Episode 18 - Your Website Is Never Done

Welcome back to another episode of the Not Brothers Podcast where today we're talking about websites, something that we've been around since well, the beginning of the company. almost 17 years now.

and well before that, first websites in 1999.

Yeah, my first website was built in 1999 and it's still online today. I can't take it down because I don't know the password. And I lied about my age. So it was I don't remember what my date of birth was either or the email address. So I think I was, what was I, at the time? 12, 13, somewhere in there.

Sounds about right. Maybe younger, actually.

Let's see, let's break out the old calculator.

Hmm See you in 99. Yeah.

was 11. I was 11. It was 99 to 2000 is the is the dates that's on that website. So was 11 slash 12. So it's always funny because I can go back and peer into the brain of 12 year old me and see all the content that I thought was really fun to put on. Yeah. The funniest one is the

and all the flames have flames.

The one that I remember the most is there's a there's a page on that website that's dedicated to rail buggies And it's all just like rail buggies and dune buggies just photos that we found that we thought were cool And I remember uploading that page and it was 56k dial-up and it took an eternity like I think it took a it took like three days just to upload all of the images and when you when you would load the website it would

my gosh.

It would just load in like one line at a time of all the images. So it took forever. But now it's super fast. We just had to wait for everything to catch up. But as much fun as that is, we've, you know, what we're talking about is from a professional perspective, right? We've been building, we started out the company, you know, today we're a full service digital marketing agency that does...

Yeah.

you know, pretty much anything on the internet, a ton of advertising, building technical products, AI development, you know, all the sorts of different things. But websites were kind of at the heart of it. When we very first started, that's what we started doing is we started building websites for organizations that needed needed a website needed to redo their website. And so we have a vast amount of experience in that we've built probably almost in every language and system you could possibly think of. We've touched almost every content management system you can think of and been able to see this all sort of evolve over the past 17 years. And I think that where we are now is fundamentally different than where we were back then. And I think even where we're going to next is an interesting place. Where do I start?

I just, you know, I was over here thinking about the, just the evolution to the high, the high points of how web development or what people should care about in terms of web design has shifted and changed probably about every five ish years or so. And we first started the company in 2009. The thing that everyone needed to be mindful of was, was mobile. And there were various ways that you could attack, you could tackle that. You could build an entirely separate mobile site. And that's what most people did for quite a while. And then responsive design came around. Yeah, that was an era. And then responsive design came around and kind of changed the game. And now you don't have to have a completely separate mobile site with completely separate content and all this different stuff to manage and maintain. And now everything can just kind of organize itself and shrink where it needs to shrink. And then, you know, as traffic continued to tick up in terms of what mobile presence was, mobile became and still is for most sites, the primary. the primary medium in which people consume content. And so, you know, the, the emphasis on mobile and making sure that content is, is vertical, not only horizontal has continued to trend. And, know, you kind of pair that with social media trends and dynamics too of like, okay, well now most content that brands are shooting should be mobile first, meaning vertical shot first. And the horizontal can be used as sort of an afterthought. for some of those things. So you like, just kind of thinking through those evolutions and then you have. You know, the, the tool stacks behind the scenes that have evolved and changed where WordPress was the engine for, you know, 10, 10 or so years. Yeah. At least at least seven or eight of those, of those first 10 years we were in business. And those things have shifted and evolved where enterprise CMSs have kind of fallen out of favor in a lot of ways. And those that are still in favor are moving away from the monolith style systems of we own everything to being more of a headless CMS style where it's developer friendly, it's very fast, it's on purpose, compartmentalized, and it doesn't try to do everything and gives a lot of flexibility to things. And you can speak to the advantage of that a lot better than I can. but from like an actual business perspective and what people should care about, I think the need for content management systems has evolved and changed. The need, and really at the heart of content management systems has always been like, all right, I have all this information that probably already exists somewhere else, and I need to be able to point people to get access to it. Right? And put it in a format and in a user friendly way. So it's not just a bunch of PDF navigations or whatever else. need to put it in a customer facing website format. Well, that's kind of exactly what a headless CMS is designed to do. It's you, you throw it a bunch of content and then on the user experience side, you can make it look however you want. pretty easily and seamlessly with some front-end code changes. And as we've worked with brands that have kind of interesting user experience needs, like as an example, we have... One group that has clients that they want to be able to brand the organization's content for their clients at an individual experience level. so a headless CMS allows you to do exactly that within the content stays the same. You don't have to manage three or four different websites to make that happen. It just pulls what it needs, shows the, you know, runs the front end code to make the styling and boom, there it is.

Yeah. I'm slightly distracted because what was something you said made me curious. You just hit like 100 topics.

My dear, you're welcome.

I think let's start back at the the one that kind of piqued my interest, which is the the introduction of mobile and what that meant. Because I think there are interesting parallels that I see with that with today's world. Yeah, that's actually fascinating. Like, there's a bit of parallels that I see where I remember being in that position where we were constantly telling people, hey, you need a mobile site, or you need a mobile site, or you need for your website to be mobile friendly, one of the two. And at the time, it was perceived as optional. And today, if you ask anybody like, hey, do want to make a website and not have it be mobile friendly? What the fuck are you talking about? Of course not. Unless it's like an application or something, maybe that's socially acceptable, or it's a B2B app that's only going to be used in the office or whatever. Sure. But generally speaking, that's table stakes now. And I think about that as like today, I would put accessibility in that category where accessibility like WCAG 2.2 AA, that kind of stuff is something that you don't have to comply with, but is something I would highly suggest you comply with. But it's also something that like, it's an additional cost, because it's it's, it's tedious, you have to make sure that that you know, as much as you would just follow general best practices, that doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to always hit accessibility standards. You kind of have to go back over with a fine tooth comb once you're finished and make sure that, you know, no fonts got shrunk too far. You don't have colors that are not within contrast. You've got, you know, all the rules that exist that you just maybe wouldn't think about. so I find that interesting, but also the other thing I thought was interesting is, is just thinking about like my personal experience and feeling as it relates to mobile and the internet. And you're right. Like there was this point where. There was sort of a convergence of the two, right? Where we hit the point of like 50-50 and then it actually flipped where the majority of website traffic was coming from mobile and not from desktop. And my personal feeling is that like maybe that's actually flipped back the other direction because time has evolved, right? personal computing systems like laptops and things are more readily available than they were at some point. They're cheaper, know, more people have them, more familiar with them. You're utilizing the internet for work more often, you know, with a lot of jobs that maybe you didn't before. And just the landscape, right? I think that mobile is the king of social for sure. Like any social interaction, any content consumption that stems from social media. whether it's audio, video, text, doesn't matter, that mobile owns that arena. But looking at our own stats, and then also looking at the stat counter that I've used, just statcounter.com, which I've always used as like global stats forever. You do see this like convergence where like mobile peaks at somewhere around 60 % ish. and then sort of dives back down and it goes like 50-50 and there's like this constant meandering back and forth between mobile and desktop over the past 10 years. And today it's pretty much 50-50 as far as theirs concerned. Now, I looked at our own stats too. Our stats for our website are like 70-30 desktop.

Yeah, I would figure that to be the case. Anything B2B oriented is going to be heavily desktop skewed and anything consumer oriented, would imagine would probably be the opposite. Pretty close.

Yeah. So just an interesting thing that I think is like I think it's interesting that that went from being an optional thing to something that's pretty well mandatory, but also just the, was a time that I remember looking at our analytics and our analytics were 60, 30 or 60, 40 mobile. And over some amount of time, they flipped also. So there have been differences in how people are consuming the information and what is driving people to our website and not. And obviously we could go a lot deeper on this than. we are but just thought it was kind of interesting and an important reminder that like you have to take into account who your customers are right you can't just look at the broad brush of you know well 60 % of the internet or what's 50 50 ish is mobile that may be well and good but if you're talking about building a CMS maybe your primary interaction point is not going to be on a phone. It's going to be on a desktop device. And how you build that and what you consider to be the primary interactions may be completely different for all those reasons.

I also, you got me thinking about how, you know, those different platform experiences, be it mobile or desktop and how navigation in particular has changed and evolved over time and how that's impacted it. So in the, in the way back days, navigation was just simple, right? And then, then came the mega nav and then came the hamburger nav and then came some mixture of the two.

Before it all came the myth of the fucking page fold.

There is that too.

which invented sliders because everybody was convinced that if you push anything below the page fold, nobody's ever gonna see it. So where they're definitely gonna see it is if you hide it five screens off the page and just wait for it to slide by, which was also fascinating because we would do like user tests and things and you'd see it. The first thing everybody does when they get to a website is scroll down. And then you're like, okay, well, let's just put Instead of having a slider of five things, let's just put these five things on the page. They're like, no, then people won't see them because below the page full. I'm like, you just scroll down. If you scroll down, you will see them. If you scroll down, you will not see anything in the fucking slider.

I think there are a lot of myths like that, right? Like I think people, people are convinced or have been convinced that clients have been convinced over some period of time that things also have to live in the primary navigation. It's like, no, it doesn't. Or, or this is, this is my favorite that the homepage has to be perfect because that's going to be the place that everybody goes to. It's like, no, actually that should be the least visited page. Yeah, that should be the least visited page of your entire website.

page is the place that you go to.

Because you should be pointing people deeper.

Yeah, it's still right. If you're if you're running any sort of advertising or anything, you're probably not dropping them off on the homepage. And if you are, probably ought to be a question why you're doing that. We have in our home page is it's in the top 10, but it's in the top 10 because we have it, in email signatures or people just, you know, when they're curious or you hand somebody a business card or something like that. So it's a good entry point. But

You're probably doing it wrong.

it is important to think about the holistic vision of the site and where people are going to interact and what their entry points are going to be. I mean, there's tons of anti patterns that exist, right? The one that that pops up the fucking, you know, oh, you're leaving so soon. As soon as I get to the website, and like trying to collect an email address, like nothing infuriates me more than when I show up to your website. and I'm just trying to click a link and then you put something in front of me like a little spinning wheel or something that's prompting me because you're afraid I'm gonna leave because you didn't test it on mobile and your stupid JavaScript doesn't realize that my finger lifting off the screen isn't me trying to leave your fucking website. Hate it.

You've got that and then you've got hiding everything behind gated content pieces. And don't get me wrong, gated content can have its place and that definitely ran its course. And I think people are generally of the expectation in today's world that if the content is important enough, you should just show it to me. And if I find it relevant, then I will engage and dig deeper and give you my information. Just hiding it behind a Any sort of thing just promotes bad behavior on the user side creating fake email addresses and then you have to do something with that fake email address and then you have the false positive of I have I now have somebody's email address I'm gonna send them stuff via email now that and it's going to a black box because it's fake

And I think those practices are even more so useless as users are more educated. I think plenty of users are educated enough to know how to use a burner email address. And it's readily available. If you don't know one, I always use Mailinator. But if you don't know one, you can just Google burner email address, get an inbox, use that. get whatever it is you want. And now you've just passed a bullshit email to them, which like thinking about that from even like an agency perspective, we ran a campaign for a client where gated content was a piece of it. That screws up everything that we have, right? All of our success metrics are fucked now because we think we were successful. We got so many email address submissions, whatever. Well, half of those are fake or maybe more, we don't know. And depending on what it is a lot of times what happens with those I've found at least is it's a big over promise under deliver kind of thing It's like I promise you this thing that sounds really really cool and I send you a PDF That's like some AI generated bullshit eight-page PDF, but now I've got your email I'm gonna spam you forever and try to like beat you into submission to buy something from me Which like nothing about that interaction. That's like a that's like a a very hostile interaction and not a good way to start a relationship. And for me, it's like a guaranteed, like, I will never buy anything from you sort of thing. Like, there are a few companies on that shit list that, like, I will absolutely never buy anything from them just because of some of their practices in the past and our experiences with them.

Yeah. Let's see, let's think about some other website trends or things that have evolved over time. I think.

Yeah. So I think the obvious one that you also touched on is the evolution of content management systems, right? From the days of something like Joomla, there were even sort of like the earliest inklings of content management systems. I remember being in like Microsoft FrontPage 2003 or 2000 maybe. I don't remember, was a long time ago. But they had like some...

Mm-hmm. Long time ago.

you know, content management-y stuff where you can make some changes and then publish them directly from their Dreamweaver had some stuff that was like that. We're going like way back right now. But then you had like, you Joomla, Drupal, WordPress, they were the big PHP ones. You've had this creation of like Sitecore and infinity and and

Mm-hmm.

these like ASP ones that are more like enterprise driven ASP systems and all of these have been these like big monolith systems that they manage all your content, they maybe have a plugin system. They handle your templating engine, they're very, you know, opinionated around how all that stuff works. It's a massive system to work within. And that's kind of been how it is for a while, right? Like you, you have a developer, they build a site. It exposes some amount of stuff. In some cases, like you can only update certain things and other cases, you know, we've had evolutions. I guess that was the first version, right? You can edit stuff on the page and you're kind of boxed in on what you can edit. Then came page builders where sort of like by way of plugins with WordPress and you know, other means, um, you had these like more page builder style where they try to give you more control over. different aspects you could change padding and margin and play pseudo developer basically, which are gargantuan difficult systems to understand, but they did give a lot of flexibility. And then I think the, where we are sort of now is this emergence of headless CMS. And it's not new necessarily, it's been going on for, I think we built our first, site on a headless cms probably eight or ten years ago somewhere in there

Yeah, I think it's like 2007, 2008-ish timeframe.

Yeah, and headless CMS is basically like you have a content management system. Yeah. So you have content management system like Contentstack is a good, a really good example. It's probably our favorite. Where the content management system only concerns itself with the content. So what they've created is they've created a platform that's really good at managing content, really good at subdividing content into what it needs to be.

We're on—2017, 2018. That's what I meant.

and then it exposes an API. then web developers like us can consume that API however we want. So we can use whatever templating system we want. We could use the same content on a mobile website or on a mobile application even. So if you have sort of like blog style content or newsletter content, maybe we push that newsletter to the website, but we also push it to a mobile application for some reason. And you can do that completely simultaneously without having to do any like duplicative entry or anything like that because you're consuming from the same API. And I think that's obviously my, I have an affinity towards that style because I like the freedom of being able to build whatever templating engine we want. In our case, a lot of times we're using Astro today, which is a static site generator that's super fast and very flexible, allows for dynamic content and all sorts of stuff. But one of the things that's great is we can basically at build time sort of pull in all the content that we need, smash it all down into the pages. And a lot of these pages never change, right? You have blog pages, you write the blog, blog post never changes or the product page doesn't change every day. So we can cram all that down to static HTML and then serve it up via CDN. And it's incredibly fucking fast. Because instead of when you make a page request, ordinarily what would have to happen is about 100 things. So you make a page request, it goes and requests all the images, it requests the HTML, which then turns around and asks the templating engine to build the HTML, which then turns around and makes a dozen requests to the database to get the contents that it needs to then assemble the HTML, and it has to pass all that in reverse. So every single time you load the page is doing that. And there are caching techniques and things you could employ still there, but then you're dealing with cache busting and other stuff too. We just kind of circumvent all of that because you ask for the page and we just deliver you the page. And there's not any necessity to go reach out and do all of this assembly bullshit. It also means hosting is, hosting is cheaper. Maintenance is cheaper. Like there are fewer things to go wrong because like the database server can't go down because there's not a database server.

right.

So I'm a big fan of that paradigm. I think that's going to continue forward because I also think it's a very AI-friendly platform. AI is really good at understanding APIs, interacting with APIs, entering content via APIs. It's not very good at dealing with that stuff through just complex UIs. Even some of the stuff that with WordPress, we've used multiple page builder style plugins within that world. You know WordPress was a great was a great thing. think it's I think WordPress has passed its prime. I think WordPress as a whole is also kind of looking at like reinventing itself a little bit, but I mean WordPress was a blogs was a site built for building blogs. That just kind of exploded and people built a whole bunch of shit on it, us included that should have never been built on WordPress. And still due to this day.

Mm-hmm.

And I think that, you know, it's past its prime for sure. They're much better alternatives. And I think we're going to concede we're going to see that continue forward, probably at a more rapid pace, even because we have AI. I think the third evolution or consideration and one that we're toying with now is what we've effectively lovingly called like no CMS or AI CMS, which is it's what we've employed on our own site as a as an experiment of, you know, are there cases where you just don't need a CMS at all? And I think the answer today is 100 % true. Like, yes, there are probably situations where depending on the group who's responsible for management, depending on the controls in place, depending on the technical capabilities and the complexity of the site, you could probably get away with no CMS. And in our case, it's just an Astro site. and we have a workflow and an agent where we can go into Fizzy and assign a ticket to that agent and say, hey, make these updates to our website or publish this blog post and it'll do it. It'll give us a preview link. We can approve it. It goes to review a review process and it gets published. know what? I don't think that'll be the primary way that kind of takes off, but it's another interesting. opportunity that exists in the world right now that didn't exist prior.

One of the advantages of AI as a CMS is that you're not constrained to whatever your development crew made for you out of the gate. You can give it boundaries. can give it things, give your agent things that it will and won't do as part of its skill and whatever. But the capability is there for you to be much more creative in what you're trying to accomplish on the other end. versus just being able to edit content in a CMS and whatever happens, happens on the other end. know, one that we didn't talk about in the CMS land is like the true WYSIWYG CMSs where, and that's probably...

That's I was calling kind of the page builder CMSs.

Yeah, yeah. So you've got, you know, like things like Webflow that do a pretty good job, honestly, if you're if you're a design person.

yeah, I didn't even think about those. Webflow and... I don't remember the other one. Wix.

Wix, yep. And those have, they've evolved quite a bit. They used to be hot garbage and they've actually evolved into pretty useful content management systems for certain application types and certain, you know, technical ability individuals, specifically designers. Like it's allowed, you know, high level designers to be able to take something that they used to have to hand off to a developer to put into code and, you know, start to finish, take a design concept all the way through. the development engine. I like those things for rapid prototype type of things. I don't like those things for like long term applications or long term utilization of sites. Backtracking a second, I think one one thing that I haven't quite figured out with AI as a CMS is how do you how do you manage the metadata in a way that you understand what's going on? Because all that's kind of hidden, right? So things like, you know, search engine optimization and whatnot. Like they're with a CMS, you at least have some application where you can kind of see what the metadata is and adapt it and evolve it based on, you know, whatever you might want to do with AI as a CMS. The metadata is there, but it's, it's not, it's not in a format that someone like me can go look at very easily.

You know, I think you'd have to use tools to pull that information out. I think it also is, that shit just doesn't matter anymore. Some of it does, like JSON, like location data and like the JSON-LD stuff and. You know, there are certain forms of the Open Graph stuff like those things matter. But, you know, things like meta keywords and descriptions and stuff, they don't fucking matter anymore. The description is like marginally. If you want to control what shows up, if it shows up in search results, like that would be the only thing. But even then, I don't even know that Google, if you make a search that matches something on the page, Google will not show your meta description. They will show the snippet of what

Yeah, definitely involved.

matched on the page instead. it's, you know, we've evolved to this world where like metadata used to be really important because it was how you told the systems how to interact with it. Now the systems are interpreting it the same way a user is going to interpret it. that really it's like, is the content on this page good?

Mm-hmm.

more so than anything else. I mean, is some aspects of that alt text and that kind of stuff becomes a little bit difficult. Like this solution is not ready for prime time because of all of this. there's probably a review engine side that would need to be paired with it that looks at things like your metadata and your Open Graph information and your alt text and your honestly maybe doing like a mini WCAG. audit for accessibility, along with some other stuff to help you understand like, you know, hey, we drifted at all. Usually what happens is that that winds up being like me with our stuff. So, you know, the AI agent creates the pull request, I kind of look over it and then make sure that it's good. And then, you know, from there, I let whoever requested it approve it. but I wind up being sort of the enforcer layer at that point to just kind of like at least spot check it and make sure that it's Yeah, that's a good point. That is one that needs to be thought about a little further.

Yeah. I think it's one of the advantages of a content management system is that there are certain things that have just been around long enough that every content management system has some solution for it. And that's a good example, right? And there are things that certain content management systems do far better than others. So. I tend to in today's world, I tend to start thinking about content management systems, especially in a headless world, as like a website's version of a digital asset manager. Digital asset manager is not exactly the same thing. But that's how I think about it. Because to your point earlier, a headless CMS allows you to push that content wherever you want it to go. So we've had clients that have one digital asset, sorry, one content management system, serving their customer facing website, but also serving everything behind a login. So if you're a user,

Yeah.

you can log into your application as whatever, as a client or as a subscriber or whatever it is, and be able to be served the same information that you would see on the customer-facing side of a website. They're not entirely distinct the way that applications are normally built and entirely distinct because you can push and pull that content from the same source. So there's a lot of really practical reasons why. headless content management systems, not just for customer facing websites, but for other things are incredibly powerful. And, and in my opinion, the way to go for, you know, probably 90 plus percent of, of web projects in today's world.

Yeah, I would agree with that. And I think that the interesting thing where we are now too is like we have multiple tools for multiple different types of solutions. I don't think that there is a one size fits all necessarily. You brought up Wix and Webflow earlier. I would never use them. But I'm a special snowflake. There are other people who I've recommended them to who have like, you know, they're starting a small business or whatever. Like, that is a great fucking solution. It'll get you it'll get you off the ground. We'll get you where you need to go. And someday you'll graduate from that system.

course not, you're a developer. I think that's a fair way to look at it, honestly. I think there are needs, need-based gates that you kind of flow through in terms of level of complication and need that move you from one tier, I'll call it, of content management systems to another. To your point. Brand new starting out something like a Wix or a Webflow or GoDaddy's builder engine. Something like that is powerful enough to get you moving, get you off the ground. And then you sort of graduate into this. Well, now I need a lot of people involved in helping either create new content or my traffic is high and it's a difficult thing to manage and whatever. And then you move into, you know, I'll call it the more advanced versions of those systems. So something maybe like a WordPress or something like a something like that, where it's a templated engine, it's operating in a database style format. And then at some point, your needs evolve even further. And because of complexity or lack of flexibility, you move away from those template style engines and database style engines to a headless content management system. I'm not even talking about the quote unquote enterprise systems here because I think those are all hot garbage right now and all probably need to be rethought.

concrete. I think the only enterprise system I would use at this point, and I think it's even on our own website, it's the only one that we talk about when we talk about enterprise website, is Content Stack. It's a really great headless CMS that can fit the bill for a lot of things and also has the personalization engine. didn't even get into that side, but like... when you get into wanting to do hyper personalization and those sorts of things, that's another area that we're like, headless really, really shines. And a lot of these other systems really kind of don't, they were never built with that in mind. You wind up slapping these like weird JavaScript plugins on top. have the, know, somebody can show up to the site, see content rendered, and then it like switches real fast. And it's just not. You know, it's not a first class experience because it was never built to be. just not say you can't do it, but it won't be, certainly won't be as robust or as good as a platform that was built with that in mind from, the beginning. But yeah, when you get into, you know, the, the monolith ASP guys and those things, I mean, we've, we've worked in them. We've managed systems and in almost all of them. And I mean, they're There was a time and a place for them. And I suppose if you're a Microsoft only shop, maybe, but there again, I would say like, just build your front end and use a headless CMS because you know, the content becomes portable. Like there's so many advantages to headless CMS that.

And not the least of which is security, right? There's nothing to hack because it's a flat page in the end. That's all that could be consumed. Sure.

I mean, you can still hack the CMS, but there is, there is something to be said about like, you know, WordPress has, I mean, you can secure it and change it and whatever, but it doesn't really fucking matter. Like every, every domain that I have, I can see in my logs, people whacking WP login.php and slash WP admin all day long, trying to get in that thing. Cause they know where the entrance is. It's like, hey, this is a WordPress site. Entrance is around back. When it's headless, it's a little bit different because it's like, this is a page of HTML. You don't know if it's content management at all. And even though it is, it's way the fuck over there. And good luck figuring that out.

Anytime I talk to clients about website design, I always talk about success criteria. And okay, in the end, what are we trying to accomplish with this website? And usually it comes in three flavors. The first flavor is some sort of conversion is happening, right? I either need leads or validation for those people that are maybe not gonna convert on a website, they're still gonna visit and they're gonna do micro conversions of like content consumption. The second is... usability. So can people find what they're looking for? Is it easy to navigate? it serving the purpose for the end user? And the third is the one that everybody forgets. And that's really kind of what we're talking about here at the heart of our discussion, which is who is managing this thing? And what is their experience like? Because if their experience is awful, then we failed. Right? So And I think people get to the end of a website project feeling exasperated of like, my gosh, that was a really difficult thing. That was four months of my life. I'm so glad it's over. And we look at it like, right. And we look at it like, well, actually our journey just began because now we get to put this thing in the wild and see how people actually interact with it. Did we do all the things that we thought we are? they doing the things we thought that they would do? Are they?

Glad I don't have to worry about that for another 10 years.

Are we accomplishing the objectives that we just outlined in an effective way? And if not, how do we evolve to do that?

I mean, think websites are interesting because, you know, your website is the only place on the internet that you own. And we've preached this for years, right? Your website's the only place on the internet that you own. And I think much like, you know, muscles and things in the body, if you don't exercise it and you don't pay attention to it on a consistent basis, it atrophies. And it's always fascinating how how many companies will fall victim to allowing the only place that they own and manage on the internet to just completely devolve and become irrelevant while simultaneously spending exorbitant amounts of money on advertising on the internet, pushing people to social media or just interactions or pushing people to a website that is in need of some love.

Mm-hmm.

Which is why we usually, you know, our thing is like, when you're done, when you're done with this website build, that's when the real work starts because we should be continually iterating and continually improving, learning from what's working, learning from what's not making iterative improvements as the trends in internet world, like making iterative design changes so that you're not necessarily planning for like your next rebuild. you're sort of rebuilt, just constantly rebuilding little bits at a time so that you don't need a massive rebuild. And I think that's a difficult concept to understand sometimes that like your website is never really done. It is really there. And there was a, you know, there's a point in time where we even discussed like, hey, our websites. are company websites going to be relevant in the future? This is probably, I think it probably hit its largest point, at least for me, in like 2016, 17, somewhere in there, where, you know, social media, all of the social media platforms are sort of like rocketing off and stealing so much attention. It was plausible for a period of time to say like, you know, Really our website doesn't matter. It's our Facebook page or you know Instagram or or the combination of social media presences and like don't get me wrong. Those are incredibly important, especially if you're a consumer facing brand But again, I go back to like you own one place on the internet and that's your own website So we've always seen those as like those are portals

Mm-hmm.

Those are all portals to your place and we should be using those to drive to something we own. And then once you get them there, you better treat them well because we worked damn hard to get them here. There's nothing.

Mm hmm. I think we should do a separate episode just on like cautionary tales, things that have gone wrong with website redesigns. And maybe we can hit on a couple of those here, but I think there's, there's a whole episode that's just around that. like a great example is we worked with a client that decided to redesign their website internally. We were running all of their creative and advertising on their behalf. And we gave we threw every red flag known to man as part of this website redesign process that we needed to make sure that the advertising was still pointing people to relevant places. And that as you're going through and doing this, we need to make sure that all the advertising and all the endpoints of where people are going are still correct and that they can self navigate after they land.

Mm-hmm.

And what ended up happening is we invited a whole bunch of people to a party. And then we gave them the wrong address and we paid to invite them to the party. And, and that's one, one cautionary tale of, of many.

Yeah, it's, there are plenty of those for sure. And that is a challenge, right? You do have to think about the fact that like, you're not your user and your user doesn't know what you know. if you find yourself, you know, if I come to your new website that you've built and I say, I can't find XYZ and you go, well, you just have to like, fuck your, just have to. You don't get to tell me this as a customer. I just showed up. If I can't find it, it doesn't exist. It's your job to make it easy for me to find. And yeah, that was the same. I mean, it's the same project where we had a number of those like, no, it makes sense if you understand how the fuck it's supposed to work. Like, well, your average person just showing up for the first time doesn't understand how it's supposed to work. I am a very technically inclined person who's been doing this for 20 years and I don't understand how the hell this is supposed to work.

And think you're picking on maybe in a completely different conversation, which is the difference between technically being correct and being a good user experience. Those are entirely different things. So technically, yeah, somebody could do step A, B, and C and find what they're looking for. But the user experience of doing that is too costly. It takes too much time and energy to go figure that out. So someone just won't. They'll bounce.

I mean, that's my hatred for for for sliders, right? Like, technically, people could get in from it could consume information. If they sit there and watch it. Technically, if you have like this really cute thing that has like these little hover points on it and shit, people can get the information. And in some cases, that's okay. It's all part of the experience. In some cases, it's not. Like if that's a really core piece of information that explains to a user how your product works or your brand or something, don't fucking hide it because that might not find it.

Yeah. I think there's also, there's also this desire on brands sometimes to try to do something completely inventive, like create a new user experience profile or whatever. And, and that's actually a really bad idea from those brands because users have an expected behavior. It's kind of like, you know, anything else, right? When you go, yeah.

It's door handles. Every commercial building, you push the door to go out. That's an expected behavior. If all of a sudden that wasn't, I that's enforced now as fire code. But if that was no longer enforced and it's a 50-50 shot. All of a sudden, like every time you try to exit a building, it'd be a conundrum. But we know if I'm exiting a commercial building, I just push on the door and I go out. There are tons of those sorts of inter, the key, the key, when we had keys. Now the push button to start a car is on the right hand side behind the steering wheel. My mom growing up had a Saab. Saab put it in the middle console. You wouldn't believe how awful, like how that threw people off if they ever tried to drive that car. Every technician, like everywhere you would potentially, anybody who ever sat in that car couldn't figure out how to start the damn car because they broke the expected user behavior. The automatic was to go for here and they changed it.

the reason why shopping carts and taking that example into the web world, like shopping cart experiences are almost identical. Yeah, they look a little bit different because of style. in terms of expected behavior, you know, you're gonna you're gonna add to cart, and then you're gonna verify your cart, and then you're gonna go to billing, and you're gonna go to shipping.

Yeah, you hit checkout, you get the billing, you get a confirmation.

Yep, it's expected behavior. If you were to try to combine all of those into one experience, that breaks user experience behavior even. It's expected user behavior that you're going to go from one to the other in compartmentalized sort of phases. And so I think brands that try to get cute about those user experience behaviors, and a shopping cart's an easy one, but there are tons of those things. So like burying key information behind some interactive element. Why? Just.

It's the high fashion of the tech world, right? You look at fashion shows and things and I just kind of scratch my head like none of this is practical or makes any fucking sense. or even honestly looks good. But it's so, you know, a fashion show wouldn't make sense with a whole shitload of t-shirts, but you know what sells the most? T-shirts. So, you know, it's like they're trying to practice and flex some muscles that don't need, and sometimes like maybe you can find some interesting new paradigms and that's where new expected user behaviors come from. But in some cases, you know, it's... it's better to just meet the user where they're at, especially if your primary goal is to be an art piece, like go fucking ham, I don't care, do whatever. But if your primary goal is to convert users or sell products, like you'd better be meeting the customer where they're at and matching some of those conventions, otherwise you will find that for some reason it doesn't perform. even though it is possible to do all of those things.

Well, we beat this up. We went about 12 different directions. We probably have three or four podcast ideas that we can keep more focused in certain areas around this one.

Yeah, I guess that's what happens when you've been doing working in the same industry for 20 years almost. In some way shape or form, but till next time.

Yeah, very true. Till next time.