271 – How do we structure our clients’ websites?

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the WP Builds podcast. Bringing you the latest news from the WordPress community. Now welcome your hosts, David Waumsley and Nathan Wrigley.

Hello there. And welcome to the WP Builds podcast. Once again, you've reached episode number 271 entitled. How do we structure our clients' websites? It was published on Thursday, the 24th of March, 2022. My name's Nathan Wrigley and I'll be joined in just a few minutes by my good friend, David Waumsley so that we can have our chat just so that, we do vary the content that we produce on WP Builds.

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You can find out more at cloudways.com. And we do thank Cloudways for helping us to keep the WP Builds podcast going. Okay. What are we talking about this week? It's episode number 271. How do we structure our clients websites? We're going through this process of relearning everything from the start.

We're calling it the WordPress business bootcamp. And today we're trying to figure out what is it that we actually need to have on a webpage right at the beginning. This is a new client. Perhaps they've got limited budget. We need to think about what's gonna be the most effective way to spend that budget.

Do we need a certain arrangement of pages, a contact page and about us page? Do we need a landing page? Do we need email signup forms? What is it that we need? What kind of things are on offer? What does the industry that are client is in require and so on and so forth? I hope that you enjoy the podcast.

[00:03:46] David Waumsley: Welcome to another in the business bootcamp series, where we relearn everything we know about building WebPress sites and running a web design business from start to finish we're on season two, and we're looking at the design process. And today we're gonna be discussing how do we structure our clients' websites?

So Nathan and I are taking different approaches to get our new business run. And our first. Client site built. She's a lawyer with no previous site and she's called miss a Nathan. Shall we just quickly recap?

[00:04:19] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. For those of you that haven't been listening to previous episodes, I'm working on the more tried and trusted decades, old principle of the waterfall, where everything is done in advance.

You discuss with the, of what you want. You get a proposal out and a contract signed and then discussions about. How things may look and so on and possibly a graphic designer, and then it's all taken. And then I just clear off and build the site and hand it over and everybody's happy. That's my

[00:04:46] David Waumsley: approach.

and I'm taking it the agile approach where it assumes that no, one's really happy with that approach. And it's all about building well it's about not set in the. The actual design ahead of time. And letting a process, get us to what is needed. Yeah. It's

[00:05:08] Nathan Wrigley: with the client and it's a, more of an organic developing strategy as opposed to top down.

[00:05:15] David Waumsley: Yeah. It, yeah. We covered that so much before, so we'll try and in, in a way, this doesn't really so much come into this. It doesn't matter, which route you're going. Although I guess what I'm talking about here particularly is favoring the kind of more agile approach, but structuring sites, we're talking about pages and how we put the content on the pages.

And I think it's fair to say that we can only scratch the surface with this one.

[00:05:40] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, the it's interesting because we had a. We had a fairly lengthy discussion as we always do before we hit record, we're often on the phone for an hour or more dis discussing what we're going to discuss. Do you know what, sometimes David, I think those discussions are better than the actual podcast that we put out.

Yeah. But that's not really the point. And it was, it did occur to me as we were having those conversations this morning that yeah the agile. Versus waterfall thing doesn't really matter quite so much as it has done in the past. But nevertheless, we're talking about the, what we put on the website, what the structure is like and so on.

So do you wanna kick us off what the problem is? Yeah.

[00:06:16] David Waumsley: Yeah. So I think we've got our lawyer and we know that she's in a big city and we probably would initially that she just needs a simple brochure side, but we'll explore this a little bit, but our. I so maybe we've got a few assumptions that it'd just be the standard brochure site with the home and about services, contact page, and that, but much has changed really.

I think, in the industry and we've become more data driven. We've become more, what UX plays a bigger role, at least in higher level sites. Whether we want to be really introducing some of these kind of concepts. So things have changed over the time. And we've got a list of things that perhaps weren't around when you and I were starting with our first web designs, we've got our starters off with the lead magnets and marketing funnels.

That's a fitly newish kind of thing. Yep. In marketing, we've got a lot of retargeting going on. We are probably setting up our website. So to exclude them from retargeting, we might need a thank you page. So we've got a little bit of a funnel, even in our basic site, which we wouldn't have had. We've got.

More com version focused landing pages. So we're now often assuming that we're going to be sending traffic to one particular page, which might be of interest. So in the case of our lawyer, perhaps there might be one particular service that she does. And you might want to, in some of your marketing, maybe Google ads to just send people directly to that page.

And have everything that the visitor needs to know to be able to take a call to action is on that page. I think that's a definite change. Don't

[00:08:00] Nathan Wrigley: you think? Yeah. There's you're right. There's yeah. There's quite a few things that certainly when I started the brochure site was literally it. Yeah. It may have been that as opposed to writing it in HTML, you would use some sort of templating.

Structure PHP template files and so on, but basically you ended up with the exact same thing. It was a static website of three or four pages with, and a contact form was about as clever as it got to be honest. yeah. But now, as you described, since then, Did you go through the list of five? Did you get all five?

No,

[00:08:33] David Waumsley: I didn't. Okay. We got personalized content, which is an option for us. That's a new trend and we've, I guess we've got a general move towards content marketing as an online marketing approach. Yeah.

[00:08:45] Nathan Wrigley: The thing that, the interesting thing and where the two models do diverge, my waterfall model kind of means that I either.

Have to educate the client on this in advance and say, look, if you're gonna, if you want these kind of things, and here's the reasons why you may want them, then we can add those in, but we'll have to, we'll have to figure that out before we start. Whereas your approach, you could completely leave that off the table.

Just get the basic structure built in go back and say. On a much more iterative level. Okay. What about this? Or what about this? It's much more of an approach to it. Both can ultimately have them, but it's just a different case of doing at the beginning. I feel that with our client, miss a, by the way, we never did talk about how old she is.

And some of the things may be of interest later, actually around social media and where they spend their time and what they view as important online. Yeah. The age may have some sort of bearing on it. I feel that literally all of those things would be desirable to have, but depending upon miss A's budget and where she spent her time online and whether she views it as a marketing tool or just something, to have on online, because it's nice to have a website.

Some of those things may maybe a stretch too far, and there'd be a lot of explaining to be done about how all of them work. And that would, there would be quite a hill I think, to overcome certainly the lawyer clients that I've had in the past, very traditional just wanted a brochure site.

Contact form was important, but what they really wanted was the phone to ring. So the website really was a conduit to make the phone ring. And so all the other things the lead magnets probably would've fallen by the wayside, personalized content, probably would've fallen by the wayside, but I can think of things like retargeting.

Maybe that would be important because that really may help their conversions and get the phone to ring more. But there would definitely be a job of trying to sell them on a, all of this in advance. And so I would have to know. And beyond my, a game what these things are and how they were. And I think when we were talking before, you mentioned a few times where you had felt that you didn't do justice to explaining them to clients.

And so it didn't work out.

[00:11:09] David Waumsley: Yeah, I think that, we've talked about these kind of things before we said that, often not for our clients and as I am literally, this series about relearning, but I am actually trying to rebuild what I'm gonna be doing for the future.

I've come to a sort of conclusion. Although this stuff is overwhelming actually to me to try and learn all this stuff. It's certainly overwhelming it to get over to a client why they might want to do it. And but I think going forward we'll have to, because at the top level, Websites, all of this stuff's really important.

And the whole thing of moving towards UX as being the thing and the. The website itself only being the tip of that UX iceberg. I think eventually it's gonna be the only way at some point of being able to distinguish ourselves in our offering from people who can now just knock up a site with a page builder and templates and WordPress is becoming that itself.

So in order to justify our as web designers, I think we have to get more into that kind of greater. Pool of UX stuff and start more at the beginning, but you are right. For most people they're gonna come for, they're gonna ask for a website and you're gonna deliver a website and they're gonna be happy with that because that's what they ask for.

I'm they're gonna turn up with me and I'm gonna talk about all of this stuff and they're just gonna go, can I can you give me Nathan's number please? Yeah, that's

[00:12:32] Nathan Wrigley: right. So a couple of things from that, the first thing is whether miss a, sees a lot of this as snake oil. In the same way that if you go into a shop and you just want to buy this one thing, and all of a sudden you feel like you're under pressure to buy the insurance that goes with it and the widget, which attaches to it, to do all these other things, you feel like actually, no, I want a website.

All of this stuff is just a way to siphon money outta me, that there may be that I think that's totally plausible that the client could regard this as. This is nonsense and it's stuff that I don't need to be concerned about. Course you and I, and probably everybody listening to this podcast realizes there is value in all of this if it's done right.

But I think the job of persuading miss a, in this case is gonna be really difficult. And the other thing is time, the amount of time it takes to to explain all of this and I'm sure you've had the same experience. There are some clients who seem to have an endless amount of time to talk to you.

It's almost do they actually work. They're quite willing to spend hours on the phone to me and it, I'm almost finding it difficult to end the phone call or end the meeting. But I feel that there are some industries and particularly lawyers, at least in the United Kingdom, they always seem to be incredibly busy and getting Madam a miss a to have the hours as that it would take.

It may be a step too far. Genuinely it may be a step too far, have you got another couple of hours where we could go through? Actually, no, I've got a whole bunch of meetings and in the time that it will take you to explain it I've lost 500 pounds or whatever it might be. So I do think there's obstacles there.

[00:14:13] David Waumsley: I've put out a kind of structure, which is not dissimilar from how our recent clients come with a local website, which could be similar to miss a let's assume the site, we assume it's gonna be simple and we haven't bombarded the client with all this stuff. It's local, so we're probably tell her to set up Google my business and be.

Consider making sure she boosts her position there by getting the link so she can invite people to give reviews, but then if we've done the thing that I'm always keen to do now and even more cuz I'm really into this kind of data driven approach do some basic keyword and competitive research.

If we do that, we could discover. Something that we didn't expect. There's a searches for divorce. Lawyers is really high and the competition for it is quite low and it's not a Google trend. It's not a result of people spitting up over COVID and being together. If the client loves this work, it could turn out that we start to structure site based on.

Some data that isn't expensive and she didn't need to be involved in it. You went and looked and said, okay, look at the services, you've got this interest and you can compete for some of these and look your competitors. They don't even know about it. They're just putting it under this.

General kind of, services we have, there's really nothing optimized for it that could lead them to see cuz they're new. Aren't they've got to compete with people with sites that have been online, for much longer time.

[00:15:44] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So are you suggesting that you might do a little bit of that?

Just a small amount just to give you some beach head. Yeah. From which to talk, you would do that perhaps without. Even consulting them about the fact that you were going to do it. You've got enough information, they're a lawyer. They live in this city. Let's find out what people are looking for when they're looking for lawyers in this city.

And you begin that conversation with data in your back pocket already, as opposed to the conversation which I've always had. I've never done it that way around, which is we should do some keyword research so that we can figure out. What people are searching for. I do that because if you've got the right tools and right experience, I imagine you could probably get a lot of that done in just a matter of minutes.

[00:16:29] David Waumsley: I think so. People don't book me for a few hours to do the keyword research and I've now from something I used to say, I think we should do this to now saying, why don't we just start this particularly with the new site, just say, your competitors have got years ahead.

So it gives them an advantage on search. And assuming that search is. The key way to be going on the website is let's just spend this time here because it'll tell us it might give us some real clues about where we should just focus and how we'll build the website. And I think if you put that over without them having to know anything and can justify and say look, here's a list.

And you can see here that certain things are hard to rank for, and that your competitors. Haven't, really taken up this opportunity. I think we should maybe structure it that way and put a bit of an emphasis on divorce,

[00:17:18] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I'm with you. So keyword research stands alone.

You had five points earlier, you had lead magnets and marketing funnels, retargeting, conversion, focused landing pages, personalized content and content marketing. The but SEO keyword research is a different beast doing that seems like a no brainer. Almost like a. A default you should do some of that in terms of those five, what would be the one that you would pick out for miss a, of as the one that you might suggest?

E even if time were limited and budget was limited? I think I would probably go for. Retargeting, I think, ah,

[00:18:01] David Waumsley: interesting. I don't know, but I'm gonna answer that question. Cause I put some points in about where , this design might go. So if we did get that, we've convinced us. So we're gonna have a page now on divorce law, this local site that was gonna be was just like if she tells us.

Next that I divorce lies what I do. Actually. I do a lot of the work for that, online. They just need to send me stuff. I don't need to meet people. Suddenly her website stops being this local. Site. Yeah. yeah. It starts to become international of which it could potentially then be worth competing for that.

And of which then we just think, start to think maybe we need to put some content up is the, can you write on something like this? And we can put this in blogs. Do you know

[00:18:52] Nathan Wrigley: That is the moment where you potentially change that person's life? because they probably have only the expect.

I say probably I have no idea, but let's imagine in the case of miss a, there's probably an expectation that the business world for her is bound by geography where yes. Where clients can get to her. From a reasonable distance, so it's gonna be people within, let's say 25 miles and depending on where she lives, that might be a huge pool.

It might not be, but if you can suddenly open up the whole of the UK, and I'm guessing in the case of a lawyer in the UK, that's probably the boundaries cuz the law changes as soon as you step outside of the jurisdiction of the United Kingdom, but you've made the whole of the United Kingdom available as possible clients.

And that. That's utterly revolutionary. So that conversation you're almost compelled to have it aren't you really? And your knowledge has just transformed the scope of what she could do.

[00:19:55] David Waumsley: Yeah think, I think there's gonna be more of that. And, people have learned certainly over this COVID period to do more online work with perhaps what were just their local customers.

But suddenly when you realize you, you wanted to find your presence is going online and you're creating something. Why not just start it off with that in mind? You'll get your business anywhere. If you can do it. From anywhere .

[00:20:18] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. And I guess lawyers is a perfect example. If you're a, I don't know, a takeaway restaurant or something, then the boundaries of the geography are always gonna be a problem.

But in this case, that feels like a really revolutionary conversation to have. I feel I've had those similar conversations before, and in my case, they've always turned out to be fruitless. The limits of that person's. Comfort has always overridden their desire to go global. It's look, can we just start with this basic thing please?

And see how we go. I'm busy enough already kind of mentality, so it may be a, maybe a conversation to have, but it may not turn out in the, the fanfare that we've just described.

[00:21:04] David Waumsley: No, and I, I've not got this, a couple of last clients have been quite interesting because I've put these concepts to them and they, I think they're quite ambitious.

In what they want to do. And they're okay that they like the idea, even if they won't find the time, but they might find the money for you to go and try and put some of these articles together, particularly if you know which keywords you're going for. So I found that where previously I've failed, completely failed to get over what I'm trying to do with them, with this marketing.

And, it's complet I'm okay. While I'm talking to them, they understand, but a lot of this. Online stuff. This, if you like reverse of traditional marketing that we get with online is just too difficult for people who are just busy in their work together. As soon as you've stopped talking, there's a whole century of mass media marketing, which is going to overtake anything you might have said.

[00:21:58] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it's interesting. E even going back decade, which in internet terms is a really long time. Let's go back 10 years. I remember reading posts in. Even in things like.net magazine, where people were describing that moment where a complete stranger had bought something of theirs, offline with no knowledge of who they were and no real insight, apart from the marketing jargon of what was contained in their course, for example, and that sudden realization that, oh, wow, this could be huge.

And I think it would be really difficult. To get miss a over that barrier. But I think if you could somehow track one conversion that, that they had no business getting in terms of the geography and their expectations from that geography, then the gates would flood open I'm sure. Because suddenly realize boy, the UK.

Wow. Okay. Or America or wherever you happen to be.

[00:23:02] David Waumsley: Yeah. Think you, with anything like this, particularly if you like us, usually local customers using not, smallish budgets, it's hard to move somebody, but I think that a simple bit of quick keyword research, if they buy into it could lead it and it could lead how you structure or pages and decide whether you might at least have attempt to have a blog in.

So some of your page structure sorted, should we move on to some of

[00:23:26] Nathan Wrigley: the, more, yeah, they're not have issues of what goes on the

[00:23:29] David Waumsley: page. Yeah, exactly. Navigation, that's probably changed over the years. It's probably that still remains the most important thing of a site. If they can't navigate their way around it, then it's a bit of a fail.

So we've got our lawyer. So what format do you think we should be doing for kind of navigation?

[00:23:49] Nathan Wrigley: It was interesting because in our conversation before we both had a sort of fairly standard template for this, and that was essentially logo left. Navigation, probably very conservative, minimal range of crazy stuff happening on the page.

But basically that, you've got the home, the logo, which is a link back to the homepage and then a contact us page and about us. And it's all linked in a menu and on mobile, just a typical, I don't know, dropdown hamburger icon or a off canvas menu, which sweeps in just something. Yeah, really predictable, nothing weird.

Totally ordinary.

[00:24:29] David Waumsley: Yeah, exactly. Cuz again, if with data, the Nielsen Norman group do a lot on this kind of thing, navigation and what works and you go with the conventions don't you where you can unless you need to be a bit wacky because that's your brand, it demands that you do it.

So you would go wouldn't you logo left. And we were saying the same thing. We got it wrong though. Didn't we? We said we went to Starbucks to see, we was expecting a big center. Logo because they fancy and trendy, but we were wrong. No, it was

[00:25:01] Nathan Wrigley: logo far to the left and a small logo at that, to be honest, I was quite surprised you're right.

Basically you are earing on the side of caution here aren't you, everything's predictable, normal. I'm imagining we're choosing some sort of really bland se style font just cuz it speaks of antiquity and trustworthiness and all of those kind of things. Yeah. Yeah. But Yeah, nothing weird.

Minimal amount of pages on this brochure site, everything clearly labeled nice high contrast, easy to use navigation, nothing weird.

[00:25:31] David Waumsley: Yeah. And yeah, probably now one of the things we were talking about landing pages and stuff, I guess if I've managed to convince her to go. This divorce thing. So she's got her own dedicated page, even if it's not in the top menu and it's just in her services for divorce.

The next question I'm gonna ask me for conversion, particularly as she's new. And we might think about taking some Google ads out, and if we can make our page that we send it to more relevant, save on the budget, the cost per click, would we be then thinking about structuring the pages for services, more like landing pages.

When a visitor comes, there is everything they need to know about that services to make a call to action. So they know potentially the price, if that's up there or is that how we might go about it? Cuz we wouldn't do, would we on our traditional sites would be happy for people to click around and. Find abouts,

[00:26:29] Nathan Wrigley: find quite separate.

I know what you mean. They all the whole landing page thing always feels to me like scarcity driven promotional style thing, where you at all costs, you want people to stay on that page and therefore click through. And I don't know my gut telling me which based upon no data at all.

That, that feels like the wrong approach, but I could be completely wrong. If the data shows something different and we can prove that lawyers with their highly converting pages have, for divorce or for conveyance or whatever it might be. If that works. Yes. But. I don't know, it just feels to me as if that would be the wrong approach.

The high pressure stuff feels like it ought to be a bit off the table, but I'm pretty sure that's me and my proclivities there. What do you think?

[00:27:24] David Waumsley: I don't know. I think there's an argument. It's cuz there's still a big argument out there, which you can miss both with sorry. Excuse me.

You can myth bust. Really this one that, that people look they above the fold stuff is the most important thing, because of course the above the fold is very difficult with all the different devices, but also that even, I think they've done research haven't they, that users will say they don't like to scroll, but in actual fact, what users say about what they want is not true about how they behave and it's how they're led on to scroll, which makes the difference.

So users hate to scroll if they're filling in a form and they. Submit button is just off the screen, , that's an annoyance, yeah. If they're led through a story on the, so I, yeah, I know what you're saying about landing pages, but I'm very keen on them. I'm VA keen on the idea that you could potentially build your structure, your pages.

So you could. Advertise them independently, the services separate to the main site. And have it

[00:28:30] Nathan Wrigley: worked. I know what you mean. I think in the back of my head is when you started talking about a page for divorce, I'm thinking at that point. And again, I think this is my personal proclivity. I'd want this to be the least stressful environment possible.

And the idea of the endorphins being squeezed with some sort of scarcity or, click here now to receive great advice about divorce. It just, it feels a bit the antithesis of what I would like to see, but again, in the data driven model, if that's working. . Yeah, it's interesting.

You get into the whole concept of, the dark patterns that you could put into play here and all of that kind of stuff. I don't know my feeling is I would go in the opposite direction to you on that.

[00:29:14] David Waumsley: Yeah. And I, my feeling is that I know exactly what you're saying, and I think that's tradition of landing pages and the big conversion experts are interested in that side.

And it, but I don't think your content has to be like that. Why not? Just, if you can put a little about a little correct pricing, a little contact in the same form, it's just convenient. Assuming you believe that your people are gonna scroll. Of course you could test this out, couldn't you to see if people do actually scroll to the end.

But in my experience though so far with just the few sites that I've been able to look a little bit at when I've gone for a more landing page approach, we talked about that trailer site. You know what I'm talking about? Yeah. That's got quite a long landing page as a homepage, but. Absolutely. That is where they're not going to the contact page to fill in their details.

They are going to the contact that's at the bottom of that page and they have to scroll through a lot to get to it. And it's not, self-contained, I wouldn't say it's a landing page in quite in that way, but so it has led me a little bit more towards that approach rather than particularly with mobiles in mind.

So the contact page, I think, is now difficult because. More people are on their mobiles. And if you have to load another page, then there's some time and you might lose people before they get to that main call to action. Whereas if the contact is always, maybe a popup or at the bottom of that particular page, it's loading in the background while they're getting ready to scroll their content.

So the, I think, there's question mark over whether the traditional, contact page needs to be there quite as much. Yeah. I

[00:30:51] Nathan Wrigley: guess we should. Also mentioned the fact that obviously we're talking about a lawyer here, so the whole contact, sorry. The whole landing page thing really interesting.

It's thrown into doubt by the industry, which is a good thing to notice. Obviously, if you were selling cheap plastic widgets, that might be like hit 'em hard, really go for the landing pages like crazy, but think you're right about the contact page. I think having on a lawyer's website, having clear.

First of all, I imagine that the purpose of this website in many respects is to get the phone to ring. So having the telephone number really visible, but also as a secondary piece, having that contact page, sorry, that contact form available on all different parts of the website. Everywhere ubiquitously, that would be a complete, no brainer.

So it might be a sidebar, or as you said, some sort of modal popup, which comes already loaded, ready to go. As soon as you click contact us or interested in talking more, whatever it might be. I think that's a really good idea. I was saying to you earlier, I saw a really nice example and I can't think what it was the other day where I clicked on a contact OS button.

I was on my mobile phone and a mobile popped up, which consumed 98% of the screen. It was only. The fact that there was a tiny board around the edge, which was great out, which made me think, oh, I haven't changed pages. And it was just brilliant. It was a, click here, the, to call us. So it was a phone number button, and then directly underneath that was the contact page and it had everything right there.

And I didn't have to think. And I did exactly what I was supposed to do. I ended up clicking and phoning and it was seamless and perfect.

[00:32:30] David Waumsley: I think the phone, I dunno. Did we discuss this last time? I'm not sure, but the it's, again, it's a conversation with miss a, because I think a lot of clients will just say they want the phone to ring, but a lot of them haven't even given it a thought to when their potential leads might be online and yeah, the telephone isn't then so important and there is some advantage to the one.

Call to action button that says contact us. And it leads you to the options for the phone, but has prominently the email, because if you've lost somebody, they don't leave a message, then you've lost them for good. If you've got their email, you've got contact back. And also there are the other things which we might get onto, which I mentioned earlier was the fact that another page that we probably always want these days is the thank you page, cuz it is part of a small funnel in the site where.

I would've never thought that in the early sites I did, but now you need it. Don't you, the thank you page. Once somebody submitted a form, you need the thank you page. If you decide to do the retargeting, you need to be able to find a way to exclude them from getting the marketing. Yep. And also, usually that thank you page.

You might want them to do something else. Perhaps join your. So you need to give them something else that they might be able to do next before you get to them. So

[00:33:47] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, I take your point. It may not be that the phone is required to ring. It may be that you want them to fill out a form, but having all those options just needs a bit of careful thought doesn't it?

Which is the one which is working, which is the one that you need to be working because you're actually sleep and there's nobody Manning the phone, or you are just not going to be Manning the phone anyway, cuz it's only you. And imagine in the case of this lawyer, She's probably not gonna be that available on the phone.

So the contact form might take precedence and that conversation would need to be had, are you actually gonna answer the phone? Because if somebody rings and you don't pick it up, you've probably lost them forever, as opposed to a contact form where they're probably expecting a 24 hour turnaround and you can deal with all of that when you've got a bit of downtime.

Do you know what?

[00:34:29] David Waumsley: I quite like. I like people for uniforms, cuz I, in my lazy wear, I very easily see whether the site's getting leads. But of course, if you are doing proper kind of Google analytics with this stuff, you're gonna mark up that phone number. So if someone clicks it. Through the web you're gonna see that an action's being taken.

Yeah. So you'll, you can measure it. Can't use a call action, but yeah. Yeah. I've got a, I've got a real inkling to go to forms all the time. Yeah.

[00:34:55] Nathan Wrigley: I just it works 24 7, doesn't it. And maybe the personalization thing that we mentioned earlier is one of those five points, at the. It may be that, with WordPress plug-ins logic hop.

And if so, and all of that kind of stuff, you can, you could just swap out the phone number just disappears after 5:00 PM on a Friday, and doesn't come back again until 9:00 AM on a Monday. So there's options there to personalize it. In fact, I would totally recommend doing something like that to based a upon the needs.

[00:35:26] David Waumsley: Yeah, we got, there was a few other sort of questions here. Things that I think have changed, as we're relearning. It used to I was watching some courses actually, which were dating back to oh, good. But. One of 'em was 2016. The middle ages. Yeah, I know it's not long ago, but there was some going further back, but this one particularly stood out.

Because what I was noticing on a good design that they were showing was that there was links on the header there to their social networks and that you used to be really popular. Didn't it? In your head of space? Not so much now. and. Do you think that's a research has come on, even in that kind of few years, really so much so that we've cause I think it has with blog posts as well, where we structure it there.

I think they've moved out because we don't really want to distract and send people to the social networks. We want them to do the thing they came to the site for. Yeah. And our call to action.

[00:36:27] Nathan Wrigley: I guess it really depends upon who you are and what your company is. So I don't know if I'm a company that's selling surf gear and skateboards and things like that, it may be that.

I'm gonna drive so much traffic through my YouTube channel with the videos that I put together, waxing down my surfboards and all of that, that, that sort of content that I can create over there and the conversations that can happen. But I feel that for the lawyer, what. Possible thing.

Can she do on social media, which is going to truly help her website? Now, obviously there are exceptions, but it you'd be pretty extraordinary to make that happen. So I think in this particular case would advise against it. Maybe they're dead set on it and they're gonna commit to tons of work on social media, but it feels in this case like Foley, but it was just the thing, wasn't it?

It was, yeah, there was no reason not to do it. We had no idea what social media was, but if you get somebody on your website and you, them to Twitter goodbye. , they're gonna get lost in some nonsense. That's got nothing to do. With with what you want them to do the conversion, but I'm sure that Twitter will gladly have them and probably figure out that they've come from a lawyer's website.

So show them a bunch of lawyers advert.

[00:37:51] David Waumsley: Yeah, exactly. To the competitor. Yeah. I think you know that there's a lot of this happens and I'm guilty of it along with everybody else, but the data driven approach where you just think, oh the template that everybody seems to do with views seems wrong for the configuration, for what people are searching for.

And I think this is another example of templates, which you might find on template, monster or theme, forest or something. They look beautiful. They're designed by somebody, but they're sticking in content. So you look at it and you think, yeah, oh, that's a good place or you've bought it and it's already got a convenience.

So you carry on with it. But when you think about it, even if you are the type of marketing that you might get your leads through the social media, just having it up there with a symbol tells you nothing about what you're gonna get. If you go on it

and

[00:38:37] Nathan Wrigley: do remember that the entire purpose of social media is to keep them on the social media.

It is not to help you. It is not to promote your business. Obviously if you're prepared to spend ads to get them spend on ads, to drive them back from Facebook to your website, then that's different, but you have lost them the second day. Stray onto social media caveats. Obviously not always the case, but increasingly.

With the noise going on, it just seems like a fruitless thing to do, but it was, everything was going social almost to the point where websites were not needed anymore. You can have a Facebook page. It's fine. But now of course we've come full circle and people are seemingly in, in small trickles getting themselves away from social media more and more.

I would say don't put the social links

in the

[00:39:31] David Waumsley: head of, but it's still very popular. Isn't it? I think to have, interestingly I think the same is true with stuff. That's now become popular. The very popular plugin come out where it will actually put your testimonials from your social, but I think they could connect.

They could potentially connect to where the source is and send you back to them. So I always wonder whether they're a good thing as well, but. People do put their Twitter feeds in their sites or their Instagram feeds. Yeah,

[00:40:00] Nathan Wrigley: I guess there is a purpose to it, but my primary argument would be, look, the endeavor here is to get traffic to your website and anything, which is.

Consuming people's time in the opposite direction is probably not something we want to do at the outset. Sure enough. If you've got a YouTube following of 20 million people or, something probably slightly less as acceptable as well. Maybe there's probably benefit in that, but yeah, in the case of a lawyer, perhaps.

[00:40:31] David Waumsley: There was an interesting thing. Actually, I just remembered it on. I said about popup forms or having the forms on the kind of landing page, but I think some research that was done on the effectiveness of that popup form. So there's a theory behind it. The, in Liz brain, you click on a button cuz it's nice and shiny and it pops up with the forms.

So you've half committed to fill in the form. Whereas if you see the form, it looks like hardwood. Work and you skip it. So it increases, but apparently research done later on that showed that with certain occupations that didn't work, lawyers were one of those or governments. They, it looks more it's too.

I go catchy. If you like to have the kind of popups, they would expect to see a form because they're a star AB institutions. So it's interesting how it goes into reverse.

[00:41:20] Nathan Wrigley: Do you use any of the built-in browser functionality to prefill forms? Yeah, I don't every single form that I go to, I have to manually fill in the only exception to that is login details with last pass.

So they get prepopulated if I click the button. Yeah. But I don't have it. Okay. Hit name surname. Fill that out. Please address. Fill that out. Credit card. Fill that out. Blah, blah. Yeah, I just wondered cuz obviously if you are, if you've enabled that feature, the forms are just. Potentially already filled out on the page already.

And all you need to do is click submit if there's no message field required.

[00:42:01] David Waumsley: Yeah, that's true. In fact, in my case, it's a bit of an inconvenience often. It's usually filling it in with the details I don't want and so it seems to make more work for me. Yeah. Did you ever

[00:42:12] Nathan Wrigley: accident get accidentally on purpose?

Get email? From a form that had consumed your email address, even if you hadn't clicked, submit

[00:42:22] David Waumsley: no. Have you had that happen?

[00:42:24] Nathan Wrigley: No. No. Cuz I don't have them prefilled. I have to make the mental effort to do it, but oh yeah. But I went to a website the other day to buy something and I didn't commit, I just filled out my email address and then I got distracted at every intention, but I clicked no buttons.

And about an hour later, I got the there's something in your cart message. Wow. So that, that had definitely happened in that case. And I, it didn't really bother me cuz I'm not gonna go back and buy it or maybe I am. But the point is I'm aware of the decision that needs to be made there.

But I did think I didn't commit to anything there did. I simply typed it in. Anyway, just a totally tangential conversation.

[00:43:05] David Waumsley: Yeah no. It's quite interesting. Particularly as we're keeping our lawyer in mind, we can't do any kind of dodgy stuff for stuff like that. So we, same as landing pages, why you felt that was wrong.

I was keen on the idea that you could have one page, but anything salesy that because you not to establish that these are professionals haven't you and anything that kind of sales you.

[00:43:26] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. And ultimately somebody that can be trusted with possibly your deepest, darkest secrets. Yeah. And the idea of see seeming a bit like a forgive me secondhand car salesman is just totally verboten.

So anyway, there's social links start with where are we going next?

[00:43:43] David Waumsley: Blog. Blogs used to go as well. If you did, if I convinced her to do a blog used to put that in the main header, now they seem to have gone in the footer because I think most people have realized that people who read blogs have come in through search.

And it's just one more distraction away from what the actual visitors you want. Yeah.

[00:44:01] Nathan Wrigley: Certainly if you're starting out it blog, which is piecemeal half done with content from ages ago, just looks worse. But if you, obviously, if you've arranged it so that the dates don't appear, that's fine.

But yeah, I don't feel that stuff belongs at the top of the website unless you are a total authority and that blog is your thing, it's clear that's an important part of the business in our case, if miss a does write some blog posts, which I think is a really valuable thing to.

Then yes. Maybe start to feature it a bit more, but at the beginning, no bury it rely on Google. Yeah, exactly.

[00:44:39] David Waumsley: And I think we've thought about it in the same way that we might now try and think, instead of trying to put your apps from your social media, into your site and send them to them. I think you think of the blog in the same way.

It's really air to generate you traffic to bring them to your site. So it can be hidden. And on the actual blog post themselves, there's some link back to relevant content. That sells your services. Yeah. So I think it's those kind of things. Didn't, we would've just stuck it in the header wouldn't we in the early days.

And I think all of this data has changed the way that we look at things. Yep. And that's changed our

[00:45:17] Nathan Wrigley: structure, but also you've got, you've got a real opportunity, at the beginning, when we talked about SEOs a real opportunity there to marry the two things together. Okay.

Here's your blog. We can totally prove. That if you blog and you are thoughtful about it and you know what your keywords are, it will have an impact. Now it might not be in media and it might not be instant or very profitable, but it will make a difference. So I think a blog for miss a would be really useful.

[00:45:46] David Waumsley: Yeah. Do you know, one other thing we could just quickly talk about, I didn't put this properly down in the notes, but I, on the 2016 course that I was looking at, they were really going through the design process of something and they decided to put some of the content. I think thinking above the fold, they put it in a slider and we'll have this debate forever.

This could be a whole episode, but it's interesting about tapped, contents and sliders thinking of SEO. Do we. As I'm doing on a recent site, I've suddenly decided it needed more. Probably just for Google, but also for the visitor who might need more information on the same page, putting it in tapped content.

Have you

[00:46:26] Nathan Wrigley: any thoughts on this? I do actually. And they're largely encapsulated by the word accessibility especi in terms of a lawyer you feel like the lawyer has the accessibility component of this website. Perhaps more than in other cases, obviously law says otherwise, the industry is what it is.

The lawyer will need to be totally accessible, that's the law, you've gotta do certain things. And I feel you'd have to make sure that was done really effectively. So whether it was a slider or whether it was a. I know tabs or whatever, they need to be you need to, with the keyboard, you need to be able to tab to the right content and make your way through it effectively and so on and so forth.

My feeling is, I don't know. I feel that those days are gone a bit, feels like the whole slider thing. It's not something I would be pushing much anymore.

[00:47:24] David Waumsley: I can't imagine a situation where the loyal would need a slider on that. I think sometimes it can be really effective and most of the research that says slider are bad are pretty much from 2014 or something where they were pretty much just.

Junk not really helping a visitor to learn anything more about the site. I think they're much more interactive from gonna be clever now, but the, I think you're right. The accessibility there tabs are fine, aren't they? Because yeah, it, beaver builder, I've noticed that it's made itself very accessible with any of their tab content.

So now there is no you're not supposed to remove the naive. So it looks pretty ugly. People are saying, how do I get rid of this ugly outline? But it's actually for. You're not supposed to remove it. And I think so. I think that content's fine. But slide is, I can't imagine she could have tapped content that gave more information because I think when we're looking at a page, aren't we, most of the time, we're trying to make it.

Easily understandable for the skim reader with shorter on attention. And maybe we not need to worry so much with a lawyer, but there's still gotta be an element of that. Yeah. And then we need to still have something for everybody who likes every bit of detail. Think,

[00:48:35] Nathan Wrigley: honestly I think that nowadays everybody is now programmed with the up, down, like the finger, it's just swipe up, swipe down not left and right.

It's just up and down. And so anything which kind of it. Interrupts that process is probably yes, not ideal. And of course, it's using up more space horizontally, but it's still using up the same space. At least they get to see it right away as opposed to a tab or a slider where it might be hidden for a portion of time.

I

[00:49:06] David Waumsley: think, that's what's really, and we can only do our best guess is, I love this conversation cuz it's, when you're thinking about. How you might like, there's because there's pros and cons isn't there, but anything you might do and trying to work out, which is gonna be the best, in an ideal world, miss ale, just say, yeah, I've got a big budget.

Why don't you just go and test all this stuff? Let's try

[00:49:26] Nathan Wrigley: it out. yay. I love miss a she's great. She's got loads of money and wants us to just try everything. Yeah. How we doing? We

[00:49:37] David Waumsley: nearly there, I. I think we've probably covered everything. We didn't do it in any order that we intended, but yeah, I think we've covered it.

Yeah. As I say, we're scratching the surface with this topic. We could go on

[00:49:48] Nathan Wrigley: forever but there's so much to talk about in terms of what you're gonna lay out on the page. And, I think the key bits for me were the bits of the beginning. What do you offer as the different services and you work from there in own model, you can just iterate through all of that and keep coming back.

I do think the bit that you mentioned about doing a sneaky bit of. Keyword research before the meeting. I think that's gold. I would've definitely benefited from that, but yeah. Let us know what you think in the comments or on the the Facebook group there. We are driving traffic away from the website.

[00:50:21] David Waumsley: Next time. We're gonna be talking about copy. Okay. Might be fun. Coffee. How did I coffee. Oh, coffee.

[00:50:30] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, dear. I was gonna say conversation about coffee. Sounds ideal. All right. We'll see you in a couple of weeks. Okay now, cheers. Okay. I hope that you enjoyed that episode as always very nice to chat to my friend, David Waumsley about these things, perhaps something in there triggered you in some way.

Perhaps you disagree with us or strongly agree. You can make comments on the WP Builds website, go there and search for episode number 271 and make a comment. Alternatively, go to WP Builds.com/facebook. That's our Facebook group. And you could make a comment there or we're on Twitter at WP Builds. The WP Builds podcast was brought to you today by Cloudways.

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Okay. That's all we've got for this week. I hope that you feel like you want to join us next week. Next week, as I said, it'll be an interview and don't forget. We've got our, this week in WordPress show, every single Monday, 2:00 PM, UK time. WP Builds.com/live, come and join in the coms. Okay, here it comes.

Typical cheesy music, which we fade in at the end of each episode. I hope you have a safe week byebye for now.