Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Episode 164: 5 Things Websites Should Not Do
887 Plays2 years ago
Find it Quickly (In the Episode):
2:50 - Transition to Minimalist movement on websites
4:00 - Focus on simplicity, prioritize performance
4:44 - Purpose of a marketing website
5:48 - Why you shouldn't overcomplicate your website
6:00 - Should you sign contracts on your website?
9:16 - Why mass emails from your website are a bad idea
11:51 - Transactional Emails
12:48 - Should your website Host PDFs or big deliverable files?
14:05 - Can your website host galleries?
15:17 - Best platforms for gallery hosting
16:27 - How to embed videos on your website
17:29 - If you find a dedicated solution that handles the heavy lifting, go with that
18:29 - What your website should focus on
Show notes and additional resources https://daveyandkrista.com/websites-should-not-do/
Recommended
Transcript
Effective Marketing Website Strategies
00:00:06
Speaker
Maybe you've never really thought about a marketing website versus any sort of other website, but for most of us, right, running businesses, we're going to have a marketing website and that website is what we use to market our business. And so I think maybe, you know, at risk of stating the obvious here, that your marketing website, everything should be oriented towards that purpose, marketing your business.
Show Introduction: The Brands That Book Show
00:00:26
Speaker
Welcome to The Brands at Book Show, where we help creative service-based businesses build their brands and find more clients. I'm your host, Davy Jones.
00:00:35
Speaker
Yes, your website can do that, but should it?
Website Functionality Limitations
00:00:39
Speaker
That's the question we dive into in today's episode. We definitely want our clients' websites to help streamline their business. But a website isn't the best tool for automating every business-related task. In today's episode, we explore some of the things we're occasionally asked to build into a website, but ultimately think shouldn't be on a website.
00:01:00
Speaker
Be sure to check out the show notes at DaveyandChrista.com for the resources that we mentioned during the episode, and we want to hear from you. Let us know what kind of content you'd like to see on the Brandsled Book Podcast as we move forward. To leave your feedback, just send us a DM on its Scram, at DaveyandChrista. Now, on to the episode.
Off-Topic: Bone Broth During Recording
00:01:22
Speaker
All right, recording day. You have your cup of hot bone broth on your desk right now. Delicious. It's like not a normal thing to drink. I've heard of people drinking coffee while they record and beer and other things, but bone broth I think is new.
00:01:42
Speaker
No, it's so good. It's a nice, you know, I don't want to have any more caffeine. So it's a nice hot drink, you know, instead of having another cup of coffee and so many benefits, so much collagen in there, good for my skins, good for my bones and joints. Just saying, just saying big bone broth fan and made here on the farm.
00:02:02
Speaker
Yes, 36 hours in the crock pot. That's right. That's right. Not forever. Anyways, we're not talking about bone broth today.
Defining Marketing Website Boundaries
00:02:10
Speaker
What we're talking about are things that you can do on your website, but shouldn't. I'm excited about this topic for a number of reasons. You know, also just something I've been thinking about when it comes to websites, website design, business. One of my buddies, Ryan, partner at Till, he posted recently on LinkedIn about how you should keep things
00:02:30
Speaker
Only as complex as they need to be simple as possible Complex is necessary and I've been thinking about that a lot when it comes to business and I think we have a tendency to Overcomplicate things and you know, maybe in the show notes I'll even take a screenshot of his post and put it there for anybody who wants to read it And then he's talking specifically about advertising, but I think the same is true for websites as well I think on websites to we're starting to see a movement back to Things that are more minimal. Mm-hmm
00:02:55
Speaker
you know, with any new technology, right? There's this excitement there and not to say websites are new technology, right? But I mean, in the grand scheme of things, they are still pretty recent, like last 20, 30 years.
00:03:06
Speaker
Yeah, oh, for sure. And so I think what we see, though, is all these tools that, you know, are created part, I think, of the, you know, just kind of the wave with any new technology, and they're exciting, and they add different marketing capabilities to a website, maybe, but then they have all sorts of, you know, downsides, especially when it comes to performance, which I think is something that we all have more of an appreciation of websites loading quickly.
00:03:28
Speaker
We should note that some of the things we're going to talk about today, I think people might do because they think it's going to streamline their business to keep everything in one place on their website. But what they actually end up doing is overloading their website, overcomplicating in their website. And a lot of these things are things that we have noticed people trying to do with their sites as we host their websites and troubleshoot why their site is crashing or why their site is like
00:03:51
Speaker
a hundred gigs, which is way, way, way too big for a website. And so, yeah, I think hopefully, like as we talk about these things, we can also give solutions that help people get back to simplicity.
00:04:01
Speaker
Yeah. And I agree. And so I was on a little bit of a tangent there. Really what we're talking about this in this episode are basically ways that people try to streamline their business using their website, but it doesn't end up streamlining their business or their website suffers as a result of some of these things. So anyways, my initial thoughts still stand. I'll probably still maybe take a screenshot of Ryan's post, but in the show notes for anybody who's interested in checking that out. You could do a whole nother episode on over complicating your business.
00:04:29
Speaker
Oh, yeah, for sure. But I still think, you know, until that episode comes out, you know, go and check out the show notes. You know, I don't know where we should jump in. And I'm sure other thoughts will come to mind when we talk about these things. Maybe where we should start is really talking about the purpose of a marketing website, right? Maybe you've never really thought about a marketing website versus any sort of other website. But for most of us, right, running businesses, we're going to have a marketing website. And that website is what we use to market our business.
00:04:54
Speaker
And so I think maybe, you know, at risk of stating the obvious here, that your marketing website, everything should be oriented towards that purpose, marketing your business.
00:05:04
Speaker
And this is going to be like DavianChrista.com, like christajones.com, like your main primary website. And then the other website that you might mention would be like secondary websites that have very specific purposes. You know, if you think about a company like ClickUp, so we use ClickUp for task management, project management inside our business and other businesses that we run.
00:05:24
Speaker
And ClickUp has a marketing website. You'll notice that you don't use their marketing website to also access the app,
Separation from Service Platforms
00:05:31
Speaker
right? You would go either to their desktop or mobile app, or you'd go to app.clickup.com, right? And the same is true for Show It. Show It has their own marketing website, but then you use app.showit.com to get into the app to edit your website.
00:05:45
Speaker
Yeah. So there's some distinction there. Anyways, all that to say, you shouldn't try to take your marketing website and do too much business on it. Right. You know? And so let's just jump in as an example here. The first thing you have listed here is contract signing. So I don't know if you want to chat about that.
00:06:02
Speaker
Yeah, so we're gonna talk about what you could do. You could either do something like creating a PDF contract for each client and uploading them to the media section of your website, which is something you can do whether you're on WordPress or Show It Elementor, and then have clients either download them using a browser extension or sign them using something like DocuSign, and then email them back to you, or some people might print them and scan them back to you.
00:06:30
Speaker
This is what not to do. Another thing you could do, but we don't recommend, would be to use a plugin like Gravity Forms or some sort of form builder to manually build forms and then ask clients to sign them. And so while forms like that are fine for simple contact forms or job applications, we use a form like that for our contact form and our job applications. If you're entering into a legal agreement, you probably want something that is more secure and easier to replicate.
00:06:58
Speaker
It's also really nice for people to be able to print contracts and save a copy. And a form built into your website is not going to be easy to print. It's not going to let people save a copy and so on. And then using a form builder, you also run the risk of maybe deleting the plugin accidentally or having the plugin fail or accidentally get uninstalled from your site. It can happen sometimes when you update your plugin.
00:07:24
Speaker
And you run the potential risk of losing your records. Yeah. And so just to summarize that, Krista was talking about things that you can do on your website, but we don't recommend. So that is, you know, creating PDFs for each client, uploading them to the media section of your website, going in that direction, or using some sort of form builder plugin, you know, to create, you know, contract forms that people can sign right on your website. Now, the latter, I think the finding some sort of plugin, right, might be possible to find a plugin that's really good at that.
00:07:54
Speaker
that maybe can live elsewhere. Still, I think that going with a dedicated solution for contracts and invoices like Dipsado, Seventeen Hats, some other... I haven't heard of Seventeen Hats for a while. Does it still exist? We use Dipsado, so I'm not sure what else is out there.
00:08:11
Speaker
But anyways, point being, using one of those other systems that's literally designed to do that exact thing, right? And not necessarily burdening your website with additional forms and then also having to store all of that data on your website. Yeah, those forms can be kind of big and clunky. So if you have a bunch of them on your website, it could get slow.
00:08:30
Speaker
Yeah, especially, and you have to store those forms for a good amount of time. So going with a dedicated solution like Dipsado is typically what we recommend or whatever DRM you're using, just it being separate from your website. Even if there is an integration, like for instance, you might embed a form from Dipsado on your website to initially collect a bunch of information.
00:08:50
Speaker
But all that, all the data. It lives in Dubsado, all the contracts live in Dubsado. Most of these systems also do invoices and payments and they just make signing contracts really straightforward and streamlined. They have perfected that process I think more than any plugin could ever do.
00:09:10
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. And again, why give your website that performance hit? Right. So the second thing you put mass emails, I'm assuming you mean like marketing emails. Yeah. Like big, big broadcast emails to a whole list from your website. So technically there are ways to do this using third party platforms, but we've noticed that websites are not the best at sending out emails. We've even seen that it can be tricky to get like a transactional email to get delivered from a website.
00:09:39
Speaker
And a transactional email is something like when you buy a product, the receipt that you get from that website, that is a transactional email. And that's because your website, your domain may not have the track record, the credibility that this email specific platform like Flowdesk does. And so it's easier for your email systems like Gmail to block email coming in from these like unknown IP addresses.
00:10:04
Speaker
Yeah. So the gist there is basically like the server in which that sends the email, right? A dedicated email marketing solution is going to make sure that the sending reputation of those servers is really good. Whereas, you know, whatever server you're using also to host your website probably doesn't have much of a reputation. At least they get started.
00:10:21
Speaker
Anyways, without getting into the weeds there, the point is that a Flowdesk, similar to what we were just saying about contracts, a Flowdesk, a ConvertKit, another dedicated email marketing platform is generally going to be able to do this more efficiently. Now, one caveat here, I've been experimenting with on the FarmFedbox website, what is it called? MailPoet.
00:10:42
Speaker
And MailPoet is actually a email marketing plugin that lives on your website that can send both marketing emails, but it can also handle your transactional emails. That is something I think if you have a WordPress website, that's worth checking out. We've had decent success with that right now. I wouldn't say though that FarmFedbox is yet a super high traffic website, right? Whereas one day I might want to take all of that and move it off of FarmFedbox.
00:11:08
Speaker
Right now, I don't think it makes a huge difference, but again, it's one of those things that ultimately could hurt the performance of the website. I will also say with MailPoet, there have been some technical things that I've come up against that we've been able to handle, but I feel like I have a
00:11:26
Speaker
at least enough technical chops to work through some of those issues. Whereas if you don't feel like you're a super technical person, something like Flowdesk is super easy to use. Flowdesk still has prettier emails than your mail. Flowdesk emails are a lot prettier. You might explore some of those options. For your email marketing solution, you go with something like Flowdesk or you go with something like ConvertKit that's great.
00:11:47
Speaker
I won't get into this now, but it's still worth exploring what you do for your transactional emails. Those can be sent through your website, but you might look into an SMTP plugin. To help increase deliverability. Exactly. It can keep email logs so you can see if somebody has been delivered their invoice or whatnot.
00:12:07
Speaker
I'll post in the show notes what we use. I'm not going to get into that now because that's not the point of the episode. Right. I'll also note that some of that Klimbert kit and Flowdesk, they make it easy to collect email addresses. They help you set up landing pages. They help you segment your subscribers into lists and set up automations. And they really just make it easier to grow your list and manage your list and keep it healthy.
00:12:28
Speaker
Yeah. And one thing I'll say about mail poet, it is not as advanced as flow desk and convert kit in the way that it can segment and tag subscribers, which is a frustration. So, you know, that's another downside. I think of using something like mail poet, at least as it currently stands.
00:12:43
Speaker
Cool. Another thing you can do on your website, but should not is host PDFs or big deliverable files.
Optimizing Website Performance
00:12:51
Speaker
So you can upload PDFs and other files to the media section of your website for both show it and for WordPress. And this is fine if it's just a few files, but if you do this for a lot of files, it can make your site really heavy. And we've noticed that if people are going to host with us and they're coming over to our website and their site is massive and we can't figure out why,
00:13:11
Speaker
it might be because they have a lot of PDFs and big files that they've been storing on their site. So not only can these files make your site load more slowly, they could even cause it to crash over time. So what should you do instead? We recommend housing these large files on something like Amazon Web Servers, which is super, super cheap, or Google Drive and then sending the links to those files instead of housing the files on your site.
00:13:37
Speaker
That's something we do with, for instance, our brand questionnaire and other documents. We use Google Drive primarily for a lot of those documents, but we don't try to automate that with our website because again, it's not the point of our website. Our website is also pretty big and maybe even a little bit too complicated, feels like at times.
00:13:54
Speaker
Yeah cool so next thing gosh even like saying this makes me cringe so never never never never do this you could use your website to host galleries so you could either upload galleries. Let's explain what you mean there probably people are listening like what gallery so you should never host you know what you're talking about.
00:14:15
Speaker
Like delivering a whole wedding gallery or portraits. Or some sort of visual artist that delivers large galleries to a client. So wedding photographer delivering an entire gallery to a client. You shouldn't use your website to do that. To do that, no.
00:14:31
Speaker
You could use an FTP server or an FTP client to upload files and then send that link to your clients and they could all drown them directly, kind of like a Dropbox or Google drive. Or you could, this would be so much work, but you could make pages on your site and then add a gallery plugin and upload a thousand images there, but it's going to load really slowly and it's going to really slow down your site. I don't even know if it would load at all. It might crash it.
00:14:58
Speaker
Again, you keep on saying you could do this as if you're recommending that. No, I do not recommend doing that. These are things that we have seen people do and we're saying do not do this. So what should you do instead? You should use something that specializes in delivering client galleries. So like a cloud spot.
00:15:18
Speaker
We've used Cloud Soil before and we like the platform and there are a whole lot of other ones out there that are similar, but these platforms are designed to store large files to make them load quickly. They offer multiple sizes of images for downloads. They let people place print orders. They let you easily communicate with clients. I know a lot of them are building in like email marketing and they really just make it so much easier to store your images instead of like housing them on your individual website.
00:15:43
Speaker
Yeah, especially if you're a photographer, you're going to get a lot more functionality out of using a dedicated solution. Just like we're saying with Dipsado and client contracts and invoices, things like that, going with something like a Cloud Spot or a pass we used in the past, but not for a long, long time. I mean, both we haven't used for a long, long time.
00:16:00
Speaker
you know, a solution like that. And as Krista said, you know, they're often going to have like print shop functionality in there, they're often going to have some email marketing tools that are built in there. And it's just going to really streamline things for your business, without you having to do all that on your website, and worry about yet another part of your website breaking or not working properly, or again, slowing down your website. So check out those will link to a couple solutions in there that we've used in the past, and maybe some that we just hear good things about.
00:16:27
Speaker
embedding videos on your website. So in the past few years, the internet has adjusted and technically you can upload MP4 files directly to your website. And on a platform like ShowIt where you're just gonna upload a small video that's like less than eight megabytes, it's gonna loop in the background of the canvas, maybe have some text above it, that's fine because those are small enough that they really aren't gonna hurt your site. But if you're a WordPress user, you could technically upload big full video files to your site.
00:16:55
Speaker
but we don't recommend doing that because that's going to significantly slow down your load time. Those files are huge and most places, most platforms, it's going to be better to upload the files to YouTube or Vimeo first and then either link to them on your site or embed them. I know both WordPress and Showit let you easily embed those files and they technically live on the YouTube servers, the Vimeo servers and so they still load fast and they still look really good but they don't add lag time to your site.
00:17:26
Speaker
Yeah, and I don't think there's much for me to add there. I think that the gist of it is if you can find a dedicated solution that handles the heavy lifting in the background on its own app server, you know, whatever, go with that, right? And I think that's true of each of these things that we just talked about, whether it be.
00:17:43
Speaker
contracts or sending emails hosting PDFs. The gist is, you know, if you can find a solution that its whole purpose is, you know, to whatever end you're trying to reach, right? Go with that. Now, the downside of these things, of course, is, you know, these things add up.
00:18:00
Speaker
A lot of them cost money. But with that said, even if you were trying to do it on your website, you'd often have to get maybe like a paid plugin to do that. Or pay for more server space. Yeah. Or pay for better performance on a given server. So you're going to be paying money either way. Yeah. You might as well use that money as efficiently as possible and as wisely as possible.
00:18:20
Speaker
Yeah, I think that one of the big key takeaways is to make sure that your forward-facing marketing site loads as quickly as possible. And so by using these other specialty platforms and software, that's going to help maintain that forward-facing website to load fast. Because if somebody is just reaching you for the first time and they're not familiar with them at all, you want to give them a good first impression. And if your site is lagging or slow, they might click away and never come back to you.
Engagement and Feedback
00:18:49
Speaker
Yeah. And so if you have any questions about this, if there's something you're doing on your website and maybe you just want like an alternative idea, feel free to reach out and let us know or post or comment on the Instagram posts associated with this episode or in the comments. And thanks for joining us guys.
00:19:08
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.