In this episode, Chrissy Rey continues her conversation with Eve Simon, founder of Eve Simon Creative. They discuss essential website design elements, current trends, and when DIY website creators should consider hiring a professional. Eve shares valuable insights on creating effective calls-to-action, the importance of white space, and how to approach color choices and accessibility in web design.
Listen to the Episode
Show Notes
Eve Simon discusses essential web design elements like calls-to-action and white space, while addressing current trends and design elements to avoid. She emphasizes the importance of accessibility in design choices and offers advice on when to hire a professional designer. The conversation provides practical tips for DIY website creators and insights into the value of professional web design services.
Guest Bio: Eve Simon
A lapsed Philosophy major with an MFA in theatrical lighting design and over 2 decades experience in the web industry, Eve is both an experienced creative thinker and a quirky addition to your next dinner party.
Over her career, she’s solved design challenges for exciting brands like The League of Women Voters, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, The Nature Conservancy, Habitat for Humanity, ALS Association, National Audubon Society, and the Ad Council. She has also spoken at major conferences, including three times at South by Southwest Interactive in Austin.
When not running Eve Simon Creative, a design & storytelling consultancy, she writes a lot and produces/hosts GenX Stories, an award-winning podcast about how the lost generation found itself. Oh, and she’s a bit obsessed with ampersands.
Key Topics Covered
- Essential design elements for every website (0:01:24)
- The importance of calls-to-action (CTAs) (0:01:56)
- Using white space effectively (0:04:08)
- Current web design trends (0:23:34)
- Design elements to avoid (0:09:53)
- Accessibility considerations in web design (0:17:13)
- When to hire a professional designer (0:32:02)
- Balancing DIY efforts with professional expertise (0:35:08)
Transcript
[00:00:08]
[00:00:08] Hey, everyone. This is Chrissy Rey. I’m back with Eve Simon. We went a little bit long on part one, so we decided to carry over and have another part with our discussion about design with your website. So welcome back, Eve.
[00:00:32] Thank you. And, and honestly, Chrissy, you and I could sit here and talk about hours upon hours, which we have about this stuff. So even just two sessions, we are compressing everything, but thank you for having me back to continue to talk about this good stuff.
[00:00:47] Yes. And I suspect that I will be having Eve back again in the future to talk about some more specific design stuff because as she said there’s so much that we could cover about design. And I am not a designer I am not a design expert. I know what I like, but I am not a designer. So I would rather have an expert talk about that
[00:01:07] Thank you for including me in this and yes, whenever you want me to come back and babble at you for a while Just call.
[00:01:13] All right. All right. Awesome.
[00:01:15] So the next question that we have is a big one. What are some design elements that every website should have?
[00:01:24] Okay. And you know, that’s loaded.
[00:01:26] It is a loaded question for a number of reasons. One of which goes back to what we were talking about in the first half, which is what are you doing with your site? What is your site supposed to achieve? And that’s going to determine some of these elements.
[00:01:40] The first thing to talk about is, is there a call to action or a CTA? That can be any number of things. Usually it manifests as some sort of button or a link somewhere. But what does it do? And where is it? And how important is it for your audience?
[00:01:56] So from a CTA perspective, when you are dealing with many clients who want to have you do something, you come to the website and there’s a button to push. Could be sign up for a newsletter. Could be contact me. Could be doing any other number of things. In non profits, it tends to be donate.
[00:02:16] So there’s some options to do it. The question of whether or not to have a CTA, I will always say yes. Because otherwise, why have a website? The whole goal is you put something out there to do something. And if you come to a website and have nothing to do, then You know, why would you stick around? So I think you need some sort of CTA button.
[00:02:35] It can be a link, but in a, in a design perspective, most people notice things that stand out. We have a phrase that we call visual hierarchy, and that’s like what you see first, what you see second, what you see third, a button is going to get attention. Of course, there’s the decision of coloring the button, but you know, we talked a little bit about color before, so I think it should always have a CTA button.
[00:02:56] I think that there’s also value in seeing imagery with your content. So like when you come to a webpage, sometimes you come up with that big old image, which we’ll call a hero image at the top of the page, there’s some value to that, but more value is what the messaging is. So is it a promo? Is it, is it something when you come to it, you see something that tells you to take an action immediately, or are you building sort of trust and credibility as people take in the webpage? And that includes promotions, that includes content.
[00:03:28] So once you get past sort of the initial, you know, homepage, everything has something big, hero y at the top. I think you should have some sort of short text promo with an image, something. I think it’s a pattern, which we can talk a little bit about the difference between patterns and styles and all that, but it’s something that will be repeated if you just think about it that way.
[00:03:47] So a promo can be a single piece of content. A promo can be multiple pieces of content, which we could call three up or two up or four up depending on the number of promos that you have. So I think again, that depends unpopular by answer that depends on what you’re trying to achieve and how much content you have to fit into your homepage.
[00:04:08] I think the design element that is not like an element that you need to think about is white space. And people think white space means literally white space. I look at it as air. So as people come down the webpage, you don’t want to stuff so many things in there at one time that people are overwhelmed. So white space in my mind means how you space things out and how people sort of build an understanding of what your story is. And then maybe some examples of things to do in the middle of that story. Definitely by the end of that story.
[00:04:39] So when you do promos, think about the right format for it. Is it a photo and text? Is it a bucket? It’s three little squares of text. Is it just a graphic that has something on top of it? All of these things are elements you should think about.
[00:04:54] There are other types of elements that are valuable to think about. Things like blog posts. If you run a blog, most platforms will allow you to embed them. So you can get sort of a promotion or, you know, a little clip of something. I think if your quote unquote though leadership is important, pulling blogs onto various pages is valuable because not only do they get the content, it leads them to another page. So I think you can do it that way. People sometimes do that with galleries or portfolios that you bring pieces of those in different places.
[00:05:29] Another element that I’ll talk about is when you come to a page, you should never leave without anything else to do, and that gives you a number of options of how to guide a person through a page, which leads to how do you design it? I usually think that there should be some sort of call to action, maybe at the bottom of a page, you know, you read this content, great, go sign up. Or you could then say, Hey, I’ve read this piece of content, here’s three other pieces of content driven by a number of options that you could go to. You never want to end a page with nowhere else to go. But you also don’t want to force people to do it. So these all, you know, all, all the content options and discussions have a design side to it.
[00:06:13] I would suggest that you don’t overdo the various number of design elements because then it gets, you have something that looks like this and something that looks like that. And some, it’s just too much. So think about what’s going to represent your story the best. Is it a big image with two lines of text? Is it just a button with a headline? That’s a type of design element too.
[00:06:36] In figuring out some of these things for me in particular, when I’m designing, I do something called wireframes, which is sort of a, a black and white schematic of a webpage and allows me to explore exactly this. It allows me to explore the types of design elements. Is it going to be blog posts that come in with a link and a button? Or a button and no link? It lets me sort of figure that stuff out and then in theory, you can go look at all of the wireframes you do and count the number of different kinds of designs you’ve got design patterns and then say, Oh, that’s very much like that one. So I only need one of them. But it lets you, it lets you look sort of, again, I’m, I’m big on holistic design. It lets you look across the breadth of it and see which things are actually doing what you need to do. It comes, you know, back to the Princess Bride quote, I don’t think that means what you think it means. You know, make sure it means what you think it means, and then that’s going to be a valuable element, design element for the rest of your site.
[00:07:32] But again, it starts with the unsexy stuff. It starts with what does it need to do? How long is it going to be? And then what does it look like?
[00:07:40] Mm hmm. Okay. So a lot to consider there, but not A lot to consider. Yeah. And, and in my experience, I get a lot of clients who they don’t want to do a call to action. Cause they like their picture that’s on their homepage. They love their picture and their pictures are beautiful. Don’t get me wrong, but gotta explain to them that it’s great if you want your client or a potential client to just look at a picture.
[00:08:01] Right.
[00:08:01] What do besides look at a picture?
[00:08:03] Right. It has to be actionable. It can’t, it’s not a magazine and it doesn’t have to be on top of a hero image. It can be in your navigation. So it could be, you know, Squarespace, again, the platform that I use, will, won’t give you a whole lot of options, but it gives you sort of options to layout your navigation, which is like, your elements would be your logo, your navigation, and then a CTA button, if you want it. So it’ll arrange it for you. So it can lift it up to the top, so it’s on every single page. That may be another decision for design elements. Is it on every page or is it only on one or two pages? So, CTA falls in that too, but I’m with you that it, you know, while your picture may be gorgeous, no one’s just going to want to look at it because they’re just going to scroll right past it. And then, then maybe an opportunity.
[00:08:51] Right. I mean, unless you’re a photographer and people are just looking at your eh, maybe. But even then you want them to hire you, right?
[00:08:58] Right, right. Either, right. It’s, it’s either depending on, on what that hero looks like. Are you hiring them? Is it representing something for an organization like a nonprofit? Is it the work that they do? Is it their mission? It’s, you know, do you want to have them jump in and donate? It’s not always hire me. Sometimes it’s just get involved some way and how you get people involved is an entire science is an entire practice of design and a segment of UX user experience design all about that. So it’s a big decision, but you want to make the right decision and you want to make the decision that is driven by behavior. Which, which I will lead this to since we’re talking about heroes. Slideshow heroes.
[00:09:46] Yes, and that, because that brings us to my next question. What are some design elements every website should avoid?
[00:09:53] And it’s confusing because you’re going to hear us say, well, if you have a big hero image with a button, go for it. If you need an action. The flip side of that is if you start to make it move and there’s multiple promos that have multiple actions, why is that bad? Because in logic would be it’s three or four new options. It doesn’t work that way.
[00:10:16] So the first thing I would tell people not to do is to do any kind of carousel. You find them mostly in hero spaces. So you have like this big thing and it has an arrow on the left and an arrow on the right. Usually it auto rotates. So you’re sitting there and you’re saying, Oh, that’s a pretty picture. Boom! There’s a new picture. And often with it, there’s a new action, and you just barely take it in the first one.
[00:10:40] What people use that for, usually, is if they can’t prioritize how the rest of these actions and the rest of the content will be on the website. So they stuff it into the top, especially if they’re working for a large organization that needs to be represented and you say hell with it. Cool, you get a big slide on the homepage. Well, I hate to tell you, no one’s gonna see that. Because website behaviors, you know, no one sits there and just watches the slideshow go on the top of your homepage. There have been studies that have been done and there, I don’t know in the more recent ones, but some of the older studies were like, people look at the first image. Great. The second image, there’s a fall off. Okay, well, maybe some people see it by the third image. Nobody is seeing it. Certainly by the fourth image. Nobody’s seeing it. So sometimes you have these slideshows that are like five slides deep and there’s nobody seeing that stuff. So if you’ve put important stuff there, it’s a waste of opportunity and it’d be better for you to break it up and use it elsewhere.
[00:11:38] People also do carousels for other things. So you may see carousels of testimonial, which I would recommend. I would recommend having a design element that is some sort of testimonial we call it social proof that people can have like, Oh, well, that person from so and so place used you, then they must be, you’re legit. But if you put them in a rotation in a carousel, You don’t, people don’t see it. So it’s, it’s, you know, that’s less of a, of a no, no, not in my mind, then like a promo and a hero space, which is gone because quotes are quotes. But if you think that people, you know, you put your third, the best quote you’ve got is the third one. And honestly, no, one’s going to freaking see it. I’m sorry to tell you that.
[00:12:19] Other things I would think about not having are very complicated animations. Like when you hover over something and it does something crazy. Partially because there’s what we call friction. You want to eliminate sort of visual friction. You want to make sure that everything flows and is understandable and is logical and intuitive. And if you have one thing that goes woohoo, another thing that goes , it’s a lot of bells and whistles . I would keep your bells and whistles at a minimum for that. Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have it, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do some sort of micro interactions, as they call them. The piece of micro interactions that get tricky, though, is like if you have it on a click. Let’s say that we have a couple different behaviors, which are some things are activated by themselves manually, which can be tricky. Some things are activated with a click, and some things are activated with a hover. Back to talking about mobile hover doesn’t exist on a mobile. So, and these things that you, if you can hide your most important content, saying you see some sort of beautiful picture, you click on it, you see text, it’s not going to do it on a phone. So then it has to be a tap and then you have to tell it to be a tap. It just, it adds more complexity, which I don’t think is necessary.
[00:13:29] The other thing that is controversial that I would not add to your website is, video, which can be useful in certain situations. For example, if you are surfacing some video from a YouTube channel, for example, you could bring in a link. You could sort of say, similar to how you show your blog posts on the page. You could say, these are my top three videos from my YouTube channel. And then a link that takes you off to the YouTube channel. Okay. But what people do is they embed a video on a website. Which means it takes all the time to load the video when your page loads, sometimes. And the bigger the video, the longer the load. If a site doesn’t load in two seconds, we’re gone. Video can hurt you. You’ll see a lot of websites that have videos sort of like in a hero with something that’s, you know, that has some sort of movement to it, or maybe it’s a loop. Sometimes that is very useful, but they found ways to optimize it and they found ways to make it not add friction and not add weight to your page. So they’re very, very unique situations where I would use video, to be honest.
[00:14:33] But again, all of these are rules that are meant to be broken, but if someone comes to me and says, I have this great piece of video and it’s this 15 minute thing I’ve done to promote myself and I want to put it at the top. I take a deep breath and I say, let me explain why not.
[00:14:47] Something like that might be good to embed on like your about page, lower down or on Website Success Academy, I have courses. Those obviously they need video.
[00:14:55] Exactly.
[00:14:56] But I’m not putting a video in my hero, because that’s, that’s, you know, Yeah, that’s, it’s going to take forever to load. And, and I, I will also add for, for any of you that don’t know me from many years ago, I was a Flash developer. So if you remember Flash, I was all about animation. Everything was animated. Everything. That, that was just what you did. But now animation is the bane of my existence. I will avoid it at all costs.
[00:15:25] Yeah.
[00:15:25] And yeah, any movement. And not for the fact that I, you know, I’m not a fan of animation, but because I’m also very big on performance and optimization of a website. And animation typically is going to add JavaScript and CSS to your site that doesn’t really, give you any benefit. It’s going to make your website slower. Sometimes it makes it slower because it just runs slower in the browser, but often it’s going to be slower because it takes longer to download all of that code for the animation. And it’s also in a lot of cases going to make your website less accessible. Accessibility is really important, and if you have some kind of meaning to the animation, like if the animation adds some sort of meaning to the content of your website, people that can’t see that animation aren’t going to get that meaning, which means your website isn’t accessible. Which means in some areas they could sue you because your website is not accessible to them. So these are all things that you need to keep in mind when you’re considering the animation and also with the video.
[00:16:31] So that’s definitely, um, if, well, while there are things that you may not want to want to add from a design perspective, you can’t always look at that design in a vacuum. You need to think about all of the other factors that are included in that decision.
[00:16:45] And I think both of these questions, what you would include in what you don’t include are based on that. It’s based on context and it’s based on why you are doing it. If you can’t answer the question, why you want that animation, get rid of the animation. You know, it’s the Coco Chanel school of getting dressed in the morning. Like before you leave the house, take off one piece of jewelry. If you don’t need it, it shouldn’t be there. And so if it is driven by, well, I really like it. That’s not good enough to put that on your website.
[00:17:13] You brought up a really important question about accessibility, which also comes into design choices. A lot of people will use flat areas of color for pieces of their design. And it could be a promo. It could be a large area. Maybe it’s an edge to edge piece that you want to put like, you know, button, some text. You need to know that the people can read the text if they have visual impairments. And as someone who is in my mid fifties now who wears readers, it’s earlier than you think it is. So it’s always better to err on the side of making sure that your site is accessible. And one of the easiest ways to do it is in color contrast. So make sure there’s sufficient foreground background, and that’s usually like a text on top of a color or text on top of a photo. You need to make sure that it is legible. And there’s a website called, I think it’s called AI, AIM, uh, web contrast. Color contrast checker and allows you to put a hex code for a foreground color and a background color, and it’ll tell you which of the levels of accessibility it meets and which ones it just outright fails, right?
[00:18:21] Sometimes, sometimes it has to do with the size of the text, sometimes it has to do with the, with the weight or, or, the selection of your text your type, and they don’t give you that option there, but it gives you enough to go off of to determine colors and to determine size of type and thickness of type.
[00:18:36] And if, if the, if what is accessible doesn’t look right to you because it’s like, my God, I had to make my text 20 point to have it on that background, then you’ll make a different decision. It also keeps you from making bad decisions like white text on a yellow background. Because it’s not legible. I mean, nobody, even, even without the readers, nobody’s going to be really be able to use that.
[00:18:57] So when you’re picking how you style these design elements, I personally think it’s a no no to use big chunks of color with type on top. I think color can be used as a design element on a Photo. It’s an edge on a photo. It is maybe, maybe it’s a dark line above your content. So it’s like a three pixel block, something that gives you something to look at. And so, so you can not just see a whole page of stuff coming at you, but don’t use it for text necessarily, and don’t use it for a large chunk of content. Of an area of your website that could largely be illegible.
[00:19:34] I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had a client give me their colors and I try to implement them into the design and they want white text on their selected color or black text on their selected color. And I use color. adobe. com. They’ve got a accessibility checker there and you can plug in your foreground and your background color and see, is this going to have high enough contrast? And sometimes it doesn’t. So, you know, I, I say, well, maybe we should use black text on that instead of white, or maybe we should make the color slightly darker or slightly lighter so that it works with the color of the text that you want. Sometimes it’s just, it’s just a matter of doing that.
[00:20:14] And the guidelines as far as what those numbers are, what that contrast level is, uh, for anybody that’s curious is in the web content accessibility guidelines. It’s from the World Wide Web Consortium, W3C. So if you search for WCAG, it’ll tell you what the contrast ratio should be for that. I can’t remember off the top of my head, but there are specific numbers that you want to aim for when you’re, when you’re doing that, so.
[00:20:40] And tools like your Adobe tool and tools like my AIM, they’ll tell you what the percentage is, they’ll tell you. It’s like four to five or whatever it is, four to 3. 2. But it’ll also tell you pass or fail. So you don’t have to like, figure out the number yourself. You just want to put the numbers in and then adjust it until it hits.
[00:20:57] You bring up a good point about color that sometimes when colors are provided to you, this is another design no- no for me. Those colors can be determined, having nothing to do with online use. They also can be determined, not understanding how much of each you would use. So. You know, you may pick colors that look good together, but then you go and you try to design a site with a background of a color that doesn’t work. So, so there’s some adjustments that need to be made.
[00:21:26] The other side of that is someone who designs a logo isn’t always designing the logo colors for web. It can be done for print. It could be done for by itself. It should be tested and all this stuff before the logo is complete, but it’s really the higher end agencies that do that. And so that’s often a step that gets cut out. So I bear that in mind.
[00:21:49] And then the codicil to that is me personally, if there’s colors in the logo and that are considered brand colors, I don’t necessarily use the colors in the logo to color code the rest of the site so it matches the logo. Because in my mind, it means that the logo won’t stand out. So maybe you, when you’re picking colors, you pick something that’s complimentary and that it’s accessible because then the contrast will show up and you’ll say, Oh, that’s different than that. And then your logo gets to stand out.
[00:22:18] So when you’re, when you’re designing stuff, I wouldn’t make it matchy matchy. I would make sure that the cheese stands alone.. Your logo is what it is. Sometimes I will take a logo color, if it is a web safe color that way, and maybe make it a button color so that you’re then saying color means something. Your color using the logo is actually an actionable color and you click the button. But again, you got to make decisions on that.
[00:22:39] I probably, I have a lot of don’t do’s then I have do do’s, which I, I feel very negative about, but you know, there’s, again, there’s two sides of everything. If there’s something you don’t do, there’s a way to do it so that it may actually work better for you.
[00:22:53] Another question that I have, this is, one that I added. I didn’t, I didn’t tell you this one before, so sorry. I watched it. I watched you ask, so here you go. You saw me type it in there. Here we go. Yes. Uh, so what are some web design trends that we should know about?
[00:23:09] Like, and I’ll, I’ll use an example. Right now, a lot of websites are what, some people would consider very stripy. You’ve got a block, and then you’ve got a color block with some stuff in it and then you’ve got another color block with some stuff in it and so it looks like a whole bunch of stripes. So, that’s one sort of trend but what are some other trends that we should know about that maybe you’re thinking are good ones to consider when it comes to designing your website.
[00:23:34] One trend that has stuck around is large type. And what I mean is, you may notice this, now that I’ve said it, if you go look at a bunch of different websites, people may notice that this hero area or the top section has bigger than normal text. And it could be thicker than normal text. So, there’s a reason for it. Nobody does, nobody should do anything without a reason. And usually that’s meant to have impact.. It usually indicates that, that typography is an important aspect of the person who’s designing it or , of the mission of the organization. So it could be a headline that’s bigger than everything else. And then that sets up what we, again, hierarchy. Look at this first.
[00:24:14] Sometimes there’s very little imagery. And it’s just text promos and they use text as a design element, which is fascinating to me. You have to be very strong in typography to do that. You have to have very strong opinions about type. You may even have a brand font that is a unique font to your organization. But we’re seeing that a lot.
[00:24:36] I also am seeing clean sites. That’s, you know, everyone, when they say, what do you want a website on? It’s like, I want it to be bright and clean. Well, what does that mean? I see a lot of sites that are , not over, over the top. I’m seeing more one page sites these days, which is sort of interesting to me that it’s one page that leads you off to different places. So the one page has to communicate a message, but can’t be so much that you don’t want to go anywhere else.
[00:25:01] They’re starting to do the phrase brutalism comes in for design trends a lot, and it’s really a unique type of project that uses that. And what I mean by brutalism is people are, are beyond Bauhaus. If you’re looking at design styles and you have any history of visual design, it’s structural, or it could be striking, or it could be downright ugly, that that’s a trend that people are starting to do, if you can do it right. If you can’t do it right, it’s just really freaking ugly. So you gotta be really, really careful with that.
[00:25:31] There was a period of time where video was a trend. I don’t, I’m, think people are, are understanding what that does. And it’s not. I’m trying to think of other trends that I’m noticing.
[00:25:42] What about animated GIFs? Animated GIFs and MIDI files.
[00:25:48] I’m Do you want me, do you want me to cry? Please don’t make me cry.
[00:25:53] Those, those were really popular in the nineties.
[00:25:56] There were banners at the top of your site and things that scroll. .
[00:26:00] Yes.
[00:26:01] So was the dancing banana?
[00:26:03] Yes. The, the scrolling text that was, that was really big. Yeah. Back in the nineties and the two thousands. Having, having the, the newsfeed scroll .
[00:26:11] I, I, I think so. Emojis are starting to become very popular, but I don’t see ’em on websites. I see them in emails. So email design is a different set of things to discuss, but people are using them in subject lines and people are using them like you would text because they assume that people are going to be similar to people who do that. So you’re used to texting with emojis. So of course, in any other digital format, you want to see emojis.
[00:26:36] I’m trying to think other mobile. And these are not sexy trends, but last I heard Google was penalizing you if you didn’t have at least a mobile site that was indexable, if your site wasn’t mobile friendly in indexing. So I’m seeing people, this notion of mobile first was always sort of a pipe dream that you design it for device first, and then you, you drag it out to the size of a desktop and then you see how it lands. Everyone says it, nobody does it. I’m starting to see more people do that. So that it is, it is, you’re, it’s a stuff that you’re used to dealing with on a phone. Like you know where the, the, the button is for your menu. You know how long it’s going to take to get down the page. I don’t know. I don’t know if I call that a trend versus a best practice, because that’s where Language gets funky, right?
[00:27:32] I haven’t kept up with the best of, or, you know, the trends for X cause every year there’ll be a billion articles that come out saying the new design, visual design trends for websites in 2024. But they tend to cycle back. You’re seeing things like one year it was all of your buttons should have shadows. And then the next year it was, don’t do a shadow. And then there’s this thing called skeuomorphic, which is like realism and everything needs to look like it actually is. So if it’s a button, it needs to look like a button. If it’s a book, it needs to look like a book. And then everyone went away from that. And a lot of that came into button design for apps. That’s also a side note to all of this. That we’re talking about websites. We’re not talking about online applications or mobile apps , which have their own set of things.
[00:28:22] I don’t even know where skeuomorphism is right now. I am seeing Shadows. I am seeing subtle shadows so that something stands off the page, but you don’t really notice why. It’s not heavy. It’s not the dancing banana of shadows kind of thing.
[00:28:41] Do you see anything else like stuff that crosses your path when you’re working with your clients?
[00:28:46] I’m just glad that drop shadows are not as big as they used to be. Okay, right.
[00:28:53] Because you can do them, but it requires custom CSS.
[00:28:56] I just added a drop shadow for a client because they needed more contrast between their hero image and the text that was on top of it. And they didn’t want to, I tried to make the overlay more opaque so that there would be enough contrast between the text and the background. And they didn’t want to do that. So I compromised and gave them a drop shadow and that added just a little bit more contrast. It’s probably not going to pass an accessibility check, but it was better than it was for readers that needed to see what the text said.
[00:29:28] Yeah. I think that’s, again, square peg round hole. If I’m, there’s things that are worth fighting for. You need to design something, it has to get built. There’s things that are worth fighting for in that translation. So if a developer like Chrissy comes back and says, You’re not going to read this text on top of the photo. There’s some options. There’s a calculus that goes on saying, Okay, how important is it for me to do this, this way? If it is really important to the value and to the brand. Okay, we’re going to find a way to do it. If it isn’t, it’s like, you know what, what if we just do a different color overlay with the image of the text stands out, or what if we make the text larger, or what if we take away a line of this text underneath it?
[00:30:06] I mean, there’s things that you can do if it’s worth fighting for. But you have to make that calculus yourself. Like your client was not willing to do a darker color on top of a photo so that the text was legible. You were forced to make a decision that you might get penalized for because it isn’t accessible. And that’s a decision that as a client, I would have bailed on. I would have said, what do you think is the best practices here as a developer to do this, to get me the result I want.. There’s a lot of, um, Ego, I hate to say that you have to let go. Because you can design everything pixel perfect. I mean, you have to let go as a client, but as a designer, I know that whatever I design, if it is in, in, not in HTML, I’m designing it in a comp, Photoshop, Figma, Canva, whatever, there’s a change that’s going to happen when that goes into HTML, and if you’re not flexible enough to handle that or know enough about the industry to come up with a difference of an option, um, you’re going to hurt yourself in the end because then you spend time and money arguing about how to make that happen. And ultimately it’s probably not worth that energy to do that. So ego sort of has to be left at the door and, and listen to your experts in some ways.
[00:31:23] Yeah. And that actually brings me to. to the next question.
[00:31:27] How do you like the segues? I’m good with the segues.
[00:31:30] Well, you’re, you’re able to read the questions on the side for any of you. I like to put the questions that I’m going to ask on the screen. So when I interview somebody, they know what I’m going to be asking them. So it’s not completely on the spot, except for that last question, which I was typing in as she watched it go like, Oh no, I have to answer that next. So, so my next.
[00:31:50] Yeah, the next question is, a lot of the people that are listening are trying to DIY some or all of their website, but when should they consider hiring a professional to do some or all of it for them?
[00:32:02] I hate that every answer of mine starts with it depends. But I’m a philosophy major so everything depends.
[00:32:08] There’s a couple of pathways that I would suggest for somebody at this point. One is if you have reached the end of what you’re able to do, I would rather you call in a professional to help you. So let’s say you started the DIY and you’ve hit a roadblock thing. Oh my God. I don’t know how to do this. I, the system’s fighting me. I would hire a professional and have a very specific list of things you need them to, to help you with. They may come up with other options, but what are you having trouble with?
[00:32:37] The second way I would suggest doing it is if you do DIY it, there is value to hire a professional from the beginning, especially if you come with thought through your content, thought through some of the stuff we discussed in part one. Like, what are your goals? What are your audiences? How, why are you trying to do this? Do you have colors? Do you have even if you don’t have colors, you have opinions on colors?
[00:32:58] Come to a potential professional with some of the stuff going around in your head. And if a good professional will help you sort that out.
[00:33:05] The value of a professional is specifically if it’s, if it’s a professional, it’s been in the business for as long as Chrissy and I have, they’ve seen this before. Because there’s really nothing new on the web. So you can find different ways to do it, and it’s done in your way, but sometimes under the hood it’s similar. So they can do it without rebuilding the wheel every single time. I think that that’s a valuable thing to bring a professional in for.
[00:33:33] I think there’s also a loneliness to DIY that if you find the right professional that you click with, there’s someone to bounce ideas off of and to collaborate because it’s a lonely business. Like if you sit here in your room and all you’re doing is looking at your computer all the time, it’s like sometimes you need to see a face saying, is this right? Is this right? A professional is gonna help you with that and help guide you through the process again if they are the right professional for you.
[00:33:59] And I know the people out there are starting to wince and go, but I can’t afford to hire a professional. There are different levels of professionals, and there’s different levels of engagement with a professional.
[00:34:08] My recommendation is, while you’re thinking about all the things you need to do, while you’re doing a website, I would think about budget. I would think about what do you have that you can put into the project. I’m not going to put numbers on this, because everything is fungible at some point. But think about what you can afford to do. And sometimes a professional, is if you talk to them and say, I want to do all this stuff, they may not bring it up to the end of the website, if it, end of a meeting. If you go into a meeting with a professional, and they say, what’s your budget? Step one, I would back away slowly. Because they don’t know what you want yet. So, so have an idea of what you can spend. Say, great, this is what I want to do, and at the end of the thing, I only have this or I have this. Based on what you know about me, what can you give me? And a professional, unless it is astronomically low, like somebody says, hey, I want to do a 20 page website and I have 500. We know the math isn’t mathing on that one. Everybody will know that.
[00:35:08] So, some of them will be obvious, like if we go through that whole conversation, and it’s like, hey, I want to do all these things, that’s great, I love working with you, I have $500. Well, at that point, it’s wasted everybody’s time because we’re not going to do that.
[00:35:22] And even if you, this is a controversial thing. Even if you get somebody, let’s say right out of school, who’s willing to charge next to nothing odds are you’re going to have to rebuild it with a professional, another professional later down the road. So you spent twice as much money. So if you go with the cheapest option. You get what you pay for. So I would, I would say that this is what I have to work with. It could come down to the professional saying this is okay. For this amount of money, we can do X and the variability can come in terms of, you know, we’re going to do one design instead of three, or we’re going to give you four different layouts that you can, we can work between, and then you make the decisions on the content. You determine what the images are for that. You know, there’s lots of things that as someone who’s hiring someone who is a DIYer, you can still do DIY and still hire a professional at the same time, because they’re sometimes different tasks.
[00:36:14] So I will always lean towards hiring a professional in my mind. And, and it doesn’t need to be as scary. As you go to an agency, you know, and again, I’m a former agency girl, so I know that we build websites for $300,000. Which is, you know, nobody, no individual human has that money. But there’s, there’s a wide range between $500 that’s inaccessible, that your nephew does and $300,000 for a big organizational site. So see, see what they can do for that.
[00:36:47] I will tell you that, that you will probably, you may get less out of a more experienced professional. Or they’ll charge more. Some of them charge hourly, some of them charge project based. It really depends on the type of professional, but the amount of time they take to do something means that every second they’re working is far more valuable than somebody who may charge less.
[00:37:11] And this is another controversial opinion that it’s like, it seems to be against the brain to say, why would I hire someone who costs more like, well, because you’re only going to have to do it once. And they may get it, you know, hopefully because you’re charging someone who has more experience. That’s why they charge more money. You’re going to get a better product out of it.
[00:37:29] There’s no harm in saying I’ve done my best and I have built a site myself and it’s not performing. So frankly, you do both. You DIY it, you build the site, you look at it, you see it’s not doing what it needs to do. And at that point you go, Jesus Christ, I need to hire a professional.
[00:37:46] Some of those are best going to be people who know people. Most of my business as an independent person comes from referrals. Because when you work with somebody and say, Oh my God, I know this designer who does this great thing. I recently just got a project from a former colleague in a totally different area.
[00:38:02] And, and he said, Oh my God, you need a website? I know someone who can help you with that. And then we talked and we got along and we’re working together. So it doesn’t have to be the, Oh my God, decision to hire a professional. It could be a relief in some sense.
[00:38:19] Right. Yeah. And I’ll agree with the referral thing, the recommendations, I would say 75 to 80 ish percent of the work that Pongos does is referrals. I’ve got clients that I’ve had for 20 plus years.
[00:38:32] I’ve known them almost as long as I’ve known Eve, but, but yeah, I, I have one client that, that I do a, pretty good amount of work for every year. And they refer me to other clients. Sometimes the people over the past 20 plus years, people have worked for them, have moved on to other organizations and bring me into their, or that new organization.
[00:38:56] And, you know, as they, as they move from organization to organization, we bring on new clients for whoever they’re for. So, that’s definitely, something to consider. So if you are thinking about hiring a professional, ask other people that, you know, and that you trust you worked with.
[00:39:11] Yeah. Yeah. That you trust. Don’t you?
[00:39:13] Like a lot of people just say, Hey, I need to hire somebody. I’ve seen so many Facebook groups that are like, I need to hire somebody. Nobody knows what, and then the case, then someone’s going to jump in saying, I only, I’m off school. Offshore, I charge 10 an hour, I’ll build you a website.
[00:39:27] And on, on that vein, I will also say back when I was a flash developer, and even now as a web developer, I can’t tell you how many times I had to redo somebody’s work that was the cheapest option. They hired an offshore developer that was $15 an hour. I charge a lot more than $15 an hour, and I had to completely redo the work because the $15 an hour developer kind of coded themselves into a corner and couldn’t find their way out.
[00:39:58] So I had to basically start from scratch to redo it. So that’s, that’s definitely something to consider when you’re thinking about it.
[00:40:05] The other thing I, that I wanna mention, when it comes to your budget, if you’re not going to budget money, you need a budget time.
[00:40:12] Yes. Yes. Yeah. Time and money.
[00:40:14] Same, two sides of the same coin.
[00:40:15] Yeah. If you’re going to do it yourself and you want to do it entirely yourself, that’s totally fine, but make sure that you are budgeting the time to do it. And the amount of time it’s going to take you to do it, it’s probably going to be a lot more than it would be if you hired somebody.
[00:40:29] So even though it may cost financially, they may cost more money for somebody to do it for you. It may end up costing less because the time that you’re spending doing it is time that you could be making money on your business instead of doing it yourself.
[00:40:45] And also when you’re hiring a professional, there is no rule that says that what they do needs to be custom because I know there are designers and developers like you who have a package. That has an existing template that is usable for most people. There’s usually sometimes a little bit of customization depending on your level, but like I just recently started doing Squarespace packages and, and one of them I call web doctor because it’s like, this is for the DIY er.
[00:41:13] This is for somebody who screwed up their site. This is someone who’s like, uh, Ooh, I have a small budget. I’ve done it. Are there small wins I can do here. There’s small things I can do to fix it all the way up to building it from scratch. And then beyond that is just like they don’t want to use any of those packages. We just want to do some custom stuff. So it’s never, if you look at somebody’s website, which you normally should do before you hire somebody. And if they don’t have a website back away. See if they have packages, it’s not a bad deal. And sometimes those packages will require you to pay a little bit upfront, and then you do it at completion. There’s rules usually around those, but there is value to that. And there’s probably examples of sites that they’ve done that fit into those different categories. That if you feel comfortable with it, It’s still hiring a professional, but it’s at a lower price point and a little bit less customization, but it’s, it’s still really valuable.
[00:42:07] Cause I know you do that for pongos. You have a series of those things that people can get and that’s hiring a professional.
[00:42:14] We’ve got packages. A small business starter package. It starts at $2,400 and we use templates for it. That’s how we’re able to keep it inexpensive and it’s a homepage, contact page, two more pages. So usually it’s going to be like about and services and a blog or news, whatever you want to call it. But we do all of those, and, even though we use templates, most people wouldn’t know that we use templates because they don’t look like templates.
[00:42:42] We’re
[00:42:42] Exactly.
[00:42:43] Yeah. We’re, we’re customizing the colors. We’re customizing the font. We’re adding images that go with the brand of the client and they look like custom websites, but they’re, it’s a lot less expensive than a custom website.
[00:42:57] And like, You were saying for the budget, we get that question a lot. How much is it going to cost for you to do the website for me? I will say I have done websites that cost as little as $750 and as much as $750,000.
[00:43:13] Right.
[00:43:13] So there’s a range, there’s a big range, and the range, basically, there’s a lot of factors that go into it, you know, how much customization, how much development, how much design and programming needs to go into it, how much integration needs to go into it.
[00:43:28] So, you know, that’s, that’s definitely something to keep in mind.
[00:43:32] I think it’s a valuable resource. Think about it as a resource. I know a lot of people, there’s pride that’s wrapped up in doing it yourself. But back to what I said in part one, where I don’t want you to have to be a designer to speak design to me. Don’t speak design to me. Just tell me what you need. The best professional will be like that. And it should be almost like a colleague. It shouldn’t feel like, Oh my God, I got to talk to my designer now, you know, it should be, this person’s going to help me achieve what I want better and faster and more and, and once, well, once on an ongoing basis, because as we know, website scale, but you, sometimes you can’t even launch it because that offshore designer, uh, you know, like, frankly, Chrissy, I sent you a client whose site was developed that way and, and the, the, the owner wanted to do all these design changes and we were limited because the back end was so bad. And we brought you in and you did what you could and then when the first opportunity hit and she had a budget for it, we rebuilt that site. And gave it a fresh new look, but the look was almost less important at that point than actually building it correctly. And that person would have saved a lot of money if they’d just gone with a professional that they vetted.
[00:44:48] Right.
[00:44:49] At a time. So it’s never, it’s never a bad thing to, to do. There are sometimes designers out there, me included, Who will do 15 minute free consults. So if you have already have a site, you can actually say, what would you change? Or it isn’t performed. Like if you, if you’re sophisticated enough to know it’s not performing, why isn’t it performing? Is it not performing because people aren’t finding it? That’s a tech issue. Is it not performing because of how it looks at the design issue? Is it not performing because my story’s not clear? That’s a content issue. I recently just did one of these, someone recommended me, I was like, yeah, I’ll talk to her for 15 minutes. And, and, she ended up not having the budget to do it, which is fine, but it got her going in her head, so I hope at some point, She’ll fix it, but there are people who are willing to do that.
[00:45:34] Sometimes you have to give up your name and your email for their list that they have to, you know, free is never free. But it is often a valuable thing. So if you see it to someone that you know is a good designer, someone who, you know, has done stuff for other people that they trust, that they trust. If you see that person offering free time, take it. And let that person know you, come prepared to tell them what you want to address. And they’ll do what I’m doing, which is just babble at you for 15 minutes and tell you some things to do. If you’re, if you’re a pure DIYer, so that’s a valuable resource as well.
[00:46:09] Is there anything else that you would like to share, talk about, or let folks know if they’re trying to DIY or thinking about hiring somebody to help them with their design? Anything else you want to add to what we already talked about?
[00:46:21] I’m going to always go back to the basics. I’m going to go back to story. That is, that is. Again, it’s taken me a long time to sort of whittle down what I do into one word, but it’s story. If your story isn’t clear, a website won’t make it clear. So my big push for everything is make sure you understand what you’re trying to do and who you’re doing it for and that that person can understand.
[00:46:48] So before you even think about, about putting anything down and making anything pretty, know that stuff. Know, know the hard. Don’t expect a web designer to come in and solve it for you because the best web designers are just going to ask you questions and you need answers for those questions. I may be speaking for an OG design group because that’s how I function. I don’t know how 25 year olds right out of college with website degrees function. I will always try to find the story what you’re talking about and to validate that the story is correct because that, you know, if the story is wrong, I’m going, you know, garbage in garbage out. I’m going to design something based on something that is not accurate and not true.
[00:47:30] I think there’s another thing that may just be me. Authenticity. When you design a website is really important because authenticity leads to credibility and it leads to people believing in you to hire you, which ultimately believes in you creating their product for people to hire them. So if you don’t come at it, honestly, and it’s not custom to you, you say, I just want to get more followers. You have to buy them. I’ll do that. Or I just need a website because people expect me to have a website. Those aren’t good enough reasons. So if that’s true, tell someone that because then the rest of the decisions would be based on that.
[00:48:08] And, and one of the examples I give of this is I was working with a very large brand who was terrified to say anything bad. And we designed three different versions of their website for them, which they chose one of, and it wasn’t until we started in the first week of developing it, that they said, you know what?
[00:48:28] We don’t like this. And that was months. And I can’t tell you how many dollars later. And that’s because they, they either didn’t feel confident enough to talk to the person truthfully, person being me, or, or I don’t even, they changed their mind halfway through. But I think that if you can get to the root of the authenticity of why you’re doing it and who you’re doing it for, the rest of it won’t be, I would say slapdash easy, but it will come freer and it will all come back to that truth.
[00:48:58] I may be, this is why marketing is tricky for me because I find that a lot of marketing is bullshit. But a lot of stuff is made up, and it isn’t real. And a real person like me, and someone who’s been in this business long enough, if I come to a site, I can diagnose exactly how that happened. And I can see the story. I can smell the lie. So don’t give them a shot at that. Just don’t waste the time. Be true, be authentic, be reliable, let people understand who you are. And then if you are in a position to be hired, to do work for them, let’s say you’re a coach or you’re, I don’t even know what people, you know, you’re doing it, you’re writing books, it’s a vulnerable place to be in therapy language. But the, the payoff is so much stronger because it’s really you.
[00:49:48] So do that and then everything else should come from that. Ask questions. I think that’s another really important thing when you’re working specifically, you’re working with a professional, don’t be afraid to ask questions and don’t be afraid to tell them that you don’t like something and why you don’t like something.
[00:50:03] Because if you come back to me and say, well, you’re using blue, I don’t like blue. There’s no way to go from there for me. So I have to say what kind of blue and do not like it because it’s dark. Do you not like it because it’s a full swath of it on your current website and you need it to be a smaller thing. There’s a lot of, there’s a lot of whys. So I would ask a lot of questions until you’re satisfied. Be prepared to get some pushback if you are, if you’re working, you know, if you’re out of the DIY world. If you’re in the DIY world, I would also test your design with members of that audience. So don’t test it with your best friend. You know, your mother’s going to say, you know, Oh, most mothers, Oh, it’s wonderful, darling. Now, if you’re doing a website for, I want to say for coaches again, and you know, someone who is a coach, go to them and put the, this is the goal. This is what I’m doing it for. This is what the website looks like. Do you think that achieves it? And if they say no, and they’re your audience, then that’s a problem.
[00:51:00] If they say yes. You’re in the ballgame. So do that, but avoid the, what do you think? I see so many of those popping up everywhere, especially social media saying, I’ve just designed this website or I like you, I’m a podcaster. So that happens with podcast cover art, a little square that you see, some people say, what do you think about this?
[00:51:20] And there’s no context for it. So how can I, you know, why are you all saying you like it or you don’t like it? What? You don’t know what it does. That’s it. So if you don’t ask the questions, be prepared for the person that you’ve hired to ask you the questions so you can answer them.
[00:51:33] So if somebody would like to work with you, if they need help with, let’s say a custom design or Squarespace, or they just want to take advantage of your 15 minute free consultation, how can they get in touch with you?
[00:51:48] My website is evesimoncreative.Com. And there is a form. There’s a contact form and there is a CTA button, that encourages you to fill out a form and on the form, you can say, I heard you on Chrissy’s podcast, and I’m interested in, I here’s my project. You could say, they’re saying I’ve done something. I don’t know what to do with it.
[00:52:05] Will you look at, so there’s a, there’s a field there that you could just fill out and say what you’re interested in. And then I’ll get back to you. Usually it’s within 24 hours. I have availability now, which is great. And I like to work with small businesses because there’s an immediacy to the work that we do.
[00:52:23] If you’re a slightly larger organization or you’re like a big non profit or a medium non profit, contact me, but sometimes I’ll pull in a partner like Chrissy. Because if I feel that the scope of your site is probably too big for one individual person to handle, I need to partner up. And I will, you know, we, Chrissy and I will combine and work on things like that with you.
[00:52:43] But the first thing starts with checking out my website, seeing if, if what I do is interesting to you. And then just reaching out because I like to meet new people.
[00:52:53] Yes. Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Eve. I appreciate you coming on here and chatting with me and giving me all this information and giving the audience all this information about design.
[00:53:04] And I’m sure you gave people a lot of things to consider, a lot of things to think about when it comes to the design for their website. So I really appreciate it.
[00:53:14] Thank you. And just don’t be scared. I know I gave you guys a lot of stuff. I don’t mean to scare you. Just do it. Just do it. Get started. Step one is where you go.
[00:53:25] And if you need somebody we’re available.
[00:53:28] Yes. Thank you. Well, thank you everybody for listening. I appreciate you coming on here. If you haven’t already subscribed, make sure you do. Come on back next week. I’ve got more to share with you and keep on listening.
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