Is your small business missing out on the power of a website?
In this episode of the Small Owned Business (S.O.B.) Marketing Podcast, we break down why having a website is crucial for small business success and how to create an effective one. Learn why a website is essential for: establishing legitimacy, boosting visibility, gaining valuable data insights, and maintaining control over your brand.
We dive into key topics like: mobile optimization, reducing website clutter, enhancing website navigation, strategic planning & branding, improving website speed, and cost-effective website building.
Plus, discover how to ensure your website is user-friendly, secure, and aligned with your small business goals. Listen now for actionable tips to build a website that drives your small business forward! ___________________
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FREE Website Speed Check: https://developers.google.com/speed
Free Training - 3 BIGGEST mistakes small business owners make at events, craft fairs & pop-ups: https://seasonedmarketer.kartra.com/page/free-training __________________________
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Everyone, welcome to the SOB Marketing Podcast, where we celebrate the SOB that you are. And if you haven't figured it out yet, we mean small owned business. We don't mean SOB. 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.
Our commitment here at the SOB Marketing Podcast is to give you the real talk, what works when it comes to advertising, marketing, promoting your business, and then what doesn't really work. And Chelsea and I promise to always keep the conversation real. Hey, everybody, and welcome back to the SOB Marketing Podcast, SOB as in spell own business. I promise we are not calling you guys names. Before we get started, just wanna say thank you for listening.
If you haven't already followed us, make sure that you do that, or if you're on YouTube, make sure you subscribe. If you have any topics that you want us to talk about, please let us know. Or if you wanna be a guest on the podcast, we absolutely bring on guests. We would love to have a conversation with you and see what knowledge you can bring to other small owned businesses like yourself. So go ahead and send us an email at help at the season marketer.com, or you could send us a DM.
You can leave a comment. We are always looking at that stuff, so we will not miss your message. Vivian, what are we talking about today? Well, today, the topic of conversation is going to be the one, the only websites. And, yes, you guys, listen.
I know you're probably thinking, are websites even something we need to be doing in 2024. And Chelsea, what's the answer to that? Yes. Yeah. Y'all, the amount of I don't want to be heated this entire episode, but I want to say the amount of small businesses who are doing themselves a disservice by only using social media and not transferring or moving people over to their own platforms, take back the keys to your kingdom, take back your power, move people from other businesses platforms to your own.
Yeah. A website is one of the very few things that you guys have absolute complete control. Okay? So let's let's just remember that because the thing is, yes, you can dump all of this effort and, you know, resources into building a really great Instagram profile. Same thing with Facebook.
But at the end of the day, y'all, you don't control either one of those platforms. Okay? The only thing you have 100% control over is the website that you build or the website that you have somebody build for you. And so that's just one of the reasons. We'll give you a couple more here in a second.
But that's just one of the reasons that you do need to take a website very, very seriously. So, Chelsea, I have a very interesting statistic that I think is gonna blow a lot of people's minds. Okay. So, you know, most people think, oh, if there's a small business, most of them have websites. Right?
Mhmm. What percentage would you guess of small businesses do not have a website? Okay. As someone who is a part of the small business community, I want to say like 25%, maybe. 27%?
No. See, okay, but as a consumer, let's think of it this way. As a consumer, if I'm looking into a small business and I can't find their website, like, how do I know they're a legit business? Yeah. So this is what's striking to me is that means that a little more than 1 in 4 small businesses in the United States do not have their own website.
And so what I'm guessing and what typically happens I think is maybe they're relying on a Google Business Profile, which we highly do recommend. We don't think you should rely on it, but we do want you to go in and to actually claim your Google Business profile because that means you will show up on Google Maps and all the things. We also want you to go out there and claim your Apple Maps listing because those are two very different things. And for people that are on the iPhones, you wanna show up in their maps as well. But you want to be able to have your own website to include in both of those profiles and in your Instagram profile because it does legitimize you as a small business.
I just think that it's shocking to me that 1 in 4 businesses, a little more than 1 in 4 businesses, just don't have anything of their own. Yeah. I'm really glad you put it into that perspective because, you know, when you say 25%, like, 25 is, like, 14. That does it like, that that sounds like a lot, but at the same time doesn't. You know what I mean?
But when you say 1 in 4, like, that is significant, I think. Well, think think about all of the small businesses that you know off the top of your head in your local community. That means that for every 4 of them, one of them is just not taking the time to actually grow their presence. And so, Chelsea, where do you wanna start this conversation with websites? Let's start the conversation by not just saying a website will legitimize your small business.
Let's talk about every way that a website is important because it's more than just legitimizing, which is very important. I mean, that helps you build trust, and your consumers are more likely to trust you, but it also helps you increase visibility. Everyone Google stuff you want your website to appear. It will help you specifically with SEO opportunities. So if you really take the time to optimize your website, then it will show up more often when people Google stuff.
That's great. That's so powerful. And my favorite one, which if you guys know me at all, you know what I'm about to say, it helps you track your data. Because data is so important, and it's the thing that's gonna help you find out what works and what doesn't when it comes to your business' marketing. A website is a wonderful way and a great opportunity to understand your consumers.
You can see, you know, who are my visitors, what web pages are they sticking on the most. You can track conversion rates, You can track visitors. It'll help you collect leads. Powerful stuff. Yeah.
I think for me, the the lead collection is a big one. So this is a thing. When when you talk about owning a small business, I find that what you're really looking for are golden opportunities to allow a platform or to allow something to do the work for you. Right? So kind of like a set it and forget it type thing.
If you have a website, you have an opportunity to set it and forget it when it comes to using a lead magnet. Like, one of the ones, for example, that we use are quizzes. Yeah. Okay. We have a course that we sell that's geared to, craft fairs, people that are going to and selling at markets and stuff.
We've created a quiz that somebody can take to help them determine if they're ready to do this. That quiz that they take then ask them for an email address, which then we are then able to continue communication outside of just that one time interaction. And I think it was, you know, the work we did was setting up the quiz, setting up the results, embedding it on our website. But now that it's there, it's there permanently. And we don't have to touch it, and it's just collecting leads for us, for people that may be good for that course.
And so I think when you find opportunities like that as a small business owner, those truly are gems because you're able to work smarter and not harder. And then also, Chelsea, like you said, the data is such a big thing. One of the fun or interesting things that I learned over the years is I, you know, I came from health care industry. Mhmm. In health care back in the day, most people didn't, the doctors weren't big on, like, talking about themselves.
Right? But the one thing I kept noticing was that the most popular page on our website was the one that had the doctor information on it. Mhmm. And this was years ago. Okay?
So it wasn't like it is now where it's like, you know, you have a provider profile for every single thing. Yeah. Back then, you didn't. And so, I thought that was interesting and it kinda made me perk up and pay more attention to that because I thought, oh, wow. People are picking specifically based on looks, personalities, and education.
Right? Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. You know what I think is really funny?
We just listed reasons why you should have a website, and we forgot the most important one, which is it's a place to put your products so that you can sell them so you can sell more. Well, no. And that's exactly it. Well, and what better way to the product thing is really important. And let me connect the dots here.
Chelsea mentioned earlier, it's good for search engine optimization. Okay. So think about this. Let's say you sell, candles. If you have a website, your own website.
So let's say you sell TikTok shop. You also sell on Instagram. That's fine and great, But you also have your own website where you have all of your products listed and you give somebody an opportunity to buy them on your website. For one, that's self standing. Right?
And it's doing the work for you even when you're not actively promoting on there. But each one of those products now gives you an opportunity to actually provide more information via the product description that will give you a boost in the search engine optimization world. And so essentially what that means is when somebody goes on Google, when somebody goes on Yahoo, if that's still a thing that people use, if they go on DuckDuckGo, whatever, I don't think DuckDuckGo is a part of this whole SEO thing quite yet. Oh, no. But so, anyways, it is actually, it's able to crawl the interwebs and to say, oh, hey.
You were looking for a candle that smells like, you know, a Georgia farmer's market or a Georgia, you know, peach orchard. Like, here you go. Here are all of the products. North Carolina. I know.
I'm just making this up. But here are all the products that I found that match it. Yeah. And your product would likely be listed in there if you put a good product description in there, right, that matches that query. And so it's full circle.
Yeah. Well, and I was gonna say and that comes back to s g e, which is Google's new form of searching the interwebs, which we did an entire episode on. I'm not gonna get into it right now. But having a good product description is really going to help get your products in front of people when it comes to Google. Absolutely.
And also, I think one of the things we failed to mention too, Chelsea, is having a website gives you an opportunity to tell your story. Okay. And you don't have to pay play by somebody else's roles. Okay. Great.
If I wanna tell my story on an Instagram reel, then I gotta do it in, what, 90 seconds? Yeah. Okay. So here's the thing is you have an entire platform that you can build to tell your story the way you want, whether you do that Yeah. In a 10 minute video, whether you do that just from, you know, a few paragraphs on a landing page.
However that is, you have complete control of, you know, how you're showing up for people. So I think that's really important. And then the the services and the, product portfolio part of it, Mhmm. It's such a great way to be able to just kind of, like, walk people through what your business actually does. Yeah.
I'm glad that you brought up, you know, it's your opportunity to tell your story the way you wanna tell it, because I'm sure there are some small business owners right now that are listening that are like, yeah. Okay. That sounds great, but I know nothing about website design. I'm not computer savvy. I can't do this.
Okay. First off, we are living in the digital age where everything is becoming easier. Yeah. Yes. You can hire a web developer, and we'll talk about that too.
But you can absolutely build your own website. You do not need to be tech savvy. You do not need to know what you're doing because so many of the platforms now like Squarespace, they give you templates, they give you forms, they give you designs, like they take you through the entire thing to make it as simple as possible so that you can set it up the way you wanna do it. Yeah. And just because you do something now doesn't mean that you can't change it down the road.
So the way I always end y'all, I'm not giving you advice that I myself do not take. Okay? Trust me. I do this. Sometimes what happens when I'm making a decision, I get overwhelmed because there's a lot to it.
Okay? So let's say if I'm about to build a website, I'm like, oh my gosh. Like, there's just so many pages, so much I wanna say. Like how do I even go about organizing it? Mhmm.
It is completely okay to say I am going to get a website up now for what I needed to do today, and then I'm going to go back in and revamp it as I have time to do it. Yes. Interestingly enough, this is what I did with the season marketers website. Mhmm. It's something that I created on my own.
The website as it was 7 years ago has changed tremendously because as we added on resources, great. Now I have a YouTube, channel that has all of these videos. Okay. Well, I found a way to embed that into the website. Great.
Now we have a podcast. Now I have to go and add that to the website. So the other thing that I I wanna mention here is look at your website as a central hub for all the things and all the initiatives that you do. All right. So if you guys, great, you're using Instagram install.
If you want, go ahead and put a preview of your Instagram feed on your website, if that's a big part of like what you're doing. Right? Yeah. So there are just so many different ways and opportunities that you can you can get something up and going Mhmm. Depending on where you're at in your budget Yeah.
And where you are in your small business. If you're just starting the ideation, like I'm just taking this business from an idea Mhmm. To now bringing it to life Yeah. That's gonna require a very different website than for a small business owner that's been in business 10 years and has a, you know, a solid customer base. Those are 2 very different websites.
Yeah. And I do wanna say, you know, if you personally do not want to do this and your budget allows you to hire someone, go ahead and hire someone. I mean, if you know that your time would be better spent doing some other initiative for your small business, kudos to you. You can hire a web developer. You can tell them what you want and they can create it for you.
Prices will range anywhere from, like, 300 to 3000. I would even go even go up further. Like, I know some people that charge, like, the one that I'm hoping we're gonna get to, because I already have in my mind the person I wanna work with to redo our website. I think with them, it was, like, right under 5, maybe, like, 4 or something. So I think it it depends on what you're wanting, how many pages, what do you want it to do?
Yeah, exactly. And I do want to say like, if you if you want an intricate website, and you find someone that's gonna charge you $300 do not use them. I just wanna throw that out there. Like, if you are not creating your own website yourself because you want it to be really intricate and, like, you wanna be able to schedule appointments and stuff like that, and the person is saying, oh, I can do that for $300. No.
No. Because they cannot reasonably do that for $300. Okay? Like, we Research is a very, very big deal. Mhmm.
I agree with you there. And the the recommendation that I have that helps with the research is y'all don't just get one quote. Ask a couple different people for a quote. Right? So you wanna have a solid idea of what you're expecting or wanting.
So that way, that's clear communication upfront. You email the person or contact them and you say, hey. I'm looking for, you know, for a website to be built. This is the industry that I'm in. This is the stuff I needed to do.
This is about, you know, how I want the pages, like, what pages I want included in about us, a, you know, schedule an appointment, a services, all of that. Have a clear view of that going into it, and then reach out to maybe 3 people. I think 3 to 4 quotes is is adequate, because like Chelsea's saying, that's gonna give you a feel for kind of like the price range because you like she said, if you want a whole lot of features in there, you don't wanna go with $300 option because I could tell you that's gonna be Sketch. Unless the person's like, hey, I'm just starting my business and I just wanna do this for, you know, so that you can, you know, give me a client review or something. Yeah.
Yeah. But, yeah, just thoroughly vet the people that you're going to, you're going to work with because if you are going to get someone to build a simple website for you, I'll be honest, you could have done it yourself then. Again, I understand maybe that's not the best use of your time. Completely understand. Just know what you need, what works best for you, and what your budget allows.
Yeah. And I think it's also important to ask when you are getting these quotes or you're talking to somebody that potentially could be, creating your website for you, ask them for their portfolio. Ask to see what they've done before in the past because I think that's gonna give you, an idea of maybe what their capability is and their style and aesthetics. But any person that's worth their salt when it comes to website design is going to be able to give you maybe, like, 3 websites that they built or a few references. Right?
Yeah. So don't don't feel like, oh, well, I just don't know if they're gonna, if they're gonna be a good fit for me depending on the price, what they've done in the past, what their portfolio looks like, the websites they've built, also what your communication is with them. I'm gonna tell you guys right now, I have heard some horror stories, and I'm not trying to deter anybody from the from hiring someone. But I've heard horror stories of people basically like, hey, yeah, I'll build the website. You start with the communication and it's almost like they ghost you.
Yeah. Like they'll, you know, you don't hear back. Maybe you hear back 2 weeks later. Mhmm. They don't keep you updated.
So it's important for you to ask these things upfront like, hey, what's your communication style? How will you be letting me know when the work is being done or what phase you're in of the project? Right? How do you let me know that you've started creating it? How do you let me lay eyes on it so that I can start approving verbiage and pages?
How do you let me know when it's done and it's ready to be piloted so that I can see it before we publish it? Yeah. Do you love making crafts and working on your small business, but struggle to get them in front of customers? Do craft fairs, events, or pop ups leave you feeling overwhelmed or frustrated? Introducing rock your affair.
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Do not let craft fairs, pop ups, and events hold you back. Sign up for rock your fair today and start rocking your way to success. For a limited time, get access to our free mini course. Simply head over to our website at www.theseasonmarketer.com and click on workshops. Let's say you decide to build your own website.
Let's talk about things that you need to pay attention to when it comes to building out your website. This one is a big one, consistent branding. Y'all, I understand that it is fun to design stuff, to make it pretty. And you have all these font options and color options and all that stuff. You need to stay consistent with this stuff.
You can't use 5 different fonts all across your website, or maybe you can. If it works, it look. The point is consistency is so important, specifically on a website because that shows you that you're still on the same website. And I will say I am guilty of this. Okay.
Guilty as charged, you guys. Because, Chelsea knows not too long ago, I was looking I wanted a different home page design on our website, and I went in and kinda redid it. And then I wanna say maybe, like, a week later, I was like, yeah. That's not really our vibe, and it's not, you know, branding wise, it's it's not in line with, like, everything else that's on the website. So I 110% understand how it can be difficult and Yeah.
You kinda get that squirrel syndrome where you're like, you know, I I just wanna change something or update it. And so I feel like, you know, you went you end up sometimes making mistakes along the way. So it's okay because you can always go back and change it, update it, refresh the look, and that's something that I definitely will be doing. Vivian, let's talk about SEO. Okay.
Because this is I know we already brought it up a little bit at the beginning of this episode, but this one is huge. Making sure that the content that you have that you have on your website actually makes sense, should actually be on your website. Like, it's not just random blog posts. I'm all for blog posts. I think blog posts are great.
It's great for boosting your SEO. We have a blog. We have a blog. It's great. Make sure the content is relevant.
No keyword stuffing. And make sure the content is relevant. So important. Yeah. And keyword stuffing for everyone that might be scratching their head as to what she means by that is, let's say I were a dentist office Mhmm.
And I want to rank for the word dentist in, you know, in Columbia, South Carolina. And so back in the day, because when they would crawl the Internet, they would be looking for the phrases that people were, like, googling in there. Right? It wasn't as intuitive as it is now. So what people started doing is they would keyword stuff by making sure that as many pages on their website Mhmm.
Had the word, dentist in Columbia, South Carolina as many times as possible. And so then what you ended up getting was just a lot of verbiage that didn't make a whole lot of sense because, like, people were just trying to use that phrase all the time. And so what what Google is doing now and with these search engines because they're using AI and they're just being, they're so much better at doing what, you know, what they do now than they were years ago. Now they're like, they can tell if someone lands on a page and immediately, like, clicks off of it. Yeah.
And so if you're doing keyword stuffing, you're actually gonna be hurting yourself because people are gonna be clicking off of your website, and then the search engines could be like, oh, they don't that website isn't good because no one's staying on it for more than 2 seconds. Mhmm. I'm glad that you just said that. Yo. If your website is slow, it's also gonna really hurt you.
Okay. So think about how Vivian just said, you know, if people are clicking off of your website in, like, 2 seconds, then Google's gonna ding you. They're gonna be, like, people don't like this website. If your website takes forever to load, so people are clicking off of it, that's gonna hurt you. 40 set this this is really interesting.
According to Forbes, 47% of users won't wait longer than 2 seconds for a website to load. You guys, that's half the people in this world. They're not gonna be waiting how many seconds? 2 seconds. More than 2 seconds.
Wow, y'all. What are we doing with all this extra time? And and 40% will leave a site if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. Yeah. Those numbers aren't good.
You well, they're good in the sense that they they indicate and they tell us something about, website users. It means that website users have gotten so accustomed to be able to load a page quickly onto their mobile device or their laptop that they now aren't gonna sit there while your website takes 10 seconds to load. Yeah. Not doing it anymore. And I'm glad that you said mobile because that's also a really big one.
Make sure that your website is optimized for mobile. Think about how many people almost only use their phones at this point. Yeah. And I don't I don't wanna scare anybody off because, listen, if you're if you are in the camp of great, Vivian and Chelsea, I don't have a budget right now that I can pay someone to build me a website. So I'm gonna take a stab at it, and I'm gonna do like a let's say I sell digital products.
I'm gonna do a Shopify store, and Shopify has these templates. And so I'm gonna use a template. If Chelsea just said, be sure that it's mobile friendly and you're like, how do I even go about doing that? Like, I have no freaking clue how, like, how do I, you know, revamp my website for that? Or what considerations?
What do I physically need to do in the template? The good news is you guys, y'all practically don't have to do anything. You wanna know why? Because if you're using a Shopify template, if you're using a Wix template, if you're using a WordPress template, most of these are already doing that automatically on the back end. They've coded the template so that it will reformat your page to look good on a mobile phone.
And the way that you can check this out is usually within the template. Somewhere in there, there's gonna be a place that you can toggle between seeing your website on a mobile phone or seeing the website on a laptop version of it. Yeah. So if you have that option and you can toggle between those 2 to see what it looks like to preview it in that way, it means the template's doing it for you. So don't don't be thinking that you have to go to coding school or anything like that.
You don't. Yeah. No. Most of the templates will do it for you. I'm just saying make sure you're actually double checking though.
Just just double check. Just make sure that it is still It looks correct on a mobile device. Happens too. It's the same thing that happens in emails. If you're not checking the emails that you're sending to your customers on a mobile device as well to see what it looks like, because like Chelsea said, most people are now using their phones to check emails, look at websites, do all the things.
I don't even know that some people own laptops anymore or desktops. Yeah. So yeah. So here's the thing is, sometimes what happens is depending on if you use a font size that's too big, it shows up differently on your mobile device. And so that's why she's saying just double check.
Yeah. Right? Make sure that the headers look okay on the mobile device and that the buttons appear where they're supposed to be. Yeah. Make sure it's optimized for mobile.
I'm glad that you said website too big. Mhmm. Like sometimes your website's too big because y'all less is usually more. Clutter hurts your brain. Your website will be harder to download.
I know that it's fun to add things, but let's try to be as efficient as possible when it comes to your website. Because again, the more stuff oh, okay. Yes. Chelsea, what is it just reminded me of this thing that I see a lot of well, some people do not a whole lot, but people that have a cluttered website, this is what I find that they do. What are those little Russian dolls?
That's a doll within a doll within a doll? Russian dolls? No. They're called they're called something. I I mean, I know what you mean.
I just call them Russian dolls. But, yeah, it's the doll. Then you take the doll out of the doll. Like, it's yeah. Okay.
So they will sometimes take information Mhmm. And they will, like, segment it so far and so granular that you have a topic Mhmm. Upon a topic upon a topic. And so basically, what what that does, we want you guys to think of this from the user's experience, from the website visitors experience. Okay?
If I'm going on there, and let's say that you're a, you're a cooking author. Okay? You write cookbooks. If I'm going in for a recipe for an appetizer, but you have this particular app that I'm looking for to make, you have it 5 clicks in. Like, I have to click on 5 different things in order for me to get to the recipe.
Ask me if I'm ever gonna get there. No. Most people, like you said, that statistic and I'd be curious because I wanna I hope it's I'm not making this up. I wanna say that I read somewhere at some point that people will only go 2 to 3 clicks in. They're not gonna click on stuff more than 2 to 3 times to find the information they need.
So if you have some good information that's so embedded in your site that someone's taking 6 or 7 clicks to get there, I guarantee you nobody's seeing it. Yeah. Kind of off topic. I love how you brought up like a you're a cookbook author. Why do people write their entire live story before getting to the recipe?
Like, is that a website read? Like, is it SEO purposes? I don't understand. It's a blog. It's because they're using it.
Most of these recipe recipes are pulled from blogs that people have. And so usually you wanna give it some context, but notice that there's always I love the ones that have a jump to the recipe button at the top because that's what I do. I'm like, I don't need to hear about how your daddy raised 7 horses, and then this is your, like, you know, your fig recipe Yeah. Or I don't know what. So we said less is more.
You know, you don't want it cluttered. You don't want it so embedded into your website. Love that. Also, it needs to be easy to navigate. Yeah.
And that comes back to the 7 clicks thing. Like, someone's not gonna go searching through your website to find what they're looking for. If they don't find it fairly quickly, they'll just go to a different website. Yeah. And I think that's the the big thing is when you're building a website for 1, you want it to do your business justice and you want it to be able to tell your story, but you also wanna give a lot of thought or equally as much thought to what the customer is seeing and experiencing when they land on that page.
And I know every single one of you out there that's listening to this has had this happen before where you get on a website and you're like, what the like, I cannot even like, you get off of it really quick because you're like, I'm not gonna be able to find any of the information I need. Absolutely. And that also ties in with map out your website before you start working on it. Yeah. And like you said, think about your customer, your consumer.
What do they wanna know? What's the information that they're gonna want? So map it out so that you can build it to be easy to navigate. I actually draw it out, to be honest with you. Like, what I do whenever creating That's what I mean by map it out.
Like, create a map. Yeah. Like, I'll I'll put at the top, you know, I'll use one piece of paper for the home page and it's like, okay, what do you want the, categories to be up in the menu bar at the top. Yeah. And then how many of those categories need subcategories?
What are those subcategories? Then, you know, what do you want the header image to look like? What are the 3 things you want people to take away immediately? It helps to have this all upfront because then Yeah. You know, like Chelsea said earlier, we have a I think as humans, we always wanna change things up.
Right? And so if I have my WordPress up and I don't have a clear game plan for what I'm doing, I'm gonna sit there tinkering for all day. Okay? For stuff that's, like, dumb. Like, I just don't need to tinker with that.
I don't need to be sitting there, like, you know, looking at colors all that time. I need to be sure that I have all the information I need ready and good to go. And I think also having your verbiage already done is just gonna be, a lot less stressful because then you're just copy and pasting. Right? Yep.
Yeah. Y'all, Vivian, when she redid this home page, I don't get me wrong. It looked really nice. It looked really nice. It's just not us.
It was not us. The fonts were kind of funky. You couldn't read them very well. We all do it. You sometimes you just need someone to be like, and this was me to Vivian.
I was like, no. No. This doesn't align with our branding. It doesn't work. I think first I think first it was a I love it, and then it was a wait a second.
Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah, because it looks it looked great. And that's what I want you guys to keep in mind. It might the design might be fantastic.
But if it's not clear, branding wise, like, if it's not a clear branding design branded design, then it's not gonna work for you. Yeah. And I think it's it's all of that to say, it can look aesthetically pleasing, but still just not be the right fit. Yes. And so that's the that's the whole thing is Mhmm.
You just wanna be sure that it's consistent with what you're wanting to put out there. That doesn't mean that you can't change it up. Listen, y'all. You wanna rebrand. You wanna, you know, a fresh look 100%.
And that's the beauty of actually building your own website is that you don't have to wait for someone else to do it. The other thing I will say is if you guys do have even if you do have the budget to be able to hire someone to create your website, just understand that a website, we like to say, is a living, breathing thing Mhmm. Which means that you need to be updating it on the regular. And by regular, that changes depending on what industry you're in and what type of business you are. But for some of you out there, you need to be messing with your website maybe once a month.
And so you wanna be sure that when you're outsourcing that to somebody that you still either have, access to your website on the back end to be able to go update and change things as needed, or that you're willing to dish out the money to be able to pay someone to make those changes and revisions for you. So that's a very big component of what you need to be thinking about if you're outsourcing website creation. Yes. If you decide that you're not gonna outsource it, a great tip that we have, Vivian does this all the time. This is how she got on this entire redesign of the homepage.
Look at other companies' websites. Look at what they're doing that you think is right. Like, when you see a well designed website, you can tell. So if you find a website that you're like, oh, man, I want my website to look like this. Do not copy and paste, obviously, but use that as a launching point to build your own website.
Yeah. I think, definitely. I love the flexibility that you have whenever you're able to build your own website. And I promise you using whether that be a Squarespace, a I think Tonic is another one that does templates. Mhmm.
Shopify, Wix. Wix. WordPress obviously is popular. And then also, I think Divi Builder is one of them. And there's another one that is what is it?
I can't remember, but there are a ton of them out there now that, you know, you guys can utilize to just kinda build your own template. So I think it's definitely doable. You get way more efficient in it once you have it up and going. But if you're just not ready to, you know, take on that expense of building one out through a professional web developer, then, you know, you can get by until that's an option for you down the road. The one thing I did want to say Chelsea too is Mhmm.
We talked about website speed and how that's really important. I don't wanna close out this podcast episode without reminding people that every single one of us has a has access to a free Google tool that will tell you what your website speed is. So if you're listening out there and you have a website and you're like, I have no clue how fast my website is loading. Mhmm. Go to developers.google dotcom/speed.
Mhmm. And then put in your website address. Mhmm. And it will tell you, and it does this in a really great way. Red obvious me obviously means slow and bad.
Yes. Green means, hey, pretty good, fast and good. Yellow means, you need to do some work. Mhmm. And what I love about it is it actually will tell you some of the things that you can do to increase your website speed.
So Mhmm. If you take anything from this episode today, take that. That is a free tool. If you've never used it, that Google gives you that you can check your website speed. Because remember, people are not gonna be on there for more than what?
2 seconds, Jill? 2 seconds. Mhmm. 2 seconds. I'm adding another thing too before we close out, which is, you know, we're talking about the cost related to hiring a web developer.
There is still a cost that comes with building your own website. It's gonna be significantly less than if you outsource that, but you still are going to be incurring a cost. Vivian, can you talk about the cost? Like, what what are you gonna have to pay for if you create your own website as a small business? Yeah.
We definitely don't wanna be misleading. Just Yeah. There is no such thing as putting a free website up y'all. Yeah. Not in 2024 because there there's always gonna be minimal cost to it.
Mhmm. So things to consider if you are or just know up front that this is money you'll invest in. Some of it is very few dollars. Other, you know, stuff is gonna be monthly costs that you incur. You need to have like a domain.
Yep. Number 1. Right? So you can get a free domain through wp.com. But if you wanna legitimize your business and you want something like the season marketer.com or insert your business name here.com, then you need to go in there and you need to purchase it.
And that can range anywhere from a couple dollars to sometimes I've seen them a couple 100 depending on how popular that name is. Right? Yep. Secondly, you're gonna need a host platform. Okay.
So basically, I use WordPress to build the website, but I do it through Bluehost. Okay. Because Bluehost is what provides me the host platform is what provides me the security Mhmm. To make sure that my website doesn't get, like, hacked or anything crazy like that. Yep.
And I can also do everything I need to for the design and stuff, in WordPress through that. Okay. The other thing is the template. If you select a template that may cost you money, there are some free templates out there, but some of the really good ones are gonna cost you maybe, like, $67 or something along those lines. Yeah.
And then additionally, anything that's gonna require, like, a plug in sometimes will cost you money. So for example, let's say that you want to be able to have some type of search function on your back end for staff members or something like that. Okay? Or clothing. You can include plugins.
Sometimes those plugins will cost you money. Or let's say you want a very specific plugin on the back end of your website for SEO. Mhmm. That may cost you like $6 a month, $15 a month. So it does add on as you go, but that's something that, you can easily just keep track of so that you know how much a website will cost you even if you're building it out on your own.
Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I just wanted us to be transparent about it. You know, you're still going to have to pay some money.
Y'all, please don't skimp out on security either. Keep your website secure. You want your customers to feel confident that their information isn't going to get leaked or anything. And knowing that a website is secure is going to give you, once again, credibility. So Yeah.
And little tip here, if you guys are like, I have no idea if I if my website's secure. If your website starts with h t t p s Mhmm. And then you have colon slash slash, it's secure. That s is telling you it's secure. If your website name starts with h t t p and it's missing that s Mhmm.
Your website's not secure. Okay? Yeah. And so, the SSL certificate, that's what they call it. Mhmm.
What that basically does, just so you guys know from a view, like, from a website visitor's perspective, and you guys have probably had this happen to you, you find you go to Google, you search for something, you go to click on the website, and the page kinda turns black and it says, this this page is not secured. Do you want to proceed? No. Okay. If you don't have it secured, that's what it's gonna look like to some people depending on what their settings are on their computer.
And so you just don't wanna do that. So like Chelsea said, make it a habit that anytime you put a website up, you wanna get that SSL certificate to make it secure. I think that we hit hit everything. I want you guys to walk away from this saying, okay, I should have a website. Let me research what my budget is.
Can I budget for the things that I will need to pay for when it comes to building my own website, or can I outsource it? The point is that if you do not have a website, I want you guys to seriously consider it. Seriously consider it. I'm not gonna tell you straight up do it. I want to, but I understand that everyone has different circumstances.
So maybe you're not at that point yet, but I want you guys to get to that point. Yeah. Websites are definitely still a go in 2024. So if you've heard otherwise, please send those people to me so that so I can remind them that, you know, we're living in a I don't know. World?
Digital world, and you guys, that is your digital real estate. Mhmm. Having your own website is having a digital home that you 100% have control over and can do whatever you want with. So be sure that you're taking full advantage of that. And just remember, you know, we love platforms like so like, Instagram and Facebook and TikTok and all these other social media platforms.
We love them. They are such great tools for you to expand your audience and to draw people into your business. They also can go away tomorrow. Yep. And they can change the rules in 2 seconds on you.
And so just be sure you always have a backup. Your website should be the one place that people know, like, hey, you know what? She deleted her Instagram profile. No problem. I can go submit a cake order on her website.
Yes. Well, guys, if you have any questions, you know, if you're on YouTube, just leave us a comment. I think on Spotify, you can also leave us a comment. You can also DM us on any of the platforms. We are there at the season marketer.
You can also visit our website, the season marketer.com. We have all of our resources in one spot on our website. So all of our YouTube videos, all of these episodes, all of our free downloads, stuff like that. So make sure you go check out our website, leave us a 5 star review, and go be the best SOB you can be.