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today on websites dakota i'm joined by amanda mcgrath commercial director here at blend to talk about the sorts of hidden and misunderstood costs that businesses can find themselves facing when they make cms choices that are rooted in the needs of the moment as opposed to the needs of the long term business wordpress is the most common on the market so it's natural that a lot of the circumstances that we described today and a lot of the challenges that businesses face will be seen through the lens of wordpress cms wordpress implementation but there are lots of ways that businesses can end up in this situation and it's not how they get there that's important it's what it means for them in terms of their opportunities their growth and their ability to run their business effectively so we're gonna talk today a little bit about what that looks like share some examples of things we've seen and heard and hopefully help you help you navigate this topic with a bit more success in the future amanda thanks for coming on almost so decode thank you for having me you're on the front of conversations with our specs with our customers about their choices in terms of technology in terms of partners in terms of cms what is it that in those conversations that has led you to want to talk about this issue today and think really clearly about it i suppose i've been talking about this to lots of different people different wordpress implementations that people have had in the past or are thinking about now they're considering implementing other cms they're usually evolving they're usually thinking about wordpress the mix as well ultimately because it is the dominant platform but it brings me back every time i have these conversations it brings me back to my own history of working in an in house wordpress environment i worked in a situation where we had i think eight somewhere between eight and twelve wordpress websites that we were looking after in addition to a number on proprietary cms is and the goal of wordpress that was being brought in was that it would move us away from these proprietary environments and mean that we were better able to manage our sites effectively ourselves and i think that promise is something that still holds true in the market people think that that is what they get when they move on to wordpress but ultimately what i'm hearing from people i'm talking to is it really isn't always the case mh and i very recently had a conversation that i came out of both really interested and you know enjoying the conversation with the people who were talking about this project and so frustrated for for them for the situation that they had ended ended up in because not only were they having to use in house resource to manage some of the site they had an agency they were completely tied into as well and between just those resources not taking into account the time spent by the marketers on the call with me they were spending nearly a hundred thousand pounds a year just keeping their site on launching new pages but their whole process was geared around moving things in this very slow way big launches which i think a lot of people want to move away from in in terms of how they manage their site these days is actually when you've got a new page you just want to get it out there you don't want to have to think about it being this big body of work and pushing something out live so there's just a lot of pain that these people were talking to me about and echoed not only with other conversations that i've had of every time i want to make a change i have to go back to the developer but my own experience essentially are working in exactly this sort of environment and how painful it could be not just to make changes and get things live but even to do things like keep the lights of the site on yeah oh this plugin has updated i need to make sure that that i'll know it's broken this bit on the homepage in these three pages i remember being in situations where we would say oh today we're going to we we need to update these three plug ins let's say oh no that's broken this well we have to now go back and figure out which one has made the break or maybe it's a combination of the things together that has caused this so there's a lot of pain i think out there the people experience mh i felt it i'm hearing it all the time yep i think it's still a big issue i think it would be a surprise where it should be a surprise to a lot of people to hear that this is there's you know this is still an issue and it's an issue that is we've all experienced like a decade or more ago and yet it remains and i don't think that's widely discussed or understood it's twenty twenty five and technology is amazing and technology is everywhere and ai is you know disrupting everything and yet still the problems that many of us have experienced in decades past are still a factor and what you've described you know there is no way on earth that businesses are considering those sorts of things those sorts of cons points when they're making the investment choices and decisions at the point of adoption of this of these platforms right so like you know wordpress in particular is considered to be widespread well known quick and easy to buy cheap to operate you know hosting choices are abundant most of them are managed and and so on and so it would appear that paints a picture of a very easy life right where you can get low cost resource to do whatever needs to be done on a low cost cms that's hosted on low cost infrastructure and just works but nearly everybody we speak to has some version of the problems you described where they're incurring huge costs some of them visible some of them hidden to keep that platform working to move that platform forward to evolve their website on that platform and it's widespread and nearly everyone we talk to who approaches us obviously with some interest in hub hubspot as a cms which i call a cms as a service effectively and share stories of these sorts of challenges it's really really common i yeah it is it is so common and i have calls day in day out where people are facing these exact challenges of i need to edit this and i can't i can't change my navigation i try to fix this thing and it breaks something else and i don't necessarily personally either have the the capabilities to fix it or a resource that i want to invest in getting to fix it the agency relationships that are set up where people are very tied in can become very painful and when everything is sort of bound up in that i i need to pay x to get y and i have no control over how much that cost whatsoever things can become very full mh even relationships that started out really well can break down yeah this podcast is brought you by blend the hubspot website agency your website is your most valuable marketing asset and so it's crucial that you get it right we're the specialist hubspot website agency helping businesses create effective scalable websites that drive real results see examples of our work and the impact we've delivered for businesses just like yours at b b b dot com you've made me realize as well that like this is i kinda it's an important conversation and probably one that rarely happens right businesses don't typically compare notes on what it's costing them to like course correct for the the choices that have been made right so if a business is spending ten k a month thirty k a month in some cases a hundred k a month to maintain a site that was procured on the basis of you know widespread and understanding low low cost resource availability like that's potentially a little bit embarrassing right but businesses need to confront embarrassing conversations and if they were to compare notes with one another and realize how many of them in in the same situation or before making the decision understand that that's where they might end up some could avoid those huge costs but add nothing to the business really they don't generate anything for you if it's just keeping the lights on keeping the site running patching vulnerabilities and and publishing updates right yeah absolutely i mean if you think about a marketing leader having to instruct the in house developer yes we need to get that plug in updated or the or the reverse hearing that that needs to happen and we might have some downtime and then planning for oh when is that gonna happen and that's all time away from actual strategic activities actually thinking about what can we add to our content what can we do to get to more of our audience ultimately every time you have to fix the homepage or deal with a security issue that's come in as a result of an update that is time taken away from investing the effort and the time and the money in moving the business forward it is just business as usual being held together in a very flimsy way yeah unfortunately yeah one thing you you know you mentioned about how can how can business owners or business leaders compare notes it's very very hard for them to assess those costs i had someone ask me how much will we save like how much are you spend right on those resources how much time is that taking the other members of your your team how much do you spend on those people unfortunately that probably is something that only you can assess but those are probably the major cost areas what are you having to spend on any agency relationships on any specialist roles for maintaining the site what are you spending in terms of time from your other team members and what's an average cost to you as the organization for those team members per hour if they're spending three hours a week that stacks up really you know that can stack up really quickly yeah essentially that total cost of ownership piece is probably one of the most important things that businesses can do when thinking about the future of their site because that promise that the platform is free it's free if you invest in a whole infrastructure around it it's free if you build your team around it or your resources around it that's not free really isn't there may be there may be something i'm starting to censor it if you if you aim to lower the cost at the outset of a journey like this then you essentially maximize your cost later right which is to say that if your focus is on you know making cost savings you know constrain budget when you get started on a project like this choosing platforms choosing you know solutions then it then it may not pay off in the long term i think hubspot is a is a fairly unique proposition in terms of cms is in terms of how much value it includes for what i think is relatively a very attractive license fee but of course you know you can go further and say well what would be the cost of monitoring your site you know detecting anomalies and attack and preventing ddos which happens less than less these days in terms of that's dealt with but the security the the maintenance the proactive all of these things you know most businesses can't even begin to do you know and and would cost them significant amounts on top of everything we've talked about were they to try and so i think i tend i tend to divide cms is into like cms as a service where more of your requirements for your business are supplied by the vendor than by yourself and i guess legacy i don't know what that would be called software plus infrastructure plus something else but like where you're taking a cms which might be proprietary or open source or low cost mh but you're having to bolt around it all of these solutions one way or another and when you do total up all of those costs and expenses usually there's a very clear leader like you say total cost of ownership being the true measure of the the decisions you make in in this area i think that's it and that's where you know the proposition of wordpress when people are comparing just the cms is they look and they go wow wine is more expensive at the other yeah and that but that's an upfront cost and that's a transparent cost and ultimately what people need to do more of i think is to look beneath the surface of the proposition for their website it's not just a question of looking at you know whoever's building your site and designing it how does that look is it gonna look good enough is the strategy behind it good enough those are really important components but people need to spend more time assessing whether whether whether what they're gonna get inside the content management system is going to be easy for the team that they have to use mh or if it is going to tie them in to complex relationships either with internal team members or with their you know with agencies yeah let's say so more transparency and more looking under the hood at the not sexy bits yep when it comes to assessing a people you know i have lots and lots of different conversations where people say oh yes the quality of the work is just as good is it when you look at what is being produced for you to use is what you're being given as flexible as easy to edit you really need to double check that because that is actually what you're going to live with the most as the people who need to do the marketing yeah yeah yeah yeah absolutely no partners and resources play a role there right we've both said before any ec cms can be implemented poorly or well yeah but that is a that is a factor which complicates this discussions somewhat because it's no longer solely about software or infrastructure and but you know it is it is vitally important that that your cms is implemented in a way that supports your business objectives empowers your team and for whatever reason you know on average we see that businesses that have made decisions that lead them to open source lower cost rarely are in rarely themselves in a good position in that in that rear in that in that way and we certainly take you know we we pay a huge amount of attention to what that product looks like in terms of the editors experience because that's a big determining factor in theory you can take any cms and you can implement it in a way that helps you achieve your business goals but i i maintain that in my opinion where wordpress for example is a fantastic cms they've done incredible things mh and it's the perfect for solution in some situations but as businesses mature typically seeing see it providing less and less of what they need in order to achieve their goals and and succeed and in my experience i've seen it better results are empowering those marketing teams creating that edit eligibility creating that scalability mh on hubspot as a platform than i have on wordpress as a platform is there anything else with it within the context of your like your partner's matter in terms of the setup in terms of any cms can be set up well or poorly is there anything else people need to consider in terms of is that a reason is that a justification for pursuing you know a wide range of solutions or are there other factors that should encourage people to look in a certain direction i think obviously if you are already in a situation where as an organization you've got some sort of in house developer that is going to play a part in your decision making it's a hard decision to make to move away from a platform that your developer is good at what i would say and we you know we've definitely talked about this before but it's very hard for a single developer in an organization to be assessed yes yes so how good their work is even if they go out and they read really widely and they look at other people's examples if they are the only technical lead in their organization for that sort of work they are always going to be there's always the risk that they do something and they leave something happens that key man risk is absolutely there but also in flight how do you critique the quality of their work if you do not have that experience yourself so i do understand where businesses have that existing resource they want to you know they want to maintain that they've built up relationships and so on but really assessing are you ever going to have enough sites as an organization to have more than one person mh if so yes a team could balance makes sense it would make sense for you but if you are a single brand or even you know yeah i would say yeah any single band surely what you're creating doesn't need enough things that are new to warrant a full time resource of any specific kind yeah these days because there's so much you can do in terms of scale your multi brand perhaps but it's about your business strategy that's when it all kind of starts to roll up from i think that's probably true of a lot of these considerations when you're planning your site you need to think about how much flexibility it's gonna have with the way that your business is going do you grow by acquisition are you going to be bringing in new products what's happening that will change your navigation also how will it be looked after is there going to be enough work for full time team members ultimately i don't think many organizations really should be thinking how am i going to create a role that is one person's role forever in this business where there's no one else in it who can actually say whether that person is doing the best job they could yeah can compare their work to anyone else's yeah actually it's a single point of failure risk yeah yeah yeah interesting point so if businesses if anyone listening is is like pre that point they have an opportunity to save themselves that mistake that cost and you know and and and take a smarter route which is ultimately about making better investments in terms of time and money my one of my observations about cms is lately modern cms is is that the message they give typically they're they're sort of like entry level customer the people they wanna onboard first is that you don't need a developer to do this sort of stuff and i think that gets mis cons as if you use this cms you'll never need a developer mh and i think that's i think that's untrue i think that actually there will there there will always be times and you should want to need a developer from time to time but it's not a good investment to put yourself into a situation where you nec having a developer on staff just to do basic editing work yeah because that's what cms is should offer you so that yeah there's a really interesting like res like challenge there that could be optimized that's exactly i think with wordpress you have to accept that there is some level of ongoing developers support needed to keep the site running in many other cms that are less open source have hubspot being one of them that is not a requirement in the same way yeah when you take on that sort of platform when you go back to developers it is for that point if we want to add something new innovative we want to move things forward that's fantastic and that's a really you know sensible investment and so the routes that you can take as an organization the focus on what the cost of those routes is is very different yes with an agency you will invest more upfront but you will not spend if you've got the right setup up as much ongoing mh unless you choose to unless you look at that team of people and think actually you can really help me take this website to the next level right you can be part of my strategy and help me dovetail into parts of my business where i'm never going to have the need for a full time resource so yes i can add all of that in and i've got that extension of my capabilities that's very different from saying i need to go back every time i want to change something on the navigation oh we spelled it wrong last time yep the product name's updated yep who wants to be going back to the agency for that no no one no no one should absolutely yeah exactly you we've talked about the cost of you know these choices the consequences and and now we're talking more about the opportunity because with every cost means we fore go an opportunity if people are able to save themselves these costs what are the opportunities that they are able to you know therefore take advantage of and i think about you know customers we've helped onto the hubspot platform and i think about the ones that have put proper heat mapping on their website understood their ux and made significant improvements to the customer journey by changing navigation by changing conversion points and offers and the customer journey and so on and what do you see as being the opportunity that's unleashed as unlocked if people like able to understand identify and and mitigate these unnecessary costs i certainly think the ones that you you point to are key ones can they evaluate the site that they've got and make improvements to it to make it unlock better results but also there's a huge opportunity in not just changing what you've got but planning for the future and being able to execute on bigger bolder moves yeah essentially not just like the fine tuning which we know has such great impact but that big campaign that you were never going to get to in a situation where you spend even half a day two days a month on being really stressed out the part of the site was down and har rang your developer to fix it while you've got someone in your ear from sales saying was the site doing down i got a cool with the across back yeah totally that is really those are really stressful situations and stress does not breed creativity it does not help people be strategic it puts people into adrenaline and vital light mode right yeah so actually there's the direct cost of the time there's the indirect cost in terms of how you as a team will enjoy your work and enjoyment brings out the best in people they get to do better and more imaginative things and we all know that when we put more of ourselves into what we're putting out there it is more authentic it is more valuable that's where our effort and our energy needs to go not being absorbed in nasty difficult situations essentially yeah just take the pain out you'll all have a better time yeah well i mean you know you've you've brought me around to a point i was just thinking about it which is say if we're gonna give advice to people about how to make you know good investments and and be sort of impartial about it like one of them is if you're in this situation now don't repeat the same mistakes right which is if that's yours if you're incurring those costs those extreme total cost of ownership challenges that you know as a result of a certain setup don't go to market when you wanna get a fresh site and simply repeat that set of mistakes on the basis that something is free or low cost or cheap and easy to to get right any other things that you think people need to think about when it comes to investment decisions that will help steer them do well yeah do try and genuinely assess what it cost you genuine to run your current implementation yeah in time in resource that you pay for directly and indirectly really try and get a full picture because when you add it up saying i spend a hundred thousand pounds a year right now so spending forty fifty to get this fixed as opposed to going and spending seven eight on a new site that will repeat the same problem yes that's very different mh that's that's that's where you can really game change i think as an organization not not falling into the same traps i think the other one would probably be at that point that we made earlier of when you're looking for a provider whoever it is in house agency don't just look at the visuals don't just look at what the front ends of their site look like look underneath because any mh cms can be implemented badly and be hard to use have a video demo asks to see something in action get confidence that the way you want to work is supported by what will be delivered to you yep that's so important because it's you're when you're in a project it's far too late change course there nearly every modern than cms offers like drag and drop editing right but it there's actually a huge amount of variance in terms of how that's implemented and unless you see what your potential partners can offer mh you may get a very different solution to the one you anticipate or expect and even then i don't believe that it's necessarily optimized for the users within the business and i think that's another message that cms is cms vendors like give to their sort of entry level customer that everybody hears which is it drag and drop is a solution to all problems it's the reality is it isn't i also think that there's an important consideration that businesses need to make as they change sort of scale and as as a website project comes along which reflects them having move from one scale to another which is to really think carefully and clearly about all of their requirements it's it's quite common to see cms is chosen not in a rush but based on name and what's perceived about them as opposed to an actual like systematic identification of what do we need our website to do offer and and guarantee and ensure for our customers and our visitors and of the solutions we're considering which which do they offer and which do they not which is included in the cost and manage and maintain and procured for me and which one will i have to find configure support maintain myself ourselves and that process is incredibly enlighten i think and really shines a very clear view on which of the cms on the market are compelling given what a maturing growing business requires and that can help people avoid a lot of a lot of future pitfalls i think when they realized that actually something they didn't put on the rfp or on the you know the requirements list was was key mh and and and having that in from the get go is really really powerful really really helpful any final points any we you haven't covered that you wanted to share one thing just come to mind which is a conversation you and i have been both part of recently i think for me more than once where self hosting as a requirement in that procurement process for a cms was put really high on the list why i mean that's why don't businesses ask themselves why yes if that's a requirement i think that's i think that's largely an outdated requirement it it's probably simply a carryover from other lines of business from other things that you do as a company that lead you to believe that either because our website currently is self hosted our new one should be because we have extensive server resources that we utilize for other lines of our business we may as well utilize them for our website and it could be lots of reasons and yes we see it frequently you're right but i think in the case of your go to market website it's actually you know rarely if ever the smart choice given what you need to to produce an effective website that get your message to your market and converts it into pipeline self hosting isn't gonna help you achieve that in the majority of cases i see and i i i think we've had the feedback of we have a highly technical team here they're more than capable of doing that and the question i think we would always put to them is is that the best use of that that capability capabilities time when it could just be completely out of their hands and just be running itself the idea that because you have a certain kind of resource you should have total ownership of everything is a bit of a mistake in many cases especially when it blur the lines of responsibility for a project between marketing and sales who should ultimately be driving the success of your demand generation website being such key component of that perhaps with some other people in the mix from you know your careers side and and whatever other kinds of audience you have for your site but the idea that just because it is tech your it team should be able to put their hands all over it and look inside it isn't necessarily true in many cases yeah yeah i think when you look at it through the lens of pure infrastructure provisioning and management it can like look quite attractive but there's so much more to the website of a business than that that it just doesn't make sense to try to orchestrate all that internally and security can be a very real concern but that that is a concern that should be levi at the providers right at this at the at the the vendors of the cms and the infrastructure and the partners that you use mh and they should be able to meet your requirements there and there are ones that can mh we're an iso twenty seven one certified agency our preferred cms platform hubspot meets pretty much every standard you can throw at it and so we can meet the needs of even the most stringent the most you know critical businesses mh that shouldn't be a reason to suffer the the the the problems that come with self hosting and the and the and the lit of things that you've then got to figure out for yourselves and monitor and maintain and update and patch over the rest of the lifetime on that site yeah that's definitely a good point okay let's wrap it up there i think that's that's a good what good place to end thanks for listening if you're enjoying websites to go do please give us a like or a follow or a subscribe on any of the platforms where you see this and thank you very much see you again next time thank you amanda

ai is changing and will change the way that websites are created the way that they're discovered and the way that they're used how those changes are gonna manifest over the longer term are very hard to predict but we can already see some of the ways that ai is impacting b websites and their uses and we can think a little bit about where the future might lead us as well nothing is guaranteed however ai is advancing at an incredible rate and we might see unexpected twists and turns in this journey but right now i think we can see potentially a number of ways that ai will impact websites in the near future if we think about website creation in the first place of course ai is becoming a tool and asset to everybody involved in the website creation process writers can use ai better than ever to help generate content as long as their own in control of the context and the instructions and the tone and the style guide that is put into the ai tools that they use large language models are effective at filling in blank pages with content which are writers can edit refine optimize for website use again the writers of your website should be the final ar of quality of conversion of length and optimization but they can certainly use ai to help them in the process for creating that content designers too are getting more and more support from ai tools ai creation of images particularly stock photography and illustrations is becoming increasingly commonplace and and design teams can save time and money in some instances by using ai tools for the generation of some of the assets that they use in their website creations i don't currently see ai playing a significant role in either the design step of the website from a ui ux and brand point of view or from the wire framing part of the design process there's still too much decision making that's best done by your expert team for ai to currently play a big role in that space but who knows things will change designers will probably see more and more utility in ai tools in more and more of the design process over time but currently it's still quite constrained this podcast is brought to you by blend the hubspot website agency your website is your most valuable marketing asset and so it's crucial that you get it right where the specialist hubspot website agency helping businesses create effective scalable websites that drive real results see examples of our work and the impact we've delivered for businesses just like yours at b b b dot com developers like writers are also well positioned to benefit from the language creation capabilities of generative ll they understand lack code languages very very well so when it comes to developing websites and writing the code for those websites ai is a huge productivity aid to the developers that can write code sections of code snippets of code very quickly which developers can then review refine debug and optimize ai can't generate entire websites at a high standard of either code or fidelity currently so that's not where we're seeing the application right now but each discipline within the website creation process can leverage ai to help them be more productive and to get more done quickly in the process there are of course ai website builders out there and more appearing all the time different brands different tools claiming to be able to create high quality world leading websites from a single prompt the reality is probably a little bit short of that expectation that's being set sure there are certain pages for certain businesses that can potentially be created by ai the typical challenges we see with ai generation of whole websites is scale they don't scale very well to create multiple pages of a of a cohesive on brand quality website they're also not particularly good at facilitating edit in the back end currently or scalability and security of the code base this is where ai tools that are generating you know whole products currently facing limitations and falling down own so if you're a small business or a solo entrepreneur you might well be able to get a single page website that looks pretty good out of an ai engine but you won't most likely be able to build upon that edit it scale it out and meet your growing objectives for quality and consistency of brand effectiveness and performance of code edit and scalability in the middle either so there's interesting things happening there but it's still very early days ai may also influence how websites are used and therefore what buyers expect on them and create new opportunities to integrate ai into the user experience now people have tried already to switch traditional navigation in favor of conversational based question and answer experiences and for the most part i don't think buyers are ready for that just yet most reactions to you know web pages that present nothing but a text box for you to chat with have been met with muted and mixed reception and usually you've gone away quite soon afterwards i think there's a challenge still with trust and authenticity and people although they want to use ai in the research process they probably want to see real information and make their own decision about whether it's credible trustworthy and believable or not but ai personalization of your website pages ai powered chat experiences either alongside or in front of your website content all these things are more may become commonplace as ai gets better and better buyers become more and more comfortable with ai experiences and they start to expect and demand more and different things from us in terms of the website experiences we offer them moving on to discovery ai is having a huge impact in how websites are discovered regardless of how they're built discovery of websites is being influenced and affected by ai ai overview in search results are gobbling up informational queries and answering them without any clicks so fewer and fewer visitors are navigating to the informational blog posts and pillow pages that exist within many websites meaning that traffic to those websites to those pages and around those terms is decreasing but the research is still taking place the research is still happening and the brands that have content that feature and appear in those ai overview in the citations that support them and get mentioned in ai models directly like in chat gb and claude are still going to be creating brand awareness brand affinity and trust amongst buyers in that category what i think will happen short term is that they're going to arrive on those websites on the commercial pages homepage product page service pages much quicker than they would have done in the past the research part of the process having happened quicker as a result of very effective ai overview helping them understand complex topics quickly but they're still gonna arrive on your website and they're still gonna use your website to a make a decision about whether to court contact you and inquire about your product based on what they read and see and whether it supports what they've learned from ai and then be to make that contact with you so in the short term i think websites are gonna get a boost in terms of how they're valued and perceived both by buyers and their owners organizations for the important role they play in turning ai educated buyers into pipeline you can't neglect your website even though ai is answering lots and lots of questions about your category to your buyer during the research process the goal is still to get your buyer onto your website to provide a logical and intuitive and familiar experience answer the key questions they have that are critical to their purchase and encourage them and incentivize them to take a mutually beneficial attractive conversion offer that results in a high intent lead in your pipeline ai could change all of that in the long term it could change the way purchases are made even in b2b it could change whether those visits those websites happen at all or not but right now and in the short term i think those visits are gonna continue to happen and they're gonna become even more important b2b organizations so websites are being impacted by ai and will be impacted by ai in the future in ways that we can't possibly predict we're already seeing changes to the way that websites are created the way that they're discovered and we're most likely gonna see ways changes to the ways that they actually are constructed and the experiences they offer but i don't think websites are going away anytime soon and i think buyers are still gonna be seeking websites of vendors in order to confirm whether what they've learned through ai conversations and ai overview is backed up by the information that companies have decided to share there so websites remain incredibly important for pipeline generation shouldn't be neglected and might even get a bump in terms of marketing budget focus and spend in the coming years while research is taken care of by ai for more and more buyers

today on websites dakota we're talking about wire frames what are they why are they important and what role do they play in making sure that your b2b website pro project is a success at the end of the day we're gonna talk about what wire should look like how you should create them and the real reason that you need them in your b website project wireframe are a common concept in website project discussions and the sort of thing that everybody thinks or knows they need but they might not know why they need them after all a website isn't a piece of software where every single user interaction has to be planned for and predicted in order to create an intuitive experience in fact websites are living breathing things that change over time so whatever you put in your wireframe is not going to be reflected faithfully one hundred percent on your website at some point in the future but they still play an important role in building successful effective website that drives your business goals so what i wanna talk about today is what is the role of the wireframe in creating your website and how can you make the most of that step in the process now all of you are probably familiar with the concept of a wireframe it's a low fidelity mock up of a page or pages within your website many of you will have seen black and white sketches or grid presented layouts of pages with navigation and boxes for images and text on them and that's exactly what a wireframe is today still to mock up of how you think your pages will be laid out and some of the important decisions that you can make at this early stage are of course what will your main navigation look like and where will it be positioned there's only a few good choices for that obviously but nevertheless a decision you make at the wireframe stage what will your homepage content look like in terms of order structure placements will you use text with images alongside one another will you use columns or cards when you use video to communicate your message all of these decisions can be made on the wireframe frames of individual pages and typically your wireframe multiple pages in line with your site map or website structure to get a sense of what the complete end product might look like this is also a good opportunity to make some decisions about how the visitor will journey through the website so where will the key sign post calls to actions and navigational aids outside of main navigation live on the page and help your visitors find firstly the content they're most interested in but then also navigate to other information that they will find useful and ultimately onto conversion putting your wireframe together enables you to think about the page its purpose the right content to present and the right way to present which is a very valuable stepping stone but again it's not too completely and utterly lock yourself into a a single way of presenting that information the role of the wireframe is actually more important when you think about what websites have become and what you need to create in order to leverage the full benefits of the cms you're working on give your team edit eligibility but retain a unique and memorable representation of your brand websites these days are all building blocks composed out of reusable modules that your editing team need to be able to access use and modify with ease and the wire framing step enables you to identify because you're not gonna be building each page individually individually exactly as it's seen in design what are these building blocks that you need to create that produces a reusable set of modules templates and and sections that your editing team are gonna be able to use to create content and publish it over time so by wire all your pages at the outset or all your key pages you're able to identify where the layouts you're using are repeated and how you can harmon some of your pages requirements to produce a more intuitive and easier to work with set of building blocks that can be used to create your initial website more or less exactly as your as your wireframe frames described but over time can be used to edit and move away from that original wireframe while still retaining consistency of your brand the performance of your code the logical and intuitive presentation of information that buyers will respond to and keep it easy for your team to work with in the back end so by putting your wireframe together you're empowering yourself to create a website that's not only great at the point of launch but that every day after that can be made even better by a team that don't necessarily have to have deep design or deep development skills and don't have to go back to the wire step just to produce new content this podcast is brought to you by blend the hubspot website agency your website is your most valuable marketing asset and so it's crucial that you get it right where the specialist hubspot website agency helping businesses create effective scalable websites that drive real results see examples of our work and the impact we've delivered for businesses just like yours a b b b dot com when it comes to creating your wireframe there's lots of different ways to go about it and they don't need to be the most polished thing in the world they can be created in design software like fig or sketch or even photoshop or in powerpoint i've even seen wireframe frames in word before the most important thing is that you go through a process of carefully understanding what your pages need to achieve and how you can achieve that goal when you go through design and development of your modules and pages on your cms thing in terms of involvement whoever has the information to determine how your website looks and feels and sand should be involved in the process now that might just be one person and a small organization but in larger organizations and teams we would commonly recommend that you include design and strategy in your wireframe discussions with support from copy and development along the way to ensure that what you create is supported by and supports both your message and the development process from a c performance point of view so after choosing what piece of software you're gonna produce your wireframe frames in it's a case of sitting down together is and drawing frankly the boxes and the sections of of laura ips some copy if you will if you wish to fill in the blank sheet and build up your pages of your site systematically it's common to start with the homepage because there's easy decisions to make quickly whereas our navigation whereas our footer doesn't take much effort to decide those what does our hero section look like roughly in terms of content that we present what are the calls to action on this page and what are the supporting pieces of information about differentiation p's pricing competitors whatever it is testimonials where on this page does it live what mediums are we gonna use to represent it and what layouts do we think will support that the best these wire frames are not carved in stone you can change and adapt them both as you create new pages and after to a certain degree design and developments begun to reflect your evolving understanding of your needs after your homepage wireframe move on to your product or service or solution pages look at your about us pages pricing pages contact us pages and identify what content needs to be on the page what order is best for it and what layout will best achieve the aims of getting a buyer to convert once you've got all those wireframe frames laid out you can do a number of things you can flow in mock copy to make them look more like the final product you can identify which modules are repeated and standardize them to reduce cost and the and the effort required to develop and manage them later and you can then transfer those wireframe frames into your design team to begin the building out of the design system that will power your site typically beginning with the smaller and more granular components such as your typo your button stars and your colors and then building up to the modules you've described in wireframe frames to be able to build the templates and the pages that make up your site with modern cms being construct to the way they are if you were to go straight into design without the wire step you run the risk of hamper and limiting your ability to be creative and to create a unique and memorable website out of reusable building blocks the end result is more likely to be block and determined by the template or theme or framework that begins the design process by going through the wire framing step first you are able to harness the advantages that come with a modular cms the the advantages of edit eligibility usability and performance but also maximize the creativity that you apply to those modules by looking at them in a holistic fashion and deciding what they look like ahead of time in the design process the wire framing step helps to both harness the power and potential of modern cms but also overcomes some of their flaws and limitations in terms of having like a block end result because of a template approach to design development wireframe step helps you get out of those template look and feel websites and into something that's truly uniquely yours and memorable whether you do mobile wire frames or even tablet in addition to desktop wireframe frames depends somewhat on your primary audience your objectives and the team that you have at your disposal really means reacting gracefully to the limited size of the mobile device and a lot of the work that's done at the desktop informs that process competent website designers can usually produce very very effective mobile versions of websites from a desktop wireframe because the decisions about how to respond to the smaller screen size are rooted often in in best practice that they'll have well developed if your design resources and development resources are not as knowledgeable or skilled about the constraints of mobile or about your audiences you know device use or or characteristics then you might find it advantageous to produce at least a mobile wireframe alongside the desktop version so that those decisions are explicitly made for them and you're not leaving it to chance but you know at the end of the day in b2b an awful lot of our decisions are being made purchase decisions will being made on the desktop version of our website so it's key that that is wire framed first and has our attention on it the mobile version can be driven by that desktop design to a to a great deal to a great degree and there's only certain places on that design where you'll have to make conscious decisions about how to deviate from the desktop layout in most cases one of the biggest mistakes that we see made in the wire step is not taking the opportunity that it presents to harmon and standardize your use of modules across your website as i've said modern cms are all modular these days meaning every page you see is built from pre existing modules if every single module you create during your wireframe step is an original creation not seen before on any page and completely unique you're simply increasing the cost it will take to design and develop that website and the complexity of managing and editing it later taking a holistic approach to both the wire framing step and the design allows you to be creative while still having a high degree of usability in your modules which is the best way to ensure the cost of the project is attractive performance of the code is is in line with your requirements and that your team are able to manage the website with ease without going back to developers or back to the wire framing step later on take this opportunity to standardize and harmon your modules while retaining your unique design and you'll get the most benefit out of your wire step other mistakes include going beyond the low fidelity level that wireframe frames require and benefit from and trying to get too close to your final design this is not the opportunity or need time to think about the real images or even the real copy to some extent you're focusing on user experience communication of content message and effective and efficient design and development so keep definition low keep fidelity low keep it simple but do mark up and annotate your designs so that the rest of your team can understand the decision making and the thoughts that have gone into the wireframe frames that you present them your decisions may not be obvious or clear just by looking at a you know a a black and white image of what you expect to see on the website so annotations and notes for your team are really valuable

good b website ux is boring what do we mean by that and how does it impact our ability to be creative and exciting when communicating our offering that's what we're gonna be talking about today on websites decode the purpose of a b website is to turn interest into opportunity to take visitors who arrive at the website via whatever channel that you've used to drive the traffic to it take them on a journey through information that they seek a need and convert them into a high intent lead or in your pipeline in order to achieve that while your brand and your design needs to be memorable unique and exciting the user experience the way information is presented the way buyers interact with your website how navigation works and where things are located should be familiar intuitive and conventional to sum that may sound boring but boring ux is good ux because you want your buyer to be able to it's instinctively you navigate your website find what they're looking for and complete their objective for being there not spend time trying to figure out creative approaches to navigation content presentation layout or get past irritating scroll jacking animations movement and information that isn't related to their aims for being there this podcast is brought to you by blend the website agency your website is your most valuable marketing asset and so it's crucial that you get it right we're the specialist hubspot website agency helping businesses create effective scalable websites that drive real results see examples of our work and the impact we've delivered for businesses just like yours at b b b dot com creativity is a vital element of b b website design and development and every website should be a unique representation of brand values a compelling communication of features benefits in usps but within a rapper that is logical and familiar to the buyer so that they can access it una aided un guided and not run out of patients with the experience the worst thing that you can do in b b website design is present something that is so novel and unique and challenging to a buyer to interact with that they give up and go away to find another website that they understand this is critical when you think about how and where to place navigation and how big that navigation is berg menus are fantastic on mobile but please don't put them on your desktop website layout buyers need instant access to the critical navigational all pillars of your website so that they can get on with the work of finding out what you offer and if it meets their needs massive mega menus on your desktop website are not gonna help buyers find more of your information they'll create choice paralysis and deter people from using them at all if you're lucky they'll look for other links on the page they're on but in many cases they'll just give up and go away so you want your navigation your layout your presentation to be simple and familiar and what they expect within those boundaries you can and should create a beautiful website experience that is completely stand out and unlike anything they've seen before your brand brought to life your values communicated and you're offering shown in the best possible light use great product imagery if you're selling software supporting imagery is fantastic too but don't get drawn into creative abstract expression if it doesn't support the information you're communicating animation is a positive too used with care but again don't go overboard animation can so easily distract the mind and the eye from what's be important about the page that a visitor is on so use it to support your message to communicate your offering and to aid the buyer not to be the focus of their attention or yours when you're looking at your website or building it in the first place your user experience should be boring it should be familiar it should be expected if you want buyers to be able to easily take their journey from the first point of arrival through the information that's critical to them to a conversion point that appeals and into your pipeline the reason website ux goes off the hours so often is because the inputs and outputs of the process are not optimized for the producing the right results many website projects are not the product of a sound strategy rooted in keyword position traffic sources and and volumes user behavior through heat maps and session recordings you know interviews with users or critical analysis of what buyers want and do on websites in reality they're not used to inform the design and development process in many cases whereas if you start by assembling that information you can build a website you can design a website around your buyers needs and behaviors fully and be be sure that your ux is aligned to their requirements from your website and not your own wishes for it in addition if you're only measuring website kpis like time on the page bounce rate etcetera then you might be misinformed as to what's important whereas if you look at the conversion rate into high intent leads the quality of those leads in conjunction with those user behavior analytics and and and data sources then you can inform the user experience of your website and ensure it's aligned to what creates pipeline for your business and not profile of the many pitfalls that exist to be creative in the area of ux and retain that creativity for the design of that website want applied to that ux boring ux isn't ugly it doesn't mean your website can't look good just the opposite it means that the experience is familiar and intuitive and easy but your website can still look amazing if you take care to optimize the ux for the journey and the design for your brand get your ux right by sticking to the basics stick to the principles researched and communicated by nielsen norman and others and given to you by the user data that you can obtain from heat maps recordings and your marketing analytics systems then apply creativity to it to bring your brand and your proposition to life in a unique memorable way make it easy then make it beautiful

today i'm talking about the risks of overdo the removal of friction from your b2b website this is just one of many things that marketers can take too far for example replacing forms with diary embed and chat widgets in the hopes that they'll improve their business impacts when in reality it can have the opposite effect today we're gonna explore what friction is what the good and bad forms of friction are and why you might want to take a different approach to introducing some friction to your website's user experience if you wanna grow pipeline and business impact in website terms friction is anything that makes it harder for your buyer to achieve their aims for being on your website and for you to achieve the outcomes that you want from their visits so in the majority of b2b cases that's going to be a buyer coming to your website and being able to easily learn about and understand your offering and in terms of a marketers goals it's going be for the the buyer to convert and express their interest or their intent in that solution removing friction from the buyer experience is good advice because anything that you can do to make it more intuitive and easy for a buyer to explore and discover the content that's on your site will make it easier for them to understand your offering and anything that you can do to make it easier to enter your pipeline will improve the conversion rate that you see and the opportunities that you can generate but like all good advice marketers have a tendency to take things too far at times and can take steps to remove friction that go beyond making it easier for a buyer to complete their objective and actually can harm the overall business impact that the website has this podcast is brought to you by blend the hubspot website agency website is your most valuable marketing asset and so it's crucial that you get it right we're the specialist hubspot website agency helping businesses create effective scalable websites that drive real results see examples of our work and the impact we've delivered for businesses just like yours a b b dot com removing friction by making your user experience more familiar intuitive and easy to understand making navigation simpler easier to operate and easier to digest presenting content in a logical order a logical format that's familiar and consistent with buyers experiences on other websites are all good things to do in the pursuits of improved website performance but removing friction can go too far and where marketers become obsessed with the removal of friction from their website user experience they can end up harming their own results and it's rooted in the mindset and the measurement that marketers are using to inform their approach to their website yet again we see that when marketing is measured in isolation around impressions visits clicks times on pages bounce rate and not in terms of pipeline marketers can get distracted from the goal and optimize around the wrong things some common examples of how we see this taking shape are marketers will look at their bottom of the funnel conversion page and say well if i remove this form and i replace it with a diary embed where a visitor can book time in the in the diary of a sales rep directly then i'm making it easier for them to enter our pipeline i'm reducing friction from the process likewise shrinking forms down so they only capture minimal information before buyers take up valuable time and resources within your organization or replacing forms altogether with chat engines in the hope that by removing the friction as much as possible you're gonna increase the business impact in the business results you have are all examples of good advice being taken too far and applied incorrectly in the majority of cases some positive friction where buyers are required to put in a degree of effort overcome some small obstacles in order to become an opportunity in your pipeline take time in your people's diaries consume your resources in many cases it's a good thing for b b websites to require anything that can potentially increase the quantity of conversions at the bottom of your funnel for example allowing people to book time and diaries directly use chat rather than fill in inform fields and not educate themselves on your offering before they do so we're more likely negatively impact quality before it impacts quantity positively and that decrease in quality has significant consequences when you look at the quality of opportunities that are generated the win rate the value the time to close and all the things that actually matter when it comes to pipeline and revenue generation so by removing friction from the conversion process by making it as easy as possible for visitors to your website any visitor to your website to pass through the bottom of the funnel and consume resources from your sales function you're actually potentially making matters worse for your business rather than better form feels served to encourage buyers and visitors to qualify themselves more properly before they enter your crm before they enter your pipeline you gather information which tells them and you whether they they're likely to be a good fit for what you offer or it's gonna be a harder sell process and structure around the conversion process creates an expectation that there will be a systematic and a and a professional process of handling their inquiry whereas a free flowing free form conversion process where they can say anything and they can get time with anybody doesn't necessarily build an expectation that it's gonna be a professional process that's well run and deserves proper time consideration and merits all these things contribute together to create higher value opportunities as opposed to lower value conversions at higher quantities it's not just the bottom of the funnel conversion point where the removal of friction can go too far marketers can have a tendency to apply this to other parts of the website too all with good intention to make the experience better and easier for their buyer but slightly misguided because they're not necessarily looking at the right measurements in kpis where we see this taking effect is for example in call to action language before you get people to your conversion pack it's tempting to make the language of a call to action friend more welcoming for example get started learn more take the next step as opposed to being specific and honest about what is behind that call to action a conversation with sales a trial of a software or a demo buyers actually appreciate the honesty and the specificity around those calls to action and they and they result in increased click through rates and conversion rates unlike the softer and more welcoming language that represents lower friction in the minded of marketers such as get started as i've already mentioned this is an issue where marketers have the right intentions but the wrong measurement if they're measuring their success and their impact in terms of the quality of the pipeline they generate the ability of the sales team to close it the win rates on the opportunities created then it helps to inform a different approach to the removal of friction from the website that's focused on the right outcomes reducing the quality of conversions by reducing friction to the bare minimum isn't necessarily a good think for your sales team or for your business having an element of strategic or positive friction in that buyer journey can help to ensure that while you maximize quantity of conversions you also maintain the quality levels anything that's too easy can have the effect of reducing the perceived value around it serious buyers expect to go to some effort in order to identify the best solutions for them and in order to obtain the time and the resources of viable providers of the solutions their problems make it too easy and you undermine the value of your offering whereas if you put a little bit of positive friction into that process you ensure that buyers feel like they're being valued when they convert and take up your time and that they are putting in enough effort to make it worth their while too things that are free are often seen as being low value whereas things that cost us a higher amount are perceived as higher value a simple psychological process from b2c markets some of which applies here too zero effort required to convert low low value applied to the solution put some effort in you're more likely to think the solution is higher value so marketers need to find the right balance friction does need to be removed from the website user experience to make it intuitive familiar and easy for buyers to do what they want to do but when it comes to converting those buyers into pipeline into leads and into opportunities an element of friction is a good thing positive friction is a benefit to you in your business because it it'll ensure that you maintain the quality of your conversions whilst you do other things to increase the quantity of conversions coming through your website if you want to reintroduce some positive friction into your site having gone to the extent of removing forms in play in favor of chat widgets or diary embed the solution is relatively simple go back some of the way that you've come for example ask buyers to fill in a form by capturing key qualifying information before you present the diary embed that way you're creating the structured process that you both benefit from but making it easy for your buyer to achieve their goals names two balance is the key look at your website's lead generation function and how it contributes to pipeline generation and close one revenue what are the value of the deals created what are the win rates how effective our sales at following up with the types of leads that you generate and use those insights to inform your approach to website optimization not marketing measurements in isolation

nearly all marketers are asking themselves what the future of seo is given the changes that we're seeing disrupting the search landscape almost daily at the moment no doubt they'll be asking themselves if seo still matters is it important to a b2b business wants to grow pipeline you know how is it changing does it work do i need to do it and all those sorts things and there's a lot to discuss because there's a lot of factors playing into it at the same time this podcast is brought to you by blend this the hubspot website agency your website is your most valuable marketing asset and so it's crucial that you get it right we're the specialist hubspot website agency helping businesses create effective scalable websites that drive real results see examples of our work and the impact we've delivered for businesses just like yours at b b dot com the you know the headline is that seo is still important and very powerful and can be very effective but the how and the why and the what you should do is changing as the landscape is changing around it so for a while now we've already been seeing the change in buyer behavior their attention and the way that they do research into b2b categories and sectors has been has been moving and ultimately some of that has been moving away from search to social to the consumption of content that is native to social optimized for social and before they even turn to search as a channel so because search had becomes somewhat saturated buyers have started to spend more and more time forming opinions based on content that they consume organically in places like linkedin reddit and some other social platforms video has been on the rise in those platforms where it plays really well to the mindset of the buyer when they're there and they only come to search later in the research process when they're ready to really dig deep into a you know problem they have or a set of solutions that they're already aware of so the role of search in the b brian process is already changing and some degree condensing now we're seeing the very rapid rise of ai generated answers you know taking lots and lots of visits away from informational search terms so not only were so buyers spending more time elsewhere searching less when they do go to google and they do search for informational queries they're gonna get ag generated answers and those answers are taking eyeballs away from the content the businesses would typically publish historically to improve their seo and by improve seo i mean to acquire organic search traffic around long tail queries and keywords so it's changing rapidly so with ai answers taking away the buyer's eyeballs from your informational or content the question becomes well why publish it at all and what's interesting i think is the fact that increasingly the use of search is becoming commercially driven and so in order to arrive at the websites of vendors that they've already identified people with solutions to the problems they identified buyers are still using commercial search terms to navigate to those destinations so search still matters plays a role but not the informational content in the same way that we were used to but the commercial keyword can drive visitors to our website when they're ready to buy now having a commercial keyword strategy which is an element of seo is still critical because you still want to be found for the right terms in the right results but how you improve your position there is still one of the advantages of creating informational content at this point in time so publishing blog posts writing pillar pages creating content clusters is still an effective way to create topical authority on keywords that improve your position for commercial keywords too you're just not gonna get as many buyers visiting those pieces of content so i think the takeaway here is that it's not it's more important now than ever to set your expectations around what that content needs to look like sound like read like in order to perform its job it's not gonna be visited by the same volumes of people as it was before and it's gonna be competing with a lot more content at the same time as brands everywhere start to harness and embrace ai to create content at volume so although buyers aren't visiting informational content in the same numbers as they were it's still an effective way to make sure that your positioned well for commercial keywords thus i think it's important to properly set or expectations around how polished how unique how branded how special our blog content or informational content needs to be in fact i've always argued that it doesn't have to have the same level of finesse as our website content or as the glossy content that we would put out at events or you know in in other areas and it's a mistake for brands to take it too seriously when it comes to communicating there expertise their credibility their knowledge of a subject which should really be done in a very straightforward manner to educate and demonstrate what you know there's no need to actually spend a long long time making your blog posts a component of your brand per s and that's why that business has have wasted a lot of time doing that over the years now the focus is on creating quality content quickly so that it can compete with the amount of content being generated by others using ai it can be used to train and form and be cited by ai generated answers when it when it's appropriate to do so and it can improve our position for commercial keywords the key therefore is to creating efficient ways to create quality content within this landscape one of the best being to record long form video with your subject matter experts and use that to fuel your content creation process efficiently and to the right level of finish and polish and finesse i think businesses have got a short period of time in which this strategy can have very positive of impact on their results and they need to act while it lasts because the trends that are taking shape where ai is answering more of our questions buyer attention is drifting to other places behavior in the buying process is changing means that there isn't a endless timeline in which this approach to seo makes sense and therefore businesses that are doing seo or want to use seo need to act on this now in order to capitalize now seo is still a broad umbrella for other things and one of which is the technical on page seo that we think about when we're optimizing our website and one of the big factors in that is user experience page speed and core web vitals so if you consider those things seo they're all still very valuable a site that is quick to load responsive and has a very intuitive familiar and effective user experience is a great asset to a business when buyers arrive as a result of commercial keyword search or any other channel so seo in its many different guise is still important can still have a very positive impact but there's a lot of very rapid change taking place that mean we can't guarantee that anything that works now will work in the same way in five years but there's an opportunity at this point in time let's not forget to to the best of our knowledge currently the best approach to being known by l m's being cited by l m's when people search for using them you know being referenced by them looks a lot like good traditional seo quality content well linked well optimized around topics that you have you know expertise in and i think a lot of people are maybe calling it too soon in terms of truly understanding how these l are going to evolve over time you know ultimately they're all being trained on different cadences and in different ways and they search and reference the web at different times and in different ways but at this point in time we don't have a better sense of how to be found and reference than to take an seo approach to content creation around your areas of expertise so seo can still benefit you in an ai generation because it could be the key to being found when users use ai to search

to answer the question if mobile first design is a sound approach to b2b website design you've gotta look at who's accessing your website for what reason and what their behavior is like so mobile first design obviously became very popular buzz word when google announced that it was changing its index to use mobile sites first and foremost when determining positions so of course mobile is important and we can't ignore it but you've also got to look more broadly at what your website aims to do what the objective of your website is and what buyers will typically do when they're visiting it from desktop or mobile and the truth is that to go all in on mobile first design where you design the mobile experience first and before anything else and you optimize every aspect of it for mobile is potentially putting too much of your budget in one place when you've got other considerations to take care of this podcast is brought to you by blend the hubspot website agency your website is your most valuable marketing asset and so it's crucial that you get it right we're the specialist hubspot website agency helping businesses create effective scalable websites that drive real results see examples of our work and the impact we've delivered for businesses just like yours at b b b dot com so what are the positives of the mobile first approach well speed ultimately and there's no denying that a fast responsive website that loads quickly is an asset to any business and taking a mobile first or a mobile compatible approach is one good way to ensure that you're in the right area when it comes to website performance and speed but the reality is that in the majority of b to b sectors in the majority of you know moderately complex b sales the vast majority of purchase decisions and in debt research processes will take place on a desktop machine or a laptop more specifically meaning that the landscape presentation of your information is as important if not more important than how it looks on a mobile screen when it comes to generating pipeline and revenue so clearly putting all of your efforts all of your budget into a totally optimized mobile first design runs the risk of impair the performance of your desktop website when buyers are making decisions so the best approach is to take a balanced approach ultimately and that is to consider your mobile website experience at the same time as designing the desktop one so we would always encourage people to design for just desktop first and understand what information you wanna present what buyers need to know about your product or offering before they make a purchase decision but also look carefully at how that information gracefully responds to the mobile view port so that nothing important is hidden it's nothing important breaks when visitors do visit it on mobile or when google looks at on mobile and by taking that balanced approach you can absolutely make your investment work the hardest for you and balance the benefits of both a fast mobile compatible website that ensures you rank well and loads fast and gives a positive user experience and that no critical information is hidden from a mobile visitor but then when buyers do come to your website on their desktop to look really closely at what you're offer to make a purchase decision you've got an experience that's optimized and aligned to their requirements when they do that so mobile first not necessarily mobile compatible absolutely another risk associated with taking the mobile first approach is that your user experience your navigational approaches on desktop start to take elements of mobile design into them and this is well known to be like counterproductive so burger menus you know collapsed hidden expanding menus which are absolutely necessary on mobile are a terrible idea on desktop they're they're proven again and again to hide critical information behind more clicks than is necessary and to reduce the frequency with which buyers see those links visit those pages and consume the content that they hold which ultimately decreases your conversion rate into high intent leads pipeline and revenue at the end of the day so there's a number of mobile first design practices which are applied to your desktop are gonna harm rather than improve your performance hence it's really important to consider both desktop and mobile pretty equally in b2b settings if you're in any doubt about this take a look at your analytical data to understand where your visitors are coming from no doubt you'll have a high volume of mobile visits to your website you know buyers are clicking links taking emails searching on mobile and visiting sites every day but in the majority of cases in b markets you will see an equally high number of desktop visitors and in the majority of cases it'll be those desktop sessions that produce pipeline and revenue more so than the mobile sessions so it's really important to look at your own internet data understand your visitors and optimize for what they do on your website not for a global recommendation to take a mobile first approach so if you're approached with a request to make your b website mobile first to design a site with a mobile first approach the response should be that that's a risk that that that could harm pipeline generation rather than improve it a responsive approach to design that caters to all screen sizes relatively well with special care taken to the desktop resolutions and the mobile resolutions is the best way to balance the benefits of both and make sure that you're optimizing for the buyers that really do become pipeline use data to back up and reinforce that recommendation because you should be able to clearly see that desktop buyers are critical to your pipeline generation and need to be considered carefully alongside those mobile visitors

when it comes to b website design it's so easy to get caught up in the trends of the day and think that their application is the best thing that you can possibly do to create a you know novel exciting fresh experience for for visitors and buyers but beware the vast majority of web trends are not aligned to or designed to improve your business outcomes from your website they don't create a more effective user experience that turns more of your visitors into high ten leads so take caution use caution when it comes to implementing new trends on your website here are some things to avoid in particular because they are not aligned to the ultimate outcome that you seek they're more likely to create interesting friction which will not produce pipeline if applied to your website this podcast is brought to you by blend the hubspot website agency your website is your most valuable marketing asset and so it's crucial that you get it right where the specialist hubspot website agency helping businesses create effective scalable websites that drive real results see examples of our work and the impact we've delivered for businesses just like yours at b b b dot com so things like para scrolling scroll jacking custom curse all things that are really quite easy to implement give us a nice novel feeling when we see them but in reality they are just so opposed to the purpose of having a b website and the task completion of buyers when they're on your website that you want them to take and complete i e become a high intent lead go into your pipeline and ultimately buy from you changing the way that your visitors browser behaves in a in in ways that deviate from all the other websites that they visit is not gonna create deeper connection deeper affinity better trust with your brand it's simply going to irritate so resist the urge to implement any of those you know flashy but counterproductive web development design trends similarly you know there are best practices and there are conventions around navigation that just makes sense to adopt and stick to because they consistently produce the best user experience and the best results and the best outcomes novel approaches to website and navigation are not the sort of thing that you wanna be implementing in your b website unless they are widely adopted on desktop horizontal navigation with dropdown downs or simple mega menus will always produce the best customer experience the best journey and the highest conversion rate navigation that's on the left hand side stuck to the bottom of your screen fills the screen when you click on it all these things are just gonna create an uni intuitive unfamiliar experience for buyers that will ultimately decrease your conversion rate so stick to traditional navigation and don't experiment in that area dark mode is another sort of sounds nice seems nice feels nice but in reality is a good way to invest a lot of time and money creating something which isn't aligned to the core outcomes the core kpis you have for your b websites so we've noticed that in general dark mode websites or websites that are dark don't seem to have the same efficiency of converting visitors into leads as standard typical light mode website white text on dark background is not easier to read it has to be at such a large font to retain the clarity and the readability that it really fundamentally changes your approach to your website and unless you adopt and implement that change throughout putting your website into a dark mode or using a dark design is gonna make your website harder to read and consume for the majority of users who are on desktops in light environments now i think there are edge cases here where developer audiences and certain applications may have a a a reason and a need and a and a good a good reason to have a dark mode or a dark website but for the majority of businesses when it comes to communicating your proposition effectively generating pipeline for your business a dark mode website is not gonna help you achieve that and therefore putting a toggle or having your your website permanently in the entire mode is not gonna be the thing that produces better results for you one type of trend that some people will love and embrace and others will try to sort of debunk are the general sort of design trends of flat versus realistic versus sc morph etcetera etcetera etcetera i think in this day and age those sorts of things are all fair game it's up to you entirely how you present your information in a creative design manner i don't think that it's necessary to follow a trend or a pack in terms of adopting sc morph versus flat and there was a time when there was a clear preference among visitors and buyers for one type or another of these models but now we're so familiar with the web we're so comfortable using it and we've got so many different devices and experiences in our lives but i think visitors can get on with any approach to your brand that you like so those sorts of trends for design approaches are no longer ones that you need to worry about adopting or not you can stick to your guns in terms of how your brand is brand is best represented

understanding how visitors to your website read matters because it's an incredibly important component of the overall user experience that you need to create in order to have a positive effect give a quality experience and ultimately achieve your aims for the website by helping your visitors achieve their aims for it now the early internet gave rise to two very predominant reading patterns that have lasted for a long long time namely and particularly scanning and skimming as opposed to reading every single word individually and the f shaped reading pattern the scanning and skimming behavior has remained consistent even to today and the f shaped reading pattern applied for a very long time because it was reflecting how the pre how the majority of website content was presented this podcast is brought to you by blend the hubspot website agency your website is your most valuable marketing asset and so it's crucial that you get it right we're the specialist hubspot website agency helping businesses create effective scalable websites that drive real results see examples of our work and the impact we've delivered for businesses just like yours at b b dot com now it should come as no surprise that anything that it oc the human attention human consciousness as much as the website as the web does it will start to form a sort of s relationship with human behavior if enough people start presenting content in a certain way then human behavior when consuming that content will over time evolve to adapt to it so the early internet unlocked huge amounts of content and information so much so that visitors could not possibly read it all in the time they had available so they developed methods of skimming and scanning the content to find what was interesting important and relevant to them the majority of content was presented in top to bottom left to right format and so they started to scan the headline read it sort of most intently more carefully then sort of start to move down the lines quicker read a few of the words in give up move further down and sort of by the time you're a third of the way down the page readers are really flying down the rows of text looking for things that stand out as interesting and of course we as web developers web designers businesses we started to lean into that we started to prioritize important content at the top of the page we used headlines and subheadings to catch their attention and direct them to the most important pieces of text but no matter what we did we couldn't get users to read every single word in long pieces or passages of text and that's still true today so the overriding principle to adopt is one of precision because visitors to your website don't have the time to digest lots and lots of words in in sequence and they're gonna be looking for standout words that relate to their area of interest they're challenge their topic and they're gonna use those to hone in on the bits that are important and amounts to them so short passages of text with clear headlines are best aligned to the behavior of buyers on your website today now as i mentioned behavior and the web have evolved hand in hand so nielsen norman who are the authority on these kind of subjects and do the most research and testing and worthy the original identifier of the f shaped pattern and the skimming behavior have recently updated their research in in recent years on this subject and have pointed out the fact that new reading patterns have emerged in response to new conventions in web content one of them is the lawn moa pattern where modern websites that are built for responsive devices increasingly started to use card based layouts and image alongside text compositions and readers have adapted so now what we find on a typical modern website is that readers will still skim the majority of their attention will go on the entry or the the the top most headings after that they will start to move down in row and go backwards and forwards across the page sort of ultimately and this appears to be driven by the pre predominant of alternating image and text positions down the page so you'll typically have an image on the left copy on the right and then the reverse image on the right copy on the left so users are now reading in this f shaped pattern in this cell lawn pattern and skimming and scanning for interesting content something that i noticed that wasn't called out by nielsen in their research was that it appeared in the example site they used that at the beginning of the page reader his eyes were drawn predominantly to the images first and then the text alongside them but after they done that a couple of times after they a little way into the page they almost stopped looking at images altogether and their gaze was firmly on the copy further down the page so as with the importance of placing the the most important information at the top of the page it would appear but it's sensible to place the most important images at the top of the page as well as buyers readers will start to sort of ignore them the further they get into your content so there's ways to optimize the lawn mower approach to the reading behavior in your visuals and your copy too other reading patterns have emerged to in response to other very very common presentations of information search results being the the stand example where the reading pattern is completely hap hazard and the reader gaze goes all over the page in no predictable manner but that's very specific to search engine results and doesn't really apply to your website for your website stick with the concepts of presenting the first the the most the the most important information first both in terms of most important messages words headlines and images and leaning into the lawn mower model of reading behavior to make sure that your webpage copy is easily digested by the visitor and doesn't you know course friction when it comes to their enjoyment and consumption of your content

when it comes to how long a b website redesign take there's obviously no one answer there's a huge number of variables that impact how long any project of that kind should take could take and will take and there's a huge range of scales and scope of project which also obviously naturally affect the duration of that project and there's a huge range of approaches you can take and levels of polish that you can aim for and sophistication and complexity so there's just masses of variables affecting how long b to website redesigned take at the end of the day but everybody wants to know when going into a project how long it they should allow for it how a long long they should therefore budget for it and they wanna know what it's gonna take so while i can't answer the question in any definitive way there are nevertheless some rules of thumb that i think apply and certainly apply over the many many websites that we've designed to develop and written here at blend this podcast is brought you by blend the hubspot website agency your website is your most valuable marketing asset and so it's crucial that you get it right where the specialist hubspot website agency helping businesses create effective scalable websites that drive real results see examples of our work and the impact we've delivered for businesses just like yours at b b b dot com some of the things that i think people should think about therefore are before you get into the production of the website what are the pre project steps that you need to do and the one that i think deserves four to six weeks as a minimum is the strategy and branding exercise the processes that can to some degree run in parallel hence why i say only four to six weeks although they are quite large endeavors and these are the processes of a ensuring that you've got a sound strategy for the website that you're going to invest in building and by strategy i mean you know the structure the information architecture the content you want to present the customer journey you want to facilitate the the the the the keyword strategy behind that structure the organization of all the information which determines the size of the website but more importantly it determines how buyers find and travel through and convert on your website because you think in advance about all of those factors doing that taking that step actually increases the likelihood that you'll see real roi from that project so while it might sound like an additional cost in an additional time it's hugely beneficial while that's happening you can of course be looking at the suit of your brand your brand assets your brand guidelines for application to the web so the reality is that while a lot of brand work is very very high quality and and in great shape it often lacks thought about web application in terms of large scale deployment across multiple pages how to use icon how to use photography how to use illustration web accessibility etcetera etcetera so there's normally work required on the brand no matter what and it might go further you might want to expand explore or elevate that brand prior to going into your website project now i don't think four to six weeks is enough for all types of branding projects a re brand will take longer but if you're just refining what you've got prior to investing in a website then i would say you can get that in four to six weeks now you're at the point where you might be able to start your website project how long will it take but again there's no one answer to that question but the rule of thumb that i go by is that no good website project should be completed in less than three months and no website project regardless of size should have to go beyond six months those are my rules of thumb now there are scope of project particularly where there are massive population tasks on you know thousands of pages where you might go beyond that timescale scale but in many cases it's possible to cap it around that point and i'll explain why when you go about your website project the first three months are necessary to build out all the foundational elements that are required to power the modular implementation on your cms that gives you the website you need now and the you need in the future you've got to therefore right copy to inform the creation of wireframe frames page designs and modules and copy creation is a time consuming task as we all know you've got to design the foundations of your website you've got to design typo you've got to design navigation global styles form fields buttons text images icons you've got to design the assets that build up your website from the ground and then you've got to combine those assets into key pages to define the modules that you require this is all gonna take weeks and when you factor in the review process it's gonna take months so by this end of a three month period of time i'm unusually confident that we can be in the position where we've got the foundations designed we've got the key pages we call them first of type here at blend we've got the key pages of the website designed and they're being reviewed or they have been reviewed once that's complete you can ship that information to to to development who can then start working on coding the implementation of that while you as a copy and design team start to work on the rest of the site so for a small site the pages that are required to build a ten or a twenty page website can usually be written designed developed and populated within that three month window maybe four if it's a slightly bigger website now by the time you get to websites that are hundreds or thousands of pages the time scale needed to complete those websites isn't typically linear as in it doesn't take three months to do the first twenty pages and the second twenty pages and the third twenty pages when you get into hundreds of pages there's usually far more reuse of layouts far more reuse of presentation far more migration than rei imagining of either the copy or how it's presented meaning those higher page counts become a lot more efficient to move over in some cases you can automate migration in other cases it's a a population task that could be distributed and spread out across multiple team members efficiently and therefore completed more quickly so my rule of thumb is that a good website project should take three months a big website project is usually possible within six months but allow yourself that extra month at the start to tackle the key matters of brand and strategy readiness the the things that most frequently impact timescale scales after comme a project positively or negatively tend to be the same across projects you know classic ones are one new stakeholders entering the process midway through the problem for those stakeholders is they haven't been part of the conversation the decision making process the consensus building up to the point at which asked to review something it's fairly understandable that they're gonna find challenge or something to say about the work they're presented with when they haven't had the benefit of being part of that journey up to that point the problem is that their involvement usually only has one impact and that's to elon the process while you address their new point of view their new perspective their new involvement in the project you know and it's it's usually a very real involvement so to to turn that into a positive what what you want to do is introduce all stakeholders at the beginning of process so that they can enjoy the journey with you and they can make decisions at the right time another challenge that occurs that most often will affect negatively the timescale really comes from a misunderstanding or a lack understanding of understanding of how modern websites are built and the simplest way to say this is that when changes to copy or design are requested during the development stage the opportune moment is passed by the time you're in development you need copy and design to be approved you need copy and design to be fixed as much as possible a developer doesn't have the skill set to go back and modify design or copy fairly obvious and yet it's common it's common to sit to see feedback relating to previous stages of the creation process at the stage after where it would have been helpful so as much as possible if you wanna if you want to optimize your project timeline minimize your you know time to launch then you need to be really clear what you're reviewing and when and get all feedback on it at that phase because in the next phase any changes to earlier steps will cost you double effectively because it will require some undoing or duplication of work that's already been committed in that follow on stage while you address and implement changes in the earlier step so you can really you can really optimize your project timeline if you get your feedback in at the right phase of the project the issue with copy is that copy doesn't benefit from any economies of scale it's time consuming to create good copy compelling concise copy that communicates something complex with you know an engaging style that's on brand on tone and effective this is a real skill and you need to give copy the time it requires and deserves now website projects will often be divided between an agency delivering design and development and a client producing their own copy usually that's a product of cost but it might might also be rooted in understanding the subject matter the material preference resource in house the benefit of working with an agency on the copy aspect for your website is that they will have a team and processes that enable them to deliver it in a timely fashion that aligns with the rest of your project now in the majority of cases your website project timeline will have been based on those kind of best case optimistic delivery dates and a client's own ability to meet those is often quite challenging quite hard meaning they unfortunately inadvertently impact their own project timescale scale by not being able to deliver copy at the same velocity so there's a benefit to you partnering with your agency over copy creation not only for reasons of quality and effectiveness but also for the overall time and cost of your project and time to value you know time to launch and time to when that website can start to drive pipeline for you a word of advice for people who are considering website projects in the near future if possible don't set the end date before you figured out what's required how big it is what's included how complicated it is who you're gonna work with and when the start date is too often website projects come and undone and corners get cut because a very tight deadline is set before the plan is even in place for how to deliver it so that like word of warning word of advice try not to commission website projects when the deadlines already breathing down your neck and carved stone in those situations consider other approaches to consider to achieving your aims and goals it's not uncommon for website projects to be tied to industry events to be tied to business calendar dates and other things that are not either a directly connected or correlated to the purpose of the website or be important in a multi year view during which your website will be live every day helping buyers to decide to buy from you this year next year maybe two or three years from now so making life are unnecessarily hard for yourselves in terms of delivering the project that you aspire to deliver with a deadline now when it's gonna be low for that long period of time is worth considering