---
title: Web Design Shortcuts You Should Never Take
date: 2019-01-11T06:00:00-05:00
author: Sean Smith
canonical_url: "https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-01/episode-3/web-design-shortcuts-you-should-never-take/"
section: Podcast
---
<!\[CDATA\[YII-BLOCK-BODY-BEGIN\]\]>[Skip to main content](#main-content)Guest Mike Mella
Web designer, developer, and strategist helping organizations stay current on the Web.
[ ](https://twitter.com/mikemella)[ ](https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikemella)
Season 01 Episode 3 – Jan 11, 2019
42:23 [Show Notes](#show-notes)
## Web Design Shortcuts You Should Never Take
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1.0x
0.75x1.0x1.25x1.5x2x
[](//dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/website101podcast.com/uploads/mp3/season-01/03-Mike-Mella-Design-Shortcuts-Master-final.mp3)
In this episode of Website 101 Podcast, Sean Smith and Mike Mele discuss the importance of usability testing in website design, the dangers of taking shortcuts like using pre-designed themes and carousels, and the importance of custom microcopy for your website. Learn from an expert how to create a user-friendly website that truly represents your brand.
### Show Notes
We talk about some things that businesses often do to save money by cutting various parts of their websites. Avoid shortcuts if you can, but sometimes its unavoidable.
Usability testing should be conducted to help you make your website the best it can be. It's not as expensive as you think it might be. Testing should be done with people in your target audience but not from your organization. They should be unfamiliar with your website to get the best results.
Do not use a predefined theme for WP or a website builder if possible. You content should determine the design not the design determine the content. When using a theme, the design shapes the content and copy which results in sub par messaging and a website that is not memorable or unique.
Common issues include avoiding pop-ups, don't use the phrase *click here*, and pdfs. There is no fold. Don't worry about above the fold.
### Show Links
- [Should I Use a Carousel](http://shouldiuseacarousel.com/)
- [Steve Krug (usability expert)](http://sensible.com/)
- [CRA](https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency.html)
- [Presto Card](https://www.prestocard.ca/en)
- [Eight common user experience problems (and solutions) for nonprofit websites: Part one](https://belikewater.ca/blog/entry/ux-problems-part-1)
- [Eight common user experience problems (and solutions) for nonprofit websites: Part two](https://belikewater.ca/blog/entry/ux-problems-part-2)
- [Why you shouldn't say "Click Here"](https://belikewater.ca/blog/entry/click-here)
- [Content Carousels/Sliders on the Homepage](https://caffeinecreations.ca/blog/content-carousels-on-the-homepage/)
- [I am the Fold](https://iamthefold.com/)
Powered Transcript Accuracy of transcript is dependant on AI technology.
**\[00:00\]** **Sean:** Hi, welcome to the website 101 Podcast. I'm Sean Smith your host. Today I have Mike Mele from Be Like Water and we're going to be talking about web design shortcuts you should never take. Hey Mike, could you introduce yourself?
**\[00:17\]** **Mike:** Yeah, hey, how's it going? My name is Mike Mele. I have been designing and developing websites for 20 years now, roughly. That's a lot of fun. Yeah, yeah, and I've worked for myself like about 10 years ago I started my own company called Be Like Water. Before that I'd been working on with a lot of nonprofit organizations. And then 10 years ago I started my own company called Be Like Water, which is a web development design and strategy company that works primarily with nonprofit organizations on a contract basis. So that's what I do these days work with, I mean all the greatest CMSs, you know, craft, statomic expression engine and WordPress when I can't avoid it.
**\[01:06\]** **Sean:** Well, it sounds like you've got a lot of experience and no vow and I thank you for coming on and being willing to share your expertise on with web design tips that we should not or sorry web design shortcuts you should never take.
**\[01:23\]** **Mike:** Yeah, yeah, that's so the reason I wanted to discuss this is because being a service provider for a lot of nonprofits especially. And you know, there's the old sort of I guess trope about nonprofits is that they don't have any money and often there's like budget issues and things like that. So sometimes there's like an inclination to let's let's have let's cut some cut out some of the fat when making our website. Right. And maybe we don't need this. We don't need that and we could save money here and there and I have found that over the years there were a lot of things that I kind of started thinking well wait a minute. You're probably going to lose a lot of benefits if you cut these things out. So I made sort of a list like this to that effect.
**\[02:07\]** **Sean:** Yeah, I have some similar thoughts with some of my clients and even with myself I have to make adjustments based on how long it's going to take me to build my own site.
**\[02:19\]** **Mike:** So yeah, and I mean that's a thing before we even get started I did want to make sure make it clear that you know I don't mean to suggest that these are all like you know gospel kind of things that just that. If if you can avoid them you should avoid them making these shortcuts that is I understand that sometimes it's just not in the cards especially if for people like you and me when you're doing your own thing and your budget is basically the money you had back account at that given moment or whatever.
**\[02:48\]** **Sean:** Yeah, especially for a small a small business that's just starting out they might not have a big budget on a website. Right. So that's what we're here to help them understand the pros and cons and the takeaways of doing it or not doing these different design shortcuts that they should avoid. So what is let's let's start going through your list. What is the first design shortcut that you'd like to talk about.
**\[03:18\]** **Mike:** Okay, well one that that is probably the primary one that happens especially like I say with nonprofits is usability testing. So any web developer knows that usability testing is a really valuable thing to take on at this outset of a project. But often people think that we don't have time or we don't have a budget to kind of undergo that kind of thing and they often that's one of the things that often gets cut right at the front. And I know your next question is going to be what is usability testing.
**\[03:49\]** **Sean:** Hey, yeah, actually, you know, I know what usability testing is but our listeners might not. And so if you could go in and give a little bit of an explanation of the different kinds of usability testing and what they're good for.
**\[04:04\]** **Mike:** Yeah, okay. So usability testing or people sometimes shorten it to user testing, but you know, that's a little bit frowned upon because it implies that you're testing the user like the person themselves and it's not about that. The idea is just sitting someone down in front of your website and having them perform a series of tasks that you want them to be able to accomplish on your site and observing what they do. And if they encounter difficulties in doing it, you know, you would just the way you develop and design your site based on that feedback. So, you know, if you say to someone, okay, well, let me let's see you, you know, find our contact information. That would be a simple one. You just watch them literally click around the website and ideally you can see their face as well. And you might see them like furrow their brow and like, well, I expected it to be over here and so on. And you get them to talk out loud and all that. And you know, what inevitably happens, and this is why it's so important is that you'll find that the same major problems sort of come out with groups with groups of testers where it's like they all have the same type of problem with your site.
**\[05:16\]** **Sean:** So it really helps you to find out major issues to the streamline. But right, right. My question is this seems like it would be really expensive. Like I've got to pay all these people. Like how many people do I need to pay before it? I get usable data. And then I have to make changes to the website on top of I have to take action on what I learned. So the cost me money there as well.
**\[05:41\]** **Mike:** That's right. That's right. And that's that's often why people rule it out is because they assume it's going to cost them a lot of time and money and whatever. The thing you need to keep in mind, there's a so there's a writer if anyone's interested in learning more about this name Steve Kruege, who is sort of like the the Wayne Gretzky of usability testing.
**\[06:00\]** **Sean:** But we'll go out into the show notes.
**\[06:03\]** **Mike:** Yeah, yeah, he's got a great book called Don't Make Me Think, which is all about this. It was written many years ago, but it's still very relevant. But he's a big proponent of you don't need to spend a lot of money. All you really need is three people. He's pretty adamant about don't get more or fewer than three people because more you'll just end up repeating the same findings and fewer. You won't get them specific enough. So just get three people that are ideally from your target audience, but maybe not necessarily and sit down with them for you know 20 minutes or whatever and ask them to complete four or five of your primary goals that you want people to be able to do, you know, if you're a I don't know if your focus is on donations, you know, how how would you donate on this site or whatever.
**\[06:47\]** **Sean:** Right. So I just want you to be using your wife or your children for this sort of thing because they might have used your website already or you're talking about it.
**\[06:57\]** **Mike:** What what often happens with my clients is that I suggest this and they say, oh yeah, we do we'll do that. You know, who'd be great for that is the board members. They would love to take part in this. And I'm always saying no, no, no, you get to the board members because they're always very familiar with the organization and the how it works and very often even the website and it's not going to give you an accurate representation of how the average visitor right in the
**\[07:24\]** **Sean:** board members is also going to be familiar with the language used by your organization. So it'll be easier for them to navigate things because they'll know what something some sort of jargon means that your end user might not know.
**\[07:36\]** **Mike:** Yeah, that's a great point because a lot of times there's like some program, you know, the, you know, live it live program or whatever that they happen to have, which means something internally. And they would be like, oh, yeah, I know what that is. That's the live it live program. We came up with six months ago. But the average person might be like, what I don't I don't understand what that is. And it's important that you, you know, you realize you come to realize those issues with your average audience, right.
**\[08:03\]** **Sean:** So Mike, do you ever have any, do you have any websites that you visit regularly that have some user issues because I've got one that I want to talk about. Oh, that have that have user issues that that's that's like a straight you as the end user. I've got one I want to talk about. Well, I desperately want to hear the one you. I visit this site once a quarter. It's the CRA that's the Canadian revenue agency. So once a quarter, I have to pay my HST taxes. And I log in and then it takes me 10 minutes to find out. Find where to go. And every time I log in, things have moved around and links don't work. Right. So I wrote down a list back in April. Things changed when I did it yesterday. Wow. So yeah, and you have to do it. You can't avoid it. Well, it's really frustrating. And I the first two or three times that I was paying taxes, I actually called the CRA and had the help guy walk me through how to use their site. They need to talk to you about usability testing. Did you tell him that you bake websites for a living? I did, but I don't think he was. I don't think the rep cared because he's not the tech guy. He's just the guy that answers the questions. Right. Right. So that's that's my my own personal experience. I know I've visited other sites with issues, but this one really frustrates me because I have to use it.
**\[09:33\]** **Mike:** Yeah. So now that you mentioned that I do have one that has bothered me. And that was the so here in Toronto, we have something called the Presto card, which is let's you get on transit. You know, you can swipe it on the bus and get on the bus. And you have to refill it when it runs out of money. It's like a little short, like a small credit card or whatever. And I'm always running out of first of all, that's a whole problem right there because if you don't use it in it in the right amount of time, it will erase. Like it will refund your money.
**\[10:06\]** **Sean:** Yeah. If you don't want it to find for most users, because they take the bus every day to work. But for you and I, we only take the bus like once a month if we're lucky.
**\[10:15\]** **Mike:** Exactly. So I'm always, I get on the bus and it just time, you know, I fail and I have to dig out. You know, a token or just $3.25. Yeah, right. So I go on the website and I remember last time I was there was all kinds of things like I remember got an error when I tried to fill out to fill up my top up my funds. And the error was, please call this number. And it just said it would one 800 number. And then when I called them, they said, what was the error you saw? And I had to say it's head, please call this number.
**\[10:49\]** **Sean:** And that's the number I called to reach you. And oh man, it was painful. Oh man. So the error message was not even user friendly or useful.
**\[10:58\]** **Mike:** No, it wasn't even for them, not for me and not for the tech support people. It was.
**\[11:03\]** **Sean:** Wow. Yeah. Their website has a lot of issues. Interesting way the other day on Facebook, I saw somebody post about there's a scheduled downtime for a press their website five days while they're doing maintenance. If I had five days of downtime, my clients would kill me. Yes, five days. That's that's on except. And this is like a major part of everybody's commute in the greater Toronto area. It's just nuts. Wow. Oh man. All right. So we've kind of gone a little bit off topic here, but we're we're we're really now have some good real life examples about usability testing and why it's useful.
**\[11:48\]** **Mike:** Yeah. And sorry, just to answer your earlier question about pricing, just to quickly wrap that one up. So yeah, you don't need to. Typically, when you get someone to do the test, let's say you actually ask a couple of members of your audience to do some usability testing, you might bring them into your office. If you have an office and get them to sit down or whatever for a half an hour, typically you'd pay them like an honorarium or something, you know, $50 or whatever to just for their time. So there's that cost. There's the cost just in person hours of actually, you know, performing the test, whoever works in your office, whoever's managing and setting it up and whatever. Right, right. So I mean, it could it could end up being, you know, a couple hundred dollars. But the other thing is there are some sites you can go to where they offer services where they can either recruit people and you can say, okay, we want people of this, you know, say gender, this age range, this kind of salary range. And they will find people that work for them to perform the test online. And then they record the results and send you a video file. I've done that before. That sounds really useful. Yeah, yeah, we definitely need to lick that up in the show notes. Yeah, yeah, there's a few of them that offer that kind of thing. And often it's like a monthly fee if you want to do it regularly or a one time fee or there might be a discount if you bring in your own people and you just want to use their software to do the recording. So there's a few options there, but the bottom line is it's really not that expensive and especially when you consider the benefits it can give you the revelations about your site.
**\[13:24\]** **Sean:** Yeah, that definitely sounds really useful. And I think for any site where you have the budget and the time available or you're maybe not getting the conversions that you want. It might be a good option to do it. And then you can make revisions to your site and do some A B testing if necessary.
**\[13:44\]** **Mike:** Yeah, and that Steve Krueb that I mentioned before, he recommends doing it on a regular basis like every like every month, perform usability testing. Just bring it just have like a lunch and learn kind of thing in your office where you do some usability testing for that month. And to kind of keep on top of any problems that you might have because your site is presumably always growing.
**\[14:04\]** **Sean:** Right. Yeah, if a site is updated regularly as it should be or you're adding in new sections or features or like you mentioned earlier, there might be some current promotion. And you want to make sure people can find the promotion or follow the tasks that you want them to do. Excellent. Excellent. Excellent. So before we we started recording, we talked about this a little bit and one of the design shortcuts you should never take that you told me about was using a pre design theme. Right. So can you tell us more about why this is bad? Why can't I go to a place like theme forest and download a WordPress theme or log into my wicks account and use one of their pre made things.
**\[14:51\]** **Mike:** What's wrong with that? Right. Okay. So and again, this is another thing where I understand a lot of people have budget concerns and maybe it's not in the cards and they might go with this way. And that's fine if that's what it has to be. But being a designer, I feel like I should really promote this because I think it adds a lot of value. If you do have a budget. I think it's much better to come up with a sort of bespoke as they say, you know, a custom design because the thing I like to say is your website content, the material that's on your site that you're trying to promote, that's the thing that gets designed. So to come up to have a design from the outset, where you kind of just you find a pretty looking website with placeholder content and then you buy it or download it or whatever and then you just sort of shove your content wherever it belongs. I feel like that's kind of doing things backwards because I'm a big fan of, you know, content should come first. The most important thing about your website is the content that's on there and what it is you want to promote to your audience. And the design helps you present that content in the most appropriate way. So maybe again, going back to the nonprofit example, maybe you have some campaign that you're promoting. And it requires a certain sort of emotional vibe or whatever. And you might want to, you know, present that in a certain way. If you're coming up with your own design, it let's gives you full control over that if you're working with a designer presumably. Whereas if you just get a theme with a template, you're kind of stuck with, oh well, I guess whatever this looks like it. So it looks like it would fit here in this hero image or the slider or whatever. So we'll just put it in there and see how it goes.
**\[16:35\]** **Sean:** I have done a few sites based on pre-made themes and it's always like, well, this is where I'm going to put this content because it's the closest. Yeah. And then there's always struggles with, well, I want to do this, but it's not available. So now I have to design it. I really don't like working with pre-made themes, but you know, sometimes I do it for a client that has a severe budget, but they want more than you can get out of something like Wix or WordPress.
**\[17:10\]** **Mike:** Yeah, it's definitely, I mean, at least I guess it's better than just sort of getting the whole site done outside of any input at all. But yeah, I mean, if you can afford it, if it's, you know, it's something you can work into your site build. I think it's a great idea.
**\[17:32\]** **Sean:** Yeah, I mean, well, yeah, I think that the pre-designed theme is probably one of the more important things. And it's not one of the ones that you can bolt on later. So if you build with a pre-designed theme because of budget concerns, you're stuck with that theme, and you might fail to add on to it later, but there's a cost involved in adding on to something that was built by somebody else. Exactly. And a lot of themes also are kind of bloated and have some speed issues, both of which are things that we're going to talk about in another episode.
**\[18:11\]** **Mike:** Yeah, and just to conclude that thought, yeah, like, I mean, a lot of the themes these days are pretty flexible in the sense that, you know, for example, WordPress, if you were to get a theme, there's a lot of theme building site, sort of, well, I guess they're themes. Theme building themes, is that what you call it templates? Yeah, building themes. Yeah, theme building themes. Anyways, but it's like a theme that lets you sort of, they're called things around. Yes, okay, right. There you go. And they're pretty flexible in that they can let you add and remove components in that. But at the end of the day, they're all built without any consideration for your site's content and your organization or your company, whatever, whatever is your promoting. And you're always, you know, they were designed by some kid somewhere that has no idea about your company. And to undo any of that stuff, you always have to work against the theme. You're always fighting to remove things or add things and it's sort of that struggle with your own design, which wouldn't happen if you had a, you know, a custom design or a designer working with you for your site. Exactly.
**\[19:21\]** **Sean:** And also a lot of prebuilt themes include content types for everybody. So there's a lot of, there's a lot of bloat. Yeah, your HTML and CSS, that's the code that builds your site will be much larger than is necessary because it's trying to provide options for everything. And all of this unnecessary code slows down your, the speed of your site because it takes longer for it to download to each individual user on their phone or the tab letter or their computer.
**\[19:58\]** **Mike:** Yeah, that's right. The more flexible a theme tries to be, the more bloated it will become because they need to accommodate that functionality by adding more and more style sheets and JavaScript files and all this other stuff.
**\[20:12\]** **Sean:** Yeah, there's a whole bunch of reasons to sort of avoid that if you can. Right. And I mean, for a do-it-yourselfer who doesn't have a budget to pay for somebody and doesn't go to a card, they're a good option. They'll get you there. And then, you know, eventually when your business takes off and you've got enough money to actually pay somebody to help you out, that's when you would come back and do a rebuild with a custom design. Yep. Okay. So one of the other things that we talked about for web design shortcuts and bad things are things like sliders and carousels. Very popular with clients, but not so popular with web developers. Can you tell us why?
**\[20:54\]** **Mike:** Yeah. Yeah. So a slider or a carousel or the things where you get to the website's homepage and at the top, there's a great big image with maybe some text. And then it sort of slides over and then there's a new image all of a sudden and there might be little buttons to let you click through to one, two, three, four, you can see these four things. So that's what I mean by a slider or a carousel. People love them be again, especially nonprofits because what happens is you have these departments internally, you know, you have the marketing department, you have the IT department, whatever. And they all have things they might want to promote to the to their audience. And another thing, a gripe of blindness, people overvalue the homepage and like the homepage is like the the be all end all of your website. That's where everyone comes in, which is it's not true. People come into your website from all different areas, especially if you're complying. And you're complying pages and social media. Great. Awesome. Yeah. Yeah. So to accommodate all these departments, very often what people do is they say, OK, we'll build a slider. And then the marketing department gets to promote their thing on slide number one. And funds development gets to promote their thing on slide number two. And everyone suddenly very happy because, OK, we're on the homepage. And it's all squished in. It's like they're all yelling at their audiences. You know, pay attention to me. Pay attention to me. But if everybody's happy, what's wrong with it? Well, yeah, the reason why it's bad is because statistics show when you actually test users on how they operate websites is the most people do not engage with sliders. They just do not click on them. Assuming you can click on one of the I've even built some slides for clients that don't you can't click on they just want to promote something and they want to have awareness. And that's even stranger because how would you even know if any if it's engaging with anyone if you can't track clicks or whatever. But anyway, very few people click on them and of those who do click. It's almost always the very first slide and that's it. They don't wait to go to see the other slides and that if you think about it, it makes a lot of sense because, you know, once the last time you visit website and just folded your arms and just waited and watched things happen. But it doesn't do that. Oh, wait, I've never clicked that button either. Yeah, sometimes you can navigate around, but people don't do that. That's not how they use sites. Instead they look at the menu. They find out what pages are here. They might read your actual content, which is the important thing. Right. And then find out where they want to go that way. They're not going to sit sit there and sort of watch images slide by. That's just not what people do.
**\[23:34\]** **Sean:** All right. You mentioned research. Do you have a link that we could put in the show notes to show that there's actual research on this?
**\[23:43\]** **Mike:** Yeah, there's a great site that I love to show my clients called should I use a carousel dot com. I've used that one before I'd forgotten. That is a good really great. I almost don't want to give any spoilers about what it looks like, but should I use a carousel dot com. And it sort of explains everything really well with links and stuff, but in a very clever way, shall we say? Yeah, I also really like it. And I'm trying to bite my tongue because I do want to say something about it. I know. Well, what should I know? We won't talk about it, right? We'll leave. Let them find out. Let's move on.
**\[24:19\]** **Sean:** Somewhat related to carousels. If all of my competition is using carousels, why shouldn't I use one? Obviously my industry likes carousels despite this research or right.
**\[24:33\]** **Mike:** And that's that's a thing that I was trying to point out is that maybe your competitors aren't aware of the research. Maybe they are doing it because they have faulty information. They think people use them. But I mean, at the end of the day, I think that you should always strive to be better than your competitors. You know, if you're always imitating your competitors. Yeah, if you're if you're always imitating them, you're just always going to be behind your competition. You should be the leader in your, you know, peers of your organizations or your companies or whatever. Be the one that they imitate, you know, and if you're basing it on actual research like that, like I mentioned, you know, you'll be the one that has a reason to be doing what you're doing. And at the very least, if you want to put a slider on there, maybe you have like a the boss wants it on there or something, make sure that you at least track the clicks for the slider. Get a slider that will track clicks and put it into your Google analytics or whatever. And that way you can find out for sure are people using it. And then six months later, you can go to the boss and say, look, no one is clicking on this thing. It's taking up three quarters of the homepage. And no one's using it. Why don't we get rid of it and promote the latest program or whatever. And on top of getting rid of it, it will speed up your site because you have less images and less CSS to to download.
**\[25:53\]** **Sean:** For businesses or nonprofits that really want to have different kind of things that they can promote on the homepage that you would put into a slider. One of the things that I offer as an alternative is you could have three or four or five different hero images. And instead of a slider, you load them randomly on page load. So all of your content does get seen. It just doesn't get seen by everybody. Right.
**\[26:27\]** **Mike:** And it makes the homepage much more usable too. Like right in front of all these animals, loading less images, which is going to make it faster.
**\[26:37\]** **Sean:** Interestingly, I was approached by a potential new client recently. I was looking through their website, which was built by another agency. They have the exact same slider with five or is it seven different slides on every single page of a very large site. Oh, man. Yeah. I don't know. I didn't build the site. They're no longer working with their previous developer for whatever reason. So they're were negotiating whether they're going to work with me or somebody else. Hopefully to me. But one of the things that I went through when I did their site evaluation is I went through a number of things that I pointed out that you know you've got the slider on every single page. And it's adding this much weight to your site. One of the things you should do is get rid of the slider. Replace it with a hero image on each individual page. Maybe if it's really, really important, keep it on the homepage. That was kind of my concession. But I still think that it would be better to not have it at all.
**\[27:47\]** **Mike:** Right. Right. And to your point about the hero images, another thing that I've done with some of my clients is recommend that they actually come up with an editorial calendar where you know if they have these internal apartments that all want to get on the homepage. Say, look, every week we're going to have one hard coded hero image promoting one campaign. And this week it's marketing next week. It's funds development next week after that. It's whatever. And how are we party event? Whatever. Yeah. And it gives what it does is it helps the organization focus on what their messaging should be. If you have only one spot to promote one major thing, should you choose to design your site that way with a big hero image or whatever. It helps you to focus. Well, what is it? What's most important? It's not just like, well, this is all the various stuff that we have to promote. Let's just shove it all in there and hope everyone sees everything.
**\[28:44\]** **Sean:** I realize that that's a great idea. And it solves the problem of carousels and it gets all the important content out in a scheduled planned manner. And you don't want to be doing things really nearly with your website. It's a major marketing tool for your business. You want to do it with a systematic planned approach. Exactly. All right. What are there any other components than carousels that you think are inefficient or not optimal for the end user.
**\[29:23\]** **Mike:** Yeah, there's a so for this one, I'll refer you to a blog post that I have on my site, which is called UX problems, user experience problems. And it's a two part or part one, a part two. And I'll put the, you know, I'll give you the link for the show notes away. Absolutely. But yeah, just to run down a few of them quickly, a big gripe of mine is pop ups where, you know, so pop ups are those things where you get suddenly a window appear over the content that you're reading and it prompts you to sign up for the newsletter or whatever. Yeah, people always say, yeah, yeah, I mean, people think all they get people to sign up. But the truth is the research shows that the people who sign up through pop ups to your newsletter, for example, are much less engaged in your content. Like when you actually send the newsletter, those people who signed up that way are much less likely to read your newsletter because they didn't go and seek out, well, where do I sign up? You know, they kind of just did it as like, oh, well, it's in front of me.
**\[30:24\]** **Sean:** You know, what I do when I get those and I can't close the window, which is also really bad. As I have a throw away email address that I never check. Exactly. Or, or, or, or, I'll just put in something like none at domain.com. And nobody gets it, but at least I closed that window.
**\[30:42\]** **Mike:** Yeah, yeah, it's true. And they're infuriating. People don't like them and it can chase people away from your site. So, I mean, that's one of my big things. I've got a few others. The phrase click here, you know, click here to read our, it's click here to go to whatever. I've been. I have a blog post specifically about that. That one issue on my site. And it's my, my, my, my most popular blog post in 10 years.
**\[31:09\]** **Sean:** Was that what? Yeah. I know that one of the reasons click here is not helpful is because there's no context. Yes. That, that's Google know what it's looking for. Right. Click here. Well, what is, what is the click for? Is it for blog post on how to make the best cheesecake? Right. Is it how to change the oil in your car by yourself? You don't know because there's no context in the link.
**\[31:38\]** **Mike:** And searching, that's one example of people searching in the problems it causes there. And the other example would be accessibility. People with, you know, say visual impairments might use screen reader. And the way they work is they read links out out loud as you, as they click through. And literally what those people would be hearing as they use the website would be click here, click here, click here, click here. Like it would read that phrase out. And they'd be like click here. What for what? Right. You know, accessibility is also a coming.
**\[32:09\]** **Sean:** Episode. I think it's going to happen in season two. But I do have accessibility plan. Perfect. Perfect. It's probably going to be like a two or three part of accessibility. Such a big issue. Sure. Oh yeah.
**\[32:22\]** **Mike:** It's important too. So yeah, there's a check out these the blog posts I have there in the show notes because it has a few different options. Have those ones had something about PDFs people often, right? And PDFs too often. There's a few other gripes I have that I've sort of collated into this series of blogs. Check them out.
**\[32:39\]** **Sean:** I'm also going to include an article I wrote about content carousels on the homepage. It's nice. I have one of those. Not exactly a usability issue, but I guess a little bit tangently tangent tangentially tangentially. Thank you. Is it tangentially related is above the fold. I don't hear it as often as I used to, but I do occasionally hear about I want to have this content above the fold. I just don't know if it's a different way of having an article I'm going to link to, but there is no fold on the internet. Everybody's device or computer or whatever is different sizes. Your phone shows less content than your tablet, which shows less content than your laptop. And laptops of varying sizes than you have your desktop, which has varying sizes monitors. Like right now, I've got a monitor, an ultra wide monitor and my second monitor is in portrait mode. I mean, I've got 2400 pixels vertical visible like the phone. What is above the full if I look at it on my phone, there, I don't know above the full doesn't exist.
**\[33:59\]** **Mike:** So this is a bit of an on in prompt to question here, but have you ever visited the site, I am the fold calm.
**\[34:08\]** **Sean:** I think it's called check it out right now. I think that's what I am the fold calm. All right, I'm going right now live as we record. So it will be recorded live. An experiment to show how designing for the fold can be treacherous. Each line below is from a random sampling of past visitors viewport heights. Take care. Oh, so it shows you how how much vertical space each into only one going to make this really large so that they get mine on there. 1894 is the tallest one they've got listed recently.
**\[34:47\]** **Mike:** You'll be the only one of yeah, you'll be the only one. Yeah, but isn't that cool.
**\[34:52\]** **Sean:** So for now, now now, now mine's there 2428. Perfect. Yeah, that's brilliant. I did not know about I am the fold.
**\[35:03\]** **Mike:** Yeah, it's basically what it shows and I encourage everyone to check it out. But yeah, it's basically just a bunch of horizontal lines that are almost so close together. There's so many of them that it's basically a big solid sort of block. And each line which spans the entire height of your of your browser is what could be the fold on someone's get what what what was the fold on some visitors. You know screen when they visited this particular site. So the point is that the fold is so many different options that is no point in designing for it really.
**\[35:36\]** **Sean:** Yeah, exactly. Basically go there and whatever browser you're on, you'll be able to scroll unless you're on my browser.
**\[35:44\]** **Mike:** That's great that you're at the bottom of check if like in a few months, see if anyone's top that probably.
**\[35:52\]** **Sean:** I would suspect that it probably cycles out old ones over time, but that's that's just a guess. Okay, and let's talk about one last thing that you mentioned when we're planning this. One of the things you said is don't make your web developer or web agency right micro copy what exactly is micro copy and why is this a bad thing for my developer to do it?
**\[36:19\]** **Mike:** Yeah, okay, so micro copy is all that little text that's on your website. Generally that people don't really think about when they're writing copy so little messages to the users. You know little kind of notifications that happen the example that it you know the biggest example that you everyone would know is after you submit a contact form message for example. Often there's like a confirmation message that says that it was sent you know and that's what you would call micro copy or at least that's what I'm referring to as micro copy here. So it's it's text that's written in you know you're playing English or whatever your language is. But chances are no one in your organization actually thought about the wording or how it should be presented and the there's a few reasons why that's an issue if you're getting well.
**\[37:10\]** **Sean:** If you're not the biggest one I can think of is the voice is your organization formal informal casual exactly down and funky. Yeah, what what if I write the copy right I'm going to be conservative about it just to be on the safe side but if you're a fun live life to the fullest kind of organization and you get the stodgy message it's at odds with what your company is.
**\[37:38\]** **Mike:** Yeah, so a good example in my world would be so let's say you have a nonprofit that is about you know cancer say and you're maybe you're eliciting stories from your visitors about their cancer survival story and you want them to send them so once they submit it you would probably want a message to say something like thank you for sharing your story with us we will be in contact with you within a week about whatever. But if you let me write it maybe I would just write thanks will be in touch and maybe that's a little too casual for that or even worse what if it said done or you know message has successfully been delivered like devs are traditionally not great at social skills in the first place so don't rely on them to write your messaging which is what microcoping it microcopy is especially if your messaging should be. You know particularly emotional or whatever. Exactly formal or informal yeah. It's something you should always think about.
**\[38:43\]** **Sean:** One of the things I do when I'm preparing forms and similar copy for clients because a lot of times I need to have some sort of placeholder comment copy. What I'll do is I have the form I test it I see the thank you message in the website CMS there is a place for them to fill in the copy themselves so they don't need to they can update it and change it at any time. Nice what copy I include there is change this message in and I give directions how to get there. So that's good this is all done on the staging site before it goes live and I tell them you got to go through and make all these changes still sometimes that kind of copy slips through.
**\[39:29\]** **Mike:** Well that's a thing because in a case of like submitting message very often it's only the web developer who does the testing of the forms right the contact forms so if the client is not even checking you know what happens after I submit this form maybe they didn't even check it maybe they just assumed oh well it's a contact form and it's going to send to whatever so maybe they'd never see that message right so it's important that you either as a developer tell your client look go in and change this content or if you're a website owner really track down all of those examples of microcopy and make sure you put your organizations.
**\[40:05\]** **Sean:** I do tell my clients to do it but sometimes you tell them once or twice I assume that they've done it and I've been making other changes and then I get like okay let's go live and I grow live but they missed one or two spots or yeah they got the message that they should do it but they got side truck because life gets in the way business gets in the way. Assurance but you do need to go back and check it periodically and make sure things are consistent with your message which may evolve over time.
**\[40:40\]** **Mike:** Right and frankly if you do have a web developer who does care about your organization and actually wants to put some thought into what this looks like suddenly he's doing writing which you are not paying him to do. If you're not paying your web developer to do writing don't expect him to do writing and that includes little messages to the users because it's just you it's another like I say it's another example of you communicating communicating with your audience yeah copy writing is going to be a whole other episode.
**\[41:11\]** **Sean:** No nice I've got a professional copywriter and Calgary is going to be joining in a future episode and we're going to talk about I actually paid this guy to do copy for me.
**\[41:21\]** **Mike:** Yeah copy I have friends who are copy writers they do just fine in terms of you know the income they make so it's it's an important thing that has to happen. Oh exactly. I've been saying this whole episode content content comes first and microcopies and example of that so.
**\[41:38\]** **Sean:** Excellent well Mike this has been a really great talk thanks for joining me on the podcast. Thanks for having me on the show. Thank you for listening be sure to subscribe and share website 101 podcast with friends and colleagues you can find me at website 101 podcast.com on Twitter. These are named at website 101 pod. Do you have a question you want to ask a topic suggestion or a guest host recommendation send me an email Sean S. E. A. M. at caffeine creations dot C. A. or visit website 101 podcast dot com slash contact and fill in the form. You can find me personally online at my company website caffeine creations dot C. A. C. A. F. E. I. N. E. C. R. E. A. T. I. O. N. S. dot C. A. on LinkedIn with username caffeine creations hope you enjoyed this episode see you next time.
Close Transcript
Have a question for Sean, Mike, and Amanda? [Send us an email](/contact).
[](https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly93ZWJzaXRlMTAxcG9kY2FzdC5jb20vZmVlZC5yc3M%3D)[](https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/website-101-podcast/id1449510012)[](https://open.spotify.com/show/3rmSM1R9t6q1U8DmYWJRSO?si=NrYPMgDaRV6Dd56PjEaPow)### Season 01
- 1 [ Introduction to Website 101 Podcast](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-01/episode-1/introduction-to-website-101-podcast/)
- 2 [ Planning, Structure, Goals](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-01/episode-2/planning-structure-goals/)
- 3 [ Web Design Shortcuts You Should Never Take](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-01/episode-3/web-design-shortcuts-you-should-never-take/)
- 4 [ Websites Benefit from Continual Development](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-01/episode-4/websites-benefit-from-continual-development/)
- 5 [ SEO 101](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-01/episode-5/seo-101/)
- 6 [ Unlocking the Secrets of PPC Advertising with Dan Wood](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-01/episode-6/ppc-101-pay-per-click/)
- 7 [ PR & Marketing](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-01/episode-7/pr-marketing/)
- 8 [ Designing Effective Landing Pages for High Conversion Rates](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-01/episode-8/what-is-a-landing-page/)
- 9 [ Accessibility: Why Your Website Should Be Easy to Use for All](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-01/episode-9/accessibility-why-its-important/)
- 10 [ DIY Vs Bespoke](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-01/episode-10/diy-vs-bespoke/)
- 11 [ Season 1 Wrap Up](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-01/episode-11/season-1-wrap-up/)
### All Seasons
- [Season 01](https://website101podcast.com/season/01/)
- [Season 02](https://website101podcast.com/season/02/)
- [Season 03](https://website101podcast.com/season/03/)
- [Season 04](https://website101podcast.com/season/04/)
- [Season 05](https://website101podcast.com/season/05/)
- [Season 06](https://website101podcast.com/season/06/)
- [Season 07](https://website101podcast.com/season/07/)
- [Season 08](https://website101podcast.com/season/08/)
- [Season 09](https://website101podcast.com/season/09/)
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