 My name is Chris Remington. I'm Director of Client Strategy at Asidia. We're down in the fifth ward. And I'm happy to be here today to talk a little bit about website redesign A to Z, things you need to think about. I've got about 20 years' experience in digital from the client side, the agency side, and the corporate side, so hopefully I can share some experiences of some of these projects that have come down the pike over the years. First, a little bit about Asidia. We've been around for about 16 years. We were launched as a full-play digital agency. We've done literally thousands of projects for hundreds of clients over that time. We've got about 53 folks on staff, full design, full programming, SEO, PPC, analytics. We have a full marketing services team. Very diverse client base. We have four different markets that we really kind of specialize in, travel and tourism, manufacturing, health care, and higher education. But we do deal with clients in other markets as well. We are a Microsoft partner. I don't know if I can say that in an open source shop here. But we are, we're also certified in Sitecore and Kentico, which are two other content management systems that are more on the enterprise level. We're also certified with Coveo and Wyden, which are some other enterprise level tools, certified with Google and Mac as well. But we also do projects in WordPress. And it's a little bit unusual for an agency our size to be both in the open source world and in the .NET world. But we've found over the years that clients really have a variety of needs and we're basically agnostic when it comes to content management systems. We don't want to shoehorn them into one solution. So we will sort of discover their needs first and then from there recommend, recommend the right content management system for them. So we do work in both .NET and in WordPress. So first of all, let's sort of sort of start off. This presentation is going to be very, very high level and it's gonna hopefully include some questions that you should ask if you're on the corporate side and you're gonna be charged with launching a new website. These are some things you need to consider if you're on the entrepreneur, on the vendor side and you're working with someone at a corporation to build a new website. These are some things that will hopefully give you an understanding of their landscape and kind of what things you need to consider. So we're gonna look at it for both a vendor and the client perspective. It's not gonna be overly technical. It's not gonna be a sales pitch for any particular CMS, although we will talk about WordPress a bit in a minute and it's not gonna be any kind of a side-by-side comparison of CMS tools. It's really gonna be looking at it from a project basis instead of from a content management system selection focus. So the first question you might ask is okay, someone has said to you, hey, we need a new website and it's important to really figure out why are you doing this, right? You don't wanna just do it just to do it. There really needs to be some reasons behind it. One might be it's not producing results. Whatever those results might be, whatever you need the site to do, maybe it's not doing what you need it to do. Maybe your business has changed. Maybe you've entered in new markets, you've added new products. Maybe your competitors have changed their site and your boss says, hey, we've gotta do this, we've gotta do them one better. So go out and make our site better than theirs. Maybe it's not mobile friendly. You'd be surprised the number of sites that are out there that are still not mobile friendly that are not responsive, which we'll talk about in a minute, but that's a big driver for folks needing to do a redesign. There might be some technical or design limitations. So maybe they built the site, they used a theme and now they can't do the things that they need to do from a design perspective or technically they just can't perform the source of calls to action that they need so there needs to be an enhancement with that. Maybe it no longer reflects the brand. But the most important thing really is to, is as you can, rely on data to drive the redesign action plan. I am amazed when I talk to CEOs of companies and I say, well, you wanna do this new website. What does your data tell you? What does your Google Analytics tell you about your website traffic? Blank faces, they don't even look at that, which I think is a crime because you've got so much good data there and so much actionable information. As you can, you really should try to use your Google Analytics and use your data to tell you kind of what you want to change and to what degree it needs to be changed. But it's amazing how many people don't do that. It's also important from if you're a vendor or if you're somebody within an organization to understand who's driving the project because this is gonna give you a real good sense of who the main stakeholders are and whose buttons you have to push to make sure that this is gonna be a successful initiative. Is it somebody in the marketing and sales team? Is it somebody in the C-level suite that says, hey, we have to have this? Maybe it's your board of directors or board of trustees that are pushing for the change. Maybe it's somebody in the IT department and that can always be sort of an interesting push pull when you've got IT versus marketing. No offense to IT people. They have a different perspective of what a site needs to look like and what it needs to behave like versus someone in marketing. Marketing folks might not know a lot about the intricacies of the IT world, so there needs to be sort of a push pull there a little bit. Is your competition driving it? Have they done some things that really means that it's really making you have to change? Or they're just putting some technological advances that you have to embrace. Important thing is to get stakeholder buy-in because as you're looking to do this, you want to be in a position as the person driving this project to say six months a year, 18 months down the road, when we look to assess this project, we want to figure out what the main things are that the stakeholders are interested in as they're going to be using it to judge results. Is it going to be more traffic? Is it going to be more downloads of white papers? Is it going to be more actual business if it's an e-commerce site? So not only do you need to figure out who the stakeholders are, but what are the things that they're going to hold you accountable for as they look to say this has been a successful project or it hasn't been successful. So if you understand those metrics right at the beginning, it's going to make it a lot easier for you to try to figure out, to ensure, I guess, that you're actually appeasing the people and pleasing them, those folks that are the main drivers of the project. Another part of it is really to think about it from a business goal perspective. I mean, if you're going to start this new project, you have sort of a clean slate, right? You have the opportunity to have this website be not just a website, but maybe it can become a business tool, an operation that will allow you to improve functionality, improve calls to action, and improve operations throughout the enterprise. This is another question that I ask a lot when I'm out talking to customers. You know, what do you want people to do when they come to your website? They don't know, right? So when they get there, what is it you want them to do? I want them to buy something. I want them to download this white paper. I want them to watch this video. I want them to reach out to this distributor. Whatever those things are, you need to know if those are super important, that's going to dictate your design strategy and potentially your functionality strategy as well because you're going to want those calls to action front and center. And those calls to action are probably going to be things that your stakeholders are going to want you to track as you move forward. Yes, we want to have people come to our site, find a distributor and then reach out to them. If that's the metric, then find a way to make sure that that's very much in the front of what's happening. Is this going to be an externally facing site or is there going to be some sort of a client, member, portal or both? So a lot of times you can have a site that's out there, but they want a portion of it to be a portal which is gated content. So maybe you have a network of distributors around the country. You want them to be able to log in and download spec sheets or logos or other things that they can then use to run their business at a local level. Or maybe there's a special spot where you've got gated content just for them. It could be a variety of things, but you want to be able to know if that's part of the structure of the site, you need to account for that and ensure that you have that gate, that password protected gate in place, and then you can actually publish and push content behind it based on those needs. Are there any business processes or workflows that could be improved? So what we tell clients a lot of times is, what does your customer service team say? What do your internal sales folks say? How are they using the website? Are there some things that are constant questions or constant problems that you could use the website to address? Maybe there's an FAQ or some other area of the site that can be enhanced with their input. And if it's there on the site, then it eliminates your customer service folks from having to answer that same question potentially 30 times a day, right? So if there are some workflows, some backend workflows that can be enhanced, let's use this website redesign as an opportunity to do that. I mentioned before, how will success be measured? 6, 12, 18 months post launch, what are the metrics that are going to be looked at to ensure that this thing was a worthwhile endeavor? And again, use data to drive your decisions. There's a lot of good information out there in Google Analytics. But again, it's amazing how many sites don't even have Google Analytics in it, on it. So I don't know how you can make an informed decision without that information, but there's clearly good information there to think about. The other part of this that's always interesting is what does a resource world look like for this? Who's gonna be responsible for maintaining the site after you've launched it? You may not have the right staff if you're working at a company. You may not have the right staff on hand to maintain the site. They might not have enough people. They might not have the right skills. So if that's the case, what do you do? Do you give them training? Do you bring in more people? But at some point you're gonna have to hand the keys of this website over to somebody else. And it's important to figure out who those people are going to be. Same with the technical and creative resources. If you need to do more than just post a picture or update some post, if you need to do more design-oriented stuff or maybe some functionality, who's gonna do that? Do you have the right folks on staff to do that? Or can you partner with somebody else to do that? If you're a vendor and you're gonna be helping launch this site, will you be available to help create that form or do some other things that may be beyond the capabilities of the staff? So it's very important for you as the vendor to figure out who are the folks that are gonna be touching this site that I'm building for them once it launches? And are there going to be needs for various levels of rights throughout the website? Past Client of Mine is a big place here in town that is quite popular, I'm not gonna mention it, but they have about 20 different departments across their enterprise, all of whom need to touch the website at one point or another. Our main contact was the webmaster. He was in charge of everything, but certain departments could be trusted to publish information on the website and others couldn't. So he had to lead the charge and say, I'm gonna let you five departments, we're gonna give you the rights and the rules to go in and make changes to the site and then actually publish those changes live. Other departments said we don't wanna do that or they just weren't capable to do it. So they would make their changes, it would be put into some sort of a preview mode and then the webmaster would go in and look at it and he would say, yep, this makes sense, I'll go ahead and publish that now. So if you have a big enterprise like that and you're gonna have multiple folks be responsible for touching the content on the website and maintaining it, you need to figure out who can and should be given those rights to publish the site, publish to the site. That can be a really big deal. So it's important to sort of figure out your audience there. And then what sort of training is involved? There are a million different content management systems out there as I'm sure you're aware. Some of them are much more complex than others. If you can give somebody an hour's worth of training and they're then able to update the site, that's a good thing. In other cases it might be a week at some boot camp someplace where they have a whole directory or a whole big binder of stuff they have to know. That gets a bit more complex. But at the end of the day, you really wanna have the ability to have these customers, internal customers maintain the site to the best level that they can. And it's a challenge for agencies like ours, right? Because back in the day, before content management systems were out there, you were really beholden to us to make changes to your site because you didn't know HTML maybe at the beginning and content management systems weren't that popular. So we were the ones that you'd call and say, hey, put this new picture on the website. Now every site that we build is using a CMS, so we have to add value as an agency to do something else, right? So the paradigm has changed a little bit. So if you're going to be providing that the key is to the site basically to somebody, it's important for you then as a vendor to figure out how to add value. There's a lot of talk out there now about content strategy. And certainly content is key, right? It's important to have a content strategy, right? And it's important to figure out really who owns that content. Maybe it's multiple people across the enterprise that own it. But at the end of the day, it needs to be part of a unified brand voice, right? And it needs to be updated on a regular basis. Where is that information in the content? Where is it coming from? And how frequently should it be updated? If you're working for a university or a college, for example, you might only publish information about your math department or your English program once a semester. But as those new offerings change, you want to update that. In some cases, you may want to change your content every single day. So you need to understand what the frequency is going to be and then really who should be the one responsible for making those content updates. Again, we talked about the publishing rules, rules and permissions. Do you need to have different levels of hierarchy within the CMS to allow people to actually drive that content and publish it to the website? What are the primary content types? Is it copy? Is it videos? Is it images? Because that may change who updates it. It may change the CMS that you select based on your asset needs. And it might change really sort of how that information is posted. Because if you have a lot of heavy assets in terms of photos and images, you might want to go with an asset management option where you've got something that is separate from the CMS but is connected to it in a way that all that content can be pulled through. We've seen clients who have said, yeah, we've got nine different computers in the office here and he's got all the spec sheets on this computer and all the photos are on this computer and all the videos are on this computer. And so an asset management or a document management option or even with a CMS that has a database, you can combine all that stuff in one spot and it makes it a lot easier than for those content publishers to access that information and then pull it through to the site. Globalization and translation is something that can be a big issue. For some folks, putting a plug-in like a Google translate in a website is fine. For other cases, we advise clients that are really looking to reach out to folks in other parts of the world to actually have a native speaker actually write that content and then publish it. So you want to figure out really the level to which that translation and that outreach in another language is going to be important. If you go and get somebody very excited about your Spanish language version of the website and you don't have anyone on your staff that speaks Spanish, if that person emails you, your sales department says, I want to, I don't speak Spanish, but if they say I want to speak to somebody about this product and it's in Spanish and you get this email and you can't respond to it in Spanish, that's kind of a problem. So you have to realize that at some point if you're going to throw the translation out there you may have to close that loop and had somebody respond back in Arabic or in Spanish or in Russian or whatever that's going to be. Otherwise you're just teasing them, you're throwing the stuff out there and they're not able to sort of respond to you in their language, which is I think what you kind of want. Does there need to be any kind of gated content? We talked about that before, but is there a strategy to put certain content behind a password protected gate and what are the reasons for that? It might be stuff you don't want to have your general population access. You may want to be able to track the number of times a sales rep or a distributor comes in and accesses that information. It might be a metric that you use then to gauge how successful they are in their role, but gated content is certainly something to think about. Then social media, you can have just a link to your Facebook and your YouTube page on your site or do you want to have it actually pull through a live feed? So there are different ways you can integrate that and will community be important? Do you want to have a community where folks can come in and share their thoughts about your brand or share their thoughts about your company? If you do you probably want to have somebody sort of moderate that so that they can respond back to any questions or queries that might come up. And obviously SEO is hugely important. As you look at content on the site, it might tell you the story of your business or your products, but it might not necessarily be search engine optimized. So you sort of want to scrub it with that SEO brush to make sure that the keywords and the different phrases within that copy are done correctly and put in the right spots on the page so that you're actually able to enhance your search engine visibility. And that search engine focus may have implications to your site map. You may want to change your top level navigation or other sections of the site. You may want to reword them based on your SEO. So for example, if people are, if your analytics are telling you that people are searching for your product one way, you might want to use that phrase as what you call a certain header of your navigation. So don't forget about looking at that information. There's a good tip here on the bottom from one of my colleagues that wrote an interesting blog piece on improving ranking with SEO, which you can check out. This is the big one for me because I've dealt with clients for years. I said, well, I want to have an events calendar on my website. Oh, I want to have a dealer locator on my website. Okay, well, what does that mean? Because I can ask you 15 questions about each one of those and it could go from a plugin that we can pull down or it could be a 300 hours of programming to customize this to do what you want. So if you're going to be sending out an RFP or you're going to be engaging a vendor, you really need to understand what this means. I mean, is an event calendar really just pulling through like a Google calendar or some other thing? Or do you want to have people actually be able to register for stuff and maybe pay to sign up for things? You need to flush this stuff out. So if you're on the client side, you need to be able to say what you want. A dealer locator is a good example. You might have 100 dealers, you might say, I want to have a zip code radius of 25 miles and you put in your zip code and you find your dealer. Okay, well, that's one thing, right? But if you say, well, wait a second, I want to be able to determine really on the fly which dealers show up. If I've got 10 dealers in Chicago, I want to be able to have certain ones show up at the top and not at the bottom. Okay, well, now you're talking about a whole other level of programming. How do you determine which of those dealers show up? What's the criteria that you use to make that happen? Because now you've got a whole other level of programming. You have to make attributions to certain dealers based on whether they're a gold, silver, bronze level dealer, whatever that is so that the system, when someone types in the zip code, the right dealers show up. So it's very important for you to understand what those things are. All the nuances of the different pieces of this. And also a third-party tool integration. A lot of our clients will link to like an HR portal, like a teleo or something like that where they're actually linking to something that has the jobs posted. We have some of our educational clients that link off the site to a donation link or to an application for something. Those may or may not be responsive so you might have this really great mobile-friendly site link off to this third-party thing and now it's not responsive so you've got a user experience situation going on. But it's important to figure out what those third-party tools will be and ensure that that's factored in early on into the process. So design is another important fact. Obviously you want it to reinforce your brand. All sites now are done with a mobile focus, hopefully at least they're responsive so that you have that mobile optimized version. It's super important to have high-quality photographs so if you have products invested in the money to actually take good quality pictures because that's going to allow you to have the navigation sliders and things across the top that really showcase your products. Are you going to have someone internally do the design or are you going to work with someone external to do it or is it going to be a combination? Wireframes and user experience testing are very important. You might want to do some testing as part of that so just one simple example, you might have a store and do you call it shop now? Do you call it store or do you call it shop? There might be different click-throughs on that based on what you call it. And I worked at Mark Travel a number of years back and they were looking to relaunch a booking engine for one of their travel products and they wanted you to book something and put your hotel and your flight into a suitcase which they thought would be really kind of cute because it's kind of a travel thing but when they did user experience testing everybody was saying, well, where's the shopping cart? Where's the cart? And it was, they dawned on them right then and there that maybe that's the way they needed to go. People are used to that cart. They're not used to the suitcase and they abandoned that option which saved them a lot of issues. So there are certain best practices they really don't want to tinker with and I'm glad they made that change but you'd be surprised when you do some usability testing things like that might make come up that can save you a lot of headaches later on. And then themes versus customs. I know Matt talked about that in the first session. The themes can be great and they can get you a lot of the way down towards getting the project finished. On the other hand, they can be somewhat limiting and I have seen clients who have said, look, we had this guy build the site for us. They used a theme and now the level of changes we want to make to it really the theme doesn't support it and the theme is busting and so what do you do? Do you start from scratch? Do you sort of continue to work that theme to its limits? Themes are great. I'm not a big fan of them frankly because it seems like after we've learned exactly what the client wants to do they're maybe not the most effective thing but for certain clients they work great. The other knock on them sometimes is, well, I don't want to have my site look like a thousand other sites out there. Well, yeah, that's one of the risks of it but it does have some advantages for sure. One thing we do a lot of is user personas and this is really a good way for clients to visualize in a very practical way who's visiting the site. This is for one of our food service clients and I apologize if you can't read it but this is Graham. He's a 37 year old executive chef and his number one concern when he comes to the site, his method of web consumption, what does he do? What he's looking for when he comes to the site, tools that would be useful for him and his top needs and so for this particular client we did about six of these and it's easier than post-launch for clients to understand the content strategy when they think about it in terms of a real person like this, right? Because he's a chef, he's gonna have a different set of needs on the website than somebody who maybe is in charge of equipping the kitchen, right? The one who's actually in charge of buying all the equipment. As a chef, his needs are different. So if you can do personas, they're great, not everybody does them, but for us they're helpful because it really helps clients understand in a real visual way who's coming to the website. The budget's also obviously very important. Certain content management systems have a license fee. Some of them are 20, 30, 40, $60,000 just for the license fee and if you're talking about a $60,000 license fee you're probably not talking about a $15,000 website, right? So you need to factor that into the process and see if that's going to be something that is going to be critical. The build-out obviously is going to be another part of the budget and as you're dealing with it, how are change orders and how is scope creep managed? So what we do a lot of times is we'll say, that's a great idea. We can roll that into phase one of this project if you want, but here's how it's going to impact your cost and the timeline. It's going to delay us by three weeks and it's going to be another $5,000 or let's put that on a phase two list and we'll revisit that after we launched the site as we had originally planned. And it's interesting when you do that and you have this phase two list, a lot of times those things that are on that list they don't want them anymore. Once you see it post-launch when they were all hot and bothered about it before and now they don't want it. So it's important to figure out how you're going to handle it. If you're on the company side, you need to know that, yes, the budget I agreed on may not be what I end up with. So if that's the case, you need to kind of plan for that. And what kind of post-launch support maintenance is involved? If we go back to some of the resource slides here and you need to have somebody from an outside firm help you with some of the creative or technical changes, what is that maintenance going to cost you each month? Can you get a block of hours? Is it a certain amount of time per quarter? You need to kind of account for that because a lot of times I think clients that I've dealt with have assumed that launching the site, that's the only expense and then once that's done, they're done with it. There is a lot of post-launch stuff that potentially can happen and you need to kind of plan for that. CMS upgrades, those are very important to stay current. Some may be driven by security, some may be driven by functionality. Talk more about that in a second. But you need to make sure that you stay current with those upgrades as new versions are rolled out. And in some cases, if you're on version five and version nine is the new version, you sometimes can't go from version five to version nine. You have to go from five to six, six to seven, seven, eight, eight to nine. And so there's a lot of that that has to happen and that stuff could break during that process and I won't get too much into that but that's something you need to certainly think about. Are you gonna use internal or external resources to kind of keep things moving? And then from a sort of a corporate perspective, is this something that you're gonna have as a capitalized initiative or is it gonna be an expense? That's gonna determine how it hits your books. All right, so obviously, now you know you need to do a website, now you know, okay, we wanna have a content management system. That's great. It empowers you to make changes when you want. You're not held hostage to agencies like ours or people that are HTML coders and for the most part you can log into the admin and make changes and not have to worry about HTML code. That's the real win. But it also facilitates the execution of an ongoing content strategy and it also enables you to have cross-device optimization which would be the responsive piece. There's lots of different CMS tools out there, right? You can have software as a service. There's a lot of open source sites. There are a lot of .NET sites. HubSpot is a software as a service. Shopify is a great e-commerce and Shopify as well. Lots of different options out there. So what is it that you're going to use to pick the right application? We saw a variation of the slide earlier. This is the CMS landscape and if you can see right here, the green line, that's the market share that WordPress has. So 53% of sites are not using a CMS or are using a CMS that is not monitored. So WordPress accounts for 27% of all websites. So they have a 59% market share of all the websites that are done with the CMS. There's Joomla, Drupal, Magento and the list goes down from there. Some of these have a very, very small market share. Magento is a pretty powerful open source e-commerce tool but any one of those will be able to allow you to add an e-commerce component to it if that's where you need to go. But clearly there are literally hundreds of options out there from a CMS perspective. The upgrade path after the site has launched, it's important for you as the customer to figure out, okay, how frequently are these updates going to happen? And is it a mini enhancement or is it a whole new version? In some cases it's just one click and you've updated. In other cases, there might be lots of hours of time spent to get the upgrades going. We had a client one time that downloaded about 25 plugins for their site and when it came time to do the upgrade, we said, well, which of these plugins are you actually using on the site? Because they were really pretty much had taken it over and they didn't know. But what we had to do was we went to do the upgrade. We had to test the new version of it with every one of those plugins and it got to be very, very kind of sticky. So you need to figure out how often that's gonna happen and whether or not you need to have a whole new version or if you can bypass some of them and you'll get sort of the residual updates on the more larger releases. Is it driven because of the security patch out there or is it a functionality thing? That's super important and WordPress certainly has had its share of security issues but certainly if there are new, just new functionality that comes along, that might be a reason to do it. You may have something that comes out in a new version that changes the way somebody does something on the website. So you have to think about, okay, in the old version they used to do this form or this tool this way, now this is included in the new version, how does that change the workflow? And so you may have to go in and do some more training so that they're able to take advantage of that new functionality. You don't wanna fall behind because at some point you're gonna have to catch up and what's really involved with the cost of all that. Hosting is important, your CMS selection is gonna dictate your hosting environment. There may be CMS specific hosting services out there. There I know there are some out here that are focused exclusively on WordPress, which is great. Something like a Magento really needs to be on a server that is really calibrated just exactly perfectly for Magento because it can be a really temperamental tool. And if it's hosted someplace else, you're gonna see a lot of performance issues. It's amazing, clients that I've talked to really wanna know where their site's being hosted. They wanna be able if they need to drive out and see it. That's the box that has my server on it, right? That's great, or if it's in the cloud, it's in the cloud, but you wanna figure out that where they are in that continuum so that you can give them a hosting environment that makes them feel comfortable. And we tell clients to not host their websites internally because you're too close to your other internal systems, whether it's payroll or inventory or whatever that is, it's just easier to separate that and not have it be part of that internal world. It can cause issues. You may have a different opinion, but that's what we've experienced. And when you go to pick a CMS, there might be certain things that come out of the box with a tool that another tool doesn't have. So it might be as easy as getting a plugin, but in other cases it might do things right out of the box. For example, I've got some experience with a CMS called Concrete Five. They have a form builder built right in out of the box, and it's really super easy to use. I think what Matt said earlier is that you may have to have a form plugin come in for WordPress. So that's just one little thing that maybe will be a factor that you would use to select a CMS versus another one. How easily can things be added to it? Can I, as the client, add things to it, or do I have to call you, as my vendor, to help me add a navigational slider or whatever the enhancement is? How does that happen? And the other thing we found is that with some of these plugins, even with some of the open source community stuff, clients will say, well, I wanna have the plugin that was created by the community versus a member of the community, right? So for example, for Concrete Five, there were people that worked for Concrete Five that actually built plugins and launched those. They felt that those were better than some programmer that had a plugin because they felt it was gonna be more easily maintained and it was gonna be more reputable. That may not be the case, but you may want to look, as you're going to add a plugin, is it something that maybe is more of a CMS-driven plugin versus just a programmer, which is no offense to programmers, but you wanna find out what the interest is on that. And then how easy is it for you to integrate third-party connections? Some CMS tools will have a very easy connection to things like QuickBooks or Salesforce or Constant Contact. I know with Concrete Five that the MailChimp plugin, it's already part of the build. PayPal's another one. So if you have that environment where you're hopping out to other tools, how easy is it for you to connect those to the CMS that you pick? It's one of the questions you wanna ask. And obviously, SEO is super important. Again, use data to drive that redesign and find out what your SEO is telling you, find out what your analytics are telling you, do an SEO audit. You're gonna get some great insight from Google, top keywords, pathing through the site. If you wanna go and rebuild a certain section of the site and your analytics is telling you that nobody's going there, maybe that's why you wanna do it, but you certainly wanna figure out how you wanna enhance certain things and make sure that it makes sense given your traffic flow. And this is the big one too. You wanna set expectations for SEO visibility. I've had a lot of clients that have, their CEO has said, why don't we come up with this keyword? Well, because it was not one that you picked, top demise, right? So you're not gonna come up at the top or on page one of every single keyword in your space. So it's important for you to understand and for your managers to understand these are the phrases we're optimizing the site for. And so if you're gonna say, why aren't we there for this one? We can do that, but it's not on the list right now that is what we're optimizing the site for. So if you can set those expectations and they can Google it and they can say, oh, we're the first listing on this page, that's because we've optimized the site for that. So just don't let them throw your curve ball and pick something that's way down the road. Organic and paid strategy is a good combination. If your site is created properly organically, that's good. That's really the code on the page, of course. The paid strategy is paper click and things of that sort. You may not be able to compete on certain phrases. We have one client right now that their important keyword phrases are about $65 a click for the market that they want to get into. And some of these other ones that you see like mesothelioma lawyers, $400 or $500 a click for some of these keyword phrases. So if you want to play in that game, you know, that's a whole other level. You need to sort of understand that if you can optimize the page organically with those phrases, then you're doing yourself a good service. And there are two good resources right there that can get you some data on an SEO checklist and different friendly designs for SEO. And you know, when you think about driving traffic to the site, it's important to really understand what are the sites that are referring traffic to you currently? Are those the right sites? Are there other sites that could be set up as traffic builders? And you have to also find out where does your target audience congregate online? If you're a manufacturer of metal parts, is there a metal parts magazine that has a website that you can maybe sponsor an email or you can have an ad on that page where people are sort of getting together to talk about your industry? If there are spots like that or there are conferences that are coming up that are specific to your market, have a presence there. Is there a blog where they're talking about photography or metal parts or whatever it is that you're doing? Can you have a presence there? And then reach out to that site and have a presence. And then social media. I think social media is a great thing and we're big on YouTube. I think it's one that maybe sometimes people don't always think about first if they're more concerned with Facebook and Twitter. But if you do a video strategy properly, YouTube can be a great traffic building tool because that's the one of the second and third biggest search engine for content is YouTube. And then as you pick a vendor, you wanna figure out how long have they been in business? How stable are they? I applaud those of you that have ventured off on your own to start your own gig. I think that's great. I hope that you have many long years doing that. I have seen customers who have said, we hired this guy to build this website and we can't find him, he's gone. He's completely AWOL and we're stuck. He's the only one that knew how to build the site or make changes to it. Now we're screwed. So then they have to turn to an agency like ours to say, okay, well, we'll come in and we'll either rebuild it or whatever. But it's important to sort of figure out how this partnership will evolve over time. So if you're a freelancer, that's great. The other thing that I think customers don't always think about is who actually owns the site once you've finished it. And again, I have had clients say to me, we worked with this guy, he built the site, wanted to make changes to it and then they said, well, sorry, if you read the fine print, I own the site as the vendor. You as a company, don't own the website. And so now they're really stuck, right? Because this thing that they spent all this money on is the owner is owned by the vendor. So it might seem like a minor thing, but make sure that you ask once the site is done, who owns it? We say it very clearly in our fine print. You own the whole thing. We'll give it to you on a disc. You can do whatever the hell you want to with it, but your site, even though we had some sweat in it, from building it, it's your site. So again, a minor thing, but make sure that you talk through that. What kind of relevant and related experience do they have to do your site? In some cases, being in a market is a good thing. In other cases, it might not be a good thing because they might say, well, there's conflict of interest here. You're working with three other French restaurants in town or whatever, some other market, right? How are you gonna differentiate me from these other guys in this market? I might not, but that's my thing is French restaurants, right, or metal shops or whatever the case might be. Just because someone doesn't have experience in your exact market, doesn't mean that they can't do a good job for you to get you visibility within your particular area. What other services do they offer? What kind of recommendations can you get from them? And if we encourage clients to come visit us, we have two floors and a building on first in Pittsburgh down in the fifth ward. It'll be a beer 30 at about 3.30 today. We'll have some beers out for folks if they wanna come by. But we encourage people to come and meet the team and see us in sort of our native habitat. That may not be your thing, but if that's important to you and you wanna kind of get a sense of the culture, ask if you can do that. So that's it. I guess I'll open up for any questions if anyone has any. Someone's gotta have a, yes, thank you. The question is why does WordPress, why do I think WordPress has such a marketer? I think it's got a reputation of being pretty easy to use. It came out of the gate quick. I think as they said before, it started as a blogging tool, but you can do a lot of stuff with it. And I think the barrier to entry for folks to just download it and start using it is pretty low. So it's one that people have heard of and they're comfortable with it. And for a lot of folks, it works. The right kind of client, it might not be the optimal situation, but I'd say for the majority of folks, you can have a real solid site with WordPress. Yes. So it could be things like ongoing SEO, could be analytics, where I mentioned before, people don't always have the time to look at their analytics. We have a couple of projects right now where we're actually going to build dashboards for clients where we can actually pull together all the information that's important for them. And we'll either allow them to log into that or we're gonna give them a weekly or monthly report that says here's the important stuff that we all determined was critical for the site to measure its success. Here's a dashboard, here's a report, here are some recommendations to really make that better. And I think it's sort of an ongoing partnership to say, here's what other people in your industry are doing. You might wanna consider this, to sort of just be there as a third party set of eyes to sort of understand the landscape and always sort of push them to do new stuff because it's not a set it and forget it sort of thing, right? It's always going to constantly evolve. It may not fit their strategy today, but six months from now, it may be the standard for the site, so it's important for us to be able to be trusted and make those recommendations and be able to then deliver those services. But the dashboarding, the pay-per-click, in some cases it's content writing, they can't write the content, they'll give us a bullet-pointed list of stuff that they need on the site and we'll go through and write it so that it makes sense and we'll also kind of put that SEO sprinkling on top of it so that it's optimized. Now that's another thing that we can do. So, like I said, we have to add value now because the actual maintenance of the site now is really in the hands of the client, so we have to add value in other ways, so. Yes, in the back. No, so that's a good question, the question was about user personas. Typically what we do is there's a pretty intense discovery at the beginning with the client and we really sort of figure out with them what the site needs to do, who are the people that are coming to the site, and it's pretty obvious after you really sort of dive into that, the different types of markets or the different types of people that are coming, the personas help them visualize that. So, if you were a, in the case of the food service place, knowing that people come to the site to shop for equipment from sort of that operational side, and then you have the chefs coming, okay, that just might be just something you hear and the feedback from the discovery, but now we take that and we actually personify that and make the chef a person, and we say these are the things that are important to that chef when he comes to the site. The person that's equipping the kitchen, his name is Frank and he's worked in food service for 25 years. He's the things that are important to him and that all comes out of that discovery. So, we don't really reuse them because it's different with every single site. The stuff we're doing with the state of Wisconsin, for their Travel Wisconsin website, somebody who is a married couple with two kids going to the Dells is a lot different than somebody who's just a single person that wants to go backpacking in Devil's Lake. And so, the needs of the site are different and so to be able to have them understand, this is the Smiths and their kids and this is Billy Jones over here, it helps them understand, as they write content down the road, I'm writing to this person, right? So it helps them a little bit that way. Yes. No, it's actually in Kentico, Kentico, which is a .NET tool. Yes. What's a warning sign with a client to go? So the question is about warning signs for when a client can go south. I think, gosh, there's so many of them. I mean, if they're too involved or they're not involved enough, if they're more concerned about the price and not about what the value of it is, I mean, it's gonna change your conversation. If someone says, look, I've got $20,000 to spend or whatever it is, that's a whole different conversation than, these are my business needs, this is what I need the site to do, what's that gonna cost me, right? And so everybody has somebody that they know that can probably do this maybe on the cheap, but that's maybe not the best way to do it, right? Somebody who is not able to make a decision, right? If they're your main point of contact, you rely on them to be the one that says, you get the answers from your team and then tell us what has to happen and then we'll take that direction and go with it. If they're not willing to have those conversations and be that sort of point person, that can be a big problem too. If they change things midstream, right, and they change your direction, it's important for you as the vendor to say, okay, so when we sign the contract, we agreed on these 87 and a half things that were gonna be part of this bill. Now you've just totally changed things. We can do that, right? But it's gonna take another six months and it's gonna be another $20,000. Do you wanna do that? We'll stop it right now and we'll roll that in. Otherwise, let's put it on a phase two list. So it's important for you to help them stay on course with these projects. I hope that helps, but there's a lot of things that you can, I can see a client right off the bat and go, this is gonna be tough. We had one that we actually just lost a gig to, the guy was super involved and he wanted to be like driving everything and we're like, okay, well we can do that to some degree, but at some point we have to be able to say, you know what, that's not a good idea and here's why. And to be able to have that kind of conversation and hope that there's enough trust there that you can establish that. Any other, yes? Permutations to test for a percentage of the project, how much testing do you do over the whole timeframe? Great question. And you see the permutations because WordPress there's a lot of changes going on. Is that a limiter of the adoption of WordPress and the enterprise? I don't know if it's a limiter. You're gonna wanna thoroughly test whatever you pick and you could still have a major enterprise that picked WordPress, that's totally fine. I don't think that's an inhibitor as well as much but we have a whole QA and testing team, that's all that they do. So when the project gets to a certain point, they do the testing. We have the clients do testing as well. So it's a very sort of process that we follow that major things are sort of checked and double checked and so it's gonna solve problems down the road if you test stuff thoroughly. And I've seen projects that are given just a quick, yeah, it looks okay. And then they launch it and it was never really tested. So it's important for you to sort of define for your client what's involved in this testing and if they're to be a part of it, you wanna tell them, okay, these are the things we want you to hammer. We want you to hit this form or visit this part of the site or do whatever it is so that they're involved. But they may not wanna be that, they may not wanna be involved. We see that with content a lot of times where the site gets to the point where the design is done, the shell is built and it's time to enter the content. We say, do you wanna enter the content now? Do you want us to train you so that you do it? Or you rather just have us enter the content and then we'll train you to update it after the launch because if you allow them to do it, now you've gotta account for them for their time, right? It could be an extra two months of time for them to enter content because they're doing other stuff too, they've got a regular other job where it's easier for us to just say like, give us all the content, we'll hammer this in in like a week or two weeks and then you can be an editor instead of an author, right? But if they wanna get involved in the build and they wanna help sort of give birth to the site, then let them enter the content but that's gonna impact your timeline. But testing is certainly important and I think if you can clearly spell out what's gonna be tested and who's gonna do it, whether it's you or the client or both, I think it's gonna help down the road for sure. Yes, the question was, websites working in browsers? No, because well, yes, there is an explanation that we're gonna build a site for the most current browser or one back. So if you're running IE6, hello, it's time to upgrade your browser. But if it needs to be retrofitted back to some other thing, it's good to know that early on. We see that with a lot of corporations where it takes a huge effort to upgrade to another version. Maybe they're mandated to be on a certain version. But we say pretty clearly at the beginning, these are the browsers that this thing is gonna be guaranteed to work in and then that driest part of your testing plan too, we're not gonna go back to IE8 or whatever the case might be. And in some cases what'll happen then is if someone visits the site with their browser, they'll be noticed at the top of the page and says, hey, hello, you're on an old browser, click here to upgrade it and it's 2017 for God's sakes. So we'll encourage them to do that and then they can experience the site the way it was meant to be. Yes, yes, right. It's also in the fine print of the project plan as well. Yes, well I think that probably puts you in a good position to share with them the importance of data. And so if you can come in and say, yes, you don't have any real metrics right now, but what are the things that are gonna be important to you as we look to gauge the success of the site? And then if it's page views or time on the site or whatever those things are, then that's going to determine maybe how you tag certain things where you put the content. So it gets them to realize the importance of that data. If you don't have it, you're gonna be kind of guessing a little bit, but if you can get them into the mindset where content or the data is important, now that makes you a valuable asset to them because you're gonna help them understand all these numbers that are there and it's gonna make you a more valuable member of a team for them. So you have to just kind of guess it initially, but let them know how important it is. Any other questions? Yes, I'm not sure, but I will make sure that wherever you're directed to find them, I'll make sure that these get posted there for you. But thank you for your time. I appreciate your interest. I'll be at the bar, whatever that thing is called in a little while. So thank you.