 I'm Rob Armstrong, as I said, Bulls Eye Graphics. My talk today is about building a website, a recipe for success. Small business people, not-for-profits, government, anybody else? Recruitment, OK. So when I use the word sales, the not-for-profits, you need to substitute change the world. When I say sales to the government, people, you need to say to yourselves, assist and serve others, I think. Is that it? Yeah. So I've structured my little talk like a recipe that we would use to make something. And I'll sprinkle in some real examples of some recipes that didn't work out. It's not that I'm mocking the people who made these mistakes. I'm not sort of having a go at them or anything. I think one of the things we need to learn is to learn from other people's mistakes. So that's kind of why I'm using these examples. I've also got some LOL cats just to help me with the sort of the humor side of things. So they'll be just moving along. So our first ingredient is to find a good designer, developer, or an agency who can do that for you. And I would suggest that to find someone good, you've got to go back to sort of basic principles, referrals from satisfied customers, always a good one. Find sites on the internet that you like and have a look down the bottom. Generally, good designers and agencies will put a little credit down the bottom and so you can pop onto that credit and have a look at some of the other work they've done. If you like what they've done, get hold of them, have a meeting. Check out their folio. Of course, they're going to only show you the best stuff. They're not going to show you the disasters, but hey, if they've got a bunch of those, that's a pretty good sign. Ask some business owners from that folio what sort of experiences they had with that designer. No harm whatsoever. Ring, ring, hi. So you've got your website done by X. What were they like? Talk to people. Have a meeting with the people who are going to build your site and make sure you can both get along because you're going to be kind of working together for at least a month and you're going to be pretty close at times and there's going to be a bit of friction at times. So you need to sort of make sure you... I can work with this person. Next is the budget. Often, well, not often, but sometimes we have people come to us and say, well, so I need a website. How much is it going to cost me? It's sort of an open-ended question. It's really quite tricky. What a website is. A website is, here I'm saying it's a funnel that takes all of your exposure, all your SEO, all the other work that you're doing to expose your company to communicate with people and that's channeling it into action. And in this case, I'm sort of saying dollars because I'm sort of small business, but all those other things. So my point would sort of be it's not so much how much should it cost, it's how much is it going to cost you to get it wrong, okay? That's that one spot, that one key element. So I would say spend as much as you possibly can afford on that one thing. Earlier, we had 27% online now. That's a broad range of things. That's probably AdWords, that's all sorts of things that you're spending money on. I would say some percentage of that should be spent on your website, not only in building the thing in the first place, but ongoing maintenance, updates, all those sorts of things as well. Okay, be clear about your goals. So before you go into that meeting with your web developer, think about what sort of things you really want to get out of this. What does success look like to you? What's a good website? How's it going to help you get where you want to go? One of the methods I've used, particularly when you're dealing with a large organisation who potentially have either already got a very big website or are going to get a big website, one of the really good methods to go with is to have a meeting with all the kind of decision makers, get a bunch of post-it notes, give everyone some post-it notes and pens. Those people write down ideas, thoughts, things they want to get done, all that stuff goes on post-it notes. Big piece of board, push the post-it notes all over it, shift them around, see where all the most number of ideas, where they cluster, where they don't cluster, draw pencil lines between them all, makes a big mess, but that way you start to get a feel for what you want to do, how the site's going to be structured, what sort of things you're trying to communicate, what's important, what's not so important, what sort of left field that you kind of think, well, hang on, that's kind of a good idea, that. We might move things towards that. Make it free at the start of the process, keep it wide and open, then focus as you move along the journey. Appoint a single point of contact within your organisation to deal with the web developers, or the web developer, hopefully, or the account manager for the agency, or whatever. Have a single point of contact. That person takes all the ideas, pushes them all through in one single way. Make sure that person has cleared the decks, okay? We had one in business. About two days into the project, our central point of contact headed off to Hawaii and came back a month later and said, okay, so show me the website. Get used to disappointment if you're gonna do that. I was actually really, really surprised about that, but yeah, it doesn't work. You need to clear the decks. You need to be able to prioritise this job above other things. Make yourself available. Don't get into a flurry and wait situation. It's not a good way to build a website. Get all your logo branding and all your documents sorted out. If you haven't already got them sorted out, get them sorted out before you start this process. Branding documents are just a godsend to a developer or a designer because we've already got it there in front of us. Okay, it's gotta have this much space. If it's on a dark background, I've gotta do this. Great, brilliant. Get us going, gets us moving, moving towards where we wanna go. Around 2001, we were given, this is true as I stand here now, a fridge magnet, a floppy disk and a sheet of paper with handwritten notes and pencil on it all stapled together as our brief. Yeah, the staple went through the floppy disk, yes. Yes. Go figure. After we stopped laughing, it became apparent that the client actually felt that we were going to fix this and proceed. So to use our recipe analogy, that's sort of the equivalent of sending the chef down to the shop with loose change to buy all the ingredients. Oh, wait. Be careful about involving other designers. Quite often you'll have an in-house graphic designer. You'll have someone who's a bit creative in the office. You'll have an agency who already do a lot of your print exposure. They might do some other work for you. So you think, well, I'll leverage off their expertise and then I'll just give it to the developer and they'll kind of mechanically put it all together. This doesn't always go well. The web is a dynamic environment. Print, graphic design, is a very static environment. It's ink on paper. It's always in the same spot. It always works the same way. Web doesn't, as Ange was saying. All these devices, they're all different. They're all different sizes. They're all different shapes. They're all different. It doesn't happen that way. So for example, we had one in-house designer who came up with a design that only worked on his Macintosh in Safari in a dark room with the screen on 100% brightness. I'm not kidding. So do graphic designers make good web developers? Sometimes, yes, they certainly do. There's designers out there who are so darn good at everything, they're able to adapt and that's fine, but not always. If you don't like the heat, keep out of the kitchen. This is a sort of perennial problem in our area. You've hired this designer. They're at the top of their game. You've checked them out. You think they're great. And now you want to impose your personal taste on the design. In my experience, this leads to three possible reactions from a designer. The first one is, the designer just becomes this glorified kitchen hand and runs back and forth between the kitchen and your table, carrying out every single thing you tell them to do. The second one, the designer goes, hmm, yeah, look, I'm not sure that this is gonna be so good and tries to work with you. They show you examples of things that have worked. They go side by side. They do a compromise to try to work with you. Or they just go, no, it's my way or the highway. Any of these scenarios, it's not a good result. It's not gonna get you an award-winning design. It's gonna get you a compromise. And that's probably not a good thing. The problem here is that you guys hold all the cards. You're paying the checks. So you're essentially putting the designer, the developer, the agency, whoever. You're putting them in a situation where they're actually arguing with the person who's paying them. So boy, they're gonna have to be really experienced, really confident, and actually in sort of a space in their business where they're prepared to take you on and possibly lose. Chances are most people won't. They won't take you on. They will fold and they will go towards whatever compromise they can to get you to work. I would argue that that's not a good outcome for you or for the designer. So if you do wanna get involved in the kitchen and you really wanna get in there and rattle those pans, you need to be able to communicate in language that the designer or the developer understands. And you need to be able to show them examples of something you like. Here's something from a magazine. It looks great. I know it's not web, but this is the style I want. That's good communication. Here's a font that I like. Okay, cool. That's good communication. If you're starting to say things like electric blue, electric blue isn't a color, it's an effect. If you're starting to say things like make it pop, make it pop is not a layout. It's sort of a contrast comment. I think, I'm not sure. Clean isn't a font, to the best of my knowledge. I do check Google fonts occasionally and I haven't yet seen clean turn up as a font. What? Maybe I do. That'd be interesting, wouldn't it? Give clear feedback. So most developers, designers, will give you a few drafts to look at. Okay, something to pick from, something that they propose, something they think you're gonna like. If you don't like it, fine. But talk about what you don't like about it. Make it absolutely crystal clear. What doesn't work? What does work? Those kinds of things. If you know your market so well that you feel that your ideas are more than valid, great, communicate it. Things like give it zip. That's not feedback. Sex it up. I've actually been asked, this is a government department, ask me to sex up a website. I don't know what that means. Well, I do have some ideas, but no, really sex it up. Content. So you're writing your own content. Well, okay, possible. Proofread it. Sounds obvious. Check it thoroughly before it gets into the mixing bowl. You know, you've got all the raisins and the flour and everything all mixed in there in the bowl and now we're gonna take all the stalks off the raisins, are we? There's a lot of work involved. If you pile all your content into a system and then edit it and then pile it all back in again. More work spent there, less work spent doing something useful like SEO or nice design or some other funky thing. There's plenty of professional writers out there who can write for the web. Maybe engage them. The other nice bonus you get there is they've probably come across this thing called SEO, Search Engine Optimization, which is the big thing currently because hey, everybody wants to be at the top of Google Search. Google Search is the biggest player in town. We all have to play with Google Sandbox. That's reality. So SEO, if you can get a good writer involved and they do understand SEO, probably worth spending the money and getting them to write the content and them to put the keywords and phrases in. Win, everybody wins. Test the mixture. The nice thing about web is you can test the mixture before you bung it in the oven, okay? You can do a development site, you can check it out. I would suggest strongly that you launch that development site, it's sometimes called a soft launch, and get some people to check it out. A good cross-section of your demographic. Sit them down and say, when you go to this website, you need to know how big X is and how much it costs. And then you stand back and watch them do it on a laptop in front of you. Out of that comes the feedback you need to improve your website, okay? Online forms are notorious for problems post-launch. So get some people to fill out your online forms, have a look at the results you get from that, make sure that's actually what you need to find out from that form. Test, test, test. So I hope you all enjoyed that and I hope your next website project goes well.