0:00:00 - (Doug Jenkins): Coming up next on chamber amplified.
0:00:02 - (Dave Treat): But really, if they look like they're several years behind, that's one of the first things I look for, to see if they're actually paying attention to their site. That gives me a kind of a reliability score to know that everything that's on that site is up to date. You know, their prices are going to be relatively current.
0:00:21 - (Doug Jenkins): Welcome to the show. I'm Doug Jenkins from the Findlay Hancock County Chamber of Commerce. On each episode of Chamber Amplified, we're examining issues impacting the local business community. Whether it be employee recruitment, attention, marketing, it issues. It's really anything that can impact your business. Our goal is to give our members tips each week on at least one way they can improve operations and thrive in the current business environment.
0:00:42 - (Doug Jenkins): So here's something that I run into. On occasion, I'll see a small business that uses social media as their sole Internet presence. And I understand it can be tempting to do that. It can be convenient. You don't know how to do the website. I get that part. But there are a variety of reasons why you shouldn't and why you definitely need a website. Even it's a very simple website. Today on the podcast, David Treat from thinking small joins me to talk about what your website should be looking like here in 2024.
0:01:09 - (Doug Jenkins): For instance, how many under construction animated gifs should I have on my website while I'm building it? The answer is zero. For the record, if you don't currently have a website, or if you do, but maybe it's been a little while since you've given it a refresh, I think you'll find a lot of useful information in today's show or find questions to maybe ask your webmaster afterwards. Thanks again for tuning in. And remember, if you're listening on Apple podcasts or Spotify, you can rate and review the show. It really does help spread the word.
0:01:35 - (Doug Jenkins): Now let's get into it. So, Dave, I got to thinking about you the other day because I was. I was on someone's website and I looked at it and I thought, how are websites still looking like this in 2024? I didn't think of you because you design websites like that. Thought of you because you design websites and very functional and very good websites. And I thought, you know what? Maybe it's time for a refresher on what our website should be looking like here in 2024.
0:02:02 - (Doug Jenkins): So I appreciate you joining us to talk about it. And that's a very long winded way of me saying, what are some new design trends you're seeing.
0:02:12 - (Dave Treat): Well, it's interesting for some things. What goes around comes around and you're seeing some of the same things that we had seen before. But it's kind of got a new take on it now. For years, for the last several years, the whole look has been clean, minimalist, as little as you can put up. That's been kind of the trend, but now because of greater processing speed, better browsers, better download speeds, we can use more complexity.
0:02:44 - (Dave Treat): And that's the recent trend, is things, you know, colors and patterns and are now available to use. Where before that would have been just slowed it down to the point where it was crawling. So you've seen things like parallax scrolling. So that's when you're going through a website and the background moves at a different speed than the foreground. Oh, yeah. It actually makes it look 3d. Well, that's been around for ten years, but after it started, people stopped doing it because it was so slow, it took so much processing time. Well, now it's coming back because the browsers are better, the user experiences can be a little more complicated because of the technology.
0:03:24 - (Dave Treat): So that's coming back now. And one thing I always say is to err on the side of simplicity. Your goal is clarity. And so if you get too much stuff going on, even though now it's possible, that's not always the best thing to do.
0:03:39 - (Doug Jenkins): I'm guilty of the way that I organize things, whether it be on a website or just my own files that I have here at work is like, I don't want everything in the main folder. So I have various subfolders which have subfolders which have subfolders. If I were to design a website, which thankfully I'm not doing for anybody, I would probably have a bunch of dropdowns that then have drop downs upon drop downs.
0:04:03 - (Doug Jenkins): I would imagine that's not the way to go. But is there some, is there some way to do that where you're getting all the information out there, but it doesn't seem like overload on this first page that you see?
0:04:14 - (Dave Treat): Sure. Yeah. And I agree with you. Having drop down after dropdown is just confusing. It's almost like you have to know what you're looking for before you look for it. And that's always the best way to do a website. You want to show people the top three, four, five things that you do so they can kind of make a decision on where to go. So on most of my sites, I have what I call triage, which means there's three areas that might cover just about everything that you do.
0:04:45 - (Dave Treat): You want to break it down into that first, and then from there you can get a little finer grain and go down from there. But I always provide a way for people to see at a glance the top three to five things, and then they can choose from there what they want to go, what they want to go see.
0:05:02 - (Doug Jenkins): So I would imagine in this arena, AI has a lot to do with web design now, both in designing and also making sure that your website can be read by Google's AI or Microsoft's AI so that it shows up right in their search rankings. Let's first talk a little bit about how AI is being used in the design process.
0:05:21 - (Dave Treat): Well, as far as design itself, meaning visuals, it's called generative AI. And basically it's limited by your imagination. You can put anything you want in there and see what they come up with as far as an image. So if you want to show a kitten with a baseball bat and a politician, that could be fascinating. I may have to do that. But you can put three things that seem to be totally unrelated and just see what the AI comes up with. It'll come up with a background and an image or whatever. And sometimes it's surprisingly good.
0:05:54 - (Dave Treat): Sometimes it's a little frightening to see what it comes up with. And, you know, more and more with what are called deepfakes, you can actually fake a real person or a real product, and people could be convinced that that's the real thing when it's in fact computer generated. So there's a downside to it. But the other thing it allows is what they're looking at is taking some of the data that's been mined on individual users.
0:06:23 - (Dave Treat): So every time you do a search, Google knows what you search for and they're not listening to you, but they're watching you. So if you do a search for something, pretty soon you're going to see an ad for it. Well, using generative AI, they could actually produce a picture of what it was that you were looking for and say, well, there it is. Well, it's something that AI came up with on its own. So that also sounds great, but it's also a little scary.
0:06:51 - (Doug Jenkins): Yeah, quite a bit.
0:06:53 - (Dave Treat): Yeah. So I use, I first started using, I haven't used any generative art yet, but I use it all the time for grammar and spelling. You know, for somebody that writes for a living, I'm in bad shape. I flunked English 101 times when I was in college, and I really need help with grammar and spelling, and that's where AI really shines. And I just started using it the other day. I typed in, it had a sentence that had a couple of errors and the program I used suggested, why don't you put it this way? Well, by golly, it was pretty good.
0:07:26 - (Dave Treat): And so I just used a couple of sentences that way. But that's one place where I think AI is really going to help by modifying content or making it really match your audience. That would be another way to think of it.
0:07:39 - (Doug Jenkins): So we know that the search engines are now using AI to find things and try and put together information. And I think this kind of goes back to what you talk about. Websites are actually a little bit more complex than they used to, where you want to have, you want to have pages and you probably want to have some text for the AI to read. I would imagine this is where a blog or a story or something like that really comes into play on your website.
0:08:03 - (Dave Treat): Well, it's going to read whatever text you have. And when we, a little bit later, I'll tell you some of the places that Google specifically looks for it. But the bottom line is anymore, any text on your website will be searched. They will look for what are called keywords, which they're going to try to match to what people are searching for. And so if you're search. I was just searching for weed eaters and right away I got all these links that were picked off of the text of websites to show that's what you're looking for. Well, here it is.
0:08:36 - (Dave Treat): So really any text that's on your website can be searched in that way. And there are some specific places that you can put text with the idea that it's going to be searched by Google and hopefully that will be fed up to the user for them to click on it and go to it.
0:08:52 - (Doug Jenkins): Where should people think about putting that text? Because I think it's probably very, it's probably very easy for people to think, I'm just going to put it all above the fold. The first thing you see is all this information and that's not really what you want to do.
0:09:06 - (Dave Treat): Well, there's several things. Number one, Google looks for the number of words on a page. It thinks if you have less than 300 or 500, I think they just changed it, then you're not really telling people anything. And Google changes the rules all the time, so you have to pay attention to what they want. So Google is looking at your semantic structure, meaning your headlines. So you would have an h, one, only one h. One per page. But that said, this is what this page is about.
0:09:35 - (Dave Treat): And you would have what's called a meta title, which means it's a title that covers that whole page. You would have a meta description which says, these are the things that you will find on this page, and you've got 160 characters in order to tell that. And sometimes Google uses it, sometimes not. They have h one s, obviously h two s, which is your like a sub head, and they search all of those things to try to find out what your page is about.
0:10:02 - (Dave Treat): And so you've got to have those. If you don't have them, they write you down. One of the new things is that I didn't use for a long time, but that's alt text on every image. So every time you float over an image, you can run your mouse over it and actually see the alt text behind it. Originally that was for screen readers, so that a blind person could actually go to your site and have a screen reader tell them what they were seeing, which obviously they couldn't see, so it would read it to them. Here's a description of this photo, for example.
0:10:35 - (Dave Treat): But now, over the last couple of years, Google has started searching those alt text images for content. So if you say, here's a picture of Doug Jenkins, and you do a search for Doug Jenkins, which I've never done, but maybe I'd be interesting, it'll actually see that alt text on that image, even if there's not a caption that says this is Doug Jenkins. That makes sense. Those are the kinds of things that Google looks for.
0:11:04 - (Doug Jenkins): I didn't realize that it was using that for search content. Now that's good information to have, for sure. Let's get into the basics, I guess. What are the mistakes you still see that are out there that people can probably clean up pretty quickly on their site?
0:11:20 - (Dave Treat): Well, I'm going to say two big ones. One is speed. People are not as attentive as they should be to how fast their page is going to load. They should be using as few images as you can to actually tell the story and then compress them. There are formats like Webp that will compress an image from a couple of meg down to a few bytes and you hardly lose any quality at all with the current level of compression, but it makes your page load a lot faster.
0:11:55 - (Dave Treat): And Google actually looks at that because they know that if a person doesn't find what they're looking for in six or 8 seconds, you're going to move on, you're going to go to something else. So speed is a huge issue, and Google actually rates sites on speed. The other thing is what you've got to have, and a lot of people don't have it, is a call to action. At some point on your page, on every page, there's got to be a call to action, like let's talk, or I'd like to discuss getting a quote or something of that nature.
0:12:29 - (Dave Treat): And you want to have a couple of different options, but no more than that. One option is let's go on a date. The other option is let's get married right now. And usually when somebody comes to your site, they're not quite ready to get married. They need more information. So you got to offer a couple of options. But that's a call to action, and a lot of people don't have that. So what's someone to do when they're on their site?
0:12:54 - (Dave Treat): Got to give them a button or maybe two buttons that say, I'm ready to order right now. I can do that. Or let's talk. Let's carry on a conversation I think.
0:13:04 - (Doug Jenkins): That leads into, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to cut you off there, but one of the things that I think sometimes we forget to do with our websites is realize that it's a sales tool. Not only is it just information and you got to have one, but the information you can get from people just coming to your site where they click, how long are they on a page? You can not only tell how long they're there, but you can go back and through some different services, see who was there and add them to a drip campaign, reach back out to them and follow up with an email. It's a little creepy, but it's also a little bit about the way business is done in 2024.
0:13:42 - (Dave Treat): Yeah, and that's exactly how AI is starting to kick into this, is they know where you've been, they know you've searched for again, they're not listening to you, but they're watching. So they know where you've been, so they know what you're interested in. So they can actually custom make your user experience match your interests, which is kind of interesting. So that's good. But what you don't want to do is give people too many options, because if you people are paralyzed by too many choices, so you want to make sure that you're giving them an option to get involved with you, to engage with you, and that's what you want.
0:14:23 - (Dave Treat): You don't necessarily want them to find everything they're looking for when they come to your site, you want them to talk to you, call you, talk to you, visit in some cases. So those are the options you want to give people.
0:14:36 - (Doug Jenkins): So one cool way that people spend a little bit more time on a site or find themselves more engaged in a site is just by the little things you do with your menu and everything. So it doesn't look so utilitarian anymore. We were talking about this before we started recording. I'm going to let you say the phrase because I'm going to mangle it, but tell me about how you're able to do this visually and kind of what it does to the mind.
0:15:01 - (Dave Treat): Well, so I've actually been doing this for a while, for at least a couple of years, but I didn't know there was a word for it. And I just discovered this word today. Skeuomorphism is the word which I will probably never use again when we're done with this podcast. But the idea is that the interface, your computer interface, has objects that mimic their real world counterpart. So for example, what does the trash icon look like?
0:15:29 - (Dave Treat): It looks like a trash can. Well, that makes perfect sense. If you devised a whole new icon for it, then it would take people time to figure out, okay, what do I need to do? Where's the trash can? I told you earlier, I wish you could see it, but the old plastic disks that we had years ago, guy was trying to explain to his son what these were and he dug one out of his desk drawer and held it up and he said, so this is what I'm talking about. His son said, dad, did you 3d print a save icon?
0:15:59 - (Dave Treat): Because that's exactly what the old save icon looks like. It's one of those old discs. So one of my clients, golden pear voice and image, Rex Howard Kelly Bibler. I did their website and their navbar looks like an audio board, if you're familiar with the buttons, the lighted buttons that show up on the audio board when you're trying to control it, that's what their navbar looks like. So if you want to go to their services, you would hover over it and it changes colors. You click on it, it takes you to that page, that kind of thing.
0:16:30 - (Dave Treat): That's an example I did for a school, I did a Navbar that was all books. And on the spine of the books it had what, what page that would take you to. And if you hovered over it, the book would lean forward a little bit so you knew which one you were going to click on. So it's a reinforcement of what you're looking at. To actually see that happen.
0:16:52 - (Doug Jenkins): I. I'm going to pose a theory to you that I just thought of, and I'll let you. I'll let you grade it on if it's right. Yeah, you. You can judge whether this theory is correct or not. But I know a lot of times if I go to someone's website, if it's not on current design standards or look like something that's been designed within the last, you know, couple years or whatever, I kind of, in the back of my head, note that, okay, that's maybe not a credible business.
0:17:22 - (Doug Jenkins): I'm. That's not the only research I'm doing. I'm not, certainly not going to not do business with someone simply because maybe their website isn't the best website that I've ever seen. But I feel like it's a really important, one reason why it's really important to make sure that your website's design is with current standards just because it checks a box for people mentally, like, oh, okay, this looks legit, that type of thing.
0:17:46 - (Doug Jenkins): I don't know. How do I do on that theory?
0:17:48 - (Dave Treat): Well, you're exactly right. In fact, one of the first things I do is look for the copyright information. If I look down at the bottom of the page and it says copyright 2016, I know they're not paying attention. And I basically don't trust any information on that page because it's clear that they're not. Now, if they're behind by a year, that's fine. But really, if they look like they're several years behind, that's one of the first things I look for, to see if they're actually paying attention to their site.
0:18:18 - (Dave Treat): That gives me kind of a reliability score to know that everything that's on that site is up to date. You know, their prices are going to be relatively current. Those are changing so fast now, it's, you almost have to put a clock on there instead of a date. But you get the idea. I think you're onto something. And if it looks like they're using a whole slew of different fonts, it just makes things confusing. I like to see, you know, two or three fonts at most on a website because that helps clarify what you should be looking at and makes it a lot easier for you to find stuff.
0:18:54 - (Doug Jenkins): So if I'm running a restaurant or what have you, and I'm listening to this podcast, I might be frustrated because I might be thinking, look, I just want to sell people their lunch. I don't, you know, I'm not. I don't have a bachelor's in web design or anything like that. That's probably why it's important to talk to someone like you, Dave, where you're able to look at those things like the. The alt text and the meta tags and things like that and bring somebody on board for the nominal fee that you would pay.
0:19:23 - (Doug Jenkins): It probably pays off in the long run to have a website that people are going to view as credible and can drive business to.
0:19:30 - (Dave Treat): You sure. Absolutely. I. You know, one of the other things I was going to talk about is too much Tbu. TBu means true, but useless because a lot of people will put all this stuff on their site. That really doesn't help anybody decide now do I want to eat there, you know, or if I'm going to eat there, do I want to go there for breakfast or do I want to go there Friday for drinks or whatever? You want to design your site around the end user. What are they going to be looking for?
0:20:01 - (Dave Treat): And I hesitate to think how many sites I've been to that it took me several minutes to find out where they were. Tell me where you are. I don't know what city you're in. I don't know what time you open. I mean, they're just basic questions. So you have to sometimes get somebody like me. I tell my clients my biggest strength is that I'm stupid because when I come to their site without knowing anything about their business, it takes.
0:20:30 - (Dave Treat): I can ask stupid questions because I don't know any better. And so that comes into play a lot with mechanical or engineering sites also, as well as restaurants. What are people going to be asking? And then you show them how you're going to solve their problem. One thing I tell people is you got to have a story and you are not the hero. So you are, the client is the hero. And you got to remember that the client is the hero and not the person producing the product or service.
0:21:05 - (Dave Treat): So you think of yourself as Luke Skywalker. That's all wrong. You're Obi Wan. You're the one that can help someone solve their problem. And that's how you want to set up your website. I'm someone that can help you with you're hungry or you need a weed eater. I can help you do that.
0:21:23 - (Doug Jenkins): And all things in between those two as well. Dave, if people want to get in touch with you to talk a little bit more about their website, maybe have you take a look at it, something like that. What's the best way to get in touch with you.
0:21:34 - (Dave Treat): Best way is email. Dtreat dashinkingsmall.net that's my email. That'd be the best way to get a hold of me.
0:21:44 - (Doug Jenkins): Dave, thanks for joining us today. I'm sorry I said thanks for joining us today.
0:21:49 - (Dave Treat): Absolutely, Doug, thanks for having me. Appreciate it.
0:21:56 - (Doug Jenkins): Thanks again to Dave for joining us. I can't stress how important is to have a good web presence. One thing that we didn't talk about is making sure that your site is scalable for both phones and regular computers. If it isn't, it's going to show up weird on a potential customer or clients computer or their phone. And that little formatting issue on your end could end up costing you a business relationship. It's just something to think about.
0:22:18 - (Doug Jenkins): Chamber Amplified is a free podcast for the community thanks to the investment of members from the Findlay Hancock County Chamber of Commerce. Because of our robust membership, we're able to focus on providing timely information to the Finley and Hancock county business community, run leadership programs for adults and teenagers, and be an advocate for the area while also providing tools to help the local businesses succeed.
0:22:39 - (Doug Jenkins): If that sounds like something that you'd like to be a part of, just let me know and we can have a conversation about how an investment in the chamber not only helps strengthen your business, but strengthens the community as well. That'll do it for this week's episode. If you have any ideas for topics we should cover on on Future editions, send me an email djenkinsleyhancockchamber.com thanks again for listening. We'll see you next time on chamber amplified from the Findlay Hancock County Chamber of Commerce.