 Thank you. So I've been a WordPress web developer and designer since about 2005 and before that I worked in print and advertising. So, but actually officially I started at 10 years old. My father was an ad executive and he had some principles that he used that he taught me when I started to do layout design for him at 10. I'm gonna share those with you now. So these were the key principles my father taught me when I started to do layout for him. If everything is important, then nothing is important. White space is good and whenever you add something, something else is taken away. Now, that wouldn't necessarily apply so much the last point with CMS, but definitely for your home page or landing page, you have a limited amount of space. So what are you gonna put there? What's your point? Make it easy, make it accessible for people. So the first lesson he taught me is he showed me some ads and he did this with his clients. He'd show them an ad real fast and kind of flash out of them and then say, what did you get? What did you see? So I put two examples up here. One on the left is a busy ad, which if someone flashed that in front of you, you probably wouldn't get the message of what they're trying to say. The one on the left, well, we're probably more familiar with it, but you get a message right away. The branding's there. How many people are familiar with the eye movement charts and the heat maps? Some of you. Okay, so most people read the headlines first and then if they're interested, they'll continue reading, but there's a lot of information. And I think they were talking about Crazy Egg earlier, the speaker before me. And that can kind of show you where I flow goes. So Chartbeat, which is a company, says that 55% of visitors spend fewer than 15 seconds on your website. But some stats say that it's less than six seconds. So you really have a short amount of time to capture someone's attention. How many people have heard of David Ogilvy or Ogilvy on advertising? Okay, a few of you. He says that on average, five times as many people tend to read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent 80 cents of your dollar. So that's really where you should spend your time. And that applies to traditional advertising and also website design. So how does that tie into Zen or into WordPress websites? Well, there's many different Zen principles, but here are a list of the basics. Do one thing at a time, do it slowly and deliberately, do it completely. Now, there's been a lot of studies out about multitasking and how it's not really effective. And it goes back to the Zen principles, one thing at a time. You're actually more effective working that way. Do less, that's back to keep it simple. Put more space between things. That goes back to white space is good. Just don't dilute your point, your branding. Develop rituals, always a good business habit. Designate time for certain things. Devote time to sitting. Smile and service to others. Gratitude is always effective. The two last ones, think about what is necessary and live simply. I'm probably the most important that relate to WordPress design. So what should you include or what should you not include? Timothy Ferris says pack, put half back and bring more money. And that can apply to web design also. A lot of people, especially with open source software, the tools are there, they're free, they're easy to put on. You just want to load your site up more and more and more and more. But does it really apply and how much maintenance are we going to be talking about? So then you have to think about what not to pack, which is something that a lot of people don't think about. People have a certain absorption rate. So are they going to be overloaded with all your tools? Or do you need, for example, chat features, events, online shopping cart? That may completely apply to the business model, but it may not. And some business owners want you to add it just because they want to have this big site and have those tools to load on. So I spend a lot of time with my clients kind of talking them out of doing things sometimes for the benefit of their business in the long run. So then we have maintenance. What is the cost of the maintenance over time? Some business owners want to maintain sites themselves after the initial build. They may think they have the skill to do it and then realize that they don't later on and then they don't have the money to pay for the maintenance and then a bind and then their site starts to go down and then they have security issues. So maintenance can end up spiraling down a business, an online business. And it can also affect the branding. Let's say they have a great look. We make it bright and shiny and it looks beautiful on launch. They keep adding things themselves or requests for a little this change, add this without thinking about the branding and eventually the site, the branding gets diluted and the site doesn't look as nice as it originally did. So it's things to consider on the initial build. And then there's refinement, a review process on a regular basis. Now, depending on the size of the business and how much activity and traffic they have, this could be done weekly, quarterly, or annually, but there should be a plan for reviewing all the elements and deciding, do we need that chat room? Do we actually have events? We loaded an event calendar and we never have any events. So you have this thing on the website saying no events all the time. So you want to review that on a regular basis so that the site looks fresh and the branding stays consistent. So why simple? Throughout history, ancient China, ancient Japan, Zen, feng shui, traditional, old school advertising, state-of-the-art web design, they all have the same message of less is more or keep it simple, stupid. Simple seems to be effective and we kind of lose it as we have so many tools available in our fast-paced world. So it's something to consider. And why would you consider it? For time, for security, when people can't update or they don't know how to update, you can have security issues. Again, what we talked about maintenance, clarity. An important point that's actually not listed up here is agility. Some people want every widget, every plugin that's available, put it on a site and then once they have the website up for a year, their business model may change. And then they don't have the agility to change. So back to Timothy Ferriss's about put, you know, pack, put half back and bring some more money can really help with agility and also financially for small business startups. So I seem to have breezed through that. So any questions? Yes. Good questions. Question is, how do you know when it's too simple? And too simple can be, is usually when someone is lazy and doesn't think about the design thoroughly. Back, I don't know if we had those slides, but Hemingway's quote, if I had more time, I'd write more short stories. That it actually took him longer to write short stories than it did to longer stories because you're refining it. So it would be a different process actually to refine something takes longer than to just go, okay, I'm going to make this really simple and I'm going to one, two, three, pick two, three things and then put it up. Too simple would be to have no thought in it or if you do put the thought in it, you need to think about have you covered all the elements that you're trying to achieve with your business? Does it cover your goals? Does it have your branding? Does it have everything that you're looking for in your business model? Yes, sure. In design, there's positive and negative space. The tech step here would be positive space and all that white space around would be the negative space. The border around the edges here, that's called passive space and both the negative space and the passive space help readability and absorption. So you have to have a balance and not use up all that white space or people can't absorb the information. Yes, it's always good if you, I know some people who always do their accounting in the morning for their business or you review, let's say you review your website design and branding consistency every Monday morning or something. Then you're on a ritual and you're doing on a consistent basis and it becomes automatic, kind of an automated procedure because we're creatures of habit. Yes. Do I have any? Yes, I recommend picking a time in the morning to do whatever you think is most important for your work and that can be either right away first thing. In the morning or if you work out, do you work out and then do it immediately first thing in the day. Anyone else? Yes. They talk about whether you're doing chores around the house or work as a meditation and I've seen people cook this way and it's kind of amazing that they, I'm not at that part point with my work but you kind of get into a sink with it. Probably, do you ever garden? Yes. And you know how when you go out in the garden and you're out there and you kind of just get into flow? That's a kind of flow that you could get into your work and that's usually from the ritual of a habit of I'm going to do this between 10 a.m. and 11 a.m. or a certain hours that you get into a habit and you'll get into a flow which kind of becomes a meditative state. There's a rhythm to it. Yes. Yes. She was saying that about the ritual, if you are very intentional about it and you kind of get into the rhythm, right? That it helps. Any other questions? Yes. That's kind of tied into the rituals. It can either be sitting and working or time to meditate and just relax. And sometimes when you overthink, Ogilvy had another saying about just absorb as much content and information on your material as possible. Absorb, soak it in and then kind of let it go and then kind of the essence of what you're trying to achieve for your project or whatever you're working on will just kind of come to you. So I use that. There's a great book called The Artist's Way. Has anybody heard that? By Julia Cameron and I love that because with writer's block it's like a creative block. We use the creative free flow pages is a technique that you write three pages of free flow thought with no periods, no punctuation and just get out whatever you're thinking and it helps with creative block. Also going out if you're stuck and you're in a room and you're working a lot let's say you're on a deadline with a project and you just run out of ideas. Instead of sitting there and trying to force the ideas to come I'll go out take a walk or go somewhere where there's things that are stimulating like a part gallery or something and I'll come back and I'll have new ideas. So those are ideas from that book that I still use. Yes. How do you decide what is necessary to choose from? You just know it's kind of like if you went out to your garden and you had a big basket and you picked flowers and fruits and vegetables and you get back and then you just look at your basket and pick the best ones. What's more applicable to the project? I mean if I don't know I'm trying to think of an example for a website. I have a website, a client, the radio station. So I would apply things to what their needs were for the radio station and then think about that and then it would kind of come to me or research things that they need and then pick the best of that. Do you have a question? Yes. Things have changed a bit. It makes it a little bit more challenging in a way for the mobile responsive because when you're working with a fixed area it's easier to design than something that's moving. So in a way you have to get simple but then you want things to still pop. So white on black text and black on white text has been used for decades as a technique when I used to work in print advertising I'd look at what the competitors' ads were and if they were all white backgrounds with black text I'd make my ad black background with white text and it would pop off the page and it would be the ad and it would be the same thing now because they're usually a single column websites, you know the side columns are kind of going away so you need things to have it pop. They're talking about the web experience now instead of the click factor so there's actually websites that you can go to to check how effective that is that's one of the techniques being used is to vary that. Yeah I kind of I always put myself in the place of someone that was viewing it and what they would want to see so I'm not a big fan of pop up forms and things like that I don't think anybody really likes that in their face or to be locked out of a website before signing up to see the content behind it but so I just think about what the user the user experience would be and kind of design from that okay his question is how do you reconcile the need for a pop up form or to have a lead generator on your website but that it's obnoxious basically so one way is there are pop ups now that instead of going to we'll go to the side so they're not blocking the text it's just like would you like to sign up and then if you ignore it it'll go away for a while at least for that visit that's less in your face the aggressively generation will work if for example I had a client who was a real estate agent in Florida and he was in a region that had a database of the properties in this very nice area so he put an aggressively generator form where you had to fill it out to see the content otherwise you can't you just get the teaser the house is around and you didn't see the properties now that worked for him because there wasn't any free options when there are other sites that have the same material you don't have to fill out the form those forms are just going to annoy people and they're not really effective I think that business would be better off with a softer form maybe like I was suggesting have it go to the bottom corner and say please sign up instead of forcing you to sign up you're welcome any other questions? thank you