52 - Website Pain Points and How to Overcome Them

Episode Transcript:

Rich: Hi, Caitlin. Happy morning.

Catelin: Hey, good morning. It's the perfect time for a gin and tonic, isn't it?

Rich: It is. There's nothing like that 9 a. m. gin and tonic. Here we go. Uh, yeah. Honestly,

Catelin: yeah.

Rich: I mean. Cheers.

Catelin: I have my coffee.

Rich: I have mine, too. It's hot, though. It's hot coffee. Yeah. I can't. You have hot coffee or you have cold coffee?

Rich: I have

Catelin: hot coffee. And I have been doing cold. Because our little coffee maker makes cute little iced coffees. But, uh, yeah. I was running today.

Rich: Yeah. I mean, it's interesting because in Italy, no matter how hot it is, they drink hot coffee and they say cools them down. And like the hot tea, like iced tea.

Rich: They're like, no, just drink a hot tea. And it's like, it's 105 and they're like, it cools you down on the inside. And I'm like, I don't know how that works. That makes no sense to me. I would need somebody who understands. No, that science doesn't, that science doesn't science. I feel like it's not good science, but, um, yeah.

Rich: Yeah, but that was just what was sort of weird. I mean, they also drink like Italy, your coffee, morning coffee is like two shots of espresso and a little bit of sugar and a tiny glass and you chat with people and shoot it and then you're off to work. Um, actually you do it during work. That's usually a break thing, like mid morning.

Catelin: Yeah.

Rich: Anyway,

Catelin: about that

Rich: or, I mean, sometimes they go into work that late, I think in those countries, right? Yeah. Like, I feel like Spain in particular operates on central time. Like when I was there, I just stayed on central time because then, like, it's like a six hour difference. But then you just get up at like 10 or 11 and you have lunch like mid afternoon, you have dinner at eight or nine.

Rich: I love this. Maybe 10. Then like the clubs don't eat like here people joke like, Oh, you can't go to a club until like 11 and then no, there it's one or two. They start going up and then you're done at like four or five in the morning. Oh,

Catelin: no, I don't do four or five in the morning. You go to bed.

Rich: Well, you can maybe just go for an hour with friends and then you can get your seven or eight hours of sleep.

Rich: But yeah, it was wild. Um, and I'll think enough. We're going to talk about Spain here in a little bit. Oh my

Catelin: gosh.

Rich: But, um, Before we do that, we should probably talk about a topic. We've got, uh, you and I are the guests today and hosts. We're talking about website pain points. Are we ghosts today then? If we're, if we're

Catelin: guests and hosts,

Rich: ghosts, ghosts.

Rich: Um, I have a meme to send you about, um, Welcome mats with whales on them. Um, and combining that word, which is a good way to go. Um, I'll just leave that. I don't want, I don't want the explicit on this just yet. So I'm going to leave that to people's image. You got it.

Catelin: Oh, got it.

Rich: Yeah. There you go. Yeah. Those exist.

Rich: Somebody has created those and you can buy them and they're for sale all over the place. And it's like, no, that's not how you, how whales say, well, it might be how whales say welcome. I don't know. Like, I don't know whales. I haven't talked to any recently.

Catelin: I actually speak fluent whale based on the translations from Finding Dory and Finding Nemo.

Catelin: Dorothy was very impressed by my whale calling abilities.

Rich: That was also in, um, Oh, it's, is it Las Palmas? The Florida Apple TV show. Uh, Palm Royale. Palm Royale. That one. Yes. Yes. It was, Las Palmas is the hotel in Acapulco, I think. But anyway, um,

Catelin: It's a, it's a multi zip code episode today. It is all over the place, as opposed to usual.

Rich: She has, um, uh, the, one of the sugar bakers, I'm going to just going to throw away back, I can't remember her name, the blonde one anyway, she's in that. And she has a, an existential moment with a whale that's trapped on the beach, which was very exciting. And then. Spoiler alert. If you have not seen, um, that show, um, the whale saves her later after she falls off.

Rich: Well, she's pushed off a boat. So, oh no, she's not the one. It's Kristen Wiig who gets pushed off the boat. I don't know. The whale saves her anyway.

Catelin: Spoilers abound here.

Rich: I know lots of them, but we're talking about websites today and issues. Uh, you may have, um, and some of the solutions for those. So as background, I've been doing websites since I was a toddler, basically in the nineties.

Rich: Um, I was actually doing them in the eighties. Honestly, since the

Catelin: beginning of Al Gore's internet.

Rich: Basically, yes. Yes. When we all had numbers and letters for email addresses and you had either CompuServe or AOL and AOL sent you CDs that you could wallpaper your house with. Yep. Um, look at the CDs. What did the CDs do?

Rich: They installed the software on your computer.

Catelin: Okay.

Rich: So it was 200 kilobyte program.

Catelin: And then instead of like updates, you had to get new CDs? No. Is that? There were no updates.

Rich: No, there were updates. When you connected to AOL, it would just push the updates to you. It would just take forever because you were going through your phone line.

Rich: So,

Catelin: anyway, I

Rich: actually still have archived. I'll have to dig them up. I've got one of my first like richmikey. com websites. I think I've owned that domain since 92 or 90 years ago. Wow. Um, But yeah, so I still have some of those old, old ones. I did HTML and all that stuff. It was so exciting. I

Catelin: would like to take this moment to tell anyone who's ever considered owning a business, running for office, doing anything, go by your name.

Catelin: Cause it's like, at this point it's, it's almost like, um, part of your identity.

Rich: Yeah. It's

Catelin: like, it's like your social security number, but online. It's more

Rich: permanent than your home address. Right. Like.

Catelin: Yeah. Do not let somebody squat on your, your internet address.

Rich: Yeah. And I think if you've got a really unique name, you're probably going to be better off.

Rich: Mm hmm. But, um, I still get, I just got a whole bunch from whoever has Rich Mackey. Uh, at gmail. com, like that's me who has that, but somebody thinks they have it and they keep giving somebody that email address and I, I got all this. It's somebody in Pennsylvania. Like I've been in his classmates. com and I logged out of it and took my email address out of it.

Rich: Um, these are all like, So like, yeah, own your name and get your name on the freeze on the free emails, like Gmail. Yahoo. I still have Hotmail. I still have. You have to log into them every so often to keep them. But um, yeah, I've had those forever too. Uh, even though I don't really use them,

Catelin: I hadn't thought about the other email providers.

Catelin: Cause like I, I have a Gmail and that's, I just,

Rich: yeah, I just forward them all to the Gmail and then I never check it because I don't use that one because now I've just given it out to our tens of listeners to email me. You can email me if you want to. I might see it. Who knows?

Catelin: Gets stuck in the thousands of coupons.

Catelin: I

Rich: know I had one for that too. That was like offers at rich Mackey. com, but that one I got rid of because so the nice thing about that is you just nuke it at some point and it goes away and then you never have to look at

Catelin: another sale ad.

Rich: Correct. Correct. All right. But we're not here to talk about email.

Rich: Caitlin, um, you do a lot with websites. You kind of, you kind of wove wound yourself into this niche.

Catelin: Yeah. I have an, I have a niche, a niche. She's yeah. Yeah. So she knows enough to be dangerous.

Rich: She does. She knows enough to keep them on time and on budget and make clients happy. Yeah. Um, and to the point where, um, if you've ever done a web redesign, they generally suck, like they take forever.

Rich: They're a pain in the ass. It's, it's like,

Catelin: yeah, yeah, the peaks and valleys of website projects are, um, high highs and low lows. It's like, you see the first concept and you're like, this is amazing. And then you realize, or the client realizes that they have to write that many pages and then they're like, this is

Rich: terrible.

Rich: Or just pay us to write the pages. That's fine too. Um, yeah. But yeah, so our process though, like we've managed to hone in. And I remember in the early days you were doing this and like, we got it good. So I'm getting ahead of myself.

I'm so sorry.

Rich: Shall we talk about a cocktail?

Yeah.

Rich: So Spanish gin and tonic.

Rich: So not your average gin and tonic, which is literally just gin and tonic.

Catelin: Maybe a lemon or a lime.

Rich: Yeah. A little citrus. Depending on

Catelin: where you are.

Rich: Where you live and what, honestly, for us, it's what fruit do we have available? I've done a gin and tonic with an orange wedge, which is perfectly fine. Yeah.

Rich: You know, it doesn't matter. Um, grapefruit gets into weird territory, I think for me with the bitter and the bitter, cause you kind of want that sweet citrusy acidity. Yeah. Yeah. Um, But yeah, so gin and tonics are British. Surprise, surprise. Um, and they were used as medicine in India. So quinine comes out of Yeah.

Rich: Quinine is in it, which always sounds to me like a poison. But I guess in enough quantities, anything is In enough quantities,

Catelin: yes. Uh, my post college days, a girlfriend and I, rather than hangovers, we would say we had gin tummy because we had too much quinine. We blamed the quinine, but we were safe from malaria.

Rich: You were, and that's why they ate it, but it was super bitter and the soldiers didn't like it. And so they mixed it with sugar, lime, and their gin ration. Cause of course, if you're a British soldier, you've got a gin ration. That's

Catelin: very smart.

Rich: Um, and that created the foundation for tonic water, which was the, the quinine, the lime, uh, the quinine, the sugar, and a little bit of, uh, Yeah, no, like that's it right?

Rich: Yeah,

Catelin: quinine and sugar. I love it.

Rich: Yeah, which is also why a gin and tonic is not a zero cal like a vodka soda is. So, because the soda water has no calories, the quinine, it's got like, I don't know, like 10 calories or in the tonic, whatever.

Catelin: Honestly, if you're, if you're counting down to tens of calories, like I probably do.

Catelin: I can't do that. I don't, uh, I'm sure you're lovely, but I don't want to share a cocktail with you.

Rich: Yep. Yep. Yep. So, um, anyway, uh, in the 20th century, we go all the way two centuries ahead. So that's 200 years, right? Yeah. Um, in Spain where bartenders like. They decided like, Oh, those Brits, like we're going to do something different.

Rich: And so they made sure to use really fresh tonic water, which I guess if you're in India in the military in the 18th century would be the 17. Yes. Um, I have to do math and history. The water's probably not that great. So the quiet and probably really helped, which is why either combating malaria. So anyway, also they started to develop gins with unique flavor profiles, which has, you know, are my favorite gins, not necessarily Spanish, uh, but I love a good, like funky flavored gin.

Rich: Um, and then they made their own glass. So like they really just pushed it. Um, so this Copa de Ballon glass, which I think means balloon cup, if I remember right, like that sounds right. Right. From our Spanish lessons in previous episodes, um, it's like a short fat wine glass, but it's specifically for the Spanish gin and tonic.

Rich: Um, so it went from like, dump two things in a glass over ice to a carefully crafted

Catelin: cocktail. Yeah. It's be, I mean, but I love, I love time. This is, yeah, it's very interesting. Okay. So to make this. I'm going to take two ounces of London dry gin. May I, I might push back on that a little bit and, and say, try one of the Hendricks, like not, not as super dry because they do some really interesting flavor profiles.

Catelin: Uh, four ounces of tonic water.

Rich: The Plymouth gin, if you need a British gin, cause it's a little milder. Although I think this one you want the juniper taste is my guess, but I do think some of the herbal in those Hendricks, like, yeah. Email us or call in. We'll tell you all the Hendricks

Catelin: flavors. Two ounces of London dry gin, four ounces of tonic water, chilled.

Catelin: And we're going to garnish with juniper berries, a lemon wheel, and some thyme. So you're going to pour the gin into your copa de bologna, or a wine glass if you, you know, don't want to spend. If you don't want to buy a special, a special glass for this, uh, pour that into a wine glass or copa de balon filled three quarters with ice.

Catelin: Top with the tonic water and stir gently and briefly to combine. Garnish with juniper berries, a lemon wheel and a thyme sprig. And that would be fresh, fresh wine. As fuck for summer.

Rich: Yep. Um, and so from a wine glass perspective, any of the fat wine glasses, I think it's a Pinot glass that's really fat. If I remember right, Pinot Noir.

Catelin: I only know reds and whites.

Rich: Okay, well, it'd be a red glass, but I think it's a pinot glass. Anyway, you'll look and you look at your glassware and you've got something that is fat. Like, big wide with a slightly narrow top. Just look up Copa de Bologna. It'll be fine. Um, what I love about the gin and tonic, though, is like, this one is a specific one, and I do love the thyme.

Rich: I love an herb on there. Um, the lemon wheels. So what we've started doing when we have citrus, that's like, it's not bad yet, but it's going to be soon. We slice it and dehydrate it in the toaster oven. And then we just put those in a bag and stick them in the freezer. And then they do a really good job.

Rich: Yes. They do a really good job at chilling your drink too. It's

Catelin: so fantastic. Oh, that's smart. That's very smart.

Rich: So I asked Brian, why we keep them in the freezer if they're dried? Like we don't have to. And he's like, he's like, yeah, cause then they're cold when they go in your drink. And I'm like, Oh, that makes sense.

Rich: But yeah, you can do so much with the gin and tonic. Like you've got elderflower gin, you've got, or elderflower tonic. I think there is elderflower gin as well. That's correct. Um, we had the, the fever tree tonics are so good. And so many, like, there's like a lemon one.

Catelin: Yeah. Fevertree is our house tonic.

Rich: Our house tonic too.

Rich: And Hendrix is our house gin, but only for people who appreciate gin. If you don't appreciate gin, we've got some of the Gordons in the plastic bottle for you.

Catelin: And shut up and drink your vodka. Don't complain to me.

Rich: I, you know what? We actually ran out of vodka the other day and I didn't notice because I hadn't had any for so long.

Rich: Somebody, somebody wanted like a vodka lemonade and I was like, Ooh,

Catelin: we.

Rich: We're out of vodka.

Catelin: Sorry.

Rich: I, we have blueberry vodka that somebody left at our house. No, no, don't do that. Um, okay. I feel like we should probably take a quick break and come back and talk websites.

Yes. We're

Catelin: back. Let's talk about some, some website pain points.

Rich: Yeah. And I think what I want to talk through a little bit is just the fact that like, we love doing websites, which we didn't use to, we used to hate them. They were good money, but Oh, so much work. So terrible. But now we have a very good process and we've done, I mean, how many websites do you think we've put through that process in the last three years that we haven't, we've had it at least.

Catelin: 10.

Rich: Yeah. And they seem to go really well.

Catelin: It's funny cause like I, I will blank out when people are like, Oh, can we send some website examples? And I'm like, we don't have any. And like, I just like go, I'm like, does not compute. And then I'll look back cause I have all of my emails sorted by client and I'll just look down the client folder and I'm like, Oh, we could send that one.

Catelin: We could send that one. We could send that one.

Rich: I just always ask Jesse. I'm like, Jesse, what website should I send these. Yeah. And remember this one was not using the theme. This one was a complete custom build. So don't use it as an example of what we can do. And I'm like, all right, okay. That won't be the affordable website then.

Rich: Um, so yeah, I think that like one of the things that we hear a lot, especially with people with old websites is, Oh my God, it's so slow. Like, and then their bounce rate goes through the roof because people will not wait for that thing to load.

Catelin: People, I mean, like people, we won't even scroll past the first, like five Google results to get the answer they want before they search for something different.

Catelin: So imagine if your site is not loading quickly, um, some of the, some of the fixes for that, um, optimize your images so you can reduce the file size of those. We use a website called Um, tiny, tiny PNG, tinify, I think, yeah, tiny PNG, but yeah, and you

Rich: can saving images as Webby, Web P W E B P, but it's pronounced Webby, um, it's a Google format.

Rich: And like when we started to do that, like I was like, Oh, this 34 K image, like no big deal. No, it's like six K with no loss of quality. Um, it's just super optimized and that site does that, I believe, because I know that we have. A lot of those.

Catelin: I don't remember. I just used it to compress like, you know, five Meg full like JPEGs.

Catelin: Um, but yeah, you

Rich: can save Webby images from, um, Photoshop. It's a little different. You don't export you save as I think, but I know Megan knows how to do that and does a really good job. Um, and those work really well. One caution is if you're an e commerce site, um, and you're pushing out to like Google commerce and.

Rich: Bing commerce and all of that Sometimes they don't like the webby images so you can push then you have to use a PNG

Catelin: But get

Rich: it as small as you can.

Catelin: Yes. Yes. It is tinypng. com and I'm curious. I was just trying to confirm whether They would go to smart web P, web, webby, just makes me think of like little ducks, PNG and JPEG compression.

Catelin: So, TinyPNG has a free version that works really well, but if you want to do like a huge batch of images, it's like 30 a year or something. And what's really

Rich: nice about that is you can, you can batch those and then, you know, like just download them all from your website. Usually you can access that somewhere in the backend and throw them all in there and make them all smaller and then, uh, you know, You can with some, you can do an image replace where you pop it back up.

Rich: So you don't have to go back in and figure out where that image is and change the URL and all that, or just have somebody like us do it. Yes, we, we know what we're doing. Um, I think another thing is like, so people don't, they see like reduce HTTP requests and they're like, what is that? And that's the number of things your website needs to load in particular on the first page.

Rich: And in particularly above the fold on the first page. So every icon, every link out, every like group of text videos. Yep. So reducing the number of those. And there's a whole lot of ways. to do that. Um, so I've seen people use images just for a colored background. Don't do that because it's got to load the image.

Rich: Just actually put a colored background on it and then it's just pinging that color, uh, which is easier. Um, so servers. Generally out of your control, but you can look at where you're hosting and where other people are hosting. Um, so we do have a self serve WordPress hosting. We don't do a lot of WordPress websites anymore.

Rich: We really use, um, HubSpot's content hub. Not if I can help

Catelin: it.

Rich: Most of ours. Anytime

Catelin: you bring me a WordPress website, I'm like, that's not going to work for me.

Rich: And we'll get into why that is. It's kind of, I think the next one actually gets into that,

Catelin: but

Rich: the service that we use actually has for just a few dollars more, one, it's a dedicated server per site.

Rich: So you're not on a shared server. And then for a few dollars more, you can actually be on an, uh, a more optimized platform that has just like your computer would, it's got more Ram, it's got more cache space on the storage. Um, things like that. Um, so there's also little things like CDNs and other stuff that we can talk about, but just anything you can do to make sure your hosting plan is up to snuff.

Rich: And if you're doing an 8. 95 a month hosting plan at GoDaddy, um, no, that is not a good No, it's just not good all around. One, yes, you're at risk of getting hacked because GoDaddy's big and the hackers like big because they can get a whole bunch of stuff at once. Um, but you're also on those cheap plans or free plans or 2 a month.

Rich: You're not getting. a good hosting plan to be able to serve your site. You're much better off paying. I mean, even just, you know, three or 400 a year, you know, 20 or 30 a month is what a lot of premium plans, um, cost. And if you do have e commerce, you definitely want an e commerce plan because e commerce is heavy.

Catelin: Yeah. Uh, I think this last one is interesting to, um, Because some of this happens, I think, automatically without people realizing. So enabling a browser to cache your site. Um, but then the flip side of that is if you have, like, form fill, Concerns or things where it's like, Oh, it's not quite working, right?

Catelin: Always, always clear your browser cache first. So it's, it's kind of twofold, right? You're going to get a faster load time, but, uh, you just want to make sure that you periodically kind of clean out that drunk drawer of, of website caches so that it doesn't get gunked up.

Rich: And you can't control your, um, the user's cache obviously on their browser, but you can, um, and what we'll do a lot of times, if you completely change your site, you can turn off browser caching to not allow anybody to cache it usually at the server level.

Rich: Um, and then. It'll force the new site out to everybody. Otherwise it'll get there in 24 to 48 hours. Like they'll get the new stuff. It's really not a huge deal. Um, but there are ways for you to clear that or turn it off. A lot of times, um, putting it in development mode will automatically turn off caching because that way you'll see everything as you're doing it real time.

Rich: Um, But just some, some quick tips there. Um, but generally caching is a good thing. Um, and what's funny is, so the server you're on with your website caches, your individual browser caches, but there are also nodes of the internet around the world that have their own cache. So like we actually have, um, not for websites, but for apps, for iOS and Mac OS.

Rich: We use an old machine attached to our network at home that when one of us downloads the app, it actually caches that app at the machine level. So then if the next one of us downloads, it's instant. Because it's not going to the internet, it's actually pulling in. I didn't even know we could do this, but we can apparently.

Rich: My internal IT team set that up.

Catelin: I know, I was like, Brian is a wizard.

Rich: You have an in house bartender, I have an in house IT pro. And former Mac genius. And also sommelier. He's a man of many talents. Oh my gosh. When we start

Catelin: the commune, the Fox Mackey household is my first, is my first call.

Rich: We also know how to purify water.

Rich: So like, we know how to render like pool water drinkable, um, which would be extreme, like, you know, but if you have 20, 000 gallons of water in your backyard, like being able to make that drinkable and we could put quinine in it so that we don't get malaria. Excellent. So Caitlin, I think this next one is why you like HubSpots.

Rich: It is. Content management system, a lot better than a WordPress.

Catelin: Content hub has just like changed the game in terms of forward compatibility. And, um,

Rich: good term forward. Thank you. Yes. That means that your website will continue to work even as the internet changes its technology and gets better.

Catelin: Well, and, um, It's easier to understand how to edit, like you don't have to go, there is no like back end of editing website pages necessarily.

Catelin: True. Like what, it's a, it's a, it's a WYSIWYG thing. What you see is what you get. Exactly. I'm going to use all of the lingo that I know. So you can watch your updates happen live. And, um, there are some like kinks every now and again, or quirks, but, uh, I, for some volunteer work that I've been doing, I've been using Wix and, um, it's been like learning a different language.

Catelin: Different language. And I'm like, Oh, I just want to go back to, and things are hidden and they don't quite make sense. But on, on HubSpot, you can create or use, um, that user friendly CMS content management system, and you don't have to know how to code. Um,

Rich: Caitlin, why get, get whoever you're doing volunteer work with, get them into She's working on a customer platform.

Rich: It's so they just dropped the price again. It's 15 per user per month now, 180 bucks a year. And note that you can be a partner user and not get charged for it.

Catelin: Right.

Rich: Um, that's what I do. I have a friend who owns a small business and that's what I did for him. He was in all these things and I'm like, no, your store is going to Shopify and all your marketing is moving to HubSpot's like content platform or customer platform.

Rich: And he's like, okay. And I'm like,

Catelin: okay, well, and that's, I mean, I think, you It kind of goes back to what I was saying about like, don't bring me WordPress websites, right? Is like, for us, understanding and knowing and being really confident in what we know that HubSpot is In terms of website user friendliness, HubSpot is one of the easiest to understand, edit, maintain.

Catelin: And if you get stuck, there is a bevy of professionals. If you don't, if you don't want to use us, you can find somebody in the partner directory, that's. Close to you or in India if you want to pay. Their support team is fantastic. Like yes

Rich: on the starter suites or starter Platform, I think they're calling it now.

Rich: Yeah, you do you get access to email and live chat? You can't do phone support. Mm hmm, but I would just find donut. I don't know. I don't want to talk Their live chat is really good. And a lot of times it'll convert to an email ticket or Sometimes I'll just go in and be like, I don't want to even chat with somebody.

Rich: I just want an answer like in 24, 48 hours and I'll just email them and be like, I'll check this later.

Catelin: The other thing too is their, their knowledge base is exceptionally easy to use and there's a whole community of power users that like, I think. Is it Karsten Kohler? I think his whole job is to just answer HubSpot questions.

Catelin: He is in the knowledge, or in the, in the community all the time. And has like, yes,

Rich: you should tag him and say, we mentioned you.

Catelin: But the, the beauty and the ease of use. in, uh, a holistic CMS too, because the other thing that's really lovely about this is that their email builder functions almost identically, so you don't have to learn how to use a new email builder.

Catelin: Their landing page interface functions the same as their website page interface. And it's

Rich: actually the exact same interface right now. You can convert a webpage to a landing page and vice versa. If you want to, I haven't had to do that yet. It's in actions. All right. So I think what's good for us is. Um, it actually like minimizes what we need to do for maintenance after we build a site.

Rich: Um, because like we've had ongoing agreements, like, which is great. It's good money with a lot of people just because they couldn't like the WordPress thing, they would screw it up or it would be, it would be touchy with HubSpot. Like one, you can roll back if you screw something up, um, to a previous version, but it's just easy.

Rich: Like when we demo it for people, they're like, Oh yeah, I could do this. Cause it's built for marketers, not developers.

Catelin: And, um, I was going to, there was something else. There was something else. Oh, there's no like plugin updates. There's no, it's that it's the idea of no backend, right? Like they have a 99 percent uptime.

Catelin: They have great service, but there's no. Like plugin updates or like control panel, funny code that you have to like sort through to get. Like as long as you're not trying to do anything crazy, if it's, it's really, really easy to use, which leads us to. The next

Rich: point, using navigation, um, the thing you definitely want is for people to get to your website.

Rich: So this one kind of goes with another one with unclear calls to action. Um, I'm going to put those together, like just to squish them in a little bit, because the goal here is when people get to your site, you want them to be able to do what you want them to do, right? You want to make it clear, like, I don't want to come to a site and be like, well, I don't know what to do here.

Rich: I'm going to leave.

Like if I

Rich: can't find what I need in the navigation. And I don't know what you want me to do or what you're offering me or what, like the goal is here. It's basically like if you go to a store and they make it really hard for you to give them your money, like make it easy for me to give you my information, make it worth it for me to give you my information, make it easy for me to get what I want.

Catelin: Yes. Well, and make it clear what your goal is in service or sales or whatever it is. Like if your, if your goal is to talk to somebody either on the phone or via email, like reach out, say hello, contact us, like all of those types of like easy to understand calls to action.

Rich: Yep. Learn more. Download now.

Catelin: Yes.

Catelin: By

Rich: here. Like, just really, really clear action words. Like, what do I do?

Catelin: And one of my favorite things that Jesse and Megan have really, really started to implement on interior pages, especially, is those breadcrumbs that tells you, uh, what's going on. And like, I, this is, my experience is always like in e commerce, right?

Catelin: When I'm like, okay, so I'm on this page, but I want to go back to the page with all of the dresses with pockets. And like, I can just click that breadcrumb back as opposed to like having to back out with my browser 14 times after I've looked at all of the size and color variations, but just like take me one, one layer back or one layer deeper.

Catelin: And those, the breadcrumb navigation, um, which is just a little trail that shows Your location. It's kind of like your, your, uh, Navigation history, um, usually at the top of the page. And, and that, um, makes all the difference in terms of navigation. It's also really helpful internal links too, right? Like you can get back to where you,

Rich: where you want it to be.

Rich: Yeah. A hundred percent. And I think we've also started putting icons in like mega menus. So mega menus are great, but if they're just a hundred words, like no sense. So I love how Jesse and Megan have started grouping things logically and having a little icon that kind of indicates what it is.

Catelin: Um,

Rich: so good, good,

Catelin: good.

Catelin: Uh, one of the other real benefits of the HubSpot CMS is their Like built in mobile view and tools. And, um, we, I think there's like a new trend for millennials, especially to talk about like the big internet and the little internet. Like there's some projects that are little internet that's like on your phone.

Catelin: Right. And then there's that

Rich: Gen Z.

Catelin: I don't know. It's a, it's certainly a millennial thing for me where I'm like, Oh, I can't do this on my phone. I can't, like, I need my, I mean, my keyboard, I need to be able to see the whole thing.

Rich: I'll tell you, intern Casey, who's working on our e commerce t shirt site, um, said he does not shop on his phone.

Rich: He has to be on like a computer. I knew

Catelin: he was a crusty old man on the inside. I love it. He is.

Rich: He's a crusty old man on the inside. It's fantastic. Yeah. But yeah, he just, he wants that bigger screen. He wants to be able to see things like the phone screen is just too small for that. But what's really great is, um, There are ways to make the phone screen act differently and work well.

Rich: Um, and HubSpot does that almost automatically. I know that we have sometimes in WordPress, you can struggle with that a little bit. Um, But yeah, that's a really great one. Yeah. And the small internet and the big internet or the small internet

Catelin: and the big internet, but the small internet is really, um, like if people are looking for a fast answer or if they're trying to engage with you for the first time, they're more than likely on a mobile device on the small internet.

Catelin: And so that also goes back to page load speeds because they don't always have. a high speed connection, right? Um, I know that's changing in larger metropolitan areas, but where we are in the Midwest, if they're on a road trip,

Rich: middle of Western Nebraska is as internet speeds on phones get faster. Like remember when LTE was like the jam and it was so fast.

Rich: And now, like, if you look at your phone and it just has an LTE signal, you're like, oh, nothing's gonna load. Mm hmm. Like, I need to have that, that 5G UC extra plus.

Catelin: I don't get that here. We get 5G.

Rich: Well, we have 5G UC. It's a T Mobile thing that's, um, Ultra something, I don't know what it is, but it's like, we're faster than 5G.

Rich: Um, so yeah, and I think the worst thing is if you get through all of these other ones and everything is okay, if your content sucks, like, I'm honestly

Catelin: surprised Zach put this last as our content king.

Rich: I know, since he's really, but I think he gets that like the other stuff is like, you're not even gonna get it.

Rich: Get to the content if you don't have those other things fixed, but nothing is worse than going to a site and having it just be like nasty grammatical errors. I sent one to you the other day. That was a, it was a social media, but still, um, yeah, it drives me crazy. And I'm seeing that on news sites now, where like the grammar is bad, they're missing stuff.

Rich: Um, so first shout out, do not let AI just write everything for you. AI is a good tool to use to get an outline, to start writing, but you still need to go through it and make sure it's not recommending that you put glue in your pizza sauce. Isn't that bananas? It is, um, it is bananas. It is. So, uh, well written content, free of errors.

Rich: Keep it up to date. If you've got that blog post, that's really timely, set it to expire or set yourself a reminder to go in and update it.

Catelin: Yeah. And I think too, um, one of the things that I really like to, to emphasize for people who are writing their own sites is like 300 words per page minimum. You're not going to get by with.

Catelin: we sell widgets and you should buy one, like it, it doesn't do you any service on an organic search side. It's not going to help your, your clients find what they need. Um, so when we talk about high quality content, that's relevant, um, it's, it's gotta be a little bit meatier. And especially as you start to get into like internal services or product pages, like really describe, really like pull yourself out of the weeds and think about what your client or your customer would want to know and, uh, use that, use the beginner's mind.

Catelin: And organize it. Like, what don't I know? Mm hmm.

Rich: Use your H2s and H3s. Use your headers. Put things in. Or, like, you don't want to just vomit 300 words onto a page. Right. Having paragraphs that are, you know, three or four sentences in different sections, bullet points are helpful, descriptions on photos are helpful.

Rich: Like, keep it organized so that it doesn't feel like I'm just hitting this wall of text when I get there. That's one of the worst things to do. Um, because I'm not going to read that. No one is. It's not going to happen.

Catelin: Yeah. Yeah. And, um, that helps too with just like some organization and, um, helping Google understand what's at your site.

Catelin: If you're using your, you know, image descriptions and your H1s, H2s, H3s, properly, like all of that kind of ladders up to a good user experience.

Rich: Yep. 100%. So Caitlin, I feel like that's an episode. It is. We did it. Yep. So good content, uh, manage, uh, something that's easy to manage and maintain, keep your navigation clear and simple, make sure it's mobile friendly, make sure people know what you want them to do and keep it fast.

Catelin: And if you're struggling with any of those things, you can find our agency at antidote underscore 71, or. You can send us a question, uh, visit CTA podcast live to send us an email or leave us a voicemail on our hotline at 4 0 2 7 1 8 9 9 7 1. It could be about this episode or anything else, but if you have marketing questions, we'd love to help you.

Catelin: And your question will absolutely make it into a future episode.

Rich: It will, we promise . Um, Jack is just waiting to get not a spam voicemail on that line. Um, please. So our next episode coming up is going to be the Tiki Torch. We're going to go back to the Tiki room. Yes. Uh, and it dovetails off of this one nicely.

Rich: It's the importance of SEO audits. So a lot of this stuff is table stakes for SEO, and then you go much deeper into it. So it looks like I am the expert guest on that one. Um, maybe not. I don't know. Uh, I am not. Okay. Zach is shaking his head. Shall I guess? Can 

Catelin: guess? Are we joined by Jason or Riley?

Rich: Oh, we're getting a shrug from Zach.

Rich: It's a mystery. It's a secret. It's a mystery. All right. So we'll talk about the importance of SEO audits next time. And we'll get a tiki torch as a drink, kind of about as far from a gin and tonic as you can get, right? That's correct. And we'll see you then.