Tower Website Design Discussion
Tower Leadership: It's.
Chris LaFay: Good morning.
Tower Leadership: Hey, Chris, how you doing?
Chris LaFay: I am doing well, primarily because when we wrap up here today, I'm actually hopping on a plane to go to Washington D.C. for a couple of days to hang out with a buddy of mine, so.
Tower Leadership: Nice.
Chris LaFay: It's gonna be an exciting day today. I'm looking forward to it.
Tower Leadership: That's awesome.
Chris LaFay: What about you? What have you been up to that's different and out of the ordinary? The last, you know, few weeks or.
Tower Leadership: So we've been, we're just busy as busy can be, but it's all good stuff. So we were just at Dikama, a big event, and now we're hosting our own event, so. So we're trying to change the industry and it's the first time that we've externally done one of these big events. So it is, it's go time and we're, we're trying to navigate some, some unknowns, but you know, it's all exciting stuff.
Chris LaFay: So hosting events is a whole different ball game. What, what. Give me the like 30 second overview because I'm curious, what are you thinking in terms of like, size and structure of what you're.
Tower Leadership: Yeah. Yep. So it's a three day in person event. We're roughly a thousand. The goal is 1500. We have Tim Tebow, Jesse Itzler, Dominique Dawes, and then a lot of dental leaders speaking. So. Well, we'll be doing like a gala. We'll be doing like award ceremonies. We're trying to, like I said, just make conferences different. A little bit less lame, if you will. But yeah, so usually we do. Every year we host like one for all of our clients, but this will be the first year that we're promoting it externally and we'll use it as like a lead generating source. Oh yeah.
Chris LaFay: When I was at a. I have an agency partner of mine that does marketing for dental practices and he was at the. And I forgot the name of it, but it was a few weeks ago, about a month ago actually, in central Florida around Orlando. There was like 4, 000 people there. And I can, I can tell you just everybody that walked by the booth looked so bored out of their bloody mind. And I'm like, it's a huge event. Like, obviously they get like 4, 000 people to come and like 200 vendors to show up. It's popular. But these people just did not seem thrilled to be spending like three and a half days at this place. So I'm not as familiar with the industry. That was a new. It was a new Experience, but it was big. It was interesting, but they didn't seem excited. So, yeah, here we are.
Tower Leadership: Yep. Yep. We're trying to combat that a little bit.
Chris LaFay: Yes. That is awesome. So today. Well, yesterday, Laura and I had a fantastic conversation about, excuse me. Website organization, structure, kind of the. The meat and potatoes of kind of the what the website needs to be going forward. And I was. I was talking through some, like, design questions and things like that that I had, and Laura was like, y' all should be. And so I am more than happy to go over anything that would be of interest or helpful, but I also don't want to be duplicative, because I realize you guys talk to each other. And so my goal for today was really to kind of open up the floor to kind of hear a little bit about what your design and aesthetic thoughts are on the site. I have some of my own thoughts that I graciously give that we can kind of talk back and forth about a little bit. And that was. My agenda for today, was very simple. I can obviously give you a little bit of background about who I am, if that is helpful as well, too. But that was where I am starting with. How does that sound to you?
Tower Leadership: That sounds great.
Laura McDade: Yeah. And I just want to jump in and just add that maybe, Chris, you could kind of start with, like, how you would approach the project from, like, a building block standpoint, like, kind of some of the things that we went about yesterday, like a design system. I think that would be helpful just to give Collins kind of some perspective on where, like, how you would approach it.
Chris LaFay: Yeah, no, totally. So I'll kind of start back at the very beginning. I've been in the web industry since I've been in elementary school. This is literally all I know. I grew an agency, had a lot of employees, realized that wasn't as fun as I anticipate anticipated it to be, and then kind of thin things down to about the four or five people that I really enjoy doing business with and so kind of treat ourselves as a small little boutique firm at this point. Y' all are gonna get to work with me. At the end of the day, I have a project manager that helps keep things on track. But this is. This is what I do all day long, every day, and I love it. That's the shortest I've ever told my entire backstory, so you're welcome. Anyway, in terms of thought processes on how websites are built, I am very much a proponent of systematizing design and not over designing things that don't need over designing. So what does that mean? The entire way that we build websites is a very much like LEGO bricks. And you can see the LEGO bricks that I gain inspiration from right there is that rather than thinking about every page as its own unique design, the goal is to give you guys a library of 20 to 25 building blocks at the end of the day that all just line up with your brand so that you guys can go through and build whatever pages for whatever campaigns, whatever events that you guys need. And you don't have to think about design, you just think about what are the words that I want to put on display. And then which of these LEGO bricks do I want to then put together to make that happen. And so because what I, what I see most of the time when I talk to especially small businesses that have websites that are 40, 50, 60 plus pages, is they have a handful of pages that look okay. And then over time you can kind of see the ones that kind of got edited kind of toward the end of the life of it, because they look very different from the original ones. And so my goal is, let's give you building blocks so that you guys can be self sufficient. On top of that, one of the things that I've been working through over the last six or eight months or so is building this initial library of building blocks so that we don't have to go through the exact same building process that we've done. Historically, websites within my company minimums were like 30 to $40,000. Built everything custom, everything started from scratch. It's fantastic. Realize we were wasting a whole heck of a lot of time in January and basically created within WordPress some of these core structures so we don't have to rebuild the wheel every freaking time we do this thing. And so the way that I like to think about design in general is not that every element needs to look completely unique, but you need to have these one or two parts and pieces that kind of tie these elements together that are uniquely yours. And you do that through, through texture, through very subtle animations, through various different image effects and things like that that help bring all of those pieces together and that it doesn't feel like everything looks the same from a. Like this light looks like it was built with AI kind of motif. And so that's kind of my design methodology is give you guys a lot of tools, make some things that look really cool, that kind of lay in over top of it. It feels great. You put a lot of good content in there. And now you have a website that you Guys can use and are trained on how to use with recordings, all that kind of fun stuff. So that's my methodology and my mission.
Tower Leadership: Awesome.
Chris LaFay: Any thoughts?
Tower Leadership: No. So I'm aligned in the most succinct way. So just to give you slight background, I've been I came up through design for the last 10 years. Last four years I was a UX UI designer. So I think the exact same way you do what happened and Laura may have told you this with our last or who's developed our last site. I initially there's a lot of red flags in the way that they one were setting work over not building in Figma but Illustrator weren't thinking in design system, weren't building components, weren't talking about functionality. They had a graphic designer who they labeled a UX designer and then we're now we're stuck in a path where one I wanted everything to look either like it was built from a Google Components or MUA Components. They added extra flair as you mentioned because there's a graphic designer that's doing it. They've gone against heuristics. So I'm completely aligned with your methodology is good to hear. Yeah. I mean that's. Yeah. Simply put.
Chris LaFay: Love it. That sounds fantastic. With the process that we're going to go through with you guys is one of the changes that we've made when kind of being able to go from 40 to 50 thousand dollar websites down downstream little bit is I as a person and both a designer and a developer, I get to work. I like I use. I've used both half of my brain, both halves of my brain but apparently the brain part that talks about sentences doesn't work today. That's fine. But the great thing about what we're going to be able to do is we're going to be able to dive straight when we do the homepage design and actually showed more a little bit about this yesterday is we're gonna be able to dive straight into code because we're able to take a lot of these design and aesthetic ideas and actually create them in code first which is a wild thing to think about. This has changed in the last six to eight months and so that allows us to really consolidate our timeline down from what used to be a three to four month process to about a two month process. So after we do kind of our initial discovery meeting if we, if we work together when you see that homepage for the first time it's going to be in a fricking browser now the links aren't going to all work, they're not going to have all these pages linked out to things. You're going to be able to actually see and touch it at the very beginning, which expedites the process. It's a lot of fun. And now you don't actually have. You take that design system thinking of what you're thinking about terms of like Figma with components and reusable stuff. But rather than having to actually transfer that from design, which you know as designers, you can, you can push things a couple of pixels here and there to make it look a little bit nicer. You're straight in code, which is fantastic. There's not that transition process. And so within a week or two of us doing our initial discovery deep dive, you'll have a homepage dev doubt that you can touch and feel mess with on your phone, et cetera, et cetera. So it's a, it's an exciting time to be in this industry. Needless to say, with things changing.
Tower Leadership: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've been out of the dev game. I've never was in dev. We had developers, but it seems like. Yeah, with all the cool things, I'm sure it's changed. Okay, so just putting my expectations and where we're at and just putting the cards on the table here. So we're already about $13,000 invested into our website. There's. We initially started from when I came in a poor performing website, messaging site, map, information, architecture, just everything. So what we did is we designed, we had, they invested I think like 200. We have a home page that is about 80 of the way there.
Chris LaFay: So really quick, Laura, is that the either the ones that you sent me earlier?
Laura McDade: No, the home page is, is the one that's live.
Chris LaFay: Oh, the one that's live. Got it.
Laura McDade: Yeah.
Tower Leadership: Okay.
Chris LaFay: Okay, Understood.
Tower Leadership: Cool.
Laura McDade: Thank you.
Chris LaFay: Sorry, I've seen a couple of different things. I want to make sure that I had a good mental model of what you're talking about. Go ahead.
Laura McDade: Sorry.
Tower Leadership: Yeah, so this is. And I'll just kind of tell you where we're at too. So because what I'm going to ask and where we're at, there's. There's a few things going on. So again, this, this home page that we've built, it is like there is definitely tweaks that need to happen. There's things I like, things I don't like. There is things that they did well, did not do well. But there's been a lot of design, there's been a lot of effort put into this Page as well as some of the other pages and for example, program pages, which you will notice right away looks pretty different from what Laura sent over that was designed in clock.
Chris LaFay: Oh yeah.
Tower Leadership: So yeah, yeah, we, we need to solve. We have a budget. Where I'm at with my leadership team is we were basically, we need to finish the site and. And then here's some like really shit pages just so you can see, like they're just. But so we need to get our site finished. That's my number one priority. So we have what I would consider about four pages, maybe five pages that are designed decently well like these pages, could they be elevated 100%? Could homepage be elevated 100%? When we look at a complete overhaul design of the homepage and stuff, is that something that we need to go back to square one? No. Is there a design system we can put in place to clean it up and make it consistent? 100%. We need to build out every other page that we have, which is about 25 pages. It's like, here's one that doesn't look good. So where my brain is at and it may not be totally aligned with you guys, but where we need to just put actual like the components that we build those building blocks, it goes, okay, how is that gonna fit here? So then we can just implement them in the homepage or what do we like from the homepage that we can use building blocks in these future pages. And then when we look at the pages that, so these like this is terrible. Then the pages that we send over that we are finalizing copy and then we are using Claude just for a very fast way for us to organize information as well as to get a general look and feel. That again looks pretty disconnected from here. But those quad designs are really just for us to one show leadership what we're talking about. They would like to put ten pounds of information in a five pound bag. But even through Claude, there's ways the content needs to be organized that it's not going to organize it because it's not a good UX designer. So our goal would to be to work with you guys to build out that design system. So then from, you know, typography, colors, hover states, interaction design, and then be able to provide you guys with the updated site map, which has pretty different navigation here and then the pages that like Laura sent over some of them for then you guys to critically look at and say, okay, we get the general idea, this is the finalized copy. What is the best way that we can Plug it into our components. What is that design system going to look at those pages and then we will have a consistent site across. Then we'll have like a finalized, consistent site where everything that we have at least looks, looks and functions correctly. Pretty cohesive. Yeah. Does that mean there could be another phase to where things have to get better? 100%. Do we need to prioritize our ability in the back end to update certain pages, information we'll be building and go high level? Any landing pages most likely won't connect those to the main site. So it's not a priority.
Chris LaFay: I'm curious.
Tower Leadership: Okay, so it's like not a priority or you're curious why?
Chris LaFay: Yeah, yeah.
Tower Leadership: Oh, just to simplify the scope of work to then make sure we can achieve a finalized site within our budget. If there's a phase, if there's a second phase or like, again, this is kind of where the conversation. I just don't know what I don't know from your guys'.
Chris LaFay: Oh, totally.
Tower Leadership: We can talk about it. But I know you guys are building like $30,000 sites, $40,000 sites. I have about 12,000, $13,000 that I can reinvest back into the site to get it done. And so then it's not ideal. Right, we know that. So it's. How do we work within our budget to make sure things get done? So it's a priority prior prioritization of things. So that again, that's just all my cards on the table. Yeah, but that's just where we're at.
Chris LaFay: So Laura and I were talking about kind of where. Where budgets were and things like that a little bit. Our minimum is 15. And the way that we can do that, and we actually, actually just did this with somebody. Their site's going to go live in the next few weeks is what we'll do is we. We design out. What is that design system. First and foremost, we have building blocks that we already have built out so that we're not recreating the wheel anymore, which is fantastic. Don't need us to design a testimonials pod that looks similar to other testimonials pods. That's not going to be the winner right there. And so what I also have at my disposal is basically Claude scripts that understand what all these building blocks are and how to utilize them. So what I can pass over to Laura as she's writing all this stuff is basically this library of information that says, hey, these are all the building blocks that you have at your disposal. This is how they're Used Claude understands all these things as Lord's writing. She can then write with those things in mind with Claude helping her, and then actually output something that the website will understand and that'll drastically decrease that amount of content. Importing time, which is which honestly is one of the longest pieces. What used to be one of the longest pieces. When we did sites for 40 or $50,000, we had somebody spend weeks of time either going on existing websites, copying things down word unorganized Word documents and trying to figure out how to make it all work. This has shaped so much time off of things, which is fantastic. And then going back to the Go High Level comment, one of the things that we also do is we provide educational. We provide training and education videos on how to actually edit all the different blocks and how to utilize each of them. So y' all will be able to build landing pages and things like that on the website as soon as it goes live and then embed your, you know, your Go High level contact forms and scheduling forms and whatever that CTA is going to be. We'll be able to toss those in very easily. So chances are you'll be able to build out landing pages that are within your system. So they can all hit Google Analytics, the whole nine yards, and still submit through Go High Level. So one of the things that I talked with Laura about yesterday was I know that she's written a handful of pages already kind of using Claude kind of to help structure things. What I would love to see, and it's on her list of things to send me at some point soon, is that she can send me some of those samples. I can take those samples and run them through some of my content importing processes that I have at my disposal and see how much an alignment that goes in. And if that's the case and those all work out swimmingly, then building out this block library of 20 to 25 building blocks with a good aesthetic attached to it, hitting that, I can hit 15,000. With the quantity of content that's going to be in there. We can get all of that done in about probably eight weeks or so.
Tower Leadership: Okay. I believe Laura sent over a few page. Is that correct? Laura?
Laura McDade: I need to check back. I've sent. I sent over the Excel this morning just at the site map the Miro and then. But I need to check back. I sent.
Chris LaFay: There was one of the SEO pages like the About Us page or about something along those lines. That was in the first email that you sent. So if you have other ones that'd be Great.
Laura McDade: Yeah, I can send you other ones.
Chris LaFay: Okay, delightful. So I can run those through a test and see how they all. How they all work and what the content confidence and all that kind of stuff is. And so that's where. Yeah, that. That's where we would sit and we would basically, from a process standpoint, I do. I want to have a different discussion about kind of like colors and fonts, because I see in one document there's only a couple fonts and a different one, there's about five. There's some color pieces as well, too, that I want to talk about. You have that yellowish orange color at your disposal, but it's listed as only being used in a particular segment. I would love to see if we can bring out a call to Action Color, because dark colors in blue, they get overused a lot and they kind of blend together. And I want to pull out a legitimate call to Action Color so that when you see it, you know, this is the thing to book a call, get in touch, etc. And darks and blues just tend to kind of mesh together visually. And so those are a couple of the smaller conversations. And I realize they're small, they feel small, but they will make a drastic impact on the aesthetic overall.
Tower Leadership: Yep. And heard. So that's going to be my second question or kind of where I'm hearing too is I understand like the Claude and the timeline and the price, like those things. Obviously we, as a brand, part of this is we need to make sure it is representative of our brand. Does our website do that right now towards our core target audience? Almost, but it's not there. So it's just making sure that the claw design and then everything that we're designing is to the brand standard. And then to your point, 100%. I know a lot of the times we'll probably have to tweak certain colors from a design standpoint, like a brand book, into a design system to make sure we're compliant. So that would be like some of the things we have to make sure happens is, what is it? WGAC and ADA compliant. So then even pulling out a from our brand colors, because again, I know like, yellow is more of a. Like a caution color used and I know, like, blues are more gray for colorblind. 1 In 12 men are colorblind with the color blue. I think that's the statistic.
Chris LaFay: There's. There's a shocking number we play. We play DND with some of our friends, and one of our friends is colorblind. And the way that you Denote characters is by color. And we're like, it's the red guy. And he's like, I don't know this. Yeah, I feel. I feel so bad because it's like the way that you. We talk about this is all based on color. And I'm like, I. I'm sorry, man. I'm sorry.
Tower Leadership: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So like, even tweaking certain colors. Yeah, we're. We're here for that conversation. Usability and functionality is, like, my priorities, but we also need to just make sure, like, yeah, the aesthetics work. They work within the brand, so I think we're all aligned there. It will just be. Yeah. Making sure that every component we build is just reflective of what our brand should be and where we're going to in our core target audience rather than where it is currently.
Chris LaFay: Yeah, I wholeheartedly agree, and I have some. I have some design ideas that I can share when we have a little bit more time. But if we decide. If y' all decide to move forward, I actually already have some design concepts built out, just because that's just what I do. I very much enjoy it. And so when we meet up for the first time, I'll actually be able to show you a couple of very simple ideas just to get the kind of the wheels turning on something tangible rather than starting completely from scratch.
Laura McDade: Okay.
Chris LaFay: So, yeah, we'll be able to. We'll be able to get through that relatively quickly as well as really defining, you know, what are the. What are the two or three core design pieces that are going to make the site and its structure look and feel unique across the board? Because if we. If we really define those couple of things, the site's going to look fantastic. And I know that sounds really simple. Those two or three things are very important, and they take some time to figure out, but once they're figured out, everything else becomes a heck of a lot easier. And so that's really. That's the key piece.
Tower Leadership: Is that okay, cool. Yeah. So I think for. Should we go to just to, like, next steps, action items, type, deal.
Chris LaFay: Yeah.
Tower Leadership: So I think this next steps for us would just be to understand that. I know you said, like, eight weeks, 15,000. Taking a look at the contracts and just everything that entails, a little bit more of the. The breakdown of timelines, where it would go, everything that's included. I would also like to just see, like, some examples of previous work. I'm sure you've done incredible work, so just like, yeah, take a look at that, and then we can reach back out and schedule next steps. But yeah, I would love to just see, just see everything that we've talked about more in writing.
Chris LaFay: Yeah, I can definitely send that over. My contracts are extraordinarily simple. They read more like a scope of work than a full blown legal document. And so I can, I can scope that out. I probably will not be able to get to that before I go and to the Atlanta airport today. I will try, but I can't promise it. So I will. My goal will be to get that to you by the end of the weekend or Monday, just because Thursday and Friday I'm just, I'm out of pocket from early until super late. So I will get that over to you as quickly as possible. So you kind of have a general idea in the interim in terms of design ideas and stuff like that. If you go to the website, there's a whole section about sites that we designed. So there's screenshots of ones of companies that are not online anymore or they got that they got acquired. And then there's a handful of links of a couple of different styles of sites right in that same section there's also a section and all of these are linked at the very top of the site where there's training videos. So if you want an idea of what the back end experience looks like editing, you can watch one of those. Don't watch all of it. They're like 10 or 15 minutes long. You will be bored, but you at least kind of get an idea of what that feels like on the back end and so that at least kind of get your dip your toes wet in a couple of different areas across the board. And then I'll send you over kind of what the bullet, kind of like the contractual scope of work will be. So you can kind of see everything as it, as it flows down from a bulleted list. Okay, cool.
Tower Leadership: Yeah. Laura, is there anything you want to add?
Laura McDade: No, that sounds great. I'm glad you all were able to connect. So thank you.
Chris LaFay: Yes, likewise. Well, I will get to work on those things. I will send over that scope. I will probably, honestly, I will send it over as a contract just because the bullet pointed scope of work is basically the contract. So I'll just send that over as is. Y' all can review it, let me know what questions you have about it. And in terms of starting date, just to give you a general ballpark idea, I have availability to do some type of a kickoff next week. So it'll be a little bit later in the week, but that's I'm pretty flexible, so.
Tower Leadership: Okay, cool. Well, that sounds good. Yeah. Thank you, Laura, for putting this together. It was great to meet you, Chris. And then we'll just keep our eyes peeled for the contracts.
Chris LaFay: Yes. Thank you for your flexibility on me getting this over to you. I'm glad that we were able to meet before I went out of town for a couple of days. So thank you for squeezing it in today. And I'll get that over to you as soon as I can.
Tower Leadership: Cool. Sounds good.
Chris LaFay: Awesome.
Laura McDade: Thank you. Have fun and.
Chris LaFay: Will do. Bye.
Tower Leadership: All right, bye.