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Hey, what is up?
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Welcome to this episode of the Wantrepreneur to Entrepreneur podcast.
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As always, I'm your host, brian LoFermento, and if there is one thing that we cannot ignore in any of our businesses but sometimes we like to pretend that we can ignore it it is our website, and that's why we've gone out and we found someone who not only is amazing when it comes to all things websites and website solutions that it actually works for your business, but this is somebody who, when we came across his work, we really loved and admired the fact that he says "'We don't just leave when your website is live.
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"'this is someone who really understands web solutions?
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"'to actually help you grow your business'".
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So let me tell you all about today's guest.
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His name is Caspar Vogt.
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As Plethora Design's founder, casper brings more than 20 years of proven expertise in solving design and technical problems, including conceptual and visual design, web design, web development, user interface design, web analytics and web applications development.
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So if you're thinking to yourself, I don't have any or many of those things, well, that's exactly why Casper is here today.
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His unique blend of skills and insights have helped countless organizations and companies build their web presence, and the cool thing for me is.
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Casper has done it across all different business sizes, all different types of businesses, industries.
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He's worked for Fortune 500 companies, ngos, government, education nonprofits, it companies, research and advocacy organizations, manufacturers, radio stations, TV personalities, startups.
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Whatever it is that you're telling yourself about, your business is different.
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Casper has probably come up with solutions for a business just like yours.
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He holds a Bachelor of Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Master of Architecture from Princeton University.
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He has worked across continents, across the Atlantic.
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He's based here in the United States right now, but I'm super excited for all of us to learn from him today.
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So I'm not gonna say anything else.
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Let's dive straight into my interview with Casper Vogt.
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All right, casper, I am so very excited that you're here with us today.
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First things first, welcome to the show and thank you for having me.
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Heck.
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Yes, Casper, we are going to learn a lot from you, because I do candidly feel like websites are things that we ignore a lot when it comes to growing our businesses.
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But before we get to that fun stuff, take us beyond the bio.
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Who's Casper?
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How'd you start doing all these amazing things?
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I have always had a problem solving mind, but also creative mind, and as a kid that got me into drawing and eventually into architecture.
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And that same mindset allowed me to make a lateral move into web development, which I've now done for a few decades.
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Yeah, Casper.
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When it comes to the term of web development, I feel like it's something that we've all heard of, but we don't understand what it encompasses.
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What are all those umbrellas and branches inside of web development?
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Oh, that's a very you're right, that's a very big overarching term.
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So when I say web development, that can include everything from the programming of what goes on behind the scenes to make the thing work, to the front end design, the interfacing with the marketing team, the search engine optimization, data management, information architecture, and that's just the top level stuff.
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Yeah, and even just thinking about the top level stuff, I would imagine that a lot of business owners are tuning into today's episode, thinking to themselves well, it sounds like you view a website as a more cornerstone piece of businesses, whereas a lot of business owners might think of their website as merely an online brochure.
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And it's just there, and it's something that people look at, and it is what it is.
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What's your view of it, casper?
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Because obviously you've worked behind the scenes in so many fun projects that fuel business growth.
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In your opinion, what is that function?
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What's that role?
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What are the goals of our business websites?
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So it is highly dependent on the business and the industry that the business is in.
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So, being in the DC area as I am, there are federal contractor type businesses who aren't necessarily trying to get new business online, but they need an online presence because if they're bidding on a federal contract, the contracting officer is going to double check their web presence and in that moment you want it to look good and be reflective of ticking all the right boxes, having the right credentials.
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So that's one scenario.
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A different scenario on the total opposite end, is e-commerce site selling consumer products, and then you're going to want to focus heavily on SEO and user friendliness, getting the customer from selecting an item all the way to checking out with a minimum amount of friction.
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Yeah, hearing you talk about that first scenario, casper, I want to really point that out and hammer that point home for listeners, because we're talking about credibility.
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Is that?
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I mean, you're spot on.
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Even when I'm looking for a sushi place, I will go on their website because that will give me clues as to are they still in business?
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Are they a legitimate business?
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Do they take pride in what it is that they do?
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I'm a big subscriber to the belief that how you do anything is how you do everything.
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If I go to a restaurant's website and it's terrible or it looks like it was built in the year 1999 or the footer says copyright 2017, I question that website for myself.
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So, casper, I love that you're bringing that to the forefront here in today's conversation about the credibility component of it, especially in the government contracting space, I would imagine that's so important.
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What are those pieces of credibility or checkboxes that we, as consumers or contracts or government, whoever it is that we might be doing business with?
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What are those checkboxes that you think that people are looking for when they go to a website?
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that you think that people are looking for when they go to a website.
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So the ideal thing is that someone lands on the homepage and the homepage will tell them within a split second what this organization or company is and does, because that's the number one thing people are asking.
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Beyond that, if they stick around, if you've convinced the user to stay on the page, having some kind of about us page, maybe with a team, and then, depending on the size of your company, that might mean just the leadership or it might mean a team of dozens mean just the leadership, or it might mean a team of dozens.
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And in a lot of cases, you only want to show the leadership rather than making yourself look bigger than you actually are.
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And that's a decision that has to be made during the design process, because it's a question of the tail wagging the dog kind of thing.
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What kind of opportunities are you trying to pursue and do you want to?
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How big are you trying to look?
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You know what kind of business are you going for and that can drive.
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that can drive the messaging yeah, casper, all right, you introduced us to the design process, I would argue.
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Just interacting with as many listeners as I do on a weekly basis.
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A lot of people, too many people, dare I say go to Wixcom or they sign up for GoDaddy's website creator and they just use a built-in template, casper, and they fill in the blanks, they replace the sample copy with their copy and that's their entire process, which, of course, that's not very much of a process.
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Walk us through what an actual website process looks like, because it's clear that you've got strategy and intentionality behind it.
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You're already introducing us to the technical components of it.
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Now you're talking about the messaging components of it.
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What does that overarching process look like?
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Yeah.
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So at the most basic level, there has to be an ideation phase, thinking about what is the message you're trying to get out, who are you trying to reach?
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Who is your target demographic?
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That could even take the form of thinking about personas, two or three types of people that you're trying to reach, and then building messaging around them.
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Those could be different kinds of people, which might result in certain information being presented in different ways on the site, so you might get content shown above the fold, at the top of the page, in one way and then, as you scroll down, you get it again, but presented a different way, and they're targeting different users.
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That's just an example.
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That's done in mockups and that can be done in Figma or Canva.
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Even we don't use Canva, but we used to do that in Photoshop.
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Once those are decided on, agreed upon, then the website gets built In shorter development timelines.
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We just build directly in the website.
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Even In our case, in WordPress, we have customers that use Wix or started with Wix and then outgrew that.
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So it's a perfectly valid approach to start in Wix and then realize, okay, this isn't working for me anymore and I need some help, and then realize, okay, this isn't working for me anymore and I need some help, and so that's where we come in.
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Yeah, let's go there because it is one of the most asked about topics here behind the scenes at this show, and I think in any and all entrepreneurial conversation, people look at the tools that will help them succeed, and we're fortunate.
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You rattled off just a few tools that are very helpful for us when it comes to developing and launching our websites into the world.
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Wordpress Obviously it is probably the biggest player when it comes to content management systems on the internet.
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Great thing is it's open source, so it is free with regards to our ability to use it.
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It's flexible because it has plugins.
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Talk to us about that landscape with so many choices, casper.
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I know that you personally work with WordPress.
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What is it about WordPress that makes it a great platform for so many businesses?
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It's free and hosting it starts off very cheap For bigger sites.
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You'll want to invest in better hosting, but you can.
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Bigger sites you'll want to invest in better hosting, but you can.
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For the price of a domain at 12 to $15 a year and hosting at maybe four or five bucks a month, you've got yourself a website and there are commercial templates out there that allow you to very quickly get a site up and running.
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Where people get in trouble in terms of lack of experience building sites is when you try to customize some of those templates.
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If it's not quite what you want and you want to change it, that can become a real time suck.
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So we have a different approach.
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We tend not to use commercial themes.
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We use custom themes and that way we know exactly how it's built and how to adjust it for whatever comes up are in there, for example, a lot of people.
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It kind of is that age old question.
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We have this conversation with regards to websites.
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We have this conversation with regards to brand.
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Is the visuals coming to life versus the intentionality, the strategy behind those visuals, casper, how much effort do you put into or how much importance?
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I guess is what I want to ask how much importance do you put into first figuring out the visuals versus first figuring out?
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What is it that we're trying to do here?
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Because I'm guilty, I'll use myself as a terrible example here of yeah, I find a WordPress template that I like or a theme in WordPress world and I say, ok, I can start to see how that would fit my business and I start making my business fit into that theme.
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Of course, it's a little bit of the chicken or the egg.
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What's your approach on design versus content?
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yeah, it's a form follows function, uh, the kind of chicken and egg scenario, and I think function has to come first.
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Um, of course and I've I've been guilty of this too it's um enticing to have a vision of how you want it to look a particular way and then build that and then fill in the text later, and there is a trade-off there.
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It's okay if you have both of those going on at the same time, but it's important to have the function defined, have the function defined, the messaging defined, and don't lose sight of that, don't let the design drive.
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Yeah, Casper, it's fun for me talking to you here today.
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Just having gone as deep as I have into the work that you do, I know that for you, a website isn't just an isolated thing in our businesses.
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Your work touches on APIs, integrations, data, all of these things that transcend just what the end consumer sees when they type in a URL into their address bar.
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Talk to us about that back end of the websites.
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I feel like even as much as we ignore the front end, the back end gets even less love from most business owners.
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What is it that excites you and what are those scenarios and use cases for integrating APIs and data integrations into that back end?
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Well, I'll give you an example.
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Just before this call, I was on a call with a customer who has multiple brands of kitchen equipment I won't say their name, but if you work in that space, you'll recognize their equipment from commercial kitchens and they have service providers that they want showing on the various websites and we're talking hundreds of service providers all around the world and that data gets imported into one of their websites, but we have four or five other ones that we want to show that data on.
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So I've been working with them to set up a feed on their one site where they import the source data.
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That has an API that they have some developers working on and I'm coordinating on, and then we import that data into those four plus other sites, so that it's one source to many and it's an elegant setup, so we don't have to come up with multiple ways of getting the same thing done across those four sites.
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It's a scalable solution.
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So that's something I really love about apis yeah, and for us behind the scenes, this podcast podcast listeners will realize that they already see a website that's powered by integrations our podcast website.
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When new episodes air, it pulls from those RSS feeds.
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It pulls from our YouTube feed to pull in the corresponding videos and match them up with our episodes.
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So lots of cool things that are possible with tech.
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Casper, I want to ask you about AI, because when we're talking about APIs and integrations and all the technology that powers things behind the scenes and making sense of all of this data that we have our hands on, everyone wants to talk about AI and the impact in all areas of our business.
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What's your take on how AI is affecting front-end web design, how it's affecting the way that websites show up for end consumers and, of course, the back-end as well?
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Yeah, I think it's somewhat early days in terms of its impact.
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I've played with it myself some, so, for example, besides WordPress, we do some work with Drupal.
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For many years, drupal is my only thing and I needed to build a custom Drupal module, so I use ChatGPT to generate most of it.
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At that time ChatGPT was using data from the web.
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That's a year or two old, but it got me a module set of custom code that was 90 something percent there and the rest of it I could get it there.
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So it saved me probably six hours of work.
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And another example was Photoshop when they introduced neural network.
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The month before that, I had the task of removing somebody from a photograph a team photo that was going to go on the website.
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Well, it took me three hours to do it with Photoshop.
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Month later, neural network came out and you can just remove the object in one click.
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So it's just having impact that way.
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But in terms of web design, simple designs are becoming possible with AI.
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You can tell that, hey, here's the kind of site that I want.
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I want it to kind of look like this site over here.
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Give it the URL, you can stand up a basic site fairly easily like that.
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Once it gets beyond that you're still in the realm of, you need a human brain and maybe a team, and maybe you're the business owner and stakeholders involved making those decisions.
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I think ai won't be doing that anytime soon yeah, really well said and I really appreciate that real life perspective in those use cases.
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You're absolutely spot on.
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Things are so much faster.
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What you use as an example for photoshop removing things, the fact that on our new iphones we can just do that built in inside the photos app it's absolutely incredible what ai is enabling end users to do.
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Casper, I taught my parents pretty recently how to remove things from images, and now they are just able to do it without any assistance from anyone else.
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So it's really cool how it is filling in that gap of all these highly technical skills that were difficult to do beforehand, and now it's truly in the fingertips of every single end user.
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So really appreciate those insights.
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Casper, I want to ask you about the analytics backend of websites, because my first business was a blog, so content was literally our business.
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I became a massive fan of Google Analytics, to the point where I would argue that every single website on the internet should have Google Analytics Listeners.
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It's free.
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There's no reason not to have it.
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But, casper, talk to us about the importance of the analytics backend.
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Is Google Analytics enough?
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What's the importance of it?
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How do you hope that business owners and website owners use Google Analytics, or what's that broader landscape of the analytics?
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backend.
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Yeah, sure.
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So Google Analytics is still a staple.
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Almost all our customers have that on their on their websites.
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Last year, google Analytics Universal Analytics got replaced by GA for Google Analytics, for which was a really big change.
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Certain things are not recorded exactly the same way.
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Some people saw drops in traffic and the reporting really big change.
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Certain things are not recorded exactly the same way.
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Some people saw drops in traffic and the reporting dashboards and analytics are lacking in some regard in terms of the level of detail that a lot of people would like.
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So the biggest thing that I can recommend for people using Google Analytics, which is probably most people, is to think about using Looker Studio, which allows you to build custom dashboards that import Google Analytics data.
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It also can work with other data, but this allows you to define custom dimensions and events in Google Analytics, which you then show in a Looker Studio report for much more fine-grained reporting.
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That's the big takeaway on that.
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The other one is for people who don't want to give their data to Google.
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There's an open source alternative called PWIK P-I-W-I-K, which does a similar thing and it runs just on your server.
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It doesn't send data to the cloud.
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Yeah, I love that.
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Casper, drop in some real life tools that you're actually using behind the scenes.
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I know how excited that's going to get listeners.
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I've absolutely written down Looker Studio.
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I'm going to look that up for dashboards, because having that data that not only I can see but that the entire team can see.
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We always talk about the importance of KPIs in business.
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What you measure is what you manage, and I think that it's important for all of us to be taking constant inventory of those metrics in our businesses.
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So really appreciate that real-life example.
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I want to switch gears a little bit and talk about the way that you do business.
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Sorry, go ahead.
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I have one item to add to that Google Tag Manager.
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So for small sites, just starting out, embedding Google Analytics on your site is just fine, but as you grow, you're going to start placing pixels, tracking pixels on your page, linkedin, facebook, whatever At a certain point.
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You don't want to have to bug a developer every time that you want to do that, so you could start off using Google Tag Manager, putting your analytics in there and then giving your marketing people access to that so they don't have to bug a developer, and that can help you scale.
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Yeah, I love that, which it's a perfect segue, casper, for what I'm excited to talk to you about, because you talk about the ongoing need for a developer, and it's something that stood out to us when we first came across your work and your business.
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What you do with Plethora is that it's actually right there at the top of your website.
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You say a lot of your customers have been with you for more than 15 years, casper.
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That's a testament to service.
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It's a testament to quality.
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It's a testament to relationships.
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Talk to us about that ongoing need of a relationship and how you support people, because once our website's live, it's the beginning of the journey, it's not the end.
00:22:04.325 --> 00:22:09.692
Talk to us about those ongoing needs and support that customers have when it comes to their websites.
00:22:12.059 --> 00:22:15.790
Websites go through cycles and they require maintenance.
00:22:15.790 --> 00:22:25.529
Wordpress plugins have security updates all the time and if you're not on top of those, you open yourself up to the possibility of getting hacked.
00:22:25.529 --> 00:22:30.569
Recovering from a hack is a whole other mess.
00:22:30.569 --> 00:22:33.446
It's much more work than just keeping up with the maintenance.
00:22:33.446 --> 00:22:43.093
Aside from that, and as the business changes, grows, the site has to keep up with that.
00:22:43.093 --> 00:22:52.194
Or the site might be used as a way to go for new business and to try to bring in new business.
00:22:52.194 --> 00:22:58.251
So it could be aspirational or it could be just reflective of what the business is already doing.
00:22:58.251 --> 00:23:04.705
So it has to be kept in sync in that way, and that's what we do.
00:23:04.705 --> 00:23:12.307
Long-term, we stay with customers for years and years and eventually a site has to be redesigned.
00:23:12.307 --> 00:23:24.626
Once it gets to four, maybe five years at the most, typically sites will want to undergo a redesign, cause at that point it just doesn't make sense to keep tinkering with the existing.
00:23:24.626 --> 00:23:26.050
That's what I found.
00:23:26.913 --> 00:23:31.392
Yeah, and I think it's important to call that out, because a lot of people just set it and forget it when it comes to their website.
00:23:31.392 --> 00:23:39.231
I love the fact that you're a web designer and developer and also you maintain these back ends, but you're clearly calling out hey, the lifespan of a website isn't infinite.
00:23:39.231 --> 00:23:41.847
It's going to look completely outdated 10 years from now.
00:23:41.847 --> 00:23:57.462
Talk to us about some of those trends, because I feel like, whether we look at Apple and the design trends that they push forward, whether we go to all rounded edges for a while and then we go back to square edges, what are some of those timely design trends that you see that we should be paying attention to?
00:23:57.462 --> 00:24:12.554
And, casper, because I want to load you up with a very difficult loaded question what are also some of those timeless things that you've just found are best practices when it comes to design that we can always bank on, those being relevant as we flesh out our end user interface?
00:24:14.599 --> 00:24:17.406
Yeah, sure, I think you know.
00:24:17.406 --> 00:24:19.132
If I think about design trends, we can all.
00:24:19.132 --> 00:24:25.153
Some of us might remember the design trends of the late 90s, early 2000s with animated GIFs.
00:24:25.153 --> 00:24:31.992
There was a period of time where people would load background sound.
00:24:31.992 --> 00:24:34.827
Well, that's not done anymore, that's frowned upon.
00:24:37.681 --> 00:24:46.654
In the pre-Web 2.0 period there was a heavy focus on getting all your content above the fold so people don't have to scroll.
00:24:46.654 --> 00:24:48.986
That's kind of over.
00:24:48.986 --> 00:25:07.685
For the previous couple years, five years or so, web design has been fine with scrolling, going to the point of having all your content on one long scrolling page where the menu changes as you scroll one-page app type situations.
00:25:07.685 --> 00:25:15.813
I find that's going away a little bit again and I personally never really subscribed to that kind of design.
00:25:15.813 --> 00:25:39.971
And then the more timeless speaking of the more timeless design elements I would say for Western countries that read left to right, there's an F pattern where you start reading at the top left and you scan to the right and then you scan back to the left and you scan to the right again and then back down and then down the page.
00:25:40.839 --> 00:25:47.208
So that's why, typically, you've got the logo in the top left menu, to the right of that everything else down below.
00:25:47.208 --> 00:26:14.684
Um, there's been a trend away from sliders, uh banners with multiple images that change Um, and I think that's been a positive thing because it forces you to decide what is part of me, it forces you to decide what's important, um, to commit to an idea, to the main message you want to have out there.
00:26:14.684 --> 00:26:18.133
Um, yeah, I'll stop there.
00:26:18.760 --> 00:26:21.730
Yeah, I'm so grateful that you introduced us to F patterns.
00:26:21.730 --> 00:26:38.584
I listeners, if you've never seen the F patterns that Casper is talking to us about today, go to Google images and just search website heat map, F pattern and it'll show you literally the ways that the human eye in the Western world, where we read left to right, as Casper pointed out it'll show you where the attention is.
00:26:38.584 --> 00:26:43.513
Then compare that to your website and say are those the elements that I want people to see?
00:26:43.513 --> 00:26:52.227
And, Casper, I love all the considerations that you just shared with us, because even sliders I'm so grateful for the death of sliders for autoplay videos with sound.
00:26:52.227 --> 00:27:04.487
I'm grateful for all of these positive enhancements in the user experience across the web, because these are things that really it's become more difficult as we're all using so many different devices.
00:27:04.547 --> 00:27:05.612
I'm talking to you right now.
00:27:05.612 --> 00:27:08.260
I've got an ultra wide curved monitor.
00:27:08.260 --> 00:27:17.112
The way that things show up there is drastically different from the way it shows up on my phone or my laptop or Apple Vision Pro, If we want to go into augmented reality.
00:27:17.112 --> 00:27:19.102
There's so many different platforms.
00:27:19.102 --> 00:27:30.276
With that in mind, how do you, from a strategic standpoint and a development standpoint, how do you imagine the landscape of getting this stuff to work across all these platforms.
00:27:30.276 --> 00:27:37.031
We could talk about different smartphones, we could talk about augmented reality platforms coming to light, different screen sizes.
00:27:37.031 --> 00:27:40.770
How the heck are you making sense of it and making it work across the board, Casper?
00:27:41.501 --> 00:27:43.667
is how the heck are you making sense of it and making it work across the board, casper?
