Picking a Platform

So, the, I hate starting. Every time I edit, I'm like, so. Less so's. Less um's. That'll be our good. It's the so um's podcast. Okay. Like, um. No, that's my word. I know, sorry. I took your word. So, let me go back to what I'm comfortable with. So.

Welcome to the marketing team of one podcast, where we have conversations about the issues one person marketing teams face when trying to meet their goals with limited time and budgets. Now here's your hosts, Eric and Mike. Mike, you're on the crying couch, but you seem, you seem to be. Don't seem like you're crying about anything, but I got a question for you.

Since you are, you seem like you're open to a question probably. Um, I'm building a website, client called me and you know, they just wanted to know like, what should I build my website on? What platform? What's going to work the best? Well, I, I didn't mean for this to bring up. Eric, you can join the. Like solid 10 percent of the internet discussion boards asking that exact same question.

It's really that difficult. It's just a website, Mike. Come on. It's just a website. Yeah, no. I, uh, so many thoughts about it, but like, I think there's so many people that, that they. they ask what platform they should build their website on with it. Or, and sometimes it's more phrased it. Should I build my website in Wix?

Should I build my website in Squarespace? Should I build my website in WordPress? And I think it's, it depends. And I think, I don't know. I think maybe I've, I've stayed above the fray. I've never contributed to this and maybe, Maybe if I had, maybe it wouldn't occupy 10 percent of the Internet's discussion boards.

Um, maybe if there was a reasonable voice out there talking about how, what you should be looking for, or guiding some of these people, if it gets to enough of the people, maybe that question doesn't get asked as much. Hmm, nice. So we're, I think we can look to you then as a guide for this. Maybe. I mean, I don't have all the answers, but I think there's a lot of, um, I think, uh, I, if I, if somebody came to me with that question, I would probably have 20 different questions I would ask them, um, about to get them, steer them towards a solution.

Cause it's not, there is no, as much as, you know, WordPress has 87 percent of the, um, website market. I may have exaggerated there a little bit. That's good. Um, it's not, it's, it might not be the best for everybody. Um, it might not be best for the way that they work, might not be the best way for their priorities and what they're trying to do.

So then, what are those first questions that you ask to kind of help direct guidance around this platform question? Oh gosh, well, I mean one set would be, you know, well, what's What is your skill set? Like what, what are you good at? What are you coming to this website as? Are you, do you, do you know how to code?

Do you know like HTML? So to almost back up just one level, am I building it or am I hiring it to be built and then I'm gonna maintain it? So it's really a more Yes. Okay, and I'm kind of I kind of jumped over that and I'm assuming that if you're asking that question What platform should I use for my website?

You're already thinking about building it yourself. Okay, or using it all the time. So

Yeah, what what is what skills do you bring to the website as a whole right? Do you code do you design? Are you a writer like in neither of those things interest you like those are Those are different considerations, completely different things, you know. I guess then we need to go back to see what, then, so once you're comfortable with that decision of I'm building it, I'm writing it, I'm, whatever, wherever you fit into that, or doing it all.

Mm hmm. Which, that's a big undertaking. Yeah. A lot of people do it, you know, that they do have to own the whole website. Right. And all the different parts of it. Then you need to look at your, uh, Organization and what you're building the website for and make the decision about what type of a website What do you mean when you say like what type of a website would I mean?

There's there's probably a numerous categories. I probably couldn't couldn't cover all of them, but I like I think there's probably four or five basic types of sites. One, the simplest I would call it is like a brochure site. Um, when we talk about brochure sites, it's, it's not updated very often. It probably has 10 pages or less that's really talking about a product or a service.

You're not, Selling things directly from the website. It's usually necessitates a call or Maybe it's not even overtly selling something but it's providing information out to the public about something like proof of life. Yeah I don't know if you see as many of the I mean you still see them They still there's still purpose for those but a brochure site would be one you would approach a brochure site with one set of tools.

Um, another one would be more like a, like a content marketing site, right? Where you're using it to publish information on a regular basis with the goal of driving traffic to your website. And there's usually, and so that. That content marketing thing, you're usually adding in more information. You're, you want to be collecting more information and you'd be hooking in.

Um, well on, on the content marketing side, I think a lot of it, you're, what you're really trying to do is build an email list or drive, um, drive awareness towards your product through SEO and writing a lot. So, so it's almost like one level up from brochure site. Next would be content marketing where you're it's maybe it's got a little bit more content But it drives people to do something interact at a little bit higher level.

Yeah, there's a little bit more

There's more functionality there's more features needed in that tool set to really effectively do the Marketing that you might plug into a CRM or a content or a customer Relationship management. Yeah. Yeah platform. We're at a minimum like connecting to a like email marketing Software or a lot of them are bundled together.

I mean, that's a whole other thing too. Yeah So yeah, I think content marketing is one you've got the the e-commerce side of things. Are you selling things on your website? And then that's got some angles to like if you're selling one thing That's you know, if you're selling to one thing directly your approach to building the website would be different than if you're selling You know, 20 to 2, 000 projects, products, um, you would want different platforms for that because they're, they're different.

Um, there's, I don't even think at that level, like with e-commerce, not all e-commerce is all the same. I think that there's different needs. You get into a lot of complexities, things around inventory and change cycles within your product line. There's a lot of things that are variables within e-commerce.

Yep. Amazon is e-commerce. That's the far end of the spectrum. Then you've got a one Etsy site, almost, would be kind of the basic, like, I'm selling this hat or this scarf. Or I'm selling this digital product that gets delivered when somebody pays and it's only, I've only got one, one of them. You still need to transact and collect money.

Um, that's a layer that you need to keep in mind. in mind when choosing a platform as well. Software could be delivered that way as well. Downloadable solutions, kind of a thing. Yeah. Okay. So we've got brochure content, marketing, and e-commerce. I think another spin on it is probably similar to the content marketing side of things is kind of like more like a public information.

thing, where you, you're putting information primarily for the public to be consuming. Um, I think we see this a lot with, um, government agencies or, you know, public institutions where they, maybe they're funded by government funding or grants or something like that. But they're, they're not directly, they're not directly, uh, asking for money or, or selling a product to the end thing, but they have a very vested interest in making sure that their information is published for the public, for the public good.

Right. Um, it, that would, I would say is similar to the content marketing thing as far as the needs go, but just slightly, you might not have as much like of a marketing spin. It's more of a publishing information. Um, approach to things. So like broadcasting, how would you, would you put maybe other media sites, you know, news content, maybe publications that are online, those types, are they kind of fall in a similar category, or is that a different category?

That's, that's a good question. Um, I think they, it very similar. I think the key difference there, which isn't maybe isn't that much of a difference, but is the advertising angle, right? Like when you're talking about like media companies and online magazines or something like that, in a lot of those instances, they're, Hoping to be funded by ad revenue and everything.

Yeah, you got paywall or you've got ads or both sometimes. Or that hot mess, um, that is called the recipe website. But we could do a whole episode on the tire fire that recipe websites are. But you know that they fall in line with a lot of big publishing sites. I mean, it's bad. It's, I was on one site the other day trying to navigate through it and it was trying to avoid the ads and navigate to the actual words and the content of it.

It was like playing a video game. You're, you're like, chasing, and you're Pitting and the world's worst video game. Oh, it's, and then you just end up throwing your phone. So you gotta factor in the cost of phones that you throw at a wall, at the floor. Right. You, you had a, um, on LinkedIn you were railing against, uh, yeah.

In Ink Magazine, ink Magazine, something that was very, uh, a reputable magazine. Been a fan since I've read Ink Magazine for decades. Love it. Yeah. Yeah. Online. But their, but their website has become a tire fire. Yeah. I guess they're big enough we can pick on them and name them specifically. Yeah. I'm comfortable with it.

I, I, it's, they're not unique. No, they do, yeah. Like, that's the big point of this whole thing, right? That's exactly right. Like, that, dude, I mean, that's, they're trying to monetize it. They can't sell, um, printed ones as much as, at the scale they used to, right? Yeah. And they got to try and figure out how to fund this journalism, which is important, but man, like, it's, I think you're being so hostile to the people who are actually interested in reading your stuff.

Yeah. You really turn them away. And I feel bad for them, because I know that that's been a struggle now for 15 years with all publication, news. News sites are just rampant. They're all like that. I mean, it's really hard to find a good one. And I don't, I don't know if it's going to get any better, unfortunately, like with Google's AI plans and, you know, summarizing things and it like pushing all these actual like listed websites even further down.

That's, that's the main way that a lot of people find those, those websites. And so I don't know if it's going to get any better. I think that, I don't know. I think it's sad. I'd love to see the ROI on ad spends on those platforms. I mean are companies comfortable with spending money to Support that sort of a structure.

I know that's probably another topic we could get into for another time But I there must be some return on that or it's cheap enough to where they can just blast Millions of ads over those platforms fairly easily fairly cost effectively and something there's a payoff somewhere or maybe not Like, you know, I mean, I think a lot of people that are really hurting and they're trying to throw it.

That's why there's Pop up covered by a video, uh, auto playing video, by the way, um, that takes up a third of the screen and, um, you dismiss one pop up and then you're scrolling through and there's 40 words. And then there's another ad and there's another 40 words and another ad it, or there's a pop up that shows up on the mobile, like four scrolls down that you don't even know is there, but the whole site's grayed out and you're like, wait, why?

Oh, there, I have to click. No, thanks or whatever. This was such a big diversion, but it's really it's something that is it's like therapy, you know It is as we've worked through it. We've gone over the four Basic categories of websites that are out there. Let's go back to now the marketing team of one person Is now pretty much decided what they're gonna do.

What's the next stages of that? What do they have to start thinking about? How would they go about starting the process of building a website? I think they there's a lot of like really figuring out what you're where is your bread buttered like what's your what skills? Are you bringing to the table and everything like?

Are you? Are you a designer? You're probably going to be a little bit more picky about the look and feel of things. You might want to have a little bit more control of things, right? So that would help dictate what you're looking for in a platform. Do, do I have the flexibility to kind of impart my design?

Well on, on this, right? Heavy design, heavy visuals. Yep. Am I a coder? Like, do I, do I know how to get in there and kind of like, customize some things, uh, to fit my more functional slash, you know, um, maybe more utilitarian Approach to things building a tool or something like that building something on inside of a platform that in Enables people to do work or yeah, am I right or do I just need to like write things?

and I don't want to I don't want to deal with I don't have the skill to Build these things out and and either from a functional side or a design side. I just want to have a place to write things and put it in and move on to the next writing assignment. Um, those, so all of those different things like would affect your decision making on which platform you're.

I guess the last thing is, are you doing it all yourself? Do you have help in, in one of these other complimentary skills to kind of build something up? Um, is, is there a budget to find somebody outside who can help with some of those things too? When you're starting to design a website, I say design a website, but the build is a big part of it.

I'm looking at it from a traditional print perspective in the sense of we design cool things and then we get them printed and those are two separate jobs within a job, in a sense, and I look at websites the same way. So I can just start doodling and I'm designing my website, right? Is that how I approach?

Is that how you begin your approach when you're designing or building a website? Um, no. Not yet. Why not? I think there's, I think an important step in there is really it comes down to the same stuff that we Talk about in marketing that we talk about in user experience work Branding work and everything we have to really if we're starting from scratch We have to have a really good idea of who are who we're building this for.

Mm hmm who we're designing this for. Who's your audience? Who's your audience? Gotcha. I want to get as quickly as possible to what you're talking about, but I think I have to realize where's the overlap between what my audience needs and what the business needs. And then where's that overlap and keep that in mind through all of the design decisions and the design decisions.

When I say design, I'm not talking like graphic design and typefaces and colors and everything like that. I'm talking the architecture of What you're creating. There's a concept called user flow. Is that a cause that sound like a right? Am I making this up or is this? No, I mean, that's a there there is a That's a common thing in user experience put yourself in the shoes of the user of the website And you want to figure out how they are going to experience this website And a lot of times it's in their pursuit of getting something done.

Like what is the goal that they're trying to reach with this? That's a big research component and trying to figure out what are their needs? What are they coming across? Complex is the fact that there's multiple needs because a website has to do all of the different. Steps along the journey to getting a purchase or getting a contract or whatever the desired result is.

Um, sometimes they're just kicking tires or just look doing research or just kind of looking around. Yep. Then they have to satisfy, Oh, I've made a decision. Now I need to either contact somebody or I need to actually put something in a cart and then follow them through that process. So that's where website design or engineering or UX comes in.

Right, that's UX. Yeah comes into the difficult things because you've got a lot of combined Requirements that sometimes are contrarian. I think you should almost always be staring towards the users side of things What what does what ultimately is going to help the person who's using this website and don't let your Business requirements or your business needs or what the CEO thinks is important.

Mm hmm get in the way of of who's using that website. Looking at intent, what, make their lives better by solving this issue. You've decided to build this website and let's say you have to do it all yourself. What I like to do is look at websites that might have shared goals of the people using the website.

And if you can find maybe bigger companies who have. invested in big user experience teams to do the research to test. If you can steal some of those ideas there, Airbnb has been known for a long time to like invest a ton of money in their design team, their user experience team, their design teams and everything.

They've done, they've tested so many different iterations of how people Go through the website to book a rental, right? Like if I'm a, if I have a similar company and I want to, um, build a website that does the same thing, I would be looking all over the place like, Hey, look what they did here. Look what they did here.

They've invested probably millions of dollars. Many tests to get to this thing that's working for them. I think a really effective way before you get into that, sketching things out and everything is to do a little research and find some of those, like, again, not competitors in your market or something like that, but like, what's the goal going back to the type of website it is, right?

Like is, is the goal. of this website to, um, grow an email list or grow a community. Okay. But like, look at some of the things they're doing with their website to try and generate and build that email list. Well, and I think what's interesting about that, and that's a really great thing to start with, to look for those.

One interesting twist on that might be, like you just suggested, look up, maybe look a little bit more adjacent to that space and see how others and maybe slightly different industries or verticals are doing similar things, which might look or feel very different and might be a refreshing perspective to bring into your space for that.

It's about research and starting with a little bit of research before you really start. Like planning this all out and none of the how it's built has come into play yet, right? There's a lot of work that you can do before you even figure out what platform you're using when you're starting a Website project.

Let's hope you have a brand established that has some of these visual guidelines or directives That you can pull from to kind of help inform the look and feel of it a little bit You've done some research around UI UX You What user flows are working? You know, what combination, magical combination of user flows have you decided to incorporate into this site?

Do you then start writing it? Do you start drawing pictures? Is it a combination of all that stuff? Is there wireframes? I mean, what's the process to really get off launch this rocket ship? This is when we can start sketching things out. I think is really helpful. And I think having having a notebook or even just having a big piece of paper and doing not when we talk about wire frames, a lot of times we're talking about like these pixel, you're generating pixels on a screen like in Figma or something like that.

And you're putting all these things together. I think a step before that is just sketching it out with by hand and taking the things you've learned and mapping out. Okay. How many pages, what pages, what information do I need to convey? Listing those out and then doing like little things and I think we like back in design school They tell you like if you're doing a layout, you know, draw these tiny little versions of a magazine and you figure out Okay, this is good.

This is good go here and you're getting it's truly a little thumbnail You're drawing a little thumbnail of those things if you can If you can do that with the pages of your website, you're, you're providing a little bit more clarity, but you're also providing a lot more thinking about what should go into each one of these pages.

Big picture stuff. Big picture and how these pieces kind of come together. It sounds like at this point, we need to look at your skill set. Go back to that. What are your strengths? Are you looking for cool flexibility? Or are you looking for stability? Is there, do those two things live at odds sometimes?

Is it a hard? I, I think so. I think, I think if you go back to like what skills you bring to it, right? And what's your, so let's say a designer, a designer most of the time, if they're looking for a platform, they're probably looking for something where they can fulfill their vision in it, which means that you need something that's flexible and not, you're not feeling constrained by the platform with a writer who acknowledges that maybe they're not strong in design.

They don't want to do anything to mess up the design. If they care about the design of things, right? They don't want that flexibility. They probably want they there's healthy constraints there that I know I can focus on what I'm good at. And output's going to be really. Nice, right? Yeah. And then you've got the code side of things.

Like if you like to mess with functionality and improve functionality, do you have the ability to easily get in there? And, um, it's kind of a hybrid of the both, right? Because you want to, you want some consistency longterm, you don't want to mess things up, but you want to know that you can make this your own.

You want some flexibility there. So the skill that you bring to the project or what you're doing informs That's awesome. Your decision on where, what you should be choosing in a platform. Could you outline quickly what stable means? Stability? I know that that's a whole thing, but I mean, websites are different than a printed brochure.

Yep. Printed brochures, you print them, they don't change. A brochure website, even though you have done nothing overtly over the course of the last five years, may not even work anymore because of other changes outside your control. Um, talk about what, what's the most stable, and what's the least stable, or what, if there is a So, I, I mean, the most stable website that you could build out there would be something where you can, um, This hot take here, if you could write everything in HTML, all your own and publish it in a way, and you just put it up and out there, like there's no dependencies on putting that out there.

It's the way the web was built for a long, long time is just people creating these HTML pages, putting it up there. It's carving up just straight out of code, just out there whittling on the porch. Stability is a funny word because, um, I think there's different interpretations of it. Like when you say stable, there's not going to be a whole bunch of unexpected changes or issues with it.

Right. Right. And so, and that could be in multiple forms. Going back to the writing example, I want to focus on writing a couple of different things, uh, writing a page for this. Um, I want to know that when I hit publish, it goes out there. I have no issues. Everything's nice and clean. Right. I think when you start dealing with design changes and flexibility, of like being able to change things, I think that can break down the stability.

And you know that the more you're changing things and where you're, you're trying to bend things to your own will, unless you're really, really good at all the checking all the boxes and being very thorough on things. I think that stuff can undermine the stability. And so I think you have to realize where you are in that spent spectrum, because I think stability is way over here and flexibility.

Ultimate flexibility is way over here, and I don't know if they can exist and that they're everyone's gonna have a different Middle ground. Oh, yeah, but I don't think they can exist you can't have ultimate flexibility and Stability without a big team of people that was just gonna say that it's gonna take somebody squarely focused on Stability if you build in a lot of complexity that has A lot of flexibility in the design side of things.

Um, my mind goes to WordPress sites immediately because at this point, WordPress sites are built upon plugin, upon plugin, upon plugin. And there is no stability with that because they're. It's a challenging environment that has multiple players that are changing things all the time and they're not always coordinated and your special mix of plug ins is completely different than any other person's on earth, probably.

There's a very good chance of that. If you're looking for something that's ultimately very flexible and stable, I think that's where you end up having, You get into the very specialized skills across everything. I think you're talking about, um, UX and UI designers who are very skilled at the layout and creating that flexible design or implementing a new design and handing that to developers who are very skilled at building something that is.

Not going to break, and that can be implemented into the system. Yeah. And, yeah, I, it's, I think it's rare to have people who can possess all those skills. Plus you add in complexity levels, which is different for everybody. Yep. And that just throws the whole equation off. The more complexity, the less stable it is.

Programmers call it technical debt. There's like, how many things have you thrown in to this that you have to keep on, top of and manage. And you want, you want to manage that, that, that just like personal debt. You want to make sure that you're not too in too deep, um, with a lot of those technical things that you've, you've thrown in there.

Even stuff like image sizes and things like that could be technical debt. Yeah, a lot of those are easier to overcome going back to the flexibility side of things. If you have a system that's flexible enough for you to throw a 12 meg image in there without any constraints, that could end up being part of your website.

And then you, you know, you'll get complaints from people saying, well, why is this? What, why is your website? So, so we're getting close now to a decision around this platform, but what. What's one of the last things we need to think about? How are you going to approach the build and the design of this website?

I think it's really important to think about the different, like, architecture types, uh, that you would, of how you would build the website. And when I say architecture types, um, the most basic website is what I would call like a page based website. You Design a page. You design another page, you link those two together.

And every time you are adding to the website, you're adding a new page, working on that page. And, and there's a ton of websites out there that are built that way. And you could, you could technically build a hundred page website that way, or a thousand page website, one page at a time, one page at a time.

Those are great because. Each one can be its own snowflake. You have the, we go going back to the flexibility side of things. You're not hemmed in by any other decisions. You can create that page. You can have a, a, Now, I don't know why you'd want to, but you can have a completely different navigation structure.

You can have a completely different Layout you could put ideas. There's this page based metaphor and there's there are very complicated Systems out there and platforms out there that are still kind of built around this idea of a page based thing They're they're trying to as maybe a writer the ability to write the information for that page and not worry about design decisions or anything.

And you know that you're creating things, maybe you're rearranging some of the blocks within that page, but you write it and you publish it and magically appears as a page, but it's still just a page. Another common ways is what I would call a more database centric way of building a website. And so in that database centric way, you're creating structured.

content in a way that can be saved in a database and then pulled out of that database in more than just a page based way. I think most blogs are what I would consider in that database way, right? So what you've done is you've created a very structured format for entering information into the database.

So you've got your blog title, you've got your blog title, Description, you might have another field for a blog summary, and you save all that into the database. And then, when you're building your website, you're, you're not so much building pages, you're building templates that display that information.

Almost like a window frame, like here's, I built this window frame that now pulls the content and pushes the content that you've structured within the database through these different pages. parts of this frame, in a sense. And so the scale of your website and how big, when you go back to like, what, what is the purpose of your website?

Is it a brochure site? Is it for public information? You got, You have to consider maintainability in a lot of these things, right? So, like, going back to this nightmare scenario of a thousand pages that are all built as one offs, right? Yep. Inevitably, there's gonna be shared information. Can you imagine if you had to make a change?

Mm hmm. A simple change. Maybe you, uh, maybe you wanted to update, uh, the year of what this, this, and, um, in a common, common thing that's across many of these pages, you'd have to go in and edit every one of those pages. So let's say you add the one thing on those thousand pages, you'd have to make a thousand edits for one simple changing of the year.

That's where the maintainability thing comes into play, right? So let's going back to the blog example, right? So a common, uh, a common thing would be that, right? You might have a home page that displays your blogs, right? You might you probably have like a category based page where it lists out like hey These are all my recipes and then all of the recipes show up on that one page.

Yeah, I did say recipes Why I'm just trying to connect back. Oh, yeah. Okay. Thank you If you if you make a change in that database system and you've got these templates that display you can go into the into the post, change the date and everywhere that the templates have been, have been created to show that it will automatically update.

So having a platform that allows you to make a change once and it automatically updates and everywhere that's shown is a huge asset. If you have to manage a lot of data. Pages, or you're, you're managing a lot of content. Would you put e commerce site in that kind of e commerce platform? E commerce is definitely a more database dependent thing, right?

You're, you're adding in almost at your core, you know, something like with Shopify and everything, you're managing products. Almost exclusively, you're putting a product in there. You've got a product title, you've got price, you've got the variations of that product. You've got a description, images, all that stuff goes into a product.

One good looking form that you manage there and then they have templates on if on the side that the users see That display that information in different ways. I think it's really important to Think about the constraints of those things when you're choosing a platform, right? Like for a brochure site in a lot of cases that database mindset is Counterproductive and you have to jump through a lot of hurdles to try and like you're overcomplicating things If you've got ten pages, it might just be better to manage those ten pages as separate pages You can update it.

The, the burden of keeping things up to date isn't, isn't huge. Right. And the stability of it is also increased a lot. Correct. You're not relying on other things to keep that alive. Yeah. If I'm talking about the page based structure and a database structure, really, most websites nowadays don't live In one camp or the other?

Hmm. There's usually a hybrid there. Sometimes Common homepage layouts are a good example of this hybrid, right? Hmm. Like on your homepage, you want to have some information that is, um, unique. Let's say you're highlighting a new, you have this new feature that you wanna highlight and you're dedicating a section of your hero on the homepage at the top of the page to that, and you want the flexibility to change that.

Often so you so you're probably you want to make sure that you can update that in a way That you it's almost like what you see is what you get It would be a good way of like editing that type of thing, but then you might have some more feature Copy underneath that. But inevitably, if you're like running a blog on your site to as like a content marketing thing, you don't want to manage those things as a page based thing.

You want to have a placeholder there that can feed information from the database, more dynamic, make it dynamic. So when those things are updated, automatically updates the homepage. Let's say you have some, you put on events. And you want to have a listing of events, right? You probably have an events page that shows all the different events that are coming up, but on your homepage, you might want to highlight, Hey, our next upcoming event, you want to be able to pull that out in there and not have to manage that.

Individually, can I go back to the word hero? I just want to clarify that one time because I did recently run into a situation where that did confuse somebody when we said hero, hero image. You want to explain what that means? So I, if we're talking about webpage anatomy, let's say, right? Most, I mean, there's, there's a lot of confused people.

You use a lot of terms interchangeably. Most of the time when you talk about a hero, um, sometimes it's called a header. Um, It's that information that I'm using another industry term above the fold, right? Like back in newspaper times, they would be folded in half, right? All the important stuff would be above where the fold is.

They'd try and make sure the big headlines are above the fold on the website of things. We do the same thing, right? We want to make sure, but above the fold is where the viewport ends for the screen. So most of the time you want to have, Your hero or header section is the first thing that people see right underneath the main navigation is that hero section and usually you're compelling your writing copy to either announce a brand new feature or product or your Selling the main benefits of your company or the product.

If it's a product page, you're talking about it. One of the biggest benefits that people will see from it. Probably the most general question that that user is coming to the site for, hopefully. Ideally it's hooking people. In to be able to want to consume more of that to either scroll further down the page to find out more Or if it's that hero section on the home page that it's driving them to a deeper page where they can find out more Side note if you're gonna spend money on imagery, that's where you want to invest it is on that hero image Whatever that means if it's a photo or you want to make that the best looking thing you've got.

Yeah, that's the first impression. Yep I think a lot of people, when they start out, when they start building websites, they are very, they're thinking. a lot about this page based thing. Cause it's, it's, I think it's an easier connection. Like when I first started building websites, it was very clear to me that, okay, I build this page and I link it to this page and I link it to this page and they all link together and everything.

I treat it all of these as ones off one offs. Right. And um, I think in WordPress that especially with people who are, who've built a WordPress site and they've added on something like Elementor or something like that, a lot of that is this page based idea that you're building this page and this page and this page.

It's not taking advantage of. Some of the database inherent database structure, things that WordPress was built on. And so, um, that's where like, if, if you're just building a brochure site with WordPress and you're only building like five pages in Elementor, you're maintaining a whole undercurrent of things that you're not even using.

And there's these, the back to the technical debt thing, like there's all these things that are happening underneath there. And you're really not even really making use of them. So if you're, um, So if you're taking that page based approach and you're building it on a system that is heavily database dependent, that might not be a great fit.

Those three elements all work together in a very complicated formula to end up with your ideal answer of what is the platform that you're going to choose to build on. It's just a mishmash combination. What's most important to you? What's your skill set? What's the purpose of the site? I think too, you know, when we talk about brochure sites, that's something that in most of our conversations We really do try to talk people into having their websites Convert or do something they can do so much more like there's a huge missed opportunity if you're just thinking of putting a website up there for Validation or for proof that you exist, which is really what a lot of those brochure sites are Websites are doing I have a I have a much easier time of having conversations with people who say this is what we need if They've if they've built a case that this is what's best for our users because this is the way they use it I think we have to come back to like what's your mentality?

What's your skill set? What are you bringing to the table? What do you value most, you know, so like let's say let's go back to I'm a writer I want to make sure that the website is works all the time, that it looks good all the time. You're, you're going to be better off trying to find a more database dependent website where you can enter information in that has good looking templates that have been designed by others, or you've hired someone to design that system and you don't have to worry about any of that.

You're going to be, you're, you're going to be fine because all of the content that you're creating is being fed through those templates. You know, that you're going to have some stability through those templates and everything. Whereas if you're a designer and you're not on board with structuring your data in a consistent way or anything, that database driven way will drive you crazy.

You're probably going to want something that's a little bit more page based. A great example is like Drupal is a very, very popular platform out there. What they've always done really well is this idea of structured data, saving information into a database and everything as a designer, it was maddening to me of how to, even though I embraced the idea of putting everything into a database and trying to pull stuff out as a designer who wanted flexibility and control over things, it was.

very cumbersome. You had to figure out how to code things. It was not a great situation. You had flexibility to create whatever data and database structures you wanted and put information into a website, but there wasn't design flexibility. Yeah, because at its base, Drupal's extremely stable. It's a pretty decent platform or not?

I don't, it has a lot of the same underpinnings. in structure that WordPress does. It's open source. Uh, it's, you have a bunch of, um, contributors adding new functionality that you can add to that site and add into the mix of things. So you have to be aware of it and. And be able to update that. Um, Drupal's huge in government and public information, like large organizations where they can have it teams that can manage those things, or it's not great for a solopreneur.

I'll tell you that. Yeah. Drupal is not great for a solo market. Takes tons of data and helps. present that in a gigantic structured website. If you've got a, if you've got one of those like public information websites and you're trying to feed a lot of information out to the public, it's ideal for that is so is like, let's talk about like publication or newspaper magazine type online, is that structured in a database way as well, because you've got, you're pumping out information.

Sometimes minute by minute, hour by hour, you can't sit and design each page. You've got to just drop it in this box, in this database, and boom. Well, there's a number of platforms that are used there, but most, in most of those cases, especially the bigger media companies, they've got design teams who are, uh, doing, well, doing the user experience work.

Designing not just templates, but a whole design system that can, that they can create those templates, feed the information from the database to populate all those pages and they have different templates to be able to choose what, what shows on those pages. What information from the database is shown on those pages.

Interesting. There's algorithms that suggest and read this next and Yeah, a lot of that stuff is like Complicated, yeah. Yeah, totally. The thing that sometimes doesn't get considered but the final thing that you really need to consider is what's the life of this website. What's it going to look like? You know, the next few months you build the website, you get it all built, launched, everything's great.

Everybody's happy. The real important parts come in two years from now, four years from now. What does that look like? How, how much do they need to consider that? Well, I think, uh, an important thing is how often are you going to be updating the site? How often do you need to manage it? Um, all, almost all websites, except that brochure site that we're talking about for the most part, need, need some care and feeding.

You also have to be aware of how much time can I dedicate to maintaining this platform? You could pick a really, a more obscure platform because you think that it checks all the boxes and maybe you're a big fan of open source software and it's a more obscure type platform that you could build your website on.

Um, That might be a great short term solution, but you know what? Like there's been some of these like niche open source things that the, the people who've been running them are a tire of it. It's a labor of love. Then the love ends up being lost. And, um, then you're left having to spend so much more time maintaining it and feeding it and patching it because you don't have anybody else helping you with that.

I did that long time ago. I tried, I Put my eggs in a basket of a, of a open source thing that checked a lot of boxes. And then as things scaled, and as you become aware of more things out there, you realize that, yeah, maybe, maybe this isn't the best long term thing. There's a big. Case to be made for supporting open source and being a part of open source software.

But I think when you're a small team and you, it's probably better to maybe invest a little bit more money in a platform that, um, that you can, yes, you're gonna have to pay for it. But the, that, that payment along with a bunch of others is helping. Ensure the more long term viability of that platform.

It's not just gonna like disappear overnight or it's not going to be It's not tied up in the whims of one or two people. Yeah longevity is definitely gonna be the consideration on that stuff because Two years can go by in a snap. Yep, and then all of a sudden Something major might've happened and you're left now, we've got to redo the site again, or we've got to rebuild everything or move it to a different host or whatever it is.

And that's the, and then I think you kind of touched on another thing that we talked about that, like flexibility, stability thing. You have to think about if you're choosing a platform, the longterm flexibility of this thing. Like if you come into it as let's say this writer I keep talking about where you're just putting stuff into the database and the front end of the website where the users are viewing.

Um, if you don't have any flexibility on that, that website's going to feel really out of date. You know, two, three years down the road, and then you're going to have to go through Everyone's favorite thing building a brand new website and going through all the things if you can go into it knowing that you've got a website That's flexible and can be Maintained or improved in spots.

You're gonna be better off in the long run, too And most of those flexible systems go more towards the, um, database driven thing, because you can, if you can separate out, which is another thing I didn't really talk about much, but if you can get separated out the presentation of the content and the content itself, it's going to be better in the long run because you can, you can change templates, you can change themes and you don't have to go into every single one of those places.

Posts or pages you you can you can do a refresh of the whole website. Don't know if we've solved the Platform should what platform should I use Mike? That's why 10 percent of the internet is filled or discussion boards on the internet is filled with this question because it's It's complex. It's deep. I think you can, if you ask yourself a lot of questions about what you want out of the website, what you're looking to do, what do your users need?

What's your long term visibility and long term expectations for this thing? It can help you get closer to A solution, but at the end of every one of those roads, there's probably 10 platforms that are saying, Hey, pick me, pick me, pick me. And then you got 10 over there and 10 over there. Pick me, pick me.

It's a hard thing to just come up with even five names. And we could name a bunch, but it's really, that wouldn't be relevant. It really makes it, you really do have to do your own homework around all those different factors to get to that answer. And I, I think. Of those 10 that are at the end of each one of those roads.

There's probably a reason WordPress has been, is probably in those of all of them, because of all the different, the ecosystem of things that you, you can go through those decision trees and you could, uh, WordPress has been used for millions of brochure sites. Yeah. It's been used for many content marketing sites, many, many, um, you add what WooCommerce to it and it's a new of e commerce surprise.

Yeah. used for public information sites all the time. It's used for all, it can be used for all these things. And so it almost sounds like I'm endorsing it for all these things. I don't know that I am, but there's a reason why. Well, and I think you can endorse a sliver of the audience that might use it for this one thing that isn't built on a lot of complexities.

At its core, WordPress is probably a really great platform for a very simple type website. It was originally a Publishing website, correct? Yeah, I think we have a whole episode where I talk about how I'm done with it. Check it out, done. But, um, and reasons why I don't know if it's the best for a lot of those things.

It using the word simple for WordPress nowadays is not the, they do not don't equate at all. Um, it's not, I don't know if there is a simple website platform. If you're looking for a simple. Website platform you're you've decided what you're looking for in the simplicity of it Mm hmm, and you're and there are other things that may not be important to you.

Mm hmm. They are not included in that so like I think Squarespace is one that's very, very popular. They've taken a lot of the design flexibility away from people. So if you remove that design flexibility, it is simple. It is a simple website. And stable, probably a little bit more stable. They probably did that, sacrifice the design to get to the stable.

If you're a coder, it's probably not a fun thing to do, but if you are a writer and you want to build more on it, in this case, this is one of those more like page by page type Hmm. Structures? Perfect. It, it, it, it's perfect. Could be a great platform for you. I I'm not going to endorse one product over another.

Cause I just, it can't like you, I think you have to go through the decision trees to figure out what's important. Yeah. You've merely just highlighted best of breed in a sense or top of the market or whatever. It's you're just identifying the big, big players by no means. Are you endorsing? I mean, and I guess the last thing is I could, I could say that where we've landed with the sites that we typically do all the time.

We found that Webflow is a good hybrid of those things. We, we run a design firm. We want design flexibility. We, um, often have people who want, they want to have some content marketing type. entries into that. Web, Webflow has this kind of hybrid approach where you can design and build, you have ultimate design flexibility to build out some of these pages, but they have this CMS component on the other side where you can create this structure and integrate it with the page based structure to create a more flexible website.

And for our needs, It's been, it's been fantastic. Um, a coder would hate it. You can't get in and monkey around with it. You can, but it's like, it's probably, there's, there's a lot of like, hurdles to doing that. I think if you're, if you like code. You're gonna make a different choice. You're gonna go somewhere else.

Alright, well, I think this has been a complete waste of time. Thank you, Mike. I've, have no actual answers on, you said nothing, you didn't give me a name. What I have learned is that I need to go back and consider. A lot of the things that you mentioned earlier. Yeah, you've just reviewed them for us again So that's really the answer to this question is go back come up with those Individualized answers for all those questions and that will provide the guidance to get you to the right platform.

Yeah I realize I may not have helped you to get to an actual solution, right? Yeah, you've you do feel like maybe, you know, you have to do the work. I know. But if I see that you've posted on Reddit, what platform should I use for this website? I'm coming after you. Thank you for the warning. I appreciate it.

Torches. Pitchforks. Do the work. You can make more informed questions out of that. And people will be able to help you a lot more. That makes a lot of sense. Very helpful, Mike. I appreciate it. On that note. Let's finish the podcast. Thank you so much. Good information. Thanks everybody for tuning in. Thank you Thanks for tuning in for more information and other episodes subscribe to the marketing team of one podcast on youtube apple or spotify podcast networks You can also chat with us on the r marketing team of one subreddit or visit marketing team of one dot com to learn more.