Sherman & Phalen :: Homepage Review

David Sherman: Right again.

Chris LaFay: Hey, there's the box this time.

Brooke Desmond: Nice.

Chris LaFay: All right, share. All right, I'm gonna go ahead and scroll through this here.

Brooke Desmond: And just a reminder, all photos are for placement only.

Chris LaFay: Yes, that's right.

William Phalen: Says work with an attorney that picks up the phone. Just getting calls to all the attorneys right now.

Chris LaFay: Yeah, I just.

David Sherman: Silence.

William Phalen: One.

**Rebecca P.:** Helps me.

William Phalen: Nobody. Nobody in the whole freaking office will pick up the goddamn phone. Really? Sorry.

Chris LaFay: All good. So there was the homepage. So let me kind of walk you through some of the decisions that were made here. One is kind of at a very, very simple level. I wanted. I like applying texture to sites, and so what I wanted to do was I applied this very simple kind of paper texture to the background that kind of helped emphasize that tannish off color that we talked a little bit about on our call last time to went ahead and use that dark green color within that palette as kind of that primary background color of different sections. That really works well contrasting that tan color. Another thing I did was we talked a little bit about solid colors versus gradients on our call last time, and I went ahead and leaned very much into the gradient aspect, but I made them very subtle. So, like here you'll see kind of on the hovering of these buttons, that gold color kind of goes from light to dark and kind of moves around a little bit just to add kind of to the texture piece of things. Another thing that we did, we used that dark green color, kind of did like a highlighting segment here for basic text links that live inside the content area as well, too. Applied some very thin drop shadows around to kind of showcase that things are sitting on top of that paper texture. I didn't want to lean too much into the kind of this hand drawn paper aesthetic because I wanted to leave that professionalism there.

William Phalen: But.

Chris LaFay: But I did find a couple of different dividers that were hand drawn kind of with different lines that kind of emphasize that kind of custom feel, but didn't look childish or kiddish or anything like that. So I also wanted to make them very subtle as well. I didn't want to do dark green on tan for these dividers. I kept them kind of in that very light contrast area so that they're subtle, but it still feels right now. One executive decision that I made, because we talked a lot about on our call last time about color in photos, and when I was going through the design process of this, this idea of pulling both kind of this, like, tannish color background tone with the dark green color and applying that tan and dark green filter automatically to photos that were loaded in on the site. This felt really good to me, which I know contradicts a little bit of what we talked about in our initial meeting of kind of showcasing color and things like that. But I feel like from an aesthetic perspective it really levels things up. It makes everything feel very cohesive together. Now that's not a hill that I'm willing to die on. There are some hills that I am. That's not one of them. But I wanted to at least call out the intention behind it because I know that it does contradict a little bit about what we about.

**Rebecca P.:** Talk.

Chris LaFay: Talked about here.

**Rebecca P.:** We talk about it's not a black and white photo. You've applied like a filter. Like a gray green.

Chris LaFay: Exactly. Yes. So it's. It's very. It's specific to this color palette. So that green shifted that kind of. That scaling of that color would also shift a little bit. I initially tried it with. I was initially going to go with the. The darker blue color as being that primary kind of dark color that's used across the board. The images did not look nearly as good with kind of blue being that darker accent color for them. It looked. It looked like we were trying too hard. Whereas the green kind of felt a little bit more natural here. So that's kind of why we went with kind of the dark green structure. We have an entire set of icons. There's. So there's icons that you don't like. We have like a thousand of them preloaded that are all the exact same style. So we have those there which is why we use it Wanted to showcase a little step by step process. Did go ahead and import all of your blogs. So all of Your blogs are 100% on the new site. We also applied the same filter to those here as well too. Very simple. And then down here at the bottom, I work with Brooke to get access to your CRM.

**Rebecca P.:** The.

Chris LaFay: The form is not going to be styled 100% like it just because it's in a completely different system. So you're going to see that the form looks a smidgen different than the rest of the site. But that's a limitation of the system. There's nothing we can do about it. And honestly nobody really cares. People are kind of expecting forms to look a little.

Brooke Desmond: I got it as close as I could to this.

**Rebecca P.:** So.

Brooke Desmond: And if anything does change with the site, we can certainly make those adjustments too through the CRM.

Chris LaFay: Yes. So those are some of the reasonings behind the different things that you see here. The Floor is now yours.

**Rebecca P.:** Yeah, I like. So in this main, this first picture you have, you left a little bit more color for that header.

Chris LaFay: I actually just realized that in this like as I was scrolling through it, I'm like, no, I did not code that one to do the same thing. So. Good eyes. I. This is what happens when you look at something for way too long. It's meant to have the gray undertones and I just miss the.

Brooke Desmond: The one.

David Sherman: I think I almost kind of like the.

Chris LaFay: The difference. I think it depends on the coloration of the specific image. Cuz we are doing a, a literal green overlay on top of it. This image has a lot of grayer tones in general. Like this guy's wearing a black shirt, she's wearing a gray shirt. He's wearing something a little bit that's more on the navy side. So it's a very neutral image in and of itself. If there was more color in that image, I think it would have been a lot more noticeable possible.

David Sherman: I think especially if we're doing pictures of our team, I think it does favors for people to not have it be so, you know, sharp. And also we don't have to worry about the colors that they wear as much.

William Phalen: Yeah.

David Sherman: And I kind of like it.

William Phalen: I do too. I think it was good.

**Rebecca P.:** Now notice in this section. So when you hover. Yeah, I like that. I like how it pops out a little bit when you, you know where you are. Yeah.

Chris LaFay: This is the type of animation that I like to have. It's animation that draws attention and showcases you're actually touching something. I'm not a big fan of animation that has content go from non existent to existent. Like you see a lot of websites, as you scroll, things kind of fade into place. Well, those animations don't load. Then that content stays disappeared. And so I'm more of a fan of very small, subtle animations that happen kind of throughout versus big things. Yeah, big things. Sometimes the big things don't work.

David Sherman: So.

William Phalen: Yeah, I was just on a Chicago title website and they had like just basically movies running in the background. Yeah, it's like this is so distracting. It's like am I watching the movie or am I looking at. Trying to find information? What am I doing?

Brooke Desmond: And it's also, it's also accurate, Chris, that all the things that have this little animation, they're showing clickability too correct.

Chris LaFay: For the most part. It's not a one to one, but it's really like the, like this whole pod is not clickable. The read more down here Is right.

Brooke Desmond: But there's a element within it that is clickable, which is great.

Chris LaFay: So like these button, like all, all the buttons, no matter what will zoom in a little bit and then move up slightly. Their shadows will increase also to kind of showcase that they're a little bit farther above the page. All very simple stuff. But yeah, tying motion to something that can have an action to it is another piece of what I. What I am a very strong believer.

Brooke Desmond: In why I am too. And I actually worked with the designer once that just added animation for the sake of just having something move in a section and I just. I'm very anti that. So yeah, it looks great.

William Phalen: Yes.

David Sherman: Yeah, I'm a big fan. I like it a lot. I think it, you know, obviously this is the goal but feels like us. It's professional but not too stuffy.

**Rebecca P.:** Yeah, yeah. I definitely like the gradient to see it in action. It's almost like give it a little dimension when you look at it.

Chris LaFay: It doesn't need much. It doesn't need much. There's even a slight. All these back for the most part. Most of the background colors do have small gradients behind them. These right here don't. These are all solid. But most of these sections do have that gradient sitting behind them.

William Phalen: How's this going to translate to mobile in general?

Chris LaFay: Everything stacks. That's the short version. So there does need to be a little bit of work done on mobile. But I'll kind of give you a walkthrough so you might see some things that are a little bit issue. Like problematic. Like this text is going over the edge here. Don't think too hard about that at the moment. But everything stacks. So like these, this like two column one that had a big image on the left with content on the right. We just kind of change how that overlay happens here. Anything in general, things that are card based kind of do a side scroll. That's not 100 true. Some cards will stack but some of them go side by side scrolling icon pods. We stack them appropriately. Again, that little two column layout with the solid background color is an issue with the. The margins there. But that'll be fixed across the board. We have our process that does a little side scroll testimonials. I do a little side scroll.

William Phalen: Man, I probably missed a whole lot of side scroll stuff on my phone. I didn't know I could do.

Chris LaFay: And there. And that's part of the reason why we lay them out like this is so that you see the next one over here on the side. So it kind of gives. It's the. We're pulling kind of from the Amazon feel of, like, if you have multiple cards that need. That are visible on both sides, you showcase the edge of the next one so that you can go over. And that also just helps with not having to scroll vertically because cards like this are tall at the end of the day. So that's, in general what that's going to look like there for you.

**Rebecca P.:** So we're not using the blue very much. You think it's just a different feel for it, but yeah.

Chris LaFay: And we can chant like. And if this is. Obviously, if we want to go more of the bluish route rather than the dark green, like, that's perfectly fine. All of that stuff can be swapped with a handful of lines of code. We're using kind of blue and kind of the, like, secondary call to action sections here. That's kind of my. My general idea is gold is the primary cta. It's the main thing that you want people to click on. Green is going to be kind of that background base color to provide contrast in different sections. And then as appropriate, blue is then used as that secondary call to action. Obviously, your blue doesn't work when it's sitting on top of a dark green section, hence the white outline here. But wherever possible, the secondary call to action or the secondary button type would be that blue color. That's how I envision using them.

**Rebecca P.:** Yeah. I really like the texture in the background, too.

Chris LaFay: A little texture goes a long way. It makes. A lot of people are not using texture right now, and so it does make things feel different. I think we're going to actually. We swayed over the last, like, decade into very flat design. See everything on your iPhones and whatnot. Where we used to have a ton of texture, we're gonna see it come back a little bit more and make. It's gonna feel. Make things feel a little bit more real and tangible. So that's kind of the next. Next Sway is kind of back into the early 2000 style of a lot of texture of things. So it's about using them in the right places.

William Phalen: Black and white.

**Rebecca P.:** You're saying that on the pictures.

William Phalen: Yeah.

Chris LaFay: Say that again. I didn't capture them. I'm sorry.

William Phalen: No, I'm just. I'm just trying to think about the black and white pictures. Yeah, I like them. Is it. Well, people. But what people think is too.

Chris LaFay: I don't know.

**Rebecca P.:** It produces a really clean look.

William Phalen: Yeah.

Chris LaFay: Let me actually. Hold on, let me. Let me try something really quick. I don't know if this is going to work or not. Let's see here. Hey, that did. Hey, look at that. Hey, when you code things well, things are easy. One toggle. So this is everything in color.

**Rebecca P.:** I mean, now I kind of like the black and. Or the, the green filter over it.

David Sherman: Yeah.

Chris LaFay: I think it also helps with bl. Like, I know blog post images are not like the main thing that people are coming here for. I get that. But it also does help that if stock photography is ever used anywhere on the site, the filter does help stock photos seem less stock.

William Phalen: That's exactly what I was going to say.

Chris LaFay: Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you. It didn't mean to steal your thunder. But like this right here is a stock photo of stacks of paper, but it looked more in line with your style and less noticeable.

William Phalen: So it looks a lot less stock with the black and white. And I know it's not exactly black and white, but you know what I mean.

Chris LaFay: Yeah, I got you. I know what I mean.

**Rebecca P.:** Yeah. Yeah.

David Sherman: The colored photos puts more emphasis on the picture than the words next to the picture.

**Rebecca P.:** Yes. I find my eyes more drawn to those pictures than the words.

William Phalen: And it takes away from the depth of the background too, for me.

Chris LaFay: I also think that with the industry that you're in, people, the photos are going to help showcase that you're real people at the end of the day. But people know what you do. You do closing. Like it's me. I, I build websites. People know that. Like it's, it's, it's a, it's a service that a lot of people provide to folks.

**Rebecca P.:** Folks.

Chris LaFay: And so I think in your case, if the photos take a. When I say an aesthetic back seat, what I mean to that is you're not drawing attention directly to them. You're letting the words stick out and then the photos then prove that you guys are human and actually give a crap. I think that combination of having that more grayscale like photos, the fact that they're going to be real is already going to be a big old plus. Compared that to like your current site and all the other ones out there, and then it's going to let the word shine a heck of a lot more.

William Phalen: So.

Chris LaFay: I agree.

**Rebecca P.:** Would you change it like when we. On the headshot pages or individual bio pages, would you put it.

Chris LaFay: That's a good question. Pro. I probably would. I would want to see what it looks like. I know exact. I, I hear, I hear the. I. I know exactly what you're asking. I, I don't know the answer. I would want to see it first.

**Rebecca P.:** Yeah.

Brooke Desmond: And you could even play. We could even play around with like. You could even do like a hover effect of it too. Like maybe going one or the other as well. We could see what options are there.

**Rebecca P.:** Right?

William Phalen: Yeah.

David Sherman: I definitely think you lose the color palette theme when you make the pictures color.

Chris LaFay: Yeah.

David Sherman: Like the, the tone of the website goes away when now all these new colors are introduced.

**Rebecca P.:** For a headshot where we can tell people, hey.

David Sherman: Oh yeah, no, on another page for sure. Yeah.

**Rebecca P.:** On a different page and it's on its own page and we make sure people are still dressed in appropriate colors.

William Phalen: It's kind of different. Like what are we selling? I mean, if we were selling Coca Cola, you'd want a really nice picture of a Coke can.

**Rebecca P.:** We are. You are selling.

William Phalen: But we're selling people. I'm not talking about the. I'm not talking about the headshots. I'm talking about the, the.

**Rebecca P.:** Oh yeah, yeah.

William Phalen: I mean we're selling a service and information. Right. So the service needs to be primary. The primary not. Yeah. If we're selling a thing.

**Rebecca P.:** I'm glad you did that. Could turn the color on because really.

William Phalen: Yeah.

David Sherman: It totally helped.

William Phalen: Totally help.

Chris LaFay: It's real. It's. This is a lot more relaxing.

**Rebecca P.:** Yes. Yeah.

Brooke Desmond: And I agree. I think you're. I think you guys hit the nail on the head that you're. You focus more on the content in that regard too. And so I think that's nice.

William Phalen: Cool.

Chris LaFay: Anything that you would want. So the next step here is we're going to go through the rest of your site map that we've already talked about already. And what I'm going to do is our side is going to put basically do a pass of basically moving your content over, editing some of the content live, getting it into kind of these various different buckets of these different blocks that we already have that are kind of styled like this. Then we'll pass it over to Brooke to do a pass on content on everything. And then from there, the next time you'll see the site is where it's. Other than photography is basically done. I would call it. The next time you see the site will probably jump up to about 85 to 90% and we'll go through the site and show you all the different pages. We're probably not going to do a lot of feedback live. But the way that. And I'll. I'll re. Emphasize this on our next meeting, but you'll have this tool over here on the right hand side that says report an issue. So let's say that there was an update to this section of order. You would click on report issue. It's gonna take a screenshot of whatever you're seeing. And then if you want to change the text just right, give us a little bit of a rectangle right there to be like, hey, this is what we're focusing on. And then you'll type in how it works. Should change to not how it works. Four steps would change to five steps to be a better person. I'm making this. I have no idea. And then you just give us the feedback like this. And we would go through and change everything. If there was a specific photo that you wanted loaded in, there's a button here for attachment. So this was a section with an image. You could actually directly upload an attachment here so that we knew exactly what photo you wanted to use. I'll go over this again all with you again later. But I just wanted to plant another seed about it ahead of time. And then I would just recommend that you guys get together and spend about an hour and a half, two hours together just going page by page talking through the changes you want to make. And then once you come to a conclusion, submit tickets. And then we'll run through all those tickets, update everything that you send over and then we'll take the website from 90 to 99. So if.

**Rebecca P.:** I know we talked about maybe collapsing the about and our team.

Chris LaFay: Yeah, we're probably going to do that. Yeah.

**Rebecca P.:** And then we need like the earnest money link up. Well, somewhere prominently we can do that.

Chris LaFay: We can add a. We can add a. We add a secondary button over here. I don't want to get the menu bar too far. So we might just keep. Contact us and drop the phone number. And then if like earnest money could live right here. So it's easy for folks to access.

Brooke Desmond: Or even put it in the footer too. We could even add a footer for that as well. Yeah.

Chris LaFay: Yes. Because then all you have to do is just direct people down to the free. Hey, just scroll all the way to the bottom and then there's an earnest money link right there. And therefore it gets it out of the main navigation bar.

**Rebecca P.:** And then there'll be a mobile menu.

Chris LaFay: Yeah, it'll all collapse into the little three lines.

**Rebecca P.:** Our mobile menu we've been having trouble with.

Chris LaFay: Yeah, it'll collapse into this little guy. And then we'll pop open a. Just a list of links on a white screen. It'd be very simple.

**Rebecca P.:** Yeah, I mean, it's looking cool. Yeah.

Chris LaFay: Great.

Brooke Desmond: My only question for you guys is, I know your guys photo shoot is August 11th, which is great. Did she. Did Adrian happen to talk through anything about turnaround time of edited photos or anything?

**Rebecca P.:** No. Okay.

Brooke Desmond: I'm sure she'll go over that with you at the shoot itself, but I just didn't know if you had that available to consider. But that's. Well, we'll deal with it when it comes.

Chris LaFay: So there's a. Basically what. Given that we. Feedback on this is pretty much what I'm. What I'm hearing is all solid, good to go. Let's keep rolling out pages. There's a good chance that we have the majority of your site done prior to the photo shoot. And so what I'll do is I'll send this link over to you guys. There is a username and password that pop up. I'll send you the user and password so you can view everything as well. This showcasing this page and kind of showcasing cuts and all that jazz would be a good place to start as well with your photographer in terms of figuring out what types of photos you want to take, how to frame them, etc. And so my goal, I will be out of office a little bit towards the end of July, but there's. I'm feeling pretty good about getting the website into your hands before the beginning of August and letting you guys do your QA rounds on all the content, all the structure and whatnot. So then really the only thing that we'll have left after your photo shoot is really just taking a library of photos and doing a photo swap and then being done.

**Rebecca P.:** That's awesome because I'm thinking, you know, I really like the who we serve and then those pictures, but I don't want to put pictures of us for who we serve.

Brooke Desmond: Okay.

**Rebecca P.:** Because we don't serve our. You know, I want it to.

Chris LaFay: We would probably need to lean stock photography, though.

**Rebecca P.:** Yeah.

Chris LaFay: If that's the case.

Brooke Desmond: Which I think is okay. I think that's. I think that's fine. I think there's. There's going to be some easy. There's going to be some simple photos.

**Rebecca P.:** That we could put there.

Chris LaFay: Yeah. As long as things don't really. What we try to stay away from are things like this that are like. Like nobody owns wooden blocks with a checkbox on them. And this also physically would not be able to stand up. And so as long as we avoid things that are overly, overly fake in the elements that they have, like some. Something like this is better than something like this. So we can go and grab a couple of stock photos that kind of talk about lenders, real estate agents, investors, etc, that kind of give that feel. And also with this image overlay that we have going on here, all the images will feel the same. Whereas one of the key problems with stock photography is a lot of times they're taken by different photographers that have different styles. They're in different rooms with different lighting, so they have different feels to them. And so with a. With an image filter like this, that will neutralize a lot of those things and make them still feel like they're in the same family. So that will definitely help.

William Phalen: Do we do like a collage of people? We got people that take photos for social media all the time in our lobby. Do you do a collage of those?

**Rebecca P.:** We don't have those pictures.

William Phalen: Pull them off Instagram because there's got to be 50 of them up there.

Chris LaFay: Do those photos imply that those people are specifically lenders, real estate agents or investors?

William Phalen: A real estate agent now, most. Well, mostly buyers and sellers. Mostly. Actually mostly buyers.

Chris LaFay: So in this section, I think that having an image that directly ties to the topic is going to be. It will be better than something generic here. So along the same vein, we don't want our team members kind of above these different buckets. I think something that is visually definitely a lender, definitely a real estate agent, and more in alignment with investing in general, I think would probably do better than three generic photos. I was thinking more of that.

William Phalen: That big picture at the very front.

Chris LaFay: Oh, are you talking about this one right here? I think too busy it. So for SO a, it needs to be a horizontal photo. I know a lot of people that take photos of themselves and in places do vertical. Those are gonna be a lot harder to crop horizontally. 2. The only thing I can think of that this is more of an aesthetics thing. You're going to have a lot of very well taken photos across your side of your team that would immediately have a ju position of a cell phone photo taken. Not in the same vein. Now is it possible? Absolutely. And I'm gonna. No, no, I was just.

William Phalen: I was just spitballing.

Chris LaFay: So one of the things that I do is. Where'd it go? Where's the. I scroll past it too quickly. So one of the things that I do. We do have professional photos, but I had the four people that are on calls with me most often take photos from their webcams. So that when you see these photos and you see the person for the first time it, you, it looks the same. So there's less of that shock factor now that's intermingled with other professional photos as well too. So can you do that 100%? You can. I think it's more about how do you tell the right story because you might have a cell phone photo here with a professional photo here. And I don't know if that positioning of those makes sense. I could be convinced otherwise. But I like having, if you're gonna go the professional route, I like having the self created photos or the selfie type of photos or things like that kind of in their own dedicated section that calls attention to the realness of them. Does that make sense?

William Phalen: Oh, absolutely. I'm with you.

**Rebecca P.:** So I think what testimonial section?

William Phalen: Yeah, that makes sense that. Exactly. Yeah.

Chris LaFay: So like we have a different. We have another block that doesn't look like this. It looks different where the, the images are a little bit more square. They're actually a little bit more in alignment with this, but the image is a little bit taller. Where we could actually use that block for the testimonials versus this very basic one to where if you had testimonials combining, excuse me, a real photo from somebody that took with their cell phone, that would be a great place for them. More storytelling than anything else. So I think that division is perfect.

**Rebecca P.:** I had worked on a, like an audit of our blog post and some were losing. So I think Brooke has that list. So we can, I don't know, I didn't want to start deleting them because I'm like, I don't know if they need to be redirected or, or what the deal is.

Chris LaFay: If Brooke has the list, she can give me the list of the ones that are deleted. All the URLs stayed the exact same. So, so if we just know which ones to delete, we can just. I can, okay, we can just go through them and delete them. That's all fine. Yep, that's easy.

**Rebecca P.:** But in the meantime, I can add blog posts to our current site.

Chris LaFay: Yes, you can. What would be great? How are you writing them up? Are you writing them in like a Google Doc or are you writing them directly into WordPress?

**Rebecca P.:** I think I just paste them into WordPress.

Chris LaFay: Okay, that's all fine and dandy. We can go through and do another import later down the road. So when we're ready to launch, we can do another import process that is.

William Phalen: Or should we just hold off for a couple months?

Chris LaFay: That's, that's More of a marketing and SEO question. If these are actually driving good organic value for you, then yes, I would absolutely recommend that you keep doing them. If blog posts are not a part of the marketing thing and you're doing it just to do them, then sure, you could hold off, but I don't know the full blown plan that you're doing with Green Melon, so I'm not going to speak into that.

**Rebecca P.:** Yeah, we.

Brooke Desmond: Well, we don't blog on their behalf. Although I will say that I, I don't. I know that we will pull fresh blogs before we go live. I know we'll get the full inventory. So I don't think it hurts to continue blogging if you have things that are in queue. So that's perfectly fine.

Chris LaFay: This is the last one that we pulled here, so anything that's newer than this we'll pull.

**Rebecca P.:** Yeah. Do you have like there be like a guide on choosing pictures for blog post? Like a style guide?

Chris LaFay: No, not really. There isn't. You can just keep doing what you're doing, people. And the reason I say this now, if you were a larger company that had a lot of brand segments and things like that, I would have a lot more ideas and thoughts. At the end of the day, people overthink blog post images.

**Rebecca P.:** Yeah, I definitely do.

Chris LaFay: There. It's the. Unless you did custom artwork and custom stuff on a per post, which I don't recommend that you do, it doesn't matter that much.

**Rebecca P.:** Okay.

Chris LaFay: Don't waste time.

**Rebecca P.:** Okay.

Chris LaFay: I. One thing that I'm a. One thing that I am a large proponent of is if you're looking through a stock photography site. One thing that has helped me in the past is if I spend time and I find a couple of different photographers that I like their style, I will go and just download 20 or 30 photos from those few and then use those for my next X number of blog posts so that every post I'm not going to a stock photography site and being like, all right, where do I start looking for this? Yeah, so I found that building that library like once a quarter has helped from a mental standpoint. It's helped me choose faster with a much more limited view.

**Rebecca P.:** Yeah.

William Phalen: Okay, makes sense.

Chris LaFay: Okay, awesome. Any other questions before we wrap up today and then start bringing over the rest of your content?

David Sherman: Nice.

William Phalen: Good start.

**Rebecca P.:** That's good.

David Sherman: Yeah.

Chris LaFay: Fantastic. Wonderful.

William Phalen: Yeah, that's good.

Chris LaFay: So what we'll do is let's go ahead and get a meeting on the calendar for our next touch point. Brooke. It's going to take me about probably two weeks to move the rest of the content in.

Brooke Desmond: Okay.

Chris LaFay: How long would you like to then go through and review everything at that point?

Brooke Desmond: I think, you know, I probably would need at least a week. Maybe let's just get two.

**Rebecca P.:** Just.

Brooke Desmond: Just in case.

Chris LaFay: Let's say for the beginning of August then.

Brooke Desmond: Yeah, that's what I was going to suggest. First week of August. I can say for me personally, I'm only available the third through the fifth, but I have plenty of availability those days.

Chris LaFay: Awesome. So third and the fifth through the fifth. I'm pretty open as well too. So let's say. Let's say Chia. Does a Tuesday at 1pm Work for you guys? I'm sorry, Monday. I'm sorry, Monday the 3rd at 1pm that's what I meant to say.

William Phalen: Sorry.

Brooke Desmond: That all works for me.

**Rebecca P.:** It looks like it works for us, right?

Chris LaFay: Fantastic. We'll go ahead and lock that in. We'll do. Let's. If we do 45 minutes, that would be great. We're probably not going to do a ton of QA live on that call. We'll let you guys kind of take that behind the scenes and do that yourselves. But we will kind of walk through each of the various different pages and talk through a little bit, kind of in a very similar vein to what I just did today. Give you another overview of the marker tool that's on the little tab on the far right hand side to make sure you guys know how to use that and then unleash you guys. My recommendation would be to go ahead internally to put a two hour block on yalls schedule that y' all can get together and work on this either the fourth or the fifth or the sixth, just so that it's already blocked off on your calendar so you don't have to think about it. Y' all could then give us your QA that day, submit it all in, and then that following week while you're doing photos, we can update all the content. So does that sound good?

**Rebecca P.:** Yep.

William Phalen: Somebody beat me to the punch on the website.

**Rebecca P.:** I did. Yeah. Now we got two entries on our calendar.

William Phalen: You didn't color code it.

**Rebecca P.:** I did not color code it. Sorry.

Brooke Desmond: Chris, would you like me to send that calendar invite for us?

Chris LaFay: Yeah, sure. I'll let you. Yeah, you've owned the other ones. I'll let you do it.

Brooke Desmond: Okay, thanks. I'll. I'll just block it for an hour. I know you said 45 minutes, but just in case we go over, I'll just do hour, so.

David Sherman: Great.

Brooke Desmond: I'm gonna both send you guys that now.

Chris LaFay: Lovely. Well, I think we're about wrapped up here. Any last questions before we wrap up for the day?

William Phalen: We're good, man. I like it. Looks great.

David Sherman: Yeah, appreciate.

Chris LaFay: Lovely. Well, have a fantastic day. I know we have another. I know it's gonna be about a month before we talk again, but if we have any questions in the meantime, we will assuredly reach out and we'll chat with you guys again on August 3rd.

**Rebecca P.:** All right, sounds great. Thank you.

Chris LaFay: Have a good rest of the day, guys.

Brooke Desmond: Talk to you later.

**Rebecca P.:** Bye.

Brooke Desmond: Sweet.

Chris LaFay: Do you have any questions about anything?

Brooke Desmond: No, I'm good. I just want to make sure. Just to confirm the way that I was submitting feedback for the site was clear. Good.

**Rebecca P.:** Okay.

Chris LaFay: Yes. 100. Yeah. Which is great. I. I go through it very specifically because if it's done well, the robots can take care of a lot of it. And so, because a lot of these changes aren't design changes. It's just content swapping. And, like, nobody wants to actually go through and be like, all right, copy, paste, save, check it, like.

Brooke Desmond: Yeah, I understand. Well, as you know, I'm a. I'm a PM and I love a process, so I just want to make sure when someone gives me a process, I'm following it as clearly as they said it. So I just want to make it as easy for you as possible.

Chris LaFay: It was. It was absolutely perfect. Okay, cool. That all sounds great. They seem. They seem to love it. We've sent them over the. I've already sent them over my photo library, so they have all that to look for. I sent that over to them beforehand. So if they do their QA review that same week while you're gone, that following week, the middle of August, I can run through all of it because it's probably just going to be content changes.

**Rebecca P.:** Right.

Chris LaFay: The week after their photo shoot, I'm out of town that week of August, so then that last week of August, August 24, or even the 31st. Hopefully they'll have their photos by then.

Brooke Desmond: I imagine they will because they're using the same photographer that we used. And I think they gave us like a. I think we got all of our photos within five business days. So I think that will be perfectly fine.

William Phalen: Lovely.

Brooke Desmond: Okay. Yeah.

Chris LaFay: So then we should be able to launch them by the beginning of September.

Brooke Desmond: That's what I was thinking, too, which.

Chris LaFay: Is great, because we started this, what, like, about three weeks ago? So middle of May, something like that.

**Rebecca P.:** Yeah.

Chris LaFay: So May, June, July. So about two and a half months.

Brooke Desmond: Which it's a great turnaround.

Chris LaFay: That's a great. It's fantastic.

Brooke Desmond: Yeah, I'm not mad at that.

Chris LaFay: Lovely, lovely, lovely. Okay, cool. Any other questions before we wrap up today?

**Rebecca P.:** No, I think you're good.

Brooke Desmond: I mean, everything looks great. I, I knew they would be really pleased with it, so just keep on keeping on.

Chris LaFay: All these websites, Bill, that I've done so far this year have been a cakewalk. And I don't know what world I'm living in right now, but I'm extraordinarily grateful that they have been.

Brooke Desmond: Yeah, that's fantastic.

Chris LaFay: So, yes, I know.

Brooke Desmond: And it's, it's nice to see it on this end of it too because as you know, like our websites took some somewhere between like six to eight months to do and they notoriously would always go longer because clients be clients. So it's like, it's just really like refreshing to actually see it happen at the speed that it's. That everyone could be happy with.

**Rebecca P.:** Right.

Chris LaFay: And that like the entire pro, like I have a client right now that we're working with where they have currently like a 30 or 40 page website and it has a good amount of. It was built in. Yeah, it was built in a page builder. Every block looks different. It doesn't look bad, but everything, every page looks different. So like porting that content over into like a consistent 15 to 20 blocks, it's gonna be a pain in the butt. And so we basically told them, like, we have a content importer. We're gonna basically bring over all your content not as is, but migrated into new blocks that are similar to what you currently have.

David Sherman: Right.

Chris LaFay: So that everything is consistent. But we're only really going to focus in on about five or six pages. And we're going to work through those with you From a content standpoint and a layout standpoint, we're going to derive everything we design from these five pages. And so as she got into things, she was like, I want to rewrite everything. And I'm like, oh no.

**Rebecca P.:** Oh dear.

David Sherman: Okay.

**Rebecca P.:** Oh dear.

Chris LaFay: Like we just went from. We just like doubled the amount of lab.

Brooke Desmond: Yeah, no kidding.

Chris LaFay: I wrote a script because she was very AI forward. So I took all of our building blocks that we have and I had AI write its own documentation of those building blocks. Like this is a multi column layout with an image, a header, paragraph and a button. Like, and then reasons to use said block.

**Rebecca P.:** Yeah.

Chris LaFay: And I did some test runs with like a fresh version of AI. It was like, want to write some content for this popular Site. Here's a list of the blocks you're allowed to use. Walk me through creating content for X, Y and Z pages. And it output my blocks in text form, but my blocks with the right structures in place. And I was like. And I told my clients, like, go test this out.

**Rebecca P.:** Yeah.

Chris LaFay: And she tested it out. She some like. And she sent like three pages over in this output that it generated. She was like, I don't know what this is, but here, take it.

Brooke Desmond: It's. Yeah, this feels right. Go.

William Phalen: Yeah.

Chris LaFay: And I chucked it in and was like, claude code, do your thing.

Brooke Desmond: Yeah, yeah.

Chris LaFay: And it imported everything with all the blocks. It had placeholder images everywhere. It had the right paddings, the right structures. And I went to my client, I was like, you. I didn't say you got lucky, but I was like, we're testing this out and this looks to work. Does this look good to you? And she was like, that is spot on. What I thought it was going to look like. I was like, well, then God bless. You can just go ahead and like, write all your. Use the same format, right? You can write as many pages as you want. I don't care.

Brooke Desmond: I mean. And that. Listen, I honestly am, like, more impressed that you are working with somebody like, so AI forward for that, because I feel like a lot of clients are so, like, there's. They just like, have this, like, thought in their mind, like, well, we're paying a human to do or paying you to do it. So I don't expect. Expect AI to be a part of this. But, like, at this point, like, there's no ignoring what we're. What the environment looks like. So, yeah, I mean, that's really great that you had somebody that was like, yeah, cool, let's go this way.

Chris LaFay: Yeah. I was like, if you can work with me, I will work with you. This sounds wonderful, because I don't really page count. Doesn't matter if it's autumn, if that import process is automated. And you are aware that when you do the QA process, there's going to be things that are just. That are just a little weird. Like, so as long as you're okay with that, I don't care. And I told them today, actually, that was my first call today. The. The financial guys, the financial suits and ties were on the call. And I was like, just FYI, your marketing person and me working together on this, y' all just saved yourself about $25,000. Like, this is a $25,000 project that we would have had a come to Jesus meeting about when we shifted these things.

William Phalen: Things.

Chris LaFay: But because we're working together on this, you guys saved to come to Jesus meeting.

Brooke Desmond: Yeah.

Chris LaFay: And are now getting more. And it's wonderful. Not like in a like I told you so way, but just like this is. This is what it would have been like a year and a half ago if we.

Brooke Desmond: Right, right, exactly.

Chris LaFay: It's also nice to have a thinner team to where it's like we can kind of be nimble and do things and not have to worry about this like monstrous overhead that we have have to cover. So.

Brooke Desmond: Yeah.

Chris LaFay: Anyway, I digress.

Brooke Desmond: It's all good. No, overall I knew they would love it. This has been. No this really. I've enjoyed sitting through another side of the process with this, so this has been enjoyable for me too. So. But yeah, we'll just keep continue this and yeah, just send over everything when you have it ready. And I like I said, I don't imagine it'll take more than a week, but yeah, that's fine. Just probably the nature of summer and.

Chris LaFay: Stuff, it's probably not going to take me more than a week as well too. But I also know that I have promised a lot of things in a week and yes, sometimes. Sometimes takes a little longer. So.

Brooke Desmond: Yeah, understood.

**Rebecca P.:** Yep.

Brooke Desmond: Yes, but cool. And also I just sent you the inventory list of the blogs as well. So you have that.

Chris LaFay: Okay.

Brooke Desmond: Just to have it in mind. I really haven't looked that much into it, but there's. She doesn't. There's not a ton of blogs on my website anyway, so it's not going to take long. Regardless of what. How they want to move forward.

Chris LaFay: Nope. Awesome. Okay, cool. That all sounds good. Awesome. If I have any other questions, I will holler at you and let you know. I will get my robots on building out new pages for the site and once I get them in a happy spot, I will send the entire site over to you and say click, click around to your heart's content. Have fun. God bless. Good luck.

**Rebecca P.:** Okay.

Brooke Desmond: Love it. Sounds good. Well, if I don't talk to you before you have a great rest of your week and yeah, we'll be.

Chris LaFay: Sounds like a plan. Have a good one.

Brooke Desmond: You too. Bye Chris.