Erin Dyer - Current

Chris LaFay: The point of contact is somebody that I do not know and I have not talked with before. This was a referral by Mickey Melon. However, it was a cold reach out on the Green Melon site. So there really isn't that much information inside of my inbox about it. The only background information I have is the contact form that he sent out last week. And I've copied the contents of that below.

Dawn Audano: It.

Chris LaFay: That's early.

Erin Dyer: Good. Good morning.

Chris LaFay: How's your. How did you do? Anything exciting this weekend?

Erin Dyer: Well, yesterday was Mother's Day. It's always a day of great pressure in my household. Yeah.

Chris LaFay: Here's a day to rest and relax and whatever. Except. No.

Erin Dyer: Is it when you're a mom? I don't know. It's. It's a whole. It was good. My husband tried so hard. He's so sweet. He's a good husband. My kids are just like assholes because that's the age they are. They just are. They're both in puberty and they try, but we ended up. There's a girl that my son's in love with and. Yeah, he's 13. I don't. I don't know if it goes both ways. He's so sweet to her. And we went with her family to the Chattahoochee Nature Center.

Chris LaFay: Oh, yeah, I've heard. Yeah, I've heard of it. I haven't been, but I've heard of it, though. Yeah. Yeah.

Erin Dyer: I mean, it's fun. Like, I don't think you would go unless you had kids. It's very. Like.

Chris LaFay: We might be thinking of different things then. Okay, never mind. Then I might not actually know what you're talking about then. If it's a kid thing, then. No, I was.

Erin Dyer: Oh, it's not a kid thing. I mean, it's like they have like. I don't know. I mean, but like, I didn't really go, like, hang out and look at a bunch of birds and stuff with my husband before we had kids. Maybe you do that. Maybe. Maybe that is something that you do.

Chris LaFay: My. My wife loves birds, to put it lightly. So if there are a lot of birds at the Chattahoochee Nature center, then you might have actually found me a good date night idea.

Erin Dyer: So they do some fun stuff too. Like they do like these little magical fairy forest things. And there's like. It goes over to the boardwalk over in Roswell, like around the park. So it's really cool, actually. It's a really. It is a fun thing. And they have lots of. I don't know, just exhibits. So there's eagles there, and there's unbelievable amount of owls. If she's an owl person.

Chris LaFay: Yeah, pretty much. Any. Any. Any animal that is not, like, a reptile or, like, an amphibian. Like. Yes. Like, if it has. If it has wings, she's on board. Yes.

Erin Dyer: You might like this. Have you been to the Chattahoo Teenager Center, Dawn? I feel like you have because you're from Roswell.

Dawn Audano: Yeah, I mean, I. I know I did an event there. I don't know the last time I, like, walked around.

Erin Dyer: Yeah.

Dawn Audano: Like, I used to work for Radio Disney, so we would do stuff there randomly.

Erin Dyer: Oh, fun. Happy Mother's Day, by the way.

Chris LaFay: Thank you.

Dawn Audano: You, too. I hope you get what you wanted.

Erin Dyer: Well, I was just saying, you know, I feel like there's a lot of pressure on Mother's Day. Like, there's more pressure on me to, like, not lose my mind and, like, be appreciative of everything. Funny story. The best gift that I got, my daughter, who's 10, handmade me a topless mermaid statue. Thank you so much, wildest kid.

Dawn Audano: That's what I wanted.

Erin Dyer: I bought these two, and they're funny. They're like, round, topless mermaid statues that we got at, like, T.J. maxx.

Chris LaFay: Oh.

Dawn Audano: Oh, yeah.

Erin Dyer: And they're on my bookshelves, and I think they're hilarious because they're not, like. They're not sexy by any means. They're funny. Yeah, maybe one. She made me want to bring work.

Dawn Audano: I'm. I'm about to derail us for, like, a second if I can find this.

Erin Dyer: Hold on.

Chris LaFay: I'm so curious.

Dawn Audano: Okay, hold on. Here we go. There's this couple, and they go to Home Goods.

Erin Dyer: Okay,.

Dawn Audano: Tell me if you can hear my audio. Can you hear my audio?

Chris LaFay: No, I can't. I don't know how you do it. It just magically works for me.

Dawn Audano: Sometimes I feel like I'm gonna mute and then unmute. No. Okay, You're presenting.

Chris LaFay: I want to help you.

Erin Dyer: Hey, I know Taker is going to be all over the place today. It's gonna be like, whoa.

Chris LaFay: Right? Huh? Exactly. Yes.

Dawn Audano: Video General.

Chris LaFay: No, it's not that.

Dawn Audano: What is happening?

Chris LaFay: I don't see it either frame, though.

Dawn Audano: Show my screen.

Chris LaFay: Call control. No.

Dawn Audano: Oh, oh, oh. I know the issue. I'm in a different browser. We're going to try this. I'm going to stop sharing that, and I'm going to stop. Stop presenting. All right, we're gonna try this one more time. Okay, this is My last attempt. Okay, a snow globe. How about now a photo of my.

Matt: Grandma and all her friends.

Dawn Audano: And it says squad goals, Sir. We love your grandma here. Of course we do.

Chris LaFay: Hi.

Dawn Audano: I found this. And I'm looking for Bambi. But just like a little bit tiny, happier, like she needs to give.

Chris LaFay: How about these? Do you guys have like a really lanky horse statue?

Dawn Audano: Sir, do I have just the thing for you? I'm not sure, but do you guys have a metal rocket? And I want it to look like almost inappropriate. Oh, does this do? I've been in the market for a full size bust of a woman, half black, half white with bubbles on her head. Is that something that you guys. Oh, come on. Like this. Yes. I'm also looking for about 352 green pillows. You've come to the right place. I'm wondering if you have a globe but with no countries on it.

Chris LaFay: Just an inspirational quote.

Dawn Audano: What type of question is that? Of course we do. The adventure begins. Okay, I'm looking for a sign to put like near the dinner table just in case people don't know what to do. Right here next to our directional collection. We do have this. Cuz I. I know that does get confusing sometimes for people. I'm a seamstress just looking to get into the Christmas spirit. Do you have something in mind for me? How's this? I'm a cat lover who's also super into art. Do you have come with me right now? This is perfect. Is there any chance you.

Erin Dyer: Oh my God. I'm gonna have to find out. That's so funny.

Dawn Audano: I do like a full. There's like more of these. Like that's my favorite because of the link. You.

Erin Dyer: This is Matt. He's supposed to join us. Hello.

Chris LaFay: Oh man.

Erin Dyer: Yeah, we're on the call actually.

Chris LaFay: Oh, sorry. Yep, yep, yep. Huh.

Erin Dyer: Okay. He's. He's letting you know. All right, thanks. Sorry. That was a good intro though.

Matt: I. I know I've been out, but I thought I was still on the team.

Chris LaFay: We were on it. We went down a rabbit trail real hard and I didn't hear the little buzzing noise that Google Meet makes and it's. Yeah, so sorry about that. You didn't actually miss anything other than a really funny YouTube video video.

Erin Dyer: Yeah, sorry, it was my fault. We were talking about Mother's Day. It all went off the rails.

Matt: Yeah.

Chris LaFay: Oh man. Do you anything exciting this weekend, Matt?

Matt: No, no, my. Unfortunately my dad's been in the hospital. He had a triple bypass last week, so.

Erin Dyer: Oh.

Matt: Came back from Vacation and then spent most of my week in, in the hospital.

Dawn Audano: So.

Erin Dyer: So.

Matt: But he's.

Erin Dyer: How's he feeling?

Matt: He's feeling better. I mean, feeling better, but.

Erin Dyer: Good.

Chris LaFay: That's good.

Matt: He's an old man that had heart surgery, so he's only going to feel so well. Right. So. Yeah.

Erin Dyer: Well, I will tell you, my dad had a quadruple bypass and he made a great recovery. That. It's a scary day, though. It's a really long, scary day.

Matt: Yeah.

Dawn Audano: Yeah,.

Chris LaFay: Man.

Matt: I'm excited to see what progress we've made here in the last couple of weeks.

Chris LaFay: Yes. So we're. Today we're going to be looking at the collections page. But before I dive into that, dawn, is there anything else that you would like to preface this with?

Dawn Audano: I just had latest rounds of design, so that's what we're gonna go over today so you can kick it off.

Chris LaFay: Fantastic.

Erin Dyer: Bill Madden, real quick because I think that you have missed.

Chris LaFay: Oh, okay.

Erin Dyer: Probably three of our calls in all between you and I and Dawn. But we did have two secondary meetings, I think where we talked about design and a couple of documents that have gone in that have really talked about the customer journey and, you know, our actual target audience and what our people look like that are looking for us. Matt Nelson had an interesting recommendation the other day when I was leaving on Friday actually. And we were talking about the contractors are going to know where they need to look on the website. And we actually came to a pretty interesting conclusion, which is maybe just have that tab up there that says resources, say for contractors. Right. Anybody can go there. But if we direct them there, since we're so focused on the actual customers right now, that might actually be pretty smart.

Chris LaFay: That was exactly what I was thinking. It's kind of like, I think we may have talked about this a little bit last week, but it's kind of the idea of when you run a non profit, yes, you have the donate button in various places, but you're not the. The site's not directly appealing to the donor.

Erin Dyer: Right.

Chris LaFay: By appealing to the work that you're doing and the benefit to society that you're giving, by default, you're attracting the donor. And therefore your calls to action to donate can be relatively small and not big and bold and humongous. That's not a one to one comparison, but it's close if you have your contractors tab at the top. These are technical people, they know what they're looking for.

Erin Dyer: And I also think that's a really good analogy. And I agree. I think when on a non profit site, when it's just donate, donate, donate, donate, you're not selling anything. We're not getting to the root of the cause. So I think that's great.

Chris LaFay: Yeah.

Matt: And what I want to keep in mind here too, guys, is the thought that whatever we're doing here with this Lumber Rock site, you know, looking ahead to the CMI site, I'd like to be able to kind of just take that same type of format, mentality approach and look at it and just have it more, you know, dedicated to sheet pile as opposed to, you know, decking.

Erin Dyer: Sure.

Matt: To just be able to make it easy for us all to transition and understand where everything's at.

Erin Dyer: Right.

Chris LaFay: Honestly, at the end of the day, websites are about what verticals do you support, how does that product impact that particular vertical? And then what is the call to action? And so in this case, you have the handful of different product lines that solve different problems, AKA verticals, but then you have another kind of vertical over here on the side, which is contractors. And so all websites kind of follow that, that same premise, unless it makes sense to break that mold in an effort to be visually unique in some way to. To cause disruption and whatnot. And so. So that's the long answer to saying, yes, you're correct. So. So in general, what we've covered the last couple of weeks is we all but lock down the homepage design. We made it a lot shorter, which actually made a couple of small tweaks to it over the last week as well too, to kind of showcase kind of how some of that color can kind of bleed into different areas. And then we designed one singular collection layout, but did two iterations of them. The content's all the same. Some of the images and whatnot are different. Just to kind of show you the difference of what the different collections are going to feel like. So you can kind of see that dynamic swapping of textures and colors.

Matt: Yeah.

Chris LaFay: So you kind of feel like everything feels the same. I'm sorry, it looks generally the same, but feels slightly different. And that's the point.

Erin Dyer: And let's walk Matt through the homepage too, if we can let him have, you know, the opportunity to, since he didn't see it last time and we did talk about it a little bit.

Chris LaFay: Yep, that all sounds good. So let me go ahead and move my screens around now and I did restart my computer, so we shouldn't have any crash outs today. It's the hope. Let's see here. Share this tab. Here we go. And share Voila Perfect. So, and don't when, when we're looking at this, don't read too hard into the actual text of things. Aaron hasn't gotten her hands on this to kind of really craft what she specifically wants. So I kind of view the text as kind of directional and not like locked and loaded by any sort of placeholders.

Matt: Right. But it's more. What is the imagery, the color combo, the different bolds and the boxes and all that stuff.

Chris LaFay: Bingo. 100. 100%, Exactly.

Matt: And I love this photo here too, because it does put that product first and foremost.

Chris LaFay: And the goal of this photo here is to have, and this is going to be true with a lot of Hero section photos that have text on top of it. You want a lot of dead space so that text has a natural location to live without it being noisy. But also kind of in the same vein as a lot of what we talked about, you want to show real people doing life and in whatever form or fashion that looks like. And so this shows life, but also highlights the product and has the dead space as well, too. So this photo actually for a Hero section is actually very well proportioned. If I can use proportion as a verb. I don't know. But we're going to do it anyway.

Erin Dyer: I like, I mean, the bare feet and you're, you know, in the woods and on the water. It's pretty good.

Matt: We're missing is Sandy.

Chris LaFay: Yeah, I know Claude, who is a human designer. I do have to. I have to preface that all the time now. He did do some of his own AI generated images. I don't know if this is one of them, but I know that he was able to use. He was able to pull from the library that you sent over, Aaron, and kind of use that as a base of operations so that when he was prompting, he was able to have a good solid base to work from.

Erin Dyer: That's awesome.

Chris LaFay: So starting here with something bold, we want, at the end of the day, we want this header section to be a little bit more on the generic side in terms of the specific icp. So I think leaning into the word home could encapsulate that some to where that could be home on the beach or in the suburbs or wherever that might be. And then we kind of have our dual calls to action. This is the piece that we actually made a little bit of a change. So the images here are all the same, but leaning into the generic terminology for the different product lines, these words, again, are not final, but the idea of you have products specifically for mountains versus coastal, etc. Etc. And then showcasing both the imagery, the iconography and then the label of that so that people can jump straight into that if they want.

Erin Dyer: Yeah, we're getting close to that.

Chris LaFay: And then now we get into some of the detail pieces because again, you do want to showcase some. When I say data, I'm not talking about the contractor type data, but you want these mental checkboxes of like, okay, cool, if I have a house that's on the coast, how does it handle moisture, how does it handle sand, how does it handle warping, being in the 110 degree sun all day? You want these mental check boxes. And so this is our way of saying you can kind of choose where your house is. It will give you some bullet points. But we all also know that there is a lot of crossover with some of the quality pieces as well too. So even if you're not on the tab that is your particular home type or location, you're still going to get some of those mental checkboxes checked. Like if we put coastal first and we talked about moisture handling and water handling and sun, everybody's deck for the most part gets sun and water in some way, shape or form. So you're still going to get some of those mental checkboxes and then the ability to go and view the actual product line itself. And here's where we introduce the actual name of it here. Leaning into a little bit of story at the bottom because really all these ct, all these actions are typically speaking going to the individual collection pages. One of the comments that Aaron made last week was we're probably are going to add a couple of probably a thin call to action that uses that orange color to drive people to requesting samples as well too. We might actually do that kind of in between these two sections here just so that if somebody is ready to make a. To give you their information to get samples, let's go ahead and do that. Now, long term, with these little story sections, I would love for these to be legit, real life people on their decks. I know we don't have that right now, so I wanted to design a section that feels more story oriented and more realistic than just here's our cool products. So if we can tie some testimonial quotes in it, even if we don't have the real photos to go with it, that's fine. That also sets us up for more legit testimonials later down the road.

Erin Dyer: So. And I will make a quick comment. I do think that, you know, as we've been talking about what we want to see with this and how we want to lead people. I like this so much more than the other decking pages right now. They're so line specific and so kind of engineering and specification focused that if I'm a consumer and I'm coming here, I feel like I'm really easily identifying what's for me. And I really like that direction.

Chris LaFay: And with this for the homepage, one of the core purposes here, outside of the missing, like, request sample cta, which will probably go here, we wanted to give people easy jump points to get into their collection page. So here, this is just simple. If, you know, like, boom, I want to go coastal. Great, Done. Fantastic. I'm on the beach. Finish here, you get a little bit more of that checklist marking of like, okay, cool. I can start doing my research of like, will this check off the things on my list? And then here is the more emotional poll. So you have generic and simple detail, emotional poll. And all of those are going to get you into some collections page, which will be something like this. So here we have big hero section, image, compelling header section. And then you immediately get greeted with that texture that we were talking about, kind of that swapping textures from place to place. And also coastal is kind of this teal greenish blue as well too. And here is where we kind of pull some of those concepts from the not tracks, the timber tech, where we kind of talk about kind of the different problem areas. So, Aaron, that's kind of where we pull some of those problem texts from. In the documentation that you sent over. We obviously would not label it problem one or problem. Yeah, but this is where we would talk about, you know, dogs and kids, bare feet on stuff and sand and moisture and all that jazz. But in a lot more detail here.

Erin Dyer: What page is this? Genesis?

Chris LaFay: This is the. This one. This is a generic one. There's not really any real content on here yet. Yeah. But the. For coloration and texture, this is the coastal one.

Erin Dyer: Okay.

Chris LaFay: Coastal has this teal with the sand and whatnot.

Erin Dyer: This is. It's coming up very green to me. I don't know if it's just my computer. Like the. This color. Yeah.