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Episode 48: Why We Redesigned Our Website
148 Plays5 years ago
How do you like our fresh look?
While it’s normal for us to give our website a bit of an update each year, this update was massive and has been months in the making.
To say we’re excited to start closing out this project would be an understatement. Krista and Alex, one of our designers, are especially excited to have this thing launched as it’s been an almost daily project for them since late last year.
I’ve always felt that there are so many updates that happen ‘behind-the-scenes’ during a website redesign. Things that most people might never see or understand unless they were told. This post is meant to provide some insight into those things. While I wish it was comprehensive, it doesn’t quite cover everything that I’d like to share (even at over 2,000 words).
Read the full post at https://daveyandkrista.com/why-we-redesigned-our-website/.
Recommended
Transcript
Understanding Website Goals
00:00:05
Speaker
So I think it's really important to understand what your goal is, what is the purpose of your website, whether it's achieving that purpose and then making a decision on what needs to be done. Welcome to The Brands at Book Show, where we help creative service-based businesses build their brands and find more clients.
Introductions & Personal Updates
00:00:27
Speaker
I'm your host, Davy Jones.
00:00:33
Speaker
After months of hard work behind the scenes, we finally launched our brand new website. While we generally give our brand and website a bit of a polish each year, this project was bigger in scope and required quite a bit more development. Not only did we switch up website platforms, but we also made some decisions about the services we'll be offering going forward. Vanessa Kynes joins me once again to chat about these updates that we've made to our website and in our business, and we also talked through some advice we have for others who might be in a similar spot.
00:01:02
Speaker
Be sure to check out the show notes at DavyandChrista.com for the resources we mentioned during the episode, and I'd like to hear from you about what kind of content you'd like to see on the Brands at Book podcast as we move forward. I'd also like to know what episodes you've most enjoyed so far and why. To leave your feedback, head on over to the Davy and Christa Facebook page
00:01:19
Speaker
and send us a message. I've also written a corresponding blog post that accompanies this podcast and goes into some further detail about why we've decided to redesign our
The Website Redesign Journey
00:01:31
Speaker
website. Now, onto the episode.
00:01:36
Speaker
All right, we are back with another episode of brands that book today we are chatting about our recent website redesign. And Vanessa is back to join me to chat about that. And I'm excited Vanessa, I will actually get to see you next week at creative at heart. I think we're actually all driving down together.
00:01:55
Speaker
Yeah, it's really exciting because last year I was just attending and this year I am educating so I've done breakout sessions before I'm really excited because I love this group of people and I think the car drives gonna be fun. Krista told me that Jack prefers the Lion King on soundtrack. Yeah, he does. He does. I'm excited to lots of Lion King. That's awesome. That's awesome. Yep. So I'm excited about the drive down.
00:02:20
Speaker
Krista did warn you correctly though, there'll most likely be a lot of Lion King soundtrack involved. We've noticed that Jack is at the age where when he's up, he just started walking and now he wants to walk everywhere. We take a lot of walks throughout the day to kind of break up the day and it's gotten a lot harder because he wants to be out of his stroller walking with us.
E-commerce Focus & Challenges
00:02:42
Speaker
So now we find ourselves spending more time walking up to the park and letting him play and less time on these long walks.
00:02:49
Speaker
Well, I'll warn you because I actually just wrote a blog post which is not related to Pinterest on traveling with kids, specifically kind of that baby age. And I think this is the trickiest age for y'all because they're not quite as easy to reason with. The logic hasn't set in his name and they do want to be on the move, but he's so adorable.
00:03:09
Speaker
Yeah, I guess at least he has that going for him because, yeah, and we also have our first international trip coming up, which is, you know, again, just going to be challenging with, I think, I guess he's technically a toddler now, a toddler at his age. So all of that to look forward to. But today, talking about our website redesign, so if you go to davianchrista.com, you see that we have a new look.
00:03:32
Speaker
And this is something that we do almost every year. We take another look at our website on some level, so there's some sort of redesign project on an annual basis. However, this one is a lot more massive in scope than
00:03:47
Speaker
years past. We've made some serious changes, we've changed website platforms, we've been focusing on. So I'm excited to talk about kind of what goes on, what went on in that project behind the scenes from the perspective of website designers.
00:04:04
Speaker
I love it. It's kind of meta because you're web designers who are redesigning your website. That's right. I often wonder as a web designer if it's hard to redesign your own website because you almost just know too much. You know all the different things that you can do like on a website, but you can't probably do them all. So you have to really decide what's important to you. So my biggest question for y'all is why did y'all decide to rebuild the website? Like what's the main thing that you wanted to re-tweak?
00:04:29
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. Well, our business has just evolved a lot over the course of the last, I'd say, 12 to 18 months. Previously, we were primarily a service-based business. So most of our revenue was driven by the one-on-one services that we provided people in the way of website design and branding. Over the last 12 months or so, the e-commerce aspect of our business has grown significantly. So now it makes up almost 50% of our revenue.
00:04:58
Speaker
But our website wasn't really built in a way that made the e-commerce aspect of our business a priority. For instance, on our old website, you had to go to a hamburger menu, you'd had to find the shop. Then from the shop, you had to select what category of product you wanted to look at just to get to whatever it is that you were interested in shopping. We didn't hear this a lot, but it wasn't out of the ordinary for somebody to ask, hey, I'm trying to find the website templates on your website.
00:05:27
Speaker
And so for those making up such a significant portion of our revenue, we wanted to make sure that people could find those really easily. So just the more of a focus, more of a renewed focus on e-commerce, that was a large driver of wanting to redesign our website. And then in addition to that, we've actually eliminated some services as well. So one thing that we started fooling around with over the last
00:05:53
Speaker
I'd say six to 10 months is only offering search engine optimization and digital marketing services for people whose websites we've designed or for people who are using one of our website templates. And we've decided to kind of make that official. So we're still doing SEO, but we're really only offering it to people who we've designed their websites. And we made that decision based on a number of different factors.
Technical Transitions & Improvements
00:06:18
Speaker
Yeah. Well, that makes a lot of sense. And it does seem like even in the service-based
00:06:22
Speaker
feel that there are people who want to become educators. They start developing digital products. And so I think that you kind of like going forward ahead of them is going to help them see how they can even redesign their own website to be more user shopping friendly. So that's really helpful. And congratulations on having all that passive and well, I wouldn't call it passive. It's hard for those digital products. I wish it felt passive.
00:06:48
Speaker
Yeah, they always say that. It doesn't actually make sense. So you talked about switching platforms. I want to hear about that because I know you guys do a lot of show it templates, but you guys are doing WordPress so that you can utilize WooCommerce. So I want to hear more about that. Yeah, for sure. So that's one of the big reasons that it was such a massive project was because we actually switched from show it to WordPress. I'm using a builder called Elementor also so that we can take full advantage of the e-commerce side of WordPress via WooCommerce.
00:07:16
Speaker
So WooCommerce gives us all of the shopping cart functionality that you see on our redesigned website. And we love Showit. I think the majority of websites that we build for people are still Showit websites.
00:07:32
Speaker
So I do, I want to emphasize that we still love show it or show it design partners. Todd Watson, the founder of show it, I consider a really good friend, but it wasn't designed to be an e-commerce platform. You can make e-commerce work on show it. And that's what we previously done, but it makes it a little bit harder to implement some of the advanced e-commerce functionality we wanted.
00:07:56
Speaker
without some serious workarounds. So that's one of the reasons that we switched from Show It to WordPress because we needed easier access or be able to more easily implement some of these e-commerce features. So for instance, just customizing the cart experience in WooCommerce would have been a lot harder if we tried to take advantage of the Show It and WooCommerce integration versus just going with a straight WordPress website with WooCommerce.
00:08:24
Speaker
Okay, so for me that makes total sense because you are serving and selling templates for service providers who maybe have no interest in doing any kind of e-commerce function. Sure. But for yourself to run your own business and be able to run this website in a way that makes sense e-commerce, it makes sense to me that you would be using WordPress. So I think it's a good partnership between the two and you've kind of worked with those so you're really familiar with both because you do sell WordPress templates as well.
00:08:49
Speaker
We sell WordPress designs as well. The other thing to keep in mind too is that we're very technical people. There's not much in the way of integrations or dealing with website hosts, whatever it might be, server configurations that we can't tackle on our own. We appreciate the greater control of
00:09:07
Speaker
you know, finding our own website host, making those optimizations on our own to our website. So by going to a self hosted website, WordPress website setup, we're able to get more control more granular control over our website. And that's not for everybody. Again, that's, I think, why we did most of the websites that we designed for people are short websites, because most people don't want to set up their server.
00:09:29
Speaker
You know, they have no interest in that nor nor should they, you know, they got into business to be a photographer or planner or calligrapher or, you know, whatever it might be. And so they don't want to be spending potentially hours on kind of the technical aspect of their website. Right. And it freaks us out. We don't understand it. Yeah.
00:09:47
Speaker
Well, exactly. And so your time is better spent on other things. And so going with a website builder slash host, like show it, they're going to take care of all the technical stuff, they're going to do a pretty good job of making sure that's optimized for you. And then you can just focus on, you know, being able to make easy updates to your design. But for somebody like us who doesn't mind kind of the technical aspect of managing a website, going the WordPress route just made sense.
00:10:17
Speaker
Yeah, totally. So I want to hear about do did you guys kind of push yourself through your own branding experience? I know you guys are building a house right now and I wonder if there's even some connections between building house and building website and kind of thinking through like what you want to communicate. Did you even tweak like your branding style?
00:10:34
Speaker
We did. And I'm going to have Krista on to talk a little bit more about that, just the branding process in general, because she's going to be able to better speak to that. But we, you know, really, Krista went through her own branding questionnaire, and we revisited different things like colors and fonts. And so that's reflected on our new website. And we think that's important just to do on an annual or, you know, at least every other year basis, because businesses do grow. If you reflect over the past year, you've probably grown a lot more than maybe you even think you have.
Analytics & User Experience
00:11:04
Speaker
And so it was a good opportunity for us to kind of go back to the basics, I guess for lack of a better way to put it, and just revisit what is it that we want to focus on? What's been profitable? What hasn't been profitable? What can we cut away? I think it's Donald Miller, I don't even want to say because I can't remember exactly who it is, but it's somebody, I hear they cut away 25% of their business or something like that to make room for more growth.
00:11:31
Speaker
And that's just an interesting concept of pruning. And so I think that's what we did through the branding process, through thinking through this new website and our services, feeling like, you know what, we want to really focus on website design and branding.
00:11:46
Speaker
Those are our core services. That's what we're going to focus on and getting people website templates in the shop. That's what's reflected. Our top-level navigation is much more simplified on our new website. You can very easily get to either custom design and branding or to the shop and then within the shop, filter in all the ways that you would want to filter products.
00:12:10
Speaker
And I think by eliminating SEO as a standalone service and digital marketing as a standalone service, one, that's something that we can offer our current customers. And two, it just makes more room for growth in the areas of design and branding and continuing to provide website templates and resources for creatives.
00:12:30
Speaker
So you said that about every year you take a look and you tweak things. So what goes into planning this whole process? I know you guys have a team of four, right? A team of form designers and programmers, including yourselves. How do you guys like decide what goes and what stays and what you want to improve?
00:12:46
Speaker
For sure. A lot of it is just focusing on your numbers. Our numbers are going to come from a number of different places, but one of those places being revenue and breaking down exactly where money is coming in from and looking at it and saying, wow, look, we are bringing in a lot more money from The Palm Shop and that channel.
00:13:08
Speaker
And, you know, then going back and looking at SEO and looking at the SEO services that we're providing people who aren't clients in some other respect and saying, okay, we're spending a lot of time here, but it's not as profitable as proportionally as profitable as something like website design and branding.
00:13:24
Speaker
So making that decision, okay, well, what if we cut that out and got all of that time back and then could focus it on, again, maybe building more products for the Palm Shop or taking on additional clients for design and branding?
00:13:39
Speaker
And then you know hopefully the idea is that we would increase our revenue by cutting that portion out. Yeah no that totally makes sense like it actually reminds me a lot of the book essentialism and like once you really get hyper focused on a service obviously to you it's really easy you know exactly what to do and what workflows to follow and so you become more efficient and ideally profitable and not so that makes a lot of sense.
00:14:03
Speaker
We had a ton of pages, and we still do, we still have a ton of pages on our website, but I would say if you went to our, if you remember our old website, our top level navigation out of the hamburger menu, there were a lot of pages there. And it's not so much that we have less pages, but they're certainly organized in a different way. And one of the ways that we organized them was basically going back to Google Analytics and understanding what pages people were visiting, where people were coming in, where people ended up.
00:14:29
Speaker
and then making those pages the primary pages. As you can probably guess, since a lot of our revenue is driven by the Palm Shop, a lot of people visit the shop. Why wouldn't that be a primary page or one of just a few in our top-level navigation? We made decisions based on data like that as well, looking at what pages are people visiting, what pages are actually leading to conversions, and then trying to focus on those
SEO & Traffic Management
00:14:56
Speaker
pages.
00:14:56
Speaker
I know you want to focus totally on the technical aspects, but my brain has a lot of questions for you. Ask away. You own the domain. This is going to come from such a beginner perspective. You own the domain and you actually do a lot of your own hosting and you host for clients. Did you pull it away from show it and then put it on WordPress? Was that an issue at all with domain ownership?
00:15:21
Speaker
No, I mean, these are all good questions to ask. So you don't really own your domain. So VanessaKynes.com, right? You're basically renting it. So you purchased it through something like Google Domains or GoDaddy or Dreamhost or wherever it may be, your domain registrar, right? So you've purchased sort of that address, right? If we're thinking about just imagine a street with an empty lot on it, you know, and you've purchased that address. Well, then you need a place for your website to live.
00:15:50
Speaker
and that would be your host. So you're paying for your website to live with this host. What happens is people go online and they search your domain and then it pulls it, pulls your website from wherever that host is. Website builders like Showit and Squarespace and Wix, they both act as the website builder, the tools in which you use to build your website.
00:16:12
Speaker
and then also your website host. They host your website as well. That's in part why you pay them a monthly subscription or an annual subscription.
00:16:22
Speaker
So what we've done, so our domain is, I think it's via Google domains. That's where we keep most of our domains. So we're really just pointing that domain now to a different host, you know? So instead of it pointing to show its servers, it's pointing to, you know, different servers, our own servers. So that's how that works. When you're building a new website, and this is good, just good for anybody to realize, you generally don't want to build your new website
00:16:50
Speaker
on top of your existing website. Does that make sense? We built our website on a staging domain. Basically, a totally separate domain. So, www, and I won't tell people it because we do a lot of testing stuff there. Not that it's a secret or anything like that, but we build our new website on a staging domain. And then when we're ready, we migrate that from the staging domain to DavyandChrissa.com.
00:17:15
Speaker
So for months, we've been building a website at a different domain. And then when we are ready to launch, all we did was migrate that website we had built to DavyandCrista.com. And there's advantages to doing that. One, you're not under a time crunch. Like your website's not under construction. People aren't seeing a page that's like halfway built, right? But in addition to that, you get the opportunity to test your website before it actually goes live. So our website, our new website actually went live a week ago.
00:17:45
Speaker
So actually today we're recording this episode a week in advance of it going live. Our website went live today and we're not going to announce it for a week. People are going to visit it and they're going to see it, but we're not going to announce it for a week because even though we tested on our staging domain,
00:18:01
Speaker
there are things that inevitably will need to be fixed when we move it over. No matter how much testing we've done on the staging domain, we're still going to have to fix some things in part because different plugins and stuff require licenses and those license have to be reactivated for new domains and so on and so forth. But point being, and I think that's a good lesson for people too, they get so excited, their website's ready, they publish it so it's alive, and then they want to tell everybody.
00:18:28
Speaker
But how many times I've seen in the show at User Group, people say, I just launched my website, I just announced, and now I realize the whole mobile site is broken. Well, if you just waited a little bit, you wouldn't have that sudden influx of traffic, you would have been able to take care of that issue, and then you could announce.
00:18:46
Speaker
Yeah, that's so smart. I don't think I ever really thought about that from a I mean, I would have thought about hosting it kind of like on a fake domain or whatever like a testing domain, but even just giving it a week to kind of tweak through and have maybe just some friends or industry friends click through and give them your feedback their feedback about like the flow.
00:19:04
Speaker
So I wouldn't be a good Pinterest strategist, because I get this question a lot, is what happens when you move websites to those domains? So the way Pinterest works is it connects an image, a pen, to a specific URL. And so it seems like for y'all, because you've probably thought about this. So for example, this podcast might be like davincrista.com slash B2B slash new website. I don't know exactly what it's going to be. You're going to use that same URL on your new website, correct?
00:19:33
Speaker
Yes and no. You bring up a great point. Whenever you're redesigning a website, you need to realize what happens when somebody visits one of my old links. Well, in some cases, nothing because for a blog, for instance, all of those blog post URLs are going to remain exactly the same. All right. It's good. Yeah, exactly. For all of my BTP episodes, all the brands and book episodes, those are going to live at exactly the same URL. However,
00:19:59
Speaker
Something that will change are our product URLs, and they're going to change to a certain extent by necessity. The way that our old website was built on ShowIt, we couldn't do things like DavianCrista.com forward slash product forward slash category and the product name, let's say. And again, I should clarify, there are things like that that you can do now via their WooCommerce integration.
00:20:21
Speaker
But anyways, we didn't have it set up that way. So it would just be davincrista.com forward slash product name. Well, now that those are living within a subfolder called products, what we'll have to do is create redirects. And so what we'll do is we'll use a plugin called Yoast. We use the premium version of Yoast. There's a free redirections plugin just called the redirections, I think.
00:20:40
Speaker
And what you'll do is you'll go in and put the old URL, and then you'll put the new URL, and then you'll select a 301 redirect, which means that it's a permanent redirect so that when people visit Davy and Krista Ford slash Positano, which is one of our
00:20:53
Speaker
show it in WordPress website designs. They will be redirected to the new URL, which is davianchrista.com forward slash product forward slash positano or something like that, right? But that way, all of those old links, they don't become just dead 404 links, which creates a bad user experience, right? Because we do a lot of work with you on Pinterest. And so people come in through those pins and we want them to land in the right place. So this allows us to get people to kind of the updated page.
00:21:22
Speaker
But you know we we do we talked about eliminating services right so we're not offering we're still offering digital marketing services but we're offering digital marketing services for. People who are website and brand clients you know but we don't have a ninety nine percent sure we don't have a digital marketing page on our website anymore so what do we do with that page well i think right now she's hidden so people can definitely still get to get to it.
00:21:44
Speaker
But ultimately what we'll do is we'll create a redirect so that it goes to some other page that might make sense. So maybe it's our home page, you know, maybe it's, you know, whatever replaces that. I don't know.
00:21:55
Speaker
Yeah, you can just redirect them to somewhere that's related or kind of gets them to at least a place where they could contact you and inquire. But yeah, that totally makes sense.
User Experience Enhancements
00:22:05
Speaker
So that's important to me because I get that question a ton from the Pinterest side because people, you know, you still want to be getting the benefits of all that traffic, especially from SEO and Pinterest or YouTube or whatever. So you want to make sure you're not going to lose all that website traffic. Absolutely.
00:22:21
Speaker
You've talked a lot about this, so we maybe touched on this a bit, but what areas you really want to focus on. It sounded like for you, the biggest thing was e-commerce. But what about those user experiences? Were there other things that you feel like you now have improved from moving from your show to your WordPress site?
00:22:36
Speaker
Yeah, and I don't know if it's necessarily, I wouldn't say it's because we move from show it to WordPress. I would say, again, with WordPress, we get more granular control over our website. So there are a few things that I'm excited about. One, being able to really truly optimize our website speed, the speed at which a page loads on our website. So since we have
00:22:59
Speaker
total control over our servers, we can set them up in a way that makes our website load more quickly. And we can basically pay to have it load more quickly as well. But we can set up things like content delivery networks, which again will increase or hopefully increase, not increase, but decrease page load speed.
00:23:17
Speaker
All right, make pages load more quickly. So website speed is a big deal for us. And we want to make sure that we optimize that as much as possible. So I'm really excited about that. Even the checkout process, just, you know, people being able to add more than one item to a cart, us being able to offer different deals for different combinations of things purchased, which is something that was really difficult for us to do on our old website. One thing that I love about Elementor in particular is that allows us to pay attention to
00:23:47
Speaker
how our website looks on tablet devices, which is something that we weren't previously able to do as well. And we see increasingly a number of people coming from tablet devices. What about the mobile experience? Anything new or exciting there?
00:24:01
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, show it does a great job of this to giving you the opportunity to design your website with mobile in mind, you can actually just toggle between the desktop screen and the mobile screen and figure out how that's going to look. So there's not really a huge change there from, you know, moving off a show it to WordPress, but it just
00:24:21
Speaker
I think it comes down to a lot of the experience of just like checking out buying purchasing products and things like that i think it's a more seamless experience now that we we are using really just one platform instead of hooking up a bunch of different platforms to make our website work how we wanted to work.
00:24:41
Speaker
Yeah, totally. So I think one of the most important questions I can ask you is, what are you most excited about? And congratulations on the launch, but I want to hear what you're most excited about the new website.
00:24:52
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of it has to do for me going back to e-commerce. It just having that be more of a priority on our website, things working how you would expect an e-commerce website to work, being able to add multiple things to the cart, being able to see your shopping cart, all of those things I'm really excited about. We've added different things to our website as well. People want to see what
00:25:18
Speaker
templates look like in the wild. They want to see other people using that template to better imagine themselves using that template. We've added on each of our template pages demos from people who are already using that template. That's really exciting as well. Just building in some more of these things that people have been asking based on the questions that people have been asking over the course of the last year.
00:25:42
Speaker
So I think we'll cut down on customer support, you know, just questions that we get. But then I also think that's that's pretty cool functionality as well. Yeah, that's awesome. Are you still gonna have your chat on your website? Yeah, we still have the chat on the website. And but you know, some of the questions that like, for instance, one of the questions is how do I add more than one thing to my cart?
00:26:00
Speaker
And the reason that we love Thrivecart, so we're leaving behind a couple of different platforms that we really love. One, being show it, two, being Thrivecart. Thrivecart is a great cart solution, but it's really meant if you're selling a course or if you're selling one product at the end of a sales page. Because if you're selling a course, let's say, you want people when they land on that sales page not to be distracted by all the other things they can buy, you want them to buy that course. So something like Thrivecart is awesome for that.
00:26:27
Speaker
I mean, Thrivecart was one of the best purchases I ever made. I got it on a lifetime deal. We've done so much in terms of volume through Thrivecart and never had an issue. They continue to add new features. But it wasn't meant to be an e-commerce solution like Shopify is where you can go in and you can add a bunch of different items to your cart. So moving to something like WooCommerce just makes sense.
00:26:51
Speaker
Do you have any capabilities in WooCommerce? I know you can do this on Shopify, that if someone adds something to their cart and maybe they kind of leave and abandon the cart, do you have, are you have any plans to like set up email reminders to kind of say, hey, you missed this or come back and shop with us? Things like that.
00:27:06
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. That's called cart abandonment. We could actually do that with Thrivecart as well. It didn't work as well again because people could check out multiple items. I should say it didn't work as well for what we were trying to use it for. That's an important clarification.
00:27:22
Speaker
But we can do that with WooCommerce. So we can set up cart abandonment. So if we have your email address and you put some stuff in your cart, you would get an email from us saying, hey, what happened? We noticed you started checkout, but you stopped. You can finish checking out here. And then it brings them to that direct link back to their cart so that they can finish checking out. And that kind of stuff makes a big difference. Even if one out of 20 people decided to purchase because they got that email, I mean, that kind of stuff adds up over time.
00:27:50
Speaker
It also sounds like, to me, it sounds like the biggest thing for you is that you could have multiple items in a car. And just from an e-commerce perspective, you can increase the amount of profit per sale. I don't know exactly what the terminology is. The amount of revenue per sale by just allowing somebody to be able to, and maybe they really want to, it's not like coercion, but they want to add multiple things to their cart but can't because it wasn't quite as easy to do with Thrive. So that sounds like that's going to be a good fit for you guys.
00:28:17
Speaker
Yeah, for sure. I mean, just based on the amount of people that are asking that question, we got, you know, we want things to be as easy as possible for our customers, but we also want to make sure that we're not losing out on sales because people get frustrated and don't want to have to go through the checkout process three times to buy, you know, three items or whatever. So like you said, hopefully it increases the cart amount, you know, per purchase. But then in addition to that, you know, I'm excited to have kind of that total control over our
Necessity-Driven Redesign
00:28:42
Speaker
website. You know, that's a double edged sword because when something goes wrong, you have to figure it out on your own.
00:28:47
Speaker
Again, I think that's one of the reasons why going with the website platform is so great is because if your website went down, you can just reach out to show it and they're going to troubleshoot that for you and get your website back up and running. But at the same time, we're now able to optimize our website in ways that we previously weren't able to. I'll have Alex, one of our designers who was a big piece of putting together this website, building this website on the show at some point to talk exactly about those optimizations.
00:29:17
Speaker
Awesome. I expect to be a really fun episode. Yeah, I'm excited to really chat about those things and talk about the small tweaks that we make to our website in order to improve performance. But one thing that I want to mention too before we go on, I think that sometimes we have people come to us for a website design project and they don't
00:29:40
Speaker
They want to redesign their website because their friends redesigned their website. And I always think that's a terrible reason to redesign your website. We look at our website and we make a judgment on whether it needs to be updated based on its performance. So we'll have people come to us and say, hey, my website, I don't really have all that many issues with it. The SEO is great. I get found on Google consistently. I'm on the first page for the different searches that I want to rank for. I just feel like it's time for an update.
00:30:08
Speaker
You know, and I just don't think that's a very good reason to update your website. Sure. Does that mean that maybe we can go back and freshen some things up? Yes. Does that mean you want to do a massive redesign? Probably not because why rock the boat? You know, if you're getting a ton of bookings because people are finding you on Google, you know, or or you're just getting a ton of bookings and
00:30:27
Speaker
You can't handle them all, then what's the point of the redesign? I think it's important to keep that kind of stuff in mind as you tackle a website design project. What is the point of that website? It's not to impress your friends. It's not so that you have the most beautiful looking website. That's great. You want your website to be beautiful.
00:30:48
Speaker
Ultimately, you want your website to do its job, which is probably either to get people to inquire so that you can book them, or two, to sell a product online. So if it's not doing one of those things, then definitely you need to tackle your website. But if it's doing those things, then really think hard about whether that's a project that you want to bite off. If you have great search visibility, do you really want to restructure your entire website?
00:31:14
Speaker
Yeah, because I think you guys would admit like this is a huge project for you guys and took a lot of time and manpower to pull together, but it was necessary for you guys as you grow the products out of your business. Yeah, absolutely. It's very much driven by necessity, you know, especially if we want to continue to grow in the way that we that we want to grow. And this is I mean, this is a months long process for us. This is one of our I think one of our longest website projects that we've ever bitten off between
00:31:42
Speaker
our own websites and client websites. It was probably super frustrating for Krista and Alex for that matter because dealing with me, I just constantly go back and revise things. So there is a revision process that we would never afford any of our clients, not just simply because it would cost an outrageous amount of money. At one point, things were built and we just decided now this isn't it and we scrapped it and went back and basically redesigned every single page.
00:32:09
Speaker
you should tune into next week's podcast about how to deal with difficult clients. I should have Kristan here and you too could have talked about it and she probably would have used me as a as her example, you know, so but yeah, I mean, my point in saying all of that is simply that it's a huge investment of time, you know, even though for us like
00:32:29
Speaker
We don't have to pay ourselves to do it, but we are paying because we're spending a ton of time on it.
Lessons Learned & Conclusion
00:32:35
Speaker
So I think it's really important to understand what your goal is, what is the purpose of your website, whether it's achieving that purpose and then making a decision on what needs to be done.
00:32:47
Speaker
That's such great advice. Well, congratulations. And I'm super excited. Maybe I'll go and click around and test for you. But I'm super excited for you guys. I love the new images and the new branding. You've got Jack in there a little bit more as well. So I'm excited for you guys to be able to share your story of your family, too.
00:33:04
Speaker
Yeah, thank you. I'm interviewing Eric and John Hayes this week about brand photography, so we'll talk a little bit about how important that is. I think that it was just definitely one of those investments that we really valued while we redid our website. Of course, it's interesting because while we're closing out this project, it's never really closed out. There's continually going to be some tweaks and stuff.
00:33:26
Speaker
So if you are on our website, you notice something is a little bit off, feel free to send us an email so that we can make that update. But again, that's why we try to keep this website live for at least a week before announcing it to anybody, just so that we can deal with those issues without there being a huge influx of traffic while we do so. That's awesome. That's great advice.
00:33:47
Speaker
Well, Vanessa, thank you for your time this morning from Birmingham. I know you're traveling, and so it's difficult dealing with hotel Wi-Fi and just travel schedules and stuff like that. So I appreciate you taking some time talking to me about this new website. Thanks so much for having me. It was so fun to talk about.
00:34:06
Speaker
Thanks for tuning into the Brands That Book Show. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider subscribing and leaving a review in iTunes. For show notes and other resources, head on over to dvandchrista.com.