Announcer:
Welcome to the Marketing Guides for Small Businesses podcast. In this podcast, you’ll get discussions and interviews 100% dedicated to helping small business owners tackle their marketing challenges. The Marketing Guides for Small Businesses podcast is produced by the Marketing Guides for Small Businesses, a collection of four small business marketing consultants with over 60 years of combined experience in helping small business owners plan, execute and measure their marketing plans and strategies in order to grow their businesses at a rapid pace.
Announcer:
Your hosts and panelists include Antonio Guerrero, owner of Systematic Marketing in Sarasota, Florida; Ken Tucker, owner of Changescape Web in St. Charles and St. Louis, Missouri; Paul Barthel, Head Web Developer at Changescape Web; and Mark Fortune, owner of Fortune Marketing in Little Rock, Arkansas. So thank you for checking us out and please let us know how we can better help you grow your business.
Ken Tucker:
Hello everybody. This is Ken Tucker with Changescape Web. In this episode of the Marketing Guides for Small Businesses podcast, we’re going to be talking about how to have a website that builds trust and why that’s so important.
Ken Tucker:
Today we’ll talk to each of the panelists about what goes into creating a website that builds trust, why that matters for every small business, what’s at risk without a trustworthy website, and what a well-thought-out website design means for a small business in terms of the execution and the role it plays in effectiveness for their online marketing. So let’s just jump right in.
Ken Tucker:
In our last episode, we talked about the importance of the five-second test. There are a couple of them that are out there that we use. Mark mentioned what we call the five-second test, which is basically you land on the homepage for five seconds and do that with your competitors, cover up all the branding so you don’t know what they are and then tell which one is yours.
Ken Tucker:
Another one that I like to do comes from Donald Miller with StoryBrand, which is called the Grunt Test. And that’s to go land on a website, your website, for example, and be able to grunt back within five seconds what it is very clearly that your business does. So the grunt test is Donald Miller’s focus on clarity of message. The second test, the five-second test that Mark talked about in the last episode is really one about differentiation. So I think that’s a good place to start. Antonio, you want to add anything to that?
Antonio Guerrero:
Well, for me when it comes to building a website that encourages trust and conversion, to me one of the most important things I want to see and look at and have be clear is the call to action. I think it’s very easy to get distracted on a website. I think it’s very easy as a service provider, as a product provider, to really burden your websites with all the different things you could do and you could offer and you could engage people with that it ends up muddying the waters and people can get lost.
Antonio Guerrero:
So does it have a clear journey and a clear call to action to me is probably the most important thing and I need to be able to see that within the first few moments of logging into a website so I know what needs to happen next or where to start my journey on gathering the information I need and once I’ve satisfied that what do I do next? Who do I contact? Who can I talk to or what steps do you want me to take?
Ken Tucker:
Mark, we had talked in the last episode about the importance of strategy and part of that is identifying the different customer personas that you work with in your ideal customers. Can you talk a little bit about that from a website perspective, especially homepage design?
Mark Fortune:
Sure. Yeah. The thing is so many times when we work with clients when you either evaluate an existing website or ask what they’re looking for in an updated website, so much of it starts with themselves. Oh, here’s why we’re great. Here’s why we’re awesome. Everybody should know this. And the fact of the matter is that doesn’t necessarily speak to your target customer’s problems that they came to your website to educate themselves about. Business owners need to put themselves in their ideal customer’s shoes, in their persona shoes, and design their website and their messaging from that point forward.
Mark Fortune:
Like you said, in the five-second test, what a visitor sees on your site right away in that hero section, in the call to action, needs to speak to a problem that they’re trying to solve. Otherwise, you just risk losing them. That’s why bounce rates go high and you see bounce rates of 90% cause people just hit your homepage, don’t see what they want and bounce right off somewhere else. It all starts with personas. But the challenge is of course when you’ve got multiple personas, how do you get all of that accounted for in an updated website, but there’s a lot of ways to deal with that. But if you don’t start with your target market, you’re never going to pass the five-second test.
Ken Tucker:
Yeah, a common mistake I think we all see is that customers tend to use language that they use all the time and not necessarily the language that their ideal clients or prospective customers might be using. Paul, can you talk a little bit about that? Something that comes to my mind is clearly language we see when it comes to working with painters.
Paul Barthel:
Yeah. Trust and conversion go hand in hand, but from a search perspective, no matter what the industry, a lot of businesses tend to use jargon and language that is industry-specific, whereas that’s not what your customers are going to use. A good example, like with painters is “residential painting.” We have some painting clients and “residential painting” is something that they tend to use within their industry but the most searched for term is “house painter.” People aren’t necessarily going to Google and typing in “residential paint” or “residential painting.” They’re searching for a “house painter” or “house painter near me.” A lot of painting companies, they don’t realize that. So they use the term “residential painting” and that’s not what the average consumer is looking for. That’s not what they’re using.
Ken Tucker:
Another quick phrase that comes to my mind is “repaint.” That’s a term that painters use all the time.
Paul Barthel:
Yes.
Ken Tucker:
I don’t think many people who are doing searches, who own homes or commercial buildings, maybe commercial uses that phrase a little bit more, but homeowners certainly aren’t going to type in “repaints” in the search phrasing.
Paul Barthel:
One of the biggest villains I’ve seen of this exact thing I would have to say is in the medical space. When we’ve worked with dental clients and certain healthcare practitioners, they want to use the overly clinical official medical textbook definition of a service when you just have a toothache. You don’t need an “endodontic exam,” you just have a toothache or you need braces. And that’s probably the sector that I see the most who violates that because I didn’t go to medical school.
Paul Barthel:
I may have gotten a referral from another doctor, which helps me find that more specific term but I’m looking for the alleviation of pain and in the healthcare field, it’s physical pain but in in-home services, it’s the pain of having an ugly house that really needs a coat of paint or a roof that’s leaking. While you may call it something else, when you go to those industry trade shows and you’re talking amongst your peers and colleagues, remember a very small fraction of that audience understands that.
Paul Barthel:
IT services is another one. It’s very easy to get people lost in IT jargon and shorthand, and they just want their computer working. They just want to be able to connect to the internet.
Mark Fortune:
Yeah. I’ve got that exact situation going on with a client right now that insists on using a very technical term that describes the degree and the field of study that he got in grad school but it is not anywhere related to what consumers put in a search to find him.
Paul Barthel:
Well, it’s ego.
Mark Fortune:
So he shows up for the technical term, but he doesn’t for the term that consumers use.
Paul Barthel:
Well, it’s ego, right? And that’s usually what gets in the way of good marketing from the perspective of the service provider. Especially if you have an engineering degree, law degrees, if you have medical, oh my God, a medical degree. You can’t tell me that there’s anybody smarter than me once I’ve earned my medical degree. And then they wonder why the results are a little lackluster because nobody knows to search for that. I don’t know to search for “disc compression.” I just know that I have a backache.
Mark Fortune:
The thing is they’re good at what they do. When you look at this particular client’s reviews and trust signals online, they’re wonderful. Their clients love them, but you can’t find them online because all of their messaging is so jargon-heavy that it doesn’t reflect that real trust and value that consumers and patients put in this gentleman. So that’s what we have to use to really transform his marketing and to get his message in front of more people.
Ken Tucker:
Mark, let’s talk a little bit about website objectives. We’ve talked a lot about things that imply findability online and search engine optimization. Do you see opportunities where literally it’s just the main objective of a website project is to have a client’s website look professional?
Mark Fortune:
Yes. I guess there’s a range of situations where we get involved, but on one end it’s certainly the “I built this site in Wix over a weekend 10 years ago and I haven’t touched it since” syndrome. And in every instance where that happens, the site stopped reflecting the true value of the company years ago. But they don’t know how to log in or somebody built it for them years ago and they can’t change it, or they just don’t have the time to change it. So just bringing things up to date.
Mark Fortune:
Still even in 2020, making a site mobile responsive so that it renders correctly on mobile phones is still a gap in many small business websites we come up against. So getting the message clear and gaining a good professional look is, many times, the first objective.
Mark Fortune:
The thing about it is though, you have to be careful because sometimes — we just recently concluded a project like this — the design is all that they care about. How it looks and if it spins and colors and visual engagement tends to overwhelm everything and it can really degrade site performance from page speed and things like that. So it’s always art and science. There’s a balance to everything, but getting a professional look and that usually goes along with — and I know we’ll talk about this more later — accompanying it with a professional email so it’s not “business@yahoo.com” anymore. It’s “yourname@yourbusiness.com.” It goes along with upgrading the website as well.
Ken Tucker:
Absolutely. People confuse the beauty of design sometimes with a professional-looking website. There are certainly industries that have to have absolutely beautiful stunning websites, but for most industries, they literally need a professional-looking website that is going to convert, meaning getting people to take the call to action that they want them to. And they don’t need to obsess with a crazy design. And like you said, that actually is detrimental more often than not.
Ken Tucker:
Paul, you work a lot obviously with our SEO projects, but you manage our PPC campaigns as well. Can you talk to the importance of just having a professional-looking website really where the objective is not for search engine optimization, but really just to provide credibility and trust when people land on a site?
Paul Barthel:
Credibility. Trust conversions. They all go hand in hand. And I think reviews are really important and if you can get video testimonials from your customers, that’s powerful because anyone can stick a testimonial on a website. I could make that up all day. But when you get a client that’s willing to do a video that builds trust and people aren’t going to convert if they don’t trust you. So you have to build that trust first. We could do a whole another podcast on that, but you have to build that trust before you’re even going to have a chance of engagement.
Paul Barthel:
So when they go to your website, let’s say like you just said, it isn’t about SEO. It’s a pay-per-click campaign and you’re sending them to a landing page. You have to have something on that landing page that speaks to the fact that you’re a trustworthy company. You’re not some fly-by-night organization. Maybe they’ve heard of you, maybe they haven’t. Maybe that’s the first time they’ve ever engaged with your business. So they have to know that they can trust you. And the best way to do that is with Google reviews, because you can’t really fake that. Text testimony on your website — anybody can slap that on there and put a name on it. But to have a video from a customer that’s thrilled with your service, you can’t get more powerful than that. You can’t build trust better than that, in my opinion.
Ken Tucker:
We’re all a part of or have been a part of local networking groups, whether it’s a BNI chapter or a local chamber. We all know businesses and have worked with businesses where they literally get 90% of their business or more from word of mouth and referrals from those networks.
Ken Tucker:
I just stress to a lot of those folks. Sometimes they don’t even have a website and it’s like, look, it’s a prerequisite in this day and age. You got to have a website because even if somebody refers you and they come from a pretty trusted source in that referral, they’re going to check you out online. And if they don’t see anything online, or if what they see doesn’t look to be very well put together, that speaks volumes potentially about your business. So even though you don’t need it for people to find you necessarily because you don’t need to have that element for your marketing, first of all, good for you. But second of all, you still have to have a professional presence online.
Ken Tucker:
Paul, you walked us down the path of the credibility and trust factors. Antonio, what else do you see that it’s important to have on the homepage of a website that’s going to help establish credibility, trust, empathy, things like that for a potential site visitor?
Antonio Guerrero:
Picking up on what Paul just shared. I think if you can really amplify the testimonials and reviews by adding video. Easier said than done — especially with a lot of your clients — but if you can have video testimonials, video reviews, I would say a video case study. So again, let’s look at our home services clients. Here’s a before and after of the lawn, a painting job. Not only is that great content to have on your website, but it’s also very powerful content to be shared in social channels as well. So I think folks neglect the case study aspect of a lot of what they do.
Antonio Guerrero:
Remember you have folks dealing with a certain type of pain, and they may not see the road very clear ahead of them to get out of that pain. And if you can put me in the shoes of somebody who has been in that pain, here’s how we took a company just like yours from this problem to this solution. Here’s how we helped this homeowner who had a low budget and a leaky roof get a roof that’s going to last them 20 years and not a drop of water is ever going to get through. So I think having case studies is something worth integrating and integrating as much as you can with it, with videos and pictures.
Antonio Guerrero:
Now, probably the other thing that I would add to that is having a really good if not necessarily on the homepage, it’s very clear on the website where there’s an FAQ and an SAQ. So, “frequently asked questions” and “should-ask questions.” I think that’s one incredibly powerful from a search engine perspective.
Antonio Guerrero:
Again, we as service providers and business people get a certain set of questions asked nearly every sales call. So how much credibility do you build ahead of time where you can answer those questions that you already know you’re going to get? And I think to really put fuel on that fire is to say, hey, you might be shopping around and here are the frequently asked questions, but are you asking this? Doing those “should-ask questions” is a great place for you to really differentiate yourself and set yourself up as a higher authority versus your competitors as well. And so if you can answer my question, if you know enough to answer my questions before I ask them, that’s going to instill a very strong sense of trust and comfort with you and your brand.
Ken Tucker:
Mark, you do a lot of different things as we all do. And I think on your website, you’ve put together several things that we consider to be credibility badges. Can you talk about the importance of that and maybe give listeners some ideas of credibility badges that they maybe should consider to put on their website?
Mark Fortune:
It all goes back to that idea of building trust. When you’ve got just a few seconds of somebody’s time to help persuade them that you’re the solution to their problem, how are they going to know? Credibility badges, it all goes into building the idea of trust. We’ve talked about case studies and testimonials, but are there industry associations you’re a part of? Are you Better Business Bureau A+ rated? That BBB badge needs to be on your homepage. Are you in your local chamber or a BNI network or some other networking association that lends credibility?
Mark Fortune:
In this podcast, we’re members of networks of other marketing consultants and badges that have to do with that. And it all implies social proof and trust and third-party endorsement. So it’s not just me saying that I’m a wonderful marketer or a wonderful house painter or whatever the case may be, but other people are saying it as well. Industry associations, local networking, turn performance that you’ve developed into the credibility badges. 24/7 response. I have a restoration company that we use that badge with them. Turn your five-star rating into a little badge that you can put on your site that says we’re five star Google rated or five star Angie’s List rated if you’re in the home services business. Things like that, it all just builds up credibility.
Mark Fortune:
So far we’re just talking about your homepage. We’re just trying to get people to understand right up front on your homepage why you’re the solution to a customer’s problems.
Ken Tucker:
Absolutely. Over the last several years, we’ve seen a real shift from search behavior and also driven by social media where more searches by far are done on mobile devices than on desktop computers or laptops. And with the prevalence of social media, we’re very accustomed to swiping down walls and just reading a constant flow of information.
Ken Tucker:
Paul, let’s talk a little bit about modern website design and really the focus of the homepage has now changed to where I consider most homepages need to have a long scrolling homepage design. What do you think about that?
Paul Barthel:
Oh, I agree because people, they become so accustomed to swiping. There’s an old saying, I’ll swipe but I won’t click. And there’s a lot of truth to that. And it has to be mobile responsive. Google has gone to what they call mobile-first indexing, which means they’re going to look at the mobile version of your website and your indexing, your ranking is going to be based on that.
Paul Barthel:
If your website isn’t mobile responsive, it doesn’t work well on mobile, they’ll default back to the desktop version. But if your competitor has a mobile responsive website, they’re going to be given preference. So it’s simply not an option anymore. Five years ago you could get away with it. It’s not an option anymore. Your website has to be mobile-friendly.
Ken Tucker:
So when you say mobile-friendly, it sounds like you’re talking about a lot of things that are related to performance and speed and things like that. But your website has to be easily consumed on a mobile device as well. And it’s really common that a lot of people will design a page because they may be doing the development on a desktop or a laptop and not really consider what the mobile view of that website looks like. It’s definitely important that it also looks great because that has such an impact on conversion.
Ken Tucker:
And you talked about the swipe versus click. It’s a lot easier for people to scroll down on a mobile device than it is to navigate through a long navigational hierarchy that you might see on traditional websites, where you go to the top of the page and you’ve got all these dropdown menus with all these different choices of pages that people could click on. That’s to me fundamentally changed webpage design to make it so that a lot of that is actually built in through buttons and clicking and swiping as you’re using the mobile device.
Ken Tucker:
Antonio, let’s talk a little bit about clear and prominent calls to action. What do you think about most websites? Where do they seem to fail on that?
Antonio Guerrero:
Well, there’s a number of issues. One, they simply don’t have any. The biggest call to action is “learn more” and it just takes you to a page that tells you more about the product or service but doesn’t encourage anybody to engage with you as a brand, as a company. The other, which is a very close second, is that they muddy the waters with too many calls-to-action. They’re not very clear on what they want you to do next. They offer the consultation, they offer an ebook, they offer a cheat sheet. They may offer four or five different things on the website, rather than again, guiding you through.
Antonio Guerrero:
We talked earlier about strategy and that customer journey, and I think that’s essential to helping you and your client connect over what’s the next logical step. We just talked about the mobile design and clicking versus scrolling. And I think, again, that’s part of that customer journey element that, I don’t know about you guys, but I may have the TV on watching a show and be flipping through my Facebook feed or some websites on my iPad or phone while something else is going on. I’m still incredibly shocked and almost surprised by the amount of people who are wildly confused and don’t even know what a hamburger menu is, especially on mobile, that replaces the dropdown.
Antonio Guerrero:
And so when you look at mobile, you may have a call to action on your website, but where is it being shown in mobile because now the fold is very different. And if you’re a service provider, the thing I care about the most, again, I think of maybe a plumber or roofer, I might have a plumbing emergency. I don’t want to be scrolling through your website trying to find the phone number. I want to go to your website, and that’s the first thing I want to see when I type in “emergency plumber St. Louis,” for example, and that to me is the only call to action. So do I have the appropriate call to action and do I have it in a quick, easy, accessible place? And for most service providers, that’s simply going to be that phone number.
Antonio Guerrero:
And I think the key to remember there is especially — we’ll go back to mobile for a moment — is make all those phone numbers click-to-call so that I don’t have to try to copy and paste or remember a phone number. I just want to be able to click it and have my phone automatically dial it. I think when it comes to calls to action, it’s just that very clear, very concise, very easily found. I need to find it in that hero image, in that navigation bar or near the top of any mobile search.
Ken Tucker:
I’m a big fan of StoryBrand and just the simplicity of the way he talks about things, Donald Miller. He lays it out, and it’s as simple as this. You have two different types of calls to action. You have a direct and a transitional call to action.
Ken Tucker:
A direct call to action is “schedule a consultation,” “call now.” Something very clear that drives immediate action. Not everybody’s going to be ready to do that, but you also need to have those things that are going to facilitate nurturing and building a relationship with a client or a customer or visitor to your website, to the point where they’re ready to take that action. And so having those transitional calls to action to get email addresses or cell phone numbers so that you can start to do some text message delivery as long as you’re adding value is hugely important.
Ken Tucker:
I think the mistake, Mark, you can probably talk about this quite a bit. Like Antonio said, you don’t have to put everything all on your homepage. As a matter of fact, every page on your website should have distinct and separate calls to action, right?
Mark Fortune:
Generally. Again, I think you just used a great example of what action are you wanting them to take? I think transitional call to actions are important. And especially for businesses that want to build a relationship over time or have a longer sales cycle. If you need an emergency plumber, that direct is everything about it. It has to be a phone number. It has to click-to-call. You have to make the phone ring right away.
Mark Fortune:
But if it’s a commercial plumbing contractor who may work on buildings over time or generally works on long service contracts, you’ve got to build trust and nurture that relationship over time. So your interior pages need to support more the services you provide, the problems you solve, demonstrate expertise over time with various types of buildings or situations or whatever the case may be. And again, to educate buyers as to why you’re the best solution to their problems.
Mark Fortune:
So yeah, it differs once you get beyond the homepage. Again, it goes back to, you’ve got to understand where your customer is and what journey that they take in order to buy from you.
Ken Tucker:
Yeah. Paul, can you talk about the importance of different types of pages and page content and we’re getting pretty close to time, so we need to try to be brief on this, but can you elaborate on that?
Paul Barthel:
Yeah. A couple things. Your navigation structure needs to be fairly flat. So internal linking is important. Your internal pages have to speak to the different services that you offer in the areas that you serve. And like Mark alluded to is you have the different calls to action. If you offer emergency services, in my opinion, all phone numbers should be click-to-call because we live in a mobile society. And if you offer an emergency service, that needs to be prominent.
Paul Barthel:
If you have a longer sales cycle, then the buyer journey is going to be different so that’s where those internal pages get really important. If the service or product you offer is expensive, like say Hardie siding, that’s an expensive proposition. People are going to do some research on that and your internal pages become extremely important if you have a longer buyer journey.
Ken Tucker:
Including blog posts too, right?
Paul Barthel:
Absolutely.
Ken Tucker:
Antonio, stock photos or business provided photos, what do you think?
Antonio Guerrero:
Well, it depends on the quality of the photo.
Ken Tucker:
And video.
Mark Fortune:
I was going to say, you put him on the spot there.
Mark Fortune:
The right answer is it depends on the quality, right Antonio?
Antonio Guerrero:
That’s exactly it. Are they cheap? I’m an amateur photographer so I can be a little picky when it comes to the photos. And if it’s going to be a dark pixelated crooked image that the customer did on their iPhone, then I’d rather go with stock photography. I think when we talked a little earlier about design, I think one of the things that separates good design from bad design very, very quickly and easily is the quality of the images used and any illustrations.
Antonio Guerrero:
Now, the easiest way to have a very beautiful website that’s unique is to have your own photos, but I find some clients to be a little resistant with the idea of hiring a professional photographer with, oh, well I have a phone and it’s got a good camera. Or my cousin’s brother’s uncle has a really nice big camera or an expensive camera. It doesn’t mean they understand light and perspective and some of the finer aspects of photography that lends itself to telling that story. So just because you can take a picture of your fleet of vehicles doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to look good on the website when there’s overexposure and the sun’s right beating on somebody.
Antonio Guerrero:
Ideally in a perfect world, it’s well-crafted unique photos that you’ve hired a photographer to produce, but in lieu of that, and again, we talked about how design builds trust, I’d rather seeing clean different kinds of stock photography. That means you have to dig into some of those stock photography websites to find it. But I think it’s very, very possible over just again, a bad cheap image. This is something we have had to deal with as a design agency many times where a client provides us a Dropbox folder full of pictures they took and by the time you crop them, weed through a lot of these photos that they took themselves on their phone, it really hurts the design of the website. There’s no continuity to it. There isn’t a design language and photographers can achieve that.
Antonio Guerrero:
So I’d say if you can hire a photographer, that is number one. Number two is find good unique stock photography. And then three, if you’re left with no choice, use what you got, but try to get some video in there if you can.
Ken Tucker:
I think it’s important too to stress it’s not okay to just Google for a picture and grab the first picture you find. You’ve got to be respectful of the usage rights of the image that you’re putting on your website. You can face pretty severe consequences. And there are free stock photo sites that are out there like Pexels and Pixabay and things like that. And you can even do Google searches and you can filter based on usage rights and those pictures are okay, but be careful.
Mark Fortune:
Yeah. Sorry to jump in guys, but I have a client that’s just gone through about, and this was prior to me working with them thankfully, of course, but about eight months of literally litigation from probably would’ve called a patent troll back in the days. And there’s companies out there that are just surfing your web for unlicensed images, your website, and then sending you letters that you can continue to use this picture for $1,500. And they do not let up on those things because if you don’t know that you have rights to use the photos you’re using, don’t do it.
Paul Barthel:
Just because something is in Google images doesn’t mean that it’s not copyrighted.
Antonio Guerrero:
But I think it’s even more fundamental than that. The fact is, if you are able to do a Google search and find an image you want, so have all your competitors and everybody else on your industry and so you break from that unique photo thing. The fact that you’re looking for free photos should be the first indication that you’re doing things wrong.
Mark Fortune:
There’s one corner shopping center photo that is probably on two million websites out there. And you can tell that everybody’s just photoshopped a different sign onto the same storefront of the same corner shopping center that’s on every stock photo site.
Ken Tucker:
One last thing about photos or video for your homepage. I think in this day and age, especially COVID-19 era, it’s really important to have pictures or videos of the principles of the business or the team, the people, especially for home services contractors or professionals where somebody is going to go to their office. They want to see who they’re doing business with. So, it is important to have the real people who are working in your business, very visible, very prominently.
Mark Fortune:
You can get a good set of professional photography done for just a few hundred bucks, and it’s totally worth it. At the same time, your smartphones have an HD camera on them so two minutes of the owner talking about how they solve client problems is more than good enough resolution with a good web designer to make it work on your site as a video, and don’t shy away from that.
Ken Tucker:
That’s a great point. I think it’s worth paying somebody to create professional photography. You’ve got that as a base and you can use it for your social media, you can use it for your website, brochures and printed material. And once you’ve got that base, any good graphic designer can work with those images and create a whole series of different images from that initial photo shoot.
Ken Tucker:
Okay, so we got to wrap this up. I can’t leave a website discussion without talking about website platforms that we recommend people considering and why. Paul, why don’t you start? Website platform, what would you recommend?
Paul Barthel:
I would recommend WordPress because of the versatility it offers, and I don’t want to get too deep in this. I know sometimes people talk about WordPress being hacked. The problem, usually if your WordPress platform is kept up to date, the problem is people don’t keep their plugins up to date. You have to have a maintenance program in place. Usually, if WordPress gets hacked, it’s not WordPress itself getting hacked. Someone’s using an outdated plugin as a backdoor to get in there, but WordPress is a very secure platform and it gives you a lot of versatility in design and functionality.
Ken Tucker:
Antonio?
Antonio Guerrero:
Oh, I’m Weebly all the way.
Ken Tucker:
I figured. We’ve got it on record now.
Antonio Guerrero:
It’s there for posterity. Without a doubt, it’s WordPress and WordPress certainly has its disadvantages as Paul was saying, but the industry-standard nature of it. I think a lot of the lay folks that we may work with. And when I say that, I mean, folks who are not very technical do know WordPress. They have spoken to other web designers and one of the big selling points I’d even tell my clients is, hey, let’s say I disappear one day for whatever reason, I hit the lotto, I’m done. You can throw a rock and find WordPress experts. It’s when you start getting into some of the other more unique and niche CMS platforms that it just gets very expensive very quickly. So for the money and for the versatility, WordPress can’t be beat.
Ken Tucker:
What do you think, Mark?
Mark Fortune:
What I tell clients is we will build your website in any platform that you want as long as it’s WordPress.
Ken Tucker:
I’m a big fan of WordPress. We occasionally will run into a client who’s worked with somebody who’s come from a real coding and IT background and they always squawk and kick and scream about WordPress. But the reality is WordPress powers well over a third of all websites on the web, including major corporations, major websites like the New York Times and things like that. So it gets an unfair shake. Paul mentioned it because of the security issues and hacking and whatnot.
Ken Tucker:
The reality is it’s the biggest player. It’s the easiest target. People are lazy. They don’t do their maintenance of their plugins and the theme updates in a timely manner or even the core WordPress version although most quality hosting platforms are going to force that now. It’s just the old Microsoft argument all over again. People are like, well, why would I want to use Microsoft? It’s always being hacked. Well, it’s because it is the dominant player. And when you’re a dominant player, you’re always going to be the biggest target.
Ken Tucker:
Don’t let that sway you from using a platform when there are a very robust set of best practices that are not very difficult to implement to provide a secure environment. And like Paul said, it’s got the functionality and the design elements. And as Antonio mentioned, you’re not going to have a hard time finding somebody who can take over the maintenance of a WordPress website.
Ken Tucker:
I want to thank everybody for listening to this episode today. You can reach out and contact any of us on this podcast. We all do website evaluations for people who are interested in seeing if their website measures up to what we think a quality business website should be. And so feel free to reach out to any of us for that. Thanks, everybody. Enjoyed it and stay safe.
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