028: Is Your Website Outdated? Here’s How We Can Help

Title: Is Your Website Outdated? Here’s How We Can Help

Guest: Kyle Rhodes

Peter: Welcome to the Biz and Life Done Well podcast, where we explore what it means and what it takes to do business and life well. I’m your host, Peter Wilson. If you’re like me, you’re intrigued by stories of common people who have achieved uncommon success in business and life. Join me as I interview fascinating people about how they got started, their successes and failures, their habits and routines, and what inspires them. Today, I’m with Kyle Rhodes.

He is the designer at bizmarketing.com. Today, we are going to talk about three reasons why your business may need a new website. We came up with three things that we see in a lot of websites. So Kyle, why don’t you kick us off? What’s sort of the first thing that you see with a website that might need to be replaced?

Kyle: Yeah. The primary reason that I think a lot of people are looking to update their website is the fact that it looks outdated. I think the primary motivation behind that is they want a website that will make a good first impression because at the end of the day, people will judge a book by its cover. If they come to your website and it doesn’t look up to the level of, say, your competition or, it’s not Instagram worthy.

Peter: Well, yeah, I mean, that’s the thing. I mean, what we’re used to seeing on the web now has really, I think thanks to Instagram and other sites like that, you know, which people use every day, the level of professionalism they expect from a site has kind of gone up. Expect

Kyle: a intuitive user interface and they expect a clean, modern website. And so within eight to ten seconds is the average that a user will spend browsing through before they decide, am I going to try somebody else or am I going to stick with you? So that is a big deal when it comes to.

Peter: So that first thing is looks outdated and it’s kind of hard to articulate specifics, but it could be too much stuff crammed into a small space on the site. It could be that it doesn’t look good on mobile phone, for example. It could be just maybe it has like a really old logo. Like, sometimes we’ve seen people have a brand new website and they keep their old, old, old logo. They don’t, like, update the logo.

You don’t necessarily need to get a brand new logo, but they don’t update it. So, yeah, that’s a biggie. I think that’s one where that one’s hard to put your finger on because people don’t really know if it looks outdated. It’s kinda like, you know, they’ve been living in their house for so long. They don’t notice that the walls need to be painted.

Mhmm. Right? It’s when they maybe go on vacation and then come home and they start looking around their house. They’re like, wow, we need to paint.

Kyle: Yeah. So It’s true. People don’t realize this is your one and only opportunity to make that good impression a lot of the times. So it’s really worth spending the time to make a great impression.

Peter: Right. So what do we got for the second reason?

Kyle: Number two is that the technology itself is outdated. It’s the performance is not good. Mobile responsive is one huge thing. If they go to your website and it doesn’t look good on a smartphone, that is a big, big no no. And it’s also something that Google will be looking at and ranking your website accordingly.

Peter: Yeah. One of the things that I’ve also noticed is that if it’s outdated technology, it may not, like you’re saying, it might not load very fast. Mhmm. And the other thing that we’ve noticed is that some of the newer technologies allow us to track what’s happening on your website.

Kyle: Mhmm.

Peter: And there’s also different types of features you can have on your site where if you have outdated technology, it may just not have the bells and whistles. And I’m not saying you need to have, you know, every latest and greatest thing on your site. Mhmm. But there are so many advances in website technology, especially with WordPress and specific plugins that are available, not to mention security. So having a, you know, outdated technology on your website is not something somebody would necessarily see, but it definitely is a invitation to hackers to come into your site.

Kyle: Yeah. That’s very important. And not only is it important just purely in the user’s experience, but also Google is looking at all these factors of your website’s functionality and its technology, and it ranks you by that. So if your website is loading slow, for example Yeah. Or as I mentioned before, mobile responsive, people will never even get to your website in the first place.

Peter: Right. Because Google search engine won’t rank it very, very high. Yeah. That’s a big one. That’s definitely important.

And, you know, we’re seeing on a lot of websites that we work with now, 70 to 80% of the visitors are first coming to the site on a mobile device. And I remember 2015, Google predicted that’s the year when we crossed the line where we go from to 50% mobile and now we’re way past that now.

Kyle: Yeah, it’s almost, people are almost exclusively using the web through their phone. Yeah. It’s definitely, times have changed.

Peter: Yeah, that’s amazing. So the last reason, arguably this could be the most important reason that you would want to look at a new website.

Kyle: Yeah, number three that we identified is it’s not performing. The bottom line is even if your website is looking great and all that, but if people can’t find it, they go to it and they don’t click call now, or they don’t actually interact with your website and it’s not creating those leads that you need, then what’s the point?

Peter: Yep. In marketing speak, we call that conversions or leads. And I mean, let’s face it, your website really exists to generate leads and get contacts from new potential customers and existing customers who are gonna come back. So if it’s not you’re not getting phone calls based on your website, you’re not getting lead forms filled out on your website, you’re not getting appointments booked through your website, then, you know, that’s a fail. And one of the things we see is companies spend a lot of money to drive traffic to their website.

Like, they they buy ads. Mhmm. So they’re buying ads, you know, some a thousand dollars a month, some multiple thousands a month. So they’re driving traffic to their site, but the site is not optimized for turning those people to visit into an actual lead and getting them to raise their hands. So that is, it’s almost like, you know, you’re going spend a thousand bucks, you might as well just throw half it away if your site’s not working right.

Kyle: And the way to turn that traffic into leads is primarily, first and foremost, with a clear call to action. You need to make it so obvious. This is how I’m gonna do business with you and clearly invite them into that process. And, that needs to be front and center on your website is, well, here’s our phone number, or here’s a book now button. Here’s how we get in touch.

Peter: If if I wanna do business with you, what do I have to do? Yeah. We always say that, you know, your website has to do three things in eight to ten seconds. You know, people have to know what do you do? Why should I pick you?

Or, you know, why should I do business with you? Or what makes you better? And how do I get started? So that’s really helpful. So we’ve just talked about the three reasons your business may need a new website and let’s just recap those really quick.

One, just looks outdated. Two, it has outdated technology. That could be something like it’s a Wix site or a Squarespace site as well or a GoDaddy site. And then three, it’s just not giving you enough leads. Those are the three core reasons.

So we do a lot of websites for folks. So I just kind of wanted to step through the process that we go through. Now, one of the things that we do is we want to make sure that the company the first thing we want to do is figure out whether or not they have clear messaging. Right? So we have a process to develop a marketing messaging language and a script that is useful in terms of inviting customers into your story that you have for them.

So we have a professional on staff that does that guy named Chris Goldman. And we’ve talked about that process in the past. I’m sure we’ll talk about in the future. So what’s really cool though, is you are part of that as a designer, you’re part of that process too. So what kind of cues are you looking for while you sit in on that process?

And that process, by the way, is about a two and a half hour, three hour conversation with the business in real time where we kind of fill in the blanks. So what are you looking to get out of that?

Kyle: So during that process, as Chris, he’s brainstorming how to position you as the guide that’s going to help their customers succeed and solve their problems and motivate them. While he’s doing that, a lot of times what I’ll be focusing on is what are your pain points? What are the things that need to be addressed?

Peter: Customer pain points.

Kyle: Customer pain points, as well as the business itself. What is motivating them to get that new website, as well as just, I’m always looking for ways, little ways that I can improve upon what you have. I’m usually thinking about the visuals and how do we represent the ideas that are coming up.

Peter: Right. So that process also includes maybe looking at some competitors’

Kyle: websites? Yeah, I’d say after we have that meeting, the next step I always go through is brainstorming through competitive analysis, through research, and when I’m designing a website, I’m not trying to reinvent the wheel. I’m trying to get a good sense of what successful companies are already doing, and I’m using that as inspiration for the website that we will be designing.

Peter: See, it seems like one of the core things that we try to focus on is we’re not putting up an ego booster for the owner of the business. Right? Like a lot of websites, owners are really proud of their websites. But if, again, if it’s not creating any leads, then, you know, what good is it? Right?

We had a business that we recently did a website for a roofing company, and it was sort of comical because we were talking to the owner and they said to us, hey, we really want other people in the industry to just see this as a wow, you know, just an amazing website. We had to caution them and stop them, say, listen. That’s not your customer. Right? Mhmm.

It might look cool. You might impress other people, and but that’s kind of an expensive exercise. Right? Whereas, you know, what you really should focus on is when your customers are visiting or your potential customers are visiting this website, what information do they need? Because we wanna give them enough information to get them to raise their hand Right.

To call you, to fill in a form, you know, contact form or book an appointment. Right? So it’s like we wanna give them enough information to where they feel comfortable, but we don’t want to give them the whole encyclopedia about what you do on the homepage Yeah, either,

Kyle: at the end of the day, that’s all we’re doing was we’re getting leads and we’re getting phone calls. And I think if you lose focus of that, you’re gonna run into a lot of issues because it’s all about a customer experience that is motivated by them solving their problems. You can’t move beyond that. It can’t be about what makes you so great because at the end of the day, they just don’t really care. They care about how you’re gonna help them.

Peter: Right, right. So what really matters is how great you are at helping them. Not how great they are, the customer. Exactly. The client, the business.

It’s better to be okay and really great at helping customers than being amazing as a business. Like, you know, we’ve been in business a hundred years and blah, blah, blah, and not really helping your customers.

Kyle: Yeah, it doesn’t matter how great your services are if nobody understands how it’s going to help them. Exactly.

Peter: Yeah, that’s true. One of the things I’ve seen a lot through this process, especially in the front end of the process, is businesses wanna tell a lot of stuff on the homepage, and I think you’re the one that really preaches simplicity. And seems like Mhmm. Like when you do your first cut of a design, you’re trying to just get the essence of what it is the customer needs help with and how they can help them and not, you’re not trying to tell the whole story.

Kyle: Yeah, you can only really digest one piece of that story at a time, and it needs to be clear and succinct so that they can just breeze through it. And when one thing catches their eye, they can read that. Because I think if you just have a wall of text, nobody’s gonna take the time to read it. People are very lazy. Think that’s something we don’t understand, but

Peter: You mean people that are visiting a website.

Kyle: Yeah, all of us. Yeah. Whenever we look at a website, we’re like Don’t make me work. Yeah, it has to be simple and quick, otherwise people just won’t do it. They won’t dig through your website to try to get every little detail.

It’s gotta be quick and easy to understand.

Peter: Right, so you’ve got this process in the front end, and then you go off and you do a little research and then you put together some designs. Mhmm. And so I’ve noticed you’re using a you use something called Adobe XD, which is actually when you show a design, you’re actually showing them, like, a mock up

Kyle: Mhmm.

Peter: Of what it would actually look like as a website. Now how many versions would you typically show somebody? Like, would you show them one, two, three, or does it just depend?

Kyle: Yeah, it depends. First off, I’ll start off with the homepage because that’s really 90% of the traffic is just gonna be at the homepage. And I’ll give a couple looks so that the customer can have some input on what they think will be effective, as well as a lot of times the first thing I come up with may not be the best thing. So through that iteration, I’m able to try new things and find what’s going to be the best in the end.

Peter: Right. So sometimes I’ve noticed you’ll show a client two or three website ideas maybe with a different hierarchy of the different elements on the page. Like one might have testimonials up high, one might have testimonials down lower, one might have, this is how we can help you with a contact form and all that. And so give those to the client and then it’s a meeting with the client where we review. So we, you know, give them a chance to get some feedback.

And then what I’ve noticed is usually you get the feedback, you go back, you’re not going back to the drawing board, but you go back and refine the design. And typically it’s when you come back with that refined design is usually when most of the clients are just blown away, I’ve noticed. Yeah.

Kyle: That is my favorite thing about what I do is able to take somebody’s vision, bring it to life and just blow away their expectations. It’s a very satisfying creative process to take somebody’s vision and then just knock it out of the park, I’d say.

Peter: Right, and then they look at, yeah, I’ve noticed, it’s funny to see people are just like, woah, we had one client recently who was logged into our design platform and watching as Kyle was making updates to the design. And they were checking it, like, every morning to see all the latest updates. Mhmm. They didn’t tell us they were doing that, but we had given them the link. So I guess we should have suspected they would do it.

But we got on a call with them, and they were like, yeah. We were watching everything. It’s so cool. How everything came together. So then when that’s all done and we’ve got a final sign off

Kyle: Mhmm.

Peter: Then you give the design with all the assets to build the site to our development team, and then they build it on a server. So it’s actually on the web, right? So there’s challenges in that process because you can kind of design it on paper, so to speak, and make it look really cool. It’s like the architect and the plans, but then we’re handing it off to the contractor who actually has to build the thing. Right?

So you’re like the architect and then you get a deal with the builder.

Kyle: Yep. And it’s a back and forth there and it takes some time, but we make sure that we get all the details right and really bring the original idea to life.

Peter: Yeah. And I think it’s really magical when we share the actual link and the site is live to us, but nobody else can see it on the web unless they have the link. I think it’s really fun to share it when we finally have a chance to share that with the client, the customer, and they’re looking at their new website for their business.

Kyle: And,

Peter: then they’re able to share it with their, like they can share that link with, they can look it on their phone, they can look it on their desktop, they can share it around the office. And it’s always fun to get some feedback at that point. Usually they’re pretty anxious to just get the thing live. Yeah. But sometimes we find some things that they want to add at that time, you know, so it’s not really done until it’s done.

Usually it’s just minor tweaks though, because I think we’ve really got the process honed down pretty well from the design process.

Kyle: Yeah, when we were able to give the client a high fidelity, every detail fleshed out in the mockup that allows the development process to be much quicker and we’ve addressed a lot of the issues beforehand.

Peter: Right, so then we get the final sign off from the client and we take the website live and the rest is history. So we also make sure we instrument the site. So we have call tracking code, which is so you can see how people came to their website before they call you. So if you’re spending money on ads, you’ll know that which ads was driving the phone calls. And then the contact forms too, we have all the Google analytics and other instrumentation on the forms and that sort of thing.

The nice thing is you don’t ever have to go offline. Your website will just automatically transition once we throw the switch from one website to the other, which is really cool. Any final thoughts?

Kyle: Yeah, I guess running off what you just said about making sure that it’s got all the tracking, and that’s really important about everything that we do here at Biz Marketing is we want to have measured solutions that we know that they’re driving results because it doesn’t just look pretty and it’s not just fun to look at, but it actually is tracking Right. The leads and the calls and everything to make sure that your investment is working. Yeah. That’s huge.

Peter: And that also leads to a whole another topic that we can cover on another day, which is, you know, the difference between just driving a bunch of traffic to a website and actually having it turn into business. You know, that’s, we’re always focused on making it turn into new business for you. So if you’d like to find out more about our website process, feel free to visit our website, bizmarketing.com. We’ve got a big button that says book appointment, and we will, you know, sit down with you, take a look at your website. We offer a free forty five minute marketing consultation, and we’d love to take a look at your site and see if we can help.

Thanks for listening to this episode of Biz and Life Done Well with Peter Wilson. You can subscribe to us on iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and most of the other popular podcast platforms. Please tell your friends about us and leave us a review so even more people will find out about us. Thanks again. We’ll see you soon.