5 Website Upgrades That Will Drive Conversions with Whitney Bateson

Jennie Wright [00:00:05]:
Hey everybody. Welcome back to the Acquire podcast. I’m your host, Jenny Wright, and this podcast is all about list building, lead generation, marketing, and sales. And one of the things that is huge in that actually two things is not only mapping out your sales, your offers, what it is that you’re gonna put in front of your audience so that it all makes sense and all works together, but also making sure that you have a place, a repository to sell and communicate all that, I e, your website. Did I get away with not having website for years? Yes, I did. Was it the right idea? No, it wasn’t. I do now have a working functioning website. I’m a happy person, but I didn’t have all that set up right away.

Jennie Wright [00:00:44]:
I kind of did a little bit backwards and I wish that I had met our today’s guest earlier because she would have set me straight on both of these things. Sales, like your, your process, like your, product mapping and also the website, and I could have used that swift kick in the butt. So without further ado, let me introduce you to Whitney, Bateson. So Whitney, I’m so glad you’re here.

Whitney Bateson [00:01:07]:
Thanks so much for having me, Jenny. I’m really excited for the conversation.

Jennie Wright [00:01:11]:
Absolutely. And where are you coming from today? Because you’re all over the place.

Whitney Bateson [00:01:15]:
Yeah. I am a digital nomad, if you like the term, or a perpetual traveler is my more of, like, mature way of saying it. But, I travel around the world. So I’m in Medellin, Colombia right now. And when you and I first met, I was in Mallorca, Spain, so I get around.

Jennie Wright [00:01:30]:
Living the life. I’m so jealous. And yet, and yet you refuse to learn Spanish, but we’ll deal with that another time.

Whitney Bateson [00:01:38]:
I will try when I have some more mental space. I want to. I think the first step is wanting to, and I want to learn. I’m just not taking the steps yet to commit to it.

Jennie Wright [00:01:50]:
That’s okay. As somebody who speaks the languages, it’s just you know, I’m just playing with you. So I have a really direct question. If you want to know more about Whitney, we’ll have everything in the show notes, so go and check that out. The quick synopsis is Whitney was a dietitian who then moved into website coaching, who then talked about wellness and nutrition for professionals and how to establish themselves as experts because you had been there. But how the heck did you go from counseling clients and patients as a dietitian to then moving over and supporting the other side of making sure that these, you know, these individuals had the right website and also the right products to sell to their audience.

Whitney Bateson [00:02:32]:
Yeah. Yeah. It’s been an interesting journey. I mean, when I was like little, little, always loved art and, and all of that. And then as time went on, you know, you’re like, well, I need to get a real job. I can’t be doing art. So I went to the sciences because science was another love of mine and I became a dietitian. And my career actually moved I worked in hospitals for a little bit during my internship, but then I moved into school nutrition, which was really fascinating and it allowed me to pull in And I think many, many dietitians in basically any industry can probably attest to this.

Whitney Bateson [00:03:08]:
You wear many hats. And so I started doing some graphic design for some of our marketing nutrition education materials. And we needed to teach little kids how to use salad bars and not stick their hands in the food and sneeze on it, and you know, how much food to take in order to have it be a reimbursable meal for for the government. And instead of I worked in DC public schools. We had a lot of schools. I still left that job not having stepped foot in all 100 and 20 schools that that were there at the time. So I needed to be really effective and efficient in my communication of, you know, teaching students, educating students, teaching the staff. So I started leveraging, like, video and more technology, and I created a an a food allergy training before teachable and Thinkific made it so darn easy for you to do that.

Whitney Bateson [00:03:57]:
We used really clunky LMS. And I just really, really realized during that time, a, how much I loved doing that kind of work more than really the nutrition science type of stuff, and how critically important it was in order for us to have powerful marketing and communication and just digital tools behind us as wellness professionals in order to get our message out there. Because no matter who we are, we we’re the experts in what we do and we think, you know, everyone should be excited to hear and learn about whatever it is we want to teach them and tell them. But especially when it comes to science professionals, we spent many years learning the science, but not many years learning how to communicate and market. And for a lot of people, that’s just not what they wanna do anyway. So I founded my business 6 years ago now to really empower other nutritionists and health professionals to be seen as the experts that we know that they are and get their messages out into the hands of the public, just communicate better, and and leverage the power of the Internet, basically, to to get out there. So

Jennie Wright [00:05:06]:
yeah. That’s you in a nutshell.

Whitney Bateson [00:05:08]:
Yeah, it’s been fun.

Jennie Wright [00:05:10]:
Absolutely. Okay. So the message that we’re going to talk about today, although you work with a lot of health professionals to get their messages out, I think what we’re talking about universally is acceptable to everybody. And one of the things that I was really excited to chat with you about was talking about mapping out services because if you’re in business long enough, you will go through, I don’t know how many iterations of your programs, products or services over and over, and you’re always tweaking or there’s always something new you wanna try. I think we don’t really settle. I just, I don’t think we settle. So can you kind of walk us through what this sort of, you know, mapping out your services looks like, why it’s important, what are the tricks, what can we do to help? Mhmm.

Whitney Bateson [00:06:01]:
Yeah. And I broken it down into 5 simple steps, which you could spend forever going through them and thinking through them. And I think if you’re just getting started with thinking about services, then you may spend a lot of time in each step. But if you are just wanting to introduce a new service and you want to figure out how it fits into your offer suite in general, then then maybe you can move through these pretty quickly. But just to give a highlight of the 5 steps. So first, who are you selling to? Which is a common question no matter where you are in your business, you always need to get clear on that. And it’s funny how we may take for granted that, oh, I already know it’s you know, busy moms or it’s stressed out professionals, but we want to get clear on that. So step 1 is who are you selling to? Step 2 is what are you offering? And then this is really where it starts thinking about, okay, all of the things that you’re offering.

Whitney Bateson [00:06:55]:
So then step 3 is which which ones are the most important? Which ones are like the flagship of your business that you want to drive most people to? And then step 4, how can they be organized and be thinking through that process? And then step 5, how can they be featured across your website? Because this is really in the context of you have these services, how are you going to make them make sense to your customer? Because you may say, okay. Well, I could do this and I could do this and I could do this. But if you are laying them all out kind of haphazardly on your website our our website is supposed to guide people through a journey and learning about us and first connecting with us and and so, you know, we could talk forever about, like, copy and and all of that. But once they get to the services, we want it to be clear that there’s some kind of structure in order. And there can also be this process can also be helpful for those professionals who are multipassionate, and they are maybe serving different audiences. I know there can be that that focus a lot of times, you know, niche down, pick 1 niche. But I’ve definitely encountered business owners where they just can’t. You know? And I don’t feel like that should just hold you back and and that you can’t move forward if if you have 2 different types of people that you wanna serve.

Whitney Bateson [00:08:13]:
But you do need to pick which one is going to be a little bit more prominent in your messaging and on your So for so for example, for my own business, I my main focus is helping wellness entrepreneurs with their websites and getting them out there. I do have other revenue streams. I also do consulting still in school nutrition. I have chosen I’m not planning to grow that side of my business right now, but if I was, I would have a section of my website speaking to that service. Now is that the most important service to me? No. And nor do I be I think, you know, you mentioned you wish you had a website earlier in your business and all of that. And I think the big thing is the question of why why is a website so helpful? Because I think so many business owners hear, oh, you need to have a website, and they think it’s just to legitimize your business. But you wouldn’t be saying you regret that you didn’t have a website if it was just that, oh, you it, you know, didn’t legitimize your business because you made money without having a website.

Jennie Wright [00:09:28]:
I was multi 6 figure at that point before you were doing one.

Whitney Bateson [00:09:32]:
Yeah. It wasn’t a legit a legitimacy question, I think. And you can fill in the gaps here too, but I think it’s mainly about, streamlining your sales process and making it easier for people to move through to getting on a call with you because they’re coming to your site and they’re reading about your services. It’s also attracting more strangers to your business, so you’re not always having to be hunting and searching for leads. So they’re finding you online, they are doing their own reading and learning about your services and what you offer so that when they do get on a sales call, they’re a more qualified lead, they are more educated about your services. It’s probably an easier sell. And then you also are doing things like building your email list from your website and building that traffic. And by building your email list, those are just potential leads for future services and people that you can nurture because there are so many people out there that find us and they’re not ready to buy, but we want to continue to show value to them, communicate with them, and having that built into our email, and into our website is is really critical.

Whitney Bateson [00:10:37]:
So so anyway, that’s that’s kind of the the basis behind having a website. And so in terms of deciding which services are most important to feature most prominently on your website, ones where, hey, I just do this service every so often, but I’m not necessarily wanting it to be this streamlined lead generation sales machine that’s kind of building and growing and scaling. Well, that one doesn’t need to be as prominent on your homepage, But the one that you really want to be growing and so that’s why I have that question of which is the most important, which is the one that you really want to be growing right now so that you can really put more time and energy on your website and in your messaging behind that service.

Jennie Wright [00:11:21]:
Okay. That was a lot.

Whitney Bateson [00:11:23]:
Yeah. I know I kinda talked for a while.

Jennie Wright [00:11:25]:
Oh, good. Talk, talk, talk, honestly. But that was a mini masterclass in that little moment there, and that’s really good. And you were saying all the reasons why you need to have a website. One of the reasons why I didn’t have one was I couldn’t nail down what I wanted that forward facing persona to be Because when I started out, everybody knew me as the summit queen. Okay. Not I did not give myself that moniker, by the way, that was like, put on me because I had done all these summits, right? And at this point, I think I’ve done about 400. However, I didn’t want that to be the one trick pony that everybody knew me for because I had already started moving into the strategic marketing coaching side of things.

Jennie Wright [00:12:09]:
And so if my whole website was Summit focused and Summit facing, then I wasn’t going to attract those people. But I didn’t have the messaging down. Right? So that was the thing that was happening. I didn’t know how to do it and it was confusion that I can do this for anybody else. No problem. But I couldn’t do it for myself.

Whitney Bateson [00:12:27]:
Yeah, I hear you.

Jennie Wright [00:12:28]:
And then the last thing is one of the reasons that I really wanted to get my website up is I was about to speak in person for the first time since the pandemic. And I knew traffic would be coming to my website. So I was like, okay, this thing’s got to get done because I know that people are going to be going to it. And like you said, there was no like I had tons of landing pages because I’ve been selling over the years, but there was one, not one repository where everybody could see, follow and go through the story and follow to the products. And so that was, my drop dead date of getting this thing done was before I got on the plane and headed to my speaking engagement. And so I made that deadline. I missed it. I was on the plane when it went live, but I was close.

Jennie Wright [00:13:13]:
And I’m just thank you. I owe all that to my partner because he was the swift boot in my butt to get it all done. He’d been saying it for years and I’ve been like, yes, yes, honey, no problem. Sometime in the future.

Whitney Bateson [00:13:27]:
Yeah. But It’s tough. It’s tough to make it a priority in our businesses, but I It’s a story I hear too where there is some kind of event or there’s something that’s kind of pushing them, but then it becomes a bit of an emergency and a stressful situation. And so I love it when people come to me early and they’re like, I’m building my business and I know I need a website. I don’t have it yet, but I wanna work on it. Because then it’s like, okay, then you can take a little bit more breathing room to figure out. Because I was talking with a member of my team the other day, and she put it so well. She’s like, a website is just a series of decisions.

Whitney Bateson [00:14:06]:
And you’re just making little decisions every single What service is the most important service? What lead magnet am I going to feature? What is my headline? What photo is going to go here? What colors am I going That’s brilliant. Yeah. And so it’s just it can be very exhausting. Yeah. And, you know, in your if you’re in your business and you are having to make decisions about things, then I’m sure you you get this mental fatigue as well. And so just think about that you’re having to do it for your own business. You’re having to do lots of them, and we’re putting so much weight. Like, you are going to this first speaking engagement that, you know, it’s like a big one, and so you’re like, there’s people coming.

Whitney Bateson [00:14:49]:
If I’m getting on this flight, if I’m sending people, I want it to be perfect. It has to be exactly correct because if it isn’t, then all of this work that I went to, you know, will be well, like, I’m

Jennie Wright [00:15:00]:
dropping my head, Whitney. Seriously, get out of my head. Okay?

Whitney Bateson [00:15:04]:
Like, maybe that wasn’t you, but I know that’s how I feel.

Jennie Wright [00:15:07]:
Oh, no. Oh, no. No. That’s pretty much the internal dialogue that was happening.

Whitney Bateson [00:15:12]:
Yeah. But Yeah. The great thing is though that I think we all have to realize and remember too with these things is that, the our website is constantly evolving. And even though people were coming to your site at that moment and we did want it to be good, people will have you know, they come home from the summit, they’re maybe going through their paperwork, then they find your website and they or whatever summit talking event that you went to. And, you know, they’re they’re kind of going through things. And so I guess I just you know, we still have this pressure on ourselves as business owners. We do want it to be correct and right. But through to the program that I help people with, I’m teaching folks how to edit them site their sites themselves and how the strategy behind writing the copy and adding the pages and all of that so that they can always make changes.

Whitney Bateson [00:16:06]:
And I think that’s so critical, especially in this conversation about services.

Jennie Wright [00:16:11]:
Yeah.

Whitney Bateson [00:16:11]:
Is you’re always evolving. You’re always going to be changing things. So it is better if you just kind of look at your website as this evolving thing. It’s not like a point in time that is static.

Jennie Wright [00:16:23]:
Completely. Completely. I’m in the process right now of moving my whole business from a series of different tech stacks into another tech stack. And so I’m auditing what products, programs and services are going to come with and which ones I’ll no longer keep. And I’m going through my email list and I’m having this like wow moment of going, Wow, I’ve really run a lot of webinars. A lot. And I don’t need to carry all those, lists and tags and everything from one email marketing service to this new service. And it’s a really interesting, sort of feel what the progression has been over 12 years.

Jennie Wright [00:17:05]:
Right. Because every webinar I’ve ever hosted is in that email marketing system. Wow. Right. And I’m like, oh, my God, I talked about that. That’s actually cool. I should probably run that one again. That’s really cool topic, actually.

Jennie Wright [00:17:16]:
And yeah. And other ones that I was like, oh, no. No. No. That was that was a mistake.

Whitney Bateson [00:17:21]:
Yeah. That was the wrong wrong angle.

Jennie Wright [00:17:23]:
That was the wrong approach.

Whitney Bateson [00:17:25]:
Luckily, you know, we learn these things. We have to try them, because if we don’t, we don’t know. And, you know, I think another thing when it comes to looking back at what we’ve done in our business, sometimes those can be great products to then offer and sell to people, you know, like past webinars and and whatnot. So you never know.

Jennie Wright [00:17:48]:
Yeah. Well, when I was younger and thinner and all those things, but we’ll we’ll get there.

Whitney Bateson [00:17:53]:
Okay. Questions. Maybe we can’t sell that.

Jennie Wright [00:17:55]:
Maybe we just won’t give when people do the audio. But let me let me ask you a couple of questions because, you know, everybody that listening is listening. Most people have a website at this point. Everybody needs an update at some point. What are the things that you consider elevations on a website? What are the things, like, not the basics, but the the the things that actually add a little pizzazz and wow, that as you progress, you should consider having?

Whitney Bateson [00:18:22]:
Well, I think if if I’m thinking about websites where someone made it themselves, just some basic things I I look at when I look at websites. And it’s aesthetic, but I think we do know that people first make a judgment with their eyes and they decide if they’re going to keep reading and connect with you and all of that. But things that bug me are like alignment and spacing and, just continuity of the font hierarchy and brand, consistency across your site.

Jennie Wright [00:18:56]:
Oh, you’re right up in there. That’s awesome.

Whitney Bateson [00:19:00]:
I was like, you know, if I had to say, like, elevate, just take purely just making your sight look, taking it from, like, just a kind of a typical business to a professional high end Mhmm. You know, all all of the bells and whistles, even if you’re still kinda like, you know, Wizard of Oz behind the the curtain, if your website is looking and I think that’s another thing that kind of comes up is there’s this idea that you, you know, oh, I need to have this amazing fancy website with all these things going on and, like, depending on what your aesthetics are. Like, I want you to have a website that you you like and that you like looking at. I think that’s important. If you have something that you don’t like and you’re like, well, I just had to get this up and, you know, I don’t like how it looks and and all of that. But, you know, the sites that we help business owners build, they they come out beautifully, but they are also not overly complicated with lots of moving parts and things like that. And, honestly, I think those things are harder for a business owner to maintain because if you do wanna swap out a section or something like that, it may require some code or settings and that can be sometimes tricky to navigate. But I just think the hallmark of an unprofessional website are just these inconsistencies visually.

Whitney Bateson [00:20:21]:
And especially if you’re you’re continuing to add to your site over time, maybe you forgot what your color code was and you didn’t have them built into the site. So you just kind of guessed. And so now half of your buttons are this shade of pink and the other half are this shade of pink and

Jennie Wright [00:20:34]:
Yep. I’ve seen that.

Whitney Bateson [00:20:35]:
Kinda thing. Yeah. So I think yeah. I think the visuals, you know, even diving into that deeper, you know, if you had photos of yourself taken a couple years ago, maybe go and get

Jennie Wright [00:20:48]:
a she’s calling me out. God. What the heck, Whitney?

Whitney Bateson [00:20:53]:
Go and get some new photos

Jennie Wright [00:20:54]:
taken in. 2019. No. When when was my no. 2020.

Whitney Bateson [00:20:59]:
I have some photos from 2020 that I love. I still believe I look the same.

Jennie Wright [00:21:03]:
I am not changing them. Not yet.

Whitney Bateson [00:21:06]:
No. If you still feel that they but I think that’s not even that that long ago, but I’ve seen ones that, you know, maybe 10 years old. Even the style of the photos is a little different than the style of photos today.

Jennie Wright [00:21:18]:
Oh, do you mean do you mean this?

Whitney Bateson [00:21:19]:
Right. Like the glamour shot kind of life touch kind of look, a little softening, soft filter, blurry a little bit. A little bit. So so I think updating your photos and and having brand photos, if you launched your site and didn’t have brand photos of yourself, I think it’s a great time to to do that and get those popped in there because that makes the site look more professional and allows people to connect with you.

Jennie Wright [00:21:44]:
It does.

Whitney Bateson [00:21:45]:
Yeah. I have

Jennie Wright [00:21:46]:
a question for you to break in, and that is about AI generated imagery. Thoughts, feelings about having AI generated images on your website?

Whitney Bateson [00:21:58]:
It’s like such a nuanced, answer that I I have to give. Right? Like, I mean, I personally tried and played around with, like, Canva generating images. They’re just god god awful. They just don’t look good. Yeah. So I was like, okay. Not it was fun to try, but I’m not going to do that. You know, a lot of times we’re looking for, like, woman holding a computer or, you know, some kind of ethnic group that is totally underrepresented in, in stock photography.

Whitney Bateson [00:22:27]:
And Mhmm.

Jennie Wright [00:22:28]:
So if

Whitney Bateson [00:22:28]:
you can get a good photo, then that’s great. I know there’s ethical considerations that we have to take into account and, but that’s where I’m not really sure. Do you put a note that there’s AI generated imagery on the site? I don’t I don’t know.

Jennie Wright [00:22:44]:
I don’t know either. I will tell you I will tell you that I, I did use an AI generated image on a landing page for a webinar, not for a client because I could not find the image that I wanted in anything. Stock photography, Pexels, any of the stock sites could not find anything. Canva, nothing.

Whitney Bateson [00:23:05]:
And so

Jennie Wright [00:23:06]:
I was like, okay, like I mean, I got to get this out and I need a hero image and nobody’s going to have photography done in the next, like, 8 hours. Yeah. So we just generated it and it took 2 different AIs. Canva couldn’t do it. Firefly could, which was, that’s an Adobe AI. And also Leonardo AI, that one can also do it, but you got to pay. But Firefly is included in your Adobe subscription, so that one worked. And it wasn’t bad, but it didn’t feel completely it felt a little disingenuous.

Jennie Wright [00:23:41]:
So I’m going to hold off a little bit. But coming over to the website side, you do something that I love and this is one of the reasons why I was like, we’re going to be really fast friends, super cool, is because you use what I love, which is drop shadow. Oh. Okay? And and in I love drop shadow. I love drop shadow. Okay. So, like but but the reasoning behind it, people don’t get. So I always tell people to think of your website as something that starts off as one dimensional that you need to get to 2 dimensional.

Jennie Wright [00:24:15]:
And if you’re really good, you can get it to three-dimensional. And the three-dimensional aspects like drop shadow, slightly rounded corners here and there, pictures that have drop shadow if you’re using a simulated computer screen. Right? So because it would it would create a shadow. So using that creating field of vision changes in your field of vision. So forefront, mid front, back front of of that field of vision is what’s going to make the eye feel like it’s it’s natural and interesting. We don’t like 1 dimensional imagery. Yeah. Right.

Jennie Wright [00:24:48]:
And I mean, if you if you if you see a 1 dimensional site from, like, the early 2000s or, you know, even like 1996 when Jenny had a poetry site up, which is no longer up and you can’t find it. But if you could, you’d see what I’m talking about because I had a poetry site way back in the day. But, like, the the one dimensional to two dimensional to adding those aspects that make it feel three-dimensional, I think, is what creates a high converting page or website.

Whitney Bateson [00:25:18]:
I love that.

Jennie Wright [00:25:19]:
And parallax. Mhmm. Okay.

Whitney Bateson [00:25:22]:
A little a little bit of parallax, I think, is a good thing. Too much parallax, then I start

Jennie Wright [00:25:27]:
No. Because you’re gonna get dizzy. Everybody gets a little dizzy. You don’t know where to look on the screen. How about stickiness? So what do you think about having sticky logo, sticky menu bar?

Whitney Bateson [00:25:37]:
Mhmm. I think it’s helpful. I think, you know, there’s certain pages where, like, if you’re doing, like, I have a sales page and I have the the countdown, and I just found that the countdown was taking up too much visual space. And so I was like, alright. Let’s just drop it, you know, and not have it be sticky. But otherwise, I think when people are are navigating the site, I think it can be okay. I think you just have to also see like how much visual space it’s taking up. And if it’s, you know, like, you want it to shrink on scroll.

Whitney Bateson [00:26:07]:
You and if your logo if you’re put in and that’s another thing too. And these are just a little bit more, like, minor things, like, don’t have your have a a horizontal version of your logo or, you know, it’s okay, yeah, to have different versions of your logo. It it’s not bad to have I I have, like, multiple versions, whether it’s a, you know, a more, like, vertical stacked, yeah, or horizontal and you wanna have, like, your little, sub mark and whatnot. So having it on scroll, you know, get smaller, I think that’s fine. You could also have it suddenly turn into a hamburger in the corner or something like that. I think one thing that I had learned long time ago is when it comes to websites, we don’t want to be too, like, avant garde, too, like, oh, let’s put the menu. I’ve seen people, like, put the menu over on the left and have it, like, come down in a weird way. And I’m like, I like that you’re trying to innovate, but, you know, 99% of the websites on the web have it on the right.

Whitney Bateson [00:27:10]:
And the logo, when you click on a logo, it takes you to the home page. Like, just do what other it’s that prototypical typicality, I think, is is prototypical. Like, you just want it to be the same as what people are used to doing. So I think it’s also just one of those thoughts. Unless, you know, you see, like, a photographer website or like a brand designer.

Jennie Wright [00:27:33]:
Sure. Anything that has that avant garde feel, why not?

Whitney Bateson [00:27:36]:
Yes. But

Jennie Wright [00:27:36]:
if you’re going to if you’re you’re not in that space, I completely agree with you, Whitney, because you want it to be easy for people to maneuver around and find what they need. You can I think you can wow and dazzle people in other ways? Yeah. Right? And so I completely agree with you. Stiff to the prototypical why is that word hard today? Prototypical, you know, Yep. Venue bar and so on. And I love I love having a stacked logo. And then in the footer, I like like a nice inline logo sometimes. Right? Having those different logo variations.

Whitney Bateson [00:28:12]:
Yep. You

Jennie Wright [00:28:12]:
know, it’s also not used very often and it I don’t even know why is not having a favicon. I love a big favicon in the so when you search, right, I think that’s important. It makes you stand out because I’m looking at about 30 browser tabs.

Whitney Bateson [00:28:30]:
Right.

Jennie Wright [00:28:31]:
And your favicon sticks out. It’s actually yellow. Mhmm. Right.

Whitney Bateson [00:28:35]:
It’s not just a small version of your full Exactly. Built logo. Yeah. Like, a submark is, you know, like, for me, it’s just my it’s a circle with my, initials of my business in there, and that’s my little and, yeah, you can barely read it, but it’s pink. I like it. It it, you know, keeps it just a little bit different. So, yeah, just those little touches. I think if we’re just sticking in the visual and then and then I have another one that I’m sure you’re going to agree with too that is departing from the visual.

Whitney Bateson [00:29:04]:
But I would think in general and just, like, everything you’re saying, up leveling your site to doesn’t have to be fancy schmancy, custom coded, all of that stuff. It

Jennie Wright [00:29:18]:
just Elementor Pro?

Whitney Bateson [00:29:20]:
Yep. Yeah. We use Divi.

Jennie Wright [00:29:22]:
We love Divi.

Whitney Bateson [00:29:23]:
They’re the same

Jennie Wright [00:29:23]:
pretty much. They’re great.

Whitney Bateson [00:29:25]:
Yep. You can do everything you ever wanted to do with both of those page builders and and more. You can have some animations. You can have things move a little bit. You can have the parallax. You can have the drop shadows, you can make sure that all of your padding and your margins between sections is consistent and adopt styles that carry through everything. I think just those basics of having it be a clean, professional brand that’s consistent across and then just adopting basic design procedures of, space spacing and alignment and all of that. I think another thing too, just going on the visuals, is don’t disregard mobile and ensuring

Jennie Wright [00:30:08]:
talk about that. Yeah. Because that’s big.

Whitney Bateson [00:30:11]:
Yeah. So people can spend a ton of time making their site look really good on a browser window. Although, I will say too, make sure that you’re testing it in different browser sizes. Don’t I think some folks will space their headline a certain way so that it wraps to the next line or something like that. And it’s like, that looks good just on your computer. You know, the next person who has a slightly smaller screen or a bigger screen, it’s gonna look different. So, and a lot of these page builders now, you know, they allow you to test the responsiveness in so many different screen sizes and all of that.

Jennie Wright [00:30:45]:
IPads and all the rest of it. Yeah.

Whitney Bateson [00:30:47]:
Right. Right. So you do wanna make sure because most people are browsing sites, especially if you’re doing a lot of marketing on Instagram or Facebook or anywhere where people are really more using an app or through social media, they’re going to be going to your site from from their phone. And so you want the site the font sizes to be the appropriate size for mobile so that it’s not like screaming your headline in like 48, you know, point font that they have to scroll forever to get through it.

Jennie Wright [00:31:16]:
I probably have a 48 point font, point font somewhere on my website. Whitney, why have you called me out so much today? This is the 3rd time.

Whitney Bateson [00:31:24]:
I see things. I’ve seen things. You know?

Jennie Wright [00:31:25]:
So, basically, you’re you’ve looked at my website before we had this, and and this is what you’re doing to me. No. It’s okay. I don’t have 48 point yet. But I do I do remember the day that I created one of my first sales pages, that allowed me to check mobile and it was on ClickFunnels.

Whitney Bateson [00:31:40]:
Uh-huh.

Jennie Wright [00:31:41]:
And I remember clicking mobile to to test it out. And I was like, holy crap. Because all it was was scroll. Yep. Scroll. Yep. The the font size was insane. I think the font size on the sales page, don’t laugh, was 74.

Jennie Wright [00:31:57]:
Okay.

Whitney Bateson [00:31:57]:
I mean, you wanted people to see it.

Jennie Wright [00:31:59]:
But on mobile, it’s like, this needs to be 18. Yes. 20. Right?

Whitney Bateson [00:32:03]:
Yeah.

Jennie Wright [00:32:03]:
And I think one of the things that, when I started doing sales pages and and you you were talking about having the same font size, the the same spacing, the same padding, you know, curling, all that kind of stuff. I usually open up a doc and I will copy over headline font, you know, sub font, body copy font, all those different things, call out colors, all that kind of stuff. Canva is amazing for that because then I just use the brand builder in Canva if you have Pro. And I put my client stuff right into it. Yeah. I can’t screw up. And then as I’m building, I’m like, this headline font was, you know, 32 and such and such. And then it’s 20 on mobile.

Jennie Wright [00:32:44]:
Right? So I’m always and I write that stuff down just so it’s consistent because I will not be consistent otherwise. I’ll just be like, Oh, that looks nice.

Whitney Bateson [00:32:52]:
Right. Yeah. Yeah. Having a style guide, you know, for your brand, but then also when you’re working on your website and, like we in Divvy, you can set like global styles and presets. So like no matter what, you can get it where you want. And it’s not to say that, you know, sometimes you wanna override things and make things look a little different, with a different size or font weight or something like that. But using lots of different, like, font typography across your site, definitely no no. But you can play a little bit with, like, the sizing and the, you know, all of that kind of stuff every so often.

Whitney Bateson [00:33:26]:
But, so then, you know, aside from, like so we’re talking about, like, up up leveling your website and really taking to to the next level so that it can actually be this sales machine for you. The other big thing is after people look at your site and they’re like, okay, this this looks legit. This looks good. Then they’re going to start reading what you put on the screen. And so I think that that’s another huge opportunity for any business owner to up level, and I know it’s not gonna be something you’re gonna wanna do. You’re gonna wanna play with all the colors and all of that is more fun, but redoing your copy and revisiting it and ensuring that it is speaking the words that your customers are using to describe their problems, that you are not using jargon, that you’re not using, you know, dry dry language. You’re you’re talking about the benefits, not just the features of what you do. It’s like really going through.

Whitney Bateson [00:34:20]:
If you haven’t updated your copy in years, which I am guilty of, I’m about to do a finally, like, truly overhaul of my site. My about page has not changed in years, and it really needs to because I am a different person than I was, you know, when I started it. And and those are the kinds of things people are reading the copy on your site. They are looking around. You don’t know what they’re looking at. That’s the beauty of a website. It’s like having a 24 hour store that people can come in and browse at any time and either buy or let you know that they’re interested, but you don’t know who’s coming into the store. You don’t know what they’re looking at.

Whitney Bateson [00:34:58]:
And so we want all of the information that they’re getting from the site to be connecting with them and and making them want to work with us. And if you haven’t updated your copy in a while or, you know, that you were kinda putting your site together and you got exhausted by by all the decisions and you were like, not gonna worry about this right now. It’s probably a good time to come back and look at it.

Jennie Wright [00:35:21]:
I agree. Okay. Wow. Alright. We could still talk about so many things. Like, I I mean, I’ll have to bring you back because I really wanna have the discussion between serif and sans serif fonts, but that’s really nerding out. Yeah. But I love it though.

Jennie Wright [00:35:35]:
Yeah. Me too. Because I have, like, a whole view on serif and sans serif fonts. And I’ve had some fun discussions about those. But I think just as a as a wrap up, where do you think, where do you think sort of things are going in terms of what features people should or should not have on their website that you see happening? Like, what’s coming down the pike that you’re able to see because of what you do?

Whitney Bateson [00:36:06]:
My my answer is probably not a very exciting one. It’s just continuing to do the foundational things that businesses need to do in order to attract customers, which is getting them on an email list. Like, email lists have been a thing that people have talked about for years, and they are going to continue to be important because there’s just so much craziness happening on social media sometimes that people are just going away from social media. They’re moving away from from those platforms and not, you know, not necessarily like I’m saying that there’s a trend or anything like that. But just in terms of marketing your business and having that stability, I think finding ways to get people onto your email list and nurture them is just going to continue to be important. I really love having I I use Chakra on my website and I have chat. It’s not a bot right now. It’s literally you can send me a message and I will respond to you.

Whitney Bateson [00:37:03]:
It’s me behind behind the scenes. And that’s what’s really helpful for me. I know they’ve been around for a couple years, but I think just looking at that and seeing how you can utilize that, maybe it’s not across your whole website, maybe it’s just on your services page or a sales page. I think those those can be helpful. And, yeah, just continuing to actually follow the foundations of having a a solid visual website that following all the things we talked about, having great copy that’s connecting with your customers, and having things like people being able to book a discovery call. Still, when I am hiring service providers, I’m still looking to be able to book a discovery call and that’s been around for years. I don’t see that changing. People want to talk with someone, especially if it’s a large purchase.

Whitney Bateson [00:37:53]:
Yeah.

Jennie Wright [00:37:54]:
They want

Whitney Bateson [00:37:54]:
to be able to talk with someone. So giving those opportunities to have some human interaction with your customers, I think, is critical, and we can leverage technology. Like, you know, even getting on a call, like, at least you don’t have to schedule it. But having, like, a little chat module or making sure that you have, your FAQs or some you know, you could build a bot that does answer some FAQs depending on what your product is. So I think giving people those answers and giving them quick answers. And because AI is becoming this it’s you know, people love it and hate it. Yeah. And I think there’s there’s the concern about, oh, are they going to replace blogs? Is it going to replace search and and all of that? And I think it’s still it’s still really early with all of it to really understand what’s going to happen.

Whitney Bateson [00:38:45]:
But I think we need to continue to be putting out content and information that is is unique and is showing value, and it’s not just regurgitating something. So I know the temptation can be to use AI to put out a blog post. But then you’re just really adding to the noise out there, and and AI is generating things that it’s from ideas that are already out there. So Yeah. You know, kinda trying to come out ahead and and use your own expertise. You can use these things as tools, but don’t use them to replace the unique value that is ultimately what you’re trying to get in front of your customers so that they want to work with you. You know, they’re not gonna work with a robot. So we need to get our personality out there somehow.

Jennie Wright [00:39:29]:
Completely, completely agree. And I’m gonna add that website, to the show notes. So it’s Chatra. It’s actually by Brevo, which is kind of funny. And, I didn’t know that it was by Brevo. But, I’ll put that in the chat in the, in the chat notes, in the show notes so that people have it, and they can be, you know, go and check it out. Where can people connect with you, find you, and get to know you better? Yeah.

Whitney Bateson [00:39:53]:
So my website is whitneybateson.com, and I do have a workbook for mapping out your services on your website. So those steps that I just really briefly ran through, I have a whole workbook that has exercises and deeper questions to lead you through that process and get you thinking about that. So if that’s something you’re interested in, just go to whitneybateson.com/resources and you’ll see I also have a branding resource and a profit planning resource. So whatever suits you, I have some resources there. And then I’m also on Instagram. You can follow me at whitneybateson. Generally looking in my stories, not posting as much, but great way to connect. You can always send me a DM and all of that.

Whitney Bateson [00:40:36]:
So

Jennie Wright [00:40:37]:
Amazing. Thank you, Whitney so, so much. I’ve really had a good time. Obviously, this ran longer than I anticipated, but there was just so much stuff to talk about and I’m really grateful that you took the time and shared it. So thank you again so much.

Whitney Bateson [00:40:50]:
Thank you so much for having me, Jenny. It was great.

Jennie Wright [00:40:52]:
Of course. And if you want to learn more about Whitney, go to the show notes for this episode. We’ll have all of our contact details there for you to check out and also, some of the stuff that we talked about today as well. So you can find it all there. And as always, the, the podcast is brought to you by the Aud Phonic Podcast Network. And I love doing a choir, but I also wanna make sure that I’m doing exactly what you need. So make sure that you’re following the podcast, letting me know what it is that you’d like and consider leaving a review. Thanks so much for listening.

Jennie Wright [00:41:19]:
We’ll talk to y’all soon. Take care.