitors, which can also help you identify how other people are talking about the products and services you offer. It's also great to find inspiration in other places. This again goes back to you know, you're going to design house. Your web designer can't read your mind. So if there are certain sites that you are drawn to that, you know, you find attractive - make notes.

It's about what you like. So for example here, you know on this First Oak site. Maybe it's a matter of you're really connecting that there's this very personal image or it's a really simple navigation. A site may have a really great use of video or the way they have organized their online store. Again, the answers are endless. When you're identifying sites that you find interesting or that really inspire you it's important to make notes so that your web designer will know what it is you like about that particular site. You don't have to find sites where you love everything about them. As long as you can articulate “Hey, I really love the way this header looks but you know, I'm not so crazy about the fact that you know, it's got a busy navigation.” That's really going to help you a lot in the process of once you're ready to meet with your chosen web designer to build out a new site.

So often people come to Angela and ourselves and like “I want a home” say “I want a site” or “I want product pages“ and I want this and I want that. They haven't even begun to answer those first questions we talked about and now that we are looking at the actual site. This is where we really begin to dive in and we need to think about content.

 Content is what's going to drive everything. Once again, this content now should align with the types of visitors who are coming to your site. What are they looking for? What do they need? You know, if you're trying to present your company as a great place to work, you know, you may need a section of the site that really shows off your culture and has great pictures of your office space. Or maybe it has that you don't have an office space at all.And maybe it's all about how your people telecommute.

This is an important exercise we use when we're designing sites for folks. We always start once we've answered those other questions. This exercise of what are the the key elements of the home page and the other content pages. This helps us then create an initial site design for you. You'll see how some of the elements that we talked about earlier really feed into this. Well, if I've already identified who might come, what I do, who I do it for and why it matters. It's really going to help me have a working headline for the top of my page. And if I know what my visitors want to do, I can define key pathways. Maybe I want them to view a demo of the product. Maybe I want to be able to help them immediately choose the right product or set of services that they were interested in? Maybe I want to be presenting proof points so that my client can see who my other clients are or awards that I have received as a company. That's always important and helpful because it gives credibility to your site. So we always encourage our clients to think about those sorts of elements as well and equally important throughout your entire site. Not just the home page.It is making sure you have adequate calls to action and relevant calls to action, you know, if you're selling enterprise software, you know, the next step is probably not buy now. It might be schedule a demo, you know, it might be, you know in a different instance. It might be compare products.

So you really need to think about these and what you want people to do next the whole goal of the website is to bring your visitors along the journey through self-discovery so that they can begin to identify and see themselves, see how you meet their needs and then make that next step. So when you speak to them on the phone, they already at least have an understanding of “Yes, I know this company.” You know is has a product that makes sense for me. I mean how many times have all of us now with software as a service and it's kind of a pet peeve of mine, you know, they have a one-page site and they want you to immediately sign up for you know a free online trial. Well, maybe I don't want to take the time to download the software and sign up for a free trial and try to figure it out. Maybe I would much rather have a video presentation that walks me through some of the key points of how the software works and I don't want it or have the time to download it. So again, these are all very important considerations and be on the homepage. We always like to break content into different types of content just because you know, it helps with the organizational structure. So perhaps you are dealing with you have products. So you're going to have a bunch of pages that are about them.

You want to show your staff? So, you know you make the decision. I want to show my entire team or maybe I only want to show the management team, you know that you're going to be posting news articles regularly or resource articles. You want to blog. You want to display case studies. So again, we like to segment these out because each of them also might have a different layout. We can help that's going to help drive from a design perspective so we can make similar layouts for similar sorts of content throughout the site.

One of the things that is incredibly important with building a new site is that it is not a one-time exercise that I build my site and I'm done. Then, I walk away and now I don't need to do anything for the next four years until I'm ready to do a new site. It's extremely important. If you want to bring people back to your site then you're constantly adding new content.

So and it's also important in this comes back to your business and what your business is all about. That you plan and you think about future growth and you communicate that with your web design firm. So we have a client who dwells in the in the mental health care space and they know that over the course of the next couple of years they are going to be adding more offices. So by communicating that to me we could plan accordingly and make it really easy for them to add that content as new content became available.

So that's the other piece of it. We always try to build sites where the content that's going to need to be updated regularly is something that the client can do on their own if they like. If they want us to do it that's fabulous, but we don't want them to feel like “Gee I can't do anything on my site by myself.“

 So again some of the answers that you know, you might have is you know that you're constantly gently expanding new products because you're an online store. So you're always going to have new products coming, you know, you you plan to expand and continue to do more case studies or resource articles or you know, that staff’s going to change over time and you're going to want to be able to update people's bios. So these are again some of the different types of content that you might be planning on updating on a regular basis and use the example here on the right is one that we did for Morrison and Forrestor. They are a law firm and it was a microsite we did for them talking about their initiative to help start up businesses, you know, in terms of formation funding expansion, going through IP. So we built this whole site around the idea that it was going to be a living breathing thing and organize the content so that people could easily find it's different topics or find different topics without simply looking chronologically at whatever the most recent articles were. So that's another important element as content grows. You want to make sure that it's still easy for people to access and they can get to relevant content with search functionality or there's you know, logical ways of categorizing information.

With all of this in hand now we get to the piece that again people often jump to first. You know, organizing that content or I shouldn't say they don't jump to first. They tell us all the content they want but now we want to organize that content and this really falls into the category of really defining our navigation. Making sure we're focusing on the important items. You don't want to have you know, 10 items in your primary navigation because people will not you know traverse that much.

You also want to make sure when you're naming and your choosing names for your navigation that it's a name that's going to make sense to your visitor. Not to you just because you call something a treatment option your visitor may think of it as a service. So, you know, these are really important considerations and this is where we go back to as we're doing this exercise. We can go back to the information we had defined earlier.

Who is our visitor? What are they looking for? What are the types of words they use? This is also important. I know a topic that I didn't not going to speak to here is near and dear to Angela's heart is, you know, organizing your content and understanding the words that people look for is really key to building an SEO strategy and a Content strategy for your site with navigation.

You know your primary navigation isn't the only piece you have to work with. Oftentimes people will use secondary navigation that space right above your navigation. Maybe it's a different color bar. That's a great place, you know, if you know you want people to call you as a next step having that ability to find your phone number instantly is really important. You know, if you have it's also a great place for if you have secondary audiences.

So again back to I mentioned this healthcare provider we have that we work with their primary audiences are people looking for mental health care providers. But, a secondary audience is Physicians who are referring people to their site. Well rather than putting that is part of the main navigation. We put it up above and had a little button for referring Physicians. So there's a number of different ways that we can organize our secondary information.

And lastly don't forget about the footer, you know, it's great to go minimalist if you don't have a lot to put in there, but it's also a great place to kind of put a mini site map. You know, if you have things that you're concerned, you know may not be obvious within your navigation without kind of clicking or clicking each element, you know, you may have products, or may list out the product categories underneath it. So again, lots of things you can do to help your user be able to navigate your site and find content and that's really what this is. Also great ways to repeat your phone number and address if you have a physical location and it's also a great place to add in your links to social media so that people have a way to connect with you beyond just your website.

One thing that's you know as designers that we value and we think is really important is making an lasting impression. You want visitors to remember your site. There are just a million websites out there today and there are all these templates out there and all these, you know, simple little builder tools. The downside of that is that sights all start to look the same. So it's really, you know, we're trying to draw our visitors in to make the next step, either purchase a product or do business with our company. So there are many, many different ways. And this is something that a good web design firm can help you with to use different elements. We try to do things like adding unique background. You'll notice on the screen on the right on this particular site. This is our site, you know, we have kind of these wavy lines that we use throughout. So we're not just using you know, the same old solving color backgrounds. Also this sign is actually a good example as well. You know, we see these full-bleed images everywhere now that's kind of a pretty standard element. So we went ahead and did something a little bit different. We decided to have you know, images bleeding off, you know, in some cases the left side of the page and other cases the right side of the page, so that it could create some visual interest. Motion is always a great element to add into the site provided that it is used to engage your audience and not just an effect for the sake of having an effect.

You know, if it helps bring someone down the page that's you know, a perfect use of motion. Another thing that is really important again with all the clipart and stock photography and stock illustrations that are out there. If you have the budget, consider having some custom illustration work done or custom photography done specifically for your site, especially if you have a physical location, the last thing you want to do on your site is have a generic looking office, you know, take the time to have somebody come in and photograph your office. This can again really make your site stand out and different than all the rest and give people a true sense of what your company is all about.

Lastly and again incredibly important is prominent calls to action. You're not building a new website just to have a pretty website clearly you want to attract new business or become a thought leader. So you want to have those calls to action so that your visitors are engaging with the site the site should not be this static. That thing that someone reads it is meant for people to engage with so that they can explore and they can take the next steps.

So and of course, you know that leads me to once you have built a site, another important thing your web developer should be doing is making sure you're setting up all the metrics so that you can actually measure what you've done. I mean, that's the beauty of the web and digital engagement. It's we have things like Google analytics. We can look at all sorts of different metrics. How many visitors are coming to the site? How many visitors have purchased a product once they've come to the site? How much time are they spending on the page? Which pages are they spending very little time in completely leaving our site? You know what we call abandonment. If you have a shopping cart and you're having people put stuff in the shopping cart, but then they never check out, you know, you can measure that. What are the most visited pages?

In Google analytics which you can get just a ton of information. It's important to make sure you configure Google Analytics and again a good one building when you get to the point of actually building a site. Not only do you want someone who can create and build a site for you. It's really valuable to partner with an SEO firm who can also help with all the analytics at the same time. The other sort of tool that is really valuable our heat map tools and you'll notice on the image on the right hand side of my screen again that you see these little heat maps. So it gives you a sense for where people are clicking or where their eyes are resting. Crazy egg is one tool. That is a really nice tool that lets you see how people are navigating your site. It's really wonderful too because if you have a really long page it can indicate for you that 50% of the people, made it what we call below the fold or beneath where you know, that's this first initial content you have. You can kind of see the drop-off rate. So, you know, gee maybe I need to get more content up to the top because people just aren't taking the time to go all the way down to the bottom or I need something that kind of shows what the next section is coming so they actually realize there's more content on that particular page.

You should always be aiming to continually improve your site and build upon what you've created. I mean again, the beauty of digital tools is we don't need to create something in, you know, then have to completely tear it apart to refine it. So these are all very important considerations. So, you know again, what I've tried to present here to you is largely the things you need to consider before you go to a web design for or an SEO firm or any sort of partner or your internal team.

Even if you're going to build a website yourself, it's about knowing who you are and knowing your audience. If you know those things and you can articulate that. Well, you are going to be so far ahead of the pack when you finish your site in terms of it achieving your goals. So that's really the essence of what I wanted to cover today.

We will make this presentation available to you. Angela will speak to that because I highly recommend that you use this as homework before your next site redesign. It's a process we use each and every time we build a site that we work through with our clients. And again, really the goal is to help focus your efforts so that you can build a site that your visitors are going to love.