leran lhanie - Current
Chris LaFay: Good morning.
leran lhanie: Good morning, Chris. How are you?
Chris LaFay: I'm doing well. Just got back from the mountains and basically did not.
leran lhanie: Actually.
Chris LaFay: No, that's a lie. I did a lot at the mountains. It was very relaxing. I worked on fun things that I wanted to work on, and I'll gladly show that to you a little bit later, but I'm launching something new for my company in the next few days that I am beyond excited about. And so in the mountains, I just got to sit on a sofa, look at the mountains and the trees and listen to the birds and work on my fun thing that I have been dying to work on for the last, like, month. And I basically got it finished. See, that's what I'm talking about.
leran lhanie: Speaking of the mountains, I'm talking about. Sometimes you just need to. Man, that's the best place to work.
Chris LaFay: Are you on vacation or is this where you live?
leran lhanie: So I actually just moved in this week. It's a long term. It's a long term Airbnb. So I'm here for three months. So I just. Dude, I used to live in downtown and I'm just like, man, I need to get the hell out of downtown. Go. Because I'm a. You know, I'm a nature guy as well, and I just needed to get back into. Into the nature, man. I just. I feel so much more relaxed. I could work better. And, dude, it's. It's been amazing, so I completely get it.
Chris LaFay: There are days where I wish that. I mean, I have basically hedged my entire bets on my business in terms of, like, word of mouth referrals, the whole nine yards. Like, I don't do a lot. I don't do any outbound marketing and all that kind of fun stuff, which I'm fine with. Like, that's okay, of course. But the way. The way that you grow that through word of mouth and doing things is being. Meeting up in person and shaking hands and hosting events and all that jazz. And so being close to Atlanta is important. And until the business gets enough just internal momentum to where it's sustainable for a little while, to where I don't have to go to events, you know, for a few months at a time, I'm stuck because what I. I would love, like my wife and I've actually talked about not even necessarily the mountains, but, like, let's go pick a city. Like a city that's highly walkable, that's not like, super. I'm not talking about, like, New York necessarily, but like, yeah, where you don't need a Car and just like stay there for a month and just do life in that little area for like 30 days and just enjoy being in a different part of town entirely. And that sounds wonderful to me, but I need Atlanta right now.
leran lhanie: And so I get it, man.
Chris LaFay: That's why it will be the year.
leran lhanie: That's why I haven't left, like LA, man. This, I'm like 15 minutes away from LA, like closer to Malibu area in the mountains. But like, still if I need to get to the city, 20, 30 minutes away, you know, so it's. I, I get it. You need that. You still need the city, but just enough to get out of it.
Chris LaFay: Exactly, yes.
leran lhanie: That's awesome, man.
Chris LaFay: So let's dive into your stuff and not gonna lie, very. I don't know what's happening. Okay, I got your text messages that were basically like flyer. Basically like flyer PDFs or JPEG files with a lot of things. Got the email code, version of some of these and also the task that you submitted with the email with cross referencing. And there's a lot of moving parts. My brain is not. Isn't putting these together very well. So, yeah, that's kind of why I.
leran lhanie: Wanted to get on call because I know I kind of send them like, yeah, I sent you a lot of stuff, so it is a lot simpler than it looks. So on the original side, I'll just jump into it. So on the original site, right, we had those top bottom comparisons for each section, right? So we have the aluminum, the stainless steel, the mesh and the stitching. Those are the four points. So rather than having the top, bottom and just like bullet points, I wanted to do more graphic type. And that's what I created. And so you're going to notice for each section, I've created a graphic that shows other brands versus ours. And so those are the graphics I sent you through text just to give you like a visual. And then on the email, what I did is I, I sent you a separate email for each one. I sent you a separate email for aluminum stainless steel, so it doesn't get mixed up. And what I sent there is the image itself, which shows the comparison. And again, I don't understand the code, but I thought, yeah, if I can try to make this easier on you and already send the HTML css, I sent those as well for each one. Of course, you could pick and choose and edit through the code. I understand that, but at least you have a baseline and so that, that's with the comparisons. Now, the, the graphics, what do you like? Because I know they're just graphics. How do you think that's going to work in. Just in those comparison areas?
Chris LaFay: Okay, so basically in the. So we have four. No. 1, 2, 3. Oops, hold on. 2, 3, 4. We have five comparison sections.
leran lhanie: Yes.
Chris LaFay: And so. Okay.
leran lhanie: And. Yeah, so four real ones. The last one is more like a summary of just lifetime warranty and just all the stuff that. That wasn't included in the other four.
Chris LaFay: Got it. Okay. Got it. Okay, so what I'm. What I'm hearing you saying overall is for the, for the five comparison sections on the site, having them be. So what I was trying to do is actually the first version of this page. I didn't. So let me back up. I sent you the first version of the page and then you sent me the. What I'm just called the. The long single email that was long that basically had all the pros and cons just straight down the page with emojis. So the first version of the revised page. So before version two was actually more like what you sent, where basically every section of the revised page almost looked the same to where it was like title of whatever the problem set is. Column for cons, problem for pros or. I mean I'm not cons and pros, but other brands versus this brand. And then rinse and repeat, duplicated over and over and over again. Visually that gets very repetitious. So like as you're scrolling down and you're seeing the exact same things over and over again, it's taking up the whole screen. It was, it's from a user experience perspective, was hard to focus on. Like what am I supposed to be looking at here? So what I did was I took those bullet points and did the alternating kind of two column layout. So you kind of broke it up with imagery and icons and color and bullet points. So what I don't want to do is basically have a page on the site that is. We'll call it five two column comparison blocks. Just back to back to back to back to back. Because people aren't going to read all of that information. And so I would rather from a user experience perspective, I like the idea of mixing photos, icons and text because I don't want it to be a wall of text.
leran lhanie: Yeah.
Chris LaFay: So I, I'm a fan of the, I'm a fan of the overall layout that I created because it breaks those things up well. So I think where the middle. I think we're. The through line here is, is what. What can we do to make the. The pros and cons list stand out more within each of these two column blocks to give you that more other brand versus pull defense kind of comparison piece without it being just a wall of tables. Does that make sense? I realized I reinstated. I said a couple of things a couple of times in a row. But what are your thoughts there?
leran lhanie: So I agree with that and I. The thing is though, is that I like the design on these graphics because it's like very. How can I say? Like it highlights versus and then like the color difference between the orange and the blue. And it's like you could very like as soon as you see it, it's very like, like you don't have to like, re. Like you can just read the main points. Because I also made it a lot more concise. I made a lot of these points more concise as well. So I like the visual of it. But if we can break that up somehow, that would be. That would be ideal. You know what I mean? I see what you're saying, but here, let me. Do you still have that first version?
Chris LaFay: The first version?
leran lhanie: Yeah.
Chris LaFay: If you get rid of the word revised out of the URL dash revise, it'll. It'll go back. I'm actually, I will. I don't mind sharing my screen a second, but I'm doing.
leran lhanie: Yeah.
Chris LaFay: Trying something.
leran lhanie: Yeah. Yeah. Because I know the way. Yeah. That, that. That's the only. Like I. But the thing is, I really like those graphics. I just don't know how we're going to work it into the page in the right way. And maybe that might take some brainstorming. Maybe we can.
Chris LaFay: Because what I would like. I would like to come up with one. One style that we can then replicate across the board so that in one fell swoop all of them can be updated one and done.
leran lhanie: Exactly.
Chris LaFay: Revised draft. Okay, hold on. I'm going to do this. And then over. Go 75 and 25. I don't know that's going to be right or not, but we will see. Refresh. That's not right either. Let's do actually. Okay, hold on, hold on. Let's do this. This goes inside of here. And let's actually do this. Okay. And then let's also do this. I'm about to share my screen. One second.
leran lhanie: Oh, yeah. Take your time.
Chris LaFay: What if we'll need to swap the colors? But that's fine.
leran lhanie: Because I know you know and I. I will say this. It is a lot of information, but in a. And the reason why I'm almost willing.
Chris LaFay: To risk that is because our product.
leran lhanie: Is so, so much better that like pe. Okay, so a lot of people in the industry, this is what they're doing. A lot of my competitors, they have a solid core post and what they're doing is they're lying to people. It's not stainless steel, it's aluminum. Not only that, the aluminum is very crappy aluminum. And it's very hard to communicate that. Right. And so what these graphics do is it communicates it very well. And it like, does in a way that like, do you know what I mean? Even on the phone, for me to, when I explain it, it comes off a little like I'm, I'm attacking the other companies, like, and it's hard for them to believe me. You know what I mean? It's like, oh, yeah. But it's, how do you know that it's real stainless steel or it's not the T6 aluminum and whatever. So these graphics, like, I could say that, like, hey, look, this is really what it is and people will understand that. And so that's the only. And I get what you're saying, but I'm almost willing to risk that to make sure that people actually know this. Because if they know it, it's 100% they're going to purchase with me because there's not even a huge price difference between the two. And if they know that we have not only a better product, but better times 100, it's. It's automatic sale.
Chris LaFay: What if we did something like this to where we have image icon, some text over here. And these would be kind of an alternating color styles to where we have the tan, then the white, then the tan, then the white. Where'd it go? Where'd it go? Where'd it go? This one right there. And attached to each of these, we can make this text a little bit larger with an icon on the side. And so we would swap. And then we would swap the colors as well too. So we do something that we do the red over here, then the, the, the, the gray, blue over on this side, basically.
leran lhanie: So I'm still not a huge fan of, of like that method. And so. One second.
Chris LaFay: Also something to consider on mobile. These, these row. These, these column sets, they're going to need to stack because on a mobile device you're not going to be able to have that two colum with those icons and that amount of text. So these do. From a visual standpoint, these are going to need to be able to be stackable on mobile.
leran lhanie: Yeah. So what if, what if we take the images I sent you, but instead of keeping those two columns together, we split them into two. Like they are here. And then in the middle, we could put a circle saying verse.
Chris LaFay: Yeah, so that's that. I think, I think we're actually saying the same. The same core concept here. So like, this would be the, the oranger color from the palette. This would be blue. The. This text would get a little bit larger and we would put some icons next to each of those going down the page. And then on mobile, these would stack on. They. We could put. More than likely, we can put something in the middle of this. Yeah, I don't want to break it though, because the thing is, what I, what I want to make sure of is almost all of the content of the site right now is editable in the back end of the site without having to touch code. That's my. I want, I need. I want that to happen. When you start overlaying stuff like that, you get a little bit into this. How editable is it actually going to be? Because you're kind of floating these elements in places that aren't really meant to be dragged and dropped. So I don't know about putting a versus in between here on desktop. I will give it a shot, but I'm not 100% sure it's going to work.
leran lhanie: Okay, so. Okay, so what I, what I would like. So let's say if we do two boxes next to each other, right. What I would like is to keep the icons the same on. On mine. And you see how we have the, like the title is big and bold, and then you have like a small explanation under it in smaller font. So the, the one. The things that I like to keep are the icons that are there because I think they did a very good job. In terms of the icons. We used the way. In terms of big, bold writing for the title, smaller writing under it, explaining what it is, and then the top, obviously other brands versus pool defense. Right. Maybe a little banner at the top with those colors. Do you see what I'm saying? So similar. I want to try to keep it as similar as possible to what I sent you versus maybe we don't need to put the verses. I mean, I would like that if we can. But almost like, like, for example, let's pull up my image that I created.
Chris LaFay: Yeah, I have it pulled up over here. Hold on one second.
leran lhanie: So you see how that is how they're basically two boxes that are put together. So if we need to like, if we can like kind of Mimic that color and border at the top. And if we need to separate those boxes completely, fine. I do like the headlines and the colors on the top too. Safety in the detail, the pool defense difference, the difference in the orange and the, and the blue. I like that design factor. If we can make those two boxes very similar to that and keep those icons similar to that, that would be ideal.
Chris LaFay: Okay, got it. Okay.
leran lhanie: You see what I'm saying?
Chris LaFay: Yeah. Let me, let me play around with that some.
leran lhanie: And I know, you know, for example, I know it might take a little extra time to do something like this. If I need to pay you a little extra for the extra time, I'm happy to do that. I just want to make sure that we are getting it done the right time, the first time. Right. Like, I don't want to go back five years later. Like, you know what I mean? Like, I, I, I want, like, if you're looking at Lifesaver, for example, let's pull up the Lifesaver website.
Chris LaFay: If you can Give me one second. Somebody's at my house, and he might need to say something to me before he walks out or give me. Let me be right back.
leran lhanie: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Go ahead, go ahead.
Chris LaFay: Okay. Get my car washed. I'm gonna make sure I can see for a second. I was like, it's in call. The world's in color again, so very nice.
leran lhanie: So actually, as you were gone, I came up with a little bit of an idea in terms of how to break this page up a bit. So let's bring up the, the, the website page again. Yeah, and you'll. And. Okay. And so just to jump forward a little bit as well on the notes for the rest of the website, and the way that I did it is I made notes on the website itself, and then I made that, that last email that those two only cross reference. Okay. The notes on the website itself and the last email, those cross reference. And I will say on the website as well, like here, I showed you an example in the email, right. For this area. And you'll see that. So what, What I was so. Okay. If you see that little boxed picture. Yeah, I don't like that. And the reason for that is just.
Chris LaFay: Wait, are you talking.
leran lhanie: Right? It's a box picture. So what I was. That. That's. Yeah, that's something different. That's something different. And so, so I'm talking about, like, these pictures next to the comparison. Right. So what I would prefer is instead of the picture, take out the picture. Just do, like, the icon up top. Then possible title. Right. And then the comparison.
Chris LaFay: Okay.
leran lhanie: Right. The two boxes.
Chris LaFay: And so that's gonna be the section for each of the comparison sections, one after the other after the other. Well, that's just gonna. Not necessarily.
leran lhanie: Not necessarily. Because instead of the picture being there. So let's say you have the icon, right? You have the top T6 aluminum icon. You have the title. Then you have the visual comparison under that. Visual comparison across this, like, one section, we could put an image. Do you see what I'm saying? Rather than a small box to the left. So let's go on my original website now.
Chris LaFay: Hold on.
leran lhanie: My. My. My old website.
Chris LaFay: Let me go back over here. So for. So. What you're. So basically what you're saying, other than the fact that. That icons all the way to the left, this is what you're saying for these. These content sections here is. I mean, the updates that we just talked about for these things. But the. The title, the description, and then the two columns. Rent. Yeah, down the line.
leran lhanie: Not again. Not necessarily. Because I want to break it up. So now under that. Let's say under the first one, we can do. We could even put like. Like go all the way down on that. Keep going, keep going, keep going, keep going, keep going. Okay, you see that? You see that right there? You see how the weight, like a small wavy part? We can do something like that under each one to break it up. And then I can. I can give you like. Like we could put. I can make up content to break stuff up. Or under each comparison, like, go back to my old, old website. Like the one like that I have up right now, like, actual on the pool defense us website.
Chris LaFay: Hold on one second.
leran lhanie: Got a bug in there? No, you're good.
Chris LaFay: There you are, little booger. Okay. That's what that is. Okay. All right. You can just go and be happy. Sorry. I thought I heard sheets, like, pieces of paper rustling around, and I'm like. I'm in a tiny nothing here to rustle around papers. There's a. There's a wasp in my room, which. That's normal. Anyway. What's your. What's the pool number? Here we go. Got it.
leran lhanie: Cool. Defense us dot com. And I just want to show you some ways that we can break things up in between. So let's. Let's move down. Okay. So you see how this. Those four images are across the page?
Chris LaFay: Yeah.
leran lhanie: So we could even break it up with stuff like that as well.
Chris LaFay: Got it. Okay.
leran lhanie: Do you see what I'm saying?
Chris LaFay: Yeah. Okay, cool. Gotcha. So Basically, in short, we're gonna do these sections for the five different comparison sections and then between each of them we'll do kind of like a little image, like a row of images and.
leran lhanie: Stuff to kind of break images. We could do blue banners. I like how we like at the end of this page I go all the way down. I love this. I love the orange breakup and I love the blue breakup. So in between the sections we can, we can even do a little bit of blue, a little bit of orange breakups. We could, we could mix it with some images across, across the page. We can stick to that. Do you see what I'm saying?
Chris LaFay: Yeah. Yep.
leran lhanie: And we could even, we don't even need to like, we could just do little taglines like voted number one. Like, we don't even need to put like huge paragraphs or even a full on dedicated sections just in an effort to break these up. We could put like number one voted or number the truck, the most trusted tool fence on the like, stuff like this.
Chris LaFay: We can always take, we can actually take these little blurbs that are at the bottom below and actually just put them in the next sections.
leran lhanie: That's what I'm saying. Maybe we could do like a little section of blue, a little section of orange, stuff like that to break them up.
Chris LaFay: Okay, that'll make sense. So that's basically going to cover us for the majority of the content on here. So basically what we're going to do is we're going to do sections that are like this for the, the comparisons and the conversation that we had prior to that. In between each of them we're going to have a small little breakup section and that will cover 80% of the content on this page. And then you have some notes over here for this section up at the top and some notes about the video as well too. Yeah. One thing I know that I did in one of your things that you mentioned is you wanted these icons move to a different spot. These, these icons in this section is in its own like container area. And the recommendation that you had was actually move these out of here on mobile and put them somewhere else. We're not going to be able to do that because they're inside of this section. We can't move them on mobile to underneath the images down here. So these will have to either stay here or, or get brought out to an entirely different section.
leran lhanie: I see what you're saying. And, and so all of my edits I make on the mobile. Mobile and, and the reason why I do that is because let's be honest, 90% of people are on their mobile looking at websites. So I think we need to make sure the mobile is perfect and work our way back to the desktop version. So I guess, yeah, so we could see what we could do with that. So. Yes, you have that right. On the first conversation we had with the comparisons. The one thing I do want to note though is try to match those designs as much as you can in terms of the coloring, the boxes with the border at the top, with the, with those colors, the icons, as much as you can.
Chris LaFay: Okay. All right, that all sounds good. I think I have enough to where we're about 80 or 90% there. If there's content that's missing or wrong, I will probably just give you access to the back end of the site so that you can just go make whatever content changes you want. So that'll be my plan. Also, I have, I worked with Studio Hawk last week and got your SEO pages structured to where now they can all be migrated over as is and so they match the updated style of the website. And so now that's about to get all ported over here momentarily.
leran lhanie: Beautiful.
Chris LaFay: So that'll all be done probably by the end of this week. And I know Andrew was working on the add to cart stuff. These add to cart links, by the way, will link over to the actual product pages. Like the actual honest to God product page. Like your standard Shopify. Like image on the right, description. I'm sorry, image on the left, description on the right, add to cart button with the variations. This is not an actual add to cart page. This is a get them to the standard product page so that they can choose all their drop downs and stuff like that.
leran lhanie: Perfect.
Chris LaFay: One thing Andrew did note late last week to me was that he went in and started that setup process. There are going to be pieces that he was missing from the email that you sent about a week and a half or so ago. And so what he's going to do, he's going to get all the complicated setup stuff done and there's going to be some missing. There might be some missing images or descriptions or maybe a couple of prices here and there. He's going to shoot you a loom video and say this is the back end of Shopify. These are the pieces of data that I didn't have. But this is where you go through and edit all of those things so that you can just go in and drop it in directly. None of these things are technological. They're all just simple content me management stuff.
leran lhanie: Got it, got it.
Chris LaFay: That'll save some back and forths about specific things. So that sound good?
leran lhanie: Perfect. Yeah, that's perfect. So let's. Last thing. Let's bring up the last email that I sent you with the summary and bring that up too. And when I'm talking about this, I'm probably talking about more of the mobile version, right?
Chris LaFay: Yeah.
leran lhanie: So first thing, the image. Did you see that example of Mary Ruth that I gave you? So that's how I want it. Like main image and then smaller images at the bottom they could just run through. I X'd out those icons on the right. Because that's not what I want. I just want clean image at the top right away. And then small little images under that people can just click and scroll through. I know you did that in some way on the desktop version. It doesn't communicate that. Like, now that you're showing me, the desktop version looks better than the mobile version. But also. But the thing is, like, even on the desktop version, the extra photos on the bottom are a bit too big. So I want big, clean main photo and then small, like things. They could click at the bottom to change that photo. That main photo sounds good. You see what I'm saying? Okay, so that's. That's that. That point for the bottom area. Do you see what I created in terms of the built for child safety drownings, number one cause. So what I did here was I made it a lot more concise. I understand that. Like, okay, so the image. I'm gonna have to change out that image because that's not our fence. But we can put that as a placeholder for now maybe. But the main thing here is how the words are highlighted and the color differences. Right. And the sizes. Right. Like, why quality manners. Then in big built for child safety, then under it, drowning is the number one cause. And then a little icon, full defense, last line defense. And then again the biggest and the Che us, right? And the cheapest, weakest fence is no, no defense at all highlighted. Right. Then we could even break it up at the bottom. Protect what matters most. Right. With a little like something like this at the bottom rather than what we have now, which is more of just like a image paragraph next to it, stuff like that.
Chris LaFay: So I want to keep things as consistent as possible, because what I don't want to do is we're starting to lean into. So we have a. We have a design aesthetic that we locked in on the home page, which is. Which is this here. And so with the. The columns that we were talking about for the comparisons, we're adding in another blue color and a couple of different font sizes, some larger icons, etc. And then also with this, this is also a bit different with like, background images that are getting faded out with overlay text. So we're getting into a lot of different competing styles here. So what I want to try to figure out is how do we take the style that we already have and in place and apply the pieces of this thing, of this piece here that you like. So, for example, in this section, this header 2 tag is the same header 2 tag that we're using across all these other sections. Again, for consistency. This is the same larger font size that we're using in other places. That has a slightly larger font size as well too. So I want to. I want to have consistency here. So my recommendation, I think would be that what I might do is if you wanted to generate another image that didn't necessarily have like the actual, like, calls to action and stuff like that on it, but like, things like with the shield on, like built for protection and stuff like that, we could then put an image here that has the kind of like the fencing with the shield on it that says built for protection. We can put that over here on this side and then we can then shorten up these paragraphs of text here and place some items that are bold and italicized and things like that to draw attention to them. That's how I think we bridge the gap between not having this section look completely different than all the other sections and maintain consistency, but also bring out the highlighted pieces that are of interest to you.
leran lhanie: I think that should be fine. Again, try to bring as much as we can over. I don't. And the reason why I don't just like that, like, box image and then like, it's. For me, it's like less smooth. It's just more kind of just like abrupt stop, like square image and paragraph. You know what I mean? Like, it's very, like almost robotic and very like I could just copy and paste this into word, you know what I mean? And so I like the design aspect of the one I sent you. If we can try to make it similar again. If you try to match that style, but also ve bring out those. Those things that we kind of spoke about, I think we should be fine.
Chris LaFay: Yep. Alrighty.
leran lhanie: Sorry, Just the last thing at the top. If we can you see the price match guarantee?
Chris LaFay: Oh, this? Yes.
leran lhanie: Yeah. So with the wording behind it. So we could just put price match guarantee doesn't need to be more words, but I do want the price match guarantee rather than just regular font. I want it to be kind of like that. A bold, like, colored font, if possible, with an icon next to it, if we can.
Chris LaFay: Okay. So we're going to increase the font size here and then make it the same orange color as the other calls to action on the site. That.
leran lhanie: Or like a darker blue.
Chris LaFay: Okay.
leran lhanie: Maybe a darker blue to just to kind of give it a little bit more of a transition between that and the call to action itself.
Chris LaFay: Okay, that sounds good.
leran lhanie: Yeah. So that. That should be fine. And then again, in the email, I sent you a picture of kind of what that would look like in a way, but, yeah, that's. That should be it.
Chris LaFay: Okay. All right, I'm gonna go ahead and have our. On my note taker on all of this. I'm gonna dive in, knock out some of these things here. I'm going to talk with Andrew as well about his Shopify update too, and also get the SEO pages migrated over. And so my goal is to have as much of that done by the end of this week. This week.
leran lhanie: Okay.
Chris LaFay: And then we should be pretty much ready to launch the site next week is my plan, so.
leran lhanie: Okay, that. That sounds awesome. If we need a little extra time to make sure everything's perfect, completely fine. Don't feel rushed or. Because I definitely want to make sure that this is on point rather than, you know, rush things in. I will say that eventually, because of budget reasons, maybe we can't fix the whole site and, you know, like, perfectly, but at least these two pages will be perfect. And then once we're done with this project, as more money is coming into me, we can start on kind of redesigning some of the other pages to look, you know, a little bit more design worthy and, you know, kind of just, you know, look at it under a microscope more and stuff like that.
Chris LaFay: That all sounds good. Well, awesome, man. Well, thank you for taking some time today to chat with me. I really do appreciate it. And you'll hear back from me by the end of the week.
leran lhanie: Okay, awesome. Chris, thank you so much, man. I really appreciate it as well.
Chris LaFay: Take care, man. Bye.
leran lhanie: All right, man, Thanks.