CMILC - Current
Chris LaFay: It. It's.
Erin Dyer: Good morning.
Chris LaFay: Did you have an excellent weekend?
Erin Dyer: I did. Did you have a good weekend?
Chris LaFay: My wife and I went to the mountains this weekend up in Blue Ridge and It was a 10 out of 10.
Erin Dyer: Oh, that's great.
Chris LaFay: Weather was perfect. Very little rain, which I'm also doubly thankfully for very little rain because the mountain road that we had to go up to get there was very bumpy and hilly to like the degree. And if, if it did rain, it would have been extraordinarily complicated. So thankful it stayed dry.
Erin Dyer: So I have a funny story about that. The last time that I went to Blue Ridge, my whole family went and we spent Christmas there and it was like my mother in law, my father in law, there was like 15 of us. We got snowed in. My dad had to be like airlifted out. Seriously, by the cops because he was on dialysis and he had run out of like dialysis. And the rest of us had to walk down the mountain and leave our cars there and get home and then come back and get our cars later. Was crazy.
Chris LaFay: What?
Dawn Audano: Yeah, it was.
Erin Dyer: We still. It was like one of the most memorable Christmases ever because it was so weird that we had to like walk down the mountain and we had little kids, so we had like car seats and like babies and all of our presents. It was, it was truly crazy. Yeah, I know.
Chris LaFay: That takes the cake.
Erin Dyer: Yeah. So be, you know, just be mindful when you go to Blue Ridge. Make sure there's no snow on the agenda.
Chris LaFay: Yes. And a four wheel drive car.
Erin Dyer: Yeah. That's cool. That's nice. That's so great. When you get away for the weekend, it's like a whole rejuvenating experience.
Chris LaFay: Yes. Sitting out on the deck with nothing.
Erin Dyer: Yeah.
Chris LaFay: A wonderful thing. Needless. Yes. Matt, how about yourself? You gotta top that story. Like you. That. That's the goal here now.
Matt Nelson: I stopped competing with her stor.
Erin Dyer: It's.
Matt Nelson: It's not a big deal, so. But no, hey, look, I. I live a very peaceful life. Playing tennis all the time. Got my buddies, friends, family lives away. One daughter lives here. So, you know. Yeah. So not nothing real exciting to report.
Chris LaFay: That's all you need. That's all you need.
Erin Dyer: Michael's a lot more fun stuff than I do. I just do kids stuff. Dawn might know what I'm saying.
Dawn Audano: I spent Saturday at a regional or divisional climbing competition, so. At a bay sale, to top it off. Yeah. My oldest daughter made it to divisionals and so that was really good. She didn't make it to Second day of divisionals, which she was, like, kind of bummed by, but I was like, oh, oh, yeah. I don't have to stand there for two days. I had, like, a long run too, so I moved my long run from Saturday to Sunday, which is always kind of mentally difficult.
Erin Dyer: Yeah.
Dawn Audano: So. But it's fine. Made it through. What's a long run? Well, I am. This is like nine miles, so I'm doing. I have a half in like a month, so. So I probably should have done it longer, but I paused and I didn't actually start training until after. Till March, so.
Erin Dyer: That's awesome.
Dawn Audano: I was, like, a little delayed.
Matt Nelson: Thanks.
Dawn Audano: I'm excited. It's my. I haven't done one in a couple of years, so I'm a little nervous. But also most days I feel like I could wake up and run a half marathon just in general because I've done it, like, a while, so.
Erin Dyer: Good for you, man. That's awesome.
Dawn Audano: Yeah, I'm a fan. All right, are you ready to jump into this? Are we waiting for another mat?
Matt Nelson: No, Matt's out.
Dawn Audano: Okay.
Matt Nelson: He's got a. His dad's going through bypass surgery today, so he's gonna be out of pocket for another few days.
Erin Dyer: I didn't know that it was right after his vacation.
Matt Nelson: Yeah, he got home last night at 11:30 and had to be at the hospital this morning at like 6.
Erin Dyer: Wow.
Matt Nelson: So.
Dawn Audano: Hope that all goes okay.
Erin Dyer: Yeah,.
Dawn Audano: So we won't wait for him, but we will jump into the building block designs. Chris, you have everything on your end to showcase today, right? Okay.
Chris LaFay: Yes.
Erin Dyer: Great.
Dawn Audano: I'm going to kick it over to you then.
Chris LaFay: Sounds good. So worked with our. Worked with our designer a little bit over the span of last week or so and have a couple of ideas for content on the homepage that I want to. That I want to showcase here. So we have this in Figma. Figma was acting up for me today, so I was going to do a couple of, like, live tweaks, but some of the fonts aren't loading on my computer, so I can't make any edits, so. Pardon. There's some texture that I would like to have changed, but my computer is being stupid, so.
Matt Nelson: Or what? I mean, that.
Chris LaFay: Wait, say again? Sorry.
Matt Nelson: Is this a bad omen about.
Chris LaFay: Exactly. Yes, exactly. Starting off Monday on a real good note right here. Yes. So going to keep it simple. Kind of what we're thinking is to keep it simple with the. The homepage hero section. We want to have something generic enough that kind of hits Hits kind of everybody in one fell swoop. And the. The. There's three areas I want to focus on from a, A general structure perspective. So when we talked last time, we talked about making the homepage a little bit more consolidated. So I want to do two. Actually, I want to do three core things here. I want to talk about kind of the. The execution of these three core things and also about the laying in some. Some different, like, aesthetic elements as well, too. So first I want to get people jumping straight into the type of decking they want to get that we talked about that last week. That's the. So taking one of the existing blocks we already have and getting people and using generic terms. And these generic terms might not be the right ones. And that's okay. My goal is I'm going to use these other places. So the goal is consistency here for the time being. But where do you live where. Not actually using these words, but where are you experiencing your problem? Because the boards in general line up to different kind of biomes, if you will. And then looking at the Trek site and seeing what they did with kind of like large image on the left and these like options on the right. The. It's visually appealing, but it wasn't a great user experience. And so the thinking here is if they didn't immediately dive into any of these things, let's give them some of that. Those data points that might trigger them to want to learn more. So again, using the same kind of generic labels here at the top and having this basically be like a tabbed view to where they're in coastal, we see a honest to goodness, like, beachy location with these boards. Go ahead and label it the actual name of the collection here. And this is actually the piece I was trying to edit, actually putting like information about the Coastal line. I'm not a wordsmith, so please don't hold on to that too harshly.
Matt Nelson: No.
Chris LaFay: And then having the CTA down here to then actually go and view that collection. So it gets. I know a lot of the bullet points are going to be fairly not going to be the same, but there's through lines between them. So even if we land on suburbs, some of those things within suburbs, those bullet points might be kind of the same across the board, but would be tailored specifically to suburbs.
Erin Dyer: And then down here up there is what you're saying. So if you clicked on historic, we would oscillate to the historic piece.
Chris LaFay: Bingo. Exactly. Yep, 100% love it. And then down here. And this is something I realized as soon as we dropped off our call last week. We never really talked about testimonials. And I don't necessarily know if I want to go for, like getting this next version of the site live in this first phase, if we want to dive into these humongous testimonials and case study pages and all that jazz. So I challenged my designer. I was like, what I would like to do is I would like to create a section on the home page that draws from that human nature. One of the sites that you sent over had it. It wasn't Trex, I think it was. It was another one. I just don't remember which one it was. But they had stories at the bottom.
Erin Dyer: Timbertech, I think.
Chris LaFay: Say it again.
Erin Dyer: Timbertack.
Chris LaFay: Actually, that. That does sound right. I was like, what I don't want to do for this version is get into this big case studies, big testimonials thing. But I would like to bring some stories to the front that would then drive people to the associated collection. So what I think would be really interesting here is how can we tie a simple testimonial, preferably a real photo of these human beings on their deck, if possible, and then actually have the call to action jump into the collections page. So in reality, the way that we kind of have this laid out is all of these sections are to drive you into the specific collection to where you can make an actual action and to hear the story that you guys want to tell these people. It's just laid out in three different ways for people to then gravitate to whatever is interesting to them while giving them technical data points as well too. I am done. I see the floor.
Matt Nelson: Aaron,.
Erin Dyer: I will tell you what I love about what you've done here is exactly that you're not giving people a lot of chances to guess what the next action step is. And I appreciate that. I don't know if there's some value in adding easy like CTAs in other places as well, because I don't want it to be difficult for people to request a sample or to contact us. So I don't know if there's room higher up there to go to one of those or if we just make it really, really easy for people to understand where to go with that. The mountains, historic coastal and suburbs. I love the thinking behind that. I think we gotta, like, think about it for a minute and figure out. Is that exactly how we want to phrase it? But I think the layout looks super duper clean. I really love the built for the way you live how they can go between those really quickly. I think you're taking all the problems that we've been having, which is, okay, how do we translate what this is for? How do we guide people through this process? And you are taking out the guesswork, which is awesome.
Chris LaFay: That's kind of the goal. The goal is to make it. I. I draw a lot of this from two. Two clients that we worked with. One was a higher education, and they had. They were large enough to have a lot of conflict internally. And no, everybody always wanted their one thing live on the site. And so figuring out how to. How to deal with that. The other was an organization that they had four products that had stupid names. Like, if I listed the names off and I was like, what do these guys do? You'd have, like, I have no freaking clue what these guys do. And they were so adamant having their product names be the, like, hero of the homepage.
Erin Dyer: Yeah.
Chris LaFay: And it didn't work. Now, they had. So their business worked somehow, but, like, it didn't. It didn't convert well. And so I've taken a lot of that learnings over the years and be like, how do you. How do you make it more stupid? And that sounds blunt, but it's true. Like, how do you make it as simple as humanly possible? So anyway, yeah, I think what we could do. I think what we could do here is between. Between these sections, we can pull that thin call to action strip that.
Erin Dyer: Yeah.
Chris LaFay: Low. Or that yellow orange color.
Matt Nelson: Yeah.
Chris LaFay: To where basically the content of that would say something along the lines of, do you. Do you already know what you're looking for? Get some samples.
Erin Dyer: Or.
Chris LaFay: Or it could actually be the opposite. Like, don't know what you're looking for. Get some samples. I can see it actually go. I could see the. The verbiage and tone kind of going both ways and it being equally as impactful.
Erin Dyer: I will say that a lot of the actions that are taken on the website is to go right to the samples page. Right. So they'll go from the home page and. And they'll either go to a collection page or they'll go right to the request, a quote request, a sample page. That works for us because at the end of the day, that's a warm lead. You know, if that's. That's moving the ball forward really well. I was going to say one more thing. If you go further down, back to the testimonial area, I think that there is the opportunity here. If we don't want to use testimonials we could kind of leverage this into like one of those. We have a lot of blogs, but we could actually use that space to be like, I was sick of having replaced my wooden deck every 10 years. Click on, you know, my wooden dock every 10 years, go to the coastal collection. We could make it kind of more of that, you know, problem solving that we're doing with our different lines. We'd be like, I needed something that would work great for my mountaintop home and I needed somewhere where my kids and dogs could enjoy the outdoors without ruining our patio. You know, kind of like segue. If. If. Because we don't really have the testimonials yet. I'm sure we can get them. But just an opportunity there.
Chris LaFay: My. My recommend. So my thought would be let's. Over the next month or so let's come up with a way to start collecting some of these things because the more, the more you can lean into real stories, the better.
Erin Dyer: Yeah.
Chris LaFay: In the more like, especially like when you can put like a real face and a name to something in quotes, that's going to go a lot farther than what I'm just going to call generic statements. That's not the right phrase. But. But I'm also fine with doing something like this with generic statements to start off with. With the idea that we would flip that around at some point, you know, in about four or six months.
Erin Dyer: Yeah. I can probably do some things to drive some testimonials, you know, like do some little social media or email marketing where we. We reach for that.
Chris LaFay: And there's also. I. This isn't something that you have to decide now. I'm just going to toss it out. There is obviously there is a. There's an image aesthetic that's been set with. With like the high quality, the professional, the whole nine yards. And I also know that getting for testimonials and kind of having legitimate photos of the real family on their deck.
Erin Dyer: Yeah.
Chris LaFay: Is. Would be extraordinarily challenging to do. And so a thought that I'll toss out there is what would it look like to have a section on the site that are real photos from real people and having the. And being okay with those being like selfie shots, iPhone photos, etc, but then hedging it with messaging around like real people, real photos, real action so that you kind of segment away from the professional shots and actually lean into the. The grungier real. The realness of it. So something to think about for this section as you're thinking about collecting testimonials when you're asking somebody for them, figure out at the very beginning what is the most that I want from somebody. I want, I want their quote. I'd love a selfie. I'd love a photo of this. If you were thinking about video, how do we collect that easily? There's some ideas and thoughts I have there as well too that I've done in the past that have worked and haven't worked. What is that in mass package? Because once you ask somebody to do it once, you can't really ask them to do it again. We all know this, right? I'm not saying anything new, just refresh, just refreshing at the end of the day.
Erin Dyer: So yeah, I think that's great because I do think that, I mean we know we can make great photos because we are making them, you know. So actually seeing the real deal and communicating people's real stories is still a great, authentic way to build trust.
Chris LaFay: Yeah. Okay. So overall takeaway from, from this here is the general concept and idea of kind of labeling each line with a generic Label is a 10 out of 10. We're good to go that direction. The labels, we're probably going to change them in some way, shape or form, which is all fine. That doesn't matter. We'll stick with what we have for right now because it's simple. The concept of this of like clicking through the tab, seeing some actual data points also good here as well. Going to add probably a thin call to action strip in between each of these sections. So underneath this one we would put a thin CTA that's you know, the solid yellow orange color. And then below this section we would also do the same thing. And so probably one of them would be requesting a quote, the other would be getting a sample. And then we have all these various actions across here and then we have the consultation down here below. So kind of each section has its own defined primary cta, but in a secondary position effectively. So that way we give people a lot of ways to get into the pages that we want them to go to. But if they are ready to make a choice, they can go ahead and hop in there with one of the orange things that they see. So that is my overall takeaway from this so much. Summarize that.
Erin Dyer: Well, yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. And, and I don't want to over talk. So Matt, please feel free to jump in if you want to know.
Matt Nelson: Okay, let me, let me just offer a couple comments here. First of all, I love the idea of real life testimonials. The authenticity that it creates is really valuable, I think.
Erin Dyer: And.
Matt Nelson: Even though the, you know, we're talking about layout here, we definitely need to straighten out and coordinate the right professional photos for the product line. Right. So yeah, so there's, there's all kinds of work that need to be, that needs to be accomplished there. For example, veranda, that's a porch board, right? Porch board is, is laid perpendicular to the house. Not across, not parallel. Okay. So. So in the photography we just, we need to sort that out. But anyways, it looks great. I love it. It's clean, it gets to the point. I think it certainly elevates our brand and you know, I, I really do like it so.
Chris LaFay: Fantastic.
Matt Nelson: Two cents.
Erin Dyer: Yeah. And, and we haven't provided a full line of photos yet, so that is something because it takes a long time there. As, as much as I'd love for AI to be the point where it just, you know, spits out a great one, the first one. We've provided some of this, but not all of this. And I do like the way that you laid that out. I mean, I like how. Looks similar enough that you get the point. Right. Each of them in that way. One thing I wanted to point out is that the aesthet different from the rest of the site, which is fine. I like it a lot. It's much more mimics kind of that timber tech and Trex. It's clean, it's pretty, it's very elegant looking. When we transition the other pages to this new site, how will we ensure that it keeps this same aesthetic without overhauling everything?
Chris LaFay: So that's where that block library comes into play. Yeah, So I gave, I gave my designer. So he gave. He had that entire block library all to himself and I gave him some creative liberties on this page to expand that. And so he, what he did. And the kind of the core pieces that I think that you're seeing that are a little bit different is like for example, one of them, one of the blocks on the, in that block library that we already looked at was actually very similar to this. We had a square image on the, on the left hand side with content on the right hand side.
Erin Dyer: Right.
Chris LaFay: Very similar. But this is a little bit different because we're kind of adding in a little bit of a tag down here and we're adding in kind of these little pods as well too. So basically he took that core block and then just made it a little bit, shifted it a little. He also added in icons. We didn't really have too much going on with icons. We definitely didn't have a tab section at the top and anywhere. So basically what we're going to see is we're going to take some of these minor adjustments. Like one of them is this kind of this, this kind of dual header section. We have that on the block library that we've already looked at. But he did something a little bit different here with this. The color scheme choice as well as the, the letter spacing and the sizing. So it's a little bit different than was on the style guide. And honestly, we'll probably take what he did here and then apply that on all those other blocks. So we're going to use all the other blocks that we already have and we're just going to apply some of these pieces to them. So this is what kind of that double header section will look like. We'll add in a tab section here as well and we'll also add in kind of these like icon rows that have call outs basically with these colors being toggles.
Matt Nelson: Bowl.
Chris LaFay: A bowl. So like we could do this with the darker blue. This is the greenish blue. We could do them with orange. Wouldn't recommend it because it's not really an action. And so we basically are just going to lay these on top of that.
Dawn Audano: Okay.
Chris LaFay: This is also very similar as well too. These kind of look like the standard, the image cards that have already been designed. But the differences are here, kind of this double header again here and then a text based button rather than a solid button or with an outline. So just adding a third variant to what buttons could look like. So very small changes and small tweaks. But you're right, it does make a difference. And so we're basically going to take what we have here and just overlay that on what we already have so that we're not reinventing the wheel. Okay. Answer your question?
Erin Dyer: Yeah, I think that, you know,.