 All right, thank you. Damian, is our sound OK? Yeah, all right, cool. So welcome, everybody, on my behalf as well. My name is Jonas Ukra, and this is my first WordComp. Any other first timers here? Raise your hand. OK, cool. That's good. I'm not alone. So I'm just going to quickly talk a little bit about myself. Basically, I am a marketer. I think we have a lot of very technical people here, a lot of developers. Let's just get a little poll here to figure out what kind of audience we have. So how many of you consider yourself mainly as a developer? Raise your hand. Yeah, I think that's the vast majority. OK, how many of you consider you mainly as a marketer or digital marketer? OK, cool. And how many of you consider yourself you're an entrepreneur or an individual blogger, something like that? OK, a few hands. OK, cool. So yeah, so I consider myself mainly a marketer. I have a little bit of a technical background. I used to do websites when I was in my teens, basically, because at that time, I was playing a lot of contest trike, and I wasn't very good at it. So I basically had to have some additional skill to get into clients. And for me, it was doing websites. Currently, I work for a company called Seo Seon. We're mainly doing digital marketing for the Nordic market. Before that, I was working a little bit more than two years, two and a half years in China, in Shanghai, running digital marketing operations of a consulting firm called Desensure and Associates. And basically, my job there was to handle all of the channels, including the websites. And during my time there, we launched like we had kind of an ecosystem of websites, and we launched like eight websites. And currently, at that time, I was more like an in-house marketer, and now I'm more of a working with clients and help them with their marketing problems. So basically, that brings me to the fact that it doesn't really matter if I'm dealing with a client or if I'm dealing with my boss or somebody, you know, the partners of the firm, shareholders. There seems to be a little bit of a confusion for a lot of the top decision makers on what is really the value or what is the reason to have a website. And I was kind of like, I started thinking about like what would be a good way to present it to them in a good like analogy that lets them kind of figure out that the website is not necessarily just kind of like a business card online. And since it's more, much more than a business card online, that means that they should actually put in some resources into that. Here is something that I tend to show for, you know, in my slide, when I'm talking about digital marketing generally for a, let's say, a newcomer into the company or somebody who is like not very familiar with it. This is like my very simple marketing stack. Basically what it means that everything on the bottom has to be figured out before you can do any meaningful things on the top level parts of it. And infrastructure means like server side, people, analytics obviously figure, we use that to figure out what's actually happening on the website content and then the channels and the website is actually one of the channels that our channels could be social media channels, they could be email marketing and so forth. But the thing here is why the website is such an important part is because it basically affects all of these parts of this marketing stack. When you start to develop a website, if you really wanted to be a functioning website that is actually helping your business or if you're a nonprofit organization, whatever your other goal is, you kind of have to think all of these things when you actually start to develop the new website. So we had two problems here. One was the things that we have to consider and the other one was to actually tell the top decision makers why we have to put resources and why we have to actually put a lot of emphasis into the website development project. So I was starting to think, yeah, what's the good analogy? And I was starting to think that, OK, maybe a website is pretty much like a mall. It's like a mall because people come there without actually giving anything back to you at that point. They haven't made to purchase. They don't have to buy a ticket to get in. They just come there because something in that website attracts them. The other thing, what is very similar with the mall and a website that you basically should be designing it, considering the visitor, considering the customer, keep the customer in the center of the design process. Because basically what you want it to be is that the customer feels comfortable on the website or on the mall, and they navigate it in a way that supports the true goal of your website. And the third thing is that oftentimes the basic structure, both in malls and websites, they tend to tell you to stay the same for a longer period of time. But obviously in both cases, what we're doing is basically figuring out what the people are doing in the mall and the website. And we're fine tuning the layout. We're fine tuning the content. And we're fine tuning the visitor flow accordingly. OK, so I was thinking, if I tell to my boss or if I tell to a client that you're not really, when you're coming up with the new website, you're not actually building a business card. You're not really building a brochure here. You're building a mall. So that kind of puts them into a different type of mindset where this is more functioning. And this is actually the malls. Generally, when people think about malls, it's OK. People go there and buy stuff. When you're talking to a decision maker or a non-technical boss of yours, when you're saying that, OK, people are going to come here and they're going to give you money, then that gives you a reason to tell them that, OK, that's the reason why you should be putting actually X money on this. This is actually an investment. Oftentimes, when people are starting to explain sometimes technical people, start to explain the reason why a cost of a website is this and this and this. It might end up coming out like, OK, it's because we need to do this and this takes time and this takes hours. OK, so I was just thinking that when you're saying that to a decision maker, they tend to think that, OK, now you're just telling me the cost. So now you're talking about money. OK, I understand money, but you're talking about cost because it's a negative thing. Instead, I would rather like to focus on the thing that the actual end product can bring you the value, the purchases. Hence why I like to call it as a mall. So the next step for me was then, OK, I was thinking, OK, if we can say that a website is a mall, let's look at the way that a people who are designing malls, what they are doing. And should there be something that we might be able to pick up from their processes and put it into our own development process? So how do I start my research? I start, obviously, by going to Google and figuring out, OK, how to design a mall. Some very top things to do, blistings thing content. But then I found this great post from this Indian guy on LinkedIn was how to design a mall inside out. And I started reading it. And he basically starts the post by telling some of the aspects that he has encountered while designing malls. And I started thinking that, oh, this sounds similar things that I tend to encounter with some of the websites projects that I've been dealing with. So pretty much every project starts with great enthusiasm and favor. But then if things haven't been figured out properly at the beginning, they soon turn into a nightmare. And then the problems arise when one designs the space and decides to build without proper understanding and knowledge of the business requirements. Same thing with the websites. You end up getting into problem if you're actually just going to go with your designers. You're going to say, oh, I kind of like this. And this looks good. And then you start focusing on the actual exterior instead of the real essence of that website. What is the real goal? What do we want to achieve? And how we can actually work everything for that web design in a way that it actually helps us instead of hinders us to achieve that goal. And what obviously the people, apparently, in the mall world want is that the customer is affordly guided through the mall as if in auto mode. And I think this is pretty much the same thing as web developers and marketers who are using this website to bring in sales, to bring leads. This is basically what we want. We want it to be in a way that when people enter, they're kind of like in an auto mode consuming the content and then ending up into the end goal that we want them to do. So it seems like there's a lot of similarities in the way that he thinks malls should be designed and the way that I think that, OK, we should approach website design. So then he gives us a little bit of an example on how they tend to design malls. He broke it down into four steps. We're going to be looking at what would these steps mean in the mall world and what, in my opinion, they mean in a web design world. So we'll start with the right advice. Basically, he was saying that before you start a mall project, you should go and find a shopping mall specialist. And this tends to be a person who has experience on running a mall operations and running the leasing of the mall space, as well as architects. And obviously, in a website world, this would then mean that you would want to seek out into a professional who not only understands necessarily the technology, but there's also somebody who understands your business and the operations. Or if you're very self-sufficient and you want to do everything in-house, make sure that all the stakeholders who are affected by this website, which is probably at least the designers and developers, but also marketers and your salespeople, that they get together in the beginning to figure out what are their needs. And then the person who takes the lead is actually putting these everything together and lets everybody sign off on the original design and original idea. So the original idea, the concept, after you get everybody together, you get the right advice. You kind of have to figure out what's your concept. So now we're talking about what's the thing that you actually want to do. In the mall world, they base this on usually on market research, customer expectations, demographics, locations, whether the mall is in a smaller neighborhood mall, or will it be a big kind of a whole city-level attraction. And they gather this information and then they make it into a concept. And one of the important thing is then to go to all of these stakeholders who are handling the design process and communicate the concept to them. Website world, basically we want to figure out pretty much the same thing. Who are we serving? Who is the visitor? Who is the customer that we want to actually get into the website that we actually want to go through the whole process of purchasing or the whole process of signing up? And what do we want them to do? And then again, communicate the concept clearly so that everybody who's involved in the process should understand what we're aiming to do. All right. And then you chose the right advisor and the next step is kind of like chose the right architect. And in the mall world, they're looking for architects who have the in-depth understanding of retail architecture and local market trends and shopping habits. So it seems like in the mall world, you're not just going to pick the person who has designed a mall, but you're actually going to go and try to find a person who has designed the mall and has worked in the same kind of a market with the same kind of a demographic, people with the same kind of shopping happens. So this would translate into the website world that you don't just want the developers to be people who understand technology, but they have to understand the business. And in the best case scenario, you would find somebody who also pretty much understands your industry. That means that best case scenario, if you're a B2B consulting firm, you would find somebody to work with that has previously been successful in doing websites for B2B companies. Same way, if you're an e-commerce store, let's say you're specialized on clothing, you probably would want to work with a web developer, designers who have previously had success on actually executing e-commerce stores' clothes. So basically, the closer you get into having a team who understands the business, the technology, and most importantly, the way your customer thinks, they're kind of a better result you will have. OK, you got your team together. You have the right advisor. You have the concept. It's time to come up with the actual brief. So the brief is then something that will be given to the team so they can start executing this design. More World, the brief is split into a few different categories. It starts with an introduction. And basically, in the introduction, they want to communicate to you the bigger picture. Basically, they should tell where this mall will be, what's the location of it, what's the target consumer, and what, and basically not just telling your developers or designers and the rest of the team, but also give them the reasons why you think this is true and the data sources, how you came up with this idea. The same thing basically translates pretty well into a website world. So you get the company's background. If this website is something part of their bigger scheme, is it part of a multiple website? How people tend to communicate with their brand? What's their presence on social media? And how these things actually, what's their current situation with all of the different channels? Because generally, the visitor is not just communicating with one channel. They're going to be exposed to the company, to the brand, to the organization through multiple channels. And when you're starting to develop a new website for them, it would obviously be good to know the larger picture of it. Also, it would be probably good to know the kind of future plans of that company or the organization. Where do they think they will be going in five years? Is there some big branding, really, construction going on that would be helpful to actually figure it out when you start to put the website together? Obviously, target audience, once again, who are we trying to reach out? And then considerations and data sources. Why this is important is, let's consider a case where you have a client, you have a project, and somebody is going to tell you that, OK, this is what we want to do. This is our target audience. And you are going like, OK, I'm going to do it like this. I'm going to target this audience. We're going to build it in a way that 27-year-old, let's say, Warcraft player would be enjoying his time on this site and would be going through and, let's say, buying a certain Warcraft-related product. Well, if this is the information you'd be given and then you work according to it, you get your finished website launch, dah, dah. And after a while, they're saying, this is not working. This is like the people don't understand our concept. The actual visitors don't understand the concept. They don't understand why they're here. They don't understand what they should be doing. And then you go back and tell them, OK, but this was the people that we were targeting. And you go back and forth. And finally, you realize that the people who are now actually coming to the website are not the kind of people who the company or the organization originally told you that they're targeting. This is the reason why I tend to also want to have some kind of reasoning from the organization, from the company, why they are choosing a certain talk in the audience, and also if there's any data to back it up. It's kind of a good place for developer teams to actually challenge the client, the company a bit, to actually dig deeper and make them think, what are they actually trying to achieve with the website? Some organizations, this is clear. They have a good considerations. They have good data to back their decision making. And they're just going to give you the brief. But a lot of the cases when somebody is going to go through a big change like a new website or revamping a website, it's also a good spot to actually think, what is the core audience and go into very like a deep understanding and doing more research on the actual core target audience that the organization wants to reach. Well, when you got the introduction and the more world, the next step is to have a project vision. In the more world, this means, what is the intent of the project? Again, getting a more in-depth on the actual context. So if it's a larger development center of a neighborhood or something else. In the website world, this translates pretty well. Once again, we can talk what's the real intent of the project and go into very in-depth structuring on what are the other channels that the people who will be interacting with the website, what are the other channels that they're using as well. Then the next phase would be project positioning. In the more world, this would be the very specifics of that target customer and the very specifics of that concept. And basically, we can translate the same back into website world. So in the section where we're talking about project positioning, they should give you a very, very precise view on who is the target, what's the persona of the target. Hopefully into a level that it narrows down into an age group into what kind of interest they have and into specific job titles they have and specific maybe some groups they're communicating with in different channels. So very specific. And then after that, we get into the actual aesthetic brief. More world, this means the design language. Are we talking about high-end malls? Are we talking about low-end malls? Is this the design? Should it be traditional? Should it be contemporary? Basically, what would be the kind of aesthetics that would attract the people that we've been now in the previous brief that we've targeted? And this should be based on market research. And it has to go into the level of details of the materials, what kind of textures we're going to be using, what kind of wood we're using, what kind of plastic we're using. In the website world, this basically translates into the possible brand guidelines, what kind of colors, typefaces, logos, et cetera. We're going to be using what's the framework we're working in. And again, this also should be based, hopefully, on some kind of legitimate research. Market research, surveys, even better using the actual user data, using any previous tests that they've made done, and so forth and so forth. And if this is currently lacking like the company hasn't been, it's a new company. Or they've basically just been working 40 years, but they haven't actually tracked any of this, which seems to happen quite a lot as well. Then basically, what your job is to make some kind of assumptions and create the website in a way that, in the future, you can actually test these things. So you give them the keys to actually figure this out so when they're going to be doing a next kind of a revamp somewhere down the line, two years, three years, they have a lot of previous research data on the users they had on the website that they can actually utilize. And then nowadays, mobile-first, mobile-only, basically it's recommended to just think about the mobile user-first and then the desktop users. Yeah. And then after that, there would be the planning brief. And the planning brief pretty much thinks on the mall world. It thinks about the entry points. So obviously, you have a building. So there's only certain places in the building where people are supposed to enter. And in the planning brief, you're kind of figuring out what are those entry points. Also, in the mall world, it requires operational requirements. And this means does every store in the mall need to have some kind of a backroom space? Do they need to have a backdoor entrance for all the stores, maybe just for the sum of the stores? And different zones in the mall are accessed in a different way. And then accessibility, obviously, in the mall world, it means that people who have restrictions are able to also navigate through the mall. And then in the website world, we can actually pretty much talk about the same things. Only the kind of like the entry points are a little bit different than in the mall. Oh, OK. So entry points, we're talking about landing pages. And then you have to check out where the people are coming to your website. Operational requirements, who is using the backend, what kind of a technical competency they need, is the website easily crawlable and indexable and accessible. So landing pages, you figure out from the previous data, what are the most high-traffic landing pages. Infrastructure requirements, basically, mall world, Pog and its requirement, AC electrical, lightning and requirements for certification. And website world, what's the current budget for hardware, security requirements, what's the expected truth hack you have to think about the future as well, and integration with different platforms. Also, understanding the business concept in the mall world, it means the zoning and how the zoning and the way you're releasing it changes the way you design it. On the website, obviously, you have to think about the business concept and what kind of content will be displayed. Obviously, the big difference for websites and malls is the location. Mall, it's fixed. On the website, the location depends basically on your marketing. So for example, if we have a person here you're trying to target, for certain persons, for certain number of times, basically your website mall is near him now, and he's going to go there. But the next day, it might be here. And then after that, it might be here. So situations is not as static as a mall world. But pretty much in the other situations, it's very similar to mall. But the problem is if you have a poor sense of visibility, you will be killing your website because your location is not near the person who you want to visit to your website. I have a list of technical SEO things to go through. It's a checklist. I think all of the slides will be downloadable afterwards. So I'm not going to go through this very much in depth. One thing I want to point out, though, is that you might be giving the customer a website that is very optimized in speed. But then if you haven't give them a good process and good training, it might be that the customer, when they start actually using your platform, they start actually producing content, they might be actually destroying that optimization. We had one client that started in a situation like this. Basically, the only reason was that they dumped into a huge HD image that then was scaled in the website into like 300 pixels. But the real original image was like 4,000 pixels. And basically just changing that image size into a proper size gets us into this situation. Also, the way that you design your website affects the way it can be marketed. One page structure, I'm not a big fan, mostly because it's super hard to actually share different sections of that in social media. New sites and blogs, the way that you choose to structure your URL matters a bit. Usually, keep it simple. It makes it easier. Income risk consideration, again, you probably don't want to have all of your variations, for example, of product to be a different product. Why? One of the main reasons is that basically you don't have a pretty good control on the search results you have for it, because you might end up with a lot of duplicate content, which means that Google is going to omit tons of your products. And when people are searching for something related to your product, they might see a kind of like a different product version since you didn't make them, since you didn't make them as variable products, but instead, multiple products. Quickly going through, what do you want to measure on a website as conversions? Generally, all of the other things are something to be taken as side note, but in the end, conversions, whether it's sales, whether it's leads, whether it's people joining your nonprofit organizations, this is what you want to track. So I want to end this with a little of comparison. Since I'm thinking that a website is a good comparison to a mall, let's look quickly about the kind of traffic that malls, the largest shopping malls in Finland, what kind of traffic they are getting in a month. Kampi, with more than 3 million visitors. Celllo, 1.9 million visitors. It is 1.6 million. And Forum, 1.1 million. And then let's take here is an e-commerce example. Large e-commerce stores in Finland. And you can see they pretty much get the same traffic per month as a regular brick and mortar mall. And then you start thinking, how much money went into actually building that mall? How much money does it take to build a very extremely good functioning website? So yeah, I want to leave you with that. Developers, think about it. If you would get the same kind of budget as, let's say, Ithakeskus or Celllo or the renewed Kampi has, what kind of website could you make out of that? All right, I think I'm out of time. So thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you, Jonas. I think that was a great, great first talk for our word camp and really interesting stuff. Like I was kind of protecting beforehand. So now it's time for audio questions. Do you have any questions from the downstairs or upstairs? We have two mics. So just raise your hands if you have questions. We have one over here. Do you have any favorite specific mall in the physical world that you're thinking about while designing websites? Favorite mall? I'd say, this is actually an interesting question because I was about to say Celllo. It's in Lepavara. But the reason probably is that because it's the most familiar to me, right? So this is the kind of the same thing that if you're just asking one person about the specific of a design, you might end up with the design that is not actually serving the whole group. So yeah, I would be saying Celllo, but it's probably because I've been accustomed to that. So the same thing goes with the web design. Everybody has opinions. Hence, I would say it would be so much better if you have a behavioral data to back up the design plans instead of going and asking your whatever, marketing brand manager asking like, yeah, this looks good because it might not look good to another person. Any other questions? Hello, good morning. I'll just comment this rhetorical question you have here on the screen. What would happen if we could develop a website with a budget of a mall? What would happen is that the project would go to Tieto and it would fail miserably. That's a good point. Anybody else? I didn't hear any question, but that's OK. Actually, I have one question in this middle if you don't mind. You were saying that you were in Shanghai like a couple of years. How would you compare the mall and the website world in there and in Finland? OK, this is an interesting point. Basically, the websites I was dealing with was to target the Western audience. So those were much more similar as the ones that we have in Finland, as we have in the Germany, as we have in the US. But generally, the situation in China is that your own website is not nearly as valuable channel as it is in the Western world. A couple of reasons for that one is that Baidu being censored and being very protective of its own ecosystem means that it's very hard to actually get into companies' website by search. So basically, it means if we go back to the location thing, it means that here, where's the picture? It means that basically, you would be standing here and there might be a very, very nice website or a mall here that's serving your purposes. But then we have a Baidu being not very open with anyone who is not spending advertising money. Means that there might be some completely irrelevant mall that, for example, you go and go look there for Nike running shoes. But this mall doesn't serve you Nike running shoes. But anyway, it's going to be there right next to you can't even go around it to the mall that you want. So websites there basically are a lot. If you're targeting Chinese audience, the website is not as important. Obviously, you should probably have one for even for just branding purposes. And you can also use it to do sales. But e-commerce mostly there happens through the big e-commerce platforms, Taobao, JD. Because people tend to trust them. There's also a lot of problems with trust, especially towards a company or even a big brand because nobody is willing to take the risk that the brand is counterfeit. So it's very different. And the malls are more similar, except that there tends to be quite big ones there. But the mall design, I feel, it's obviously much more similar since the people who are visiting malls are. The behavior is similar. And you go into a mall and the location ecosystem doesn't really affect so much. But the websites are a different type of mall game.