The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Melissa McKenzie Dives Deep into Website Design and Squarespace Templates

Starting point is 00:00:00 You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast. The hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show. The preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready. Get ready. Strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times, because you're about to go on a monster education rollercoaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. It's Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. There you go, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the the big show We certainly appreciate you guys being here As always, we're bringing you the most smartest minds

Starting point is 00:00:47 The people that improve your lives and your quality of your lives With all their journeys, their stories of life and everything else Refer to the show to your family, friends and relatives Go to goodreads.com, Fortress Crispus LinkedIn.com, Fortress Crispus Crispus1, the TikTok, any of those crazy places on the internet Today, we're joined by Melissa McKenzie. She's a talented website developer and owner of Carbon and Clay.

Starting point is 00:01:11 She has made her mark with her budget-friendly Squarespace templates designed for service-based businesses infused with strategic insights that convert websites into 24-7 client generating machines. She's also a mom of five, runs her successful business in just a few hours a day. She'll share with us how you can transform your website from a static brochure into your best salesman in discussing essential elements for maximizing online presence. Welcome to the show, Melissa. How are you? I'm doing good. Thanks so much for having me.

Starting point is 00:01:48 There you go. Thanks for coming. We really appreciate it. Give us your.cos,.coms, wherever you want people to find you on the interwebs. You can find me at carbonandclay.co. Don't type in.com. It's not me.

Starting point is 00:02:00 And then on Instagram, we're on carbonandclay. There you go. Give us a 30,000 overview of what you guys do there at the company. Yeah. So I decided a few, about three and a half years ago, I was doing all website custom, custom website work. And I saw that there was a hole in the industry where there was a lot of service-based businesses that needed a website that worked for them,

Starting point is 00:02:25 but they didn't necessarily have the budget right off the start of their business to hire a web designer that was going to cost them $5,000 plus. So I got into the template game so that I can create affordable strategic websites for people that are just starting off or people that are not necessarily really like maybe they're shifting in their business and they know that they don't want to totally redo their site with a website designer and revisit it in a few years or six months so i started squarespace templates that bring all of that strategy to the template so you know what to put and where to put it on your website there you go and so what's let's lay a foundation. What is Squarespace?

Starting point is 00:03:08 Squarespace is a platform that you can build a website on. It's kind of like WordPress. There's a whole bunch out there, Wix, WordPress. Squarespace is one of them. And it's crazy how the website world has changed since college. It used to be all coding. And nowadays, anyone can make a website. All you have to do is put your content in and places like Squarespace or WordPress develops it for you. There you go. And so how did, and I just like to define these things because there's sometimes people out in the audience that don't fully understand how these things work. How do templates, these things that you work on and help people with, how do they work with the Squarespace?

Starting point is 00:03:50 So it just kind of speeds up the process. So not only is it a design that is designed by a designer, it looks good. It also helps you know what to put on each page so that you're really guiding the user to where you want them to go. Okay. So it kind of drops in there and basically kind of block builds a website for you. So you don't have to sit there and type out code or pay the $5,000 to have somebody type out a bunch of code.

Starting point is 00:04:16 It makes this drop play and you can put the different pieces in there and put it together. Yep. You swap out images, swap out the content to yours and can launch in hours there you go instead of you know waiting a year to build a website exactly yeah yeah and and it makes it so much easier plus the colors you know the colors and kind of the formats of how pictures and the the website and stuff. You can choose between all those different things. Now, do you guys have pre-built ones people can buy, or do you custom make them for each person?

Starting point is 00:04:52 We have pre-built ones. So that's what our shop is all about, the affordable Squarespace website templates. We also do done-for-you. So we can take one of our templates, and we can customize it for you. We still do custom website work, but a lot of our clients are finding that they don't necessarily need to spend $5,000

Starting point is 00:05:12 plus on a website and that the templates are exactly what they need. Ah, there you go. So if I'm out there in the audience going, I'm thinking about starting a business or I have a little business, what are the prospective people out there that might be good for doing this? If you are a service-based business, that's what our templates are kind of curated for. So it's meant to kind of display your services, give a summary of them, sales pages. It's perfect for the person who's either starting off or they want to maybe revamp their site. Maybe their site's like really old and they know it's maybe not mobile friendly or it's just outdated content. They have new offerings. It's going to be a really faster process to start with

Starting point is 00:05:58 a template than to kind of mess around with that on your own. There you go. And yeah, if you've got an older site, maybe it needs a little bit of updating. Maybe it's not too consumer-friendly. You know, sometimes have a nice lean landing page that's very clean and has the quick data on it. Sometimes that can be better, I think. Is that right? Oh yeah, absolutely.

Starting point is 00:06:22 I think that when you think about how you look at a website and how you experience them on your own if you lay it on a site that has like 16 gazillion links at the top you're just you're gonna exit out and you're gonna find somewhere else because it's just too overwhelming and so a simple navigation i like to say four to six links at the top and it really kind of helps people find the information they're looking for quickly. There you go. I mean, yeah, if people, if people, if there's too much there and it's overwhelming or there's too many options, you can have what they call, I guess, a high bounce rate. Is that right? Absolutely. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:07:00 And what does that mean? So the bounce rate is when someone is on your site and they are not looking at any of the other pages they are just exiting so if you have a high bounce rate it's not not great not great because they just they come in they go oh my god this looks like a mess i'm out bye see you yeah and usually they only have like seconds to capture people's attention and so that's why it's important to have you know a good look we do wordpress on our sites and you know we use templates i've had for all these years and they're so easy to use because you just you just drop them in and like you just change the titles and the fonts and stuff and maybe you do a little bit of editing but for the most part it's like boom and it you know you

Starting point is 00:07:45 about five seconds you can have a site that looks like a newspaper or you know a professional site or if it's a photography thing you can just drop it right in so it works really well would you recommend it for people that are you know a mom or pop or anybody out there who's thinking of you know maybe selling some stuff that they make or there's a lot of Etsy type people out there. Maybe there's service like coaching. There's a few coaches out there. Maybe a site for coaching would be good for some of the things that you're doing. Yeah. So we've had a lot of coaches that use our templates. They're great for coaches, influencers, great for digital product course creators.

Starting point is 00:08:27 Squarespace has its own e-commerce platform. So whether you have physical or digital products, it works really well for that. Podcasting, you can use the blog section and blog right within Squarespace. Etsy shop owners, it would be really great to have your own site. And the reason is because it's more SEO friendly. You can create content on your site to be searchable on Google. And people can find you not only through Etsy, but through things that your dream clients are searching for. There you go.

Starting point is 00:09:01 There you go. Yeah, you want to have a presence on the Internet. You've got to have your doorstop out there, your little platform out there so that people can find it and be part of it. And of course, you know, being able to quickly set up business, you just go to what, you know, GoDaddy or.com service provider and set up and off you go. So we'll circle back to this, but tell us how you got into this. What were some of the influences? What were the proponents that made you get into this online business? Well, I was kind of thrown into entrepreneurship just with life circumstances. I could not wait for that office job, wear my high heels to like a nice fancy office and then a week after I graduated with my graphic design degree I married my high school sweetheart and we got pregnant with twins right off the bat so I was looking for a way to stay at home with some income and this was you know prior to COVID there wasn't remote jobs like

Starting point is 00:10:01 there are today so I started with freelance graphic design, moved to branding, moved to website design, which I have a website design minor. And I never thought that I would want to do that because I'm not a big fan of coding, but it has changed so much, like I said, with the platforms that you can build on. And I really wanted to have control

Starting point is 00:10:26 over the way that people use their brand, not just hand them the elements and see them mess it up. So the website, I was like, this is a place that I can curate how their brand is used. And so I started doing custom website design. And then, like I said, three and a half years ago, I kind of of i was like you know what not everybody needs a custom site and they take forever so i was like i can just make a template and sell it again and again and that's how that's that's pretty good yeah and so now you guys really are in the deep business of making templates and then you kind of have i, I think, a hybrid where you can either buy just a flat template or you can have the customization done. You've got an online store for that.

Starting point is 00:11:13 Or you've got setups for online stores, local businesses, portfolios for photographers, restaurants. There's a lot of restaurants that really need freaking websites, man. It's amazing how many don't have them. It was worse before covid uh-huh yeah it was kind of like everyone's like oh crap i need a website yeah we need to be online because so we were in a business different service-based businesses personal ones courses there's a lot of people selling courses now i'm selling a course on how to sell a course of how to sell a course. Membership sites, so those are good as well. So you can build those out. And you can do everything on there. I think, do I recall rightly, does Squarespace help with make it really easy to do service processing of credit cards and things along those lines? Or do you have to use a third

Starting point is 00:11:59 party vendor for that? Yeah, they can hook up through third party like paypal and stripe but they also have their own processing and squarespace i love that it's like an all-in-one platform you can you can host your domain there so you can actually purchase your domain instead of going to go daddy or another third party you can do e-commerce through them bloggingging, whatever you need. It's just kind of like all in one. And now they're rolling out invoicing for clients. They have their own email marketing. So it's really kind of everything like a one-stop shop. Wow.

Starting point is 00:12:37 There you go. It makes it so much easier. You know, I came from the days of brick and mortar where you had to buy a license. And if you do anything with the involving state or local government or federal government, you had to get certain licenses and pay lots of money for them. And you had to buy an office and set it up. And you had to buy all the furniture. And then you had to cross your fingers and hope that you could have a successful business that would run. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:13:03 Like, I hope this makes a profit after all this money. Yeah. It's so easy to start a business nowadays. So little overhead to, to run an online business. Yep. It's, it's, it's so much different. It's like, I never thought I would sell stuff around the world and until online really came online and it was, it was so weird to be selling stuff to people in all the countries around the world. And I'm like, wow, I never saw this thing coming. I never saw the availability of stuff that was out there. It was just crazy. Now, so people can go on your website.

Starting point is 00:13:37 They can look at some of the different examples, I think, and samples of, or they can go into different, what is your site about? And they can guide you through how to build it, I guess. So our, I mean, the main page on their site is our shop for the templates. Yeah, there you go. They can also reach out if they wanted it done for them. A lot of times someone will think that they have the time or they have the capacity to start and then they're like, ah, I just want you to do it for me. So we see a lot of that too.

Starting point is 00:14:09 And because our process is just setting up the template for you, it's a lot cheaper than having someone custom make your site. And we do it in five days, actually. We start on a Monday, launch on a Friday, and it's all done for you. There you go. I was just going to ask you about that, the five day turnaround time so that you can take and do that. And you know, they can even,

Starting point is 00:14:30 they can, you can have a five page website set up ready to launch in five business days. That's pretty good. Yeah. We spent, we spent years developing our, our process to make it as streamlined as possible.

Starting point is 00:14:42 That's what you want. You, you know, you don't want to reinvent the wheel, man. And sometimes when you're starting a business, you know, time is really important. You know, you're spending money. You want to try and get that ROI turned around as quickly as possible so you can get that money back and get some profit going.

Starting point is 00:14:57 And so usually you don't have a lot of time to muck around with building websites and stuff. And you can do more than five pages if you want. You just work with you guys through that. So this is your two strategy sessions as well? Yeah, so we start on Monday with our strategy session, kind of get on the same page with the design, the content, make sure we have everything, the main goal of your website.

Starting point is 00:15:20 Obviously, that's different for each industry. And then on Friday, we have another strategy session where we teach you the back end a lot of times people will come from wordpress and be like i cannot manage my site i'm paying someone all the time to just switch out an image or add a page and then they switch to us and they're like that is so easy and they they never have to come back if they don't want to just easily can just easily switch it out themselves. So we teach you the back end on Friday and launch it together. There you go.

Starting point is 00:15:52 That's good to know is how to master what you're doing. So you've got training videos as well that can help people? Yeah. Each of our templates will come with a customization course, teach you how to switch out the images, make the brand colors and fonts your own, add pages, whatever you need to do. There you go. And then you make sure that it works for a design on any screen size, you know, mobile, you know, different variations. Like I have a 4K screen. Some people have a 1080p screen.

Starting point is 00:16:22 Some people have, I don't know, 720p. Does anybody have one though maybe on a laptop but yeah laptops and ipads and tablets and stuff so you guys make sure that it looks great no matter what what's being viewed on yeah and that's so important nowadays because when you think about how we use our phones like i'm checking email on my phone while i'm waiting for my food at a restaurant and when i click click over to a link, I'm on your site. And if I'm having to like pinch in and zoom in and then scroll over to read one sentence, people aren't going to do that. And so most of our traffic to our website, everyone's website is coming through mobile devices nowadays.

Starting point is 00:17:02 So it's super important to have that. You got to be mobile friendly. If it doesn't look good on the Androids and iPhones, it's, it's, you know, it's not going to sell as somebody. There's some people that I wrote me from one of my groups that I,

Starting point is 00:17:16 I give advice and I'd written a long post on the website version of Facebook. And they were yelling at me. They're like, you know how hard this is to read on a mobile phone? I was like, I don't care. Go read on a website. I heard that the generation, what are we on? Generation Z, X.

Starting point is 00:17:37 Yeah, there's Z. Most of them don't even have laptops or desktops anymore. It's crazy. Yeah. Well, that's what's wrong with this world. No, I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. It's actually, you know, why do we really, when you think about it?

Starting point is 00:17:51 Mainly I need a desktop because I'm old and I have to blow everything up to see what I'm reading anymore. But that or I have to get out my, that's my version of the old person's microscope or, you know, magnifying glass. What's that share? So there you go. You also have with copywriting. Tell us what copywriting is for those people who don't know and how you help with that.

Starting point is 00:18:16 Yeah, I see that one of the biggest struggles is they can't make their website look good. But two, they don't know what to put on each page. They don't know what pages they need. They don't know what goes on each page and they don't know how to make it sound good or get people to click on what they want them to click on. And so what I help with is I figure out the main goal of your website,

Starting point is 00:18:39 whether that's to get views on your sales page, contact you, free discovery call, whatever that is. And I help you create each of the pieces of content for each of your pages and help you write that in a way that's going to convert your traffic. Oh, nice. Yeah. Everything's about conversion. So you got to not have a high bounce rate.

Starting point is 00:19:02 You got to have people read your site. You do a call to action, get them to make that buying decision hit that buying button or whatever you got going on and off they go and so it sounds like it's a real streamlined process you have for people you can walk them through everything you can make it so they don't have to go through this huge thing where they have to learn you know spend hundreds of hours like you probably invested in this thousands maybe and you don't have to learn how to know, spend hundreds of hours like you probably invested in this, thousands maybe. And you don't have to learn how to do something new. You can just get right focused on what you want to focus on, selling your services, products,

Starting point is 00:19:34 wares, et cetera, et cetera. That is the goal. That's the goal. And then I guess if they sign up with you too, they get 20% off of Squarespace for the first, let's see, what is it, a year? Yep, the first year. There you go. That's a deal. So you can get a good deal.

Starting point is 00:19:52 I like how they make it all inclusive to where they will sell you the.com. You know, with us, we have everything in a million places. Yeah. The.com is over here and the website's over there. It's a crazy mess which we're just surprised the site keeps working no i've learned the hard way how to run these sites over 15 16 years and be really good because when they go down it's a real pain in the ass to get them back up yeah well it's it's so different too than it was 15 years ago so much easier than it used to be.

Starting point is 00:20:26 Oh, yeah. And things seem much more stable. For a long time there, I would like, let's update a plug-in. And then you're like, the site's down, and it's all broken. And we're like, hey, can we cover that? No. Yes. It was the crazy days back in the Wild West of all these site things.

Starting point is 00:20:43 But now things are much more balanced. What have we talked about that's just part of the work that you do and offering you you do to help people did you say what have we not talked about yeah what have we what have we missed that maybe we should flush out to potential customers out there for you i would just say that i would like to bust the myth that your website is just like a landing page to send people to or like a static brochure because our website can be converting our traffic into email subscribers. Email marketing is one of the biggest revenue generating things for a business, I would say, in my opinion. And we can be taking our organic traffic to our site and our paid traffic and capturing those email addresses in order to further nurture them for sales later on.

Starting point is 00:21:33 So I would say starting to think about your website in a way where it is actually working for you to gain leads and sales on autopilot because it doesn't have to sleep like we do like it's always running in the background so that's the that's the beautiful part about these websites is they can run 24 7 they can appeal to international clients etc etc yeah and we have if we have the right things in the right places we can easily lead them to the next step in the process yeah like i i've used templates forever and they just make things so much easier you can you just got this blank site you're just like oh god what do we got to do and i have no design skills i have zero

Starting point is 00:22:17 design skills i'm good at running businesses but when it comes to pretty i cannot do pretty at all i'm just i don't know i'm a guy but i've always you know my offices when we had lots of brick and mortar offices you'd walk into them and they were just like white walls and and just plain and we threw some pictures up every now and then but you know they're just boring but i would go i go into like really nice restaurants it's really cool office buildings and i and i and i see you know sometimes how people you know designers have come in or whatever they're just or maybe they just have a good eye and this is making stuff look good and I'm just always so jealous so if it wasn't for templates my websites would look

Starting point is 00:22:54 awful they'd just be like white and some stark black and probably no one would buy anything yeah I mean that first impression makes such a difference especially nowadays with how easy it is to make a site and how many sites are out there it's important to make sure that yours is memorable and they want to stay and it's impressive and it doesn't look homemade yeah and so you can drop in those pre-made templates and it's like you go from that black and white just kind of empty space of too much whiteness and all of a sudden boom it's oh wow it looks like a newspaper it looks like looks like some site we spent five thousand dollars on exactly boom yeah i'd buy from this thing and it just makes all the difference in the world so give us your final pitch out to people

Starting point is 00:23:43 and how they can onboard with you, how they can reach out to you, how they can find out how to do business with you. Anything else we miss, we haven't talked about, you want to plug? Yeah. So you can visit us at carbonandclay.co. You can visit the shop page with all of our templates there and view them. And I also have a coupon code for your listeners. If you type in chris 10 you can get 10 off of any of the website templates and then you can reach out to us on the contact page if you have any questions there you go chris 10 check that out folks and give us the dot coms i think you just did right but shoot us one more timeandclay.co and then we're on instagram

Starting point is 00:24:25 carbon and clay there you go and what do you do on instagram do you talk about kind of walk people what you do and and kind of do the the freemium version where you talk about how you do it and how you do it and why it's important things yeah we do a lot of behind the scenes we do a lot of tips and tricks hacks to make your to make people stay on your website longer, that kind of stuff. There you go. There you go. Show people how the thing works and the work that goes into it. Thank you very much Melissa for coming on the show. We really appreciate it.

Starting point is 00:24:54 Yeah, thanks so much for having me. There you go. And thanks to my audience for tuning in. Go to Goodreads.com, 4ChatsChristmas, LinkedIn.com, 4ChatsChristmas, Christmas 1, the TikTokity, and all those crazy places on the internet. Be good to each other. Stay safe. We'll see you next time.

The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Melissa McKenzie Dives Deep into Website Design and Squarespace Templates

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