MBA2391 How To Redesign Your Website + Free Ride Friday

0:09Heyo! Welcome to the$100 MBA show. No fluff, just the good stuff. with our practical business lessons. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher, Omar Zinhome. I'm also the co-founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started back in 2014. And today is Free Ride Friday. On Free Ride Fridays, we give away a free ride to the$100 MBA program. Our program over at 100mba.net that guarantees you'll become a better entrepreneur. If you want to win a free ride, just leave us an Apple podcast rating and review and you enter our weekly random draw we call Free Ride Friday. Listen in on Friday, just like today, to see if you won.

0:43We announced that this week's winner a little bit later in the episode. In today's episode, you will learn how to redesign your website. Your website is where your business does business. So optimizing it and making it beautiful and useful is super important. Many of us start our business and we build a website to get us going. And it's good, but it's just good enough for us to get started, which is great because you want to get the ball rolling, make some money, get a proof of concept, get some customers through the door. But once you're past that phase, about a year or two or even three years in, you're probably thinking about redesigning your website, updating it, making it look more contemporary.

1:21And this episode is going to show you how to do it right. Your website is the experience your customer goes through when they buy your products and services. It's a part of the purchase. It's a part of what they will actually buy, especially if they're going to consume your product on your website, like a course or a training or software. So let's make sure we nail it. Let's get into it. Let's get down to business. I'm a big believer that great design can really level up your business and the value you offer your customers. This means you can charge more and actually make more money just because you have better design.

1:59Don't believe me? Ask companies like Apple, Porsche, or even Ikea, who the whole value proposition they're offering customers is simple, clean looking design. And this is why I wanted to do this episode, because this is an opportunity. When you decide to redesign your website, this is an opportunity for you to actually create a better experience for your customers and therefore create a better product in general. Remember, your product, your service is not just what they actually buy. So for example, I run a software company, Webinar Ninja. This software allows them to run live and automated and series webinars, hybrid webinars.

2:36It's a great way for them to grow their business and deliver great content to their customers. But part of what they're paying for is the design, is what it looks like to the customers they're serving. It's the design that they're experiencing when they use my product. If it's easy to use, if it's good looking, they're going to value it. This is why a lot of businesses actually struggle because they want to charge premium prices for their products or services, but their website looks like something from 1995. Design matters. So when you're deciding to redesign your website, you should have a set of principles you should follow so that you know what good design is.

3:14And instead of me just giving you on the top of my head what I think good design is, I'm going to give you the rules I follow. And these are not my rules. These are rules that were created by an amazing designer from Germany, Dittier Roms, He was a head designer for the company Braun, you know, the Braun products. And I've been following his rules for design for some time now, and it's never failed me. So I'm going to quickly go through those 10 rules so that you can follow them too when it's time for you to redesign your website. So that you know that, hey, if I follow these rules, I know my design and the investment I'm making into redesigning my website will go to waste.

3:50Number one, good design is innovative. Number two, good design makes a product useful. 3. Good design is aesthetic 4. Good design makes a product understandable 5. Good design is unobtrusive 6. Good design is honest 7. Good design is long-lasting 8. Good design is thorough, down to the last detail 9. Good design is environmentally friendly 10. Good design is as little design as possible I love these rules because I really believe in them. I think that this actually makes great design. Whether you're designing a website, a sneaker, or home decor, it doesn't really matter. But let's go back to your website here.

4:38One of the rules is good design is long-lasting. And this is really important. You want to make sure that when you redesign your website, that it's going to stand the test of time. This is why I'm not a big fan of design trends. There's a lot of design trends when it comes to websites, whether it's big, bold colors or some crazy cartoon characters or notion like graphics. There's a software called Notion and their design became so popular that everybody just copied it. But the point here is, is that you want to create design that's going to go beyond trends, that's going to last beyond trends, something that you'll be happy with even if the trends change.

5:16So let's talk about how to get started. One of the best ways to understand what you want when it comes to your redesign is understand what you don't like. So it's good to make a list of the things that you don't like, websites you don't like, designs you don't like, ideas or branding you don't like. Then I like to start with that because this allows whoever's going to work with you to understand what are the no-goes, what are the things that you don't want to have. And that really allows you to have a clear path to what you want to have. And that's where we go next, where we make a list of things that we do like.

5:46What are some of the websites or brands or businesses where we actually admire their design? It could be even genres like Swedish design, or maybe your brand has like a Western theme and you like country Western design. The point here is that you want to give whoever you're working with some idea of what not to do and what to do or what you actually like. Now, of course, they're not gonna make a carbon copy of sites that you like, but they're gonna get inspiration. Next, you want to find a designer that you can really jive with, that you can work with, that can really create your vision into a reality.

6:20Designers are worth their weight in gold, meaning they're worth paying for. And design is really what you want to invest in here, because if you have some great designs, getting somebody to implement them, meaning code them on your website, that's the easy part. There's so many people that can do that. The design part, that's the rare part. so where do you find a great designer well you can find great designers on places like upwork freelance.com or even dribble which is a great kind of library of different designs where you can reach out to designers to say i love your design i love your taste i would love to see if we can work with each other get an understanding of how much they cost if your website redesign project has a budget i would allocate the lion's share of the budget to design meaning let's say your budget is$10 ,000 to redesign your website, then I would spend$6 ,000 on design and$4 ,000 on the implementation of design, the coding of the design, getting somebody to actually implement these designs on your website.

7:16Now, if they're not building the website from scratch, this is not going to be that expensive because they're basically putting a new coat of paint on their already there features. Now, having said that, a great designer is going to improve your experience. This is what's called the UX, the user experience. UI is user interface. So a great designer might make some changes like what's on the menu, how things interact with the customer when they are buying or when they are browsing your website. That's going to require some technical changes on the backend or in the implementation, the coding. But for the most part, this is just a few things to improve the experience.

7:55It's not going to be a heavy lifting job. Now, there are some unicorns that are great designers and great developers, meaning they can code what they design. It's rare, but you might find them. And they're great value because you can just do one deal and get it all done with one person. If you could find somebody like that, amazing. But in my experience, they're like a unicorn. Super, super hard to find. Might be easier and faster for you to find a great designer and then a great implementer, somebody who can actually put that design into play. Now, depending on how you host your website, whether it's on WordPress or some other website builder, you're going to have to see what's possible.

8:32Now, obviously, if it's WordPress, then you have a lot of flexibility. It's super easy to custom code things in WordPress. But if your website is hosted in a different way with a different, let's say, website builder, you need to contact them and find out what's possible. Say, hey, if I have a bunch of designs designed by a designer, how can I implement these new designs into my website. What files do you need? What format do you need? What's possible? What's not? Contacting your website hosting provider should be pretty simple. And this is a bit of homework you could do before you start hiring people.

9:05I like structuring this into a project, project work, not hourly work. Meaning you say, hey, this is my budget. This is how much I want to spend on design. Break it up into milestones. Let's say three weeks of work for this project. Each week is$2 ,000, total$6 ,000. Each time they hit a milestone, which you decide, okay, this is the milestone, this is the progress of work you're looking for. They pass that milestone, you release that milestone, they get paid, so on and so forth. Now, if you work with a website like Upwork, this makes it super simple. They have this milestone system. It's really easy.

9:39This is why I recommend going through these types of gig economy type of websites. Now, normally once the designs are done, the designer's not done because it has to be implemented to spec. That means whoever's going to code this has to code it on the website or in a staging environment or some sort of sandbox environment where it's not live on the website and you'll make the switch later alive. But the point here is that you get to actually see and interact with it as if it was live in some sort of environment that you can just go to your browser and look at the new website in action. At this point, the designer comes back in and makes sure that their designs are actually implemented the way they intended.

10:18Because static designs is one thing and real life interactive design on the actual website is another. They're going to make some notes. They're going to pass it over to the engineer. The designer then will take a look at the website, play with it, interact with it, make some notes for the engineer, the developer and say, hey, change this to do this. This is not exactly to spec or this is not the exact color or font or whatever it might be. And then once the The designer gives it the seal of approval. Yes, this is exactly the way I intended. This is exactly the way it should be. You give it a seal of approval and then the engineer will implement and then switch it to the live environment, which is your website.

10:54And then there you go. It's launched. It's ready to go. My last piece of advice is this is supposed to be fun. This is a great experience. Redesigning your website could be a lot, a lot of fun. It's kind of like redesigning your home. So enjoy it. Take it with stride and don't stress out. You're giving your baby a new look. Thanks so much for listening to today's lesson. But today's episode's not over. It's Free Ride Friday. Let's see who won this week's free ride. And the winner is C.H. Vox. C.H. Vox says, The$100 MBA is amazing. Five stars. As a business person and entrepreneur, I love the concise lessons Omar and his guests give.

11:32I highly recommend The$100 MBA Show to many I work with. Thanks. Well, thank you, C.H. Vox, for that amazing review. you have won a free ride to the$100 MBA. It's on us. Go ahead and email me over at omar at 100mba.net so we can hook you up with the$100 MBA program over at 100mba.net. If you want to win a free ride, just leave us an Apple Podcast rating and review and you enter our weekly random draw. We call Free Ride Friday. It's that easy. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. In this process of redesigning, take your time in finding the right designer. It's so important. Don't rush this.

12:07One of the things I like to do when vetting the designer is giving them a task to do so I can see they can actually do what I want. Where I can give them the list of things I said I don't like and what I do like and give them an understanding of what kind of redesign I'm looking for and say, hey, can you redesign just one page? I'm willing even to pay for it even. But basically, it's like a paid interview. Sometimes I will have to put out some money, a couple hundred dollars and realize, oh, not a good fit. I dodged a bullet. I just saved thousands of dollars. But when it is a good fit, it's like money well spent.

12:40One, because I found the designer that's going to do what we need to do and achieve success. And then two, that money I just spent goes towards the design, meaning one of the pages just got designed. So we're good to go. At least we have some work under our belt. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in Monday's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

13:08Thank you.