 Thank you, Jason. Appreciate it. I am Tom Todorisi, and having started out as a designer, I love good design. And on their own sites, designers talk about how great website design will help a company be successful. And I'm sure that's true, but I'm also curious about that because as a web buyer, you know, looking at solutions for my own home or business, well, I've been to plenty of gorgeous websites where I didn't respond or spend money. On the other hand, I have bought stuff from ugly websites. I'll bet you have too. So I've thought about this and thought about it probably more than it was good for me. And over the years, that's led to two things. First, whenever I checked out companies for a product or service I needed, I started paying close attention to what happened when I landed on the site. What drew me in? What did I ignore? What did I click? And what impressions was I left with? Second, I took what I had learned from all this observing and started integrating those lessons in my work for web clients. Whenever I started working on a seller site, I'd mentally put on my buyer's hat. And that totally changed how I approached the field of web design. Of course, a shop-looking website can make a shop-first impression. It can visually convey that the company is professional and contemporary. A good-looking site can even help that company make the buyer shortlist. But I found that by the end of the journey, that's not really the thing that makes the buyer choose that company as the one to do business with. For most business categories, I found that it's the writing that does that, compelling, persuasive copy and content and the strategy behind it. So the way I've come to think of it, good design makes them look and good content makes them think. You've ever heard the term content is king? Raise your hand. Okay, put them down. Have you ever heard the term color schemes are king? No? How about security plugins are king? No? Drop-down menus are king. Nobody? All right. I mean, all these things are essential for a modern, fully functional website. But they're not the purpose of having a website in the first place. Naturally, companies need an online presence to engage and inform their buyers to point with some respond, leading to leads and sales. Now, if your website has beautiful images of, say, the jewelry or fashion items that you offer, well, it's really the pictures that are doing the selling. But in most other cases, when someone is responding to your site offering business services, well, once again, it's because the words show them, it convinced them that your approach might work for them. If you're selling web design, of course, your portfolio is important to show capability. But that's just one page. Throughout your site, there's content and there's design and they both have a role to play. But I find that there's a third factor here and it's the place where content and design overlap. I call it content presentation. It's about using design not just for aesthetic appeal, but to intentionally draw the eye into all the essential messages on the page. Because if folks don't read all about those product benefits, they have no reason to use that product, right? The thing is, those busy people today with short attention spans are really just kind of scanning websites instead of reading every word. And especially with the growing glut of information out there, I think it becomes more important than ever to capture people's attention and get them to linger instead of bail. And I think some of this does happen naturally in website design, but as we'll see, there's a lot more you can do. So let's take a deeper dive into content presentation. Now, me mostly these days, I do strategic copywriting for websites, working for companies or partnering with agencies and designers. Maybe the designer included fresh content in the website proposal, or maybe they just got tired of waiting for the client supply it. And after a discovery and strategy phase, I try to organize and write the copy in a way that indicates the emphasis segmenting and sequences of messages as a guide for pages that I like to think of as optimized for humans. Also, I've found that site owners, even the designers sometimes could be a little bit too close to it to notice missed opportunities and problems that are causing their visitors to reach for the back button. So I also do consulting audits for existing sites to help uncover some of the on page issues that lead to low engagement and conversion metrics. And I'll share some of those issues in just a minute. You know, there's a common assumption these days that people don't read. That's silly. Of course, people read. They read what they want to read. They just might not read a certain website because not enough was done visually to engage their attention. Or maybe the words they did see failed to connect what was really important to them. So let's look at ways to turn that around. The approaches you'll see today will include aspects of what's called UX or user experience. But here it's kind of a mashup with marketing principles. Good UX helps people accomplish something online, whereas good marketing shows them why it's in their self interest to pursue it in the first place. So carefully thought through messaging isn't really as important if you're doing a site for, say, a public library. But it is if you're trying to convince people to buy your books or anything else. One other thing, we tend to use the generic term content for all the assets on a website. And even though even I use the terms interchangeably, the phrase content writing really applies more to things like informational blog posts, whereas copywriting refers more to the core selling pages, homepage, product or service pages. So two different purposes. And even though the principles today are going to cover both, they're probably most crucial in structuring and styling core selling pages in an effort to get people to engage and take action. Anyway, every West for the next half hour or so, I would like you all to forget everything you know, and everything you've done. And let's take a look at website design with fresh eyes. First, we'll dig into some ideas for visual engagement and some ideas for copy engagement. We've already learned overall that core pages, especially home pages today, are less likely to be read if they're one big pile of plain text. Breaking the copy into bright bite sized segments makes it friendlier and more inviting to the eye before and after. And that's important because people will read a key message if it's visually prominent enough and can be taken in what I call a single eye gulp. On the other hand, you may mention a smart game changing product benefit, but if it's buried in the third sentence of the fourth paragraph, might as well not be there at all. Plenty of product and service pages still use mostly a plain text format, but by converting those to a more of a homepage format, a segmented series of blocks, that lets the visitors snack on bits of content without committing to a meal. Also, remember to keep you most important messages near the top of the page because, sadly, folks don't always make it to the bottom. This one's easy. One of the main uses of images and icons is to capture the eye and deliver it to our key messages. People do notice images first, but generally spend very little time on them. So give the engaged eye some place to go next. We carefully arrange our menus and sub menus, but in the real world, really, only our most motivated visitors are clicking away on all those tiny menu links. According to analytics averages, most folks don't stray too far from the page they initially landed on. It's why it's important, especially on the homepage, to also include prominent links with bits of teaser copy to the most important pages you'll want people to see. Entice them, make them curious, and I think you'll see more page views per visit. Also, if you provide different services or serve more than one business category, list them right on your homepage and not just in a dropdown. People will quickly see that you do accounting for construction companies, accounting for engineering companies, and so on. And they can then click through to pages where you will address their individual issues. Here is a headline that starts at the edge of the page. And here's that same headline that starts closer to the page's visual center of gravity with a little more air around it. As your eye naturally scans its way down the page, which headline are you more likely to read? Which one are you more likely to miss? You see that? So good design isn't just about arranging elements to fit on a page. It's also about syncing with the scanning eyes natural patterns. Okay, maybe walk away from your page design and come back later and look at it or wearing your buyer's hat. You know, it turns out that there's an enormous gulf between the last word of a headline and the first word of text. A lot more people are reading that headline than reading the text. And that's so sad to me. But I fight back and my weapon is the subhead. The secondary headline kind of acts like a bridge or a visual funnel gently guiding the eye in deeper. Again, make your subheads enticing, suggesting that the ideas to come will solve a need, resolve an objection, or give that visitor an edge. For blog posts and other long form content, we still have to overcome the visitors subconscious tendency to go, eh, I'm not going to read all that. You've done that a million times, maybe a million and a quarter. People are more likely to read text in a narrower column versus a full width column. Of course, people are more likely to read text in a larger font size than a smaller font size. Of course, people are more likely to read text with increased line spacing versus tight spacing. Of course, these simple tweaks just make it easy to read and therefore more accessible and inviting to the eye. Now, one way to make long text a little less scary is to insert bold section headers, say every two paragraphs. And of course, you'll use those headers to intrigue readers with your juiciest most helpful benefits. Keep paragraphs short, no more than two or three sentences. Or you can you can make the first few words of alternating paragraphs bold to draw that scanning eye into the content. Okay, I mean bold leading is so easy to do and really do make a difference. If your first paragraph introduces the main points of your topic, turn it into a prominent intro to help jumpstart the reader's attention, or pull the brightest bits of wisdom from your text and feature them prominently as pull quotes. And these helpful quotes about solving the customer's problem can also be presented as quotes from the staff. So those impatient scanners out there might just read the pull quotes or just the section headers or whatever. But two purposes here is to make sure they don't walk away without at least being exposed to the main messages you want to convey. And two, having headers or intros that point to such interesting possibilities that some of those scanners become curious enough to turn into readers. So look at the top one. Look at the bottom one. We make the decision of whether or not to read something in an instant. Thoughts, questions, any other ideas? Just placeholder text. All right. Can you hear me? I will talk like this. No, really? I love technology. I love technology. Okay. Where was I? Okay. Also, some companies respond to a dwindling literacy by having an absolute minimum of copy on their site. On one hand, concise writing without fluff is good content presentation. But don't eliminate secondary information or points that might be helpful to the engaged reader who wants to dig a little further or needs more convincing. Okay. The solution might be a low density topic page that links to more detailed subtopic pages, right? Or you could put longer chunks of copy towards the bottom of your page, which also helps increase word count for SEO purposes. But either way, the visitors choose their own journey. So of course, it's not just design tweaks that draw the scanning eye into the content. It's the content itself. For example, when I'm skimming a site an intriguing headline that cuts to the heart of my issue is going to make me mentally lean forward. But if those headlines are filled with the company's vague self-serving claims and bose, my mouth starts inching towards the back button, sometimes all by itself. I mean, photos, charts and graphs are absolutely good ideas to help break up the text and keep people reading and scrolling. So yes, good point. Very good. So you've seen these superficial marketing cliches that reflect the inside of the point of view of company employees that use the words we and our away too much. So instead, dig down to find the one thing that the company offers that makes it unique, in this case, 24-hour on-call service, then approach that as a benefit from what it means to the customer. When they see that the company truly understands not only their needs, but they're also their frustrations, well, it kind of creates a sense of trust and trust as the prerequisite for a sale. Notice how we has been replaced by you. In his insightful book, Building a Story Brand, how many people are familiar? John Miller, okay? He says, figure out your customer's story and place yourself smack in the middle of it. He says, too many companies try to be the hero, whereas they should position themselves as the guide that helps the customer become the hero. Okay? Yes, people do care about the company's story this much, but they care about their own story this much. Vig unsupported promises that we often see in headlines and quickly tune out are never as impactful as specific competitive benefits. And yes, we do have to quickly let visitors know what it is we do, but on so many home pages, sadly, that's all they accomplish because they didn't dig deep enough to find a meaningful advantage to stand out from the pack. So here's what a company might want to say about its product. Let's try a different approach. Okay? So you might generally make decisions based on an emotional reaction, so let's help that visitor imagine, help them feel like they're already there. Okay? So same image, but with a more visceral copy approach and relevant supporting points. You don't have to sell so hard if you simply put your product in the middle of the customer's story, right? Bullet points can be useful, but not all bullet points are created equal. Okay? So choose the strongest one and make that your header. In the second example, we're giving, getting across something valuable to the scanning reader. In the top example, we're wasting that opportunity. Okay? We need to include an a prominent, a prominent call to action button. We know that, but if we put on a buyer's hat, we'll realize that folks are more likely to click on it if you give them a reason. So attempt them with an appeal that works on a logical level, an emotional level, preferably both. Second, very important, folks are more likely to take action if they know what's going to happen after they respond. Okay? Knowing the plan raises their confidence and lowers the risky sense of the unknown. In fact, it's often not a bad idea to include a how it works section on your website so that they can get a preview of what to expect. That make sense? Also consider having two call to action buttons. Say one button to get in touch for folks who are closer to purchasing and one button for downloading, say a helpful e-book for people who want the earlier stages of the buying process. Have a path for both types of visitor. The first few words of text, your opening, will determine whether people are going to read further. If your opening is a vague and obvious statement, they'll figure, rest of it's vague and obvious, so why read it? But if your opening takes them by surprise, if it immediately connects on a visceral level, they'll need to read on to see if there's something they need to know about. Plus remember humans are more likely to be engaged and take action when they're emotionally engaged. Okay, let's take a look at these and tell me what the difference is between them. Anybody? Look at the three messages. Okay, all right. But if you notice also there are three different messages that get it going three different directions. In the bottom one, okay, so the point here is with all the points and messages on your website, how will people know which are the most important? Try repetition with variations throughout your site to really drive home your main value proposition. We tend to remember something that's repeated versus something that's just mentioned once. Being so strongly associated with that one important point can help you be the one vendor that online searches actually remember. Okay, so back in grade school, how did you learn your alphabet? Repetition, right? So however many years that's been, raise your hand if you don't remember your alphabet. Okay, here's my point. Again, we need to let people know what it is we offer, but instead of just listing our deliverables, try presenting them in terms of real world benefit to the buyer and maybe add the surface itself as a subhead. So look at the difference between these two approaches. So notice in the top one, the company is trying to be the hero. A wiser approach makes the homeowner the hero for successfully replacing their problem with an achievement. Does that make sense? So good marketing translates the process from the company's perspective to the customer's perspective and this is what way too many sites out there fail to do. Again, since most business websites pretty much just talk about what they do, most sites in the given category pretty much sound the same, and that's not very helpful for the online buyer who's trying to make a choice. Top headline does get across a benefit, but posing it as a question makes people curious and draws them in. Plus in the second one makes clear who this is for, and that's always smart to include. What's the difference between these? It's shorter, right? Also try to avoid using the word customer or client or patient. They're really just customers from the point of view of company employees. So just use the word you as you would in conversation. In the bottom one there's an implied you, and the other lesson here of course is if you can find a shorter way to say it, then your website visitors, especially the lazy ones, are more likely to read it. Okay, in the top one you might see from creatives who prefer to take a more personal, authentic approach that considers any type of promotional language turnoff, and I get that and there's certainly something appealing about it, but from the buyer's perspective there's really no room for them in that top story. In the bottom one there is. It gets across the designer's passion for helping, but maybe without using the word everyone else that uses. Although blog posts are meant to offer useful wisdom, I think it's cool to add a brief promotional blurb somewhere that helps the buyer along on the next step of their journey with a link, and just as it's okay to add a little marketing to our wisdom, maybe we can add a little wisdom to our marketing. On product pages I like to add some brief related tip or insight that helps the customer solve their issue, and this is important because if we saw if we position ourselves as a resource, serving that person right up front, well we're planning the seeds for a relationship instead of just focusing inward on how we see our company's mission. Although before and after examples we just looked at, they're all doable, they're free, they don't require configuring a plugin, and you can start using them tomorrow to tweak and improve your site, or at least know enough to work with someone who can complete the improvements. And remember when you're developing a new website it makes more sense to start with a copy and then build the design around that because the risk there, instead of pre-building the pages and you know trying to fit in the copy, because the risk there is squeezing the messages to fit some arbitrary template or layout instead of arranging them to fit what that visitor needs to see on her laptop in her kitchen with her credit card out. So don't forget when a viewer's eye lands on your page that's your first opportunity to grab those eyeballs and put them in your pocket, so to speak. Be sure the first thing they see is something that matters to them. In fact think about this simple formula, make the headline about the buyer and the subhead about the seller. Headline, buyer, subhead, seller. In fact the more you know about your customer and what's important to them, the more you can use that to approach everything on a business website as an opportunity to connect. If you have a video on your home page just saying, watch our video, throws away that opportunity because if you don't make it sound interesting, unique and truly helpful, why would they? And that's often a problem when company insiders try to write their own web copy. I mean they know their company but in fact they're so close to it that their words tend to appeal to other company insiders with something to sell rather than real world buyers with an issue to solve. Company managers, employees also tend to copy the same worn-out phrases of their competitors which makes them feel safe but that's no way to to present yourself in a competitive environment, right? On the other hand a thoughtful discovery process with an outside consultant writer can help us kind of stand back and get a wider view of what it is we bring to people's lives and also look closer to get a more genuine chance to you know to make a more memorable connection than competitors who are just yacking about what they think about themselves. Now if web designers can create sharp-looking websites with powerful copy points that grab and keep people's interest, then deliverable is not just visual website design and implementation. It becomes a strategic marketing solution that fulfills what that company actually needed in the first place. In fact for the web designers here, let's remember you're not in the design business, not really, you're in the marketing business because in the end it's not about getting people to fall in love with the website, it's about getting people to fall in love with the product. So if you remember anything at all today, remember this. If you're working on a seller's website whose hat should you be wearing? The buyer's hat of course and that will make it easier to not forget what's important here. So if you want to dig deeper into the stuff, go to tomtolerici.com, scroll down for three free ebooks you might find interesting. They're all quick reads with other fresh ways of looking at this stuff, there to be shared with anybody who might find them useful. You can also access the slides today at tomtolerici.com slash eyeballs.pdf and that's all I got.