Episode Transcript
Monica Pitts 0:00
Hello again and welcome back to marketing with purpose. In today's episode, we are diving deep into the question of refurbish versus redesign. I love a coupon. I am a coupon hoarding human. I love thrift stores, I love to remake things and keep what exists. But then there's a time where something just needs to be torn down and rebuilt, or you just need to buy new, right? So web design is a lot like building a house. Sometimes a fresh coat of paint is all you need. But then other times you really need to rip out a wall and burn all your furniture, right. And we've all had those moments. At the end of a long weekend when the kids had been cooped up inside all weekend long, and you look around the house and think it would probably be easier to burn it down than to clean it. i Yes, I especially in the winter, I swear every weekend feels like that weekend. But because we don't want to go to jail for arson, we clean our house, right. And the good news is that rebuilding your website isn't nearly as bad as building a new house. It's not it's much I feel like it's a lot more straightforward. But maybe that's because I don't build houses, I build websites. And sometimes starting over is the best option. So in this episode, I paired up with my chief wear of many hats, Stacy, and she is going to be our digital contractor. And she's going to guide us through this decision making process because that's what she does every day she listens to people and what they need our own clients and new prospective clients and decides, does she need to go to the thrift store? And like rehab stuff? Or is she going to suggest the complete overhaul? Right? So we will explore the signs that tell you it's time for an update. And when you need to do that full blown overhaul, and we'll discuss everything from how to handle small cosmetic fixes, like rearranging the furniture in your online home to the tell tale signs that your website might have sprung a few leaks, or time travel from the 90s. All right, friends, so let's get to business. You're on mission and you just need more people to know about it. And whether you're brand new to marketing or a seasoned pro. We are all looking for answers to make marketing decisions with purpose. I'm Monica Pitts, a techie crafty business owner, mom and aerial dancer who solves communication challenges through technology. This podcast is all about digging in and going digital. I'll share my marketing know how in business experience from almost 20 years of misadventures, I'll be your backup dancer. So you can stop doubting and get moving towards marketing with purpose. Okay, Stacy, say hi. I want people to hear your voice. Hi, friends. All right, Stacy. So for people who haven't met you before, tell us a little bit about yourself. So they know all of the problems that you help solve over it may create. So
Stacy Brockmeier 3:10
I wear many hats it may create.
Mostly I help new clients and current clients plan out their websites understand what they need, and how we're going to move forward. And then my other role is to manage all of our finances. So I also am a numbers gal. If you couldn't tell the numbers go for sure. And you love
Monica Pitts 3:38
a deal. I do love a good deal. Yeah, she's a deal finding human. So just know that even as she's guiding people through whether they should be refreshing or redesigning their site, she is a gal who loves the deal. So she loves to find cost effective solutions. I mean, honestly, she really, really does well.
Stacy Brockmeier 3:57
And I wholeheartedly like believe in not selling people things that they don't need. Like, I'm the quintessential, like, throw thing away, throw things away. Does that make sense? Like I like to throw things away. And so I don't want you to have things you don't need. Yeah,
Monica Pitts 4:14
yeah, sure. Like you like to simplify, simplify just the other day. So we do a lot of website reviews for our clients to like, keep those websites fresh and rolling. And just the other day, I did a website review. And I was talking with Rebecca, one of our lead designers about it. And I was like, you know, I mean, their website is older, but it is really working for them still, and it still looks good. And there's not a lot of loopholes in it that are that are going to make it unsafe or insecure or not serve their business. So I sort of feel like we should just leave it alone for a little while longer. And she's like, alright, I'll note it in the estimate. And I was like, Okay, I mean, and then I'm like, Okay, well, they went they went a couple $1,000 But it was the true because they don't need some rebuild thing. They just needed some stuff updated. That's what they needed. Okay, so, Stacy, before we start explaining reflash, fresh versus redesign, because we're going to talk about the determinants that we use to decide if something needs to be refreshed or redesigned. I think we should talk about the four components of a site. So can you take us through those so that way, when we talk about them in a few minutes, everybody knows what the heck we're talking about? Yep.
Stacy Brockmeier 5:32
So there are four components of a website. And I think different people think about them differently. So the first thing that most of our clients think about is the overall look and feel of a website. That's the thing you can see, it's super tangible. What does it look like? Does it look like it was from the 90s? Or does it look like something that was built in the last few years that's modern and functional? The second piece is the template and the code. And so this is a conversation that I have often with clients about what does that mean? So there's these literal languages that personally, I don't speak those languages. Tyler speaks those languages, Rebecca speaks those languages, Monica speaks those languages. And that is what your website is built on. And if those languages are out of date, so like CSS, HTML, Bootstrap, jQuery, all these libraries, all of these legs play PHP, they make up your template. And if that stuff is good, then things are good. And if that stuff is outdated, because different versions, it's just like your computer, it updates over time. And so if you have a computer from 2005, versus a computer now, like those are very different things, even though they might both be like Microsoft Office based or, or Windows based, I guess, technically. So then the third thing is each individual page, what's on the page. So again, something super tangible, is the information that's on the site, what your clients need to see or what viewers need to see when they get there. And then the fourth thing, which honestly is one of my favorite things to plan out is the functionality of the site. So how can we make your site be an employee for you? I talked about this, like, literally, I think in every episode that I do with Monica is like, what can we do to make your website actually like, save and or make you money, or save and or give you more time. And so that is the functionality of your site? So what does your website do for you?
Monica Pitts 7:43
So the four components of a site are the overall look, the template and code each individual page and the functionality, okay, so thank you so much, because we are going to examine those things and how they impact your decision to either like refresh your site or redesign it. So we approach refreshing versus redesigning actually not as two separate things that may create, we actually do three separate things. And we would call them updating, that would be the first thing, just updating stuff. Then the second thing would be we call it a re template. And re templating is kind of like refreshing. It can be. And then we have like a complete redo, redo. It's like a rebuild. For us, we call it a rebuild. And part of rebuilding is redesigning. So while everybody else calls it refresh versus redesign, we consider it updating. And so updating would mean that the overall look and feel of your website stay the same, we're just fixing some stuff in it, it would be like painting your room or rearranging your furniture in your house. And then our mid level would be what we call re templating. And that would mean that you might need to do some small refreshes, like small refreshes on your website. And it's more usually a technical challenge. Because we're not redesigning the whole thing. We're just taking the design that you have, and maybe updating a few little components of it. Like one thing we do a lot is make the pages wider. We make it so they're not so narrow. Or we might add a slideshow or something like that in every template, but we're not redesigning the whole thing. And then last but not least, is redoing it and when we redo or rebuild a website, it's it's a completely new thing. It's a whole new house. It's not just a remodel friends. It's like everything is new. And sometimes that's the way to go. Okay, so now that I've explained those three things, let's let's start back up the top and talk about updating so Stacey give me some examples of when you suggest to people that they just need to update their
Stacy Brockmeier 10:06
site, I would say most of the time clients update their site until it's time for one of those other things. So maybe they got a new logo, and they want to adjust the colors, or add the new logo, make basically making small cosmetic changes. So again, using your analogy, the equivalent of painting a room or rearranging furniture, or maybe they added a new service, and they need to add a new page to that site. So that's giving more information. But overall, the site is remaining the same, and you're just updating things there. Sometimes updating includes outdated plugins. So WordPress is built using a lot of plugins. And I say a lot, we try to use as many as few of plugins as we possibly can. But occasionally, one of those plugins may be deprecated, or out of commission. And we need to replace it with something else that is the equivalent. And so those things are updating. There's so many things, it might just be that we're not pulling people through your website in the most efficient way. So we need to put a call out to a service on another service page. Because usually when they buy one thing, they buy the other thing, and so it could be improving user flow.
Monica Pitts 11:34
But user flow like in a smaller way, not like I mean, if you have like terrible engagement on your site, like overall, then that's not like a small fix for user flow. That's like a big fix for user flow. But Stacey's example of, hey, people got to the Services page. And now we want them to fill out this form that's on another page. That's a different thing, you know, that that would be something that we could do with an update.
Stacy Brockmeier 12:00
Another thing. So in the last few years, there's been an emphasis put on Ada, so accessibility, across many, many facets, not just websites, but really in websites, it's become a hot topic that we continually try to help. And we continually try to make websites accessible for all people. So if you need small adjustments in that, so for example, when a screen reader so someone who is visually impaired when a screen reader goes to a website, it's going to read for that person what is on the page, and we don't want it every single time it starts reading something new to read your navigation. So if we just need to put in a tag to skip that navigation, that's a small accessibility challenge that we can fix with an update.
Monica Pitts 12:57
But then there's other bigger accessibility challenges that can that need to be solved through a re template or a complete redesign. But there's a lot of things that you can do to make your website ADA compliant and allow people with disabilities to use your site without having to overhaul your whole site. However, it is way easier to start at the beginning. With ADA compliance, retrofitting is not as successful as rebuilding, but that doesn't mean that you can't boost ADA compliance with some updates. Yeah.
Stacy Brockmeier 13:30
And I think the other time we update things are if there's easy loading issues. So one thing that we put a really big emphasis on is compressing images and making those small, and that allows your website to load quickly for people. So if you have small loading problems, like big images, that's also an update. Yeah,
Monica Pitts 13:53
and but the load time on your website is comprised of a lot of things. So if it's just huge images that are slowing it down, or maybe you need to install a caching plugin, that's something that you can do with an update. But if it's that you have a ton of code, that's that's not loading quickly, because it's antiquated, then then you you have to re template or redo this site, right. And then the what's the last thing, but we do this all the time for people.
Stacy Brockmeier 14:25
So adding functionality. So one thing with WordPress is making sure that you continually update the software so that you can add functionality to your site. So maybe it's time to add that employee members only section. Or maybe it's time to add that new form that collects payment or donations. So those little pieces of functionality that are really adding value to your site are things that can be done in an update, not necessarily a rebuild. But if you're going from having no functionality Due to a crazy amount of functionality, that's probably in the more of a return litter redo, because we need to think about how that functionality fits in with the rest of your site. That's
Monica Pitts 15:10
a really good example. And actually an excellent segue, because let's say that you're going to add a members only section on your website, okay? Well, when people log in, your navigation is going to change. And if it's going to change in a very extreme way, or just in a small way, it has to be added to your template, and it has to change the way your site is functioning. And sometimes if you've let your site go for a really, really long time, and then you want to add in this additional functionality, it can't handle it, like the structure of your site literally won't accept this new, like plug in that you're going to put in it. And so in that case, you would, at the very least need to re template your site to make it actually work right for your users. And, and, and then and then add the extra functionality into it. Okay, so then, re templating were already there. And like we said, this is the middle ground. A lot of the time, I feel like our clients choose to do this, or we suggest this, if a design is aging really well. And it still looks super modern. And it's not something that they really want to change, they haven't rebranded or anything like that. But the website might be loading slowly. Or it might have security vulnerabilities. Things change all the time online, right, all the time, your browser is updating all the time. And the code that is used to build your website is continually improved and made more secure, like almost I would say, not even almost like on a daily basis, right. So for example, WordPress is built using PHP, you know, it also is built using PHP, Facebook. So as Facebook builds out PHP to get that code to do what they want it to do, it becomes a more and more robust open source language. And then WordPress can piggyback on that, and use all those new features in there. So it's a really cool thing that everything evolves, you know how much Facebook has evolved. Even, I mean, think about it, I swear, every time I log in, I can't find anything anymore. So eventually, things just get out of date. And if your website's so looks the way that you want it to. But it's not loading quickly, or it has big ADA compliance issues or the functionality, it won't accept the new functionality you want to add or it has secure security vulnerabilities, then we would end up re templating the site so that way we can maintain the status quo for user experience and add new functionality. And well also accommodate people with disabilities. So that's usually why we suggest re templating
Stacy Brockmeier 18:02
it's really a good mid level thing to make your website last longer, so you're going to build a website and then a couple years or three years later, you're going to have this like re template to bring it all back up to speed. And then you'll get be able to get a longer lifespan out of your website. So that's why it's like kind of this mid level. It's sort of like changing, I don't know, recently had to change the transmission fluid in my van. And so kind of an expensive thing to do. But it's gonna make my van run longer, right? So your website is very much like a car in that way that at 100,000 miles, you need to do these things so that you can get to 200,000
Monica Pitts 18:47
miles. Yeah. And this will actually cost you a fraction of what it costs to completely redesign and rebuild your site. It really will. But it's not always the right answer. But it does extend the life line of your site and keep Google happy and keep people happy. For quite a while like it I can double the length of your site life which if you have a good looking site, then that's a great thing to do. Right. So then number three so now we know when to update we know when to re template let's talk about this whole rebuild slash redesign a monster Stacy. So what is like the number one thing that people come to us with that may you want to make create client to begin with? And they're like, I need to rebuild my site. Why are they usually asking us to do that?
Stacy Brockmeier 19:42
Often it is because their site is built on a system that is antiquated or is not able to do the things that they want their website to do for them. So there's
Monica Pitts 19:52
like it could be hard to use, or it could literally just not be able to do the things that they want it to do. To help them run their business,
Stacy Brockmeier 20:01
and oftentimes they're unable to update their own site. Ah,
Monica Pitts 20:05
that happens, that still
Stacy Brockmeier 20:07
happens to people, it's still a thing,
Monica Pitts 20:10
oh my gosh, people, if you cannot update your own website, you should definitely consider rebuilding it. Or just, man, go find where your web developer lives and get them to create you a login, because who builds websites anymore? That that people can't update? Like, that's just like, negligence?
Stacy Brockmeier 20:31
You would be surprised? You'd be surprised,
Monica Pitts 20:35
yeah, oh, I'm grossed out and goes out.
Stacy Brockmeier 20:38
I think the other thing that people usually come to us for is that they've rebranded or their, their business has changed in a way that doesn't match their site at all, or maybe they've just completely changed their services are added new services, or they got a new look, all of those things, oftentimes also drive a rebuild. I
Monica Pitts 21:01
think that sometimes it's like new management. But then too, I feel like people get to a certain point in their business where they look at their current website, and they think this doesn't represent us as I want to be represented. And when it comes to that point, when you're looking at it, and you're not proud to send people to your site to learn about your business, when it's not serving you as a tool to help you grow, then oftentimes, that is not a real template, that is a rebuild, because we're gonna change the way it looks. And, and not just the way it looks overall, like not just that theme that stays you talked about at the beginning, but like, every page, like the whole thing looks new by the time it's done. So um, yeah, so that might be that it fell out of the 90s. And if you're not sure, like, if you're not sure if your design is like, modern or not, then just go look at your competition. You'll you'll know, once you look at your competition, you'll know their stuff looks like super modern and trendy and yours looks like 1992 called and they want their website back then yeah, then that's, that's probably a sign that you need to rebuild your site. Now,
Stacy Brockmeier 22:14
a disclaimer there, though. If your webs if your competitors websites are ugly, that does not mean that you should have an ugly website, we refuse to do bad design?
Monica Pitts 22:26
No, I mean, because you want to be one step up, you should be one step ahead of your competition, right? I always tell people, you want people to go to your website, and like, remember you, you want it to be a memorable thing. And if you're the same as everyone else, there is no remembering you like you're just there. So then you didn't stand out from the competition. And they're going to look at multiple websites before they make a decision on who to call if they're just shopping around. So you got to make sure that they remember you to get back to you. I mean, how many times have you been like, oh, my gosh, this is such a cool company, this is gonna be really great. And then you can never remember how to get to that website. And you're like digging through your browser history looking for it, or Amazon products. I do that on Amazon. Okay, so the next thing that we often will advise a website, like rebuild for would be like low engagement overall, on the site. So I look at Google Analytics all the time. And if people are just not engaging with your content, overall, then there's something wrong in the design in the code, like it could be anywhere and everywhere. And I'm sure that you can diagnose exactly where it is. But ultimately, it usually means that we either don't have the right information on it, it's not loading fast enough for people to get to it, or like that, it just isn't displayed in a way that makes people want to look at it, which would mean that we need to rebuild the site. And then another thing that we will find is that after a certain amount of time, sites get old, and they will start dropping in search engine rankings. We actually saw this at one point on our own website, because we do a lot of blogging. And after a while, Google just stopped serving those blog posts in favor of newer blog posts, and it will do the same stuff with your website. So if you see your traffic dipping, it's probably a result of your search engine rankings dropping, and that can ultimately be solved. Oftentimes with a website rebuild. We have seen it on so many websites where you rebuild them. And then suddenly, there's just an uptick in traffic, and you just get better results overall with your website with that new code and the new design and, and ultimately, it's that people are having a better experience on your site. And then that sends those signals to Google that your website is quality and it's going to serve it more often. So that's it The powerful thing. Okay, friends. So hopefully now after listening to this episode, you know, like, do you need to refresh your website? Or is it just an update? What a re template solve your challenge? Or do you just need to rebuild the stinking thing like burn it down? Then build it again, there, there are many, many positives of just redoing it and starting fresh in a new environment, you can clean up so many challenges one of our clients that it was like, it was like cleaning out a closet, because there was just so much stuff in the storage closet, she said it was it was difficult to use, and no one could find anything. And they didn't know what they were doing. And so when we rebuilt that site, she was like, This is amazing. You just simplified my life. And it's cleaned out my storage closet all in one. All in one swoop. Right. Okay, so thank you so much for hanging out with us today. And if you're wondering what to put on your website, we actually have a free checklist for you. So head on over to May create.com. In our resources section, you can download the what to put on your website checklist. And it goes through your website, page by page with ideas and must haves for each page of your site. And if you find that a lot of those things are functionality items, or there's a lot of stuff on every single page of your site, then you might need to re template or completely redesign. And of course, if you need to redesign, you can call us and hang out with Daisy to help you plan it, but free. It'll be great. All right. That's my shameless plug. So thank you again for listening and for joining us today and until next time, go forth and mark it with purpose.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
