Does your small business have a website? We’re hoping the answer is yes!
This week on the Small Owned Business (S.O.B.) Marketing podcast, we are discussing essential do’s and don’ts for small business websites in 2025. Websites are extremely important for credibility, and allow you to be in control.
We talk effective website design, including prioritizing user experience, implementing SEO strategies, and tracking website performance. We also discuss common pitfalls to avoid, such as overcomplicating design, neglecting maintenance, and ignoring security measures.
Hopefully this episode will empower small business owners to take control of their online presence and ensure their websites are effective tools for growth.
Have a question you want answered on the S.O.B. Marketing podcast? You can leave it in the comments or send us an email at Help@TheSeasonedMarketer.com.
PLEASE REMEMBER TO FOLLOW AND LEAVE A 5 STAR REVIEW!
Looking for a community of other S.O.B.s handling their marketing on their own? Join our S.O.B. Community! A membership includes:
- An extensive library of tutorials
- A community of like minded small owned businesses
- Free downloads and templates for you to jumpstart your marketing
- A weekly hour long Zoom call with marketing professionals to talk shop or answer any questions you may have when it comes to marketing your small business.
Join our 𝐒.𝐎.𝐁 (𝐒𝐦𝐚𝐥𝐥 𝐎𝐰𝐧𝐞𝐝 𝐁𝐮𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐬𝐬) 𝐂𝐨𝐦𝐦𝐮𝐧𝐢𝐭𝐲: https://www.skool.com/sob
____________________
Chapters:
00:00 Thank You For Listening & Please Leave us a 5 Star Review
05:56 Do’s for Maintaining a Website in 2025
20:07 Don’ts for Website Design and Maintenance
35:36 TLDL: 3 Do’s and Don’ts for Websites in 2025
____________________
𝐑𝐄𝐋𝐀𝐓𝐄𝐃 𝐂𝐎𝐍𝐓𝐄𝐍𝐓:
What Small Businesses Need to Know about Google’s Search Generative Experience (SGE): https://youtu.be/pyhLbSnfglI
𝐒.𝐎.𝐁 (𝐒𝐦𝐚𝐥𝐥 𝐎𝐰𝐧𝐞𝐝 𝐁𝐮𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐬𝐬) 𝐂𝐨𝐦𝐦𝐮𝐧𝐢𝐭𝐲: https://www.skool.com/sob
S.O.B. Marketing Merch: https://theseasonedmarketer.com/swag-shop/
Episode Transcripts: https://sobmarketing.com/blog
Sign Up For Our Email Newsletter: https://theseasonedmarketer.myflodesk.com/nb0wpptjjt
____________________
If you like the show, telling a friend about it would be helpful! You can text, email, Tweet, or send this link to a friend: https://sobmarketing.com
This podcast is brought to you by THE SEASONED MARKETER. For more free marketing resources, follow us here:
**Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheSeasonedMarketer
**Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/theseasonedmarketer
**Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theseasonedmarketer
COLLABORATION REQUESTS TO: vivian@TheSeasonedMarketer.com
*Intro* Chelsea: Hey everyone and welcome to the S.O.B. Marketing podcast. Where we celebrate to S.O.B. you are, and if you haven't figured it out yet - we mean Small Owned Business, we don't mean S.O.B...
Vivian: Listen, we know that as a small business owner you are working hard on the daily to keep your business fully operational while trying to promote it. And while some days it may feel like the business is owning you, if we're being honest with each other I bet you would admit that you wouldn't give up the insanity for anything.
Chelsea: Our commitment here at the S.O.B. Marketing podcast is to give you the real talk, what works when it comes to advertising, marketing, and promoting your business. And then what doesn't really work.
Vivian: And Chelsea and I promise to always keep the conversation real.
*Beginning of Episode*
Vivian: Hello, our little SOBs, small-owned businesses. We're not here to call you guys names. You know us better than that at this point. So, friendly reminder, we want you guys to subscribe. If this is your first time listening, I promise you, you're going to want to come back for more. We have a whole library now of over 120 podcasts for you to binge right now. So go ahead and just subscribe and binge them. If you are a, what do they say? Long time listener, first time caller. We want you to subscribe as well because what are you guys doing? What are you doing? If you listen to more than one episode and you haven't subscribed, we want you to. That helps to get this podcast in front of other small business owners. You guys know we're here to build a C-U-L-T, cult.
Chelsea: For good.
Vivian: For good, not for evil.
Chelsea: I'm fighting the evil allegations still.
Vivian: The allegations that nobody throws our way. Chelsea, what is our marketing topic for today?
Chelsea: This is going to be a great conversation, y'all. We are talking about websites and the do's and don'ts for your website as a small business. I want to start this conversation. I have two things to say. One, y'all, these are grapes.
Vivian: They're very yummy.
Chelsea: I grew them myself. I just wanted everyone to know that I grew grapes. Okay. The second thing that actually relates to this conversation is, if you are a small business, you need a website. Period, point blank.
Vivian: Yeah. If you just thought to yourself when Chelsea introduced this topic, if you're like, that's okay, I'm on social media. Wrong. Wrong you guys. Okay, try again. Even with social media, you need a website. So Chelsea, do you want to tell them really quick why they need a website?
Chelsea: Absolutely. Here's the thing. Remember when TikTok went away for a day and...
Vivian: And the world collapsed, and the world economy tanked?
People lost their livelihood. That's not funny. Some people did. They really thought they did.
Chelsea: They really thought they did. But that's a really good point. You don't know what's going to happen with these social media platforms. You are not in control. We want you guys to be in control. That's the whole point of this podcast, is to make you feel good about marketing your small business on your own, in control.
Vivian: Also, can we talk about the fact that it is the ultimate signal of freedom. You guys, when you have your own website, you can put whatever you want on there, okay? That means it is a place for you to be able to communicate with people regardless of, like Chelsea said, something happens to any one of these social media platforms that you rely heavily on. If you're reminding people that you have a website, they know where they can reach you at all times, where they can find your products and services. Let's not forget, it still legitimizes your business. I get it. Everyone says, do you have an Instagram profile? We all think that that's the thing that legit legitimizes us, but it doesn't. It really is a website that you can attach to, whether that be your business cards or Google business profile, any of those things, you need to have that website still in 2025.
So now that we went through that whole little rant, we're going to divide this conversation by sharing with you guys do's for a website in 2025 because believe it or not, some of these things have changed and also don'ts. We're going to follow it up with the don'ts.
Chelsea: Which you better keep on listening to hear the don'ts as well because those are just as important.
Vivian: Otherwise Chelsea will track you down.
Chelsea: Because those are just as important as the do's.
Real quick reminder, if you're new here, we have a TLDL section. So TLDL stands for Too Long Didn't Listen. If you're in a rush, you're in a hurry. I totally get that. That's why at the end of the episode, we have a chapter for Too Long Didn't Listen, TLDL. I'm going to give you a little summary of what we talked about today. But make sure you listen to the entire conversation, because that's where the good stuff is.
Vivian: Yes, that's a rule. If you listen to the TLDL section because you're in a hurry because we get it. You're a small business owner. You got to come back later and listen to the whole episode. Then we're adding homework to it. You got to listen to another episode. So only do TLDL if you're ready to listen to two episodes back to back.
Chelsea: Do you want me to go ahead and start?
Vivian: Yeah, let's get started with the do's.
Chelsea: Let's get started with the do's. So this first one is going to be, prioritize user experience. It does not matter what is on your website. If people do not understand how to navigate it or if people can't get it to load or it just is really confusing to understand. So you need clear navigation. We've had this discussion before.
Vivian: This debate.
Chelsea: This debate because some people believe this has been debunked, but it's still a good rule to follow. Three clicks. It should take your consumer three clicks to find what they're looking for on your website.
The next thing is responsive design. So I mean, your website needs to look good y'all. It needs to load correctly and quickly. No matter what they're trying to do. The longer it takes someone to find something on your website, the more likely they are to give up.
Vivian: We've mentioned this before in a prior episode, but one of the things to remember with responsive design is, people are looking at your website both on a laptop or computer. I don't know if anyone does anyone have a desktop anymore? I guess they do.
Chelsea: Some people do. Gamers?
Vivian: Yeah, there you go. Okay. They're looking at it on a computer and also on a mobile phone. So as far as responsive design, you want to be sure that not only does it load quickly, like Chelsea's saying, and there are tools out there where you could plug and play. You just insert your website link and it will tell you how quickly it loads and it will give you recommendations on what you can do to make it load quicker. Also formatting it and making sure that the design is mobile friendly.
Chelsea: Yes. That's very important.
Vivian: Yes. This also goes for, I'm not taking or steering us off course here, but Chelsea and I were just talking about, we have a weekly email that we send out. One of the statistics that I always look at is how many people open it up on their mobile phone and how many people open it up on their desktop. I love that it used to be for us, we had a ton of people that would open it on the desktop. Now over the course of this year, I've seen that the shift has become more of a 50-50. So people are starting to open our emails up more in their cell phones. So that's all great information for us to keep in mind.
Chelsea: Yeah. I love that. Okay. You have a do?
Vivian: I do. I do have a do. Implement SEO strategies.
You guys, I know this is not the first time you're hearing it. You're probably like snooze fest. This is not new rule, Vivian. I've heard this before since the beginning of time.
Chelsea: Wait, real quick. You've heard it since the beginning of time. Are you doing it though?
Vivian: Chelsea's coming for you. The reason we wanted this to be one of the top do's again is because, I don't know if you guys have listened back to our episode on SEO strategy and what has changed in 2025. We did a whole episode on this because Google came out with a new way that they are ranking websites. I'm pretty sure the acronym was EEAT. E-E-A-T, right? On the stuff that they prioritize. So go listen to that because you want to be sure that you stay up to date with Google's latest SEO things. As a reminder, you guys, we've also brought this up in a prior conversation. For those of you that are thinking Google's on the way out, uh no. No. No, ma'am. No, sir. It is not. Google is still by leaps and bounds, the most popular place where people are going to search for things. All right. So until that changes, Google needs to be a big priority when we are designing websites, just knowing how they prefer things to be displayed.
The other thing I want to bring up here is this isn't something that just happens automatically. You do have to give some forethought to it. A lot of that has to do with the quality of content that you're putting on your websites, whether that be through a blog, through your product descriptions. Google loves meaty product descriptions because that is what gives them more information where they can match the person doing the Google search with the right item they're looking for.
Chelseas: Absolutely. If I, let's say, what am I shopping for, Vivian?
Vivian: I want you to be shopping for a pair of slippers.
Chelsea: A pair of slippers. Okay. So I want slippers with a hard bottom that are real fuzzy on the inside and that don't go past my ankle. So when I'm Google searching this...
Vivian: I'm just thinking of a booty. What you would look like wearing a booty.
Chelsea: Okay. Stop. So I Google search, "ankle length, hard sole, warm fuzzy slippers".
If your website, you sell slippers. If on your website you have something, that would be perfect, but you only put fuzzy slippers.
Vivian: Or just slippers. Size eight slippers.
Chelsea: Yeah. Then you may or may not show up. But if you put "ankle length, hard soled fuzzy slippers", and that's what I'm searching for.
Vivian: Boots with the fur.
Chelsea: Boots with the fur. Then Google's going to show me that.
Vivian: Good point. SEO is still a big priority. We just want to be sure that you guys, if you're putting your efforts into building a website, because we all know that does take time, then we want to be sure you're showing up and your website's being, it's in the running for whatever that person's looking for.
Chelsea: Exactly, and I just wanted to give that example because I feel like sometimes when we think of SEO we think specifically of blog posts.
Vivian: Yeah, we do.
Chelsea: That's part of it, but product descriptions. That's SEO. You need to be thinking of these keywords all over your website. Not just on blog posts.
Vivian: The analogy that we love to use around here is that Google is the ultimate matchmaker. Just like any good matchmaker, the more details you give it on the type of person that you're looking to match with the better suited they're going to be to find that perfect match for your product or service. These product descriptions, these blog posts, the stories that you're loading in there in the "About Us" or the details you're loading as far as like your shipping cost or your return policies. All of this gives it more data to be able to better understand your small business.
Chelsea: Perfect. Exactly.
The last do that we have, pretty big one, because y'all friendly reminder, marketing is only successful when you make tweaks and small changes and you pay attention to what's going on. Right? So this do: is track your website performance. You need to know what's going on. The site traffic, the engagement metrics, the sales numbers, how many people landed on this specific webpage. You need to know all of that because it'll help you understand where you are in meeting your goals. What are you trying to accomplish? If I'm trying to increase the sales of my fuzzy slippers...
Vivian: Boots with the fur.
Chelsea: The boots with the fur, and I'm not looking at my website analytics, how do I know that anything that I'm doing is working?
Vivian: Yeah, I think also because we all have this commonality as small business owners, we are naturally curious. We know you guys are little PIs. You are little scientists. You like getting to the bottom of things. I think once you actually dive into your website analytics and look at all of the information that it has available to you, you are going to be so intrigued by this. So if you don't take the time to do it, start doing it now. You don't have to do it every single week. I would say once a month is a good thing. Once every two months at bare minimum, you want to take a look at it. Some of the things I would recommend you look at first. Look at which pages are the most popular. What does that tell you about your website design? Are people checking out your "About Us" section. Okay, that means that that storytelling has to be really good and compelling. Maybe they're naturally curious about how your business came to be. If there is one particular page that is a product page and you get the most views there, then it's telling you that obviously a lot of people are looking for this very specific product. How could you capitalize that and push it out? Maybe you have a slideshow header at the very top and it's one of the products that you put on there, right? This could change with the times, right? If something gets really big on TikTok, like I'm thinking right now, Chelsea, have you seen these candies that everybody is obsessed with? These sour candies, like they're frozen candies?
Chelsea: No. Is this specifically on TikTok? I don't go on TikTok.
Vivian: Okay, so people love this kind of stuff, but my point being, depending on trends, you could see a shift in some of the products that gain popularity over time. The other thing to look at is where people are coming from and landing on your website.
Chelsea: Love that you're bringing this up.
Vivian: Yes, and so this could be, say for example you were recently on a podcast as a guest. All of the sudden, when you're looking at your website analytics, you see that a lot of people are jumping from this podcast to your website because they have linked your website in there. In the description of their podcast episode. Great. Now you know for one, it was worth your time doing that guest appearance, that interview. You also know that it directly translated into people going and checking your business out.
Chelsea: Thank you for going through and explaining.
Vivian: Yeah, well, and I think going back to what you said, which is a lot of people still really focus on blog posts, you guys. Your website is not simply there to host your blog post. Blog posts are a great way to get people there and to wet their palette to keep them to stay on your website or to be introduced to your business. But we hope that you're leveraging your website for a lot more. These data points all tell you a story. That story hopefully changes over time, depending on what you're tweaking. But I think that if you're anything like us, when you see stuff like that, get a little excited. For example, Chelsea and I had a conversation last week. Every week we talk about the podcast, right? Because it's growing and we're super excited and you know, we need it to build our cult. What is a cult without a podcast, right?
We look at the analytics from our website, because we have an entire website just for the podcast. Things that we look at, which episodes are popular, where people are coming from, right? Are they coming from Apple and looking at our podcast website? Are they coming from Facebook? That's a big one because I do go in there a couple days after Chelsea posts and publishes the podcast, I go in and I share it in some of the Facebook groups, the business Facebook groups. We can see that direct correlation. So it's going to help you save time and it's going to let you know more about your business.
*S.O.B. Community Ad*
Chelsea: STOP wasting your time Googling, "how to market my small business".
Vivian: Join the S.O.B. Community! Get templates, expert advice, weekly Zoom calls with us, and a supportive group of other business owners for - get this. Just $50 a month.
Chelsea: Marketing doesn't have to be hard when you have help. Head over to www.Skool.com/sob. That's S-K-O-O-L.com/sob. All lowercase. Join today and feel confident in your marketing.
*End of S.O.B. Community Ad*
Chelsea: Okay Vivian, let's do don'ts.
Vivian: All right, moving on to the things you guys do not need to be doing.
Chelsea: Do not do this. Vivian, do you remember, I don't remember which episode this was, but it was a recent one where we talked about 90s websites or 2000s websites.
Vivian: Yeah, I think we were talking about Napster, right? A little throwback to Napster and all that.
Chelsea: Well, we were specifically talking about, the yellow font on the pink background.
Vivian: Italicized font everywhere, bolding everywhere.
Chelsea: Yeah. This is an example of this next don't. Do not overcomplicate your design. Just because you have the ability to do something.
Vivian: Don't do it.
Chelsea: Does not mean you should do it. Don't just add stuff. You know Vivian, this is a rule for marketing too.
Vivian: In general?
Chelsea: In general.
Vivian: There is a certain throwback that's happening right now and you guys have seen this with branding in particular, logos. A lot of the logos that we know and have loved over the years are getting this like refreshed look and it's becoming very minimalistic. I don't know if you guys have noticed this, right? I think this is also applying towards websites.
One of the things we want you to remember is the simpler the better, right? It doesn't have to be super fancy or have all these bells and whistles. The one thing that you should prioritize over the bells and whistles is, can someone easily navigate on it? Can they find what they need very quickly? And don't be using like crazy yellow fonts and stuff like that, okay? One of the things, I'll give you an example.
Chelsea: You know what? If you are like, a UFO-ologist, I'm giving you permission to use yellow font. I feel like that's the one time it will work. Or like a lime green. You're good.
Vivian: Yeah, if you're talking aliens, lime green all day long. You're allowed to use that. Yes. And also you're allowed to have like animations on your website.
Chelsea: Yes! Have like an alien coming and abducting someone. Perfect.
Vivian: All right. But the other thing I wanted to bring up is an example of how this also applies in just marketing in general. You know, working for healthcare companies, we see this quite a bit. The one thing we have to always think about is when we are targeting people in a certain age group, right? So maybe over 50, some colors can be definitely harder on the eyes. We always make it a point to be sure that we're using color schemes that are not going to do that.
Chelsea: Yes, or some fonts can be difficult to read.
Vivian: Yes. There are fonts that, you guys can Google this, that are recommended for online use. We recommend sticking to those fonts for websites so that way people aren't having to squint when they're, they're looking for something.
Chelsea: Yes. Also clutter. Clutter makes people anxious. Clutter makes it hard for them to find things. So if you have like, I know we said it's not all about blog posts, but let's talk about blog posts. So the UFOologist has written up a thing about Roswell and then on the side, he has all of his other articles. Then on the other side he lists all of this other, and then on the bottom, if there's too much going on on the page, I'm not going to lie, I'm going to give up on reading it. I'm not even going to bother. I'm not going to call anyone out. But when I was doing research for this episode, I was trying to pick the most important do's and don'ts, right? The ones that we think we need to talk about in this episode.
As I was doing research, I was reading this girl's, I ended up on someone's page.
Vivian: You already gave it away. It's a woman. Half the population.
Chelsea: I ended up on someone's page and she's talking about do's and don'ts, but this website was so cluttered. It was so messy. It was like yellow. I was like, I don't believe anything you're saying because this is not good website design.
Vivian: I love that you brought this up. Let this also apply to pop-up windows, y'all, okay? Do you know sometimes when you're trying to look at a recipe and stuff keeps popping up and you're like, no. I just want to get to the recipe so I know what to do, right? So just keep all of that in mind. Pop-up windows, also ads, if you have ads that are popping up on your website. The layout of the website. I think the other thing Chelsea that you had mentioned is not using too much jargon, right?
Chelsea: Yes, I wanted to make sure that we talked about this. You are an expert in your industry and I love that for you. OK, you know UFOs. That's awesome. I don't know UFOs. So if you use that kind of language, like the industry language. I'm not going to know what you're talking about.
Vivian: Right, so if you're trying to convert her to a UFO believer, you're not going to be successful.
Chelsea: I mean, I'm already a UFO believer, Vivian. But.
Vivian: But, so the point there being, remember who your target audience is. If you are a biologist and you have a website and you're writing stuff for other biologists, use that industry jargon all day long because that's very quickly going to tell someone that lands on there that doesn't know the jargon, like whether that's for them or not, right? But if you're a biologist that has created a product that you are trying to sell to the mass consumer, then you need to not use that jargon unless you're doing education, and you're teeing it up and you're hand holding people through all of that.
Chelsea: If you're explaining, "hey, actually UFO is an outdated term. It's now UAP, unidentified aerial phenomenon". I'm explaining that to you. That's fine. But if you just start out saying UAP, I'm going to be like, what is going on? I was looking for UFOs.
Vivian: Right, there you go. Great way to bring that back to aliens. I love it. All right, so the next don't. Don't neglect maintenance.
Chelsea: This is a big one.
Vivian: Yes, I always say websites are living, breathing things and no, your website is not going to grow legs and walk off somewhere, but it is important to understand that the information is probably going to morph and change over time. Okay. So very rarely in 2025, can you put a website up, publish it, and then not touch it for two years? I don't think that's even a thing these days, okay? Whether that be because you are updating your business hours, right? Because maybe you have summer hours, maybe you have Christmas hours, okay? Or maybe because of the influx of products you sell, you have a fall product line that's going to be launching, you have to get all that information up there. Or maybe because you are linking or you're launching initiatives that are helping your small business, right?
So these are all reasons why you need to have a good pulse and keep an eye on your website. The last thing you want is for someone to get on the website and be like, wow, it does not match their Instagram profile. Like they have not updated this thing in like three years.
Chelsea: Well, I have, Vivian, I have an analogy that I've stolen from you. But I'm going to use it.
Vivian: Nothing to do with UFOs.
Chelsea: No, it's not UFO related. So Vivian has said in the past, your website is your- It's free digital real estate.
Vivian: You won free digital real estate.
Chelsea: Well, I guess technically the social media platforms are free. You got to pay for website, but it's digital real estate, right? Okay. If you had a brick and mortar store and you neglected the maintenance on it, no one's going to go there. They're going to see all the vines covering the windows and everything. The walls are cracked. I don't know. I'm trying to think of how you can neglect.
Vivian: Graffiti.
Chelsea: There's graffiti.
Vivian: A brick's been thrown through the window.
Chelsea: And then you just left it like that. Your website is your digital real estate.
Vivian: I like that analogy. That's a great analogy. If you guys have not looked at your website in the last six months, you have a brick through your window and graffiti all over it at this point.
Chelsea: Absolutely. Let's talk about some things that you should do when double checking and running website maintenance. Double check that the information is up to date. Make sure all the links are working correctly. That's a big one.
Vivian: Also, because tying this back to SEO, search engine optimization, broken links are actually going to work against you. So to Chelsea's point, love that she's saying be sure that you're checking, click on the stuff and check on it because if it's broken, Google's going to ding ya.
Chelsea: Exactly, and just make sure that it looks fine on mobile devices. Those are three very simple things that you need to do, just double check on your website.
Vivian: Yes, love all of them. Okay, what is the last don't that we are leaving with?
Chelsea: Last don't, and I feel like this is a big one. Do not ignore or skimp out on security measures. You're a business. People are trusting you with their information. They want to make sure that you're not losing their information.
Vivian: Let me give you a really quick way to check this. Right now, if your website, you know how every website starts with HTTP? If your website is HTTPS, the S stands for secure. It means that you have a secure certificate on it, right? So if you don't have that and if your website only starts with HTTP, then that's an indication that you probably could do a lot better with your security measure.
Chelsea: Yeah, just making sure your software is up to date. Like you're saying, use an SSL certificate, malware and virus protection, back up your website.
Vivian: Yes. If you guys have a website that you've built in WordPress, this is something that can easily be done. They have a, I think a plugin that you just put on the back end that will automatically, I think it's called like, it's not time machine, but it's something. It will back up your WordPress website.
The reason you want to do that is let's say something happens to your website, it goes down and you have to put it back up. You want the most current version of it. You don't want the three-year-old version, right? That that was the last time you backed it up. So just keeping that current works.
Chelsea: Vivian. One time when I worked in healthcare, I was trying to clean up our website and make edits to it and I don't know what I did, but I crashed it and no one could get on the website. I had to call a website developer, the person who had developed the website. I was like, I need you to fix it.
Vivian: I need you to get it back up and running. Well, so that brings me to the last point I want to make with websites. We're telling you guys that websites are going to be something that you want to maintain over time, which means you want to have access to it. That doesn't necessarily mean that you have to be the one building out the website. What we do want to recommend though is let's say you've partnered with somebody who has built you a great website. Be sure that you understand what their turnaround time is for changes or updates. Also be sure you're clear on how much they charge you for that. Some people charge by the project, some people charge by the hour. So for example, I recently had to do this. We had a website that we had outsourced and I was going in there and asking them just to make a couple of changes. What they did is they said, absolutely, we can make those changes. It's probably going to take about two hours. Our hourly rate is X, Y, and Z. This can be done within three days. Okay, those are all important things that you need to know.
The other part of it is sometimes people will build you the website and they'll transfer the ownership to you, meaning that you have back end access to it and then you're responsible for keeping and maintaining it. Just be very clear on what the expectation is and also who the point of contact is for future changes that are needed.
Chelsea: Yes, and I would like to give the suggestion of knowing someone who, if you accidentally crash your website, can help you and fix it. Just having that point of contact. I don't want you guys to freak out and be like, oh my God, Chelsea crashed her website. I'm going to do that too. No, no. I have a minor in tech so I was reaching further than I should have been. I was trying to do something that I didn't technically know how to do. That was on me. That was on me.
Vivian: Well, the other part of this too is let's say you have a Shopify store. A lot of people are doing their website through Shopify, especially if they're selling product. Just be sure that you know the support email or you have that phone number that you can reach out to for support if something were to go down. Of course, same rules apply. Be sure you guys are backing up that website. I'm sure Shopify or Wix or whoever has an option for that.
Chelsea: Well, Vivian, I think we're ready for the TLDL.
Vivian: Do it.
Chelsea: Okay. Let's do the TLDL. Too long didn't listen. If you skipped ahead here, I'm going to give you a little summary of the do's and don'ts for websites, but make sure you go back and listen to the entire conversation because that's where the good stuff is.
So our dos: prioritize user experience, implement SEO strategies, and track website performance. Our don'ts: don't overcomplicate design, don't neglect maintenance, and don't ignore security measures. That's what we talked about.
Vivian: All right. So that is the end of our conversation about websites. Listen, if you guys have topics that you want us to cover, go ahead and either hit us up on Instagram under The Seasoned Marketer, send us an email at Help@TheSeasonedMarketer.com.
Chelsea: Or if you have a question that you want us to answer on the podcast, please send it our way. If you have this question, another small business owner probably also has this question. There are no bad, there are no stupid questions.
Vivian: No. And lastly, listen, you guys, you are officially part of our SOB, Small Owned Business cult. If you want a t-shirt that tells everybody you're part of our cult, go ahead and go over to our merch shop.
As always, join us next week for another episode.
Chelsea: Yeah. Go be the best SOB you can be.