 Hey, thank you. Hey, thank you. Hey, everyone. Good morning. Good morning. This is my seventh word camp this season. And so far, Atlanta is the best. It's really wonderful. So thanks for being here this morning. And I'll try to keep the energy up, and I'm going to rely on you to help me with that. The trick to incremental web design. We're going to talk about a few things. But first, let me do a real quick little more background on me. I'm from Orlando, Florida, although I live in Sarasota, Florida now. And I was born there before the mouse. Y'all know what I mean? It was before Disney, and it was great. It still is good, but I wouldn't want to live there. I'm actually trained as a performing classical musician. I'm a flutist. And for many years I was a principal flute of an orchestra. Yeah, it was really cool. I loved it, but it never really paid all the bills. So I developed some other skills so I could do this. And while I was at it, I'm also a music critic for the Herald Tribune. So imagine this. This is the oldest school thing you could do. I'm writing about classical music for print newspaper, although they do have online sources. But I love it, and it's fun. So it's just a little sideline, something I do when I'm not doing all the other stuff I do, which is I've been in marketing for most of my career, marketing and education. But as a marketing consultant, I've been doing that for about 20 years, and I've owned my own agency now streamlined just me for 11 years. So I've been through a lot of things. I've been on the client side. I've been on the agency side. I've been on the freelancer side. And I was doing all of this from about 2001, which was nation before WordPress, and on through this whole digital evolution, which means I've seen a lot of things, and I am bone tired of keeping up with everything, but I still have kept up with everything. Y'all understand that? So I'm still doing this. Almost warms the same outfit. Anyway, that was not planned. All right, this is what we're going to cover today. We're going to just take a look at website design redesigns, the reality check of what that looks like, and talking about the definition for incremental design. Who here just knows exactly what I mean by incremental design? OK, just a few handful. We're going to kind of circle around this topic so that you have an understanding of the various legs it has. And what it can mean for you, what it can mean for your clients, and then how to implement it so that you don't get yourself in trouble and then that you keep your clients happy. Sound good? Awesome. Website redesign. It's been my experience that I frequently get approached by a client who says, oh my gosh, we built our website five years ago, six years ago. We haven't touched it. Yeah, we don't want it anymore. So we'd like you to build us a whole new website. Now if it's really old, they really do need a whole new website. But if it's something where we built it two, three years ago, we haven't touched it. But it's built in WordPress. But I want you to build a whole new website. And by the way, I only have $1,000 to do it. OK, I started having that conversation about doing it a little differently, because tearing the whole thing down when the structure is good, when we know with a WordPress structure, good hosting environment, you've got that foundation. And why do you want to tear down all those pages and lose whatever search engine visibility and cred that you have? Let's keep it. But this is a graph of what we have been seeing for many years. You build it. You spend a big budget item. You coast. And then you do something big, because the marketing department or the owner finally goes, ah, I'm getting complaints about the website. And you can see if you think about the best websites are always getting better and better with time, you lose your momentum. And it's been my experience that a website left alone doesn't just stay static. It atrophies. We all know that, right? That's why we have maintenance programs. It is also my experience that another big problem is that our clients don't really understand this whole website structure, construction, what it can mean for them. And so they approach it like, ah, this one big project, we're all going to have to have committees, or I'm going to have to really spend a lot of time working on this that I don't have, because I'm running my business. And so they spend a lot of time in angst trying to figure out what they want. And they don't make a lot of decisions. They think it's going to be a big budget ticket item. And they procrastinate. Or they hire you, and then they make you sit while they're deliberating and all. It's money, and it's time, and there's a bit of fear in it. So you have to think about that when you're talking to clients. Usually, those are all right there, although they may not say they're afraid. But they are afraid of the money. They are afraid of all those decisions they have to make. So we're going to come at this from a totally different standpoint, Money Python fans. Yay. So we're going to come at it now for something completely different. I'm going to sound like I'm going off on a tangent, but Kaizen. It's used in industrial settings. This is a phrase that you learn in MBA classes. Kaizen in Japanese means small incremental improvements, continuous change for good. And I think of it like the bonsai tree. You don't plant a bonsai tree and watch it grow. You have to continually care for it to make it be what you want it to be. So Kaizen. Then we have the incremental or reiterative design process that is taught to engineering students and project managers in industrial settings. And it's also for software development. And these software developers in here who are familiar with this, yeah, it's so common sense. It is so common sense. You figure out the initial planning. And too often, initial planning, requirements, analysis and design, implementation. And then you shake hands, you get your check, and you walk away from a client. And they don't benefit from testing and deploying new content and evaluation and new ideas. So what you see, I'm going to continue with this, I'm taking the trends and the process that have been in place in action for years in the business community. And we're putting them to use in our little world. Eric Rees, the lean startup. How long ago was this a New York Times bestseller? It's been a while. But the lean startup, a lot of talk about that. And the big part is build, measure, learn, feedback loop. It's the same thing, just different words. Really important for continuous innovation and improvement. And now, any HubSpotters in here? Anyone? Wow. Yeah, yeah, yeah. OK, I became a HubSpot agency partner in 2010. And that was still fairly early in their development. And one of the big things that we were all being trained to talk about was incremental website design. And in their training, in their world, what they were talking about is, I'm just going to throw out numbers. You build the initial website. It's going to be $10,000. Build that website. And then get them on them, client. Get them on a monthly retainer for developing new content, tweaking, A-B testing, all of this evaluation, and continue, continue. You're adding content to the funnel. And this was the way that a lot of agencies really grew. It's not that they kept that initial website build down to a real beneficial level for the client. It was a way to really build your business. And it's a smart way to build your business. I'm not against it. But this is when I first was introduced to incremental website design. But the reality of my clients was they have a budget like this. And they're trying to build something. And when I say, OK, we're going to build this. And then we're going to do all sorts of nah. But I thought that the concept of incremental website improvement was something that was so important just for my clients to understand how a website needs to grow and evolve. And I wanted to move them away from that belief that we build it, and then we can ignore it for a while while we do the rest of the business. I wanted to get them into that every month looking at how's my website doing? What's the conversion rate? What can we do to help it build more business? And here, the guys at wider funnel made this wonderful graph. And this is really what we want, rather than that stair step thing, we want little bits of improvement all the way up so that, ideally, for my clients, I'm helping them build their search engine visibility, their content base, testing their calls to action, really kind of building the productivity of their website ongoing and long beyond this. That's my goal for my clients. Anyone in on that? Do you think that this is what you want to do? Hey, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no, we just want to let them atrophy. Then they come back to me. So I begin this conversation with clients. I start talking about when they're saying, I only have $1,000 to build a website. I say, OK, let's look at this in a phased approach. What do we need to have initially? And maybe if it's an old website, and I've done this and it's a little cumbersome, if it's an old website and I have to flip it over into a more robust theme or building the environment like Divi or whatever, I will flip the whole thing, but I'll really focus on making sure that their home page, their route, their contact, maybe their services, the core pages are really strong first. And then for the next phase and paycheck of whatever they can budget, we do more. We get into product landing pages or whatever detail they need. And then phase three, this is an example. We might really start activating their content marketing aspect of their website if they're going to be doing that. And this makes them relax a little bit. Like, oh, I don't have to do all of it at once. I can stage it over time. This helps me. It helps them. I'm not overloaded with a huge website design. I also get money in phases rather than feast and famine, bunch of money, then none for a few months. It's all good. Very important when you're a freelancer or a small agency is to be looking at ways to deal with your cash flow. So this is actually something I've been doing more and more lately. I had an orthopedic surgeon who had been with a large medical practice. And later in his career, he wanted to just go solo and have more of a concierge practice. And he really didn't have a lot of money at first, because it's like a startup. He was spending all this other money on all the other things he needed to set up a separate medical practice. So I agreed to kind of like a larger initial payment, not quite 50%, but a larger initial payment, and then spaced out the rest of the payments over six months. There's a risk to this, as we know, because if you do this and the client disappears on you, you've already built it off a lot, and they're gone. So I'm very careful to vet these folks and make sure that there's language in my contracts that absolutely make this clear what it is. And I try to impress upon them that I'm doing most of the work here, and then you're paying in payments for that suit that you have on. You're still paying for it, that car you're driving.