In this episode, Chrissy Rey interviews Julie Campbell, President and CEO of Severn Leadership Group, about their website redesign journey. Discover insights on choosing between website builders, the importance of professional web development for nonprofits, and key considerations for website redesigns. Learn about mobile optimization, content management, and the benefits of separating domain, hosting, and email services. Perfect for nonprofits and small businesses considering a website overhaul.
Listen to the Episode
Show Notes
In this episode, Chrissy Rey interviews Julie Campbell, President and CEO of Severn Leadership Group, about their website redesign process and considerations.
Key Takeaways
- The importance of professional web development for nonprofits
- Considerations when choosing between website builders like Webflow, WordPress, and Ghost
- The significance of mobile optimization and page speed
- Benefits of separating domain registration, hosting, and email services
- The value of analytics in making redesign decisions
Topics Covered
- [00:01:16] Reasons for website redesign
- [00:02:13] Using professional developers vs. DIY
- [00:03:04] Desired improvements for online presence
- [00:05:32] Experiences with different website builders
- [00:07:09] Challenges with current website platform
- [00:08:15] Considering Ghost as a platform
- [00:11:00] Separating domain, hosting, and email services
- [00:12:54] Importance of checking website traffic
- [00:13:58] Using analytics for redesign decisions
Resources Mentioned
Guest Bio: Julie Campbell
Julie Campbell is a mother of two boys, wife to a college athletics coach, and President/CEO of the Severn Leadership Group (SLG), making the world a better place through virtuous leadership. She served for 20 years in the U.S. Navy in various leadership positions in space systems, electronic warfare, and communications, followed by 15 years leading teams in the defense, information technology, and nonprofit industries. With a passion and curiosity for people and their purposes, Julie is a life-long mentor and collaborator with a mission to help others level up their leadership as they change the world.
When she’s not knee-deep in creating partnerships, fundraising, and growing the SLG network of mentors, fellows, and supporters, you can find her volunteering at her sons’ school, cheering at sporting events, playing board games, or walking, listening to podcasts and reading (sometimes all three at once)!
Take Action
- Want to learn more about website redesigns? Check out Chrissy’s previous episodes on website planning.
- If you are part of a nonprofit that needs help with your website, contact Chrissy’s team at Pongos Interactive.
Transcript
[00:00:09] Hello, everyone. This is Chrissy Rey and welcome back to Website Success. I am doing our second interview here on Website Success. So I am going to welcome Julie Campbell. She is a mother of two boys, wife to a college athletics coach, and the president and CEO of the Severn Leadership Group, which is an organization that is making the world a better place through virtuous leadership.
[00:00:34] Welcome, Julie. Would you like to add anything to that introduction?
[00:00:37] Thanks, Chrissy. Well, I’m just happy to be here. A little bit, just a little bit more on SLG. We are a nonprofit organization that’s based in Annapolis, Maryland, where you’re at, but we are nationwide. And so I look forward to learning from you what we can do better.
[00:00:53] Julie and I were talking before I started recording about that she would like to do a redesign of the Severn Leadership Group website. So if you’re curious to see the website, it’s at severnleadershipgroup. org. And again, she is thinking about doing a redesign. So Julie, what made you decide that now is the time to do a redesign of your website?
[00:01:16] Well, we’ve been around for about 12 years. And in those 12 years, we’ve had three different websites. And as we expand and grow and our mission and who we serve becomes more clear and widespread. I just felt like it was time to do a redesign. We this past year, we’ve done some really good work on our strategic plan, and we really looked at the personas of who we serve and wanted to make sure that what we are putting out to the world does show that. So we attract the perfect or the right people that would love to come participate in our programming.
[00:02:02] So, It looks like your website right now was done by a professional. I saw the credits down in the footer. Have you always used professionals for your website or did you ever DIY your website?
[00:02:13] We have always used professionals.
[00:02:15] Okay, and why is that?
[00:02:17] Well, as a non profit organization we have very few employees and lots of volunteers. So to be consistent one, we want to have someone that’s a professional at it. And that has that time and ability to help us with this two. That’s not our, what our role is. And so I’ve always felt and the folks before me are born for me really felt that having somebody who’s a professional in that space and that could help us design, but also provide maintenance is what we need to do with our small organization.
[00:02:53] I like to hear that, especially as a web developer. Professional does this all the time.
[00:02:58] What are some of the improvements that you want to make to your website and to your online presence with this redesign?
[00:03:04] Since COVID, we really have expanded nationwide. And so I think there is some pieces there that we need to be conscious of, whether it’s security or operating in different states making sure that we’re attracting folks outside of the Annapolis, Maryland area. So, are we speaking the correct language? We want to be clear about our programming and what’s available outside of where we’re actually located. So there’s that piece.
[00:03:35] I’ve also noticed that we have a lot of video, which we love. We love showing the impact, but also real people. People who are actually going through our programs or have been impacted by the programs. And so, I, what I’ve seen though is that it just seems slow, especially on the mobile. And I know more and more people use their mobile devices to, if they want to check us out, they’re going to be doing it first on their phone or an iPad.
[00:04:04] And so, I just don’t think we’re optimized right now.
[00:04:08] And we did take a look earlier. The PageSpeed, which is a website that you can, anybody can use from Google. It’s pagespeed.web.dev. And the mobile page speed was 55, I think. So that my recommendation is usually to get at least a 70 with the mobile page speed, and somewhere in the eighties or nineties for the desktop page speed, and I think yours was in the seventies or eighties.
[00:04:33] 75, I think. Yep.
[00:04:35] So definitely can do some improvement with that. And it can be tricky to do that with a lot of the website builders out there because one of the, one of the benefits of WordPress is that you have a lot of control over pretty much every aspect of it.
[00:04:47] So you have control over the hosting the caching on the hosting, which is basically going to speed things up for the website. And you’ve got control over all of the code that goes into it. So it makes it a little bit easier to optimize things a little bit.
[00:05:02] Speaking of control, that’s one other reason. We currently have some functionality where we can go in, we have a monthly blog, sometimes two a month, and then we will update our events and things that are going on. And I don’t want to always have to go back to our developer or people who are doing the maintenance. I want to have some functionality where we can go in and make some changes and that it’s easy for us to do.
[00:05:27] And that has, that’s currently, it’s a little bit wonky for me.
[00:05:32] And your old version of your website was in WordPress, but your current version is using Webflow. And why did you choose to use Webflow?
[00:05:42] When we re did this last redo, we really wanted to have a lot of we want it to be, look, we’re really creative. And like I said, the moving pictures and beautiful, almost artistic. And so the organization we found great group to work with, fun group to work with. And they were introduced to us by some of our members and board members. And that is the platform that they used, or that’s the what do we call it? The web biddler that they used. And okay, I’m not an expert here. So I’m like, sure. That sounds great. Sounds. It’s pretty popular. But what I found over time as I’ve looked a couple of times to maybe find someone locally who could help me nobody is that familiar with Webflow.
[00:06:29] That’s something that I’ve heard a lot from other clients. I was telling you earlier I’ve had one client that was using Webflow and they weren’t happy with it. And it wasn’t an issue really so much with the platform Just as well, I guess it was an issue with the platform, but the lack of developer support that they found in the area, they wanted to work with somebody local, and they just weren’t able to find Webflow developers locally.
[00:06:53] And so they ended up switching to WordPress before the site even launched, we completely rebuilt the website in WordPress. So, and I know when we spoke earlier, you were interested in possibly switching back to WordPress. What is making you think that you might switch from Webflow to WordPress?
[00:07:09] I think just as I’ve gone in to try and edit some things Webflow has been a little quirky for me, and I don’t remember that when I was on our last platform. I remember it was a little bit more simpler to upload our blogs and not deal with formatting. Right now, almost every month I upload a blog. I have to go back to our developer and ask them to fix it because I can’t get the picture right or I can’t get something right. And of course, that could be me. But I just don’t remember that in the past and I’m I guess that’s probably my biggest reason.
[00:07:47] And one of the other website builders that we talked about before we started the interview was Ghost, which I hadn’t actually heard of. I guess I, I gotta start keeping up with the latest trends and everything. I looked it up before we started and it’s been around it looks like for about 11 years now. It came out in 2013. We’re in 2024 now and it looks like it’s specifically for Blogging and online publishers. What is piquing your interest about using ghost?
[00:08:15] I think the the other, also the other stuff, yes, is that because we, do writing and we want to be able to maybe publish more things, whether it’s online courses or just writing more, so that we have activity, changes to our website
[00:08:32] Ghost had also, they also talk about needing less plugins because the things are already built in, which that, that sounds good, but I’m, I question that, right? Cause there’s nothing for free, right? And, but it’s also can be somewhat attractive as a nonprofit. I don’t want to be spending a lot of money on plugins because I might use just a fourth of the capability, but I need that piece.
[00:09:02] So, I’m really just trying to investigate myself and see, would that be helpful so that I can minimize expenses but still get the bits of capability that we might need.
[00:09:13] And I did see that Ghost is open source, which is great. WordPress is also open source, which I think is really nice because in a lot of cases with open source, you can go in and edit the code if you need to. So you’ve got a lot of control over it. But, I will say one of the potential issues of a sort of all in one package is like Ghost, where you said it’s got all of the functionality that’s built in there, is that sometimes and I don’t know this about Ghost, I haven’t used it yet, but I do know this about some other platforms that sort of say they can do everything that you need, is that sometimes they do all of the things okay, but they don’t do them Very well, like they don’t, they’re not the best at certain functionality, so they, and sometimes the functionality of certain things is terrible and again, don’t, I’m not saying this about Ghost, I’m just saying this about these sort of do everything platforms, that, and I won’t mention any, because I don’t want to annoy anybody, but But they, there are many out there that claim that they can do your website, all of your your funnels, your sales pages, your email marketing, and they basically do everything.
[00:10:21] And in some cases, again, they do some of those well, some of them okay and some of them not well at all. So you still end up having to use things from different vendors and different providers to cobble everything together. Even though you’re paying for this platform that supposedly does everything. So just a caution out there if you’re thinking of using an all in one system.
[00:10:44] Another thing that we talked about before we started the interview was along the same lines was having your email, your web hosting, and your domain name at different providers. So right now your domain name is registered at, was it GoDaddy?
[00:11:00] GoDaddy. GoDaddy. Okay. And then where do you have your email hosted?
[00:11:04] That’s Google.
[00:11:05] Google. Okay. And then we weren’t, you weren’t sure about the website, but we’re thinking that it might be hosted by, well, yeah, it’s on Amazon, but we think that might be through Webflow. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And one of the reasons that it’s good to have it split up like that, not, I know some people like to have their email, their website hosted and their domain name all at one place.
[00:11:29] And you can do that, but again, if you get your website, if you’re using WordPress and you get your website hosted at a hosting provider, that all they do is specialize in WordPress hosting, they’re going to be really good at, Making that website go really fast on their hosting. And then if you work with a company that they specialize in email although Google doesn’t really specialize, so they do a lot.
[00:11:55] But they don’t. They don’t do, they used to do domains, but now they just do the email. So they don’t host domains or they don’t let you register domains through them anymore. They do a lot of other stuff, but they’re really good at email. That’s like Gmail is I think the most widely used email system out there. So they’re very good at that. And then, somebody like GoDaddy or Namecheap or one of the other domain registrars is good at the domain registration. So I just want to throw that out there. Don’t necessarily, you don’t necessarily want to put everything into one place.
[00:12:29] And another reason for splitting things up like that is if your email goes down, you don’t want your website to also go down. If your website goes down, you don’t want your email to go down as well. So if you have them with two different providers, sometimes that, that is. Very helpful.
[00:12:43] That makes so much sense. Thanks.
[00:12:46] And then speaking of web hosting one of the factors that we consider when it comes to web hosting decides, what web builder you’re using is traffic.
[00:12:54] And do you know how to check your traffic for your website?
[00:12:58] I used to with Google analytics but I haven’t in a long time. It’s just it’s not one of my main job in my main job description. So, or it’s not something I can, I often afford the the time to do. Okay. Okay. You weren’t. Yeah, you can do it.
[00:13:15] You and I, we checked. I think you said that Google Analytics is installed on the website. So even if you can’t do it right now, you can go in there and take a look at your traffic. And why?
[00:13:27] Yes. And why is that important?
[00:13:29] Well, it’s, there are lots of reasons. Number one when it comes to web hosting, you need to know how much traffic you’re getting because a lot of the web hosting providers will give you limits based on how much traffic you’re getting each month.
[00:13:41] So, it’ll cost one thing if you’re getting less than 5, 000, it’ll cost another thing if you’re getting between 5, 000 and 10, 000 visits per month. If you’re getting between 10, 000 and 100, 000 it’ll cost another thing. But, and then you can also get it a sense of the bandwidth that you need for the website.
[00:13:58] And also when it comes to a redesign, it’s really important. And this is something that you definitely want to look at as part of your redesign thinking is what pages are working well. So if somebody is going to your website and they’re clicking on the our team page, and then they’re spending a lot of time actively interacting with that page, then you might want to consider keeping the content and the sort of the layout and the functionality of that page pretty similar in your new website.
[00:14:27] But if you’ve got a lot of pages where people spend no time or they’re not interacting with the pages at all, then you know they might need some improvements with those. Or if there’s pages that people aren’t going to at all, then maybe they’re not finding it. So you might need to really think about your navigation and the structure of your website. So lots of reasons for that. Yeah.
[00:14:47] And it also is helpful because at least with Google Analytics, you can see what kind of device people are using. You had mentioned earlier that you had the sense that a lot of people are using like their iPad or their phone to look at your website. Google Analytics can tell you pretty accurately if they are doing that. So it’ll tell you if they’re on a mobile device or a desktop. So you can see that what kind of device they’re using.
[00:15:09] Did you have anything else that you wanted to share about your thoughts for your redesign or platforms or anything else like that?
[00:15:16] No, I think we’ve covered most of it.
[00:15:18] Well, thank you so very much for coming on with me. I really appreciate it and sharing your insights into the redesign process. I know that’s something that, that a lot of my listeners have either been through, are considering, or eventually are going to have to do. So it’s good to get some insights from a real person instead of me just saying, this is what you need to do for a redesign. Cause. That’s what I do, but I don’t want to be the only one talking about it. So, well,
[00:15:42] if I could add to Chrissy, I really love the way you take something that can be complicated. I’m not a dumb person, but I, sometimes it’s just, it’s a lot and you do a really good job of being able to explain it to me, answering my questions when I don’t get it. Your approach is very easy to follow and inspiring and you’re just a master at it. So I’m really looking forward to maybe some next steps.
[00:16:10] Well, I appreciate that. Thank you very much.
[00:16:12] So everybody, thank you so much for listening. Again, this is Website Success. I’m Chrissy Rae. And my guest again is Julie Campbell from the Severn Leadership Group. So thanks for listening. And I will catch you in the next episode.