Aaron Garner 0:00
I'm glad that I get the privilege of introducing Cory, because not only is he a great guy and a general badass, he also builds all of our websites. thing that I like most about Cory is that he designs with intent and with the user in mind. So he does a lot of thinking about how people think, as he's putting websites together. And it's very psychology intensive. And I mean, we work in the psychology field, and I'm impressed with the way that he thinks about how people think. So welcome, Cory. Looking forward to conversation.
Cory Via 0:37
Thank you, thank you. Good to see you guys. Here, I care a lot about you know, how people consume information on the web, I have been doing it for over 15 years, you know, building websites from scratch, or using, you know, third party utilities. So, I've been through a lot of these situations where people say, just put me together a website, I just want it to look good. You know, that's obviously just kind of firing a shotgun into the air and seeing what falls.
Maria Esterline 1:13
Let's get started. How about that? Would working in about you know how it looks? I am curious to know, what strategies you do implement and the web design to ensure a website is aesthetically pleasing, easily navigated and consumed and accessible to visitors?
Cory Via 1:36
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, a lot of that comes with experience and just the trial and error over the years of what works. But, you know, there's a lot to be studied out there in terms of, you know, psychology and what works and what doesn't. So, you know, you have to have a foundation, for sure. But, you know, in terms of just the common sense approach, you know, it's don't put more into it than it needs students, actually, you know, people, you may make something look crazy, good or beautiful, you know, in your opinion, but when the visitor sees it, they're ignoring what's standing 70% of the, you know, the extra you put into it, because it's not relevant. So it's about keeping things simple, static, relevant, easily navigated and consumed, you know, people will come to your site with something in mind, and that is their focus. They may not, they may or may not care about anything else that's on your website, they, they will get there and say, why is this hard for me to find? You know, it's about them, obviously. So, you know, from a construction standpoint, in architecture, we want things to be simple semantic. For example, when you build like a website's navigation, you know, the semantic way to do that is just use regular anchors inside of, you know, a navigation element, for example, because that standard way of doing that is readable and habitable by all keyboard users have, you know, seemingly all modern screen readers. And it's important that the foundational structure of your site can, you know, either, you know, progressively enhance, or if you've added a lot of enhancements you want to you want it to degrade gracefully. For people who can't utilize those amazing features that we went through
Aaron Garner 3:45
them, I'm kind of interested in the difference between some web design agencies, they start off as like a design agency, or maybe they came from a background of graphic design or maybe some other type of design. And then there are other agencies that are a little bit more marketing first, what is the difference between designing from a marketing first perspective, versus designing from an aesthetic? Only perspective?
Cory Via 4:17
I think just by default, if you are someone who's saying, just give me a site that looks good, you sounds to me, like you may not know too much about your client, you may just be trying to get all you can, but you know, it's it's better to focus on your you're more like your minimum viable audience, basically, you know, it's about performance, not just an appearance, you know, you can implement things that allow two way communication, not just from like, web form, but add in ways to get feedback from your your user, your users using your site. So really, it's just that thought of how can this website perform for the people that I'm making for, you know, you want to do them a service, not just trick them into, you know, buying a pig with lipstick on them. There's a lot of things to think about there in terms of keeping things relevant and easily shareable. That's a huge thing nowadays. So really just, yes, that it, honestly, I think comes down to the, like I said, performance, and not just the parents really.
Aaron Garner 5:28
That was one of the things that I was curious about, our clients probably get aggravated with me asking the question, Who is it for? And What's it for? And that's because we often decide to build something, and we have a vague idea of what we want to do. And but it's really hard to hit the mark, if we haven't put a significant amount of thought into that. And I noticed that that's one of the phrases that you'll say as well. So what's the important importance of asking yourself? Who's it for? And what's it for before you start putting the thing together?
Cory Via 6:03
Well, I didn't get that phrase from us the Thank you. But it makes so much sense, really, I think it comes down to kind of the simple analogy of if you don't have a target you can't aim for, you know, so therefore, if you're shooting, you have no idea how effective it is, you know, you can go out and count, try to count the 1 million pieces of buckshot and shot into the forest. But you know, that is taking away from your, what you ultimately should be focusing on. So literally ask yourself, who is this for, and if you say everyone, that is going to get pretty cumbersome. I like to go back to what Seth Godin says about having the minimum viable audience, you know, you can always grow it from there, based on the needs or the, you know, respective thought processes of those people, it all builds into a larger collective of, you know, getting to know your audience. So
Mark Wilhelm 7:11
I wanted to go a bit further on that, based on based on something you said earlier, you're sort of talking about what you don't want is a web page where a visitor lands on it, and they know what they're looking for. And they can't find it, when you're pretty sure you know, what people are looking for? How do you lay out a site such that it's easy for them to find it?
Cory Via 7:36
Absolutely. I mean, from a foundational standpoint, just don't break too much out of the mold in terms of, you know, navigation and such, because people, obviously, they're going to websites all day long, they they build this natural, you know, I expect this, when I go to a website, you don't want them to be thinking how they need to find out how to find what they're looking for. That's a lie, right? You don't want them to figure out where to find their information. It's, it's, you know, follow the standards. But yeah, from there, it's just taking the common sense approach. And a lot of websites that I've come into issues with are mainly ones that are just heavy on information, like there literally is just a ton of documents or a ton of information on webpages, you know, when you have a smaller set of content, it's easier to keep things up top or you know, easily visible from the homepage, for example, but when it's something where you might be serving people who are looking for a lot of information, you know, comes down to organization at that point. And, you know, kind of calling back to knowing your audience, you need to keep tabs on what they want to know, don't pretend like you know, what they want, because unless you've done the work and the research, you don't know. So that's when it comes down to ABX testing, keeping tabs on your metrics. It's all that that's part of the two way communication. It's not just asking them, Hey, what do you want, it's paying attention to the communication that's coming from they're signed in, you may start off your site, totally horrible, you know, it's got to start somewhere, but you need to quickly be paying attention to what's popular, what's been clicked, what if they're scrolling all the way down, you know, you should know what people aren't seeing as well as what people are seeing.
Aaron Garner 9:40
I do have a few questions. Cory about those all. I agree with you by the way that the communication is about giving receiving information. And a lot of times people feel that it's our role as a marketer to give information. So we just need you to make this post or we just need you to put This video together the way that we want it. But it is also our responsibility to listen for the clients that we represent. And how is that performing? Is that resonating with their audience? Are they getting confused with it? Are they bouncing off of that page right away? Maybe there's something that we we need to adjust. So, with this being the thought process, that marketing is equally about listening as it is about speaking, what's the role of empathy? And being a web designer?
Cory Via 10:28
I guess it comes down to a simple question of why would they do that? You put something on your site like this is cool. Why would someone use it? Why would they interact with the data? If your recommender looking in retrospectively? Why did they do that? Or why didn't they do that? No, I put this cool widget on my homepage, why is no interaction, a lot of times that comes down to you know, metrics and somewhat deductive reasoning, I suppose, depending on where you're at, in your state, but it really just matters. The intention of the person, it's not empathy isn't feeling sorry for someone. It's caring for what they're doing. And also understanding just the actions they're taking the things are saying,
Mark Wilhelm 11:13
some ways it sound it makes me think of like, almost like doing detective work. Like, okay, I designed the webpage this way. And we can look at, you know, where people clicked and where they went, and they're not doing maybe what I thought they were going to do. And then let's just try to figure out some reason, let's do some thought experiments, almost. What would have led them to go through this path? Or that if, if that's not what I would hope them to do, but what should I change or, or maybe I should, maybe, maybe the way I laid it out doesn't make sense. So maybe I should just change it to fit what they're already doing or something like that.
Cory Via 11:55
Right. And it obviously helps to know more about where someone is coming from, and why they do what they do. So very, very minimal amounts of data for psychographics. And demographics. That's obviously the starting point, but sometimes takes more marketing effort to get more information, you know, you have to put in, they may not mean something to the client, but do you like recording events and actions on your website, they give you clues into what people care about, not not so that you can get to know them better to trick them to do something, it's good to know them better, so that you know, you're serving them better.
Aaron Garner 12:40
That's a great point that there's that back and forth, it has to you know, you don't just immediately have a product, that's remarkable, you don't just immediately have perfect affinity, the people don't immediately love what you created, you take a first step and you give it a try. And you present it and see how they engage with it and see, see if you hit the mark or not. And nine out of 10 times, you're not gonna hit the mark right off the bat. And then you'll have to readjust and ask for feedback. Again, asking for feedback. I mean, we will probably get into this later. But there there are tools that we use to help us to not only watch the metrics, but a little bit more proactively receive some of this feedback and that kind of information. I'm curious what your thoughts are Maria at this point, because I'm thinking about, you know, like education as a gift to the person that you're giving it to, and you you will operate in that space. And what we chose to build our platform is on thrive, and we'll get to that and thrive has a learning management system that's built into it. But it occurs to me that there might be some similarities between the gift that you want to give you put it together, and you send it off and then see how it resonates. And you see how it lands, and sometimes it hits. Sometimes it doesn't. And then if it doesn't hit then, but you got to have that first step to see if it's gonna work or not, and give it your first go based on how the listening that you're able to do, or your previous experience with other students or with other clients and and then just iterate from there.
Maria Esterline 14:22
It's just trial and error, right? We just keep testing and always be testing, right. Always be testing and always be learning. Which takes me to a question I was curious about what does it mean to really build a website that is truly for the consumer? What are your thoughts on that?
Cory Via 14:44
What does that look like? mean to me? Really, it just has to do with who you're there to serve? Are you serving the consumer first or are you serving your underlying agenda alcoholic which could be just I want to make money Right off the bat, If your answer is I want to serve the consumer. But I also want to make as much money as possible, you know, you can't have it both ways. You can maybe eventually, but you have to start with one first and guaranteed, you're going to get better consumers if you're there to serve them first. So that just goes back to gaining better insight on your target audience, you know, you, you almost have to go live your target audiences, like, if you're not already kind of a part of it, you know, we're all part of a target audience. So it depends on the business. But that to me, it just comes down to the underlying ethic of why do they even start this, you know, I, I'm here to make everyone's life better, or I'm here to make a lot of money and, you know, retire. And so it's really just, you know, serve the consumer first. And if it's causing a tension or something on the business side, then that's just something to learn and work through, honestly, you set out what's your, your mission, and there's going to be bumps, you've committed to serving the customer first. So gotta roll with the punches.
Aaron Garner 16:23
I feel like it goes full circle, how you had mentioned the minimum viable audience or the smallest viable audience. And sometimes people wonder why it is that we serve mostly clients in the mental health space? Well, when you think about that, you have to really understand your target audience. I think from the naive perspective, you would say, Well, we know how to use Facebook Business Manager, we know how to use Google Analytics, we know how to build websites. Can't you just do that for everyone? And for anyone? And the answer is tricky. It's sort of Yes. But sort of know, like, we can put it together, but it's more likely to fall flat outside of our industry, because we have to do more of that empathy work. And when we do it within our industry, we've already done some of the empathy work we are first go at it is more likely the land. And it's going to require less iterations, because we've already thought about these types of things with very similar other clients. And then it's the same thing with their clients, our clients, clients have a target audience, then when they come out with something new, they have a pretty good chance of being able to make it to make it land to make it hit with that audience, and we have a good chance of being able to help them make that match. But if they come out with something entirely new, and they don't know who is for, what's it for, then we got to, you know, give it our best shot. And it's probably going to require a couple more iterations, because we're going to have to listen, and we're going to have to try to improve and listen and improve. And if you don't do that, you just, it's just so, so difficult. I think that's like the number one lesson of marketing. That's why I love that you incorporate that into the thought process behind the websites is I mean, the website is like the home base for everything that you do in marketing.
Cory Via 18:07
True. It is. It can be lengthy sometimes because I, I come down, I compound like my experience with what I see daily in like consumption of who knows how many websites,
Mark Wilhelm 18:20
I want to say something that might be just tangential and might need to be cut out. But it made me think about wanting to what Corey was just saying, maybe think about the phrase jack of all trades. Allegedly, the full phrase is jack of all trades, master of none. But then apparently, there's sort of another version, that some people say the full phrase is jack of all trades, master of none, though, oftentimes better than master of one. Kind of interesting, because it's sort of like you can choose I guess, we want to maybe stick to one industry because we want to do the best job we can. We could maybe serve other industries too. Knowing that we wouldn't do as good of a job doing it. And so it's sort of like maybe it comes down to a personal level. Like maybe you're okay, expanding, maybe you feel better. Expanding knowing that you're not doing as good a job for each individual as you could if you were to consolidate and focus only on one. Wow, just thinking about that. We're kind of choosing to, to master one segment. I guess.
Cory Via 19:41
I guess being a jack of all trades, as I sometimes call it myself, I could speak to that and where I would say in between the trades that you're servicing you are losing traction and momentum on your skill set for me. A particular set of them. So I can say like, in my experience, I've coded and probably 10 different programming languages. But if I were to go back and say, Okay, I want to go write something in this that I used to mess with thing years ago, you know, I still know that language I noticed sometimes, but I still have to, you know, reacquaint myself, I'll run into errors that I previously figured out that were common before, you know, there's all these kind of new, or reoccurring stumbling blocks, because you haven't stayed on that path of a particular focus. So I get to my experience, that's what I'm stuck. If I had to pick up something that I was using 10 years ago, even though I'm comfortable with it, and I say, Yeah, I can be very, you know, we all know that, I'm still gonna have to reacquaint myself in some fashion. So I think it would come down to, you know, you compound your experience based on your niche. So we're serving mental health customers, we can use the experience from every single customer to carry over to the next one, and to retro actively think about what you are. And you know,
Aaron Garner 21:15
I think of it a little bit like this mark. And I don't know if this is helpful at all, because I'm thinking about this sort of in real time as well. But it is interesting that if there's no overlap, and you're a master of all these different things, you you are spreading your resources pretty thin. But sometimes you're becoming a master of different things where there is overlap. And then you can find that element, that thread where they're all relevant. So like we can, you know, just here on this call, we have people that are experts in marketing, web design, writing education, you think that those are all different domains, except for we found a place where they overlap. And we can pin them all together at that point and create something that's really amazing. But I think that if you don't have that those overlapping intersections, you don't get that effect. So I think that it helps to have them close enough to where you're going to have be able to synergize between the different things that you're learning, and not just so far out that you can't pull that off. But I don't know that, you know, we might run that through the bullshit filter, and it doesn't come out.
Cory Via 22:28
making us think it through. I mean, that makes sense. Because you have like this, this vector, you know, everyone's skills, and you can then concentrate that on our niche, like, you know, mental health.
Mark Wilhelm 22:43
Like make, yeah, made me think of what we talked about cross pollinating of ideas when we had Linda McLachlan on and we've talked about that some just in private, how there is like, you know, when you're working in a very specific niche, it's important to get out of that echo chamber and get ideas from other domains that you might not have been exposed to, because that can just improve your work in a way that you might not have even seen. If you hadn't gotten that sort of outside opinion from somebody that doesn't always do that work work in your space. It's like when people who do marketing talk about SEO and lead generation and all these things that are tactics of marketing, but then take a step back and talk about Okay, well, how does how is marketing kind of like education or whatever, and you kind of step back and understand the lingo isn't like, the the strategy and the and the fundamentals behind what you're doing? So yeah,
Aaron Garner 23:52
that's right. Yeah, we all have different vocabulary, but we're all trying to do a similar thing. We're using our communication skills to improve something
Maria Esterline 24:03
who would like to talk about why do we use the Thrive Themes and building website I guess what made you as a team decide that was the
Aaron Garner 24:14
the best option, but I will leave that one to Cory because Cory has utilized thrive more than any of us I appreciate it what it does, but he knows more about it.
Cory Via 24:25
Definitely, definitely got to know very well. The biggest thing for thrive is it's a package that you can easily put on top of your, you know, WordPress instance, for example, that is conversion focused, every utility that thrive has in their suite is focused on conversion and integrates well with way. So they give you things out of the box that allow you to to get further if you want to or if you need to, or else you can use Using Malwarebytes. So just from the bare bones gives you the ability to build your theme for your whole website, not from scratch. But in terms of in their architecture from scratch, they give you the boilerplate for it, and it's really easy to get up and running. But in terms of, you know, marketing and conversion, they do a lot in terms of giving you content components to generate leads, they have nifty add ons like thrive quiz builder, that you can engage visitors in a totally different way. And it's a two way engagement. It's not just you showing a simple slideshow, it's, they have to interact with it or answer questions, or it's more engaging in a graceful way. I just think it's really cool how they built a suite of products that work together, that are all conversion purposes, you can chain them together, depending on ultimately what your goal is, it's just really cool how comprehensive it is, because you can build an entire website. Or you could just use some of its components like, then you can easily create a catalog of testimonial, for example. And those are just kind of in your database for usage or on your website. So really, honestly, it's just a great suite, I just found it easy to mold it to what we need for our clients at any given time.
Aaron Garner 26:31
I've never heard somebody else tried to describe it. There's a whole lot of plugins that are designed to work together in various different ways. It really does allow you to listen more, it allows you to receive more information, put together your website in a way that allows you to, you know, be more empathetic in the sense that you're trying to understand your client. And then understanding your client leads to conversion. So because you understand them better, you can create a website that works better for them. And you can potentially know more about the product that you need, that you're putting together and make that resonate with
Mark Wilhelm 27:10
almost every tool, if not every tool has the ability to do a split test built in which if someone is not immediately from a logical split tested, it's just the ability to say, Okay, well, here's one version of this element or this page, you will send a certain amount of visitors to this, this version, and a certain amount of visitors to a different version to see basically, which version does better. And that just, I think, goes back to looking at people's behavior to try to see as a way of trying to understand, okay, what are they looking for? And what, what version of what can what we can give them best matches what they're looking for. So it's just a really nice way to do to just continually do that too. Because even when you feel like, Okay, my webpage is good. Like I think it I think this is about as perfect as my I can make it, there's still an opportunity to go, well, let's try something different, or let's get somebody come in and give a different opinion. And we don't have to just guess we can run a test, you can show both versions and run a test and see, based on real data of real people what they're doing, we can see which one seems to be better for our audience. And you can continue to get to the bottom of what better actually is for our audience. Recording, we'd
Maria Esterline 28:35
like to end ours with a little Rapid Fire question. I'm going to say a series of words. And I just want you to kind of give me a word or word that comes to mind when I say these different words. So did you know what comes to mind when I say the word? Curious?
Cory Via 29:07
I would say people who are curious or not okay with the default answer. And you don't just accept what's presented or given you want to know, who did it. How did they do it? Where did it come from? How can I make it mine? How can I? How can I make it better? It's it's, it's the over under around like it's figuring out, you know, whether, whether you're going to do something with that information or not. You just build your knowledge base a little bit further. Great. How about creative? creative is, to me, it's just having original thought. You know, I hear a lot of people say like, I'm not a creative person. Like, I literally know you're a creative person, like you can sync an original thought, and you can put it down on some medium. I know you can. You don't have to feel like obviously Rembrandt or, you know, Ilan musk or whatever to feel like you are creative, they can take over the world or whatever. But you know, it's just having an original thought, just make something that is just from you is what that means to be resourceful. You know, when someone is resourceful, I feel like, they've got a bag of tools, you know, you and you can pull those tools out gracefully, you don't dig through your bag to find if you have something for and you say, I've got that and we pull it straight out, like Mary Poppins, you know. So it's, it's, it's just being able to gracefully pull those things out of your bag, with the situation's you're given. And also being honest with you, if you can't do it, like don't pretend like you're rifling around for the answer even just to be like, I just don't, I don't have a resource for that. But then you also need to, you know, put some effort beyond that to go find the resources that are truly empathetic toward what the person needs. How about brave, being brave, I think being brave requires willpower. You know, it's an overcoming it's a it's having courage, right? Like it's enduring your courage. And it's also being okay with the outcome is when you go into a situation where you need to be brave, you in a way you don't know what the outcome is. And you have to be courageous and say, I'm going to roll with the punches. But if you believe in something new, you will have more courageous endurance, is to be black and beautiful. and beautiful. Beauty is subjective. But you know, essentially equates to just feeling pleasure or being satisfied by what you see or experience. So beauty, you might default think that beauty means that something is aesthetic. But that's not true. You know, aesthetics is more of a visual, but beauty comes to the experience, the raw experience, whether that's how it looks, how it feels, how it reads. So really, it's just don't don't try to make Don't try to make something more beautiful than it is simply because beauty is subjective. Really, you just have to satisfy what the person's intention for what you're giving those I suppose. Know, show, show it for what it is and not what you think they want to see. Beautifully said. How can people get ahold of you? Cory? Probably LinkedIn is a good bet for me. I definitely like to connect with people professionally. So LinkedIn comm slash i n slash Cory by would be a good way to do so.
Aaron Garner 33:47
I really, really appreciate your time. Thank you, ally, Cory, and we appreciate you being a part of the team.
Cory Via 33:56
Absolutely. I love you guys. And this team is amazing. we all we all bring it to the table. That's for sure.
