Roddy Boyd, owner, and Director at 23 Creative, joins me for part one of a two-part series on great business websites.
I invited Roddy on the show because pretty much every business has a website, but not every business has a great website.
Websites can sometimes be a bit of a mystery for businesses. Sure, they know they need one, and they know what a good one looks like, but they don’t know how to take ownership of their site and make that happen.
Most of you have and will use a web developer to build your site but, so often, it can be a frustrating process – whether it is taking too long, not exactly what you wanted, you don’t know how it all works, you don’t have control of and access to the backend, or it isn’t helping your business as it should.
Roddy knows that building a website isn’t enough and that you need to make sure it has clear and concise calls to action and is easy for your target market to navigate.
In the first part of my chat with Roddy, we cover off planning, target audiences, calls-to-action, content management systems, how to pick the right developer, structuring a website, how much they cost, content, and a few war stories to make it really interesting.
You can get in contact with Roddy and learn more about how 23 Creative can help you at 23creative.com.au or connect with him on LinkedIn
Enjoy.
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
As part of the service, I have had this episode transcribed. Transcribing, proofing, and editing a podcast episode is A LOT of work. That’s why I use a service called REV who provide professional freelance transcriptionists who are vetted for quality. While they offer a 99% accuracy guarantee, I do not proof-read their work extensively. Instead, I simply copy and paste below and, as such, please note that this is not be a verbatim transcript of the episode and I have trimmed things like the intro, close, and mid-show ad.
Daniel:
When a business decides to build a new site, where should they start?
Roddy:
The first thing I’ll say to everyone out there is plan ahead. Plan your website from the start. Do some research about what content management system you want, what type of functionality you want to have into it, and what goes into building a website. You’ve really got to research your market and know what they want, what drives them, and why they’re coming to you.
Daniel:
And is that all about getting your head in the game, getting your head… thinking about what needs to be done, rather than just going and speaking to somebody? And that’s what I think a lot of people get stuck on is, they build their website for themselves, not necessarily for the people that they’re trying to sell to, and they get caught in their head, going, “Oh well, I like the color black so I want black to be on my website.” But if you’re selling pink unicorns, you don’t want a black website that distracts people from what you’re trying to sell, or the message you’re trying to get across.
Roddy:
It gets really expensive when you get halfway through a build and then you want to put more functionality into it. So I get people coming to me all the time, saying, “We’ve just seen this really cool thing that our competitor’s doing and we want to do that now.” And I was like, “Well, if we had that planned out from the start, you would’ve saved yourself a couple of grand.”
Roddy:
Because it’s like building a house. If you have the right foundation, you’re not going to have a problem building on that foundation, but if you come halfway through the build and go, “Oh, well we want it to be a five bedroom now, but we’ve only paid for a three bedroom.”
Daniel:
Or we want a second floor.
Roddy:
Yeah. And that’s the thing, right. I think that’s where you really need to be careful around how you’re planning it. You need to know what you want before you even engage a developer, and if you don’t it’s going to cost you in the long run. And building on that foundation, you really need to know who your customer is and you’ve got to build a persona around that customer, and I think, once you get all those things right, you going to have a really successful built at the end.
Daniel:
Yes, personas, and as a marketer, this is one that’s very close to my heart. You say you should build them. I would expect businesses should have them before they start developing a website. It’s good practice. And it is something I speak to people about every day. They are so important. I talk to businesses quite a lot around them at a matter level. But how can we use them or adapt them to help up build something specific like a website?
Roddy:
So, if you’ve got your personas sorted out and they’ve come and seen someone who’s awesome at marketing… Do you know anyone? I don’t know.
Daniel:
Okay, it’s a short list.
Roddy:
Yeah. So, once you develop them you really should be asking yourself questions around, “If I was that person and I was visiting my website, how am I going to create trust with that person? What type of information does this person want to read? And even if that information is important, is that going to build trust with your brand, is it going to add value to them? What pages do they want to view?” Because I find a lot of clients that come to me and they have really important information on their website that people visit regularly, but there’s no call to action at the end of it. There’s nothing that prompt them to go to another area. It doesn’t meet the goals of their website. So, if your goal is to get phone calls and you have a bit of content on your website that… If you’re… Let’s talk about plumbers because plumbers seem to be regular on your show.
Roddy:
And who was it that came on? Was it Tom?
Daniel:
It was Tom.
Roddy:
Yeah, Tom popped out and he was talking about blocked drains, right? And he has really good content around his blocked drains. His call to action at the bottom of that should be, “Call us to book in for your blocked drains servicing.” What I find, a lot of clients will have that information on their website and then not actually use that to build on the goals of the website.
Daniel:
They’re just putting the content on there and not joining the dots and really leading the person to click here to either make a phone call or fill out a form and make an inquiry?
Roddy:
Yeah, and with websites, it’s the KISS principle, right? If you go to a website, you really need to hold their hand, you really need to push that person around that website. And then it comes back to your personas again, so who is the type of person coming to your website? Are they a 70 year old grandma who looks at their website on their phone? And if that’s the case, your website should be built around that for them. What’s the type of content? How do 70 year old grandmas search for blocked drains on their mobile phone? And you should be driving back to that every single time.
Daniel:
You mentioned it earlier on; CMSs. That’s another big picture area; the CMS. And when we talk about websites, we often talk about CMSs, which stands for content management system. I’ll let you explain what a CMS actually does, why does a business need to understand what they do, and what are some of the things people should… Maybe they need to keep in mind when talking about them with their developers, because this is one of the first things you do actually need to decide when you’re developing a website; “What are we going to use to develop it?”
Roddy:
Yeah, and that comes back to your planning stage again. So, a content management system is essentially… Well, it is what it is, right? It’s where you manage your content for your website. A lot of the newer content management systems have what are called WYSIWYG editors, which stands for what you see is what you get, and, I mean, it doesn’t always work out this way but technically is, as you type on the page, it should represent what it looks like when someone’s viewing your website. So, these content management systems have a back end and a front end, so your front end is your general public; that’s what they get to see, and the back end is where you log in to upload photos, change text, send out your email marketing.
Daniel:
Manage your forms.
Roddy:
Yeah, manage your forms. Follow up with people, sell your products, fulfill your orders, do all that sort of stuff. And the good content management systems make it really easy for you to do that and they’re built around… The more advanced editors now are pretty much… you just edit like you’re editing the front end of your page. You log in and it gives you admin access, and you can change photos and pictures and do all that sort of stuff.
Daniel:
So what sort of types of CMSs are out there, that we’re going to hear when a developer is talking to us?
Roddy:
Well, the main one is WordPress. WordPress is the 800 pound gorilla in the room. Of all the websites, and I read this stat this morning so I don’t know how accurate it is so don’t hold me to this; I think it was 36% of all websites on the internet are WordPress as of right now.
Daniel:
Wow.
Roddy:
So, that’s where a lot of people will go. There’s a couple of others out there. There’s Drupal, there’s Joomla, and they’re your open source content management systems.
Daniel:
So, let’s stop there for a second. What does open source mean?
Roddy:
Open source is, it’s around a license where anyone can pick up and do whatever they want with it. You can modify it, you can sell it for profit, you can do whatever you want with it.
Daniel:
But no one technically owns it, so to speak.
Roddy:
That’s right, yeah. I’m sure… Well, copyright laws out there, I’m sure they’d know more about it that I do. All I know is, that if I work on it, I don’t have to be worried about getting sued by somebody else who owns it, and that’s what open source… There’s some really good advantages to open source because it is free and because you can do whatever you want with it, but that’s also the disadvantage of it, because it’s maintained by a global community, anyone can look at the source code, and if there’s ever an exploit that’s found in the system, everyone knows about it. But it’s a disadvantage and an advantage because it’s patched really quickly and it should be, technically, easy to fix as well.
Daniel:
So we have open source CMSs. Is there another option?
Roddy:
Yeah. So you’ve got proprietary ones as well. So, proprietary CMSs are owned by a company, and these will be all the names that everyone’s heard, like your Shopify, your Squarespaces, your Wix’s. And they’re owned by a company and you pay that company a fee to use them, but they own the software. Generally they’re easier for you to start and dip your toe in, so if you want to build a website, they’re generally easy to get set up with. But the risk with them, and this… So this is me purely coming from a developer point of view, is they own it. It’s theirs, you pay them to use their product. If you ever want to take it away, you can’t. You can get your text and photos but that’s it.
Daniel:
Or if they want to double the price.
Roddy:
Yeah.
Daniel:
Or they shut down for whatever reason.
Roddy:
Yeah, that’s it; you’re stuck with them. That’s it. But they’re cheap to start with, so if you have an idea and you want to sell a product, try it on Shopify because it’s only going to cost you 60 bucks to get going. And then, if it works, build into having your own system and getting that all set up.
Daniel:
Okay. So we can’t avoid having a content management system. We have to have one to build a website. Let’s say we’ve made the choice of the content management system that we want to use, whether it’s open source or it’s proprietary, we think it’s going to suit our business the best, and we’re on the hunt for a reliable developer who can help us in that space to make it happen. What advice have you got for those out there who, maybe they haven’t dealt with a developer before, or it’s been a long time; how do they make a good choice? What sort of things should they be focusing on? What sort of questions should they be asking?
Roddy:
And that’s a good question in itself because I’d say you generally ask what’s their experience, have they done this type of thing before? Have they done previous jobs, can you look at their previous jobs, can you talk to some of their previous clients? You can ask them to explain some technical aspects of the content management system you plan to build in, and again this comes back to the very first question of do your research. So it could be as simple as Googling, I don’t know, something around your content management system. If it’s… let’s say WordPress, because we talked about WordPress. How do you get posts from WordPress? And any developer worth their salt will go, “Oh, that’s easy. It’s a WP query. It’s a global query and it does XYZ to return your posts.” If they can’t answer that, they’re not the ones building it, and you’d be asking, “Where is my website going?”
Daniel:
i.e. they’re selling websites but they’re getting somebody else, who’s not in their business, to develop it and do the work, maybe?
Roddy:
That can be the case, or they could be the account manager for a larger organization and they’ve just been promoted up the chain and don’t actually know the technical aspects. If that’s the case, you’re talking to someone who doesn’t know much about websites to begin with, and they’re selling you a product. They might not be giving you the best advice when you sit down to meet with them to spec everything up. So I would say, then, if they don’t know how to do that, how are they giving you the best advice around the product that you want.
Daniel:
Any war stories around picking developers?
Roddy:
Yeah.
Daniel:
This is the bit I’ve been looking forward to.
Roddy:
So I get at least one a month. One a month, that I pick up a job where it was done by another developer, they said they were going to promise them the world and then they don’t. So one’s for a client I have right now. These guys are called ESOZ, Electrical Suppliers Australia. These guys have hands down the most products on their website of any electrical supplier I’ve seen in Australia. They’ve got something like 15,000 products.
Daniel:
Wow.
Roddy:
But you can’t find them. They’re all just… they’re on WordPress, they’re all… They’ve got 15,000 products, they’re categorized, but if you want a red… what is it? I think they’re GPOs. I don’t know what the actual technical term is. If you want a red power point, you have to go power points and then scan through however many of a thousand power points are on there, until you get to your product, where a good developer should’ve sat down with those guys and gone, “Let’s educate your people on all the products that you want. They might be coming for power points so let’s go power points, show all the colors that we’ve got, show the different amperages, and then something like, I don’t know that they do 30 amp red power points, and then they can filter it by that.”
Daniel:
And the other things is, too, if it’s difficult for people to find the products that you offer on your website, and the product that you offer isn’t one of your differentiators, i.e. it might be service, it might be price; if people just consistently experience a hard time when they go to your website to find that red power point, or the blue one next week, they just get the shits with it and they’re just going to go to a competitor.
Roddy:
That’s right. They’re not going to come to you any more.
Daniel:
And that’s what it is, right? If it’s too hard to do, nobody’s going to do it. What about people overpaying for websites? Any war stories?
Roddy:
Yeah.
Daniel:
Surely there’s some.
Roddy:
Yeah, there’s always some. So I’ve got a client at the moment, I won’t say their name, but they have paid $28,000 for a basic WordPress website, which I think is highway robbery.
Daniel:
You think it’s highway robbery. I concur. What sort of ball park, if it’s a… Let’s say it’s a reasonable sized site, it’s fairly complex. It’s not top end but it’s not just basic five pages. What sort of ball park are we talking, and you can give a range?
Roddy:
Yeah. So I’d say 90% of the jobs that I do will come at about between the four and 8K mark.
Daniel:
So 28 is way out there.
Roddy:
Yeah. And, again, this is comes back to your planning stage. These guys have come… They did their job, they got halfway through the build and then wanted to add more design and more development to it, and because of that, that’s where they just got… Well, there’s a couple of words I want to say there but I won’t say it.
Daniel:
Saves me beeping them out later.
Roddy:
Yeah. It’s not their fault because I think they’ve been hard done by by the developer, who has purposely been cagey and not saying what they’re going to do and how it’s going to happen, and then, when they’ve asked for something else, they’ve got, “Yeah, no worries. That’s going to cost you 10 grand.” Whereas, if it was sat down at the start and they’d discussed all this…
Daniel:
And did the research, which is what we started with, and the personas.
Roddy:
Exactly right. Figuring out how much they’re going to charge you and how they’re going to charge you is a big part of doing your research.
Daniel:
So in there, we spoke before about the CMSs and what the developers are going to be doing, and asking them some questions and things like that. Some people would go to a developer and think they’re just going to be handed over a site, but there are things that the client, the business, is going to be responsible for; some inputs to help that website come to life.
Roddy:
Absolutely. So there’s… It’s going to come down to content, and you’d know this through SCL marketing-
Daniel:
Yeah, the question’s not for me. I know the answer.
Roddy:
Yeah. Content is king. Content is head and shoulders the most important part of your website. Maybe second to usability. But if you have text… if you have a photo that you took on your iPhone of your product on your dining room table with papers and stuff scattered all around, it’s not going to… and you’re selling a premium product, that’s not going to give the value, it’s not going to give the message that the person you’re trying to seel to.
Daniel:
And I’ll give you a good example just off the top of my head. This morning I was on the Procter Legal website, which are a lawyer in Canberra. Only had a quick look so I haven’t done a lot of research, but was introduced to Susan, the owner there. On their About Us pages and the staff pages, they’ve got there what you would expect to see from a lawyer. So you said not pages all over the kitchen table and stuff; the nice corporate looking lawyer photo. But on each person’s profile page, there’s actually a nice personal photo; one’s somebody with their dog, I can’t remember what the others were, but I found myself taking a couple more seconds just to look at those more personal… They’re professionally taken photos; they’re amazing looking photos, but the personal ones start to tell us a little about the personality of the organization. You can see the smiles in the people’s faces and sort of see, “Oh, look; they’re a dog person,” or, “They like cooking.”
Daniel:
And I found myself spending a little bit more time than I normally would on a page if it was just the, “Here’s our corporate headshot. Move along.”
Roddy:
And I reckon that’ll come back to their personas, right? Because they’re going to go, “We want to engage with our customers, we want to be friendly and approachable. And these types of people are going through something that might be a life event that’s really stressful, so let’s try and feel welcoming and engaging,” and that’s how a photo can do that, not necessarily the text.
Daniel:
There’s a key area that will indicate to people whether their developer really is a good one or not, and that’s whether their developer thinks that all of this stuff around websites really does boil down to usability and content.
Roddy:
You’re right. So if your developer doesn’t talk to you about this, they don’t have your best interests at heart, because copy writing and doing the text for your website; it’s an industry in its own and there’s a real skill to it. It’s not just you copying and pasting out of a Word document that you wrote 10 years ago.
Daniel:
Or your corporate brochure.
Roddy:
That’s it. Because people don’t read websites like they read books or newspapers; they look for… People have been taught to scan, and they look for bullet points, they look for bold text, and they look for headings. And then, when they reach the area that they’re interested in, that’s when they’ll stop and read. So, having five paragraphs that explain your company and who you are, and it might be really interesting, it might be written really well; nobody’s going to read five paragraphs of text until they’re at a point where they’re interested in what they’re reading about.
Daniel:
So, building on your analogy before, of doing your planning and your research and understanding exactly what you want, and the foundations of a house and then being able to add things on to it; if I was to keep following that analogy, your website and your content is like… If you’re just going to cut and paste content that you’ve developed somewhere else; maybe in a Word document or in your quotations or your corporate brochures, and you think it’s okay just to cut and past that into a website, it’s kind of like getting an amazing architecturally built house, it looks beautiful, and then filling it with shitty second hand furniture and not painting the walls properly and thinking about the curtains. It’s a great house but it won’t work.
Roddy:
I was going to use the exact same analogy. It’s one of those things where you might have a really nice architecturally designed house. As soon as you walk in the door, if it’s got… if the painting’s been done really bad, if the floor hasn’t been done well, if the carpet looks-
Daniel:
It’s missing red power points.
Roddy:
Yeah, exactly.
Daniel:
Because the electrician couldn’t find them on that website.
Roddy:
Yeah, because you’re going to walk into the house. That’s all you’re going to remember when you go into that house. It’s like, if anyone’s ever bought a house, you go through all the open homes and you remember all the bad points of the house. You don’t remember how nice the garden looked; you remember how the door handle didn’t work properly when you came in. And that’s the same as a website.