WDD LIVE 044: 2 Site Critiques + “Web Design Standards” Video Analysis

1 0:00:00 Good morning, everybody.

How are we? How are what a week man? What a week I’ll tell you.

Hmm. Fun times. Who we got in the house today?

Steve, Marcel. Simon is here. Welcome, Evan.

Maya, I got to get this chat window on the top. Mark, good to see you. Louis, let’s see, the Design Creative, morning from Maidenhead, UK.

Try Techo, good night from Pakistan. Love it, love it. Dawson, good to have you.

Andy, a lot of regulars. Some new people too. Good, good, good, good, good.

Love it. How we doing on, okay, we already got good numbers this is we’re gonna kind of get right into it today. Back to our regularly scheduled program we are looking at Simon’s website today to answer Nick here if I can Wow I am NOT I am NOT hitting the targets with the clicker today.

Okay I’m gonna have to move this off of here. Alright, yeah we’re going to look at two websites, that’s the agenda, we’re going to look at two websites and then we’re going to look at a video someone sent me about web design standards, which I think is a really good video to kind of do a little analysis on and discussion around. And it answers some, I think, important questions.

It also covers some things like, you know, why I stay away from certain aspects of web design and trends. And I was gonna do a whole segment of a live stream at some point on like web design awards. Because that’s another area that is really, it’s just so misguided in terms of like what we really should be focused on.

So, well, I mean, it has value in a way, of course, but the sites that should be winning awards never win an award, and then the sites that shouldn’t win awards win lots of awards. So that’s a whole different thing. But the standards video that we’ll watch kind of goes into that a little bit.

It kind of goes into that a little bit. Okay. So we’re going to do those critiques.

And the second critique, the first critique will be a standard critique. That’ll be like the normal critiques that we do. Full critique, we’ll talk about as much as we possibly can.

I’m going to try to limit that one to 30 minutes, 45 minutes somewhere in there. Then we’re going to do Simon’s. Okay so Simon’s site he did a consulting call with me.

He’s working on getting the the new site launched and copy and all of that good stuff and you know I gave him some initial pointers on on copy but there’s still a lot there to work on and improve. And I just said, why don’t we just like kind of live workshop this on WDD. So everybody is going to get a chance to chime in.

In fact, a lot of the questions I had for him were related to like, I wonder what typical agency owners and freelancers think when they read things like this. And so there’s no better place to ask that question than right here where there’s lots of you. And so we can all pull it up together, and I think this will give Simon a lot of really good, valuable insight.

I think he had, I think he told me he hired a copywriter to write kind of what’s there already. But it’s, as you’re gonna see, it’s like what a typical copywriter would produce, but not, in my estimation, like super impactful. It’s not really getting the job done in its current state.

So we’re all gonna work on that together as the second critique. All right, good afternoon Louis, good to see you. Mark, Keith, Suzanne, Marcus is here, Sheldon is here, good to see you Sheldon.

I feel like I haven’t seen you in a while. Where you been? Where you been my man?

Let’s see, Daniel, Sylvia, good to see you Sylvia. Evan, all right, we got a good crew today. We have a good, oh my gosh, 130.

Okay, the numbers are going up, the numbers are going up. This is good to see. But Pixel and Things did point out something very important here.

117 people, it’s actually 130 now and 15 likes. Gotta remember when you come in, you know, there is an entry fee. You know, a little entry, this is all free, right?

There’s a little entry fee. Just pay the little like, pay the little like, pay the little you know something something in the chat. Don’t send me don’t send me super chats or what I don’t even know the terminology that the cool kids use these days.

I don’t need any I don’t need your money, don’t send any of that stuff, but just send a hi, send where you’re watching from, send a you know thanks, send a whatever, but that kind of helps the stream out. All right I am going to if we do have time today too, by the way, we will do some Q&A. I’m gonna go ahead and share screen, and we are going to get started.

All right. So this is, let’s go to the homepage. Keenstage.

com. This is gonna be our first website. We’re gonna start with our no scroll test.

So I’m starting at the header up here. I see a logo Keen Stage and I see events visit education about and tickets and I’ll just pause right here to say if all I’m going on is the information in the header I don’t know where I am or what we’re doing here so I would like to see you know maybe a little bit of a tagline action right here I don’t know but let’s look at the hero and see what that offers us. That’s kind of the next thing that we’re presented with.

And I see Carolyn Dorfman Dance. I don’t know who that person is. And we’ve encountered, what have we encountered guys?

The very popular slider that hides other content. All right, so I’m gonna go through the slides. Drum towel, okay, I don’t, still don’t know what we’re doing, where we are.

I’m getting the vibe that it’s, well, see, this is very different. These are like tribal dancers and then this is, oh, oh dear, gosh, I’ve clicked something. All right, let’s go back.

Here’s another problem with sliders, right? I don’t exactly know what I’m interacting with. I thought I was hitting a button to go to the next slide and then I ended up somehow on another page.

We have 613, all right, some gentlemen all wearing the same shirt. And then we have, we’re back to Carolyn Dorfman dance. So I still don’t know.

Now, thankfully, I’m on a very large screen, and so I can see this section down here, who we are. So I’m gonna scroll down here and see if we can get any additional information. Keen Stage is the professional presenting series at Keen University, featuring diverse performers and artists from around the world.

We welcome you back to our uniquely designed venues, including the Wilkins Theater, Inlow Recital Hall, and the Miron Center Little Theater. 5 0:06:57

Okay. 13 0:06:58

Is this, 1 0:06:59

presenting series, a professional presenting series. Is that hard for anybody else to read? I don’t recall ever hearing this as like a term.

I just feel like it’s a little, it’s not what I would expect to read, I guess. Like dance troupe or dance something, or again, I don’t know. I’ve just never heard professional presenting series.

It’s a little bit confusing. It’s a little bit hard to grasp. Then we have this, I guess a photo of one of the venues over here.

I’m not being given, what am I missing? You know, what’s missing so far? I’m not really being given any reason to care, right?

There’s nothing, the hero section was a complete waste of time and effort and energy and just, it’s a waste of your chance at, this is where I’m really getting at, it’s a waste of your chance at capturing the visitor. Because this is not gonna capture any typical visitor, right? There’s nothing here to capture them.

And that’s a giant chunk of space that we’ve wasted. And then who we are also is not doing a great job of capturing and like sucking me into what’s going on here. Let’s see.

Yeah, Andy says, never heard that phrase. Presenting equals presentation. Keen says a professional presentation series.

Okay, yeah, maybe, maybe, I don’t know. Let’s see. I’m not a native English speaker, but I don’t understand what it’s about.

If it’s a theater, it must say so. Yes, I agree. Yeah, I agree about professional presenting series, says Brian.

I know what they mean, but it’s not well said. Anybody, so again, and I’m not a big theater person, okay? So if you guys, I don’t know if you could tell, all right?

I’m not a big theater person. If there is a term they should be using, if you are experienced in this area, what is it? What is the term that they should be using?

Or if you know what they mean, but it’s not well-worded, what would be a better way to word it? So let’s give them some, like something that they can actually inject there that might be a better option. Because I don’t have a lot of background in, like I don’t have any background whatsoever in theater.

So I don’t know what they’re supposed to be saying there. But I just know that that’s probably not it because it doesn’t read well. And I’ve never read that before.

So it just seems like a mismatch. Performing arts would probably be a better term. Okay.

Okay. All right. Yeah.

A bunch of people also saying the slider doesn’t doesn’t really fit their Professional presenting series does not ring any Bell. Okay. All right.

Let’s keep going and see what we encounter next So we’ve got Jubilee 30 years. These are events coming up This is very, you know, I I guess typical it’s got the crisscross layout, whatever you want to call it, the alternating layout, you know, content, media, media, content. I typically don’t like it as like full width like this with no spacing.

It feels a little bit more chaotic to me. And really, this is probably on a large screen, simply because my eyes have to travel from way over here to way over here, and then back again. And just it’s constantly forcing me to crisscross across a large screen.

So I think in this regard, it’s important to, like if you had this on a laptop, I’m sure it’d be a better experience. You know, if you were on a screen like this size, oh my gosh, gotta get rid of that. Every time I misclick that, it goes to another page.

So if it was something like this, that’s not so bad, right? But this is where we have to consider these larger screens. I actually think this is where a box layout, kind of, if you’re gonna do stuff like this.

Having a max width on the whole entire website so it doesn’t just stretch infinitely. Because the experience gets worse and worse and worse as the screen size gets bigger. When you choose to use a full width, alternating kind of content layout like this.

Okay, we’ll take a look at events like the event page more in just a second. Here’s more upcoming events. This is a better presentation.

This has more personality to it. I feel like so far other than the accent, like I see the one thing I do like is they’ve put some thought into, okay, this is the logo, which if you haven’t caught on yet, the yellow is a stage, okay? So it looks like that’s a stage, right?

And then they’ve used that accent here. Now, to me, it looks a little bit off, right? It’s not symmetrical.

It should, to me, this curve should follow this curve. Just how I feel. 5

0:11:57 Feels a little off balance. 1

0:11:59 But I like how they’ve thought about incorporating that. I would almost like to see it maybe incorporated on almost every image, if it was done really well, and you know, subtle.

But I like this, this kind, but I’m already seeing a big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big problem. Big, big, big problem. Anybody see the big, big, big, big, big, big problem?

I’ll let chat go ahead and answer in the chat. I won’t even say it. It was here’s a little pop quiz.

What is wrong with this right here? All right, we’ve got some information, tickets, info. Overall, like having a list of events like this is very good, though.

It’s very easy for the person to see what’s going on. It’s very easy to consume the information. It’s obvious that I can get tickets or info You know overall like design here this part of this is probably one of the better sections on the site But it does have a fatal flaw in it We’ll go here.

Let’s see yep, photoshopped images image image image image dates and images. Yeah, so This you don’t want to be in the business of doing this like I mean you damn near need a part-time designer just for managing all of your events that you do. This should be a div and this should be real text inside of it floating over the image right here.

And we don’t need a designer, a designer does not need to be working here. We don’t need a designer. If we build the section properly, we can let the designer go on holiday, right?

And this will just take care of itself forever into the future. And if anything needs to be edited or changed, we can easily do that. Right now, this is stuck.

This is always gonna be January 28th, unless that designer gets involved. Gotta ring that designer up and be like, sorry, we made a mistake there, we’re gonna have to change the date. That really should not need to happen.

So I would work to make these manual ASAP. But overall, I like the layout. KeenStage, okay, we’re connecting on social media.

I like this layout right here This is nice We could do a little you know I’m always curious to keyboard test these things when I see that kind of stuff happening and then we can also just do a quick 3 0:14:16

Screen reader test let me put down our volume. I don’t want to Merc your ears here. Let’s see.

VoiceOver on Chrome. Events. KeenStage.

Google Chrome. Kevin. Window.

Link. Skip to content. Link.

Skip to content. Link. Facebook F.

Main. Link. Twitter.

Link. YouTube. Link.

Instagram. Link. Image.

Social icon. Link. Image.

Social Twitter. Michael Mayo at 2 times SRGB. Link.

Image. Social icon. Instagram.

VoiceOver off. Okay, so there’s a little bit of some cleanup to do there. 1

0:14:51 Could you guys hear that? Are we good?

Sometimes you can’t hear, I don’t know. Yadira says, oh no, don’t do that, it’s not accessible. Hey, we gotta check, that’s what we do here, we gotta check.

Is this your site, Yadira? Okay, I think so. I think we’re getting that vibe.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, it is, okay, awesome. All right, so Wilkins Theater, I don’t know if you’ve been to Sino Hall, but you’ve been to Sino Theater, Little Theater. Oh, these are links.

Oh, that wasn’t even clear at first glance. Let’s see what happens here. It’s gonna take me to a Google Map.

11 0:15:28 I don’t know that I would do this.

1 0:15:29 I would do locations.

So do, yeah, locations as a CPT or venues. You call it venues, okay, CPT called venues, and then this takes you to a venue page, right? Takes you to a venue page.

And then you can link to Google Maps from the venue page, but this right here, I mean, I just always use my mom. And look, she’ll agree with me. Okay, I’m not throwing my mom under the bus.

She’ll absolutely agree with me. I mean, my mom’s on this site, coming down here, seeing something like Wilkins Theatre and my mom clicks this and you take her away she may never come back she just may never she don’t even know what happened she didn’t know that a new tab just opened she just thinks she’s on Google Maps now and that’s where she’s gonna live for the next 15 minutes she very well may never make it back to your site so I just don’t let’s let’s try to keep them on the site right for right now especially when it’s not obvious that this is gonna go somewhere else. Just think about that kind of user, especially on a, you know, this is, you know, you’re not, your target market is not like techie people, right, it’s people who like these kinds of events.

That’s the general public. So my mom, for one, right, so you’ve gotta really make this kind of stuff obvious on a site like this. This section right here just, yeah.

It’s an opportunity really to like show the venues in more detail. This is on the events, is that on every page? Yeah, that’s on every page.

That’s in the footer. So that’s going to cause a problem on literally every page. Okay, let’s go to an event landing page.

All right. One thing we can talk about here is, let me go back into mobile mode. So let’s bring, I never know which, there we go.

There we go, there we go. They’re like always attached, and I’m like, which part detaches? All right, so let’s go up here to like a narrower screen.

Do you guys see the problem with a layout like this? You know, on like a smaller wider screen, they’ve they just arrived somewhere and have no idea what’s going on because the h1 is way down below everything else that’s going on. So I’m just a big fan as a general rule like you know if this this has to be this text has to be above the fold.

Not everything has to be above the fold, right? That’s not, that was the old days, but where the person is, where they’ve just arrived, that definitely needs to be above the fold somewhere. So I would recheck this layout right here.

I mean, it’s as simple as just taking this heading and putting above the image. You could overlay it on the image, make it cute like that. There’s a bunch of ways to do it, but being tucked way down here, not super great.

All right, so let’s go down. We got a little sidebar action. I think right off the bat that this would be much better off.

Let’s go, I gotta move this window for y’all like that. Okay. Oh, we got, is this Elementor?

Okay. Let’s go here. This is gonna be so difficult.

difficult now now because it’s element or I just get to live in divception hell and I don’t even know if yeah you’re not going to be able to everything’s probably style at the ID level you’re not going to use inheritance for any of this stuff it’s just man yeah good luck good luck element or okay I can’t can’t do some stuff on the fly here I think left aligning all this stuff and then putting some more space between each item. This needs a little UI love right here. And then we gotta do a better job of selling the events here.

You know, we’re basically saying, here’s a photo and here’s one paragraph. Hope you come, hope you buy the tickets. 85, hold on, this is backwards.

85. 59, what’s going on here? Let me click on tickets.

Okay, all right, all right, yeah. So 59 to 85 dollars is the range, that’s backwards. But you know, you want people to pay a pretty good amount for tickets right here.

I think we could. Okay let’s go back. Let’s go to we already did the events page.

Visit. Uh-oh. Uh-oh.

Okay. Let’s see the problem here. Okay so we have a hover interaction that lets me know this is clickable.

Well guess what? The one that’s not clickable has the same hover interaction. So I was sitting here trying to click visit, right?

But you can’t do that. Got to go down to the drop-down. Okay, box office, our venues.

What’s this do? Box office. Hours, locations, payment methods and fees.

Okay. Fairly basic, fairly standard. Okay, education.

Oh, what’s our education look like? Music conservatory, past concerts. I’m so confused right now.

5 0:20:55 I expected to see articles.

1 0:20:57 Theater conservatory.

It would probably help if I knew what a conservatory was. Why am I seeing events now? Wilkins Theater once on this island.

Let’s get info. What is this? Is it an educational event?

Is that what we’re doing here? 5 0:21:17

Me 1 0:21:18

This it’s a musical. It’s a musical. I’m is anybody else confused.

Am I the only one that’s confused right now? Why am I seeing more events under education? On school time also when I go to this I see music conservatory and then past concerts

5 0:21:31 and

1 0:21:33 I see music conservatory and then past concerts.

And both of those things, 5 0:21:40

is there supposed to be something 1 0:21:41

in between these two sections? Or like the layout there is very confused. It’s like there’s two headers, right?

It’s like there’s two headers to this page. That’s a little bit confusing. See here, oh, look, look, they are separated out.

Hmm, hmm. 5 0:21:56

Got a little bit of confusion to clean up here. 1 0:21:58

Little bit, oh my gosh, I, like, this designer, guys, the graphic designer for this site, company, hit the fucking jackpot. They are needed every five minutes for this. I mean, my gosh, look at all the work that they have.

And it’ll be never ending, it’ll be never ending. Okay, I think the designer will make more than the the CEO by the time this is done. I mean 365 days of events.

I mean this guy is and all he has to do is just literally swap stuff in and out in a Photoshop template but he shouldn’t have to do that you know. Just giving away money All right, let’s go to about our mission. Okay, got a little timeline action.

5 0:22:50 All right.

7 0:22:50 I like the timelines.

1 0:22:51 I like the I think it’s easy, pretty easy for people to track with and consume.

Let’s go see what this timeline does on on mobile. Okay, all right. 15

0:23:03 All right. 1

0:23:04 Are these images too? Well, let’s check

12 0:23:17 Yep, yep

1 0:23:19 Gosh Designers been hard at work.

Okay our team Okay, Oh 5 0:23:25

Up here John Those are okay. Well, I 1

0:23:29 Don’t know. I don’t know what I think about this.

I’ve never really seen something like this before. 5 0:23:40

Don’t know. 1 0:23:41

Is this man, like the first thing in my mind is like, is this manually managed? Like imagine that Steve leaves, you know, he retires. Look at this fine, fine old man, right?

He’s like, I’m done, I’m done in this, I’m retiring. And we have to go remove Steve from the site. Does his name get removed from here automatically or does somebody have to remember to do that?

Does somebody have to remember that that’s there? And if Steve is mentioned somewhere else, you know, this is what we have to think of. This is what I mean when I say maintainability, by the way, right?

This would be like content maintainability. You want to get into a situation, because a very easy, like somebody, you know, let’s say this site’s a year old. Let’s say that somebody new comes on the team and they’re gonna be in charge of adding and removing people.

This is a situation where you’ve created a point of potential failure. If it’s not queried, like if this is query looped and that’s query looped, then fine. But if these aren’t query looped, I guarantee at some point somebody’s gonna get added here and not get added up here, or remove from here and not get removed from up here.

Like one of those two things is going to happen because that’s the kind of stuff that happens when it’s not like built in a fully maintainable fashion. And as agency owners and freelancers, we have to foresee that as a strong possibility and say, well, if we’re gonna do it like this, both those things have to be loops. And given that this is Elementor and it’s a pain in the ass to loop things in Elementor, I’d be surprised if it was looped.

It could be, it could be, but I’d be surprised. We can hear from them. I think the person’s here, right?

They can let us know. Did, was this looped? That’d be my question.

Was this looped? 5 0:25:32

Let’s see what chat’s up to. 1 0:25:33

Okay. Good, good, good. Look for the designer in the team.

Yes, don’t kill me. It’s manually managed, changing that in Bricks version. Good, good, good, good, good.

Okay. 5 0:25:49

All right. 1 0:25:50

I think we’re about done here. I think we’re about ready to wrap this up. I mean, we can look at things like SEO.

Probably should look at SEO. I’ve just already kind of saw, right, when I arrived, it says home, Keen Stage. So title tag nothing right.

Let’s look at general heading structure here. This is web design for Domies. We do like to go into the Dom here.

Now it’s an element or Dom which means that this is basically like where’s fucking Waldo but you know we can try. Is there an H1 in here anywhere? And in fact, this may be where we go into, where’s my little guy?

See, you guys got me having to move this screen all, oh, here he is. Okay. All right.

5 0:26:45 Yeah.

1 0:26:48 Is this the, that’s an H2.

That’s an h2. And these are. .

. Oh god, good luck finding these. Those aren’t even headings, it doesn’t look like.

I don’t, I’m not convinced this page has an h1 on it. Okay, so we need a title tag, we need an h1 tag, we need a lot of stuff. What are these?

5 0:27:12 H3s?

1 0:27:14 But there’s really no sections going on here.

5 0:27:15 Are there?

1 0:27:16 Here’s a section.

How many sections do we have? Oh, dear. Oh, dear.

9 0:27:21 Oh, dear.

1 0:27:21 There’s sections and sections and sections and sections.

We’ve got section inception. Okay, here’s a section. Here’s a.

. . Oh, no.

See this kind of a problem here Here’s a section that is an event Here’s another event. That’s it’s its own section, right? So instead of there being an events section with events in it, there’s just every events its own section and so we see I mean this is going to be Now and I this must have been done Purposefully because I Elementor doesn’t have a section element so you have to manually change the section tags so I would say let’s get some explanation going on going on here yeah where’s where’s the Kevin Hart audio on where am I there we go there we go I haven’t used that in a while okay Okay, look at this, look at this, you know, we talk about like spiders, things crawling the page, Google crawling the page, trying to make sense of what’s going on here, screen readers trying to make sense of what’s going on here, got 8,000 sections, sections inside sections, no H1 tag, H2s, H3s that can’t be H3s because they have no H2s above them and Okay, I’m glad this is being rebuilt in Bricks because this is going to get so much cleaner, so much nicer, so much more maintainable, so much more accessible.

A lot of stuff is going to improve here by swapping this over to Bricks. And this is like guys, this is, you know, when I criticize Elementor, it’s like, this is what you typically see when you look at an Elementor site. 14

0:29:14 It’s just that’s what you typically see. 1

0:29:14 It’s a mess. It’s a mess.

Can you make a messy site with bricks? A hundred percent. You absolutely you can, right?

It’s a lot harder to, you gotta like kind of mess it on purpose, but you know, so it’s not saying that like, and can you make a cleaner site in Elementor? Yeah, you can make a cleaner site in Elementor, but they don’t encourage it, right? Elementor doesn’t encourage a proper workflow.

They encourage an improper workflow. That’s why I am critical of the tool. So when people make the argument that like, well, you can still make it cleaner in elements, you can make it cleaner, you can’t make it great.

It’s still going to be messy no matter what, because you can’t fix the deception. But you can make it, you could make it better than this. But my criticism is not that it’s not possible, right?

My criticism is they encourage people to do it wrong. They encourage people to not care about any of this stuff. They don’t give you a lot of the control.

It’s just, yeah, I mean, you guys have heard the arguments, right? So it’s got to get the story straight. The critics, the critics, they never seem to be able to get the story straight.

All right. I think, so SEO, a lot to work on. When you rebuild this in bricks, like cross the T’s dot the I’s let’s get some title tags going let’s get some meta descriptions going let’s get really descriptive h1s on the page let’s get the heading hierarchy cleaned up in general we go to events events keen stage you know there’s nothing about I didn’t even know where this place was located until I went down to where were like about or something and I saw a map somewhere I don’t remember where I was.

But like we need some localization. All right, so finally here’s an address down here. But we need like, you know, this events page right here.

There’s so much SEO potential that’s just being skipped here. And then you go to info here, okay, and it’s just once on this island. Now if somebody’s searching for this event by name, that’s one thing, but if it’s a kind of event that they might be searching for, I would like to see maybe some categories of events here because in e-commerce, in events land, let’s go to eventbrite.

com. This is a little side tangent SEO lesson here. here in this is e-commerce and event land category pages are money category pages are money we’re in like a service-based business it’s typically like your home page your location pages and your service pages there’s not really category pages that often in like service business land but in e-com land and event land category pages are money.

Why? Because people don’t always search for events by name right? They search for a kind of event that they want to go to.

They might search for musicals so you need a musicals category page in order to rank for the thing that the people are searching for to try to find the events that you offer. If I am looking for comedy shows, I’m not going to type in the name of a comedian unless I just want to find that comedian and see where he’s going to be or she is going to be, which is you need to cover that base too and you’ll obviously cover that base because they’re going to have a page for their event. But more often than not what people do is they say you know what we want to go to a comedy show.

So they look up comedy shows. That’s a category of event. If you don’t have a comedy shows category page, you ain’t coming up, right?

So your only hope, if you don’t have a category page, is for people to search for comedians by name and then you’ll come up potentially. But you really wanna get everybody that’s looking for that category of event, you need a category page to do that. As you see on Eventbrite right here, there’s music, there’s nightlife, there’s performing arts, holiday events, there’s health events, hobbies events, but they’ve got it all categorized out, okay?

Then they do it by location. So they do it by name of event, by category of event, by location of event. You can search for time of event.

Look, you can even choose what you prefer and create an account. I don’t like that workflow, but you get the point. Okay, so hey, let’s add some category pages here and get those get those up and running all right there’s a great way to build the categories into the blog post page using conditions and bricks oh by the way let’s just bring this up right now perfect example what did I just say if you want to rank for categories of events you need a category page well go back to event right here.

Let me just make a point that I constantly make. You know, you know what you need to do this right here. You need a query loop that’s possible, that gives you the possibility of querying taxonomies.

Something oxygen doesn’t do, something I don’t think Elementor does, something I don’t, I don’t think most query loops allow you to query taxonomies, but Bricks does, but Bricks does, right? When I brought this up in Gutenberg land, I was like, this Gutenberg query loop block is useless. Why?

They had all these other builders to learn from and they decided, no, it’s only gonna query basically like blog posts or, you know, things from a CPT as well. And then when I brought it up, you know what they even said? They were like, I don’t know why a user would need to do that.

That’s what I was told. It happens every day, you need to be able to do this stuff. Querying taxonomies is like a standard thing.

Querying users, another standard thing that should be easily doable. And most page builders do not give you the power to do it. Bricks does.

So if you want another reason why why bricks is superior 5 0:35:16

and 1 0:35:17

By the way, if I’m you know, if that’s inaccurate with regard to elementary, let me know I’m not I don’t I I avoid elements or as much as I possibly can But I have looked at it and I’m pretty sure I logged it in my mind Oh that query loop doesn’t let you query taxonomies or users But yeah, let me know. Would Grid Builder work for querying taxonomies? Yes, yes.

Before Oxygen, well, even in Oxygen land, yeah, you would need to use Grid Builder to do something like that. Which is, it sucks, because it’s like now you’re having to use a third-party tool to do something the page builder should have done for you in the first place. Yeah.

And some people will be like, you can do it, you just gotta write custom PHP. Okay, that’s not the page builder doing it. I can just do that anyway.

What do I need a page builder for? If that’s my workflow now. But Bricks makes it so easy, that’s the point.

Like, it’s literally like two clicks and it’s done. And that makes a huge difference to workflow, to everything. Okay, I think we’re done here, we’ve done enough.

Let’s close that up. Let’s close this up. Okay.

Hopefully the filters and facets that Bricks is working on will replace the need for Grid Builder. It’s possible. It’s possible.

I don’t know. I don’t have high confidence because I think it’s going to be kind of like their forms implementation. It’s like the surface level, like bare bones.

This is what we give you, but if you want more, you got to go somewhere else kind of thing So we’ll see All right. What we need to do is go on to our second site. How are we doing on time here?

Okay, good Good good good. I want to leave time for the other video and I want to leave time for Q&A This is Simon’s site This is the one I said, we’re gonna workshop together. I need your input.

I need your feedback I need your thoughts and ideas and feelings I’ll go over a couple little things this is I think I don’t know Simon could correct me if I’m wrong we could consider this already as like version 2 so you know he when he first we did the consulting call there was a version 1 of what was going on on this site and this is kind of after some of those changes but you know on our second call I was basically like still needs still needs a lot more you know change and adjustment so and I want to workshop it so I came up with the idea let’s do this on WDD live and he was like cool let’s do it so here we are. Okay one thing that I one thing that I mentioned is you know to have the name of the company with the logo up here. I think we still need to get that done.

Moving this, just general UI stuff, moving this content higher on the page. There’s a bit of a empty space here. Can I get a, where are we?

Annotate screen, here we go. Okay. No, I don’t want that.

I want the square. Give me the square. Okay.

Yeah. You guys see like a big, just kind of like white space going on right here. Um, we’ll go over, this is going to be mainly a copy review.

That’s why I’m just getting a couple of the UI things out of the way. First, uh, I do like Simon. I like the border on the video now.

See before he didn’t have a border on this video and the video player literally blended right into the background. And I was like, I didn’t even, my brain didn’t even register that there was a video there. So I kind of like the orange border now, it helps that stand out.

I would probably go, now that I’m looking at this again, you know, probably black and white and slightly low opacity on these. I don’t think they need to be full color. There’s kind of a lot going on here.

The dirt doesn’t really match the other scheme of the site. So I’d probably just make all those white and even maybe drop their opacity just a little bit. We talked about changing the thumbnails on these videos because they’re all the same and it’s just not super fantastic, but he mentioned there’s an issue with GDPR and pulling those in because they’re dynamically pulled from the video.

I don’t know. There’s a bunch of technical stuff. I’m not in the EU.

I don’t have to deal with most of that stuff, but That was basically decided that there were some limitations there It needs another article here, which he’s going to be adding very soon again changing thumbnails up here as well so some general UI stuff to clean up, but mainly wanted to talk about copy here and I think somebody else said let’s let me just read this and then you guys tell me what Simon does okay what does Simon’s company do a new era in digital solutions specialized client-centric digital solutions I think you guys know what I’m gonna say about this web nestify stands out from typical managed hosting or service providers unlike standard subscription services or products web nestify acts as a dedicated partner to your agency. Our team at WebNestify believes in building personalized partnerships. We offer bespoke services that align closely with your goals.

I don’t know that that should be purple. It feels like it should be clickable, but it’s not clickable. It’s like tricking me.

It’s like, hey, maybe I’m a link, maybe I’m not a link. Why don’t you touch me and find out. WebNestify is not just a service, it’s your strategic digital partner.

Then we have apply for exclusive access, read, web, nestify, manifesto. Partner not just provider, client-centric approach, commitment to building relationships, tailored digital solutions, 24-7 dedicated support. Okay, David asks, is too much fluff in the sentences.

Mark says, gotta say hosting in the H1. Remove solution, solutions is a bad word. Would put video in its own space.

I’m looking mostly, mostly now we’re going to talk about copy. Let’s see. Okay.

Ninth graders don’t know what bespoke means. Okay. 5

0:41:33 All right. 1

0:41:34 So, one of the challenges, I’ll give you guys a little context and background info. You’re already hitting on some very good things.

Context and background info. One of the things we talked about in the consulting call was that this is a very challenging thing to market because he does a lot. He does a lot for a lot of people.

It’s not a tightly focused, it’s getting more tightly focused. I want him to focus it tighter, right? But it’s not quite tight enough.

So there’s a lot of different kinds of services to talk about. There’s a lot of different kinds of people to talk to. And any time that is the case, it’s going to be very hard to market that thing.

Specifically because it’s hard to talk about it. There’s too many things to talk about and too many people to talk to. And if you have a section like this, the main section on your website, you can’t possibly accomplish that task.

So you have to choose what task you’re going to try to accomplish and go after that. And then certain people are going to get left out, and certain concepts are going to get left out. So that’s the first big challenge.

The second big challenge is there are a lot of preconceived notions in the industry that he’s building these services in. So for example, I want to highlight, Mark said, got to say hosting in the H1. Typically, this would be a good suggestion, right?

The problem is he’s not a hosting company. He’s not a traditional hosting company. And one of the main points that I made to Simon in the call was, you are not a service, you are not a company like these other hosting companies.

He was using the term managed hosting. So now I’ll reveal what was there before that’s now not there, right? Managed hosting, I think, was one of the key terms that was there.

And so I said, look, when somebody hears the term managed hosting, I mean, they might think in their mind right away, flywheel or WP Engine or something like that. And you’re not them, you’re not those people. And you do more than those people do, you actually do a lot more than managed hosting providers do.

So if you call yourself managed hosting, you’re putting yourself in that bucket with those people and they’re gonna think that you’re just like them and you don’t want people to think that. You can’t, in fact you can’t succeed if people think that, in my opinion, because they’re just going to write you off. Why would I go with Simon when I can go with WP Engine if they’re the same thing?

Why wouldn’t I just go with massive infrastructure, lots of support, lots of uptime, security, and by the way he’s an expert in security, right? But why would I go with WP Engine over him? Well, if I just think he’s managed hosting and they’re all the same thing, I feel more secure with a giant company running all of this than a guy named Simon, right?

This is a big hurdle that he has to work to overcome. And as he grows, it’ll be more than Simon, but right now it’s just Simon. But Simon does a lot for you.

There’s a lot of reasons to go with Simon over WP Engine. But we just, nobody’s gonna know that if you call it managed hosting. Because they’re gonna lump you in with this other thing over here.

So what do we need to do to make this clear distinction? So that people are like, oh, okay. I know that there’s some downsides to going with a guy named Simon.

But now I’m seeing there’s tremendous upside in going with a guy named Simon over something like a flywheel or WP Engine or whatnot. That’s what we have to control. That’s the narrative that we have to control.

So one of the suggestions, he had pricing on here. He had pricing grids, pricing tables. And one of the arguments that I made was like, look, nobody’s coming to Simon’s site to just sign up for a hosting plan, or a whatever plan, whatever you wanna call it plan.

That’s something they do on WP Engine, or Flywheel, because they’re going off brand recognition, they’re going off massive infrastructure, massive support teams. People just know, hey, if I sign up, this is gonna go well, because millions of people sign up for it. Millions of people have a good experience, I’m gonna have a good experience.

But when it’s Simon, the idea that somebody’s just gonna go pick a plan and sign up, like, what happens next? That is very low percentage, in my estimation. Like, I just don’t see that happening a lot or enough for it to be effective.

So I said, remove the plans. Remove all the pricing, remove all the plans. And what I said is, we need two things.

We need a manifesto that explains to them, okay, what is the fundamental difference between Simon and all these other people, okay? Outline that in a manifesto. And then two, make it exclusive.

Okay, the number one criticism that you’re going to get is you’re just Simon, and you don’t have a huge team to serve all these people. How could you possibly let people just randomly sign up for this kind of stuff on the website when it’s just you? And so I said, hey, just embrace that.

Embrace that and say, you know what, actually, you’re right. We don’t. We don’t just let anybody sign up.

We only take specific kinds of people. Because the thing with WP Engine and the Flywheels and all this and that, they’re not going to provide you the level of service that we provide. They’re not going to provide you the level of consulting that we provide.

And they’re not going to be hands-on with you as a client. You’re just a number with them and you’re just put into their their little you know database with their pre-determined tools that one size fits all and if you don’t need something you can kind of chirp to support but you’re probably not going to get it and you know they’re not going to help you tailor these things to each client that you’re working with. See these are the benefits of working with Simon right?

But it’s very hard to you know put that on a pricing table like so just get rid of the pricing table and say you know what we we you’re right we only work with a select number of perfect fit agencies and freelancers and so what you have to do instead of just signing up to a pricing table is you have to apply for access to become a partner because that’s what we are really doing here we’re partnering with agencies and freelancers and these are the things that we can do for you and your clients when you partner with us and these are the things that you’re not going to get. This is much easier explained on a sales call, right? After somebody’s applied for access.

Now we’re going to work to do our best to explain this in other various places of the website, but this is kind of the gist. This is like the direction I was suggesting that this go in versus say, I’m a managed host, here’s our pricing tables, go ahead and sign up. I didn’t think that was gonna fly.

That was not gonna work. So that’s where we are right now. That was all on the first call.

So the first call was, that’s the direction that we discussed going in. So now the second call is really this one. We’re doing it right now.

And it’s figuring out how to word more of this. And so one thing I did say, for those of you who hit on the word solutions, right? And I’ve done this, I’ve said this in videos in the past on WDD and everything else.

I am like starkly opposed to the word solutions. I think it’s a very lazy word. I think it says nothing.

It could mean anything. And it’s overused. People see it everywhere.

So, but I asked Simon, I was like, what other word do these things fit into? They’re not solutions. What are they?

How can we describe them better? And he came back to that. He’s like, well, they just literally are solutions.

That’s literally what they are. But I’m standing firm that we’ve got to get rid of this word as much as we possibly can and we have to come up with just another headline has to be here. We’ve got to get that impactful headline that somebody knows exactly that they’re in the right spot, they’re interested, they’re intrigued and they kind of know what they’re going to get.

This doesn’t get the job done but we’re brainstorming here. So start throwing out words, start throwing out terms. I think we already got a gist of what people think about the word solutions, about, tell me what you think about managed hosting, right?

Was I correct? Like, would you lump them in with those kind of offerings when you hear the term managed hosting or the phrase managed hosting? Start dropping stuff in the chat.

Just general, I don’t care if it’s random thoughts. Just drop random thoughts. We’ll use that to spur conversation.

How about the word bespoke hosting solution? See, to me that’s exactly the same. It’s kind of that fluffy, it’s very fluffy, abstract, bespoke.

A lot of people don’t, it’s not even a simple word. It’s not an easy word to say. It’s, I’m not, I would toss that one.

So Mark says, is WebNestify similar to GridPane? For example, a platform of services that sits atop a server that you provision elsewhere? Well, I’ll answer what I think.

Here’s the thing, this is so, the offering is so complicated, I’ll be honest with you, I don’t even exactly know, right? I don’t even exactly know. That’s why we’re here.

That’s why we’re here. We’ve got to figure this out for Simon, right? It can’t be, if I’m struggling still to really understand what the offering is Obviously there’s a problem right so that’s why we’re here So let’s Simon.

I would say no. It’s not like grid pain I feel like grid pain is very like me as the agency owner freelancer is very hands-on in grid pain To me the benefit of a Simon would almost be like I just tell Simon Hey, I need to spin up another site for XYZ client. Here’s their needs.

Here’s what you know he determines the server he determines the he maybe does it all for me I don’t know Simon needs to chime in here and and and let us know 5 0:51:44

Okay 1 0:51:46

Security is the biggest concern for me with hosting as much as I’m sure Simon is great the fact that it’s one person is a Huge risk concern yeah, so we’ve got to find ways to overcome that oh He has a team in the US and AU. So that’s good. This is good.

Oh, the other thing I’ll mention, let’s go to about, let’s see if he did it yet. Okay, yeah, I said right here, right? If it’s you or a small team, we need to see your faces.

We need to learn more about you because you don’t have the benefit of getting trust like WP Engine does. I just know the size of WP Engine and Flywheel. They got a gazillion people, you know.

So I don’t necessarily need to see all their faces, but if it’s a small company, now I got to know. Now I got to know who is it? Who is it?

So like an abstract photo like this and just hey here’s about us with an address is ain’t gonna get the job done in terms of know, like, trust. It’s KLT baby, all day, KLT. It’s know, do they know you?

Do they like you? Do they trust you? And there’s nothing here for them to know.

There’s nothing here for them to like and there’s nothing here for them to trust. So this page right here needs a lot of KLT. 5

0:53:04 Okay, let’s see what the chat’s saying. 1

0:53:06 Personalized web security and infrastructure, that’s a really hard one because it needs to encompass a lot. Yeah, see?

See? And you can’t lead with security because I don’t think most people are all that interested. Like security, I think I told Simon this on the call.

Or these are just thoughts I think in my own head before a call and after a call. I can’t remember if it was said, not said, whatever. But to me, security is like insurance.

People know they need it, but they’re not fucking super excited about it. Nobody’s like, God, let me go get some security today, I can’t wait. It’s not exciting to them.

A new hosting provider that makes their life, that can be more exciting to them. But again, it doesn’t encompass nearly as much as what’s actually offered here. But I think if you lead with security, you’re gonna bore the shit out of people.

That’s my initial estimation. So our copy can’t be super focused on that. That’s why this is challenging.

11 0:54:08 How about relating his value service

1 0:54:10 to what we associate with other non-technical services, such as concierge for hospitality industry, also emphasizes his advantage to other competitors.

Yeah, I mean, but what does that look like, Scott? Like give me an example of what that looks like. 5

0:54:32 Let’s see. 1

0:54:33 This is why I use WordPress for all my hosting needs. Thank you, Gutenberg Rob, for being here today.

I have a feeling that this is, that Bev and Rob are on the same team here. 5 0:54:51

All the good stuff is in the manifesto. 1 0:54:53

Okay, let’s read the manifesto. I don’t remember what the manifesto says. I said, hey, you need a manifesto.

13 0:54:58 I don’t remember what it said.

1 0:54:59 So let’s go and look.

The market is saturated with hosting companies claiming to be the best or the fastest. How often did you receive a generic canned response? You could say, do you receive?

How often do you receive a generic canned response when contacting support? Did they solve, oh, put this in a bullet list, please. So it’s more scannable and easy to read.

Did they solve your issues or just persuade to upgrade to more expensive packages? Are you experiencing a lack of personalized attention and understanding of your agency’s unique needs? How much valuable time did you lose while searching for answers?

And you still getting the same answers everywhere. Let’s face it, you’re often, okay, I think he’s changed this since I read it the first time. So this is starting to get more improvement and more substance to it.

Let’s face it, you’re often reduced to just a number, your unique issues overlooked your need for tailored solutions ignored. Instead, you’re just funneled into a cycle of upselling where the only solution is a pricier service package, leave your actual problems unaddressed. Okay, so this is where we’re, we, you know, we talked about the core like problem agitate solution.

One thing I remember saying was you’re not agitating enough. Like you’ve, you, you did present the problem a little bit, but there was no agitation. You didn’t like drive the nail into their chest, you know, like that’s really what you want to do with the copy.

And it’s, he’s starting to do it here. Uh, where he’s giving specific examples of like, did this happen to you? Did this happen to you?

Has this happened to you that you’re driving that fucking dagger in their chest. Like, God, yeah, that’s that hurts. That’s been hurting.

That’s been hurting. You’re right. And now like you more you do that, the more they’re ready for the let’s use the word solution, the S word, which we got to we still got to get rid of.

We still got to. But so he’s starting to do a better job here of like driving that dagger in. Right.

OK. You deserve more. We recognize this industry shortfall and refuse to be a part of it.

We reject one-size-fits-all approach. We believe in solving not selling. With WebNestify you’re not a number you’re a value partner.

Okay so this is yeah I think this is starting to connect I would think you can let me know in chat if this connects with you more than what you read on the home page. Okay and I’m actually now now that I’m reading, I mean, you could go very non-traditional with this, just put the manifesto on the homepage. I don’t even know that everything that’s on the homepage needs to, it’s almost like sell them the manifesto and get them to opt in to that idea.

And then we’ll tell them what it actually looks like, what it actually feels like. You know, maybe this traditional homepage approach is just not, you’re not gonna, I think you’re gonna lose them before you have a chance to get them, would be my maybe initial reaction. I mean, this could be a solution where, the fucking word solution, dog, it’s in my brain.

This could be a situation where we just go non-traditional. I mean, you just put the, just serve on the manifesto right when they arrive. Then you can get into more details.

Could work. 5 0:58:14

Could be something to test at minimum. 1 0:58:18

I put a video to go with it too. 5 0:58:22

You know, like I explain like, 1 0:58:23

well, there’s two things. I mean, you’ve seen this with like automatic CSS. I mean, we’ll get two examples, right?

5 0:58:29 Of how this is being deployed.

1 0:58:30 You go to about, right?

So, you know, I did a video here and this video kind of talks about these principles right here. I did this for another client you know we I was writing copy for a client I don’t know if I can oh man I’m gonna have to hold on let me let me I don’t want to accidentally share something because I also had some three oh see I was about to do it y’all were about to yeah okay good I’m not sharing y’all were about to get a little 3. 0 sneak peek.

See I opened Figma and I knew I was like oh what what screen was up on Figma last I think it’s 3. 0 y’all almost got a little sneak peek. Y’all almost got but you can’t you can’t get one past me dog.

Okay let’s go back to here. Okay let’s get this off the screen until just to make sure. Alright let me see if I can find this client right here.

I’ll just go Do I say their company name? Okay. I don’t know if I want it.

Let me just quickly get this. 12 0:59:49

This. I can bring the image on the screen. 1

0:59:52 I know you guys can’t see what I’m doing. That’s the point.

Just hang tight. So we’ll just get this out of here. I’m just quickly mocking this up.

Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, let’s, there’s another reference to their name.

Okay, okay. Okay, there’s another reference. Let me get rid of that.

Okay, okay. Learn more about, okay. All right, let’s save that.

I think I can just bring this onto the screen as a screenshot. We’ll just give another example here, okay? Can I open this All right, you guys might be able to see this Yeah, I can make it nice and big okay So this was like right under the hero on the on the home page man, you know what this is like so stupid like I Blurred it out.

It’s like you literally still fucking read it. Why? Why is that a thing?

Okay, let me do this one more time. Let me do this with a stronger blur. All right, there we go.

Okay, can’t see it now. Let’s go here, get rid of that. Get rid of this.

Get rid of this. Let’s just do this in real time. This is fun, isn’t it?

I think that’s the only reference servers you get. Okay. Okay.

Okay. I think that’s the only reference. All right save Alright, let’s try that one more time And I need to make sure that I’m screen sharing too Okay now now I don’t think you can Okay, good, all right, let’s go to e-cam.

Here we go. Okay, all right, so you’re trying, again, we go back to the manifesto thing. This is all about like, if you let people, every company can be lumped in with every other company.

If you let people do that, that’s what their brain is normally gonna do. In fact, the brain does that because it’s efficient. It’s efficient.

It’s efficient to just be like, oh, this is the type of company they are. They’re like every other company. So you have to purposefully find a narrative where it’s like, and it just really helps when you can actually just tell the truth about your company.

Like Simon is able to just tell the truth about his company. Automatic CSS. I’m actually just just tell the truth about automatic.

It was born out of a different philosophy. So it’s not like you’re having to make up a narrative. You’re just responsible for telling the narrative, for just communicating the narrative, right?

And knowing that that’s important. So here’s a crane company, right? I sat in their office and we talked about how they’re a different crane company than other crane rental companies, alright?

So the first thing that I said on the homepage right under the heroes section is you don’t actually want to rent a crane. Now that’s a very odd thing for a crane rental company to say. So let’s talk about what that actually means.

You don’t actually want to rent a crane. What you want is a team with the experience and expertise to take care of specific construction challenges for you. And a crane just happens to be the answer to those challenges.

Because there’s so much, like they don’t actually want a crane. They want the operator, they want the logistics, they want to know what kind of crane, they want to know about all the safety shit that comes with it. They have this problem, and it requires, like think about you have to get a pool into your backyard, right?

You need to rent a crane. But you don’t actually give a fuck about the crane. You don’t want a crane.

You just need somebody to get that pool from there to here. And all the shit that has to happen to make that happen, they need to take care of it, not me. Not me, that’s why I’m hiring you, right?

So the idea that I would choose a crane rental company that’s just gonna like, here’s a crane for you, like, well, do I get an operator? Do I get safety? Do I, what do I get?

What do I get here? Well, it turns out this company does a lot, right? A lot more than other companies do.

So we have to make that point known. And I’m just telling the person right off the bat, just so they know, hey, I know you’re in the process of renting a crane. Let’s just make sure we’re both on the same page with the fact that you don’t actually want this crane, right?

You have a problem and the crane is the solution to that problem. Now here’s how we work, right? So we know that and here’s how we work.

So most crane rental companies just want to rent you a crane. We actually care about your project and the role that we play in helping you get it completed, that’s the fundamental difference that has a major influence on the level of service that you’re gonna get versus your average crane rental company, right? Okay, so it’s just we’re setting the stage.

Now they go to the learn more, they’re gonna get even more details beyond that. This is just a little blurb, right? But this is the kind of thing that you wanna think about, right?

We do that here, we do that with a video on digital gravy. You go to automatic CSS, about, manifesto, oh look, there’s a same concept, right? And so we have this whole manifesto about, no, no, no, this is how it’s normally done, this is how we do it, okay?

Clear distinction, we have core pillars, and the person just decides as they’re reading, they’re like, fuck, I buy into this, I can get on board with this. And if you get them on board with the mission, you get them on board with the fundamentals, like the key differences, like, oh, this is how things are done over here. This is how things are done over here.

Pick a side. Pick your team. And then that’s it.

If you don’t go through this process, it’s just, oh, this is like this. This is like everything. They’re all the same.

It’s important. You can’t let people come to that conclusion. And with Simon, oh my gosh, because this is so technical, and they hear these words all the time, solutions, digital solutions, digital solutions, cloud solutions, cloud solutions, manage hosting, manage hosting, manage hosting.

Brains can’t compute all this. They just go, oh, it’s all the same. It’s all the same to me.

I don’t know, it’s all the same. So you have to explicitly map it out. Okay, there’s these people over here, then there’s us.

See this giant gap? That giant gap is important. Now, here’s why you want to be with us and not with this other team.

And I just wrote the article, right? All right, so we go to the blog, right? Let’s go to automatic CSS blog.

This brings up a key point. Okay, let’s go to blog, let’s go here. What did I say?

Hey, if you let people lump you, they will lump you. So don’t let them, don’t let them. You write, here’s my thing.

And of course, there’s gonna be a percentage of people who can’t handle it. It’s a, oh, this is, I was called immoral for writing this. I was attacked like over and over again, just personal attack, personal attack for right.

Guys, I’m doing, this is my job. I have to do this. Any good company does this.

They have to do this. Because if you believe in something, you have to put that out into the world. Like if you believe this is the best solution, if you have designed it to have a fundamental difference from what’s available, you have a duty.

A duty to explain what that fundamental difference is. And in this case differences many many fundamental differences because once again people don’t know from the outside they can’t just absorb this magically ok by looking at a home page of each site it’s just not there so you got to do this every business and I thought my bad my bad I thought in an industry of people who help other businesses market their services, this would be obvious. I didn’t expect that there’d be that many crybabies, like over like fundamental stuff, right?

So it’s like, how could you possibly help your clients if you think this, if you think the fundamentals of putting a stake in the ground and being like, this is what we believe in, this is how we do things differently, if you think that’s problematic, you can’t market jack shit for any of your clients. I guarantee it, guarantee it. So just get out of this industry.

You don’t even need to be in this industry at this point. Like, what are you doing here? 5

1:08:13 Okay, all right. 1

1:08:14 Well, that turned into a little rant, didn’t it? All right, so we’re back with WebNestify.

We need to go to chat. 5 1:08:19

What do you guys think about leading? 1 1:08:20

I don’t know, that would be a little bit bold, but maybe it would work lead with the manifesto on the home page I don’t know Let’s go here 5 1:08:32

What if web nest if I 1 1:08:34

Shoot chose five major services and created a scroll within five sections describing what those solutions are then build from there Yeah, you could definitely I think If we were gonna do a would you call it like a services page. He kind of did that a little bit here. Secure workspaces feature.

But I went here and I was like, I just don’t know what any of this means. So it doesn’t really connect, right? But my concern is, let’s say he leads with, like, let’s say there’s hosting and then there’s security and then there’s this, in my eyes, if they haven’t read the manifesto yet, if they don’t know the fundamental difference, the minute they see hosting, what’s their brain do?

Oh, it’s just another hosting company. And the minute they see security, I mean, they don’t know it’s Simon level security, they just think, oh, well, he says security because everybody says security. So it still doesn’t accomplish the task of like I am not like them.

That is nothing, I don’t think anything will happen on this website until people arrive at the conclusion that something different is going on here than every other managed hosting provider, digital solution provider that I’ve been to so far. 5 1:09:56

Okay, I’m gonna go down. 1 1:09:57

I was at the beginning of the chat, so I’m catching up here. 5 1:10:06

Maybe an interactive quiz element 1 1:10:08

to let prospects learn more about the in-depth services. I think that’s an interesting concept, is like, could we build something interactive, like almost letting the person bucket themselves, like what do you care most about? Do you care, and then giving them some of the options and leading them down a little rabbit hole based on the choice that they make, I don’t know.

There could be, that could be explored more for sure. See, hosting is definitely marketing talk for most hosts. Nothing personal or specific for what you actually get.

Totally get that, yeah, so huge problem. Fontsite seems to jump around a lot. Yes, I think that’s the case too.

Got to get a little bit more consistency in the UI. I hosted over 12 years with WP Engine and saw a complete shift in quality and services as they grew in size. Okay, good insight.

Yes, this is Simon’s site, Brendan. I think the problem is if you don’t understand what the service is you cannot communicate it to the customer. Well in this case it’s there’s too many things that would be considered services right.

So how do we how do we boil these all together. Yeah no hosting, no security, no managed terms. You can use these on the back end but it’s after the person has bought into the idea that you are different.

What about the H1 starting as a question, what if your web host was a business partner? I do really like question headlines. I think we could ask a more compelling question

5 1:11:48 than that almost.

1 1:11:49 We would need a, and this is where, you know, it’s I would write 20 of them.

And see, this is the hard part for me is like I want to just do that right now but I can’t but this is this and this is what the copywriter is supposed to do right you write 20 question headlines the best one you can come up with and then we try to narrow it down and maybe two headlines end up getting combined together and then maybe we even split test you know three different headlines that we think are winning headlines but we’re not sure which one really would work this is the kind of work that, you know, most people don’t put into a website, and most people don’t see. And what I’m describing to you right now, guys, is how you get projects from $5,000 to $25,000. This is a, you know, and obviously if it was a real client in the real world, it could even go up higher than that.

But this is the kind of stuff you should be doing with your with your clients. The idea that you know Simon comes to you. Let’s say Simon is your client now.

Simon comes to you and he’s like I need a I need a website for my digital solutions company and you’re like okay all right we can handle that for you. What kind of pages do you need? This is a typical process.

What kind of pages you know I need this page this page this page and this page and do you have content? Oh yeah, I can send you over some content, okay? And so he has given you what he needs, the specifications, the requirements for this site.

And he has submitted the content to you, which he got from a copywriter, okay? And if we had gone for like that first copy iteration that he showed me, and just built him a site that kind of looks like this and just shipped it off, guys, what would happen? What would happen?

This is what this is how the client agency interaction goes 95% of the time if I had to guess in this industry right? They just build two requirements and put up what they’re given and they check the box and they ship it out and then nothing happens. Why?

Because we haven’t really solved any problems here. We didn’t solve any of the problems with the copy. We didn’t solve any problems with the offer.

We didn’t solve any real, no real problem with SolveSphere, if that’s what we do. This is the hard part. The hard part is, okay, hold on, hold on, hold on.

You’ve got this company that it seems to be like all these other companies, but it’s quite different. How are we going to communicate that? What are actual words are we going to use?

What strategy are we going to go with? How are we going to package this offer up? This is the hard part that most agencies don’t do.

If you start doing this for your clients, this is where the money goes way, way, way, way up. This is how they see you as a consultant and not a pixel pusher. The idea that it’s like, no, no, no, like telling the client, hey, look, that headline you gave me, not great.

We need to write about 40 of those, and then we need to figure out which one we want to go with and we need to write them in different styles and we need to write and we need to have different here’s three different paths we could go down with our strategy. And now suddenly the client because guys clients can’t, I mean it’s notorious right? Look at all the cleaning companies that we looked at in that one WDD.

They don’t know how to sell their own services. They don’t know how to, they don’t know what to call things. They don’t know how to word things.

They don’t know, you get you get copy from the client you’re like that website toast ok so this is the hard part and you see why it’s hard but this is why it’s it’s you know anything that’s this difficult tends to come with more money more value ok what do you guys think about the testimonial video interviews people explaining how the service help them I think that’s important I think we can’t he has I think he’s already got a couple but and I want to see real people’s faces and such, but I think that went back to something with 5 1:15:45

the EU. All right, let’s see. 1

1:15:49 Okay. Yeah, people like the manifesto copy a lot.

Kevin, I was just about to suggest that his website needs to be the manifesto or almost a sales letter. Yeah, I think so too. I’m more inclined to go that direction at this point.

Because there’s too many problems here to solve. And guess, somebody calls it Russell Brunson, right? He calls it the domino.

There’s the what is the one domino that when you knock it down and knocks all the other dominoes down. In my mind, the one domino is the manifesto. That gets people immediately thinking down a different track and open to what has to be said.

And so that domino knocks all the other dominoes down. So I think this domino needs to be the homepage. Now as you grow and start to gain reputation and you build a brand that is known for it, now at that point, we don’t have to lead with the manifesto We can go back to a traditional website approach because the brand itself is known for the ideas behind the manifesto So we can make a shift away from this concept later, but in the early stage.

I think we just go straight up manifesto Okay, let’s see let’s go back to chat. And the idea that you lead with a manifesto when nobody else does, you’re trying to say you’re different. I mean, that’s pretty damn different.

All right, let’s see. Okay, some people are still on some UI stuff. So lead with a question H1, have a video directly underneath, then go to the sales letter copy.

I think I agree with this. Big bold question headline right here. Because what does a question headline do?

People are like, oh, they’re trying to answer it. And then it immediately engages them in the copy, right? Versus a statement.

And then you put a video between the headline and the start of the manifesto. There are people who prefer to watch a video than read. There’s people who prefer to read over watching a video.

If you have a video there, best of both worlds, okay? Kill two birds with one stone. Okay.

Why didn’t you forget to stop the share like you forget to start it? I didn’t forget to stop the share. I was just doing it on a different.

. . I didn’t stop the share because I didn’t want to remember to start it again.

5 1:18:38 Okay.

1 1:18:39 I’m just going through chat right here.

IT solutions consultancy or something. Now, I’m putting the kibosh on the word solutions. Like imagine if I had the copywriter, I would just tell him right off the bat.

The best copywriter wouldn’t use the word solutions, but I would just tell them, you’re not allowed to use the word solutions. You’re just not allowed. Don’t give me any copy with the word solutions in it.

You’re not allowed. 11 1:19:11

Okay. 1 1:19:12

Okay, yeah, focus on developing websites for clients, not managing servers, yep. Okay, okay, good, good, good. I met Simon from WebNestify and I’m a five star chump and understand a little of his expertise.

If I could afford him, I would use him. He also gives videos in the IC. 5

1:19:44 That’s the other thing, too. 1

1:19:45 I told Simon, I was like, blog posts, videos, start putting your beliefs around this stuff out into the world. Start building a new paradigm for how a company like this should be run and managed and what should it do for a client and all of that matters.

And then that’s all content that can be brought right back to the website. Um, very, very, very important. Case studies.

5 1:20:09 I think case studies would be, would be really good as well.

Um, 1 1:20:12

okay, let’s see. Simon has so much great content, there needs more personalization. Simon is the expert and must be featured.

That too, I think would be a really good thing, you know, like a nice photo to go with the manifesto, right? Do you have a discount for bulk hours of consultation calls? Unfortunately not, because it’s just the time is the time.

Like, I don’t, you know, it doesn’t help me spend less time. Like I just I have to say no to other things when I’m on call. So it’s just, it just is what it is.

The minute’s a minute. Instead of solution, maybe a new era in digital transformations. Yeah, I’d stay away from the word digital transformations though.

It’s just, it’s very, this is the challenge with copy. Like the thing that kills copy the most is what I call fluffy words, fluffy copy, right? Fluffy copy is the worst copy.

Every, like the default, most people’s brains, especially clients, fluffy descriptions of things. So it’s like digital transformation. It’s like, what does it mean?

It doesn’t mean it doesn’t, it doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t say anything. It’s a different term, but it doesn’t it still doesn’t communicate anything.

185 Wow, we are up to 185, wow, okay, this is fantastic. Growing and growing and growing. 5

1:22:06 Okay. 1

1:22:07 Okay, I guess we’ll, I feel like sometimes it’s unclear if the target is web agencies or general companies looking for good hosting provider too. Yeah, this is for agencies, that’s one thing I said, thank you for refreshing my memory.

That’s one thing I mentioned is, he’s got to call out agencies. Like if you want to target mainly agencies, which I think he does, you got to call them out right away. So they know exactly who you’re speaking to.

You know, they know, oh, I’m an agency. He’s talking about agencies. Oh, there’s a connection there, right?

If I think, cause he was saying, he was using the word companies. He was using the word businesses. And those are very like, man, who is that?

That’s like, seems like everybody. Just hammer home the word agencies so they know you’re talking directly to them. 5

1:22:57 Okay. All right, I think, so Simon, I think what you’ve gotten, what exact services are included?

1 1:23:02 I, you, Simon, and myself don’t know the full extent of what services are offered, yeah.

This is something that needs to be outlined, but it’s outlined after they’ve obviously bought in to the manifesto, kind of raised their hand, like yeah, I want to learn more. Now you can present these things, because you’re presenting them in a different light. You’re presenting them in a different context.

And that’s the important thing. So I think we’re going to move on, we’re going to go into our last segment here, because we do have a video that we need to watch. It’s only seven minutes long, but it’s an important video to discuss.

I think our big breakthrough that we had in this little session here is the manifesto is the domino that’s going to knock down the other dominoes. We want to be different. So we are going to be different.

We’re going to be boldly different. We’re going to take the manifesto. We’re going to make the manifesto the homepage.

We’re going to add a video to go with the manifesto. We’re gonna add Simon on the page as well so people can see Simon. We’re gonna have his team on the team page so that they can see there’s more people.

I think this is the direction we need to go. Simon’s gotta sell the, you don’t sell the services, Simon, for right now. You sell the manifesto.

You sell the ideas that are in the manifesto. And when people buy the ideas in the manifesto, then they’re gonna be open to buying the services and solutions. And you overcome the idea of like small company, greater risk with, hey, we don’t take everybody.

We’re not trying to serve everybody. We only take the best fit agencies. And that’s all we do is we do agencies right now.

We’re only taking the best fit, you know, so it’s not mom and pop shop down the streets coming to Simon for hosting. That’s not happening here. We serve agencies, only the right agencies.

You have to apply for access because I guarantee what you get from us is a completely different experience. And going back to hammering home, driving the stake in, pain, agitation, you gotta agitate, agitate, agitate. Because I guarantee, I guarantee most people have horror stories of I was with WP Engine and it turned into a shit show.

I was with Flywheel and I couldn’t do this and that and this and that and I was with XYZ and they didn’t care about me drive that stake right in okay over and over and over again until they’re like yeah we do need a new paradigm around around how this works for agency owners and you can give them that once they buy into that now they’re gonna listen to what you have to say anything else before that Oh hosting manage this man a digital solution digital transformation. No, you’re getting tuned out. You’re getting tuned out.

They don’t want to hear it. They want to imagine that, oh, you’re just like everybody else, but you’re a small company, so it’s too much risk to go with you. You’re out.

You’re not being selected at that point, okay? All right, good luck. Good luck, good luck, good luck, and keep us all posted.

We’re going to watch. We’re going to see this continue down its path and see where it goes. All right, let’s get into our last segment here.

So I am going to, I gotta pull this up first in a different window. So bear with me. We’re gonna be talking about this video concerns website standards.

Somebody sent this video to me and they said, I think this would be a good video. They wanted to have a discussion around this video in the inner circle. But I was like, let’s just do it on, I think it’s a good WDD live kind of thing.

I’m going through my email. I should have had it queued up, but I gotta go find it in my email real quick. 5

1:26:35 But I think that this is, 1

1:26:36 I think it’s a really good thing to go over, and it’s not super long. So it’s important, but it’s not super long.

All right, I found it. Let me pull it up on here. Go into the fold and turn website layouts.

10 1:26:50 I know you can’t see it right now.

Chill out, chill out. 1 1:26:53

Okay, let’s bring it over here. All right, and let me bring chat back up and we’ll make sure that we’re actually watching. We are.

Chat is good. Let me know how audio is once it starts playing, if there’s any issues. With Wix Studio.

5 1:27:14 Fucking Wix.

1 1:27:16 Get off my screen, Wix.

Okay. Let’s go down. Are we going to talk afterwards about awards type sites?

Yeah, a little bit in here. A little bit in here we will. 5

1:27:28 Okay, let’s go. 1

1:27:30 Foundation of Usability. 2

1:27:32 So where are we? This is the

1 1:27:34 Website Architect.

I just recently subscribed to this site, well after I was sent this video. So I’m like alright, sounds like, seems like good content here. So shout out to them, I don’t know anything about them.

But let’s go through this video. 2 1:27:51

They provide the familiarity everyone looks for when using a website. They are the reason you can Google armadillo costumes for sale, land on the first e-commerce website, add it to your cart, and get to the checkout nearly buying it when you realize it doesn’t have the features you want and then go back to Google, find a different website, and quickly add that product to your cart, and get to the cart without having to read the website’s car manual equivalent just for you to do so. 1

1:28:15 Web design standard. Is it still doubling the audio?

5 1:28:21 Hold on.

1 1:28:22 Okay, I switched channels.

2 1:28:25 Now let me know.

1 1:28:43 Okay, all right, last chance, last attempt.

Okay, if it’s not that bad, we’ll just roll with it. Let me see. Yeah, I did chat on there.

Okay, let’s see now. In this video, I hope to answer all those questions and more and try to get to the heart 2

1:29:09 of what makes the web easier to use. 1

1:29:16 It’s not coming through my mic at all because it’s not on my speakers. It’s in my, it’s in my headphones.

So the mic’s not picking any of it up. Um, let me see. 5

1:29:25 Hold on. Yeah, it’s not coming.

1 1:29:26 No, there’s no audio out here at all.

So, um, Do you have a link to video still echoing, but it’s bearable. 9 1:29:34

Okay. 1 1:29:34

Give a link to video still echoing, but it’s bearable. Okay Rob’s video when we did rob’s analysis that wasn’t echoing right? It’s all the same It’s all the same settings Let me see Some people are saying it’s not that bad.

So we’ll just probably roll with it because it’s not a long video um to pro chat main stereo Okay All right, let’s just go with it. I’ll mute the mic just in case. Our web standards, they are norms when referring to an aspect of the web or websites that help

2 1:30:06 make the web a more consistent experience for everyone.

We can’t talk about web standards without first talking about W3C or the World Wide Web Consortium. The web standards movement started in 1998, which is when I was born actually, to make the web more accessible, secure, and overall streamlined. They mostly cover areas like web accessibility, compatibility, backwards and forwards, privacy, and coding standards.

But when you’re designing a website, web design standards also exist that indicate how websites should be designed and are likely designed. This is what we’re going to focus on in this video, specifically web design standards. And quite frankly, all those other standards are.

. . 1

1:30:55 Let me say this, some of the echo is in the audio. Like I can, his mic was not fantastic here.

So, I don’t know if that’s what you guys are hearing. When you guys say echo, I feel like it’s like bad echo, but there is a little just native echo in his audio, because it’s not, the mic is not that good, the mic situation. 5

1:31:14 Or a helloword. 2

1:31:15 Here’s how Jacob Nielsen from the NN group breaks down some definitions when referring to web practices. Standard.

80% of more websites use the same design approach. Users strongly expect standard elements to work a certain way when they visit a new website because that’s how things always work. 1

1:31:31 So this goes to a question that we often get about frames. Some people criticize frames because they’re like, these are like, a lot of these are very standard layouts and they want super creative layouts.

And I’ve always explained to them, like the response to that is, there’s a problem with super creative layouts. You don’t like, we’re not trying to win awards. What we’re trying to do is build sites that work for our clients and that make a lot of money.

And the more you get into creative land, the more you actually get away from patterns and standards that users are used to and therefore the sites don’t work as well. And so he’s gonna go into a little bit more detail on this. 2

1:32:24 Convention. 50 to 79% of websites use the same design approach.

With a convention, users expect elements to work a certain way when they visit a new website because that’s how things usually work. And then confusion. With these elements, no single design approach dominates.

And even the most popular approach is used by at most 49% of websites. For such design elements, users don’t know what to expect when they visit a new site. This is important because you ideally want to design your website where users strongly expect how the elements of your design will work.

If not, to follow a convention that users can roughly expect how the elements of your design will work. The problem is when you design something in such a way that users are not used to. Because then you start adding layers of comprehension that the user won’t be expected to go through to use or understand your website.

To give you an example, imagine if I put the navigation menu on my website on the bottom. This immediately looks strange to you, and for good reason. This design decision would definitely be in the minority, causing confusion for users.

Because it’s a web design standard, meaning that 80% of more websites follow that the navigation is at the top of your website. Some more examples of web design standards, 80% of more websites follow, are a logo in the top left corner of the page, a search box on the home page, in the absence of splash pages, breadcrumbs listed horizontally, So these are areas where, 1

1:34:28 and I’ve been intently against these kinds of things, right, scrolljacking, like do not, do not remove scroll behavior from the user, like and start doing crazy shit with their scroll behavior. Don’t, like never, absolutely not.

I leave a site immediately when that happens. I don’t want anything to do with it, right? Like these are do not do, but these are the things that win awards.

These are the things that win design awards. This is where the disconnect is, right? We got to stop awarding this kind of thing.

5 1:35:00 Preloaders.

2 1:35:01 Smooth scrolling.

8 1:35:02 Smooth scrolling is another one.

2 1:35:03 Cause what are you doing?

1 1:35:04 You’re taking over my scroll behavior that I’m used to.

Don’t like it. Social icons in the header. This is one guys, your clients will ask for this all the time.

Okay. And this is where we have to step in as consultants and be like, not a good idea, not something we should be doing. And the idea to that, like, and I will make a distinction.

Okay. So whenever, whenever a video like this is like standards, best practices, people will come along and be like, but not always, like it’s, they always wanna save room for like a little outlier here or there. And it’s like, we know, we know it’s obvious there might be an outlier situation.

What we’re trying to communicate is the vast majority of time and principles of why the vast majority of time you shouldn’t do this. Ok we’re not saying by default that there’s never an outlier situation it’s just the vast majority of time this is the principle and here’s why. Ok now why don’t we want to put social links in the header.

Guys this is a navigation we’re trying to help them navigate on the website. The idea that we’re gonna, and by the way, the website is the central marketing hub for most businesses. You already won.

You got the user to the central marketing hub. The idea that you would then immediately try to send them somewhere else is mind boggling. This is just dumb from a marketing perspective.

You got them to where they’re supposed to be. Why are you obsessed with sending them somewhere else? Makes no sense whatsoever.

Now, you want an outlier situation? Outlier situation would be an Instagram influencer. Why is that an outlier situation?

Well, because maybe the central hub for what they do is designed around Instagram and the website is actually some sort of secondary thing to that. I don’t know I’m just dreaming up a scenario where maybe there’s an outlier where it would make sense to be like well we actually need to get as many people as possible over to Instagram because that’s where we do everything that’s where we do all our shit. Okay now now you’re making a case for it but Joe’s plumbing you think you think Joe is gonna sell more plumbing gigs by sending his traffic to Instagram?

No, no. 99% of businesses have no business sending people to their social profiles from their header of their website. You know when you should get people to join your social profiles?

If you’re obsessed with putting social profiles on your website, you know where you should put them? Perfect place for them. Perfect place for them on your thank you page.

You already converted them. Now get them on social. Okay.

You already did the thing that the website was designed to do. Now get them on social. Don’t send them to social before you got them to do the thing you were trying to get them to do.

That didn’t make any sense. Okay. Here we go.

Slideshows on home page. Slide shows on the homepage. Slide shows, there’s a call out.

Don’t, quit using these things. 4 1:38:32

And videos on the homepage. Disagree. 1

1:38:36 Okay, so there’s one we’re going to, but he talks about this in just a minute. 2

1:38:41 And this leads me to the next point. Breaking elements or design decisions of your website into categories of standard, convention, and confusion can be misleading.

Because it says here that a video on a homepage would lead to or be defined as confusion, which instinctively doesn’t make any sense. And if you really look at what this breakdown implies, it’s that your website’s design level of standardization is dependent on how popular your website design aligns with everyone else’s, which isn’t really helpful. 1

1:39:17 This is the part of the video where I didn’t really, I think the terms aren’t great. I think to me a standard is like a best practice.

Like we’re building to a standard, that’s the best practice. Those two words to me like kind of go hand in hand. So like trying to oppose those words like against each other doesn’t, I don’t think it’s a great way to communicate these concepts, but we can try to kind of see what he’s getting at here.

2 1:40:09 To some great best practices, but it definitely isn’t the only arbiter of how to design an effective website.

Here are some examples of how Orbit Media lists some web design standards and how they align with best practices. So we have 53% of websites have a search tool in there. This is a common place for it, but unnecessary on a small or well organized.

1 1:40:32 Yeah, I mean, logically speaking, like if you’re analyzing this from like a logical perspective, it’s like the standard says 50, the standard doesn’t say anything.

This is a stat. This is not, this is just a statistic. It’s not a standard communicating anything.

53 percent have a search tool in the header, probably because 53 percent of websites are like e-com or somewhere in that niche, in that situation where search in the header really, really, really makes a lot of sense. But clearly, it doesn’t make sense for a lot of websites. But this is not like, this is just a statistic that exists for a reason.

It’s not saying anything about like, it’s not like 53% of websites that don’t need a search in the header have a search in the header. Like that might be a, like, if you’re aligning that with like what’s the best practice say to do versus not do, that would make sense. But just putting a stat as the standard, that doesn’t, that’s kind of irrelevant.

So the question is just, you know, should you have a search in the header? And the answer is only if it makes sense, which is kind of obvious. So to me, this part of the video is just kind of like a waste of time.

2 1:41:41 The sites.

55% of websites have a contact button in the top right. Put it here and it will be easy for anyone to find. 1

1:41:50 Sienna, this, it feels like this kind of presentation, like it’s lacking on substance a little bit because it’s almost like obvious. But again, like, what is the contact button in the top right, by the way, is that literal contact button?

Or is that maybe a CTA in the top right? 5 1:42:06

How are they counting that? 1 1:42:07

But again, like, yeah, we’re a best practice is probably to put a contact slash call to action in the top right of the page. But we can say that without a stat. That feels very low to me, actually, like 55%.

What about the other 45, right? Like, they don’t, what do they have? I don’t, why, and why don’t they have one like that should best practice is pretty much like if you’re trying to convert people or get them to contact you in any way shape or form you should have a contact or CTA in the top right of the of the website 54% of websites value proposition above the fold that also seems astronomically low.

Astronomically low. Like that should be 99%. Can we think of an outlier where you don’t put a value proposition above the fold?

Like what would an outlier example be of that? 2 1:42:59

Implying that maybe you should have one too. Don’t be clever, don’t use the tagline, just be specific and descriptive. 1

1:43:06 See now this is like, I don’t know, the best practice box seems to be talking about a different thing than the standard box over here. I just, I don’t understand this like presentation style right here.

But again, 54% like you should always have a value. The person wants to know why they should care about the site that they’re on. I can’t think of a reason why they wouldn’t.

42% of websites 2 1:43:31

have a slider or slideshow. Some sites still do it despite tons of evidence and research against its ineffectiveness. 18% of websites have a video on a homepage.

Uncommon but effective. Why not upgrade the format for keynotes? 1

1:43:48 So see, the standard is like, this is just currently what’s happening, but that’s not really a standard. It’s just reality.

These words are tripping me up right here. Best practice is correct though. Like, yeah, it may be uncommon, but it can work really, really, really, really, really well.

And I think it’s, why is it uncommon? Let’s just ask that. It’s not uncommon because it doesn’t work.

It’s not uncommon, see, something can be uncommon because people have decided that it’s not a great thing to do. Therefore, few people do it, therefore it’s uncommon, but it can be uncommon for other reasons. In this case, it’s uncommon because video is hard to produce for a lot of people or expensive to produce.

So it’s uncommon because it’s easy to not do it. That’s why it’s uncommon. That doesn’t speak at all to its effectiveness or whether it should be there or not be there, right?

So this is kind of how these concepts have to be presented. If you follow the website standards and conventions, then that would 2

1:44:53 mean your website may end up probably having some vague value proposition as your H1. 1

1:44:59 So there’s another, a good example, right? We create remarkable and exciting digital adventures.

No fucking clue what that means. No, like it’s just, it’s, there is an epidemic of like people trying to be cute. Like quit trying to be cute and just tell people what you do.

It’s way more effective to just tell people exactly what you do. All this nebulous fluffy like feel good it’s just man if you’re not communicating you’re not saying anything. 2

1:45:30 Considering not having a call to action in the top right corner, considering using a slider, or not having a great video to convey a key message. And all that would go against best practices.

1 1:45:44 Mmm, I like this right here.

Put that up on the screen. Clever is the enemy of clarity. Did you make that up on your own?

Did you make that up? Pat on the back 2

1:45:57 for sweet upstairs. What the standards are saying.

So in the end, what does any standards where 80% of websites follow that design approach give us the best indication of. . .

1 1:46:09 Simon says, it’s hard to craft a heading that will attract.

Absolutely, it’s difficult. That’s why when you see one, you gotta be like, man, like that’s why like as a marketer, like I’m always, you know, when I’m out and about, I don’t care if I’m walking through the mall, you know, there’s banners in the mall hanging up. I’m looking at what the banners say.

I’m immediately going, man, I wonder why they wrote that. Man, they did a really good job there. That obviously connects, like rockstar headline right there.

Or I can just say, another fucking banner, doesn’t say anything. But if you train your brain to constantly analyze these things, you’ll start to see this all over life, and you’ll see how much it fails. Like more often than not, copy is not good, right?

So when you see good copy, it stands out to you and then instead of being like, oh, that’s good copy, I like that. Like analyze why it’s good copy, what made it so good? It starts to train your brain on how to think about this for your own work.

2 1:47:09 General rules we should follow with our designs and generally speaking not deviate from.

And then conventions and anything less common should be determined on a per design basis with the best user experience and best practices in mind. Thank you for watching. If you want to be a better web designer or developer.

. . 1

1:47:29 So one of the things that this answers is you know when people say why why are all frames like and I’ve tried to tell people I’m like look look at all websites. It’s what I do.

I go website to website to website to web Just looking at layouts why because I’m looking for patterns and that’s why I actually like this is you know A broken clock is right twice a day the Gutenberg team calls layouts in Gutenberg Patterns and they hit the nail on the head with that. Okay, I’ve got to give them props when they do something right. I think patterns is a great name for layouts, right?

Like frames, okay? Because that’s what they are. They, all layouts on the web are just patterns that you see over and over and over and over again.

There’s a pattern among the patterns, okay? Why is that? Some people will say, I hate that, it’s boring.

You know what users say? I love that because I can use every website. I know exactly what I’m supposed to do.

Now, you go to the awards, the all award sites, and you try to use those, and the general consensus that I have when I’m on an all award site is I don’t know what I’m supposed to do here. I don’t know why this website exists. I don’t know what they do, and I can’t even scroll around like normal.

My fucking cursor’s got shit all over it. I can’t, it’s going left, it’s going right, it’s going up, it’s going down, shit’s coming in and out. That’s a digital experience or adventure.

I don’t want to be on the adventure. Get me off the train, right? I just, get me to a website that actually communicates to me effectively, and I know where I need to go and what I need to do.

The awards are always given to the worst websites in terms of user experience. And I think that that trend needs to stop. I would rather them give awards to sites with phenomenal copy, just knock the copy out of the park, clean, solid UI design, good user experience.

Just show us real award winning like, damn, from a business perspective, this site just knocked it out of the park. That’s what I want to see. Does anybody know of any websites that do that?

Any award type websites that actually do that? That look at stuff that actually matters. Not like what’s the most creative, annoying animation that you could possibly come up with.

What’s the most annoying scroll jacking technique that you guys could implement on the next website? Let’s see the real award-winning websites. Like this made of more.

Let’s go there, made of more. What is this? Made of more.

com. 5 1:50:17

This will be another example. We could just literally go from, 1

1:50:20 sometimes we should not do critiques of sites that people submit and we should do you know just random sites and just look at like what’s what works here what doesn’t work here look at this site doesn’t even work at all doesn’t even load 95% of these sites are portfolio sites I think it totally justifies their styles I still don’t think so it’s like you’ve got to show your portfolio should be what you build for clients not like your most because I I don’t want to hire you to build that thing for me. You got to show, okay, this is not it.

This is not that site. Made of more. Oh, good.

It’s menopausal skin care. 7 1:51:01

Okay. 1 1:51:02

This is fun. All right. Midlife does not define us.

We are made of more. High performance, doctor led, clinically active skin care for hormonal skin from 40 and beyond. Okay, I think it’s a good example right here.

So we have a hero video, background video, which I think, you know, it’s like, it’s all the rage. They’re not good for performance, I don’t think. But in this case, it works because the content’s been thoughtfully placed at the bottom left.

So it actually allows us to watch the video. Like one of my biggest pet peeves is when everything’s covering up the video or the video is too dark so it’s just like there’s motion back there but like you can’t really hone in on what’s going on in the video. And I love this format of it’s a one-two punch okay.

Here’s your options you can go kind of nebulous emotional in the big headline as long as you have a very literal next sentence to tell me literally what is going on here, right? Or you can flip-flop it. You can go very literal and then you can go with like the emotional connection here.

It doesn’t work so well when you go emotion and emotion or like literal and literal unless the literal is just like really connects, like people connect with that just because it’s exactly what they want, you know? So midlife does not define us. I think to somebody that’s in their midlife, like a woman about to go through menopause, like whatever they think about that, I think this is probably a headline that does connect with them.

And then we are made of more and like this champion, like you’re the hero kind of vibe that this gives off. This kind of works, but here’s the thing. It doesn’t work without this sentence right here.

Because I can read it and I don’t know what the heck you’re talking about. It also helps by the way that I can see in the video exactly what the heck they’re doing. Like they’re using skincare products.

So all of this, like this to me, this hero is a good hero because it’s checking many important boxes. It’s got the emotional connection. It’s got the actual people that they built the products for.

The people are using the products in the video. It has the emotional headline, but then it’s got the very specific, oh, in case you’re confused we have doctor-led clinically active skin care for hormonal skin from 40 and beyond. I even like, see this is what I said, when you find a copy you got to analyze it, pick it apart, why is it good?

Why is it good? They could have said bad skin, they could have said skin blemishes, they could have said, no, what do they say? Hormonal skin.

Isn’t that somebody, that’s a term that people in this target market would connect with. You’re right, my skin is hormonal. It’s a good way to describe it.

It’s hormone, hormonal skin. It almost gives them a new way to describe their own problem to other people. Like you’re giving them tools now for their own communication.

You could just tell that thought was put into it, right? On how exactly are we going to connect with this target market. Which by the way, as a marketer, makes me want to continue scrolling around.

Made of more clarity, brilliance, salvation, resilience. Now we get into the confusion part, okay? Let me reload this.

5 1:54:35 Let me see what happens here.

7 1:54:36 Yeah, see, it’s scrolling on its own.

1 1:54:38 I’m not interacting with this, it’s doing this on its own.

I don’t like that. This is effectively like a slider situation going on here. So this is an area where the creativity is getting in the way of my experience.

That’s not a good thing and we have to avoid that at all costs. But you know what designers would do, people who love to pat themselves on the back, they’d go oh look how creative I was with this. I built the slider that nobody else has done before.

Nobody’s done this kind of slider yet. Look at that thing. Look at that thing.

Hey, can I get an award? Can I? Can I?

And to me, I’m like, dog, you failed. You fit your my mom will be confused as fuck right now. She would.

Why is this? Why is this screen? I’m not trying.

I was trying to read that. Where’s it going? That’s what my mom be doing right now.

Leave their mouse alone, leave their, they’re trying to read the first thing you put in front of them. You can’t take that thing away while they’re trying to read it. So perfect example right here.

It went from great to what are we doing? Are we trying to win awards or are we trying to sell these products? Because this kind of situation is not selling more products.

Somebody got to pat themselves on the back but it ain’t the sales department okay and that’s really what makes a business sales not awards okay. Alright we come down here we started with a clear mission to tackle and by the way this is where we separate copy from UI and UX and all this. The copywriter could be phenomenal what if you took phenomenal copy and hid it behind all this creativity, right?

You’re doing the copywriter disservice, man. They gave you everything you needed to sell this shit and you’re trying to put barriers up. Quit doing that.

Quit doing that. Alright, we started with a clear mission to tackle. .

. oh look at this. What do we have here guys?

A manifesto of sorts? To tackle the roller coaster ride of dermatological symptoms associated with fluctuating hormones. Are concentrated formulas containing unique complex combining hemp seed oil?

Am I, I got to go in a minute. I got a call in literally in four minutes. I got a call.

Are concentrated formulas containing unique complex combining hemp seed oil, antioxidant rich, anti-inflammatory blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Okay. I didn’t really say what I wanted it to say.

94% of women interviewed would benefit from brands being more inclusive to menopausal women. Okay, 97% of women interviewed 6

1:57:14 like to see older women in beauty imagery. 1

1:57:15 Okay, okay, okay. Okay, got their products.

And that’s, now it’s getting more towards like a typical e-comm experience. Nothing really exciting happening here. Another slider, look at this.

You think my mom knows how to use this thing? Not a fucking chance, not a fucking chance. Just give them a grid.

Just see, we always want to get, oh, it’s so creative, so creative, but you’re selling less shit. So what are you trying to do here? You trying to be creative, or are you trying to sell more stuff?

Here’s a grid, but look at this, oh, I don’t know, it’s kind of confusing, right? 5 1:57:53

Now we have a traditional layout. 1 1:57:55

Oh, see, I can breathe easy now. I’m like, oh, I know what’s going on here. I know how to add this thing to my cart.

I know what to do. I know where the information’s gonna be. See convention, that’s what came out of that video.

Like when people see convention, they see a standards, things that they’re used to, they get the warm and fuzzies. They go, oh, I know what’s going on here. I know how to use this website.

Nobody likes being on a website they don’t know how to use or they don’t know what’s going on or it’s too creative. They don’t know why it’s scrolling the way it’s scrolling, why is the things going away? I was just reading that, where did it go?

That’s not the feeling you want any of these people to get. You want them to feel like, oh, this is familiar. It’s still unique to your brand.

You’ve done some little nice touches, okay? But you’re not creating new experiences and hiding everything behind toggles and accordions and sliders and carousels and too much too much too much Just make it easy on them. The thing that wins is copy.

That’s what wins copy Puts more money in the bank account put 90% of your effort into the copy Put 10% of your effort in everything else. All right, we got to get out of here Hope you guys got a lot out of this. Love you guys in the chat, I’m seeing you.

Just reading some last minute comments. 5 1:59:14

Hey, make sure you hit like. 1 1:59:16

If you come back and watch this at a later date, drop some comments on the video. I’ll be back very soon. More videos coming your way.

More WDD lives. And more great stuff. I’ve got a pretty, an announcement coming up that’s gonna feel like, oh, it’s out of left field didn’t see that coming did not see that coming that’s coming very very soon so stay tuned coming did not see that coming that’s coming very very soon so stay tuned

5 1:59:44 peace