October 23, 2024 • 53 mins
In this episode, Chrissy Rey continues her conversation with Eve Simon, founder of Eve Simon Creative. They talk about essential website design elements, current trends, and when DIY website creators should consider hiring a professional. Eve shares valuable insights on creating effective calls-to-action, the importance of white space, and how to approach color choices and accessibility in web design.
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Episode Transcript
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(00:09):
Hey, everyone.
This is Chrissy Rey.
I'm back with Eve Simon.
We went a little bit long on partone, so we decided to carry over and
have another part with our discussionabout design with your website.
So welcome back, Eve.
Thank you.
And, and honestly, Chrissy, you and Icould sit here and talk about hours upon
(00:30):
hours, which we have about this stuff.
So even just two sessions, we arecompressing everything, but thank
you for having me back to continueto talk about this good stuff.
Yes.
And I suspect that I will be havingEve back again in the future to talk
about some more specific design stuffbecause as she said there's so much
that we could cover about design.
(00:50):
And I am not a designerI am not a design expert.
I know what I like, butI am not a designer.
So I would rather havean expert talk about that
Thank you for including me in this andyes, whenever you want me to come back
and babble at you for a while Just call.
All right.
All right.
Awesome.
So the next question thatwe have is a big one.
(01:11):
What are some design elementsthat every website should have?
Okay.
And you know, that's loaded.
It is a loaded questionfor a number of reasons.
One of which goes back to what we weretalking about in the first half, which
is what are you doing with your site?
What is your site supposed to achieve?
And that's going to determinesome of these elements.
(01:32):
The first thing to talk about is,is there a call to action or a CTA?
That can be any number of things.
Usually it manifests as some sortof button or a link somewhere.
But what does it do?
And where is it?
And how important is it for your audience?
So from a CTA perspective, when you aredealing with many clients who want to
(01:54):
have you do something, you come to thewebsite and there's a button to push.
Could be sign up for a newsletter.
Could be contact me.
Could be doing any other number of things.
In non profits, it tends to be donate.
So there's some options to do it.
The question of whether or not tohave a CTA, I will always say yes.
Because otherwise, why have a website?
(02:17):
The whole goal is you put somethingout there to do something.
And if you come to a websiteand have nothing to do, then You
know, why would you stick around?
So I think you needsome sort of CTA button.
It can be a link, but in a, in adesign perspective, most people
notice things that stand out.
We have a phrase that we call visualhierarchy, and that's like what you see
first, what you see second, what you seethird, a button is going to get attention.
(02:41):
Of course, there's the decisionof coloring the button, but you
know, we talked a little bitabout color before, so I think it
should always have a CTA button.
I think that there's also value inseeing imagery with your content.
So like when you come to a webpage,sometimes you come up with that
big old image, which we'll call ahero image at the top of the page,
(03:02):
there's some value to that, butmore value is what the messaging is.
So is it a promo?
Is it, is it something when you cometo it, you see something that tells
you to take an action immediately,or are you building sort of trust and
credibility as people take in the webpage?
And that includes promotions,that includes content.
So once you get past sort of theinitial, you know, homepage, everything
(03:24):
has something big, hero y at the top.
I think you should have some sort ofshort text promo with an image, something.
I think it's a pattern, which we cantalk a little bit about the difference
between patterns and styles and all that,but it's something that will be repeated
if you just think about it that way.
So a promo can be asingle piece of content.
A promo can be multiple pieces ofcontent, which we could call three
(03:47):
up or two up or four up depending onthe number of promos that you have.
So I think again, that depends unpopularby answer that depends on what you're
trying to achieve and how much contentyou have to fit into your homepage.
I think the design element thatis not like an element that you
need to think about is white space.
And people think white spacemeans literally white space.
(04:09):
I look at it as air.
So as people come down thewebpage, you don't want to stuff
so many things in there at onetime that people are overwhelmed.
So white space in my mind meanshow you space things out and
how people sort of build anunderstanding of what your story is.
And then maybe some examples of thingsto do in the middle of that story.
Definitely by the end of that story.
(04:31):
So when you do promos, thinkabout the right format for it.
Is it a photo and text?
Is it a bucket?
It's three little squares of text.
Is it just a graphic thathas something on top of it?
All of these things areelements you should think about.
There are other types of elementsthat are valuable to think about.
Things like blog posts.
(04:52):
If you run a blog, most platformswill allow you to embed them.
So you can get sort of a promotion or,you know, a little clip of something.
I think if your quote unquote thoughleadership is important, pulling
blogs onto various pages is valuablebecause not only do they get the
content, it leads them to another page.
(05:13):
So I think you can do it that way.
People sometimes do that withgalleries or portfolios that you bring
pieces of those in different places.
Another element that I'll talk aboutis when you come to a page, you should
never leave without anything else to do,and that gives you a number of options
of how to guide a person through a page,which leads to how do you design it?
(05:35):
I usually think that there should besome sort of call to action, maybe at
the bottom of a page, you know, youread this content, great, go sign up.
Or you could then say, Hey, I've readthis piece of content, here's three
other pieces of content driven by anumber of options that you could go to.
You never want to end a pagewith nowhere else to go.
But you also don't wantto force people to do it.
(05:57):
So these all, you know, all, allthe content options and discussions
have a design side to it.
I would suggest that you don'toverdo the various number of design
elements because then it gets, youhave something that looks like this
and something that looks like that.
And some, it's just too much.
So think about what's going torepresent your story the best.
(06:20):
Is it a big image with two lines of text?
Is it just a button with a headline?
That's a type of design element too.
In figuring out some of these thingsfor me in particular, when I'm
designing, I do something calledwireframes, which is sort of a, a black
and white schematic of a webpage andallows me to explore exactly this.
It allows me to explore thetypes of design elements.
(06:44):
Is it going to be blog posts thatcome in with a link and a button?
Or a button and no link?
It lets me sort of figure that stuff outand then in theory, you can go look at
all of the wireframes you do and countthe number of different kinds of designs
you've got design patterns and thensay, Oh, that's very much like that one.
So I only need one of them.
But it lets you, it lets you look sort of,again, I'm, I'm big on holistic design.
(07:07):
It lets you look across the breadthof it and see which things are
actually doing what you need to do.
It comes, you know, back to thePrincess Bride quote, I don't think
that means what you think it means.
You know, make sure it means whatyou think it means, and then that's
going to be a valuable element, designelement for the rest of your site.
But again, it startswith the unsexy stuff.
It starts with what does it need to do?
(07:28):
How long is it going to be?
And then what does it look like?
Mm hmm.
Okay.
So a lot to consider there,but not A lot to consider.
Yeah.
And, and in my experience, I geta lot of clients who they don't
want to do a call to action.
Cause they like their picturethat's on their homepage.
They love their picture andtheir pictures are beautiful.
Don't get me wrong, but gottaexplain to them that it's great if
(07:50):
you want your client or a potentialclient to just look at a picture.
Right.
What do besides look at a picture?
Right.
It has to be actionable.
It can't, it's not a magazine and itdoesn't have to be on top of a hero image.
It can be in your navigation.
So it could be, you know, Squarespace,again, the platform that I use,
will, won't give you a whole lot ofoptions, but it gives you sort of
options to layout your navigation,which is like, your elements would
(08:13):
be your logo, your navigation, andthen a CTA button, if you want it.
So it'll arrange it for you.
So it can lift it up to the top,so it's on every single page.
That may be another decisionfor design elements.
Is it on every page or isit only on one or two pages?
So, CTA falls in that too, but I'm withyou that it, you know, while your picture
(08:36):
may be gorgeous, no one's just goingto want to look at it because they're
just going to scroll right past it.
And then, then maybe an opportunity.
Right.
I mean, unless you're a photographer andpeople are just looking at your eh, maybe.
But even then you wantthem to hire you, right?
Right, right.
Either, right.
It's, it's either depending on,on what that hero looks like.
(08:57):
Are you hiring them?
Is it representing something foran organization like a nonprofit?
Is it the work that they do?
Is it their mission?
It's, you know, do you want tohave them jump in and donate?
It's not always hire me.
Sometimes it's just get involved someway and how you get people involved
is an entire science is an entirepractice of design and a segment of UX
(09:22):
user experience design all about that.
So it's a big decision, but youwant to make the right decision
and you want to make the decisionthat is driven by behavior.
Which, which I will lead this tosince we're talking about heroes.
Slideshow heroes.
Yes, and that, because thatbrings us to my next question.
What are some design elementsevery website should avoid?
(09:45):
And it's confusing because you're goingto hear us say, well, if you have a big
hero image with a button, go for it.
If you need an action.
The flip side of that is ifyou start to make it move and
there's multiple promos that havemultiple actions, why is that bad?
Because in logic would be it'sthree or four new options.
(10:06):
It doesn't work that way.
So the first thing I would tell peoplenot to do is to do any kind of carousel.
You find them mostly in hero spaces.
So you have like this big thingand it has an arrow on the
left and an arrow on the right.
Usually it auto rotates.
So you're sitting there and you'resaying, Oh, that's a pretty picture.
(10:27):
Boom!
There's a new picture.
And often with it, there's anew action, and you just barely
take it in the first one.
What people use that for, usually,is if they can't prioritize how the
rest of these actions and the rest ofthe content will be on the website.
So they stuff it into the top,especially if they're working for a
large organization that needs to berepresented and you say hell with it.
(10:50):
Cool, you get a big slide on the homepage.
Well, I hate to tell you,no one's gonna see that.
Because website behaviors, you know,no one sits there and just watches the
slideshow go on the top of your homepage.
There have been studies that have beendone and there, I don't know in the more
recent ones, but some of the older studieswere like, people look at the first image.
Great.
The second image, there's a fall off.
Okay, well, maybe some peoplesee it by the third image.
(11:12):
Nobody is seeing it.
Certainly by the fourth image.
Nobody's seeing it.
So sometimes you have these slideshowsthat are like five slides deep and
there's nobody seeing that stuff.
So if you've put important stuffthere, it's a waste of opportunity
and it'd be better for you tobreak it up and use it elsewhere.
People also do carousels for other things.
(11:32):
So you may see carousels oftestimonial, which I would recommend.
I would recommend having a design elementthat is some sort of testimonial we call
it social proof that people can have like,Oh, well, that person from so and so place
used you, then they must be, you're legit.
But if you put them in a rotation in acarousel, You don't, people don't see it.
(11:53):
So it's, it's, you know, that's lessof a, of a no, no, not in my mind, then
like a promo and a hero space, whichis gone because quotes are quotes.
But if you think that people, youknow, you put your third, the best
quote you've got is the third one.
And honestly, no, one'sgoing to freaking see it.
I'm sorry to tell you that.
Other things I would think about nothaving are very complicated animations.
(12:17):
Like when you hover over somethingand it does something crazy.
Partially because there'swhat we call friction.
You want to eliminatesort of visual friction.
You want to make sure that everythingflows and is understandable
and is logical and intuitive.
And if you have one thing thatgoes woohoo, another thing that
goes , it's a lot of bells andwhistles . I would keep your bells
and whistles at a minimum for that.
(12:39):
Doesn't mean you shouldn't have it,doesn't mean you shouldn't do some sort
of micro interactions, as they call them.
The piece of micro interactionsthat get tricky, though, is
like if you have it on a click.
Let's say that we have a coupledifferent behaviors, which are some
things are activated by themselvesmanually, which can be tricky.
Some things are activatedwith a click, and some things
are activated with a hover.
Back to talking about mobilehover doesn't exist on a mobile.
(13:04):
So, and these things that you, if youcan hide your most important content,
saying you see some sort of beautifulpicture, you click on it, you see text,
it's not going to do it on a phone.
So then it has to be a tap and thenyou have to tell it to be a tap.
It just, it adds more complexity,which I don't think is necessary.
The other thing that is controversial thatI would not add to your website is, video,
(13:26):
which can be useful in certain situations.
For example, if you are surfacingsome video from a YouTube channel, for
example, you could bring in a link.
You could sort of say, similar to howyou show your blog posts on the page.
You could say, these are my topthree videos from my YouTube channel.
And then a link that takes youoff to the YouTube channel.
(13:47):
Okay.
But what people do is theyembed a video on a website.
Which means it takes all thetime to load the video when
your page loads, sometimes.
And the bigger the video,the longer the load.
If a site doesn't load intwo seconds, we're gone.
Video can hurt you.
You'll see a lot of websites thathave videos sort of like in a hero
(14:08):
with something that's, you know,that has some sort of movement
to it, or maybe it's a loop.
Sometimes that is very useful, butthey found ways to optimize it and they
found ways to make it not add frictionand not add weight to your page.
So they're very, very unique situationswhere I would use video, to be honest.
But again, all of these are rulesthat are meant to be broken, but if
someone comes to me and says, I havethis great piece of video and it's this
(14:32):
15 minute thing I've done to promotemyself and I want to put it at the top.
I take a deep breath and Isay, let me explain why not.
Something like that might be good to embedon like your about page, lower down or on
Website Success Academy, I have courses.
Those obviously they need video.
Exactly.
But I'm not putting a video inmy hero, because that's, that's,
you know, Yeah, that's, it'sgoing to take forever to load.
(14:54):
And, and I, I will also add for, forany of you that don't know me from many
years ago, I was a Flash developer.
So if you remember Flash,I was all about animation.
Everything was animated.
Everything.
That, that was just what you did.
But now animation is thebane of my existence.
(15:15):
I will avoid it at all costs.
Yeah.
And yeah, any movement.
And not for the fact that I, you know,I'm not a fan of animation, but because
I'm also very big on performanceand optimization of a website.
And animation typically is going to addJavaScript and CSS to your site that
(15:35):
doesn't really, give you any benefit.
It's going to make your website slower.
Sometimes it makes it slower becauseit just runs slower in the browser,
but often it's going to be slowerbecause it takes longer to download
all of that code for the animation.
And it's also in a lot of cases goingto make your website less accessible.
Accessibility is really important,and if you have some kind of meaning
(15:59):
to the animation, like if theanimation adds some sort of meaning
to the content of your website, peoplethat can't see that animation aren't
going to get that meaning, whichmeans your website isn't accessible.
Which means in some areas theycould sue you because your
website is not accessible to them.
So these are all things that you needto keep in mind when you're considering
(16:20):
the animation and also with the video.
So that's definitely, um, if, well,while there are things that you
may not want to want to add from adesign perspective, you can't always
look at that design in a vacuum.
You need to think about allof the other factors that are
included in that decision.
And I think both of these questions,what you would include in what you
don't include are based on that.
(16:41):
It's based on context and it'sbased on why you are doing it.
If you can't answer the question,why you want that animation,
get rid of the animation.
You know, it's the Coco Chanel schoolof getting dressed in the morning.
Like before you leave the house,take off one piece of jewelry.
If you don't need it,it shouldn't be there.
And so if it is driven by,well, I really like it.
(17:02):
That's not good enough toput that on your website.
You brought up a really importantquestion about accessibility, which
also comes into design choices.
A lot of people will use flat areasof color for pieces of their design.
And it could be a promo.
It could be a large area.
Maybe it's an edge to edgepiece that you want to put like,
(17:24):
you know, button, some text.
You need to know that the people can readthe text if they have visual impairments.
And as someone who is in my midfifties now who wears readers,
it's earlier than you think it is.
So it's always better to erron the side of making sure
that your site is accessible.
And one of the easiest waysto do it is in color contrast.
(17:47):
So make sure there's sufficientforeground background, and that's
usually like a text on top of acolor or text on top of a photo.
You need to make sure that it is legible.
And there's a website called, I thinkit's called AI, AIM, uh, web contrast.
Color contrast checker and allows youto put a hex code for a foreground
(18:07):
color and a background color, andit'll tell you which of the levels
of accessibility it meets and whichones it just outright fails, right?
Sometimes, sometimes it has to do withthe size of the text, sometimes it has
to do with the, with the weight or, or,the selection of your text your type,
and they don't give you that optionthere, but it gives you enough to go off
of to determine colors and to determinesize of type and thickness of type.
(18:28):
And if, if the, if what is accessibledoesn't look right to you because it's
like, my God, I had to make my text 20point to have it on that background,
then you'll make a different decision.
It also keeps you from makingbad decisions like white
text on a yellow background.
Because it's not legible.
I mean, nobody, even, even withoutthe readers, nobody's going to
be really be able to use that.
(18:49):
So when you're picking how you stylethese design elements, I personally
think it's a no no to use bigchunks of color with type on top.
I think color can be used asa design element on a Photo.
It's an edge on a photo.
It is maybe, maybe it's adark line above your content.
So it's like a three pixelblock, something that gives
(19:12):
you something to look at.
And so, so you can not just see a wholepage of stuff coming at you, but don't
use it for text necessarily, and don'tuse it for a large chunk of content.
Of an area of your website thatcould largely be illegible.
I can't tell you how many times I've hada client give me their colors and I try
to implement them into the design and theywant white text on their selected color
(19:37):
or black text on their selected color.
And I use color.
adobe.
com.
They've got a accessibility checker thereand you can plug in your foreground and
your background color and see, is thisgoing to have high enough contrast?
And sometimes it doesn't.
So, you know, I, I say, well, maybewe should use black text on that
instead of white, or maybe we shouldmake the color slightly darker or
(20:00):
slightly lighter so that it works withthe color of the text that you want.
Sometimes it's just, it'sjust a matter of doing that.
And the guidelines as far as what thosenumbers are, what that contrast level
is, uh, for anybody that's curious is inthe web content accessibility guidelines.
It's from the World WideWeb Consortium, W3C.
So if you search for WCAG, it'lltell you what the contrast
(20:24):
ratio should be for that.
I can't remember off the top ofmy head, but there are specific
numbers that you want to aim for whenyou're, when you're doing that, so.
And tools like your Adobe tool andtools like my AIM, they'll tell you what
the percentage is, they'll tell you.
It's like four to five orwhatever it is, four to 3.
2.
But it'll also tell you pass or fail.
So you don't have to like,figure out the number yourself.
(20:46):
You just want to put the numbers inand then adjust it until it hits.
You bring up a good point about colorthat sometimes when colors are provided to
you, this is another design no- no for me.
Those colors can be determined,having nothing to do with online use.
They also can be determined,not understanding how much
of each you would use.
(21:07):
So.
You know, you may pick colors thatlook good together, but then you go
and you try to design a site with abackground of a color that doesn't work.
So, so there's some adjustmentsthat need to be made.
The other side of that is someonewho designs a logo isn't always
designing the logo colors for web.
It can be done for print.
It could be done for by itself.
(21:28):
It should be tested and allthis stuff before the logo is
complete, but it's really thehigher end agencies that do that.
And so that's often astep that gets cut out.
So I bear that in mind.
And then the codicil to that is mepersonally, if there's colors in the
logo and that are considered brandcolors, I don't necessarily use the
(21:49):
colors in the logo to color code therest of the site so it matches the logo.
Because in my mind, it meansthat the logo won't stand out.
So maybe you, when you're picking colors,you pick something that's complimentary
and that it's accessible because thenthe contrast will show up and you'll
say, Oh, that's different than that.
And then your logo gets to stand out.
(22:10):
So when you're, when you're designingstuff, I wouldn't make it matchy matchy.
I would make sure thatthe cheese stands alone..
Your logo is what it is.
Sometimes I will take a logo color, ifit is a web safe color that way, and
maybe make it a button color so thatyou're then saying color means something.
Your color using the logo is actually anactionable color and you click the button.
But again, you got tomake decisions on that.
(22:31):
I probably, I have a lot of don't do'sthen I have do do's, which I, I feel very
negative about, but you know, there's,again, there's two sides of everything.
If there's something you don't do,there's a way to do it so that it
may actually work better for you.
Another question that I have,this is, one that I added.
I didn't, I didn't tell youthis one before, so sorry.
(22:51):
I watched it.
I watched you ask, so here you go.
You saw me type it in there.
Here we go.
Yes.
Uh, so what are some web designtrends that we should know about?
Like, and I'll, I'll use an example.
Right now, a lot of websites are what,some people would consider very stripy.
You've got a block, and then you'vegot a color block with some stuff in
(23:12):
it and then you've got another colorblock with some stuff in it and so it
looks like a whole bunch of stripes.
So, that's one sort of trend butwhat are some other trends that we
should know about that maybe you'rethinking are good ones to consider
when it comes to designing your website.
One trend that has stuckaround is large type.
And what I mean is, you may notice this,now that I've said it, if you go look
(23:33):
at a bunch of different websites, peoplemay notice that this hero area or the
top section has bigger than normal text.
And it could be thicker than normal text.
So, there's a reason for it.
Nobody does, nobody shoulddo anything without a reason.
And usually that's meant to have impact..
It usually indicates that, thattypography is an important aspect of
(23:54):
the person who's designing it or , ofthe mission of the organization.
So it could be a headline that'sbigger than everything else.
And then that sets upwhat we, again, hierarchy.
Look at this first.
Sometimes there's very little imagery.
And it's just text promos andthey use text as a design element,
which is fascinating to me.
(24:14):
You have to be very strongin typography to do that.
You have to have verystrong opinions about type.
You may even have a brand font thatis a unique font to your organization.
But we're seeing that a lot.
I also am seeing clean sites.
That's, you know, everyone, when theysay, what do you want a website on?
It's like, I want itto be bright and clean.
(24:35):
Well, what does that mean?
I see a lot of sites thatare , not over, over the top.
I'm seeing more one page sites thesedays, which is sort of interesting
to me that it's one page thatleads you off to different places.
So the one page has to communicatea message, but can't be so much that
you don't want to go anywhere else.
They're starting to do the phrasebrutalism comes in for design trends
(24:58):
a lot, and it's really a uniquetype of project that uses that.
And what I mean by brutalism ispeople are, are beyond Bauhaus.
If you're looking at design stylesand you have any history of visual
design, it's structural, or it couldbe striking, or it could be downright
ugly, that that's a trend that people arestarting to do, if you can do it right.
(25:18):
If you can't do it right, it'sjust really freaking ugly.
So you gotta be really,really careful with that.
There was a period of timewhere video was a trend.
I don't, I'm, think people are,are understanding what that does.
And it's not.
I'm trying to think of othertrends that I'm noticing.
What about animated GIFs?
Animated GIFs and MIDI files.
(25:40):
I'm Do you want me, do you want me to cry?
Please don't make me cry.
Those, those were reallypopular in the nineties.
There were banners at the top ofyour site and things that scroll.
. Yes.
So was the dancing banana?
Yes.
The, the scrolling text thatwas, that was really big.
Yeah.
Back in the ninetiesand the two thousands.
(26:01):
Having, having the, the newsfeed scroll
. I, I, I think so.
Emojis are starting to become verypopular, but I don't see 'em on websites.
I see them in emails.
So email design is a different set ofthings to discuss, but people are using
them in subject lines and people areusing them like you would text because
they assume that people are goingto be similar to people who do that.
(26:23):
So you're used to texting with emojis.
So of course, in any other digitalformat, you want to see emojis.
I'm trying to think other mobile.
And these are not sexy trends, butlast I heard Google was penalizing you
if you didn't have at least a mobilesite that was indexable, if your site
(26:46):
wasn't mobile friendly in indexing.
So I'm seeing people, this notionof mobile first was always sort
of a pipe dream that you design itfor device first, and then you, you
drag it out to the size of a desktopand then you see how it lands.
Everyone says it, nobody does it.
I'm starting to see more people do that.
So that it is, it is, you're,it's a stuff that you're used
(27:09):
to dealing with on a phone.
Like you know where the, the,the button is for your menu.
You know how long it's goingto take to get down the page.
I don't know.
I don't know if I call that a trendversus a best practice, because that's
where Language gets funky, right?
I haven't kept up with the best of, or,you know, the trends for X cause every
(27:30):
year there'll be a billion articles thatcome out saying the new design, visual
design trends for websites in 2024.
But they tend to cycle back.
You're seeing things like one year it wasall of your buttons should have shadows.
And then the next year itwas, don't do a shadow.
And then there's this thingcalled skeuomorphic, which is
(27:53):
like realism and everything needsto look like it actually is.
So if it's a button, itneeds to look like a button.
If it's a book, it needsto look like a book.
And then everyone went away from that.
And a lot of that came intobutton design for apps.
That's also a side note to all of this.
That we're talking about websites.
We're not talking about onlineapplications or mobile apps , which
have their own set of things.
(28:14):
I don't even know whereskeuomorphism is right now.
I am seeing Shadows.
I am seeing subtle shadows so thatsomething stands off the page,
but you don't really notice why.
It's not heavy.
It's not the dancing bananaof shadows kind of thing.
Do you see anything else likestuff that crosses your path when
(28:36):
you're working with your clients?
I'm just glad that drop shadowsare not as big as they used to be.
Okay, right.
Because you can do them,but it requires custom CSS.
I just added a drop shadow for aclient because they needed more
contrast between their hero imageand the text that was on top of it.
And they didn't want to, I triedto make the overlay more opaque so
(29:02):
that there would be enough contrastbetween the text and the background.
And they didn't want to do that.
So I compromised and gave thema drop shadow and that added
just a little bit more contrast.
It's probably not going to passan accessibility check, but it was
better than it was for readers thatneeded to see what the text said.
Yeah.
I think that's, again,square peg round hole.
(29:24):
If I'm, there's things thatare worth fighting for.
You need to design something,it has to get built.
There's things that are worthfighting for in that translation.
So if a developer like Chrissy comesback and says, You're not going to
read this text on top of the photo.
There's some options.
There's a calculus that goes onsaying, Okay, how important is
it for me to do this, this way?
If it is really important tothe value and to the brand.
(29:46):
Okay, we're going to find a way to do it.
If it isn't, it's like, you know what,what if we just do a different color
overlay with the image of the textstands out, or what if we make the
text larger, or what if we take awaya line of this text underneath it?
I mean, there's things that youcan do if it's worth fighting for.
But you have to make thatcalculus yourself.
Like your client was not willingto do a darker color on top of a
(30:07):
photo so that the text was legible.
You were forced to make a decisionthat you might get penalized
for because it isn't accessible.
And that's a decision that as aclient, I would have bailed on.
I would have said, what do you think isthe best practices here as a developer
to do this, to get me the result I want..
There's a lot of, um, Ego, I hateto say that you have to let go.
(30:32):
Because you can designeverything pixel perfect.
I mean, you have to let go as a client,but as a designer, I know that whatever
I design, if it is in, in, not in HTML,I'm designing it in a comp, Photoshop,
Figma, Canva, whatever, there's a changethat's going to happen when that goes
into HTML, and if you're not flexibleenough to handle that or know enough
(30:53):
about the industry to come up with adifference of an option, um, you're
going to hurt yourself in the endbecause then you spend time and money
arguing about how to make that happen.
And ultimately it's probably notworth that energy to do that.
So ego sort of has to be leftat the door and, and listen
(31:13):
to your experts in some ways.
Yeah.
And that actually brings me to.
to the next question.
How do you like the segues?
I'm good with the segues.
Well, you're, you're able to read thequestions on the side for any of you.
I like to put the questions thatI'm going to ask on the screen.
So when I interview somebody, theyknow what I'm going to be asking them.
So it's not completely on the spot,except for that last question, which
(31:34):
I was typing in as she watched it golike, Oh no, I have to answer that next.
So, so my next.
Yeah, the next question is, a lot of thepeople that are listening are trying to
DIY some or all of their website, but whenshould they consider hiring a professional
to do some or all of it for them?
(31:55):
I hate that every answer ofmine starts with it depends.
But I'm a philosophy majorso everything depends.
There's a couple of pathways that Iwould suggest for somebody at this point.
One is if you have reached the end ofwhat you're able to do, I would rather
you call in a professional to help you.
So let's say you started the DIYand you've hit a roadblock thing.
(32:15):
Oh my God.
I don't know how to do this.
I, the system's fighting me.
I would hire a professional andhave a very specific list of things
you need them to, to help you with.
They may come up with other options,but what are you having trouble with?
The second way I would suggest doing itis if you do DIY it, there is value to
hire a professional from the beginning,especially if you come with thought
(32:39):
through your content, thought through someof the stuff we discussed in part one.
Like, what are your goals?
What are your audiences?
How, why are you trying to do this?
Do you have colors?
Do you have even if you don't havecolors, you have opinions on colors?
Come to a potential professional with someof the stuff going around in your head.
And if a good professionalwill help you sort that out.
The value of a professional isspecifically if it's, if it's a
(33:01):
professional, it's been in thebusiness for as long as Chrissy and
I have, they've seen this before.
Because there's reallynothing new on the web.
So you can find different ways to doit, and it's done in your way, but
sometimes under the hood it's similar.
So they can do it without rebuildingthe wheel every single time.
I think that that's a valuable thingto bring a professional in for.
(33:25):
I think there's also a loneliness to DIYthat if you find the right professional
that you click with, there's someone tobounce ideas off of and to collaborate
because it's a lonely business.
Like if you sit here in your room and allyou're doing is looking at your computer
all the time, it's like sometimes youneed to see a face saying, is this right?
Is this right?
A professional is gonna helpyou with that and help guide you
(33:47):
through the process again if theyare the right professional for you.
And I know the people out thereare starting to wince and go, but I
can't afford to hire a professional.
There are different levels ofprofessionals, and there's different
levels of engagement with a professional.
My recommendation is, while you'rethinking about all the things you
need to do, while you're doing awebsite, I would think about budget.
(34:07):
I would think about what do you havethat you can put into the project.
I'm not going to put numberson this, because everything
is fungible at some point.
But think about what you can afford to do.
And sometimes a professional, isif you talk to them and say, I
want to do all this stuff, they maynot bring it up to the end of the
website, if it, end of a meeting.
If you go into a meetingwith a professional, and
(34:28):
they say, what's your budget?
Step one, I would back away slowly.
Because they don't know what you want yet.
So, so have an idea of what you can spend.
Say, great, this is what I want todo, and at the end of the thing,
I only have this or I have this.
Based on what you know aboutme, what can you give me?
And a professional, unless it isastronomically low, like somebody
(34:53):
says, hey, I want to do a 20page website and I have 500.
We know the math isn'tmathing on that one.
Everybody will know that.
So, some of them will be obvious,like if we go through that whole
conversation, and it's like, hey, I wantto do all these things, that's great,
I love working with you, I have $500.
Well, at that point, it'swasted everybody's time because
we're not going to do that.
(35:14):
And even if you, this isa controversial thing.
Even if you get somebody, let's say rightout of school, who's willing to charge
next to nothing odds are you're going tohave to rebuild it with a professional,
another professional later down the road.
So you spent twice as much money.
So if you go with the cheapest option.
You get what you pay for.
So I would, I would say thatthis is what I have to work with.
(35:35):
It could come down to theprofessional saying this is okay.
For this amount of money, we can do Xand the variability can come in terms
of, you know, we're going to do onedesign instead of three, or we're going
to give you four different layouts thatyou can, we can work between, and then
you make the decisions on the content.
(35:55):
You determine what theimages are for that.
You know, there's lots of things thatas someone who's hiring someone who is
a DIYer, you can still do DIY and stillhire a professional at the same time,
because they're sometimes different tasks.
So I will always lean towardshiring a professional in my mind.
And, and it doesn't need to be as scary.
As you go to an agency, you know, andagain, I'm a former agency girl, so I
(36:19):
know that we build websites for $300,000.
Which is, you know, nobody, noindividual human has that money.
But there's, there's a wide rangebetween $500 that's inaccessible,
that your nephew does and $300,000for a big organizational site.
So see, see what they can do for that.
(36:39):
I will tell you that, that you willprobably, you may get less out of
a more experienced professional.
Or they'll charge more.
Some of them charge hourly, someof them charge project based.
It really depends on the type ofprofessional, but the amount of
time they take to do somethingmeans that every second they're
(37:01):
working is far more valuable thansomebody who may charge less.
And this is another controversial opinionthat it's like, it seems to be against
the brain to say, why would I hiresomeone who costs more like, well, because
you're only going to have to do it once.
And they may get it, you know,hopefully because you're charging
someone who has more experience.
That's why they charge more money.
You're going to get abetter product out of it.
(37:21):
There's no harm in saying I've donemy best and I have built a site
myself and it's not performing.
So frankly, you do both.
You DIY it, you build the site,you look at it, you see it's
not doing what it needs to do.
And at that point you go, JesusChrist, I need to hire a professional.
Some of those are best goingto be people who know people.
(37:42):
Most of my business as an independentperson comes from referrals.
Because when you work with somebodyand say, Oh my God, I know this
designer who does this great thing.
I recently just got a projectfrom a former colleague in
a totally different area.
And, and he said, Oh myGod, you need a website?
I know someone who can help you with that.
And then we talked and we gotalong and we're working together.
So it doesn't have to be the, Oh myGod, decision to hire a professional.
(38:07):
It could be a relief in some sense.
Right.
Yeah.
And I'll agree with the referralthing, the recommendations, I would
say 75 to 80 ish percent of thework that Pongos does is referrals.
I've got clients that I'vehad for 20 plus years.
I've known them almost as long as I'veknown Eve, but, but yeah, I, I have
(38:29):
one client that, that I do a, prettygood amount of work for every year.
And they refer me to other clients.
Sometimes the people over the past 20 plusyears, people have worked for them, have
moved on to other organizations and bringme into their, or that new organization.
And, you know, as they, as they move fromorganization to organization, we bring
(38:52):
on new clients for whoever they're for.
So, that's definitely,something to consider.
So if you are thinking about hiring aprofessional, ask other people that, you
know, and that you trust you worked with.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That you trust.
Don't you?
Like a lot of people just say,Hey, I need to hire somebody.
I've seen so many Facebook groups thatare like, I need to hire somebody.
Nobody knows what, and then thecase, then someone's going to jump
(39:12):
in saying, I only, I'm off school.
Offshore, I charge 10 an hour,I'll build you a website.
And on, on that vein, I will also say backwhen I was a flash developer, and even
now as a web developer, I can't tell youhow many times I had to redo somebody's
work that was the cheapest option.
(39:34):
They hired an offshoredeveloper that was $15 an hour.
I charge a lot more than $15 an hour,and I had to completely redo the work
because the $15 an hour developerkind of coded themselves into a corner
and couldn't find their way out.
So I had to basically startfrom scratch to redo it.
So that's, that's definitely something toconsider when you're thinking about it.
(39:57):
The other thing I, that I wannamention, when it comes to your
budget, if you're not going tobudget money, you need a budget time.
Yes.
Yes.
Yeah.
Time and money.
Same, two sides of the same coin.
Yeah.
If you're going to do it yourself andyou want to do it entirely yourself,
that's totally fine, but make sure thatyou are budgeting the time to do it.
And the amount of time it's goingto take you to do it, it's probably
(40:18):
going to be a lot more than itwould be if you hired somebody.
So even though it may costfinancially, they may cost more
money for somebody to do it for you.
It may end up costing less because thetime that you're spending doing it is time
that you could be making money on yourbusiness instead of doing it yourself.
And also when you're hiring aprofessional, there is no rule that says
(40:40):
that what they do needs to be custombecause I know there are designers and
developers like you who have a package.
That has an existing templatethat is usable for most people.
There's usually sometimes a littlebit of customization depending on your
level, but like I just recently starteddoing Squarespace packages and, and
(41:01):
one of them I call web doctor becauseit's like, this is for the DIY er.
This is for somebody whoscrewed up their site.
This is someone who's like,uh, Ooh, I have a small budget.
I've done it.
Are there small wins I can do here.
There's small things I cando to fix it all the way up
to building it from scratch.
And then beyond that is just like theydon't want to use any of those packages.
(41:23):
We just want to do some custom stuff.
So it's never, if you look atsomebody's website, which you normally
should do before you hire somebody.
And if they don't havea website back away.
See if they have packages,it's not a bad deal.
And sometimes those packages willrequire you to pay a little bit upfront,
and then you do it at completion.
There's rules usually aroundthose, but there is value to that.
(41:44):
And there's probably examples ofsites that they've done that fit
into those different categories.
That if you feel comfortable withit, It's still hiring a professional,
but it's at a lower price point anda little bit less customization, but
it's, it's still really valuable.
Cause I know you do that for pongos.
You have a series of thosethings that people can get and
that's hiring a professional.
(42:06):
We've got packages.
A small business starter package.
It starts at $2,400 and weuse templates for it.
That's how we're able to keep itinexpensive and it's a homepage,
contact page, two more pages.
So usually it's going to be likeabout and services and a blog or
news, whatever you want to call it.
(42:26):
But we do all of those, and, eventhough we use templates, most people
wouldn't know that we use templatesbecause they don't look like templates.
We're
Exactly.
Yeah.
We're, we're customizing the colors.
We're customizing the font.
We're adding images that go with thebrand of the client and they look like
custom websites, but they're, it's a lotless expensive than a custom website.
(42:49):
And like, You were saying for thebudget, we get that question a lot.
How much is it going to cost foryou to do the website for me?
I will say I have done websites that costas little as $750 and as much as $750,000.
Right.
So there's a range, there's a big range,and the range, basically, there's a
(43:11):
lot of factors that go into it, youknow, how much customization, how
much development, how much design andprogramming needs to go into it, how
much integration needs to go into it.
So, you know, that's, that'sdefinitely something to keep in mind.
I think it's a valuable resource.
Think about it as a resource.
I know a lot of people, there's pridethat's wrapped up in doing it yourself.
(43:32):
But back to what I said in part one,where I don't want you to have to
be a designer to speak design to me.
Don't speak design to me.
Just tell me what you need.
The best professional will be like that.
And it should be almost like a colleague.
It shouldn't feel like, Oh my God, I gotto talk to my designer now, you know,
it should be, this person's going tohelp me achieve what I want better and
(43:52):
faster and more and, and once, well,once on an ongoing basis, because as we
know, website scale, but you, sometimesyou can't even launch it because that
offshore designer, uh, you know, like,frankly, Chrissy, I sent you a client
whose site was developed that way and,and the, the, the owner wanted to do
(44:15):
all these design changes and we werelimited because the back end was so bad.
And we brought you in and you didwhat you could and then when the
first opportunity hit and she had abudget for it, we rebuilt that site.
And gave it a fresh new look, but thelook was almost less important at that
point than actually building it correctly.
And that person would have saveda lot of money if they'd just gone
(44:36):
with a professional that they vetted.
Right.
At a time.
So it's never, it's nevera bad thing to, to do.
There are sometimes designersout there, me included, Who
will do 15 minute free consults.
So if you have already have a site, youcan actually say, what would you change?
(44:56):
Or it isn't performed.
Like if you, if you're sophisticatedenough to know it's not performing,
why isn't it performing?
Is it not performing becausepeople aren't finding it?
That's a tech issue.
Is it not performing because ofhow it looks at the design issue?
Is it not performing becausemy story's not clear?
That's a content issue.
I recently just did one of these,someone recommended me, I was like,
yeah, I'll talk to her for 15 minutes.
And, and, she ended up not having thebudget to do it, which is fine, but it
(45:19):
got her going in her head, so I hopeat some point, She'll fix it, but there
are people who are willing to do that.
Sometimes you have to give up your nameand your email for their list that they
have to, you know, free is never free.
But it is often a valuable thing.
So if you see it to someone that youknow is a good designer, someone who,
you know, has done stuff for otherpeople that they trust, that they trust.
(45:42):
If you see that personoffering free time, take it.
And let that person know you,come prepared to tell them
what you want to address.
And they'll do what I'm doing, whichis just babble at you for 15 minutes
and tell you some things to do.
If you're, if you're a pure DIYer, sothat's a valuable resource as well.
Is there anything else that you wouldlike to share, talk about, or let
(46:05):
folks know if they're trying to DIYor thinking about hiring somebody
to help them with their design?
Anything else you want to addto what we already talked about?
I'm going to always go back to the basics.
I'm going to go back to story.
That is, that is.
Again, it's taken me a long timeto sort of whittle down what I
do into one word, but it's story.
If your story isn't clear, awebsite won't make it clear.
(46:30):
So my big push for everything is makesure you understand what you're trying
to do and who you're doing it forand that that person can understand.
So before you even think about, aboutputting anything down and making
anything pretty, know that stuff.
Know, know the hard.
Don't expect a web designer to comein and solve it for you because
(46:53):
the best web designers are justgoing to ask you questions and you
need answers for those questions.
I may be speaking for an OG designgroup because that's how I function.
I don't know how 25 year olds right outof college with website degrees function.
I will always try to find the story whatyou're talking about and to validate
that the story is correct because that,you know, if the story is wrong, I'm
(47:15):
going, you know, garbage in garbage out.
I'm going to design somethingbased on something that is
not accurate and not true.
I think there's anotherthing that may just be me.
Authenticity.
When you design a website is reallyimportant because authenticity leads
to credibility and it leads to peoplebelieving in you to hire you, which
(47:36):
ultimately believes in you creatingtheir product for people to hire them.
So if you don't come at it, honestly,and it's not custom to you, you say,
I just want to get more followers.
You have to buy them.
I'll do that.
Or I just need a website becausepeople expect me to have a website.
Those aren't good enough reasons.
So if that's true, tell someonethat because then the rest of the
(47:58):
decisions would be based on that.
And, and one of the examples Igive of this is I was working
with a very large brand who wasterrified to say anything bad.
And we designed three different versionsof their website for them, which they
chose one of, and it wasn't until westarted in the first week of developing
(48:19):
it, that they said, you know what?
We don't like this.
And that was months.
And I can't tell youhow many dollars later.
And that's because they, they eitherdidn't feel confident enough to talk
to the person truthfully, personbeing me, or, or I don't even, they
changed their mind halfway through.
But I think that if you can get to theroot of the authenticity of why you're
(48:39):
doing it and who you're doing it for,the rest of it won't be, I would say
slapdash easy, but it will come freerand it will all come back to that truth.
I may be, this is why marketing istricky for me because I find that
a lot of marketing is bullshit.
But a lot of stuff is madeup, and it isn't real.
(49:00):
And a real person like me, and someonewho's been in this business long
enough, if I come to a site, I candiagnose exactly how that happened.
And I can see the story.
I can smell the lie.
So don't give them a shot at that.
Just don't waste the time.
Be true, be authentic, be reliable,let people understand who you are.
(49:21):
And then if you are in a positionto be hired, to do work for them,
let's say you're a coach or you're,I don't even know what people,
you know, you're doing it, you'rewriting books, it's a vulnerable
place to be in therapy language.
But the, the payoff is so muchstronger because it's really you.
So do that and then everythingelse should come from that.
(49:43):
Ask questions.
I think that's another reallyimportant thing when you're working
specifically, you're working with aprofessional, don't be afraid to ask
questions and don't be afraid to tellthem that you don't like something
and why you don't like something.
Because if you come backto me and say, well, you're
using blue, I don't like blue.
There's no way to go from there for me.
So I have to say what kind of blueand do not like it because it's dark.
(50:05):
Do you not like it because it's a fullswath of it on your current website
and you need it to be a smaller thing.
There's a lot of, there's a lot of whys.
So I would ask a lot ofquestions until you're satisfied.
Be prepared to get some pushbackif you are, if you're working, you
know, if you're out of the DIY world.
If you're in the DIY world,I would also test your design
(50:28):
with members of that audience.
So don't test it with your best friend.
You know, your mother's going tosay, you know, Oh, most mothers,
Oh, it's wonderful, darling.
Now, if you're doing a website for,I want to say for coaches again, and
you know, someone who is a coach, goto them and put the, this is the goal.
This is what I'm doing it for.
This is what the website looks like.
Do you think that achieves it?
(50:49):
And if they say no, and they're youraudience, then that's a problem.
If they say yes.
You're in the ballgame.
So do that, but avoidthe, what do you think?
I see so many of those popping upeverywhere, especially social media
saying, I've just designed thiswebsite or I like you, I'm a podcaster.
So that happens with podcast coverart, a little square that you see, some
(51:11):
people say, what do you think about this?
And there's no context for it.
So how can I, you know, why are you allsaying you like it or you don't like it?
What?
You don't know what it does.
That's it.
So if you don't ask the questions,be prepared for the person that
you've hired to ask you thequestions so you can answer them.
So if somebody would like to work withyou, if they need help with, let's
say a custom design or Squarespace,or they just want to take advantage
(51:35):
of your 15 minute free consultation,how can they get in touch with you?
My website is evesimoncreative.Com.
And there is a form.
There's a contact form and there is aCTA button, that encourages you to fill
out a form and on the form, you can say,I heard you on Chrissy's podcast, and
I'm interested in, I here's my project.
You could say, they'resaying I've done something.
(51:56):
I don't know what to do with it.
Will you look at, so there's a, there'sa field there that you could just fill
out and say what you're interested in.
And then I'll get back to you.
Usually it's within 24 hours.
I have availability now, which is great.
And I like to work with smallbusinesses because there's an
immediacy to the work that we do.
If you're a slightly largerorganization or you're like a big
(52:17):
non profit or a medium non profit,contact me, but sometimes I'll
pull in a partner like Chrissy.
Because if I feel that the scopeof your site is probably too
big for one individual personto handle, I need to partner up.
And I will, you know, we, Chrissyand I will combine and work
on things like that with you.
But the first thing starts withchecking out my website, seeing if,
(52:37):
if what I do is interesting to you.
And then just reaching outbecause I like to meet new people.
Yes.
Awesome.
Well, thank you so much, Eve.
I appreciate you coming on here andchatting with me and giving me all this
information and giving the audienceall this information about design.
And I'm sure you gave people a lotof things to consider, a lot of
(53:00):
things to think about when it comesto the design for their website.
So I really appreciate it.
Thank you.
And just don't be scared.
I know I gave you guys a lot of stuff.
I don't mean to scare you.
Just do it.
Just do it.
Get started.
Step one is where you go.
And if you need somebody we're available.
Yes.
Thank you.
(53:21):
Well, thank you everybody for listening.
I appreciate you coming on here.
If you haven't alreadysubscribed, make sure you do.
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Hey, everyone.
This is Chrissy Rey.
I'm back with Eve Simon.
We went a little bit long on partone, so we decided to carry over and
have another part with our discussionabout design with your website.
So welcome back, Eve.
Thank you.
And, and honestly, Chrissy, you and Icould sit here and talk about hours upon
(00:30):
hours, which we have about this stuff.
So even just two sessions, we arecompressing everything, but thank
you for having me back to continueto talk about this good stuff.
Yes.
And I suspect that I will be havingEve back again in the future to talk
about some more specific design stuffbecause as she said there's so much
that we could cover about design.
(00:50):
And I am not a designerI am not a design expert.
I know what I like, butI am not a designer.
So I would rather havean expert talk about that
Thank you for including me in this andyes, whenever you want me to come back
and babble at you for a while Just call.
All right.
All right.
Awesome.
So the next question thatwe have is a big one.
(01:11):
What are some design elementsthat every website should have?
Okay.
And you know, that's loaded.
It is a loaded questionfor a number of reasons.
One of which goes back to what we weretalking about in the first half, which
is what are you doing with your site?
What is your site supposed to achieve?
And that's going to determinesome of these elements.
(01:32):
The first thing to talk about is,is there a call to action or a CTA?
That can be any number of things.
Usually it manifests as some sortof button or a link somewhere.
But what does it do?
And where is it?
And how important is it for your audience?
So from a CTA perspective, when you aredealing with many clients who want to
(01:54):
have you do something, you come to thewebsite and there's a button to push.
Could be sign up for a newsletter.
Could be contact me.
Could be doing any other number of things.
In non profits, it tends to be donate.
So there's some options to do it.
The question of whether or not tohave a CTA, I will always say yes.
Because otherwise, why have a website?
(02:17):
The whole goal is you put somethingout there to do something.
And if you come to a websiteand have nothing to do, then You
know, why would you stick around?
So I think you needsome sort of CTA button.
It can be a link, but in a, in adesign perspective, most people
notice things that stand out.
We have a phrase that we call visualhierarchy, and that's like what you see
first, what you see second, what you seethird, a button is going to get attention.
(02:41):
Of course, there's the decisionof coloring the button, but you
know, we talked a little bitabout color before, so I think it
should always have a CTA button.
I think that there's also value inseeing imagery with your content.
So like when you come to a webpage,sometimes you come up with that
big old image, which we'll call ahero image at the top of the page,
(03:02):
there's some value to that, butmore value is what the messaging is.
So is it a promo?
Is it, is it something when you cometo it, you see something that tells
you to take an action immediately,or are you building sort of trust and
credibility as people take in the webpage?
And that includes promotions,that includes content.
So once you get past sort of theinitial, you know, homepage, everything
(03:24):
has something big, hero y at the top.
I think you should have some sort ofshort text promo with an image, something.
I think it's a pattern, which we cantalk a little bit about the difference
between patterns and styles and all that,but it's something that will be repeated
if you just think about it that way.
So a promo can be asingle piece of content.
A promo can be multiple pieces ofcontent, which we could call three
(03:47):
up or two up or four up depending onthe number of promos that you have.
So I think again, that depends unpopularby answer that depends on what you're
trying to achieve and how much contentyou have to fit into your homepage.
I think the design element thatis not like an element that you
need to think about is white space.
And people think white spacemeans literally white space.
(04:09):
I look at it as air.
So as people come down thewebpage, you don't want to stuff
so many things in there at onetime that people are overwhelmed.
So white space in my mind meanshow you space things out and
how people sort of build anunderstanding of what your story is.
And then maybe some examples of thingsto do in the middle of that story.
Definitely by the end of that story.
(04:31):
So when you do promos, thinkabout the right format for it.
Is it a photo and text?
Is it a bucket?
It's three little squares of text.
Is it just a graphic thathas something on top of it?
All of these things areelements you should think about.
There are other types of elementsthat are valuable to think about.
Things like blog posts.
(04:52):
If you run a blog, most platformswill allow you to embed them.
So you can get sort of a promotion or,you know, a little clip of something.
I think if your quote unquote thoughleadership is important, pulling
blogs onto various pages is valuablebecause not only do they get the
content, it leads them to another page.
(05:13):
So I think you can do it that way.
People sometimes do that withgalleries or portfolios that you bring
pieces of those in different places.
Another element that I'll talk aboutis when you come to a page, you should
never leave without anything else to do,and that gives you a number of options
of how to guide a person through a page,which leads to how do you design it?
(05:35):
I usually think that there should besome sort of call to action, maybe at
the bottom of a page, you know, youread this content, great, go sign up.
Or you could then say, Hey, I've readthis piece of content, here's three
other pieces of content driven by anumber of options that you could go to.
You never want to end a pagewith nowhere else to go.
But you also don't wantto force people to do it.
(05:57):
So these all, you know, all, allthe content options and discussions
have a design side to it.
I would suggest that you don'toverdo the various number of design
elements because then it gets, youhave something that looks like this
and something that looks like that.
And some, it's just too much.
So think about what's going torepresent your story the best.
(06:20):
Is it a big image with two lines of text?
Is it just a button with a headline?
That's a type of design element too.
In figuring out some of these thingsfor me in particular, when I'm
designing, I do something calledwireframes, which is sort of a, a black
and white schematic of a webpage andallows me to explore exactly this.
It allows me to explore thetypes of design elements.
(06:44):
Is it going to be blog posts thatcome in with a link and a button?
Or a button and no link?
It lets me sort of figure that stuff outand then in theory, you can go look at
all of the wireframes you do and countthe number of different kinds of designs
you've got design patterns and thensay, Oh, that's very much like that one.
So I only need one of them.
But it lets you, it lets you look sort of,again, I'm, I'm big on holistic design.
(07:07):
It lets you look across the breadthof it and see which things are
actually doing what you need to do.
It comes, you know, back to thePrincess Bride quote, I don't think
that means what you think it means.
You know, make sure it means whatyou think it means, and then that's
going to be a valuable element, designelement for the rest of your site.
But again, it startswith the unsexy stuff.
It starts with what does it need to do?
(07:28):
How long is it going to be?
And then what does it look like?
Mm hmm.
Okay.
So a lot to consider there,but not A lot to consider.
Yeah.
And, and in my experience, I geta lot of clients who they don't
want to do a call to action.
Cause they like their picturethat's on their homepage.
They love their picture andtheir pictures are beautiful.
Don't get me wrong, but gottaexplain to them that it's great if
(07:50):
you want your client or a potentialclient to just look at a picture.
Right.
What do besides look at a picture?
Right.
It has to be actionable.
It can't, it's not a magazine and itdoesn't have to be on top of a hero image.
It can be in your navigation.
So it could be, you know, Squarespace,again, the platform that I use,
will, won't give you a whole lot ofoptions, but it gives you sort of
options to layout your navigation,which is like, your elements would
(08:13):
be your logo, your navigation, andthen a CTA button, if you want it.
So it'll arrange it for you.
So it can lift it up to the top,so it's on every single page.
That may be another decisionfor design elements.
Is it on every page or isit only on one or two pages?
So, CTA falls in that too, but I'm withyou that it, you know, while your picture
(08:36):
may be gorgeous, no one's just goingto want to look at it because they're
just going to scroll right past it.
And then, then maybe an opportunity.
Right.
I mean, unless you're a photographer andpeople are just looking at your eh, maybe.
But even then you wantthem to hire you, right?
Right, right.
Either, right.
It's, it's either depending on,on what that hero looks like.
(08:57):
Are you hiring them?
Is it representing something foran organization like a nonprofit?
Is it the work that they do?
Is it their mission?
It's, you know, do you want tohave them jump in and donate?
It's not always hire me.
Sometimes it's just get involved someway and how you get people involved
is an entire science is an entirepractice of design and a segment of UX
(09:22):
user experience design all about that.
So it's a big decision, but youwant to make the right decision
and you want to make the decisionthat is driven by behavior.
Which, which I will lead this tosince we're talking about heroes.
Slideshow heroes.
Yes, and that, because thatbrings us to my next question.
What are some design elementsevery website should avoid?
(09:45):
And it's confusing because you're goingto hear us say, well, if you have a big
hero image with a button, go for it.
If you need an action.
The flip side of that is ifyou start to make it move and
there's multiple promos that havemultiple actions, why is that bad?
Because in logic would be it'sthree or four new options.
(10:06):
It doesn't work that way.
So the first thing I would tell peoplenot to do is to do any kind of carousel.
You find them mostly in hero spaces.
So you have like this big thingand it has an arrow on the
left and an arrow on the right.
Usually it auto rotates.
So you're sitting there and you'resaying, Oh, that's a pretty picture.
(10:27):
Boom!
There's a new picture.
And often with it, there's anew action, and you just barely
take it in the first one.
What people use that for, usually,is if they can't prioritize how the
rest of these actions and the rest ofthe content will be on the website.
So they stuff it into the top,especially if they're working for a
large organization that needs to berepresented and you say hell with it.
(10:50):
Cool, you get a big slide on the homepage.
Well, I hate to tell you,no one's gonna see that.
Because website behaviors, you know,no one sits there and just watches the
slideshow go on the top of your homepage.
There have been studies that have beendone and there, I don't know in the more
recent ones, but some of the older studieswere like, people look at the first image.
Great.
The second image, there's a fall off.
Okay, well, maybe some peoplesee it by the third image.
(11:12):
Nobody is seeing it.
Certainly by the fourth image.
Nobody's seeing it.
So sometimes you have these slideshowsthat are like five slides deep and
there's nobody seeing that stuff.
So if you've put important stuffthere, it's a waste of opportunity
and it'd be better for you tobreak it up and use it elsewhere.
People also do carousels for other things.
(11:32):
So you may see carousels oftestimonial, which I would recommend.
I would recommend having a design elementthat is some sort of testimonial we call
it social proof that people can have like,Oh, well, that person from so and so place
used you, then they must be, you're legit.
But if you put them in a rotation in acarousel, You don't, people don't see it.
(11:53):
So it's, it's, you know, that's lessof a, of a no, no, not in my mind, then
like a promo and a hero space, whichis gone because quotes are quotes.
But if you think that people, youknow, you put your third, the best
quote you've got is the third one.
And honestly, no, one'sgoing to freaking see it.
I'm sorry to tell you that.
Other things I would think about nothaving are very complicated animations.
(12:17):
Like when you hover over somethingand it does something crazy.
Partially because there'swhat we call friction.
You want to eliminatesort of visual friction.
You want to make sure that everythingflows and is understandable
and is logical and intuitive.
And if you have one thing thatgoes woohoo, another thing that
goes , it's a lot of bells andwhistles . I would keep your bells
and whistles at a minimum for that.
(12:39):
Doesn't mean you shouldn't have it,doesn't mean you shouldn't do some sort
of micro interactions, as they call them.
The piece of micro interactionsthat get tricky, though, is
like if you have it on a click.
Let's say that we have a coupledifferent behaviors, which are some
things are activated by themselvesmanually, which can be tricky.
Some things are activatedwith a click, and some things
are activated with a hover.
Back to talking about mobilehover doesn't exist on a mobile.
(13:04):
So, and these things that you, if youcan hide your most important content,
saying you see some sort of beautifulpicture, you click on it, you see text,
it's not going to do it on a phone.
So then it has to be a tap and thenyou have to tell it to be a tap.
It just, it adds more complexity,which I don't think is necessary.
The other thing that is controversial thatI would not add to your website is, video,
(13:26):
which can be useful in certain situations.
For example, if you are surfacingsome video from a YouTube channel, for
example, you could bring in a link.
You could sort of say, similar to howyou show your blog posts on the page.
You could say, these are my topthree videos from my YouTube channel.
And then a link that takes youoff to the YouTube channel.
(13:47):
Okay.
But what people do is theyembed a video on a website.
Which means it takes all thetime to load the video when
your page loads, sometimes.
And the bigger the video,the longer the load.
If a site doesn't load intwo seconds, we're gone.
Video can hurt you.
You'll see a lot of websites thathave videos sort of like in a hero
(14:08):
with something that's, you know,that has some sort of movement
to it, or maybe it's a loop.
Sometimes that is very useful, butthey found ways to optimize it and they
found ways to make it not add frictionand not add weight to your page.
So they're very, very unique situationswhere I would use video, to be honest.
But again, all of these are rulesthat are meant to be broken, but if
someone comes to me and says, I havethis great piece of video and it's this
(14:32):
15 minute thing I've done to promotemyself and I want to put it at the top.
I take a deep breath and Isay, let me explain why not.
Something like that might be good to embedon like your about page, lower down or on
Website Success Academy, I have courses.
Those obviously they need video.
Exactly.
But I'm not putting a video inmy hero, because that's, that's,
you know, Yeah, that's, it'sgoing to take forever to load.
(14:54):
And, and I, I will also add for, forany of you that don't know me from many
years ago, I was a Flash developer.
So if you remember Flash,I was all about animation.
Everything was animated.
Everything.
That, that was just what you did.
But now animation is thebane of my existence.
(15:15):
I will avoid it at all costs.
Yeah.
And yeah, any movement.
And not for the fact that I, you know,I'm not a fan of animation, but because
I'm also very big on performanceand optimization of a website.
And animation typically is going to addJavaScript and CSS to your site that
(15:35):
doesn't really, give you any benefit.
It's going to make your website slower.
Sometimes it makes it slower becauseit just runs slower in the browser,
but often it's going to be slowerbecause it takes longer to download
all of that code for the animation.
And it's also in a lot of cases goingto make your website less accessible.
Accessibility is really important,and if you have some kind of meaning
(15:59):
to the animation, like if theanimation adds some sort of meaning
to the content of your website, peoplethat can't see that animation aren't
going to get that meaning, whichmeans your website isn't accessible.
Which means in some areas theycould sue you because your
website is not accessible to them.
So these are all things that you needto keep in mind when you're considering
(16:20):
the animation and also with the video.
So that's definitely, um, if, well,while there are things that you
may not want to want to add from adesign perspective, you can't always
look at that design in a vacuum.
You need to think about allof the other factors that are
included in that decision.
And I think both of these questions,what you would include in what you
don't include are based on that.
(16:41):
It's based on context and it'sbased on why you are doing it.
If you can't answer the question,why you want that animation,
get rid of the animation.
You know, it's the Coco Chanel schoolof getting dressed in the morning.
Like before you leave the house,take off one piece of jewelry.
If you don't need it,it shouldn't be there.
And so if it is driven by,well, I really like it.
(17:02):
That's not good enough toput that on your website.
You brought up a really importantquestion about accessibility, which
also comes into design choices.
A lot of people will use flat areasof color for pieces of their design.
And it could be a promo.
It could be a large area.
Maybe it's an edge to edgepiece that you want to put like,
(17:24):
you know, button, some text.
You need to know that the people can readthe text if they have visual impairments.
And as someone who is in my midfifties now who wears readers,
it's earlier than you think it is.
So it's always better to erron the side of making sure
that your site is accessible.
And one of the easiest waysto do it is in color contrast.
(17:47):
So make sure there's sufficientforeground background, and that's
usually like a text on top of acolor or text on top of a photo.
You need to make sure that it is legible.
And there's a website called, I thinkit's called AI, AIM, uh, web contrast.
Color contrast checker and allows youto put a hex code for a foreground
(18:07):
color and a background color, andit'll tell you which of the levels
of accessibility it meets and whichones it just outright fails, right?
Sometimes, sometimes it has to do withthe size of the text, sometimes it has
to do with the, with the weight or, or,the selection of your text your type,
and they don't give you that optionthere, but it gives you enough to go off
of to determine colors and to determinesize of type and thickness of type.
(18:28):
And if, if the, if what is accessibledoesn't look right to you because it's
like, my God, I had to make my text 20point to have it on that background,
then you'll make a different decision.
It also keeps you from makingbad decisions like white
text on a yellow background.
Because it's not legible.
I mean, nobody, even, even withoutthe readers, nobody's going to
be really be able to use that.
(18:49):
So when you're picking how you stylethese design elements, I personally
think it's a no no to use bigchunks of color with type on top.
I think color can be used asa design element on a Photo.
It's an edge on a photo.
It is maybe, maybe it's adark line above your content.
So it's like a three pixelblock, something that gives
(19:12):
you something to look at.
And so, so you can not just see a wholepage of stuff coming at you, but don't
use it for text necessarily, and don'tuse it for a large chunk of content.
Of an area of your website thatcould largely be illegible.
I can't tell you how many times I've hada client give me their colors and I try
to implement them into the design and theywant white text on their selected color
(19:37):
or black text on their selected color.
And I use color.
adobe.
com.
They've got a accessibility checker thereand you can plug in your foreground and
your background color and see, is thisgoing to have high enough contrast?
And sometimes it doesn't.
So, you know, I, I say, well, maybewe should use black text on that
instead of white, or maybe we shouldmake the color slightly darker or
(20:00):
slightly lighter so that it works withthe color of the text that you want.
Sometimes it's just, it'sjust a matter of doing that.
And the guidelines as far as what thosenumbers are, what that contrast level
is, uh, for anybody that's curious is inthe web content accessibility guidelines.
It's from the World WideWeb Consortium, W3C.
So if you search for WCAG, it'lltell you what the contrast
(20:24):
ratio should be for that.
I can't remember off the top ofmy head, but there are specific
numbers that you want to aim for whenyou're, when you're doing that, so.
And tools like your Adobe tool andtools like my AIM, they'll tell you what
the percentage is, they'll tell you.
It's like four to five orwhatever it is, four to 3.
2.
But it'll also tell you pass or fail.
So you don't have to like,figure out the number yourself.
(20:46):
You just want to put the numbers inand then adjust it until it hits.
You bring up a good point about colorthat sometimes when colors are provided to
you, this is another design no- no for me.
Those colors can be determined,having nothing to do with online use.
They also can be determined,not understanding how much
of each you would use.
(21:07):
So.
You know, you may pick colors thatlook good together, but then you go
and you try to design a site with abackground of a color that doesn't work.
So, so there's some adjustmentsthat need to be made.
The other side of that is someonewho designs a logo isn't always
designing the logo colors for web.
It can be done for print.
It could be done for by itself.
(21:28):
It should be tested and allthis stuff before the logo is
complete, but it's really thehigher end agencies that do that.
And so that's often astep that gets cut out.
So I bear that in mind.
And then the codicil to that is mepersonally, if there's colors in the
logo and that are considered brandcolors, I don't necessarily use the
(21:49):
colors in the logo to color code therest of the site so it matches the logo.
Because in my mind, it meansthat the logo won't stand out.
So maybe you, when you're picking colors,you pick something that's complimentary
and that it's accessible because thenthe contrast will show up and you'll
say, Oh, that's different than that.
And then your logo gets to stand out.
(22:10):
So when you're, when you're designingstuff, I wouldn't make it matchy matchy.
I would make sure thatthe cheese stands alone..
Your logo is what it is.
Sometimes I will take a logo color, ifit is a web safe color that way, and
maybe make it a button color so thatyou're then saying color means something.
Your color using the logo is actually anactionable color and you click the button.
But again, you got tomake decisions on that.
(22:31):
I probably, I have a lot of don't do'sthen I have do do's, which I, I feel very
negative about, but you know, there's,again, there's two sides of everything.
If there's something you don't do,there's a way to do it so that it
may actually work better for you.
Another question that I have,this is, one that I added.
I didn't, I didn't tell youthis one before, so sorry.
(22:51):
I watched it.
I watched you ask, so here you go.
You saw me type it in there.
Here we go.
Yes.
Uh, so what are some web designtrends that we should know about?
Like, and I'll, I'll use an example.
Right now, a lot of websites are what,some people would consider very stripy.
You've got a block, and then you'vegot a color block with some stuff in
(23:12):
it and then you've got another colorblock with some stuff in it and so it
looks like a whole bunch of stripes.
So, that's one sort of trend butwhat are some other trends that we
should know about that maybe you'rethinking are good ones to consider
when it comes to designing your website.
One trend that has stuckaround is large type.
And what I mean is, you may notice this,now that I've said it, if you go look
(23:33):
at a bunch of different websites, peoplemay notice that this hero area or the
top section has bigger than normal text.
And it could be thicker than normal text.
So, there's a reason for it.
Nobody does, nobody shoulddo anything without a reason.
And usually that's meant to have impact..
It usually indicates that, thattypography is an important aspect of
(23:54):
the person who's designing it or , ofthe mission of the organization.
So it could be a headline that'sbigger than everything else.
And then that sets upwhat we, again, hierarchy.
Look at this first.
Sometimes there's very little imagery.
And it's just text promos andthey use text as a design element,
which is fascinating to me.
(24:14):
You have to be very strongin typography to do that.
You have to have verystrong opinions about type.
You may even have a brand font thatis a unique font to your organization.
But we're seeing that a lot.
I also am seeing clean sites.
That's, you know, everyone, when theysay, what do you want a website on?
It's like, I want itto be bright and clean.
(24:35):
Well, what does that mean?
I see a lot of sites thatare , not over, over the top.
I'm seeing more one page sites thesedays, which is sort of interesting
to me that it's one page thatleads you off to different places.
So the one page has to communicatea message, but can't be so much that
you don't want to go anywhere else.
They're starting to do the phrasebrutalism comes in for design trends
(24:58):
a lot, and it's really a uniquetype of project that uses that.
And what I mean by brutalism ispeople are, are beyond Bauhaus.
If you're looking at design stylesand you have any history of visual
design, it's structural, or it couldbe striking, or it could be downright
ugly, that that's a trend that people arestarting to do, if you can do it right.
(25:18):
If you can't do it right, it'sjust really freaking ugly.
So you gotta be really,really careful with that.
There was a period of timewhere video was a trend.
I don't, I'm, think people are,are understanding what that does.
And it's not.
I'm trying to think of othertrends that I'm noticing.
What about animated GIFs?
Animated GIFs and MIDI files.
(25:40):
I'm Do you want me, do you want me to cry?
Please don't make me cry.
Those, those were reallypopular in the nineties.
There were banners at the top ofyour site and things that scroll.
. Yes.
So was the dancing banana?
Yes.
The, the scrolling text thatwas, that was really big.
Yeah.
Back in the ninetiesand the two thousands.
(26:01):
Having, having the, the newsfeed scroll
. I, I, I think so.
Emojis are starting to become verypopular, but I don't see 'em on websites.
I see them in emails.
So email design is a different set ofthings to discuss, but people are using
them in subject lines and people areusing them like you would text because
they assume that people are goingto be similar to people who do that.
(26:23):
So you're used to texting with emojis.
So of course, in any other digitalformat, you want to see emojis.
I'm trying to think other mobile.
And these are not sexy trends, butlast I heard Google was penalizing you
if you didn't have at least a mobilesite that was indexable, if your site
(26:46):
wasn't mobile friendly in indexing.
So I'm seeing people, this notionof mobile first was always sort
of a pipe dream that you design itfor device first, and then you, you
drag it out to the size of a desktopand then you see how it lands.
Everyone says it, nobody does it.
I'm starting to see more people do that.
So that it is, it is, you're,it's a stuff that you're used
(27:09):
to dealing with on a phone.
Like you know where the, the,the button is for your menu.
You know how long it's goingto take to get down the page.
I don't know.
I don't know if I call that a trendversus a best practice, because that's
where Language gets funky, right?
I haven't kept up with the best of, or,you know, the trends for X cause every
(27:30):
year there'll be a billion articles thatcome out saying the new design, visual
design trends for websites in 2024.
But they tend to cycle back.
You're seeing things like one year it wasall of your buttons should have shadows.
And then the next year itwas, don't do a shadow.
And then there's this thingcalled skeuomorphic, which is
(27:53):
like realism and everything needsto look like it actually is.
So if it's a button, itneeds to look like a button.
If it's a book, it needsto look like a book.
And then everyone went away from that.
And a lot of that came intobutton design for apps.
That's also a side note to all of this.
That we're talking about websites.
We're not talking about onlineapplications or mobile apps , which
have their own set of things.
(28:14):
I don't even know whereskeuomorphism is right now.
I am seeing Shadows.
I am seeing subtle shadows so thatsomething stands off the page,
but you don't really notice why.
It's not heavy.
It's not the dancing bananaof shadows kind of thing.
Do you see anything else likestuff that crosses your path when
(28:36):
you're working with your clients?
I'm just glad that drop shadowsare not as big as they used to be.
Okay, right.
Because you can do them,but it requires custom CSS.
I just added a drop shadow for aclient because they needed more
contrast between their hero imageand the text that was on top of it.
And they didn't want to, I triedto make the overlay more opaque so
(29:02):
that there would be enough contrastbetween the text and the background.
And they didn't want to do that.
So I compromised and gave thema drop shadow and that added
just a little bit more contrast.
It's probably not going to passan accessibility check, but it was
better than it was for readers thatneeded to see what the text said.
Yeah.
I think that's, again,square peg round hole.
(29:24):
If I'm, there's things thatare worth fighting for.
You need to design something,it has to get built.
There's things that are worthfighting for in that translation.
So if a developer like Chrissy comesback and says, You're not going to
read this text on top of the photo.
There's some options.
There's a calculus that goes onsaying, Okay, how important is
it for me to do this, this way?
If it is really important tothe value and to the brand.
(29:46):
Okay, we're going to find a way to do it.
If it isn't, it's like, you know what,what if we just do a different color
overlay with the image of the textstands out, or what if we make the
text larger, or what if we take awaya line of this text underneath it?
I mean, there's things that youcan do if it's worth fighting for.
But you have to make thatcalculus yourself.
Like your client was not willingto do a darker color on top of a
(30:07):
photo so that the text was legible.
You were forced to make a decisionthat you might get penalized
for because it isn't accessible.
And that's a decision that as aclient, I would have bailed on.
I would have said, what do you think isthe best practices here as a developer
to do this, to get me the result I want..
There's a lot of, um, Ego, I hateto say that you have to let go.
(30:32):
Because you can designeverything pixel perfect.
I mean, you have to let go as a client,but as a designer, I know that whatever
I design, if it is in, in, not in HTML,I'm designing it in a comp, Photoshop,
Figma, Canva, whatever, there's a changethat's going to happen when that goes
into HTML, and if you're not flexibleenough to handle that or know enough
(30:53):
about the industry to come up with adifference of an option, um, you're
going to hurt yourself in the endbecause then you spend time and money
arguing about how to make that happen.
And ultimately it's probably notworth that energy to do that.
So ego sort of has to be leftat the door and, and listen
(31:13):
to your experts in some ways.
Yeah.
And that actually brings me to.
to the next question.
How do you like the segues?
I'm good with the segues.
Well, you're, you're able to read thequestions on the side for any of you.
I like to put the questions thatI'm going to ask on the screen.
So when I interview somebody, theyknow what I'm going to be asking them.
So it's not completely on the spot,except for that last question, which
(31:34):
I was typing in as she watched it golike, Oh no, I have to answer that next.
So, so my next.
Yeah, the next question is, a lot of thepeople that are listening are trying to
DIY some or all of their website, but whenshould they consider hiring a professional
to do some or all of it for them?
(31:55):
I hate that every answer ofmine starts with it depends.
But I'm a philosophy majorso everything depends.
There's a couple of pathways that Iwould suggest for somebody at this point.
One is if you have reached the end ofwhat you're able to do, I would rather
you call in a professional to help you.
So let's say you started the DIYand you've hit a roadblock thing.
(32:15):
Oh my God.
I don't know how to do this.
I, the system's fighting me.
I would hire a professional andhave a very specific list of things
you need them to, to help you with.
They may come up with other options,but what are you having trouble with?
The second way I would suggest doing itis if you do DIY it, there is value to
hire a professional from the beginning,especially if you come with thought
(32:39):
through your content, thought through someof the stuff we discussed in part one.
Like, what are your goals?
What are your audiences?
How, why are you trying to do this?
Do you have colors?
Do you have even if you don't havecolors, you have opinions on colors?
Come to a potential professional with someof the stuff going around in your head.
And if a good professionalwill help you sort that out.
The value of a professional isspecifically if it's, if it's a
(33:01):
professional, it's been in thebusiness for as long as Chrissy and
I have, they've seen this before.
Because there's reallynothing new on the web.
So you can find different ways to doit, and it's done in your way, but
sometimes under the hood it's similar.
So they can do it without rebuildingthe wheel every single time.
I think that that's a valuable thingto bring a professional in for.
(33:25):
I think there's also a loneliness to DIYthat if you find the right professional
that you click with, there's someone tobounce ideas off of and to collaborate
because it's a lonely business.
Like if you sit here in your room and allyou're doing is looking at your computer
all the time, it's like sometimes youneed to see a face saying, is this right?
Is this right?
A professional is gonna helpyou with that and help guide you
(33:47):
through the process again if theyare the right professional for you.
And I know the people out thereare starting to wince and go, but I
can't afford to hire a professional.
There are different levels ofprofessionals, and there's different
levels of engagement with a professional.
My recommendation is, while you'rethinking about all the things you
need to do, while you're doing awebsite, I would think about budget.
(34:07):
I would think about what do you havethat you can put into the project.
I'm not going to put numberson this, because everything
is fungible at some point.
But think about what you can afford to do.
And sometimes a professional, isif you talk to them and say, I
want to do all this stuff, they maynot bring it up to the end of the
website, if it, end of a meeting.
If you go into a meetingwith a professional, and
(34:28):
they say, what's your budget?
Step one, I would back away slowly.
Because they don't know what you want yet.
So, so have an idea of what you can spend.
Say, great, this is what I want todo, and at the end of the thing,
I only have this or I have this.
Based on what you know aboutme, what can you give me?
And a professional, unless it isastronomically low, like somebody
(34:53):
says, hey, I want to do a 20page website and I have 500.
We know the math isn'tmathing on that one.
Everybody will know that.
So, some of them will be obvious,like if we go through that whole
conversation, and it's like, hey, I wantto do all these things, that's great,
I love working with you, I have $500.
Well, at that point, it'swasted everybody's time because
we're not going to do that.
(35:14):
And even if you, this isa controversial thing.
Even if you get somebody, let's say rightout of school, who's willing to charge
next to nothing odds are you're going tohave to rebuild it with a professional,
another professional later down the road.
So you spent twice as much money.
So if you go with the cheapest option.
You get what you pay for.
So I would, I would say thatthis is what I have to work with.
(35:35):
It could come down to theprofessional saying this is okay.
For this amount of money, we can do Xand the variability can come in terms
of, you know, we're going to do onedesign instead of three, or we're going
to give you four different layouts thatyou can, we can work between, and then
you make the decisions on the content.
(35:55):
You determine what theimages are for that.
You know, there's lots of things thatas someone who's hiring someone who is
a DIYer, you can still do DIY and stillhire a professional at the same time,
because they're sometimes different tasks.
So I will always lean towardshiring a professional in my mind.
And, and it doesn't need to be as scary.
As you go to an agency, you know, andagain, I'm a former agency girl, so I
(36:19):
know that we build websites for $300,000.
Which is, you know, nobody, noindividual human has that money.
But there's, there's a wide rangebetween $500 that's inaccessible,
that your nephew does and $300,000for a big organizational site.
So see, see what they can do for that.
(36:39):
I will tell you that, that you willprobably, you may get less out of
a more experienced professional.
Or they'll charge more.
Some of them charge hourly, someof them charge project based.
It really depends on the type ofprofessional, but the amount of
time they take to do somethingmeans that every second they're
(37:01):
working is far more valuable thansomebody who may charge less.
And this is another controversial opinionthat it's like, it seems to be against
the brain to say, why would I hiresomeone who costs more like, well, because
you're only going to have to do it once.
And they may get it, you know,hopefully because you're charging
someone who has more experience.
That's why they charge more money.
You're going to get abetter product out of it.
(37:21):
There's no harm in saying I've donemy best and I have built a site
myself and it's not performing.
So frankly, you do both.
You DIY it, you build the site,you look at it, you see it's
not doing what it needs to do.
And at that point you go, JesusChrist, I need to hire a professional.
Some of those are best goingto be people who know people.
(37:42):
Most of my business as an independentperson comes from referrals.
Because when you work with somebodyand say, Oh my God, I know this
designer who does this great thing.
I recently just got a projectfrom a former colleague in
a totally different area.
And, and he said, Oh myGod, you need a website?
I know someone who can help you with that.
And then we talked and we gotalong and we're working together.
So it doesn't have to be the, Oh myGod, decision to hire a professional.
(38:07):
It could be a relief in some sense.
Right.
Yeah.
And I'll agree with the referralthing, the recommendations, I would
say 75 to 80 ish percent of thework that Pongos does is referrals.
I've got clients that I'vehad for 20 plus years.
I've known them almost as long as I'veknown Eve, but, but yeah, I, I have
(38:29):
one client that, that I do a, prettygood amount of work for every year.
And they refer me to other clients.
Sometimes the people over the past 20 plusyears, people have worked for them, have
moved on to other organizations and bringme into their, or that new organization.
And, you know, as they, as they move fromorganization to organization, we bring
(38:52):
on new clients for whoever they're for.
So, that's definitely,something to consider.
So if you are thinking about hiring aprofessional, ask other people that, you
know, and that you trust you worked with.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That you trust.
Don't you?
Like a lot of people just say,Hey, I need to hire somebody.
I've seen so many Facebook groups thatare like, I need to hire somebody.
Nobody knows what, and then thecase, then someone's going to jump
(39:12):
in saying, I only, I'm off school.
Offshore, I charge 10 an hour,I'll build you a website.
And on, on that vein, I will also say backwhen I was a flash developer, and even
now as a web developer, I can't tell youhow many times I had to redo somebody's
work that was the cheapest option.
(39:34):
They hired an offshoredeveloper that was $15 an hour.
I charge a lot more than $15 an hour,and I had to completely redo the work
because the $15 an hour developerkind of coded themselves into a corner
and couldn't find their way out.
So I had to basically startfrom scratch to redo it.
So that's, that's definitely something toconsider when you're thinking about it.
(39:57):
The other thing I, that I wannamention, when it comes to your
budget, if you're not going tobudget money, you need a budget time.
Yes.
Yes.
Yeah.
Time and money.
Same, two sides of the same coin.
Yeah.
If you're going to do it yourself andyou want to do it entirely yourself,
that's totally fine, but make sure thatyou are budgeting the time to do it.
And the amount of time it's goingto take you to do it, it's probably
(40:18):
going to be a lot more than itwould be if you hired somebody.
So even though it may costfinancially, they may cost more
money for somebody to do it for you.
It may end up costing less because thetime that you're spending doing it is time
that you could be making money on yourbusiness instead of doing it yourself.
And also when you're hiring aprofessional, there is no rule that says
(40:40):
that what they do needs to be custombecause I know there are designers and
developers like you who have a package.
That has an existing templatethat is usable for most people.
There's usually sometimes a littlebit of customization depending on your
level, but like I just recently starteddoing Squarespace packages and, and
(41:01):
one of them I call web doctor becauseit's like, this is for the DIY er.
This is for somebody whoscrewed up their site.
This is someone who's like,uh, Ooh, I have a small budget.
I've done it.
Are there small wins I can do here.
There's small things I cando to fix it all the way up
to building it from scratch.
And then beyond that is just like theydon't want to use any of those packages.
(41:23):
We just want to do some custom stuff.
So it's never, if you look atsomebody's website, which you normally
should do before you hire somebody.
And if they don't havea website back away.
See if they have packages,it's not a bad deal.
And sometimes those packages willrequire you to pay a little bit upfront,
and then you do it at completion.
There's rules usually aroundthose, but there is value to that.
(41:44):
And there's probably examples ofsites that they've done that fit
into those different categories.
That if you feel comfortable withit, It's still hiring a professional,
but it's at a lower price point anda little bit less customization, but
it's, it's still really valuable.
Cause I know you do that for pongos.
You have a series of thosethings that people can get and
that's hiring a professional.
(42:06):
We've got packages.
A small business starter package.
It starts at $2,400 and weuse templates for it.
That's how we're able to keep itinexpensive and it's a homepage,
contact page, two more pages.
So usually it's going to be likeabout and services and a blog or
news, whatever you want to call it.
(42:26):
But we do all of those, and, eventhough we use templates, most people
wouldn't know that we use templatesbecause they don't look like templates.
We're
Exactly.
Yeah.
We're, we're customizing the colors.
We're customizing the font.
We're adding images that go with thebrand of the client and they look like
custom websites, but they're, it's a lotless expensive than a custom website.
(42:49):
And like, You were saying for thebudget, we get that question a lot.
How much is it going to cost foryou to do the website for me?
I will say I have done websites that costas little as $750 and as much as $750,000.
Right.
So there's a range, there's a big range,and the range, basically, there's a
(43:11):
lot of factors that go into it, youknow, how much customization, how
much development, how much design andprogramming needs to go into it, how
much integration needs to go into it.
So, you know, that's, that'sdefinitely something to keep in mind.
I think it's a valuable resource.
Think about it as a resource.
I know a lot of people, there's pridethat's wrapped up in doing it yourself.
(43:32):
But back to what I said in part one,where I don't want you to have to
be a designer to speak design to me.
Don't speak design to me.
Just tell me what you need.
The best professional will be like that.
And it should be almost like a colleague.
It shouldn't feel like, Oh my God, I gotto talk to my designer now, you know,
it should be, this person's going tohelp me achieve what I want better and
(43:52):
faster and more and, and once, well,once on an ongoing basis, because as we
know, website scale, but you, sometimesyou can't even launch it because that
offshore designer, uh, you know, like,frankly, Chrissy, I sent you a client
whose site was developed that way and,and the, the, the owner wanted to do
(44:15):
all these design changes and we werelimited because the back end was so bad.
And we brought you in and you didwhat you could and then when the
first opportunity hit and she had abudget for it, we rebuilt that site.
And gave it a fresh new look, but thelook was almost less important at that
point than actually building it correctly.
And that person would have saveda lot of money if they'd just gone
(44:36):
with a professional that they vetted.
Right.
At a time.
So it's never, it's nevera bad thing to, to do.
There are sometimes designersout there, me included, Who
will do 15 minute free consults.
So if you have already have a site, youcan actually say, what would you change?
(44:56):
Or it isn't performed.
Like if you, if you're sophisticatedenough to know it's not performing,
why isn't it performing?
Is it not performing becausepeople aren't finding it?
That's a tech issue.
Is it not performing because ofhow it looks at the design issue?
Is it not performing becausemy story's not clear?
That's a content issue.
I recently just did one of these,someone recommended me, I was like,
yeah, I'll talk to her for 15 minutes.
And, and, she ended up not having thebudget to do it, which is fine, but it
(45:19):
got her going in her head, so I hopeat some point, She'll fix it, but there
are people who are willing to do that.
Sometimes you have to give up your nameand your email for their list that they
have to, you know, free is never free.
But it is often a valuable thing.
So if you see it to someone that youknow is a good designer, someone who,
you know, has done stuff for otherpeople that they trust, that they trust.
(45:42):
If you see that personoffering free time, take it.
And let that person know you,come prepared to tell them
what you want to address.
And they'll do what I'm doing, whichis just babble at you for 15 minutes
and tell you some things to do.
If you're, if you're a pure DIYer, sothat's a valuable resource as well.
Is there anything else that you wouldlike to share, talk about, or let
(46:05):
folks know if they're trying to DIYor thinking about hiring somebody
to help them with their design?
Anything else you want to addto what we already talked about?
I'm going to always go back to the basics.
I'm going to go back to story.
That is, that is.
Again, it's taken me a long timeto sort of whittle down what I
do into one word, but it's story.
If your story isn't clear, awebsite won't make it clear.
(46:30):
So my big push for everything is makesure you understand what you're trying
to do and who you're doing it forand that that person can understand.
So before you even think about, aboutputting anything down and making
anything pretty, know that stuff.
Know, know the hard.
Don't expect a web designer to comein and solve it for you because
(46:53):
the best web designers are justgoing to ask you questions and you
need answers for those questions.
I may be speaking for an OG designgroup because that's how I function.
I don't know how 25 year olds right outof college with website degrees function.
I will always try to find the story whatyou're talking about and to validate
that the story is correct because that,you know, if the story is wrong, I'm
(47:15):
going, you know, garbage in garbage out.
I'm going to design somethingbased on something that is
not accurate and not true.
I think there's anotherthing that may just be me.
Authenticity.
When you design a website is reallyimportant because authenticity leads
to credibility and it leads to peoplebelieving in you to hire you, which
(47:36):
ultimately believes in you creatingtheir product for people to hire them.
So if you don't come at it, honestly,and it's not custom to you, you say,
I just want to get more followers.
You have to buy them.
I'll do that.
Or I just need a website becausepeople expect me to have a website.
Those aren't good enough reasons.
So if that's true, tell someonethat because then the rest of the
(47:58):
decisions would be based on that.
And, and one of the examples Igive of this is I was working
with a very large brand who wasterrified to say anything bad.
And we designed three different versionsof their website for them, which they
chose one of, and it wasn't until westarted in the first week of developing
(48:19):
it, that they said, you know what?
We don't like this.
And that was months.
And I can't tell youhow many dollars later.
And that's because they, they eitherdidn't feel confident enough to talk
to the person truthfully, personbeing me, or, or I don't even, they
changed their mind halfway through.
But I think that if you can get to theroot of the authenticity of why you're
(48:39):
doing it and who you're doing it for,the rest of it won't be, I would say
slapdash easy, but it will come freerand it will all come back to that truth.
I may be, this is why marketing istricky for me because I find that
a lot of marketing is bullshit.
But a lot of stuff is madeup, and it isn't real.
(49:00):
And a real person like me, and someonewho's been in this business long
enough, if I come to a site, I candiagnose exactly how that happened.
And I can see the story.
I can smell the lie.
So don't give them a shot at that.
Just don't waste the time.
Be true, be authentic, be reliable,let people understand who you are.
(49:21):
And then if you are in a positionto be hired, to do work for them,
let's say you're a coach or you're,I don't even know what people,
you know, you're doing it, you'rewriting books, it's a vulnerable
place to be in therapy language.
But the, the payoff is so muchstronger because it's really you.
So do that and then everythingelse should come from that.
(49:43):
Ask questions.
I think that's another reallyimportant thing when you're working
specifically, you're working with aprofessional, don't be afraid to ask
questions and don't be afraid to tellthem that you don't like something
and why you don't like something.
Because if you come backto me and say, well, you're
using blue, I don't like blue.
There's no way to go from there for me.
So I have to say what kind of blueand do not like it because it's dark.
(50:05):
Do you not like it because it's a fullswath of it on your current website
and you need it to be a smaller thing.
There's a lot of, there's a lot of whys.
So I would ask a lot ofquestions until you're satisfied.
Be prepared to get some pushbackif you are, if you're working, you
know, if you're out of the DIY world.
If you're in the DIY world,I would also test your design
(50:28):
with members of that audience.
So don't test it with your best friend.
You know, your mother's going tosay, you know, Oh, most mothers,
Oh, it's wonderful, darling.
Now, if you're doing a website for,I want to say for coaches again, and
you know, someone who is a coach, goto them and put the, this is the goal.
This is what I'm doing it for.
This is what the website looks like.
Do you think that achieves it?
(50:49):
And if they say no, and they're youraudience, then that's a problem.
If they say yes.
You're in the ballgame.
So do that, but avoidthe, what do you think?
I see so many of those popping upeverywhere, especially social media
saying, I've just designed thiswebsite or I like you, I'm a podcaster.
So that happens with podcast coverart, a little square that you see, some
(51:11):
people say, what do you think about this?
And there's no context for it.
So how can I, you know, why are you allsaying you like it or you don't like it?
What?
You don't know what it does.
That's it.
So if you don't ask the questions,be prepared for the person that
you've hired to ask you thequestions so you can answer them.
So if somebody would like to work withyou, if they need help with, let's
say a custom design or Squarespace,or they just want to take advantage
(51:35):
of your 15 minute free consultation,how can they get in touch with you?
My website is evesimoncreative.Com.
And there is a form.
There's a contact form and there is aCTA button, that encourages you to fill
out a form and on the form, you can say,I heard you on Chrissy's podcast, and
I'm interested in, I here's my project.
You could say, they'resaying I've done something.
(51:56):
I don't know what to do with it.
Will you look at, so there's a, there'sa field there that you could just fill
out and say what you're interested in.
And then I'll get back to you.
Usually it's within 24 hours.
I have availability now, which is great.
And I like to work with smallbusinesses because there's an
immediacy to the work that we do.
If you're a slightly largerorganization or you're like a big
(52:17):
non profit or a medium non profit,contact me, but sometimes I'll
pull in a partner like Chrissy.
Because if I feel that the scopeof your site is probably too
big for one individual personto handle, I need to partner up.
And I will, you know, we, Chrissyand I will combine and work
on things like that with you.
But the first thing starts withchecking out my website, seeing if,
(52:37):
if what I do is interesting to you.
And then just reaching outbecause I like to meet new people.
Yes.
Awesome.
Well, thank you so much, Eve.
I appreciate you coming on here andchatting with me and giving me all this
information and giving the audienceall this information about design.
And I'm sure you gave people a lotof things to consider, a lot of
(53:00):
things to think about when it comesto the design for their website.
So I really appreciate it.
Thank you.
And just don't be scared.
I know I gave you guys a lot of stuff.
I don't mean to scare you.
Just do it.
Just do it.
Get started.
Step one is where you go.
And if you need somebody we're available.
Yes.
Thank you.
(53:21):
Well, thank you everybody for listening.
I appreciate you coming on here.
If you haven't alreadysubscribed, make sure you do.
Come on back next week.
I've got more to share withyou and keep on listening.
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