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The $100 MBA Show
MBA2391 How To Redesign Your Website + Free Ride Friday
00:13:20
Your website serves as the primary platform for your business, and it's crucial to optimize and enhance its design and functionality. While it's common for entrepreneurs to start with a basic website to get the ball rolling, there comes a time when a redesign is necessary to keep up with the competition and provide a better customer experience.
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Transcript16 lines
- [00:00]
Omar Zenhom
When the Moore family ditched cable Internet and switched to Zigly Fiber, they got so much more. Mr. Moore got more upload speed for next level gaming and livestreaming to the masses with reliable service. Mrs. Moore is no longer her family's IT guru, leaving her more time to stream games into overtime.
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Jim
Let's go.
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Omar Zenhom
And young Mason Moore got more done quickly uploading HD product demos and video conferencing without freezing the numbers look good.
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Brad
Brad, you're on mute.
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Omar Zenhom
Switch from cable Internet to Ziply Fiber and get more of what you love for $65 less per month than cable at Ziply.
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Brad
Fiverr.com got a 7am meeting on a.
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Jim
Monday.
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Brad
Expensing breakfast because it's in policy wasting all afternoon submitting an expense report for that breakfast. If your company used Ramp, you could submit expenses with just a text. Yay.
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Omar Zenhom
Free your team from expense reports today. Switch your business to ramp.com hey.
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Brad
Oh. Welcome to the $100 MBA show. No fluff, just the good stuff with our practical business lessons. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher, Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started back in 2014. And today is Free Ride Friday. On Free Ride Fridays, we give away a free ride to the hundred dollar MB, our program over at 100 MBA net that guarantees you'll become a better entrepreneur. If you want to win a free ride, just leave us an Apple podcast rating and review and you enter our weekly random draw we call Free Art Friday. Listen in on Friday, just like today, to see if you won. We announced this week's winner a little bit later in the episode. In today's episode, you will learn how to redesign your website. Your website is where your business does business. So optimizing it and making it beautiful and useful is super important. Many of us start our business and we build a website to get us going. And it's good, but it's just good enough for us to get started. Which is great because you want to get the ball rolling, make some money, get a proof of concept, get some customers through the door. But once you're past that phase, about a year or two or even three years in, you're probably thinking about redesigning your website, updating it, making it look more contemporary. And this episode is going to show you how to do it right. Your website is the experience your customer goes through when they buy your products and services. It's a part of the purchase, It's a part of what they will actually buy. Especially if they're going to consume your product on your website like a course or training or software. So let's make sure we nail it. Let's get into it. Let's get down to business. I'm a big believer that great design can really level up your business and and the value you offer your customers. This means you can charge more and actually make more money just because you have better design. Don't believe me? Ask companies like Apple, Porsche or even Ikea who the whole value proposition they're offering customers is simple, clean looking design. And this is why I wanted to do this episode. Because this is an opportunity when you decide to redesign your website, this is an opportunity for you to actually create a better experience for your customers and therefore create a better product in general. Remember, your product, your service is not just what they actually buy. So for example, I run a software company, Webinar Ninja. This software allows them to run live and automated and series webinars, hybrid webinars. It's a great way for them to grow their business and deliver great content to their customers. But part of what they're paying for is, is the design is what it looks like to the customers they're serving. It's the design that they're experiencing when they use my product. If it's easy to use, if it's good looking, they're going to value it. This is why a lot of businesses actually struggle. Because they want to charge premium prices for their products or services. But their website looks like something from 1995. Design matters. So when you're deciding to redesign your website, you should have a set of principles you should follow so that you know what good design is. Instead of me just giving you on the top of my head why I think good design is, I'm going to give you the rules I follow. And these are not my rules. These are rules that were created by an amazing designer from Germany, Dittier Rams, who's a head designer for the company Braun. You know the Braun products and I've been following his rules for design for some time now and it's never failed me. So I'm going to quickly go through those 10 rules to so that you can follow them too when it's time for you to redesign your website so that you know that, hey, if I follow these rules, I know my design and the investment I'm making into redesigning my website won't go to waste. Number one, good design is innovative. Number two, good design makes a product useful. Number three, good design is aesthetic. Number Four, good design makes a product understandable. Number five, good design is unobtrusive. Number six, good design is honest. Number seven, good design is long lasting. Number eight, good design is thorough down to the last detail. Number nine, good design is environmentally friendly. And number ten, good design is as little design as possible. I love these rules because I really believe in them. I think that this actually makes great design. Whether you're designing a website, a sneaker, or home decor, it doesn't really matter. But let's go back to your website here. One of the rules is good design is long lasting. And this is really important. You want to make sure that when you redesign your website that it's going to stand the test of time. This is why I'm not a big fan of design trends. There's a lot of design trends when it comes to websites. Whether it's big bold colors or some crazy cartoon characters or notion like graphics. There's a software called Notion. And their design became so popular that everybody just copied it. But the point here is, is that you want to create design that's gonna go beyond trends, that's gonna last beyond trends. Something that you'll be happy with even if the trends change. So let's talk about how to get started. One of the best ways to understand what you want when it comes to your redesign is understand what you don't like. So it's good to make a list of the things that you don't like, websites you don't like, designs you don't like, ideas or branding you don't like. Then I like to start with that because this allows whoever is going to work with you to understand what are the no gos, what are the things that you don't want to have. And that really allows you to have a clear path to what you want to have. And that's where we go next, where we make a list of things that we do. Like, what are some of the websites or brands or businesses where we actually admire their design? It could be even genres like Swedish design, or maybe your brand has like a western theme and you like country western design. The point here is that you, you want to give whoever you're working with some idea of what not to do and what to do or what you actually like. Now, of course they're not going to make a carbon copy of sites that you like, but they're going to get inspiration next. You want to find a designer that you can really jive with, that you can work with, that can really create your vision into a Reality designers are worth their weight in gold, meaning they're worth paying for. And design is really what you want to invest in here. Because if you have some great designs, getting somebody to implement them, meaning code them on your website, that's the easy part. There's so many people that can do that. The design part, that's the rare part. Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. I don't know if you knew this, but anyone can get the same Premium Wireless for $15 a month plan that I've been enjoying. It's not just for celebrities. So do like I did and have one of your assistant's assistants switch you to Mint Mobile today. I'm told it's super easy to do. @mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment of $45 for.
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Omar Zenhom
3 month plan, equivalent to 15 per month required intro rate, first 3 months only, then full price plan options available, taxes and fees, extra fee, full terms@mintmobile.com.
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Jim
And we're back folks. It looks like Jim from sales just got in from his client lunch and he's got receipts. His next meeting is in two minutes. The team is asking, can he get through his expenses in that time? He's going for it. Is that his phone? He's snapping a pic. He's texting Ra. Jim is fast, but this is unheard of. That's it. He's done it. It's unbelievable.
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Omar Zenhom
On ramp expenses are faster than ever. Just submit them with a text. Switch your business to ramp.com.
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Brad
So where do you find a great designer? Well, you can find great designers on places like Upwork, Freelance.com or even Dribbble, which is a great kind of library of different designs where you can reach out to designers to say, I love your design, I love your taste. I would love to see if we can work with each other, get an understanding of how much they cost. If your website redesign project has a budget, I would allocate the lion's share of the budget to design. Meaning let's say your budget is $10,000 to redesign your website, then I would spend $6,000 on design and $4,000 on the implementation of the design, the coding of the design, getting somebody to actually implement these designs on your website. Now if they're not building the website from scratch, this is not going to be that expensive because they're basically putting a new coat of paint on already their features. Now having said that, a great designer is going to improve your experience. This is what's called the ux, the user experience UI is user interface. So a gray Designer might make some changes, like what's on the menu, how things interact with the customer when they are buying or when they are browsing your website. That's going to require some technical changes on the back end or in the implementation, the coding. But for the most part, this is just a few things to improve the experience. It's not going to be a heavy lifting job. Now, there are some unicorns that are great designers and great developers, meaning they can code what they design. It's rare, but you might find them and they're great value because you can just do one deal and get it all done with one person. If you could find somebody like that, amazing. But in my experience, they're like a unicorn. Super, super hard to find. Might be easier and faster for you to find a great designer and then a great implementer, somebody who can actually put that design into play. Now, depending on how you host your website, whether it's on WordPress or some other website builder, you're gonna have to see what's possible. Now Obviously if it's WordPress, then you have a lot of flexibility. It's super easy to custom code things in WordPress. But if your website's hosted in a different way with, let's say, website builder, you need to contact them and find out what's possible. Say, hey, if I have a bunch of designs designed by a designer, how can I implement these new designs into my website? What files do you need, what format do you need, what's possible, what's not? Contacting your website hosting provider should be pretty simple. And this is a bit of homework you could do before you start hiring people. I like structuring this into a project. Project work, not hourly work. Meaning you say, hey, this is my budget, this is how much I want to spend on design. Break it up into milestones. Let's say three weeks of work for this project each week is, you know, $2,000 total, $6,000 each time they hit a milestone, which you decide, okay, this is the milestone, this is the progress of work you're looking for. They pass that milestone, you release that milestone, they get paid, so on and so forth. Now if you work with a website like Upwork, this makes it super simple. They have this milestone system. It's really easy. This is why I recommend going through these types of gig economy type of websites. Now normally once the designs are done, the designer is not done because it has to be implemented to spec. That means whoever's going to code this has to code it on the website or in a Staging environment or some sort of like sandbox environment where it's not live on the website and you'll make the switch later alive. But the point here is that you get to actually see and interact with it as if it was live in some sort of environment that you can just go to your browser and look at the new website in action. At this point, the designer comes back in and makes sure that their designs are actually implemented the way they intended. Because static designs is one thing and real life interactive design on the actual website is another. They're going to make some notes, they're going to pass it over to the engineer. The designer then will take a look at the website, play with it, interact with it, make some notes for the engineer, the developer, and say, hey, change this, do this. This is not exactly to spec, or this is not the exact color or font or whatever it might be. And then once the designer gives it the seal of approval, yes, this is exactly the way I intended. This is exactly the way it should be. You give it a seal of approval and then the engineer will implement and then switch it to the live environment, which is your website. And then there you go. It's launched, it's ready to go. My last piece of advice is this is supposed to be fun. This is a great experience. Redesigning your website could be a lot, a lot of fun. It's kind of like redesigning your home. So enjoy it, take it with stride, and don't stress out. You're giving your baby a new look. Thanks so much for listening to today's lesson, but today's episode's not over. It's Free Ride Friday. Let's see who won this week's Free ride. And the winner is. CH Vox. CHVox says the $100 MBA is amazing. 5 stars. As a business person and entrepreneur, I love the concise lessons Omar and his guests give. I highly recommend the $100 MBA show to many I work with. Thanks. Well, thank you, Chvo, for that amazing review. You have won a free ride to the 100 RMBA. It's on us. Go ahead and email me over at omar@100mba.net so we can hook you up with the hundred RMB program over at 100mba.net. If you want to win a free ride, just leave us an Apple podcast rating and review and you enter our weekly random draw we call Free Ride Friday. It's that easy. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. In this process of redesigning, take your time in finding the right designer. It's so important. Don't rush this. One of the things I like to do when vetting the designer is giving them a task to do so I can see they can actually do what I want, where I can give them the list of things I said I don't like and what I do like and give them an understanding of what kind of redesign I'm looking for and say, hey, can you redesign just one page? I'm willing even to pay for it even, but basically it's like a paid interview. Sometimes I will have to put out some money, a couple hundred dollars, and realize not a good fit. I dodged a bullet. I just saved thousands of dollars. But when it is a good fit, it's like money well spent. One, because I found the designer that's going to do what we need to do and achieve success. And then to that money I just spent goes towards the design, meaning one of the pages just got designed. So we're good to go. At least we have some work under our belt. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in Monday's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.
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Jim
And we're back, folks. It looks like Jim from sales just got in from his client lunch and he's got receipts. His next meeting is in two minutes. The team is asked, can he get through his expenses in that time? He's going for it. Is that his phone? He's snapping a pic. He's texting. Ramp Jim is fast, but this is unheard of. That's it. He's done it. It's unbelievable.
- [15:46]
Omar Zenhom
On ramp, expenses are faster than ever. Just submit them with a text. Switch your business to ramp.com.