Why Your Website Matters More Than Ever

Welcome to Make Good Things Happen, a podcast for makers in business presented to you by Angela Dalton and Renee Baker. Welcome to Make Good Things Happen, season three, episode two. My name is Angela Dalton and joining me is Renee Baker. As always, how are you, Renee? I’m good. How are you? Yeah, I’m not too bad. I’m a busy bee lately, but I’m good.
We have been. We’ll get into that, won’t we, a little bit? We will. I think, yeah, we’ll talk a little bit about some of the stuff I’ve been doing and share some tips. We both wanted to start by saying a huge thank you to all of you who provided us with feedback about our first episode.
I think you’re equally chuffed, Renee. It’s still a shock when people say they listen, which is awesome. But yeah, we had our first episode back for season three and we had a slightly different approach because we wanted to share a little bit more about our personal story at the moment and what we’re going through. And so if you want to hear that, please go back and listen. If you haven’t already, we are sort of jumping back into regular programming this episode, but we probably will from time to time still share a little bit more.
personal just because of the response we had which was so positive so thank you for that um it just helps us to guide our future episode planning yeah and it also makes us feel incredibly well supported too by you and we’re grateful for that as well and also thank you for doing it publicly like that is a huge support to us because you’re helping us get the story of this out there as well so we appreciate it so based on that
positive response and some of the feedback that we’ve been getting anecdotally as well we’re going to introduce a segment where we do provide a little bit more educational content that’s kind of what we’re usually known for and also it’s kind of something that we feel is important now everybody’s having a pretty hard time and we just want to make sure everyone’s doing things sensibly so that they’re in a position where they can feel
sustainable in the long term we did have a different type of topic coverage for this segment that we called making good things happen previously but we’re switching it up we’re using the making good things happen
name for this segment where we do indeed help you make good things happen by providing that educational content to support you on your business journey because we do know how difficult it is and we also know it’s it’s a tough climate out there right now. Yes and I mean this is something that we’ve like you said already have been providing through Make Good Things Happen for the last five years and even prior to that through Dalton Baker Productions and so if you have
If you haven’t been on the Make Good Things Happen website, there is a large blog available that is free that includes lots of amazing resources, articles, links, step-by-step instructions in some cases, free checklists in others. And of course, if you’re a member of our Make Good Things Happen community, you get even more content with that, or I should say supporting content with that through videos, maker sessions, which are like one hour length.
webinars and little bite-sized videos and things like that we do have all that there but one of the things that we’ve both also found is that hearing this information in a different format can be really helpful as well because i know for myself i’ve been listening to so many more podcasts now almost as like the antidote to social media off the back of our chat last episode and so i just really am loving the podcasting format if we can bring a little bit of education through this channel to you as well we hope that is helpful and so for this
first segment this week Angela you actually presented a workshop as part of the Ballarat Craft and Design Week practitioner training and as always when you’re presenting workshops you’re obviously digging into the material and creating resources and so on and you’re reminded of things that are really helpful that we sort of sometimes just forget to share and so I thought that would be a good opportunity for you perhaps there’s a couple of things that might be top of your mind from that session that you can share with us. Totally and if
you’re not here for the educational content feel free to skip forward because there is actually a new chapter feature in apple too so you can see where the chapters are so good but one of the things that we did do this week with the cohort of craft practitioners was
a session on what i called website essentials and what i had done was pull a lot of the content that we’d already written about our recommendations for websites and kind of compiled it into a presentation the benefit of doing that is i could review things and find out if they were still relevant and i have to say all of it is still really relevant in terms of what i see out there on websites and what i experience when i
navigating the internet the thing that we can help you with the most often is telling you what not to do what to avoid as a creative practitioner and indeed what could even be a mistake or a problem for you something that might prevent you from growing or succeeding in your endeavor
and that’s that’s the way that all of this comes from this comes from like a deep love of this community and we want you to do better because we know what stops people buying things from you and we know what is going to affect the way customers feel about your brand and whether or not they trust you enough to part with their money
or to call you for a commission or to see if you want to be involved in an exhibition or to ask you for a piece to send me for a shoot that i’ve got next week as the stylist all of these things can happen if you have a robust online asset it’s not losing importance it’s gaining importance how well you do this and i know it doesn’t come naturally to a lot of makers i know it doesn’t
appeal to a lot of makers to consider this but for me it’s kind of the ultimate artistic home in a professional way that allows you to express it all easily in one spot not doing this right is a big mistake
on that note one of the mistakes that came up you mentioned to me renee when we were talking about this topic earlier was the gimmicks what we do see and especially i think people who are still new to websites perhaps and they’re doing it themselves fall for that trick of adding lots of bells and whistles it’s important to remember that when things are sometimes interesting to you they can reduce clarity for the person who
lands on that website usability whether or not I want to even continue accessibility and Renee you mentioned a particular type of pop-up that you’re experiencing a lot lately you actually just reminded me of another one I think what’s happened because I was just trying to think it through then why I’m seeing this a lot there’s a lot of Shopify websites now which we definitely are big fans of we build Shopify websites for our clients and Shopify users
third-party apps and plugins to help support the functionality of the site what happens is people
Not jump on a trend, but maybe it is jumping on a trend and use plugins without necessarily knowing the ins and outs and how to customize them so that they aren’t doing this. But what’s happening to me a lot, I’ve had it happen three times now, more, I would say, more than three times across three different brands, is I’m being offered a mystery discount when I land on a site. And you’ve probably seen this as well. And I would say it’s come from, like I said, either a specific plugin or… I think it’s a trend that’s probably infiltrated the market.
market via Teemu. I mean, I think it’s a
Gimmick that’s been around for a long time, having those mystery pop-ups. I think that’s been heavily popularised.
probably i mean this is i am guessing by by timu and then that it has probably created a new style of interaction for a layer of shoppers and no doubt will be infiltrating small business small to medium business because like you said it’s the trends often that that end up being the gimmicks and people do it without really kind of giving it enough consideration whether that’s from the technical side of things or whether it’s from the user
experience side of things and how it might actually be affecting their brand and the perception of their brand. That’s the key for me.
One, it often feels a misalignment to the perception of the brand. Like sometimes I’m on like a really sort of like breezy, gentle, you know, relaxing almost like tranquil site or a brand. Like perhaps they’re selling like a beautiful facial oil or something like that. And then I get the mystery discount and it feels really jarring. The language just of that just doesn’t feel right. It’s not so much the discount that bothers me, although I’m not a huge fan of mystery. I don’t like surprises, but it’s.
the relentlessness of this particular type of pop-up once i close it
it comes back and I just that that alone is not good regardless if it’s mystery or not if someone closes a pop-up you should make sure that your settings are configured so that that doesn’t show again for them not just on a different session but in the one session I’m getting it multiple times it actually happened to me to the point the other night where I just shut the site I actually was really prepared to buy the product but I just shut the site the mystery discount is one but also another one that I’ve been noticing a lot lately is
particularly on mobile phones is when
the little pop-ups just sit sort of they’re like a sticky element on the screen and they sit either on the left or the right hand side of the screen and they stay there when you scroll up and down and sometimes they block critical information that’s on the screen and there’s no way of shutting them obviously on a desktop when you’ve got a really broad screen they’re kind of out of the way but when you’ve got the really narrow iphone or android phone screen again i just think for whatever function that’s providing it’s annoying me more than it’s helping so
Just check these things out yourself, like go on your own website in an incognito window and see what it’s like to actually be on your website as a visitor and that will help you understand if this is going to be annoying or not. It’s interesting you talk about that mobile experience as well because that was actually part of the session where I discussed with the practitioners how important it is now to make sure the mobile experience is easy and not hampered by pop-ups that you can’t find the…
way to close down again, it’s really, really important.
as Renee touched on, to consider the mobile experience and to have someone else give you a critique of the mobile experience. It’s become the majority way now that we’re all interacting with the internet is through our devices that are handheld. And so if you are not considering that experience for your shoppers in the design and layout and management of your website, then you are missing out a large chunk of
the base population in even looking at your website. It’s actually more important than the laptop or desktop experience now. In that consideration of mobile experience, always make sure you think about the navigation, you know, make sure the menu is easy to find and use, especially on a mobile. If the majority of your users are using your site on a mobile and the menu is hard to use.
What are they going to do? Having footers that make sense on a mobile as well so that there’s always a way for them to locate the information that they’re actually looking for wherever they land within your website. Another part of the session where I talked to the practitioners during the week was about contact information. And I want to start by saying I don’t think you should ever.
share more information than you’re comfortable sharing online. One of the problems that I have sometimes as a curator, and I’m sure, Renee, you’ve mentioned this to me too, as a shopper, you sometimes want to know where the shop is or where this person is located. For me, it’s because sometimes, well, in recent years with CraftLab, I needed to find people in a specific region and to not have your location, your broader location.
in an about page or wherever it makes sense for your audience to see it depending on how relevant it is to your brand make sure it’s accessible to me that i can find it therefore it’s feeding into that search engine as well so that when i’m typing into google you know ballarat ceramicists for an example because that would bring up
thousands of responses every single website of a ceramicist based in Ballarat should have the word Ballarat on their website that’s one thing that I believe and if you haven’t it’s not a direct personal criticism it’s just me saying I need to find you and I can’t find you unless I see the word Ballarat in there it’s a really important part of maintaining a website as an artist
a practitioner of any kind of creative output but also to make sure that you can be contacted there’s many times
where either I’ve entered a form that goes nowhere or that the link to Instagram is no longer working because you’ve changed the business name on Instagram and so the link that you’ve typed in on the other side hasn’t been updated. All of those little things can create a friction to the process that people are trying to go through to get in touch with you and potentially about.
an opportunity whether that’s a commission or otherwise if i can’t find that information quickly and easily that’s going to slow me down substantially and like all of these website tips or do’s and don’ts or however you’d like to look at it there’s always multiple ways to approach these things and like you said angela it’s about finding what works for you there’s not sort of one right thing like again we often get asked that one is should i have a form or not sometimes forms are good but sometimes people don’t like them so maybe you could have both like a form and an email
address. There’s pros and cons for all of these things, but you need to find what works for you and what works for your audience. But yes, I’ll absolutely just add a yes and to the missing contact information, especially your name as well, if you can. It doesn’t have to be a full name, but just even if it’s a first name and a suburb or a region, like you said, really makes a difference, I find. The other one that I always remembered too, just before we move on, was Australia as well. So particularly if you have a global audience,
or you wish to have a global audience, sometimes we might forget to say, yeah, for example, Ballarat. We might also forget to say Australia. And so if I’m even in another state, like I could be in New South Wales or Western Australia and not know what Ballarat is. And so sometimes it’s not enough to just say that. So whether it’s Ballarat, Victoria, Australia, and then you’re covering all bases, international audience can know where you are, the local audience, but also the smaller local audience.
the national audience i know from looking at u.s sites in particular i don’t know all of the states so for me i need more information to confirm that information if you want to learn more about website essentials and get more information on recommendations that renee and i have for how to keep your website
solid as a professional practitioner or as a person who needs a place to live on the internet there’s heaps of stuff as renee said at the top of the session on our website enjoy from scroll to cart we’re going to bring back one of our favorites
segments in this episode and for this particular episode I want to talk about Pinterest I saw on Instagram speaking of social media yes I am still on there for those playing at home it’s an account I follow a digital creator who’s based in Poland actually the account’s called so excited now her name’s Claudia she provides graphic design tips and other bits and pieces through
engaging graphics on Instagram but from my very brief follow-up before I brought this to the segment on her website I very quickly got all of that information just just saying the location her name that she’s a graphic designer
I just wanted to make sure that I had a rough idea who they were before I brought the content to the podcast. And I guess that’s exactly what we’re talking about. Just being able to do that verification quickly helps in a lot of different ways. Back to the topic, a post popped up in my feed. It was actually very recently that had a very, it’s not clickbaity, but what’s the word? Very strong hook that said I was wrong about Pinterest twice and why protecting your work is the most important thing right now.
and so this is targeted at artists and creators so like digital artists and people that are posting things online so really that’s a lot of people and the thing i guess apart from that sort of being quite eye-catching that caught my eye was the mention of claudia the content creator feeling really overwhelmed with the flood of ai content on pinterest and i know that we may have already talked about this on the podcast but i know angela and i have been talking about this a lot because we’ve both been
back on pinterest
for different reasons lately and we do actually we have for many many years strongly advocated for pinterest we actually created an ebook all about how to use it as a maker in business and so we do like to make sure we’re also using it ourselves but we’ve been really struggling to get on there because of the ai content it’s interesting that we noticed it then and i think what happened for me was i just much like a lot of things that i find frustrating i just kind of abandoned it and stopped going on
there but this post dug a little bit deeper they did find out that there was a way to hide the ai posts which was only a temporary thing
But what did start happening was that even more ads were appearing and that was another thing that Pinterest about maybe five years ago were really ramping up their advertising to really try and push more people to get on the platform for advertising. I remember there was really only a handful of brands that were ever on there when I used to look and I feel like now we’re seeing that flood of people that are jumping on board. What was interesting about this post and what I wanted to share was that there is a little bit of a
the classic bait and switch I suppose but something that we also saw coming which is Pinterest is turning into a shopping platform it used to be as the name suggests was about inspiration it was about creating a digital pin board and collecting things that we found interesting but now the company is positioning itself as an AI powered shopping assistant this means it’s going to be more about ads but more about sharing content that makes the platform money just kind of cemented what
we’ve been feeling about the platform for a little while now the difficulty with platforms that are designed for social media and a lot of the things that you and i have been experiencing since we started working together in the last 20 years a lot of those companies have launched during that time and become integral parts of the community now that instagram is not the same now that pinterest is not the same it’s going to be even more important for your own presence
to be managed by you in a way that you want to manage it and that’s because they’re going to be filled with ads for the large companies now i did see some comments recently and i’m paraphrasing why can’t they just leave things the way they are when they start why can’t they just leave it alone basically and it sort of made me think about how business starts and how business progresses
and how capitalism works, how going public works and all of the things that happen to businesses once they have grown to a point where they have to become public, require investment, have to grow to a stage where they are beholden to people who care a lot about money. It shifts all business because
The priority is no longer you as the user. The priority is no longer the community or the farm. The priority is the bottom line for the people who have put money into that business getting a return on that investment.
That’s, yeah, and that’s what it is. It’s a business at the end of the day. And on this particular Instagram post, which of course we’ll link in our show notes, there is a little graph that kind of articulates what Angela’s just said about the cycle of a platform. And really it’s any business, but attracting millions of users, growing the audience and then optimizing for profit. And that’s of course where Pinterest is now sitting because they have KPIs to meet and probably board members to appease and all of that.
to make rich as well yes of course it’s interesting it’s not all doom and gloom and this like I said at the start this particular post is focusing on digital creators so artists graphic designers and so forth one thing that I guess and this is of course an entirely personal choice a brand choice a business choice one thing that is happening on the platform is that they’re pushing product pins so pins that are focusing on a product that’s for sale that they can link through and so
perhaps this is a good time for you to experiment with the platform if that aligns to your brand choice and see how that works but the other thing i guess on the positive that it has been doing just as a side note is it’s been forcing me or pushing me or motivating me to spend some time in my local library looking at books
And there’s actually at mine, there’s actually a really great art and interior design and architecture and all that section where all the big, heavy, expensive books that I lust after at bookshops, they’re actually just there. You can take them home and borrow them or you can sit there and read them. So it might be a good bit of inspiration to do something like that if you’re looking for inspiration like I am on the platform.
Yeah, because the inspiration that I have unfortunately uncovered during my Pinterest use recently is fake imagery and I think that’s the hardest part of it is I can’t get to the sources that I got used to finding on that platform. Beautifully photographed and styled.
imagery where humans had constructed something really special captured a moment in real life it was a really cool fashion shoot i mean i’ve always loved commercial photography and obviously in the inner fashion context really did love magazines were a big part of my
experience with fashion and pop culture and i enjoyed looking at pictures that people had composed and pinterest used to provide that in the absence of the massive availability of magazines glossy magazines and now when i go on there it’s literally just you’re looking for a haircut it’s unnerving how human like
They can create a picture. And why the hell would I want to see the haircut of a fake human being anyway? I just don’t understand. What are you going to do? Go in and say, can I have the hair like the robot in the picture? I know. I don’t understand why that’s even a thing. I know. Me either. It’s not like serving any kind of.
purpose of creative good you just talking then just reminded me though when I really really originally used Pinterest when I was probably I’m trying to think when it would have actually launched but I would have been in my early 20s I didn’t actually scroll through Pinterest to look for inspiration I used to go on websites and then save things I found onto my Pinterest and it was again it’s this like feedification of everything everything needs to have sort of a news feed if you like where we go to so
keeps you on the platform and keeps you scrolling whereas that’s not how I used to use Pinterest I used to just use it like a notebook and then what I used to do and spend time on the platform doing was looking at my own stuff like looking at my boards that I’d created oh look how cool this is I wish I had all these things in my house and I still have looked at some of the imagery that I saved 15 years ago still dreaming for that same loft style apartment yeah mine is still pretty good too I actually had a quick squeeze through one of mine recently I was like yeah
You know, I actually still like this stuff. Yeah, if you’re finding something similar or if you use Pinterest and you’ve noticed it’s changed or if you have any Pinterest comments, let us know on the episode thread where we’ll post to our Instagram page so you can leave comments there if you find that something you want to share with us too.
Our final segment for episode two this week is something that Renee would like to share with us. Shortcuts on your phone. Shortcuts is an app within the Apple phone. So it’s part of the ecosystem of Apple that allow you to create.
automations on your phone so that it can do things without your input it’s been something that’s been there for years like please don’t come at me if this is something that’s really really old news for you it really has been on the phone for years but it’s one of those like kind of boring things that you just look at and think kind of like the iBooks app I’m sorry if you use that as well where you just go yeah I don’t know what that is I’m just gonna leave it there and never look at it again
an example of a shortcut and i haven’t set this up on my phone yet but that i saw recently was having an automatic switch on of focus mode so you could say i go to work between the hours of 11 and 4 pm monday to thursday automatically switch on my focus mode for work
during those time frames and so you know that at 11 when you sit down at your desk it’s already done for you all that distracting apps have been removed all the notifications have been silenced it’s just one less thing you have to think about i actually don’t have many set up yet i’ve created a home screen that just has my shortcut so i can just start experimenting with them i’ve sort of started with just some more simple ones so
and if you’re familiar with widgets in the home screen as well some of these might feel a bit redundant but one for example is i’ve started doing some strength training at the gym and i have a folder set up on my notes app which has like my little program that i created and i was finding that when i got to the gym like i was just getting frustrated having to open the notes app
find the folder which no doubt was not easily accessible because it hasn’t been recently accessed scrolling to find it clicking so i’ve created a shortcut that just opens my gym folder in my notes and so when i click that it just takes me straight there as opposed to navigating wow there’s also one that i’ve set up that this wasn’t my idea i saw this from someone else on instagram that is a shortcut that says create a new note in a folder called brain dump oh and just like a little
pop up within your phone so it doesn’t you don’t even have to open the note and then the brain dump folder is something that I then go into at a later date and organize but you know when you just need to be able to dump something into your phone just quickly so that’s one I track my cycle through the health app but again every month I was finding like I’d have to open the health app where is it
navigate to the cycle thing find it open i could never find it it always felt like a friction point so i’ve created a shortcut that just opens up the tracking logger within that health app that sounds helpful having shortcuts that pierce through the convoluted menu options that you have to often face particularly in apple ios apps that sounds appealing so if i wanted to find out more renee
If I’m listening to this podcast and I’m inspired, where would I go to find out more? I’m just finding out about it myself. So I can link to, I found a couple on Instagram, so I can link to those accounts. Search for the app shortcuts and they’ve got examples as well to help you get started. You’ve got automations, which is where you can get really techie and start running like background things that happen. So for example, if you’re paying with your Apple wallet on your phone, every transaction’s being…
tracked within your phone so you can tell the phone to start creating a spreadsheet of information about what’s being spent and automatically assign it to categories so kind of like making your own budgeting app but without having to pay for the subscription of a budgeting app I’m locked in so I’ll report back if I find any more those are the things that can actually end up being life-changing because you don’t realize how much those
seemingly minor frictions can prevent you from doing the things that you really actually want to be doing with your time and cutting through distractions. Bang on. And on that note, thank you so much for joining us. We look forward to talking to you again soon. Thank you for listening. Thank you so much. Bye. Thanks for listening to Make Good Things Happen.
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