Dream Couple Magnet

The elements of a superstar wedding pro website that will get you booked again and again.

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Transcript:

Hi. So we're actually just about to get started. So if you're just coming in, no worries. But welcome to the dream couple magnet: The elements of a superstar wedding pro — wedding pro web presence (I really made myself a tongue twister there, didn't I?) that will get you booked again and again. So before we start. Oh, before we start, grab something, drink water, coffee, tea, whatever.

Get comfortable. Take notes if you want. But I will be emailing you the replay and the transcript in a few days. So just relax. Take a breath. I know this is sort of the end of the year, so everyone is having a little bit of a hard time thinking about a new project. But thank you for being here.

I'm so excited to get started. So without further ado, Hi, I'm Eleanor, I have this very moody photo of me because I realized that since I've cut my hair, I have no photos. I'm a graphic and web designer. I'm an actor. I am an autodidact. I'm a cat parent. I apologize in advance if my cats come into frame or yell in the background because I'm not paying enough attention to them, it may happen.

And lastly, I'm currently planning my wedding, so something that I know you all know a lot about. So I basically... How did I get here? You know, I started working in web and graphic design over ten years ago. I got my degrees in psychology and theater, but I came from a family of artists. So I kind of knew that if I was going to do theater, I needed to learn to do other things as well that might, you know, pay me.

So I started doing web and graphic design when I was in school as part of my work study. And then after graduating, I did like a million and a half jobs, you know, like I've been a bartender, I've catered weddings, I've been an event planner.

And so with all of that, I sort of — Eventually I started ECP Designs, which is my design company, and I've been trying to figure out, you know, who I want to focus on now that I am in my in my next decade of of professionalism. And I really decided that after I started planning my website [Freudian slip] after I started planning my wedding, I decided, you know, I saw a lot of similarities between working in a visual field and a very aesthetic heavy industry. And a lot of things that I learned in my own web practice and with my clients that I really felt could open doors for couples who are trying to find the right wedding vendors and for wedding vendors who are trying to find the right couples. So how I used to work, I used to start with aesthetics. So what does it look like? And then I would worry about all of the technical stuff afterwards and like, what is the technical stuff? It's stuff like SEO, accessibility, how something is built, even stuff like the copy.

And all of that was stuff that I would just deal with after I had sort of cemented the visual design and that was my beacon. And these websites look great. I'm not going to I'm not going to lie. They look beautiful. And when someone goes to them, they make an incredible impression. But they didn't bring in consistent traffic and they definitely didn't make my life any easier or my clients’ lives significantly easier.

So we sort of treat all of these different areas as separate issues, but they all impact and inform each other. So, for example, accessibility, content, and user experience design are all key to strong SEO. Your workflow benefits from a user experience perspective and can inspire new content. And I promise, I know I just launched into like jargon, jargon, jargon.

I promise we will get into all of this in a way that is not boring as all get out. And at the core of successful, SEO, content, and user experience design is your dream couple. So let's talk about who is your dream couple. So there's a lot of wedding vendors. As you know, it can feel like an incredibly crowded field, but I'm not into invoking scarcity mindsets.

There's plenty of weddings. There are enough weddings for everyone. So what you need to answer is who do you want to work with? What are they looking for and how can you be that answer? You know, when you work in a service industry, especially when you're starting out and I know that I it was this way for me.

You kind of are you have a wide net of who you want to work with. And once you've been in business for a while, you can start to really look at more specifically what you like, what you like to do, and that will shift over time. So let's talk about who you want to work with. So think about your favorite couples that you've worked with and what do they have in common?

Think about your favorite weddings. Or if you’re, you know, an engagement photographer or a hair and makeup artist or someone who might not necessarily be at the wedding proper. Your favorite projects, like what do they have in common? Think about your values, and your business values, and what values do you want your clients to share? And then also think about what makes you unique and your specialty.

What is the perspective that you bring to your particular craft, Whether that's, you know, the the perspective you bring to planning a menu if you're a wedding planner or your approach to wedding planning. If you're a photographer, do you have a look, an aesthetic? What does that say about you? Do you like candid photography? Do you like more posed [shots], you know, what is it for you that that excites you about your work?

And then also just think about some more logistical stuff. Who's easiest to work with? Who's the easiest to get on board? Who's the most profitable? At the end of the day, that might not be your couples who have the biggest bill, because sometimes they are a lot of extra work. And that can ultimately mean that maybe some of your lower invoiced clients are more profitable for you.

So it's something you have to just like go in and look at your own numbers, but it's worth investigating. And also, who's the most enjoyable to work with? Who's who's the most fun, Who has the best time, you know, who do you enjoy being with? So get specific. Don't be afraid to get specific. I used to be afraid that if I niched down too much, I'd never find anyone who would want to work with me ever again because I was too specific.

But there's so many people who want to work the way you want to work and who want to have the experience, the way you want to give the experience. And that's great. You just need to connect with them. And that's what we're going to talk about. So when everything is balanced and considered and working together, your Web presence and when I say Web presence, I'm talking about your website, your social, you on the Internet, your Web presence has more reach.

It converts at a higher rate and it makes your life easier. Now, you don't have time and you don't need to become an expert in all of these things. You are an expert in your own industry, so you you don't need to go down a deep, deep web into learning everything about SEO in order to make an impact.

But if you understand how all of these things work together and the why behind these best practices, it'll seriously increase your impact because it'll change the way you think about your content, what you present and how you do that, and the thing is, is that I don't need to tell you that the wedding industry has shifted due to the pandemic.

You've experienced it. But when whenever there's a big time of change in your industry, that's a good time to pause and look and assess what you like and what you don't like, what's working and what's not working and and make those changes while everyone is shifting because it's a great time. Your clients are expecting changes to be made, so it's not going to disrupt the flow of your business the way it would.

You know, when you have to pick it in the middle of like wedding season because you have to do it anyway. So I promise that's like the last time that I talk about COVID. I'm sure you're all sick of talking about COVID, so let's just pause for a second. I am aware that a lot of the words I've already thrown out, like UX design and SEO and accessibility and best practices are all things that like have a tendency to make people's eyes sort of glaze over.

If you are, like, a super nerd for any of those subjects. Bless you. I am too. You have found a friend, but I know that from most of my clients (and even for me sometimes) there— there are bits of this where I start to go like, this is not the fun part, you know, The fun part is the design.

It's how it looks, It's the aesthetics, it's the visuals. That's the sexy part. You know, I'm aware that this is all kind of deeply unsexy when I'm talking about. But what I will say is that when it all works together, it it just it has such an impact. If you find all of these new clients that are aligned, that are ready to work with you, that want you and that give you a much smoother experience.

So if you can hang in with me for just a little bit, I promise I will make these as un-boring as humanly possible. Okay, So let's get into it. Ultimately, I think that these break down into five main groups. We have content design, accessibility, workflow and SEO, and these are like five elements that when they're all together, your website shines.

So let's start by talking about content. Oh, content like Marcia, Marcia, Marcia: content, content, content. It is everywhere and you are constantly being asked to create more. So let's talk about what it is because we have a tendency to associate content solely with social media these days, and that's certainly where you're putting a lot of your content. But your content also includes your website, your main pages as well as any sub-pages you have, or if you have a blog or editorial, or PDFs you upload to the Internet.

All of these things, your visuals, media, YouTube videos, etc. all of this: what are you sharing with your audience? That is your content. So you need quality content to engage potential clients and you will see the phrase “quality content” a lot if this is something that you get deeper into. Quality content. So what is that? So I used to think that because I was in a visual industry and because I worked with clients in visual industries that the images would speak for themselves and they do sometimes I'm not going to say that they're not important.

They are VERY important when someone has the impact of seeing a gorgeous image in front of them, that creates a strong emotional response which cannot be discounted. And you absolutely should have imagery for your website. And what I'll say is, if you work in the wedding industry and you are not a photographer, someone will have photographed your work, connect with that photographer, make sure you are crediting that photographer.

But those photos exist. You know, this is not a problem most wedding vendors have. You almost all have gorgeous visuals, but sometimes, especially when it gets into something that's really visual heavy, like photography or design, we have a tendency to think that they'll see the images and they'll be so blown away that that's all they need. And sometimes that is true.

But an image can only do so much on its own. We'll get into that later, so you need to support them with copy. So now we have to create all of this content, all of this copy, all of these images, all of the text to accompany the images, etc. and it can be incredibly overwhelming. So when I'm overwhelmed, I refocus on my dream client for inspiration.

So what questions do they have? What do they want to know? How do they make a decision? If you think about these three things, you will come up with a wealth of ideas for what you need to say. Think about your favorite clients. What information did they want to know before signing with you? What information came up in the process?

What were big moments for them where they learned something? All of those are opportunities to create content that helps both bring in clients that you want to work with and that prepares them to work with you most effectively. But also you don't need to do it constantly. You can make your content work double or triple duty by repurposing and by optimizing for search, SEO and creating accessible content. So we're going to get into that. So I say so a lot. Make the most of your content. You have to use everything. You create as many different ways as you can, like use all the parts of the fish, but it's your content. So a common one that most people know is to adjust your format and cross post on social.

So your tik toks can become reels. You can share your post as an Instagram story, you can share your tik tok as an Instagram story You can share from your website to an Instagram story. You can repurpose things and you should adjust the format to be most successful where it is. [e.g.] A LinkedIn post versus your blog. But if you're using it only on one platform, you're kind of creating more work for yourself than I think you need to.

You can turn frequently asked questions into more detailed blog posts or articles. Don't get rid of your frequently asked questions section, but if someone has a question about something, chances are you have an answer that is long enough to warrant its own page. Doesn't need to be a main page, but it should be there. And then if someone's looking for that information, they can find it and they find it from you.

Oh, that's my reminder to drink water. So sorry. I should have remembered to mute that. But here I go. I will. So go through — here's another suggestion. You can go through PDFs, docs, emails that you share with each of your couples. What from those is information that you can turn into an article? As I said, when you follow accessibility and SEO best practices, your content will be so much more effective.

And also a last tidbit or suggestion is review your copy on your main pages. So these are like- your main pages would be the ones that appear in your top navigation. So like, your home page, your about page, services page, contact page, review your copy there. If there's anything: process, concept, word, whatever, that is taking you more than a few sentences to explain on a main page, it can be its own page. It can be its own article, blog, post, whatever, that you can link to from your main page. If they want more information, they can find it. You can get— you can let people go as deep down the rabbit hole as they want, but make sure that you're keeping it more simple and emotional on your main pages. Keep it concise. Focus on the emotional. There you go.

On sub-pages, blog posts and social, you can get into details and logistics. So here's some content. Golden Rules. As we said, quality content offers value to your audience. So it's what they want to know. It's what they've been curious about. It's— we'll get more into that. More is not always better. If you're if you're spending the time to create something thoughtfully and then you do the work to make sure it's accessible, you're going to find that that is more effective at bringing in couples you want to work with, then posting a bunch of things without thinking about that.

Keep it simple. As I said, if anything takes more than a few sentences to explain, should be its own article. Don't talk down to your users, but don't assume they're experts. You know you do this all day, every day, all year long. They don't. I mean, they might be pretty immersed in it. Let's be real. Couples who are getting married tend to get pretty deep into learning about it, but they're also they don't know how to do your job.

So make sure that you're respectfully teaching them a little bit about what you do and how it happens so that they can work better with you. And then last, your content should sound and feel like you. So this gets into stuff like brand voice. Just come up with a few rules for how you talk. Are you casual or are you formal?

You know, do you use contractions or do you not use contractions? How you speak to your clients is how you should sound on your website. That's what your copy should sound like. So if you have a big team, you know, what are the general rules for how you all interact with customers, how you interact with your clients? That tone should follow throughout your social media.

Although you can be a little more— most people are a little more informal on social. But I think if you if you talk informally, if you speak informally to your couples, put that in your website. Don't present what you're not going to do when you show up. That's how I feel. That's not just how I feel. That's a best practice.

It's a golden rule. So let's get back into: Quality content offers value. So what is offering value? It answers a question. It teaches you something and entertains you or it inspires you. If it can do all of those, whoo!, that's fantastic, but you can just focus on one at a time. So wedding websites focus a lot on inspiration, which is great, but don't shy away from education.

So always, always return to your dream couples. Think about your favorite past clients. What questions did they have? What were moments during the process of working together where something clicked or fell into place? And don't be afraid to ask your current clients, your past clients, your audience, what they wish they knew about what you do. You can always ask and then just answer that.

All right. Accessibility time. So I will be really honest. As a professional web designer, I did not know enough about Web accessibility. I did not. And I used to think that that was because I was of the self-taught school. But all of my cohorts who went to design school didn't necessarily know anything about web accessibility either. So this is— I'll just say that if you— I know I personally and a lot of people I speak to start to feel really embarrassed when they find out that, like, they haven't been doing all of these things.

Don't be. None of us knew. They [web builders] don't tell you very, very much. It's becoming more of a topic of conversation now, and that's great. It does mean that a lot of the tech companies have been pushed to make changes so that following accessibility guidelines is easier for you. So just if you start to feel like, oh my God, overwhelmed, embarrassed any of that, just take a deep breath and let that go because you're going to learn what to do now and then you can implement it moving forward and that's all you can do.

So as I said, I didn't know a lot about it. I really wasn't familiar with the whole checklist, which we will talk about. And I was limited by what Squarespace offered because I, I often build on Squarespace. So they've made a lot of huge improvements in accessibility. Squarespace has made alt tags a lot easier. Wix added a site checker.

I am obsessed with Webflow. They've got great accessibility tools over there, so there's more resources than ever to make it easy for you to create accessible content. So let's get into what that is. First and foremost, it's not just for some people. There's this sort of idea that accessibility in general is only about a few people, but accessible design benefits everyone.

I could do a whole hour just on that, so I'm not going to do that. But when you make something more accessible, every single person who- who visits your site benefits from that. That's all I'm going to say about it. And not only— that's not all I’m gonna say about it. And it's- not only does it benefit everyone who visits your site, it also benefits your business. So at the core of accessible design, you can- you can look up the checklist. I mean, all the links are on the slide and I'll drop it to you, but you can look up the checklist. It's more important to understand the principle behind accessible design, and that is a lovely little acronym called POUR. So POUR stands for P, O, U, R. So:

Is it perceivable? That's the P. Is it perceivable? So for people who don't have any vision issues, can you see it? Can you read it? If you use a screen reader, can it be read to you? So can you perceive it too? Is it operable? If it's supposed to work, does it? When you press a button, does it go to where it says it's going to go?

If you are using an alternative method, does it work? Does it work you? Is is it understandable? Is it— is it something that everyone in your audience can comprehend? Is it written in a way that people can digest it? Is it structured in a way that people can follow it? And is it understandable on a more, like, literal level, like can— can people understand what you're saying? you know, so that can get into translation. And:

R. Is it robust? So in different situations, do the first three things all still apply? How robust is it? How much can it stand up to different settings, different situations, different exceptions? So we often think about accessibility in terms of alt tags and alt text, (alt text slash alt tags are the same thing) is important. But when we're talking web accessibility, we're talking about can a screen reader read through this in a way that makes sense?

Is it going to be full of unnecessary words? Does it work if you're just using a keyboard? Some people can't use a mouse if they're navigating with just a keyboard, can they still use your site? Color blindness. You know, a lot of the population is colorblind. Can they still read or see the information within your design? Blurred vision.

If- if their vision is a little blurry, can they still read it? You know, this isn't accessibility in terms of the way we think about disability, but slow Internet connection is also something that happens. And when you have a slow Internet connection, images don't load. You know, these are all different kinds of situations. To test the robustness of your content.

Dyslexia, general comprehension, right? We sort of got into this, so there's a complete checklist. It's free, it's online WebAIM. is the standard. They publish guidelines. Those guidelines are the standard for web accessibility across the board. And the next time they're expected to update it is in March 2023. I will drop the link to the full checklist, but I pulled out four that most people who manage their own website do have the opportunity to be in control of, and that have a really big impact in terms of reach, and in terms of just general conformance to the accessibility standards. So number one, images should have alt text. So we'll talk about it. If an image is purely decorative, for example, the image on this slide right here, it's nice and I've color coded things to try and create a sense of both consistency and an ability to tell which section we're in.

But beyond that, it's not offering any information, it's not telling you anything. You need to know that the text isn't giving you. So in this instance, I would actually not adult text for this image because when someone is going through and listening to the content, do any of these graphic elements actually add information that they need to know? No. So we wouldn't have these.

However, if we're talking about, like, one of the earlier slides where we had the starbursts, where I explain the five different elements that needs alt text because that provides information. So that's sort of the difference between an image that should have alt text and an image that shouldn't have alt text. So if it's purely decorative, leave it blank.

If it's not, you have to have alt text. Alt text should be less than 125 characters, ideally. And should explain not just what the image is, but how it's functioning. So “chart explaining the five elements of a superstar web presence” is alt text. However, there's a lot more information, right? So in that instance we might want to add a transcription or an image description which you would add outside of the alt text to further provide information.

If that information isn't given elsewhere in your text. Oh my god, I know that was so jargon-heavy. Baseline: is it decorative? No alt text. If it's not decorative? Alt text. If there's a lot of words add a transcription. There we go. Okay. Number two, text images and icons need to have a strong enough color contrast against the background. We'll look at this one in detail.

So I'm going to move on for now. Three, blocks of text shouldn't be too wide, so the smaller the font size, the narrower the block should be. So this is basically about what the human eye can look at and comprehend it at a time. So if you have a huge font, it can be the full width of the screen because those letters are taking up a lot of space.

If you have a little teeny tiny font, make the columns much smaller so that people can track the words more easily. That's an accessibility thing. And then lastly, links should be descriptive. Whew! This is a big one. For a long time I've seen different standards on links, so, there's a big one of like: “click here for more information” and “here” is the hyperlink. “Here” offers no information.

If someone is hearing this is a link, the link is “here.” Where is here? So instead what you want to do is hyperlink a piece of text that explains exactly what it is. So you could say, “To learn more about me, click here” and have the entire thing be a link. That's a descriptive link. So links should be descriptive.

That is, that is a big one. All right. We're going to look at color contrast a little more closely because this is one that when you start to pay attention to it, you notice it everywhere. So for color contrast, you want a strong contrast between the background color and then the text or the icon color. And the bigger the text is or the bigger the icon is, the smaller that contrast has to be for someone to be able to read it.

This is an example of something that is not a particularly accessible color combination. You can check this using the Adobe Color Contrast analyzer tool. There's like a million tools that do this for free, but this is a good one that I'm going to show you. So you put in whatever this for the front color is going to be and whatever the background color is going to be, you can select the level of strength that you want to do.

So AA is like web accessibility standard. AAA is, like, you're going above and beyond. So you always want to select at least AA, and then it'll tell you, you know, if you have similar text, this won't be easy enough to read to pass web accessibility standards, and then it'll suggest stronger contrast ratios for you. So that's an easy way that you can check and make sure that what you have is actually legible to everyone who comes to visit your site.

Or, you know, this is a big one in terms of graphics for Instagram. There's such— look, I love a monochrome aesthetic, but it's hard to read. And at the end of the day, you want people to know what you're saying. So that is why color contrast is so important. All right. I'm going to take a little sip of coffee and then we're going to move on to design.

Okay. When we're talking design, I've talked about visual design and UX design, which is also known as user experience design. So what's the difference? Visual design or UI or user interface design is the visual design of the site. So what does it look like? That's UI or visual design. UX design (or user experience design) covers the experience of navigating something.

So what emotion does it elicit? What vibe does it give off? How does the user navigate through the site and how do they interact with it? So here's an example. Think about a door. User interface: What does that door look like? That's its interface. What it looks like UI or visual design. UX: Can you tell whether you should pull or push it?

Do you try and pull it and then realize that's a push and get irritated? Is it too heavy? Once you push it, does it swing back so that it's a bit of a struggle to get in like it is in my house? This is user experience design. You are already an expert in user experience design on websites, whether or not you realize it.

If you have used a streaming site, for example, HBO, Max or Peacock or Hulu and you've ever tried to get somewhere that you wanted to go, you know what bad UX looks like because you've experienced it. The frustration, the— the like, [frustrated sound] that's UX. So these two work together. It's not just about what it looks like, it's about what it feels like.

So a lot of people used UX when it first became kind of a hot topic to try and trick their users. A great example of this is: if you've ever tried to unsubscribe to an email and they keep trying to show you different buttons and it's confusing about which one you should click to actually unsubscribe, or if there's one that you should be doing where it's like, Oh no, I've canceled my decision to unsubscribe.

That is using user experience designed to trick your users. We are not trying to do that. We are trying to make things easier for our users because that creates a really positive experience. So what are the principles of user experience (UX) design? [1] Know your audience. We've done it. That's so great. We did it! [2] Be consistent. So consistency is: you’re going to teach them how to navigate your site.

You're going to teach them how to work with you. If you are consistent, they know what to expect and that creates a calmer experience. So this can be as easy as like you don't want 30 billion different font sizes, you don't want a different layout for every single page of your site that doesn't call back to layouts from previous pages.

You want create a consistency that allows them to understand where they are without having to think about it. Another easy way to help people understand the flow of information is to [3] create hierarchies in your design and content. So this is stuff like header one header two, header three. You use a header one to announce a page, header two announces a big section, header three announces a smaller section. Writing or thinking about your content, not writing your content necessarily — unless it helps you — in an outline format completely improves your user experience design. Number four [4] Iteration is your friend. UX is about how people experience something. You can't plan for that entirely in a vacuum. You have to have people test it. You have to have people interact with it. And luckily, like, you already have a business, so you have people who have interacted with your website and you can learn from that behavior both by looking at analytics, by having questionnaires, by talking to people, by having people beta test differences.

All of these are ways you can learn from what you already have had people do, how to create a better experience for your customers. So any time you're like, Oh I wish I had done that differently, this is a great opportunity for UX design iteration. And then lastly, [5] accessible content is good UX design, which is great because we just talked about that.

Let's move on to SEO. When I even hear SEO, I used to be like, [bored noise] so if you're having that reaction right now, just know I know your pain and I promise I'm going to make this so much less boring. I really hope. Okay, so what is SEO and how much do you need to care? SEO Search engine optimization, Big term, big term that encompasses a whole bunch of different strategies and practices that help you rank higher in a search.

So luckily for us, the algorithm rewards the first three things we've covered so woohoo! It rewards quality content. It rewards accessibility, and it rewards good UX design. So you're already know a lot of what you need to know about how to do good. SEO. You may have heard when people are talking about SEO that it's all about the keywords.

So when we're talking about SEO, we are talking about how high you rank in a search. So the keywords are what's in that search box. Before I get deep into talking about keywords, and by that I mean I'm not going to [here]. You have to know your keywords in order to measure your ranking. It's a- it's a really useful metric.

It can be an incredibly helpful way for you to track whether or not things are working, if you're targeting the people you want to target. But it is not the only way to do SEO well. So stick with me. I like to talk about intuitive SEO. So if you understand your client, if you understand your dream couple, what their needs are, what their questions are, what information they need to know, what information they want to know, you're going to write keyword rich content because you're going to write content that they will searching for.

That sounds kind of simplistic, but it's true. There used to be a whole thing about like making sure you're using keywords the right number of times, the right percentage of times. But Google has learned all of those tricks and they've changed the algorithm. They do not reward things like keyword stuffing. What they want to do is give content that the person wants.

And so if you know what they want, you're going to create content that naturally will come up in their search — if you're meeting all of the technical requirements. Because if you're meeting all of the technical requirements, your content will actually appear in those searches at a much higher rate and at a much higher position than it would otherwise.

So when it comes to understanding all of the technical requirements, most of them can be explained by one thing, which is you've got to help out the robots. So you gotta help out the robots. When you do a Google search, there's not like a person on the other end who goes through the entire Internet to try and return you the best possible answer. It's a robot. And that robot is following a program. And again, they're trying to give you the best response so that Google can charge more for ads. That's just how it works. They want to be the best at what they do, which means they're programing their robots — constantly updating this algorithm to try and get them to give you the content you're looking for.

So a couple of things about this algorithm. It's not a secret. Google publishes it. You can look it up. People will have broken it down a million times. I'm sure I will soon. But at the end of the day, you just need to remember that it is a robot. So robots can't read your images. If you have text in an image, the robot cannot read that. It is- it is embedded, it is flattened into an image file.

It is unreadable by this robot. So they don't know any of that information. So if there's text in an image that is important for the robot to know, you got to put it in the text, you got to put it in the body of, your your Instagram caption, your comment, your website text, your copy. You have to put it in there and not solely in the image for that text to register at all with these robots.

Number two, they're going to skim- like they have to read the whole friggin Internet before they return a search result. So they are going to skim. So make your content skimmable. That goes back to UX design and using H1, H2, H3. If you think in an outline format, it's going to be easier for your reader to follow what you're talking about and it's going to be much easier for the robots to skim through and find what they need.

Three It's got to load fast. The robot has to return those search results like very, very quickly, which means it's constantly crawling the Internet. The faster your page loads, the better the search engine thinks it is, the better the robot thinks it is. The robot is like, Oh my God, it's so fast. I love it. Bump it up. Bump it up. So it has to load fast.

And then lastly, you have opportunities in almost every single web builder — and certainly if you're building from scratch — to write the robots little tiny summaries to help them read your content, These are page titles and descriptions. Sometimes they're called SEO titles and descriptions or meta content depending on your platform. But just write them a little summary. It should be unique to the page.

Tell them what's there so that they can help someone else find that content from you. All right. So that's everything that you need to know about the robots. And there are a kajillion and a half SEO checklists, but when it comes down to it, if you understand that you your job is to make your website as easy as possible for these robots to pick up, it's going to change the way you think about how you enter your content and you will start to see the impact.

So let's just talk about images for a second. As we said, text in images, they can't read it. They cannot read it. One way to help the robot know what the image is, is to rename your image, something to do with what the image is. This is a big one, especially when you are uploading a bunch of images. If you are a wedding photographer, you're not going to go through and rename all of your images necessarily right away.

But there are easy ways to batch resize images, batch rename images, all of these things, which I will send you a little write up of how that works. But all of these things allow you to format your image so that it's going to load fast so that a robot knows what's in the image. And so that anyone visiting your site, whether their Internet is crappy, whether they have vision issues or not, will know if important information is in there.

That's what alt text is going to do. And when alt text isn't enough, as we talked about before, image descriptions describing what the image is, if it's more complex than 125 characters, add transcriptions of whatever text you have, and that image is going to go a long way. They [the transcriptions] don't have to be featured. It can be somewhere, you know, in like an accordion that someone has to pop down to read more.

It can be, you know, in smaller text that someone can click and open up. There's so many ways to do it, but the information has to go on the page or it's not doing you any good unless someone is actively looking in that image. I hope that kind of shifts the way you think about image uploading. I know it's kind of a pain in the ass.

I'm just going to be honest. I know that the extra step of making sure your image is not too large, like not a super high res image. It's six megabytes. I know that renaming your images takes time. I know that writing alt text takes time to save your time on transcriptions, copy and paste from like wherever you build your graphics into a doc and save that so that when it comes time to post alt text, like, you already have it copied and pasted and you don't need to transcribe it. Again, that's a little tip, but I know that this is all extra steps.

It is so worth it because your image will bring people to you when no one's even looking at it when you take the time to do these extra steps. And ultimately that's going to save you time. Lastly, we're talking about workflow. Thank you, by the way, so much for hanging in. Okay, Workflow, a website on its own powerful, but a website that feeds into your workflow can be an absolute lifesaver. And this is to say that websites can do so much more than I think we often think about them as, you know, we talk about websites in terms of really like old school static terminology, like pages. And- and we think about it as almost like a business card sometimes, but it can do so many things. It can interact with so much other software. You can use forms to prep people to give yourself information to save time. So, you know, think about what your client’s journey is. Consider from a user experience perspective. You know, where is there unnecessary duplication? Where can your website solve that problem and how you set them up for a more calm and prepared journey, like through your services and on the day of our wedding?

You know, so when I talk about like your website can do so much more. I’m going to take like a little tiny break to tell you a story about a former client of mine. Basically, Lance Horne, incredible musician, performer, hosts this recurring event and works with a collective of artists where they kind of create impromptu cabarets. So they take live requests from the audience and structure that into a cabaret performance.

Audience members get up in saying there are sometimes backups, there's all sorts of shenanigans. And how they used to do this was if you were in the audience and you wanted either to request a song or to sing or what have you, you would go up to a person who was working and they would put it in a text thread.

And there was this whole system that led to a lot of confusion a lot of missed requests, a lot of stress for the people who were taking requests. It's a loud bar. There were instances of people being misgendered because we didn't have pronouns being checked. All of this is something that a website could fix. So I built a system for them to take requests.

This is all to say —to toot my own horn for a second — your website can do and solve problems that you're not even thinking about right now. And it should. You're paying for it. It's a tool. It should be working for you. So think about integrations. Think about, you know, are you using Zapier to help your website talk to whatever CMS, HoneyBook, Dubsado, or whatever you’re using, look at the overall process and see all of the different touchpoints where your website could be doing more.

And that’s talking about workflow. I used to think of it as something to add on at the end and not a crucial part of how the website is built should be responding the needs of your overall workflow and incorporating that into the design and the thought process. Okay. We're going to pause one more time. Oh yeah. So I just threw a lot of information at you so quick.

Little pause. What now? What do you do with all of this information so you can perform your own web presence audit. You can use everything you've learned today in this workshop to go through and see all of the opportunities you have to increase your website's star power and to really think about all of these as a cohesive solution to to connecting with more couples.

Or I can handle all of the tedious and hard stuff for you and you can move forward with confidence and all of the tools you need. So how you might be asking? Well, I have- or for the creation of a Superstar Web Presence, I have a program called the Superstar Web Expansion, an offer called the Superstar Web Expansion.

And so what you get with it is- you're going to get a website and workflow audit where I go through all of the things we just talked about in way more detail and get into all of the opportunities that you have to create a more cohesive web presence moving forward on the back end, and on the front end you get a redesigned website and workflow.

This is not to say, you know, if you are happy with the visual design, with the aesthetic, we're not going to mess with it, but we'll do all of the behind the scenes work to make that have a much greater impact. And, you know, if things need a little more consistency, a little more polish to follow the hierarchy, adjustments will be made, but they can actually all be made to preserve existing designs anyway.

You'll end up with a website and workflow that has been strategically redesigned and restructured. It's an accessible site, it's a responsive site, and it's optimized for search. I'll help you set up your templates and workflow integrations. We'll do content optimization for you and including taking an expert interview with you and writing three blog posts for you from that will create branded social templates and then we'll give you the training to manage your site with ease moving forward and to understand how to keep up all of this work moving forward so that the work can continue to have an impact.

Beyond that, you'll get a check in at six months and access to open monthly office hours where I will answer questions. Sometimes I will live audit a site and you can check in with anything that comes up along the way. And then, built into all of my offers is a 10% mutual aid commitment. I'm very big on giving back to the community, so I focus primarily on New York City based mutual aid funds, helping largely the Black community, the trans community, the greater queer community, and looking at sustainability and food and food security.

So how do we do this? Well, first we explore. We do a deep dive exploration of your current website. So this includes a questionnaire on your end where you answer all of the things that you are an expert in, and then an audit on my end where I go through all of the things that I am an expert in and we take a look to discover where you are now.

So this is a shame free zone. I don't like making people feel bad for mistakes or things that they didn't even know were a problem, especially when I've made a lot of them myself and this is my job. We just look at everything as, like, opportunities to grow your web presence into something stronger. Phase two, which is the second week I'll map out what a superstar web presence looks like for your business. I’ll create a personalized strategy so you can see where we're going and get excited about the way forward.

Phase three is the best phase for you because you get to just sit back and relax while I implement everything that we've talked about and I create sort of a balanced fusion of all of these web elements that we've talked to- talked about today, to really light up your site. And that's from weeks 3 to 7. So this is eight weeks total.

The last week it will be a supported handoff. I'll do all of the final details, hand everything over to you with training and guides. And that way you can burn bright and not out and shine brighter longer. So what's the investment? That's what everyone wants to know. It's 8500 total, but I break that up into four payments. So payment one is $1,000 deposit to book your web expansion project and secure your start date. Payment two on your start date. Payment three comes halfway through. And payment four, which is the largest payment comes all the way at the end when you'll start to have seen some of the improvements already so that you are prepared to book clients and see your ROI pretty instantly. Now bonus if you book before December 20th instead of $8500, it's going to be $7000. And once again, that is not diminishing that 10% mutual aid commitment that's coming from the original total, but it will give you a bit of a deal. And if you book before December 20th, you will also get a free SEO and accessibility checkup within one year.

You can book that, so that if you want me to come in, take a look, see how things are going, make any adjustments you can book that and that will be a free service for you if you book before December 20th. So— [cut the Q&A portion for time]

— that if you want to talk further, let's chat, I can answer your questions about whether or not this is a good fit for you.

And, if not, how I can help you. So I'm going to drop in the chat right now. [sung] Let me stop sharing. Sorry. You'll see that working with me is a lot of me singing to myself as I talk to a computer. Here we go. I'm going to drop this link into the portal right now and just feel free to get in touch and we will check in about whether or not this is the right fit for you.

Okay. Well, thank you so much. I think we're going to wrap up a little bit early today. I can't thank you enough for being here and for being interested in the superstar Web expansion, regardless of whether or not we move forward together. I hope you take everything you learned today and create a more powerful Web presence for yourself.

Thank you so much. Bye.

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