--- title: "Improving Your Website Without a Redesign: Content Audit, Usability Testing & More" date: 2021-03-02T05:00:00-05:00 author: Sean Smith canonical_url: "https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-04/episode-6/how-to-improve-your-website-without-doing-a-full-redesign/" section: Podcast --- <!\[CDATA\[YII-BLOCK-BODY-BEGIN\]\]>[Skip to main content](#main-content)Season 04 Episode 6 – Mar 02, 2021 35:10 [Show Notes](#show-notes) ## Improving Your Website Without a Redesign: Content Audit, Usability Testing & More  0:00 0:00 1.0x 0.75x1.0x1.25x1.5x2x [](//dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/website101podcast.com/uploads/mp3/season-04/s04-e06-ways-to-improve.mp3) In this episode of Website 101, learn actionable ways to improve your website's performance without a full redesign. Sean and Mike discuss content audits, usability testing, design improvements, and more. ### Show Notes We talk about ways that you can improve your website by making small changes yourself at no cost. Some changes may require a web developer but these will be low cost but with high value. A website is like a garden, it needs to grow, it needs pruning, and watering. These tips will help keep your website fresh and exciting. ### Show Links - [How to conduct a website content audit for your nonprofit](https://nonprofitmarcommunity.com/how-to-conduct-a-website-content-audit-for-your-nonprofit/) - [Google PageSpeed Insights](https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/) - [Accessibility](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-04/episode-5/accessibility/) - [Accessibility - Why It's Important](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-01/episode-9/accessibility-why-its-important/) Powered Transcript Accuracy of transcript is dependant on AI technology. **\[00:00\]** **Sean:** Hello and welcome to the website 101 podcast. I'm Sean Smith, your co-host and with me as always is Mike Mella. Hello Sean, good to be back. Hey Mike, happy to be with you again. So podcast listeners, have you noticed that the last couple episodes we've got some new music in the intro and the outro? That is all custom recorded by Mike. **\[00:29\]** **Mike:** That's right. If you need some custom music done for your podcast, hit me up. **\[00:36\]** **Sean:** Mike is our audio engineer. Actually, he's got a little bit of audio background. He used to be in a band and stuff, so he knows what he's doing, and you may have also noticed that the audio quality of the podcast has gotten better since he took over editing. **\[00:50\]** **Mike:** Oh, I don't know about that. I think it was pretty good before, but hopefully it's good enough. That's the important thing. **\[00:57\]** **Sean:** So today's topic is ways you can improve your website without doing a full redesign and these are going to be little things that you can do maybe yourself and they won't cost you any money or you might be you might need to spend a little bit of money to hire a professional but it's going to be relatively low budget. Something you know like a few hundred dollars maybe a thousand $8,000 versus $8,000, $15,000 on a full rebuild. **\[01:30\]** **Mike:** Yeah, we're always saying that having a website is like managing a garden rather than building a building or whatever analogy you want to use where you need to continually monitor it and nurture it and help it grow by adding things to it and changing things over time and these These are going to be a list of things you can try without just doing a complete redesign rebuild in the thousands of dollars that might be smaller things you can do to improve your website. **\[02:03\]** **Sean:** Yeah, exactly. So one of the first things we have here to discuss is a content audit. And Mike also has an article that he wrote on another site and will include that in the show notes. So since Mike has written an article, let's get him to tell us what a content audit is. **\[02:23\]** **Mike:** Yeah, content audit is pretty cool. If you have, I guess it works, whether you have a website already or not, like even if you're doing a fresh site or a redesign. But typically, the idea is if you have a site and you're redesigning it, rebuilding it, you wanna make sure that you have an accounting of all of the content that's in your site. because as we always say, content comes first. That's the most important thing is your messaging. The designs should follow from that, all that kind of thing. And the idea with the content audit is you create a spreadsheet, basically. And this is what's illustrated in the article that we're going to link to in the show notes. You make a spreadsheet that just says, OK, well, these are the page titles. There are columns identifying various things about the page, like what the page title is, what the link title is, I don't know, who's responsible for it, maybe in your organization, whether or not it needs updating, whether or not it should be deleted, things like that. And you just have a big list of all the pages in your site, and you can start from there. And that sounds like a really big undertaking, especially if you've got a larger site. Yeah, it can be, but it's so valuable to have this, as I say, this accounting of everything that's on your site. Even if it's not every single blog post, you know, or something like that, you could have, you know, just the basic sections. Anything would help. And over time, of course, your website, you know, you add things to it and you take away things from it, and maybe you have an article about something, and then a couple of years later, you write another article that sort of contradicts the first one because things have changed in your industry somehow. You know, you might want to make sure that you remove the first article or at least add something to it that says, you know, there's an updated version, check it out over here, that kind of thing. So a content audit lets you approach your content in that way and just like, okay, how do we go about updating things from where it currently is? It's really helpful. **\[04:25\]** **Sean:** Right, because, you know, like Mike said, your website is like a garden. It's not one and done. You've got to go in and trim the hedge. You've got to plant new flowers once in a while. maybe do a little bit of landscaping. So you need to keep your website growing. **\[04:43\]** **Mike:** You got to prune it. **\[04:44\]** **Sean:** Yeah, exactly. **\[04:44\]** **Mike:** You got to prune your content. **\[04:46\]** **Sean:** Yeah. OK, so the next one here is study your visitor stats. So this would be looking at things like Google Analytics or other analytics software. And coincidentally, we've got an episode planned. It's not scheduled, but planned to record about analytics in general. **\[05:07\]** **Mike:** Mm-hmm. And yeah, the thing about analytics, we always say, is that everyone seems to know that they need to install something, Google Analytics or whatever it is, to track visitors and how they behave. But I find, in my experience, people rarely really dig into those analytics, and I know you and I have said before it's reached. Yeah, I am too, most of the time, but at least we're busy with building other people's sites and making them great, you know what I mean? **\[05:34\]** **Sean:** Yeah, well, we're not analytics professionals ourselves and that's in part why. And the other part specifically for Google Analytics is it is overwhelmedly large and complex. Yes. That's why there's professionals to help you with that area. I recently switched away from Google Analytics to another system which I'll talk about in that upcoming podcast, just because I like the simpler interface. There's a couple other reasons as well. And I actually check my stats two or three times a week. Look at different things. **\[06:13\]** **Mike:** Yeah, I know, obviously I know the one you're referring to and I also signed up for that. And it's just a much more pleasant experience checking your stats on that than trying to dig through the message Google Analytics. **\[06:24\]** **Sean:** I've had Google Analytics on my website for a decade and I checked it less than once a year because I couldn't understand anything. I was like, what's the point of having it there if I don't understand what I'm looking at? **\[06:38\]** **Mike:** Yeah, but the truth is if people really did study it a little bit more, you could learn so much about your audience and like which pages are performing well or not performing well, that kind of thing. **\[06:49\]** **Sean:** Absolutely. And for some organizations or actually a lot of organizations, or actually a lot of organizations, it's worth it because you can get so much out of it. You can get a better understanding of how people are visiting your site and using it. You can make a plan about how to update your content or set up your funnels correctly, things like that. **\[07:13\]** **Mike:** Yeah, goals for, you know, you want people to go from this page to that page, whatever. **\[07:17\]** **Sean:** So another thing that Mike likes to talk about a lot, which he's brought up in several episodes in the past is usability testing. **\[07:25\]** **Mike:** Yeah. Yeah. There's a few here on our list that I guess they kind of all go together. I can kind of go through them. Sure. Like there's tree testing, which I don't know what that is. Yeah, tree testing. So again, just to summarize usability testing in general is about deciding on a set of tasks that you want your audience to your website to be able to accomplish, whether it's make a donation or volunteer for this program or find this particular article, anything like that. You just make a list of, it doesn't have to be that many, five, ten tasks, really important ones, top tasks, they call them. And then just recruit some people, again, it could be five people, seven people, something like that. Sit down with them, if you can, in the age of COVID, I guess you do it remotely, but that works too. And ask them to try to perform these tasks, like try to figure out how do you make a donation and just watch them click through your site, have them talk out loud as if they're speaking what they're thinking. And I recall from **\[08:28\]** **Sean:** previous episodes where we talked about this that you said that it really should be somebody who's not looked at your website before and is not a part of your organization. So you don't want to do this with your underlings or your VP or your wife or something you want to do with with people who don't know your website? **\[08:50\]** **Mike:** Yeah, I find that clients often, when you start talking about recruiting people to do things immediately, they go to their network of internal people, whether it's internal staff, board members, their volunteers, things like that, but yeah, that's not a great option because they're too familiar with the site already. They're gonna know, or at least really with the content on the site. If you have a certain, the example we always give if you have a program with a jargon, jargon-y term, that the average person doesn't know, but those people would recognize that it's not going to give you accurate results in terms of, you know, **\[09:25\]** **Sean:** how findable is this task or whatever. Right, you're not going to see any difficulties. And who knows? Maybe your site is perfectly optimized for your audience. And what you'll find out when you do this usability testing is that you don't need to change anything. Sure. I mean, that's entirely **\[09:42\]** **Mike:** possible. What a wonderful feeling that would be to learn that about your site. It's exactly optimized for your audience. It might happen. But the point is, again, over time, as your site changes, things could be more difficult to find, or maybe just the industry, you know, the way people behave online changes over time, and you can improve it. So usability testing is a way that you can very cheaply keep testing how effective your website is for the people using it and it's a great tool for that. **\[10:15\]** **Sean:** Right, so Mike, what is tree testing, which is I've never heard of? **\[10:21\]** **Mike:** Yeah, it's kind of a thing I've been more attracted to lately I find because it's basically usability testing light. So in a traditional usability testing scenario, you would sit people down in front of your website But if you're building a site, or if you're redesigning it or something, maybe the whole thing's not done yet because obviously you want to act on the tests The test results, so you won't necessarily want to complete the whole site before you do the testing So tree testing the idea is you you kind of make a navigational tree which people might be used to from navigating through folders on their computer, where you have literally just a list of the top-level navigation pages. And when you click on one, it expands to show the pages within that section. So this is basically for testing a navigational tree that goes down a few levels, which is very common for larger sites. And it's the same principle, though, you sit someone down and you say, try to find the the page where this would be located. And you watch them click, oh, I think it's here, and it expands. Then I think it's here, that expands. And they would select the final option. And if they get it, they would get like a little flag that says success, or you got it, or something like that. Okay. And again, you're not testing the people, you're testing your site. But it's just a kind of a low-fi way of doing usability testing. **\[11:46\]** **Sean:** Oh, that's interesting. But I guess that focus groups is very similar and related to usability testing as well, because you've got a small group of people and you're asking them specific questions about your organization or your website and looking to see how they understand how it works. Is that correct? **\[12:07\]** **Mike:** Yeah, focus groups is more of an opinion-based thing where you're kind of like, how do you feel about our organization? What does our site make you feel? you feel like they were warm and friendly or professional, things like that. And again, it's kind of just like, if you can engage in that over time, you can monitor how your brand awareness is changing over time, right? **\[12:31\]** **Sean:** Yeah. So, you know, maybe you want to be known as the corporate a company that's got a very corporate feel, but people view you as more **\[12:42\]** **Mike:** approachable and friendly. Yeah. Oh, or the, and the opposite, I guess would be The problem is where you want to be known as a friendly thing, but someone sees you as this kind of cold personality in terms of your brand and it's like, well, that's not what we're going for. So, maybe we should act on that. That's something that a focus group would be going through. **\[12:58\]** **Sean:** Exactly. And it might be a matter of, hey, maybe you need to re-evaluate what your values are. Yeah. What you've been saying they are might not be what they really are. And that's showing, coming through in this sort of focus group. Right, right. Or it could be that you just went off track and ended up doing the wrong thing and get back to like update your copy. **\[13:24\]** **Mike:** Yeah, and that can reveal things about your organization or company as a whole rather than just your website, but it sort of all fits together. One kind of fun way to do this is something called a five-second test word. **\[13:36\]** **Sean:** Is that like the five-second rule where you drop food on the floor? **\[13:41\]** **Mike:** You know? No. I guess it isn't. I was trying to think of a way to... them together. Let me get my cookie. Nice, you're saying, which your peanut butter, whatever it is, always lands face down. So a five second test is basically you you kind of flash a view of your generally it's a homepage I guess, but any kind of page that you're interested in promoting whether it's a landing page that you're doing for a marketing program or something. You flash it in front of a user for five seconds and then you take it away and and you kind of ask them questions like, what do you remember seeing? What do you think is the most important thing you saw when you looked at it? And because they only have that amount of time, and you tell them in advance, you're only gonna see this for five seconds, so take it all in sort of thing. It gives you information, especially when you do this with several people, about what elements of the page are resonating the most. Yeah, yeah. So it's an interesting way to tell what's effective on the homepage, especially because a lot of internal people at an organization typically fight over the homepage. And they're like, oh, I want to be in the slide carousel or whatever. **\[14:51\]** **Sean:** You know, that five second test reminds me of some psychology tests that I've read about and watched some YouTube videos about as well. It's like, there'll be, you'll be watching a video or some sort of actions going on. And then, for example, a person in a gorilla costume and we'll walk across the stage. And nobody sees the person in the gorilla costume because they're focused on the story. Right. It's similar, not exactly the same, but it really feels similar. **\[15:24\]** **Mike:** Yeah, it's a good way to find out what people are noticing and what they're not noticing, I guess, yeah. Hi, hope you're enjoying this episode. We're always looking for topic suggestions. So if there's anything you'd like us to discuss on the show, please let us know. **\[15:38\]** **Sean:** We're also looking for guests. If you have a guest that you think would be great for a podcast, please let us know. If there's a guest that you would love to come back, let us know. You can do that by visiting website 101podcast.com slash contact. **\[15:55\]** **Mike:** So Sean, let's talk about page speed and what we can do to improve that. **\[16:01\]** **Sean:** Well, page speed is very, very important. There's a number of studies and I don't have links offhand, but basically show that if you're the slower your website is, the higher your bounce rate. And if you've got a bad bounce rate, your customers are leaving, you're losing sales, you're losing conversions, you're basically you're losing out. And so you need to have a high page speed. And you can go to Google page insights. And I'll include this in the show notes and just pop in the website, your website link and Google will analyze your page and tell you what it thinks about it and it'll give you a score for mobile and a score for desktop. Now mobile and desktop have two different scores but the improvements you make for one will improve both of them. And generally I find that mobile score tends to be a little bit lower than your desktop score for almost every site and in my opinion a good score is 90 or higher. **\[17:07\]** **Mike:** Yeah. Is that, where does it, I know that it kind of starts in the red and then goes to yellow, then goes to green. Do you know where the green starts? The green starts at 90. 90. Okay. Right. **\[17:18\]** **Sean:** I agree with that then. That's also what I aim for. Typically. It's very hard to get 100, but it can be done, and I have done it a couple of times. **\[17:28\]** **Mike:** Yeah. **\[17:29\]** **Sean:** And I've done it a couple of times on both desktop and mobile. But I'm generally happy if I've got 90. Now, a lot of these things may not be something that you can do yourself. You may need to hire a developer to optimize the theme or your website that you're doing. And these optimizations can include things like minimizing your JavaScript and your CSS, setting up lazy loading on your images and other files. **\[18:04\]** **Mike:** So just so people know who don't know, lazy loading is the idea that if you have a lot of images on your page that you scroll down and you see more images, when someone first visits that page, the images that they're not looking at that are lower down that they haven't scrolled to yet. Don't really exist on the page yet. They only begin to exist when you scroll to them, right? They sort of come into being. That's generally I think, right? **\[18:32\]** **Sean:** It's generally set to appear just before they scroll into view. Right, so you can do things like that. You can get a faster server. So a lot of people will be on shared hosting, which something like Bluehost or GoDaddy, those hosts are notoriously slow. And there's a lot of other bad things about it, but the best thing you can do is move off of a cheap shared hosting and move up to a VPS. You'll get massive improvements, but VPS hosting comes with more technical overhead and would require some help. So improving your page load time, there's a number of things that you can do. Go through the audit and take a look, Google gives you specific things that you can do as well as links on how to do that. **\[19:25\]** **Mike:** Right. They give you recommendations. **\[19:27\]** **Sean:** So some of those you may be able to do yourself, like perhaps the images that are on your website are too large. Are you uploading two megabyte, three megabyte images, you know, 3,000 by 2,000 pixels? That's way too big. uploading smaller images or ensure that your website itself is reducing the file size when it **\[19:51\]** **Mike:** delivers those images to your visitor. Yeah, a lot of content management systems when it displays an image, it's not showing the one that was uploaded initially, which might be straight out of your smartphone camera and be five megabytes. Instead, it creates a copy of it that's optimized for web display, which is much smaller in file size. **\[20:14\]** **Sean:** Right. And the dimensions of the website would typically be set in the code. So I, you know, maybe my hero image would be 1920 by 400 pixels high. And I would set that up and it shows up. And then for tablets, I would serve the same image at 768 by 420 high. And so you set up a number of variants. Anyways, that's we're getting into a little bit technical points. And again, as we said, some of these things will need help and some of them you can do by yourself. Definitely check out Google PageSpeed Insights and look at your score. If you need help with it, find somebody who's familiar with whatever CMS you're using, whether it's WordPress or square space or craft like we years and they can help you out with that. **\[21:09\]** **Mike:** Yep, absolutely. So moving on here, design improvements, smaller minor design improvements, adjustments to things like white space, font size. So I'm glad you added this one in the show notes here because I wanted to talk about an issue that we brought up on a previous episode, where you had mentioned that there was a trend a while ago in web design where footers, the footer at the bottom of the page, tended to have small font and gray font. It was like basically very difficult to read. It was kind of a trend. It really was. **\[21:44\]** **Sean:** Yeah, very low contrast things that lasted for like three or four years, I think. **\[21:48\]** **Mike:** Yeah, it was like just a thing people did all the time. And this is a good example of a small design change you could make because again, the web evolve so quickly that it could be that you have a trendy thing like that going on in your site, but that particular example would be really bad for accessibility, people with vision problems, stuff like that, and it's just a bad idea to do that. And maybe you've got caught up in one of those trends, and now if you evaluate that, you can say, well, wait a minute, maybe we should change that little display of such and such logo or whatever. **\[22:23\]** **Sean:** Right, one of the things I really think is important is increasing the letting which is the line height of your fonts and white space. I think a lot of people are scared of white space when they first look at design. Now I'm not a professional designer. Mike is more of a designer but I have developed a design sense and I've taken a couple of courses designer for developers. This is based on what I've learned and just being, you know, a heavy internet user, white space, or the space between different elements on your page, gives it breathing rooms and makes it easier to digest. If everything's all, it's like, look at it this way. You can have an apartment that's really, really cluttered. Imagine, like, like a lot of older people, you look at their house, it just cluttered and covered with stuff and knick knacks and stuff because you know they've been alive for 60, 70, 80 years and they buy all these little things and they never throw it out, right? You walk in there, it's kind of stressful or you can have this minimal approach to how you decorate your apartment or your house and it's relaxing, it's open. It's like being in the basement of your house versus being in the lobby of a hotel with really high ceilings. **\[23:45\]** **Mike:** Right. Exactly. Yeah, when you go to those all-inclusive resorts or whatever, down south, the first thing you notice is this enormous openness of the lobby, and I bet it's designed partly to make you feel relaxed when you get there, right? It's your own vacation. **\[24:00\]** **Sean:** Yeah, because it's not closing in on you. **\[24:03\]** **Mike:** Yeah, and I'm a huge fan of white space, and it's also well-documented that and you alluded to this earlier, if you chunk out content in, you know, if you separate it and make it look visually not cluttered together, people will consume more of the information in that content. They'll find it easier to read. **\[24:22\]** **Sean:** Right. And I feel and I don't have evidence for this, but I feel a lot of people don't like the white space because they're like, oh, you have to scroll too far, but scrolling is not bad. People aren't afraid to scroll. They'll scroll until they find the information. **\[24:36\]** **Mike:** Yeah, and if it helps them in other ways, then it could offset whatever, you know, if you look at scrolling as a problem Maybe you get more benefits than problems if you add some add some white space. Yeah, exactly. So Mike **\[24:50\]** **Sean:** Another thing that you can do to improve your website is enhance your existing call to actions or or funnels and so I think that that would be something like maybe Maybe increasing the prominence or the visibility of the various buttons or the elements that you want people to do, whether that is submit an action or submit an action, delete that. Submit a form or buy a product or download a book or whatever it is. **\[25:27\]** **Mike:** Yeah. In other case where over time your website, the way people use your website or the internet in general that web in general might have changed and maybe revisiting how you've presented your calls to action, which again are the main things you want people to accomplish on a given page, maybe those have changed and they need to be sort of improved to account for the way people behave on your site. **\[25:54\]** **Sean:** Right, and that could go back to one of the earlier ratings we talked about the content **\[25:59\]** **Mike:** audit. Mm-hmm. We recently had Marlene Olivera from MoFlow on the show, who is an excellent guest, talking about content strategy. **\[26:07\]** **Sean:** Yeah, I really enjoyed talking with her. **\[26:10\]** **Mike:** Yeah, she was really great, and she had, she mentioned that when she does content audits, she often includes calls to action in, you know, each page. So as you're documenting the page, you identify what is the primary call to action on the page. Excellent. So we often frequent a discord chat room kind of thing and you had posted in the group that we were going to be recording this episode and asked if anyone had any feedback about it, what did you get from that? **\[26:42\]** **Sean:** Yeah. So about four or five hours ahead of the recording, I posted in there and I got several responses. of the responses came from the Sebastian to Hezden and Sebastian, I hope I pronounced your last name correctly. The first one he said is remove the outdated blog section. Now, I talked to him about this and we're on the same page, means Sebastian and I suspect Mike, remove it if it's not updated regularly. Like if you've got three blog posts dating back to 2017. Oh, right. Yeah. Yeah. If your blog is active, keep it. You might want to do a content, add it, and prune some of the older posts that are no longer relevant, but you might want to keep them. If your blog is active and gets updated, say at least once a month or every couple of weeks, great. I would say keep it. It's going to give you some good Google juice. **\[27:38\]** **Mike:** Yeah, it's basically a question of, you know, don't have things on your site that basically just scream to the world, we don't update this site. You know what I mean? If you're newest post in your blog section or a news section or whatever it is, is from six months ago, yeah, you know, maybe it's not doing any favors. So, yeah, you know, revisit that, **\[27:59\]** **Sean:** maybe. Yeah. Another thing that Sebastian mentioned was image optimization. And we talked a little bit about that earlier. Sebastian said to switch everything to image ix or image x. This is a service that hosts your images and does transforms for you. It costs a little bit of money but I personally haven't used it for myself or any of my clients. I'm aware of it and I think it's a great idea. For our listeners though, you would need to talk to probably need to talk to a developer to help you set this up. I suspect there's some technical knowledge needed. Yeah, but it goes back to, **\[28:41\]** **Mike:** yeah, as you said, optimizing your images so that you're not serving up a very, very large image on people's phones where they're using up their mobile data, that kind of thing. You want to optimize it **\[28:54\]** **Sean:** for the visitor. Exactly. And one of my favorite responses came from Josh Martin and he mentioned an accessibility audit. And if you listen to our episode at the beginning of February with Matt Succo Friedland, you would learn a lot about accessibility. Okay, so the accessibility audit would be similar to doing your Google page speed audit. You'd go to a light speed or there's a couple of different sites you go to, run a click a button and it'll give you a score of up to 100, and then tell you what you need to fix. **\[29:31\]** **Mike:** Yeah. And again, accessibility, we're talking about making your website, building it in such a way that people with disabilities, low vision, whatever, you know, screen readers, that kind of thing, can use your website just as well as, you know, everyone else. **\[29:47\]** **Sean:** Right. So, go check out that episode with Matsuko Friedland, and then there's a season one episode on accessibility as well with Leia Alcantara and Emily Lewis, and we'll link to both of those in **\[29:59\]** **Mike:** the show notes. Michael H, I'm not sure who Michael H is, but that's the Michael's username on Discord, so I don't know what H stands for. Fair enough. So he had an interesting one here, adding or expanding an FAQ or a FAC, which is frequently asked questions section. And he says that people like like to read those, they can function as a hub for other parts of the site, and Google can index them as sort of structured content. I'm in two minds about this personally, because I don't know how you feel about it, Sean, but I'm also mixed on it. Yeah, I generally try to avoid FAQs. I just find that sometimes they undermine your primary navigation a little, because they kind of like, well, everyone's, and that's the other thing. If people are really asking these questions frequently, then maybe you should make the more prominent in your navigation. That's generally where I land on this stuff. **\[30:55\]** **Sean:** I feel, and I don't have evidence to support this, but I feel that frequently asked questions are questions that you're anticipating visitors are looking for. But having said that, I recently got an email from some sort of B2B business asking me to work with them or whatever. And I went and I looked at their website. And in this case, after looking at the home page and the about page, I specifically looked for a FAC page and it was helpful for me. But I generally don't look for FAC pages. **\[31:28\]** **Mike:** Yeah, I actually have a similar example today. I was on a site where I ended up going to the FAQ FAC page and I got some helpful information from there. But yeah, I couldn't help but think like, I don't know, because I didn't go straight there, as you said, I didn't look for it. And I wonder if I would have found my answers sooner if their navigation had been built in a different way. But I mean, if you can avoid that kind of thing, and if your fact page is not just your CEO wanting you to put, you know, how does your organization improve my community? And then the answer is, we can improve the community in a number of ways, like nobody's asking that question. So if you can avoid that, then by all means, yeah, maybe a FAQ section would be helpful. **\[32:14\]** **Sean:** Yep, and the last one came from Shamus MH, and again, Shamus, I'm sorry, I don't know what MH stands for, but he said, great topic. First two things that come to mind, hire an illustrator to swap out some art, refresh or update your typography. So hire an illustrator to swap out art. This could be, you know, getting some custom illustrations or maybe hiring a photographer for some custom photography rather than always relying on stock photos or something you take with your cell phone, or maybe getting some custom icons? **\[32:54\]** **Mike:** Yeah, I thought that's exactly what I was thinking of. I never thought about that one, but if you remember a few years ago, all the rage in icon design was skew morphic icons, which is like the original iPhone where the icons looked like a physical button. They had like shadows on the edges and that. That was everywhere. And then now you never ever see that. People are into flat design. It's more line art now. Yeah, yeah. So that's another example where yeah, you can refresh the look of your site, the design of your site, **\[33:26\]** **Sean:** just by changing a few icons here and there. Right. So you would spend a few hundred dollars for custom design, or you could buy some icon package, or you could buy a package of of illustrations and, you know, when you generally, when you buy those, it's like, maybe 50, 60, $100? Boom, you've got a little bit of a refreshed look. Yep, and the last thing he said was, you know, update your typography, which is kind of what we talked about earlier about line height and stuff like that. **\[33:57\]** **Mike:** Yeah, he even mentioned make the fonts bigger. I see, that was his, his, yeah, yeah, **\[34:02\]** **Sean:** I copied and pasted into our trellaborg directly from Discord. **\[34:06\]** **Mike:** Right, right, and we specifically mentioned that very issue earlier in the show. So yeah, there's nothing, things change, so you gotta make sure your site changes. **\[34:15\]** **Sean:** Anyways, I hope everybody found something useful that they can take and use today to make an improvement on their website and help their business out. The website 101 podcast is hosted by me, Sean Smith. You can find me on LinkedIn. My username is Caffeine Creations or Twitter, where my username is Caffeine Creation, C-A-F-E-I-M-E-C-R-E-E-8-I-O-M, or at my website CaffeineCreations.ca. **\[34:51\]** **Mike:** And by me, Mike Mella, you can reach me online at B-Likewater.ca and also on Twitter and LinkedIn, where my username is Mike Mella. That's M-I-K-E-M-E-L-L-A. You Close Transcript Have a question for Sean, Mike, and Amanda? [Send us an email](/contact). [![Listen on Google Play Music](/assets/images/google_podcasts_badge@2x.png)](https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly93ZWJzaXRlMTAxcG9kY2FzdC5jb20vZmVlZC5yc3M%3D)[![itunes badge](/assets/images/itunes-badge.png)](https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/website-101-podcast/id1449510012)[![itunes badge](/assets/images/spotify-logo.png)](https://open.spotify.com/show/3rmSM1R9t6q1U8DmYWJRSO?si=NrYPMgDaRV6Dd56PjEaPow)### Season 04 - 1 [ 'Click Here' Hurts Your SEO and UX: Why It's Time to Change](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-04/episode-1/click-here/) - 2 [ How to Talk to Your Web Developer: Communication Tips for Clients](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-04/episode-2/how-to-talk-to-your-web-developer/) - 3 [ Red Flags](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-04/episode-3/red-flags/) - 4 [ Content Strategy](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-04/episode-4/content-strategy/) - 5 [ Accessibility](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-04/episode-5/accessibility/) - 6 [ Improving Your Website Without a Redesign: Content Audit, Usability Testing & More](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-04/episode-6/how-to-improve-your-website-without-doing-a-full-redesign/) - 7 [ Content Marketing](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-04/episode-7/content-marketing/) - 8 [ Alternatives to Google Analytics](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-04/episode-8/alternatives-to-google-analytics/) - Bonus[ Listener Survey - What Topics do you Want to Hear More of?](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-04/episode-/listener-survey-what-topics-do-you-want-to-hear-more-of/) - 9 [ Website Optimization and Speed](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-04/episode-9/website-optimization-and-speed/) - 10 [ Exploring WordPress Website Development with Laura Bailey](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-04/episode-10/wordpress/) - 11 [ From Novice to Bootcamp Instructor](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-04/episode-11/from-novice-to-bootcamp-instructor/) - 12 [ Pimp Your Typography](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-04/episode-12/pimp-your-typography/) ### 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/) <!\[CDATA\[YII-BLOCK-BODY-END\]\]>