Brewery Websites, How To Better Navigate The Design Process

Episode Overview

A website is one of the most essential components of a marketing strategy, but building one can be downright painful. So how can you better navigate the process?

We're joined by website expert Marcus Ohanesian, Founder of Perfect Evolution, to discuss website design and how to better plan for the process yourself. Marcus has over a decade of experience building websites and has lots of experience working with breweries too.

So whether you're shopping for website builders right now, planning to DIY, or considering a redesign, this podcast will be super helpful.

And if you want to get in touch with Marcus and his website design company, head over to www.perfectevolution.xyz

Episode Transcript

(AI-Generated, please forgive any typos)

[00:00:00] Chris: Hello, and welcome to the get optimized podcast. This is your host, Chris. And this is a show all about. Marketing and growth in the craft peer industry. Now, one thing that's going to help you grow is a website. And if you have built a website before, you've probably cringed a little bit. Maybe you've got some PTSD from the process.

Maybe you've spent a ton of money. Maybe you've tried to do it yourself. Maybe you were thinking about building a website. Well, I'm sure you have tons of questions. And I always have questions when it comes to this stuff. And who better to answer? To ask than someone who does this stuff all the time. So today we have brought on A good friend of mine and colleague from he's the owner of perfect evolution His name is marcus and he's a really really cool dude.

In fact, he used to play the drums I think he still plays the drums as a hobby. So he's like the coolest dude ever And he has connections to the brewery industry he's built websites for breweries and lots of other businesses and he's been doing it for like A decade. So he knows lots of how, about how this stuff works.

And, , I think he's going to be able to provide some insight for you, whether you are redesigning, launching, or just, you know, considering, , doing some stuff with your website. This is going to be an educational experience for you. And I tell you what, if you get some value out of this. Interview out of this discussion out of this podcast, please do me a favor, send it to somebody, you know, that you think will get some value from it too.

It doesn't even matter if they're in the beer industry. This can be a good episode regardless. So without any more delay, let's get you into the interview and enjoy it. What is up, welcome to the get optimized podcast. I have Marcus Ohanishian here. He is the dopest dude from perfect evolution. We're going to talk about websites and all sorts of things.

But before we get into that, what is up Marcus? Good to talk to you, man. Hello. 

[00:02:15] Marcus: Hello. Thanks for having me here. This is nice to reconnect with you. And I know we've chatted in the past about multiple different things and projects and stuff. So it's nice to be on this platform with you. Yeah. 

[00:02:24] Chris: You know, , when I reached out to you, I was like, Man, why have we not done a podcast yet?

You know, we've, we've talked for so long. We, we've kind of collabed a bit on a bunch of different things and sent, you know, information back and forth, projects back and forth. And it's like, d, we should be talking about this, , on the show. Cause I know people have questions about websites. So thank you for.

For, , being down 

[00:02:46] Marcus: my pleasure coming. I'm an open book and as I'm sure some people may or may not know, I'm more than happy to talk websites all day long, all night long, help you out as much as I can. So I'm here for it. You know, 

[00:02:59] Chris: absolutely. Absolutely. Do a great job with it too. So I mean, I guess let's start there.

Let's understand who you are. Give us a little background on, on who is Marcus and, and, , what is perfect evolution. And we'll, and we'll go from there. 

[00:03:11] Marcus: Yeah, for sure. So. I'm, , I'm over in, , sunny today, Massachusetts, central Massachusetts. Um, Perfect Evolution is my design agency. So I come from a graphic design, web design background, went to school for it, all that stuff.

That's sort of what started it as a freelance gig, essentially. Um, now we've grown into about, , six developers, myself, a project manager, , as well. And yeah, my background is I play drums. I've been a drummer since I was seven years old. Um, so I've been in and out of bands, gone on tour with bands, all that sort of music industry background, which.

Seems pretty common nowadays. I'm seeing more of like the musician turned web designer slash web developer. Um, so that's what kind of brought me into web design and development initially when I was maybe 18, 19 years old, , building sites back in the day, in the late 1990s, early 2000s on AngelFire and using Dreamweaver.

And when Flash was cool, , or existed at that point. Um, so I'm dating myself, but yeah, coding websites, , by hand and notepad, you know, and remembering to close the tags properly. Um, so that was my amateur web development days. Um, and yeah, we, , Perfect Evolution is a, , a design and development agency.

, we focus on branding and logo design. , for craft breweries, , also for some nonprofits and some other, , niches and industries. And then our other core focus is web design and development. , and that's either for WordPress for non e commerce sort of marketing brochure websites, and then Shopify for any e commerce websites.

So we've done full build projects. We've done monthly retainers and care plans and things like that for, , both of the, both of the platforms there. So those are our core focuses. Um, and then kind of on a side of perfect evolution, , I've worked with a brewery here in Massachusetts to sort of help, , start them from the ground up with branding, merchandise, website design, um, Canon label, , Canon bottle label design, that sort of stuff.

Um, so my wife's actually the taproom manager over there. I'm sort of the, . In term, , marketing manager, we'll call it, , and book some of the live music with my live music background. So, um, that's my sort of pet project and very close to home, , that we're called Timberyard Brewing. It's out in East Brookfield, Massachusetts.

If you're familiar, it's maybe like 10 to 15 minutes from tree house. , since that's sort of the common brewery that most people know our location. So, , I have the craft brewery experience and I also have sort of the design and website and development experience. 

[00:05:32] Chris: Excellent, man. That's, that's, you know, again, why I'm excited to talk to you because you have the experience in the craft brewery and craft beer space.

And it's a little bit different of a monster, you know, um, you know, before I got involved with this industry. I did a lot of different things, you know, a lot of like corporate business services for lawyers, accountants, I've done, , you know, , emergency, you know, plumbing services, roofing services, all kinds of different things.

Um, e com, tons of e com and it's like, okay, you know, when you come into the. The beer industry, it's like, you know, you're dealing with local businesses, you're dealing with a totally different environment. There's a little bit of everything in there. Sometimes e commerce, sometimes, you know, obviously social and all that stuff as well.

But, um, I mean, what do you find is, is like some of the big differences between websites in the beer space and craft brew space versus all the other stuff that's, that's out there. 

[00:06:31] Marcus: Yeah. What I'm starting to notice, , the more and more that I'm diving into it is every brewery has their own, , e commerce strategy or just a online presence strategy, not even just e commerce.

So everyone's architecture is different. So some breweries just have a marketing brochure site. They might have like an events calendar for their taproom events. Obviously their beer lists that may be pulling in from like untapped or something. Um, but there isn't like an e commerce component. Maybe they don't have like a merch store set up yet.

And then depending on the state and obviously all the alcohol laws and stuff like that, some breweries obviously have a fully built out website with everything and also, , an e commerce component where you can buy merchandise, but you can maybe also buy a four pack or some bottles and they'll ship it to you.

Um, so it really runs the gamut of like, A very small square space website. That's just like a five page marketing brochure site all the way to a fully built out Shopify site that has e commerce, but also has the other static content, like the beers and the, about the tap room and the contact and all that, all those pages.

So it's kind of all over the place. And it really depends on who the brewery is, kind of where you're at right now within your, you know, your space, um, and kind of what you're. What your scalability is, you know, 

[00:07:40] Chris: kind of where you want to go. It's so different, you know, it's a combination of things. Cause you're like, you just don't always need just the brochure site, or you don't want only like a heavy e commerce site that's really designed for, you know.

Thousands of SKUs or hundreds of SKUs or whatever. So you have to have this blending of the two to, to make it work, , in some cases, and I really want to ask you about DTC actually, and I'm going to take this tangent right now because this is relevant, um, I, I think that DTC is going to be super important over the next couple of years when it comes to beer, , it seems to me like every sign is pointing towards craft beer being like wine eventually with the legislation.

Passing and things. I mean, , how do you see that? You do a lot of e commerce stuff. Some breweries in some states allow it now, not everywhere though. Like, are you seeing some of the same things? Are you seeing this evolution towards more DTC and e commerce purchasing? I mean, what's kind of your, your vibe on that front?

[00:08:45] Marcus: Yeah, I'm all in on DTC side of things, you know, not even, you know, it's, it's a buzz term, but it's really like where everyone should be leaning in the most and for multiple reasons. Um, so one, obviously, you know, with the laws and if you're permitted to do it, you should be doing it online. And if you're not, , let's talk, I'll help you.

, let's get you going on that because you need to be. Um, If you're allowed to be, um, and it's super easy. Like Shopify is one of the easiest e commerce platforms to get up and running. You don't even need a web agency like us to help you. Like you can literally just get set up, pay the monthly fee, spin up a theme, customize it, match the branding and colors, all that, get it going and start selling immediately within like.

Two weeks, probably not even. Um, the, the main thing obviously is to like dial in your shipping costs, right? And the things that happen from like an operational standpoint. So you can have a pretty website, make it look nice and on brand and everything for your brewery and have nice product photography and all that great stuff.

Um, but once the customer places the order, then the real magic should happen. So everything that happens, basically when the customer places the order on your website, all the way to it, arriving on the front door. Making sure that a, your profit margins built in, make sure you're charging the right amount of shipping, making sure it's easy for them in the checkout process to pick what shipping, um, tier that they want.

Um, if you're offering that, or maybe you're offering free shipping as like a promo, you know, , and you're building that into your price somehow. So there's lots of different strategies you can go down, but I think the shipping and the fulfillment side of it, , is one side, because obviously when e commerce orders start.

hopefully flooding your inbox, you're going to have to have someone in your tap room or your brew house or whatever fulfilling those orders. Printing out the packing label slip, getting the right size box, how are you packing it, stuffing it, making sure that things aren't breaking in the process, whether it's a glass bottle or you're packing the cans properly, um, You know, and there's lots of shipping boxes out there that you can invest in.

Um, so that's one component. The other side of it is really just from an ownership perspective. So think of this as like, there's a lot of brands on Amazon, for example, that are crushing it, right? And I know this isn't graph related, but there's a lot of e commerce brands on Amazon. And that's great. It's a sales channel is Amazon, but everyone should be owning your website as your DTC hub, your source of truth, your master kind of streamlined view of everything.

And that way you can own your email addresses essentially. So it's similar to relying on Facebook or Instagram, right? And you don't have a website, why would you do that? Like you don't have access to those, your customers email addresses or the people that will eventually buy from you. So the point is, get them on your website.

Obviously get an email list built up, grab their emails from that, offer a 10% discount on their first order or something like that. But now you own that data. So you have full control of your messaging, your marketing, um, your targeting of marketing, which is right up your alley, Chris, like, that's super important to kind of own that data, um, with email addresses.

So having your own D2C site, you're getting all that data right in Shopify, you're able to take that. Send it into Klaviyo, for example, an email marketing platform and start doing segmented marketing based off of what they bought or what they clicked on, or you start tracking all this data. And now you're making these data driven decisions, which are hugely impactful, um, more than just spinning up a website, getting it up there, , and then hoping that SEO and Google kind of finds you and seeing, you know, hoping for the best kind of thing.

[00:12:15] Chris: Yeah. And that's really where I'm so excited about the DTC thing because so much of what we do marketing wise for, for breweries and really like you could apply this to any local business, right? If you're selling stuff onsite is your primary revenue stream. It's extremely difficult to measure directly measure ROI from advertising and organics influencers and all this stuff that happens at the top of the funnel and then try to tie those things together.

From a very strict data perspective is really tricky and it's loose, you know? And like for as a data guy myself, I'm sure you think the same way too. It's like, I want to see the lines. I want to know if we spend X, we get Y. And I want to know how much it costs us to get those, get those sales. But with e com, when you put DTC in there, it's like the lines become instantly clear.

And there's all this, all this work that's been done for the last. Almost decade now with people figuring out how to, how to optimize these channels with e commerce, and this is just going to explode for craft beer. And the website is a huge hub of it. It fuels your email marketing, everything, man. So I'm really glad to hear you say that because I feel the exact same way.

[00:13:23] Marcus: Yeah. Yeah. And I know there, there are some breweries that are doing this and they're doing it well and they're sort of, , putting their, their foot forward on it, you know, but I know that there's a, , a good handful of breweries that aren't, you know, and they're leaning into, , the social media side of it more and stuff and, you know, it's fine.

It's whatever you want to do. It's wherever you're, you want to put your marketing dollars, if you even have marketing dollars, depending on your size. Right. Um, so it really depends, but there's, you know, , tons of opportunity, , with having your own DTC e commerce site specifically. 

[00:13:55] Chris: So much opportunity and, , man, we could do a whole thing on DTC and maybe we should do that.

We should, , figure out, I know some dudes, , that are part of like, I forget, I can't remember the name right now, but that are part of the, , like regulations for shipping and stuff like that. It would be cool to have a conversation all about that. Um, So anyways, backing back out here. So tangent, tangent made, let's come back here to, to ground level, , and talk about like, okay, let's say you're a brewery that's looking for a new website or you are looking to refresh, um, from your perspective, how do you begin that process?

How do you go about like understanding what do you need? How many bells and whistles should you care about? What should you care about when it comes to your website? If, if you're a brewery looking for, for this for the first time or to revamp. 

[00:14:43] Marcus: Yeah. So even if you are revamping, it's obviously a good time to reset, you know, and really evaluate your goals and needs and functionality and features and all that stuff.

So we always start with a questionnaire, , online. So it's, , not super comprehensive. It's, you know, it'll take maybe five, 10 minutes for the client to do it. Um, but it really talks about their goals, right? What their, why we're even having the conversation in the first place to redesign and redevelop it.

Um, and what were their pain points that brought them to this point, right? There's obviously something that was not going. Right. Whether it doesn't look good or they're not getting enough conversions or submissions or orders, whatever it may be. Um, so we always start with the Y right. And then we'll dial into the functionality because that's really the hardest part.

That's really what takes up the development hours, , or integrating a third party app or tool, um, to kind of take care of that. So, um, I'm going to stay. High level and generalize here because obviously it's super specific depending on the website design. Um, but then we'll dive in last to the design. So yes, we obviously want the website to look nice, look slick, clean, pretty, whatever your branding says, and your messaging and your tone and all that.

But. We can always put a fresh coat of paint on any website. We can obviously customize the CSS and all that sort of stuff, um, with whatever theme you're picking, you know. Um, so we always start with the questionnaire and that kind of gives us some good discussion points. So then we'll hop on to Zoom after and we'll pretty much just kind of talk through their answers, um, and kind of ask and, you know, poke and prod a little bit more of like, Why did you say this?

Or let's pull up these couple websites that you, you liked for inspiration. And you mentioned you like this little feature of it. Okay. Let's talk about that. And now we're starting to dial it in and kind of filter it down a little bit to say, okay, they don't want this and they want this. So now we can start to build the scope of work around that.

To know how much of our budget and time investment there will be there. Um, we sort of have a templatized process to some extent, , but obviously there's some flexibility in the way there, depending on the brewery. Um, and again, it depends on WordPress versus Shopify. Um, but really we start with that and then we can kind of dial it in.

Um, and that obviously determines the timeline too, as well as costs and budget and all 

[00:16:50] Chris: that stuff. I think this process to go through it is super important. And I've done this throughout my career where I want to skip it, right? The client wants to skip it. I want to skip it. I want to get things going as quickly as possible and just, you know, maybe reduce hours on the project, save some money or whatever.

And I want to caution after learning these lessons, the hard way, and really speaking to the point you just made is like going through that process, that questionnaire, having these conversations about where your objectives are, how are you going to. Fulfill those objectives. How is this going to be useful for your audience?

Who is your audience for this website? What do you want the website to do? It's just so essential because it actually saves time and makes your stuff more effective. On the back end, which, , again, so I want to I want to agree with your point there on that front. Um, in the prep process. So, so essential.

Yeah. 

[00:17:43] Marcus: And it also is a good opportunity to vet each other out even more than the sales process. Right? So we're obviously talking about. Okay. We've sent a proposal. They signed on their client at this point. , the brewery would be a client at this point, but. , you know, we're going off with maybe a couple emails, couple Zoom phone calls, whatever it may be, , in our sort of, , vetting and screening process, but this is also a good way, um, you know, the, the flags start popping up, whatever color they are is determined, but some of them are orange to red flags.

, you know, if they haven't even filled out the questionnaire and it's been two weeks, you know, the level of effort that we're receiving, the reciprocation of that, , or, , some of them obviously is the inverse of that, which is good. Like they, you know, they did it that same day. They had really thorough answers.

Um, they're really giving us a lot of like meat and potatoes of answers to kind of work with, um, that will kind of dictate the conversation. And You know, the more you put in, the more you get out, essentially. So we always, , and sometimes we've even just hopped on a zoom and done it in real time with the client, especially if they're a little bit of like a older brewery, not tech savvy brewery or something.

That's totally fine. We'll do it in real time and I'll fill out the form for them, but we'll kind of talk and discuss. Through, , but it really, it kind of sets the tone and the expectations and the vibe of the relationship because that's your first project together. That's your first interaction of we need to get this thing done in order to dial in how much it's going to cost and what the scope of work may look like, you know.

I 

[00:19:06] Chris: had a marketing professor. Um, I forget which exact class this was. It was either some kind of buyer behavior or was a, , marketing services class or something like that. But we, she was talking about service type businesses and how there are some of them that require. The customer's input and a perfect example is a haircut.

It's like, if you go get a haircut, if you just walk in there and say, cut my hair, like it was no input on what you want, how long you want your hair, do you want it parted? Do you not like you're gambling completely on what the result is going to be, and you might not like it, but if you contribute to the.

The conversation you say what you want you talk about style and you're part of the process throughout, then you're going to get a way better haircut and you can be more satisfied and I always think about that when I think about services like yours and websites like yeah it's just like a haircut you got to tell you got to talk about what you want and what's going to work in order to be a better experience and get the better result at the 

[00:20:03] Marcus: end of it.

Yeah, and at the end of the day, you know the brewery came to us in the first place because they're acknowledging that they needed help with something right so a lot of. A lot of clients that I've talked to, , or breweries in general are, well, I don't know where to start. They're a little scared of the process that, well, I don't know how to do this.

I don't, that's fine. You don't, you don't have to know how to build a website. That's why you came to us. We're going to do that. But in order to get the best quality product out of it and project at the day, we're going to help guide you. You know, we're going to give you a bunch of questions to answer and that's going to put us down certain paths.

So, um, I think a lot of breweries. , are scared, , at a certain point, especially if it's their first brewery, the first website, right? Or first redesign of a website. They're not, they're scared of the unknown of what that process in project may look like. Um, and then there's the other side of it is, Oh, we're redesigning it for the fourth or fifth time.

And now we've been a brewery for whatever, 10 plus years, , you know, pretty more experienced. Um, then we can kind of really get into some more fun stuff, you know. 

[00:21:06] Chris: Yeah, absolutely. I was wondering if you could speak to the, we've mentioned a few times here now, and I think this can be helpful is understanding what the difference between these website builders is like WordPress, Squarespace, Shopify, Wix.

Yeah. There's all these ones. There's Webflow now that's out there. Like, can you speak to the differences? Maybe just highlight a few of them between those platforms. 

[00:21:27] Marcus: Yeah. So obviously this is my own personal take. , don't at me, you know, um, From my experience, , in the web world for a little while, um, you know, Squarespace is a great platform, , for small businesses.

Um, I used to do Squarespace, , before we did WordPress. Um, it's great because it's a SaaS tool, meaning it's online. You don't have to manage a server, um, from a tech side. So, , super cheap. They have beautiful templates as well. So, it's a little bit, um, you know, out of the box, you're going to get a really nice looking website.

Um, and it makes it super easy to customize all the content, the text, the images, move things around, change the layout a little bit. Um, so it's really good for DIYers or sort of amateur web builders or, um, junior marketing people that are at a company or a brewery that want to get something up and running.

Um, they also have e commerce too, which would be great for like a small merch store or something like that. You know, there. It's not, you know, for scalability, it's not the best for e commerce. They have like just the core bones and basics of that stuff. But when you get into complex, like product data and all that and attributes, then, , you probably want to look at something like Shopify or a big commerce or something like that.

Um, so that's where Squarespace kind of sits. , Wix is a little bit lower. I won't even really talk about Wix to me. It's not really, if I had to choose, I would go with Squarespace. Um. That's as much shit talking right now. Get the hell out of here. Wix, you know, whatever. That's for your plumbers, your electricians, or whatever.

Like your, you know, your homegrown businesses there. I will say that Wix 

[00:22:59] Chris: has come a long way. If I could comment real quick. But man, when it started it was garbage. And it still is pretty like, like it's so bloated with how much CSS and like All these Java that's in there. It's like, man, this site just does not perform well.

And it's complicated and weird. And I agree, Wix is kind of lame. So sorry, Wix. Anybody who has a Wix website. Sorry. 

[00:23:22] Marcus: Well, you know, like you said, it's came a long way. Um, but yeah, I just haven't dove into it because Squarespace kind of was the new kid on the block and obviously was dressed to impress. Um, so Squarespace is a good go to, , that's sort of under WordPress.

Um, and this isn't really like my ranking of like best to worst. It's just. you know, the use cases, um, WordPress is very versatile. It's open source, , which means that, , there's a lot of people contributing to it. , there's a big ecosystem of WordPress. I think it was like 75% of the websites on the internet are powered by WordPress or something like that.

Even like white house, whitehouse. gov, I think was, is on WordPress. Um, so it's a very hugely popular, , platform. Um, there's pros and cons to it. Obviously, like I said, you have to. Set up a server. So you've got to pay for hosting. You have to install WordPress on that server and now you have to manage WordPress.

So we have monthly care plans. , so if your site is on WordPress, you should be on a care plan with somebody, whether it's us or somebody else, you should be updating WordPress core. You should be updating the plugins that you have installed. You should be, , keeping it secure basically. So no one's trying to hack into it, , for malware and all that sort of stuff.

So there's a lot more upkeep for security and maintenance and stuff. with WordPress, , they rely off of themes just like Squarespace and Shopify do, , to get the design and layout and everything. Um, they do have WooCommerce, which is tied into WordPress. That's their e commerce component. Um, it's a little bulky for my, for my liking.

Um, but WordPress is really good for marketing brochure sites. Um, obviously like News blogs where there's it's very content heavy if you want to think of it that way Whereas shopify on the other hand is obviously very e commerce focused So their core platform is around products and orders and customers and e commerce tools that integrate within your website Um, that uses a theme for design and layout.

Um, you can also build up static pages like, you know, about page, contact page, things that don't have products involved. Um, so you can have your whole website on there. Um, so you've probably seen a lot of breweries have their store, but then they'll have all the other ancillary pages added onto that, and that's literally their whole website.

Um, so you can skin it. super cheap. It's a SaaS tool, so you don't have to manage a server like I was saying. Um, so, you know, again, if Shopify does go down, all of the Shopify sites go down, and you kind of just have to sit there and wait. Whereas you can't contact your hosting company, like Shopify just puts up a status and says, Hey, we're working on it.

And you Basically losing money every minute of sales there. So, um, and then there's other platforms, obviously, whether you're doing more B2B. Um, so like a platform like big commerce is really good for B2B. Um, even like Magento, I hate to, I'm not a huge fan of it, but like for B2B. It's super enterprise and robust in that sense.

So it's overkill for a small to midsize like brewery. , but big commerce does D to C and B to B very well. Um, definitely not one of my fortes, but, um, you know, if you're doing B to B, I would look at that. Yeah. When 

[00:26:24] Chris: we did in a past life, when. I was working with a bunch of manufacturers, you know, those folks were, were kind of more in the Magento environment because he's had so many skews, man.

And they needed like, like, I mean, you're talking thousands when you're, when you're selling little tiny widgets that are like elbow piece for a piece of wire coupling or something like that. Like you have. Thousands of SKUs, , that you have to deal with and like, you're going to have repeat business and invoices and all this stuff.

So that, that's kind of what you're talking about, this robustness of that environment. So yeah, brewery, you're not going to have all that stuff, but you know, yeah, maybe a brewery manufacturer, if you're making kettles and all that kind of stuff, maybe even then it's like, that would be a stretch, I think, but 

[00:27:05] Marcus: yeah, high product count.

And more B2B transactions like net terms and, , you know, draft invoices and stuff like that. Um, or, you know, quick carts basically where someone can log in with their email address and it remembers everything you ordered last time, quickly add stuff to cart, like all that stuff that B2B interactions happen.

That's definitely not the best on Shopify or WordPress. It's definitely a big commerce from a gentle type of. Vibe for that platform. , but yeah, for any of the breweries, most likely WordPress or Shopify is probably a good fit. 

[00:27:36] Chris: Got it. Got it. No, it's super helpful. Um, I definitely feel those questions and, , you know, it's good to get it from the expert, you know, cause I I'm not a web dev, you know, I've worked with many web devs over the years, but you know what's best when it comes to this stuff.

And I'm very grateful for your opinion on that front. Um, okay. So, you know, taking another step back here, we've talked about different platforms. The other thing I think is important to talk about when it comes to websites is SEO, search engine optimization. And I don't really know. Do you do? A lot of SEO internally or is that something you kind of say, all right, that you should contract somebody else to do and what's your approach when it comes to SEO?

[00:28:19] Marcus: Yeah, so we dabble in it a little bit. We don't offer it as a service or solution offering. , we'd rather focus on our core offerings and what we're really good at, which is all the stuff I mentioned at the beginning. , we do have partner agencies. That I'll send out email intros and we'll send them business and obviously there's room for collaboration there.

Um, so they only do SEO. That's their focus. They have monthly plans for all that good stuff. , but when we're building a website, , whether it's WordPress, Shopify, brewery, not brewery, whoever, we're doing all of the best practices for SEO. So we're setting it up for success and getting that foundation in place.

And then if you really want to lean into it more, , and put some money behind. , SEO, , not digital marketing, not to be confused, um, but SEO specifically, , that we have other agencies that focus on that, , and making sure organically you'll be, , seen very clearly in Google's eyes and we'll rank you higher on those pages.

So we're looking, you know, we set up stuff in WordPress or Shopify with like the title tags and descriptions and URL structure. Um, and sort of, you know, all tags obviously are huge, um, for SEO, but also for accessibility, um, which is another whole, that's probably not a whole podcast that we could have just on like.

Web accessibility. Um, but that's huge, , to have all, you know, there's sort of check boxes that we kind of go through, , in our QA phase before we launch a site to make sure that we're doing our due diligence and, you know, best practices. And then, , letting it sit on the internet, get crawled, right.

Submit the site to Google, all that good stuff. And then if we want to like ramp it up and. You know, put SEO on some steroids or whatever, and we can kind of send it over to one of the, one of our partner agencies that will kind of ramp it up a little bit more. 

[00:29:56] Chris: Yeah. It's good that you guys have an eye on that because so, I mean, it's like, you're another, I'm going to use another analogy or another metaphor is like, you know, you're getting your car worked on, you know, if there's something core to the machine work of the car, you've got to rip that thing apart.

And. Deal with it, you know, down at the engine block. And while you're in there, you know, doing some of the things that are helpful for the overall health of the vehicle, in this case, the health of the website and the SEO, you're in the same lanes of it. So you might as well knock some of that stuff out and it's much easier to knock it out then and have it set up then to come back later and.

And have to deal with it. I've, I've looked at so many websites where it's like, man, they didn't do anything for SEO. There's the title tags are all sorts of messed up. The URL structure is messed up. It's like, I didn't even think about this. So, you know, tip of the hat towards your direction, thinking about SEO, but advice for those listening, you know, think about SEO during the build process because.

It's going to save you time and money. And, and chances are your dev can do some of that stuff. And obviously Marcus can handle it as well. But, um, but SEO is important, man. And it's like a dev thing. Now there's so much of it now. Like if you go to Google lighthouse and you use that little Chrome extension to run a lighthouse report on your website, like SEO is one of the four quadrants of the grading, but there's like performance, there's mobile usability, there's all this stuff on there and it's all related to how far you rank on the search engine.

How you rank. With Google maps and your local map visibility. And the thing is, it's not, it's not like it used to be where you could just stack your website with keywords in the body text. There's like coding things that have to happen in the schema and all this stuff. So you need a dev involved to help with some of that stuff at some point as well.

[00:31:37] Marcus: So. Yeah, it's super important to kind of bring up those points. Like you said, there's lots of touch points where, you know, your brewery, you're focused on making great beer, the taproom experience, all that stuff. You're not, you're coming to someone like us because you need help. And that's the first step is admitting and getting there.

And then we can help. And it's okay if you don't know what SEO even stands for or means or how you do it. But If you have a current freelancer or a smaller, large agency, that's managing your website and they're not super familiar with SEO, that might be a little bit of a flag, To to ask them about that, you know, how how are you performing organically?

Do you know? Can you if someone asked you that could you answer that question without putting any paid advertising dollars for you know, ppc stuff Which is more chris's wheelhouse, you know, um and getting paid ads out there just organically how you're showing up Um, are you in google search console? Are you looking for errors that are popping up?

Have you submitted your sitemap like this? There's so many things that you could be doing and it's all free for the most part that google is giving you those tools Like, they want you to succeed, but... You don't know, you don't know, obviously. So rely on the experts, whether that's us or your current agency, and make sure that we're, you're doing the due diligence to make sure you're doing all the free stuff first, before you spend the money to scale it, you know, 

[00:32:58] Chris: absolutely do it.

Right. Once. And, , and it helps in the longterm for sure. It's a moving target. Of course, you know, things change over time, but again, you know. Measure twice, cut once, get it right initially, because time matters with SEO. And, and so again, another topic we could go down is, is SEO. I do want to ask you, you know, I want to kind of get in some pitfall stuff and get impulse from your experience on things, , in that vein is kind of about like mobile usability.

Mobile websites are like, it's mobile first. Now everything has to matter on the, on the phone. And you've got phones that have different screen sizes and internet speeds are different in different places. Yeah. I wonder if you can speak to like, okay, if we're thinking about mobile usability, what are some of the things you've seen where you're just like, Oh my gosh, this is killing you on mobile.

And, and what are, what is some advice you'd have for building your website so that it operates well on mobile? 

[00:33:54] Marcus: Yeah. So there's a couple of touch points that you kind of already, , briefly talked about there was, , speed and performance. It's huge. Obviously, you know, people unfortunately are still on some slower internet connections in other countries and things like that.

Um, again, if you're very like local brewery, , that may not matter, obviously, um, but it really depends on that. So obviously mobile first. So when we. Do design exercises with clients where we get designs, we always request mobile first and then almost working backwards to tablet and then desktop as far as the viewports go.

Um, and really at the end of the day, it's how things are scaling, right? Most of the time I'm going to generalize, make assumptions, but most of the time things are scaling to like a one column on mobile, maybe a two column. , if you're looking at like a grid of something for images or for products or for listing of beers, whatever it may be, um, or even like a calendar, it's going to go from like, Yeah, you know, you have an events calendar that's like that monthly view with the squares on mobile.

It's probably going to go down to like a list view with some, you know, larger headings and stuff. So people are used to scrolling. So don't hone in too much on the top of the, top of the fold. I'm using air quotes for the audio people, um, of You know, the top of the fold of getting all the most important stuff there, people are going to have the page load and just start scrolling and scanning and browsing because people are used to that, um, on the phone.

So that's maybe one or two points there. Um, images are huge, right? Images and video. There's a tasteful way to include images and video on websites. Um, and obviously having file size on the forefront of that is important. So. Carousels, right? Remember when like sliders and carousels were huge and everyone threw a carousel on their homepage at the top hero, like, and that still is happening, which is fine, but I guarantee you, if you AB test all those slides and see who's actually reading the text of the button or looking at the image on the third and fourth and fifth or even 10th slide that you have in your homepage hero, I guarantee you it's going to be very low and you might want to change that, um, cop take maybe, but I said it.

So, , yeah, 

[00:35:58] Chris: so that's, yeah. To unpack that a little bit, why change that? Why not have 10 images there? Are you saying it's because it slows down things? There's too much load time on the website or why not have all those 

[00:36:10] Marcus: images there? A little bit of everything. So yes, the more images you have, the more that it's going to have to load.

And you can do things like lazy loading where you don't load it until you get to it. But obviously on first load, if that's the top of the page on the homepage, it's going to load. It's needs to be present there. Um, you can do that things with. Further below the page to kind of defer the loading, it's called.

Um, but with. Having that amount you're kind of convoluting the message, you know, so we've always we've kind of steered it in like we've been culprits of this we used to put carousels on our clients websites and say these are great now you can have like three to five different directions of a slide right like ones using this promotion the others doing this promotion, so they all have a different directive to it but.

At the end of the day, you're just convoluting the message. No one's swiping left to go through every slide or waiting the five seconds or whatever it is for the auto timer to go into the next slide. People are looking at the first one and then scrolling or going to the navigation, going to where they want.

So when you just go to your website, they're there for a reason. There's intention behind it and they may not know how to get to that intention. But they have an idea of what they need to see and what information. So it could just be, let me scroll to the footer because maybe their tap room hours are at the bottom, which is most of the time the case.

If they didn't come from like Google, if your Google business profile wasn't updated, that's one goal, right? Or, Hey, what beers are on tap? They had a cool sour a month ago. I wonder if it's still on tap where I let me go to their beers page. Okay. That's their intent, right? There's something, there's a goal in mind when someone goes to your website, whether it's just to learn more or to actually show up in your tap room and buy your beer.

So how do you curate that user experience and that journey better for them? Do you add 10 slides of marketing and promotions that you're doing for upcoming events and all this stuff that they may or most likely May not even see probably not so especially because it's on the home page. That's that's the gateway in my opinion I've always looked at websites It's like the home page is where people will land And you can summarize a bunch of the content on the rest of the website on the home page With a little like teasers and then learn more buttons and all that to kind of send them over But you don't want to put everything there and you don't want to convolute this one little section on your homepage of 10 images on slider care.

So, um, and same thing goes for under that. So we always like to kind of summarize and collect the most important areas of the website and again, help guide that user journey. So, Hey, here's the beers. Click here on the homepage to go to the viewers page. Here's our taproom hours. You want to learn more about who we are as a company, click here for our mission and values and all that good stuff.

Meet the team. So kind of guiding and curating the journey for them. Um, so the images in the carousel is just one example. There's, there's probably, you know, 

[00:38:46] Chris: Yeah, I think you know what you're getting at is is thinking about the I think the industry term is user experience, you know, in UX, , on the site.

But really, I think what that boils down to is, like, consider how someone's going to use this website and what. They're most likely going to use it for and try to make that as easy as possible. , reduce friction is another kind of industry term us marketers use. It's like reduce the amount of friction to get to what they need to do, you know, and what's going to be useful to them in any form, whether that's e com.

Website usability, like you mentioned, the location pages or beers pages or whatever, , making that clean and simple is, is ultimately a good idea. And to bring this back to the mobile usability, that's like, especially true with mobile. Cause people like they don't have time. Like they're not going to spend five minutes on your website on a mobile device.

It's going to be quick. So get them the information quick and make sure it loads fast. 

[00:39:45] Marcus: That's essentially it. You answered the question. Yeah. 

[00:39:47] Chris: Absolutely. Um, yeah, man. So, you know, I, I wish we had an infinite amount of time to talk about all this stuff. I have a couple more things I really want to get to with you.

So I'm going to back out of that one a little bit and come over here and talk about what everyone loves to talk about, which is money and searching around the web. You can find prices all over the place when it comes to websites. And it's, I think it's really hard for a business owner who has no idea of this world, how to even Consider pricing on websites.

Um, I wonder if you can speak to that, like coming into this from maybe somebody who has no knowledge. What does a good website cost? How much money should you spend? Like, how do you even approach that and budgeting this process in your mind? 

[00:40:31] Marcus: Yeah, great question. Um, and it's definitely that elephant in the room of pricing and budgeting, right?

Because we're a small perfect evolution is a small agency It's myself and maybe five other people including some contractors, right? So our prices can be more approachable and attainable because of that versus a larger 80 person marketing agency You know their hourly rate is going to be larger, which means your project budget is going to be larger, you know, so first before you even talk pricing with the agency make sure that you're a good fit for them And vice versa, right sure you get along and you know, they're working with similar size clients Um, and if they're a good agency, they'll have a pretty good vetting and screening process to know like and they'll tell you Hopefully they'll tell you and say hey, we're not a good fit We're going to be a little bit too expensive for you Um, and then you kind of just keep moving on from there and find the agency that's more your size.

Um, so as I mentioned, within the two platforms, the throughout some rough numbers, I don't want to, I'm not going to put pricing on this podcast here of our exact pricing, but, um, hit me up and we can obviously talk more and I can give you. Well, 

[00:41:34] Chris: it's so situational, right? Like it depends on the scope of the work, you know, it depends on how many pages you're building, how many.

You know, it's all just like in any marketing world. It's like, how much, how many hours are we putting into this thing? Which, which is why it's hard to price ultimately. 

[00:41:48] Marcus: Yeah. Because you could spin up a really easy five page website, no e commerce. You're not selling and purchasing anything on the site. Um, it's literally just a homepage, a beers page and about a contact or something, maybe one or two other pages, like an events.

Um, and that could run you a couple thousand dollars, maybe three to five K ish, give or take, um, you could do it yourself on Squarespace. You can find a freelancer and maybe get it cheaper than three K. Um, so there's different steps, right? There's different ways that you can approach it, like you're saying, cause it's literally all over the place.

Um, You could also get a brewery website for, you know, 30 to 50 K if you really wanted to, if you really wanted, if you said these are all must haves, we need to have these for launch and it's disintegration and we need to have like this ERP system tied in and it needs to connect to, , ecos or something like that, that using Shopify, like whatever it may be.

integrations are usually a good amount of time from a development standpoint. Um, but you could also stay within that three to five K, even, you know, have a little bit more robust, maybe add some e commerce and you're looking at maybe 10 to 20 K ish, , for a full build maybe. Um, and again, just general budget range there, um, with retainers for WordPress, like our plans.

Um, this stuff's all on our website, so I'll, I'll tell you the exact price. Um, with our WordPress care plans, they're, um, they're pretty affordable in the sense that it's like a hundred dollars, I think it's 97 a month for the peace of mind plan, which is just all the core updates, you don't get any content with it, but you get all of your updates, , security monitoring, daily backups, um, you know, plugin updates as well.

Um, and then we have one at two 97 a month, which includes unlimited 30 minute tasks. So updating text and images and, you know, updates like that, um, that's included. So for 300 bucks a month, basically, you can get all the bells and whistles on WordPress. With Shopify, we have retainers. , as I mentioned, it's all, , prepaid hours and that starts at like 500 bucks a month for a couple of hours, basically.

But that includes everything that we offer, which is general marketing, online strategy, , Shopify strategy, , design work, development hours. , project management meetings, all that sort of stuff. So you pre pay and then we just basically track to that budget. So for us, because we're a smaller agency, there's a lower point of entry.

And then we obviously look at a lot of our clients and partners and we help grow with them. And a lot of our clients that have came on, , at a smaller 500 a month plan on Shopify, they're now a lot more than that because we've helped them grow and we've proven our worth and value and kind of upsold them into larger plans because of that.

Um, so I tend to look at our clients as sort of long term relationships, and that's why it's a little bit cheaper. Get them in the door, build trust, build a relationship, , and work very closely with them, and then help them grow, and then we grow with you. 

[00:44:38] Chris: Yeah, no, I'm glad I asked you the question, and, and By no means am I trying to put you on the spot and holding you to these numbers.

And I don't think anybody, hopefully nobody listening would say you said 3, 000 on this podcast. You promised, you know, I, I think that you're fine on that front, but it is a hard one to answer. And, um, Yeah, to go about it is you gotta, I guess you gotta have a plan, you know, understand what you need and how much of it you need.

Understand what kind of website you want to build. You go on the WordPress route or you go on the Shopify route. Um, and then, you know, do the quoting process. Ultimately, you got to talk to some folks and get some quotes back and analyze those things. And, , And make and ultimately make that decision. And, um, yeah, I mean, price is going up to, I mean, labor costs across the board.

And it's not just in, you know, I know brewery owners, they deal with this. They got people that, that work for them and then price per hour for that labor goes up. It's the same in the marketing world. It's all price per hour. So. Websites have gotten more expensive over the years. And also there's just so much more that goes into these things now.

I mean, you've got like all these, you got GA4, you got to integrate, you got Metapixels, you got Google pixels, you got all this stuff you got to deal with and you want to make sure it's right. So, , sometimes getting the cheapest option possible can lead to, , some problems down the road to, , 

[00:45:56] Marcus: my experience as well.

Yeah, you get what you pay for, you know, and it's fine if you're a startup brewery, right? If you just want to get something up and running and you don't have the internal resources, whether it's you as the owner that's doing six other things, as well as trying to brew the beer, right? If you're trying to be scrappy, that's totally fine.

There's also a bunch of freelancers out there. Upwork and five, I'm sure you've heard of as some of the platforms there, but you get what you pay for. I mean, it's not gonna be sustainable quality. I will say that. And of course there's exceptions. There are some good people out there on both of those sites.

But generally speaking, it's a, it's a quantity game for them. So they're pricing it cheaper and getting more of that type of work, and that's how they're succeeding off of it. Well, we're taking the opposite approach. We'd, I'd rather have less clients and be working with you. Very busy and, and out. Higher budget or retainer or whatever that may be.

Um, and getting more traction and velocity out of it than the average, you know, 

[00:46:50] Chris: quality of a quantity, man, I get it. Um, so I want to ask you one more question and then we can kind of wrap up here. Cause, , I know we've been talking for a bit and you're a busy dude too. So the last question I have for you is like, what's like, you're like, I feel super good about this moment.

I mean, what do you get, what's rewarding for you when you build a website? Like, what's the part where you're just like, man, this is why I do what I do and brings you joy. When it comes to, , this career, this industry, building a website, look, building something beautiful. I mean, what's that moment or process for you?

[00:47:22] Marcus: Yeah, it's a really good and important question. Um, I've been sort of doing a lot of that self reflection recently. I came back from a conference that was all agency owners and it was very, , introspective and it was very like, what's our purpose here? Why are we even doing this? Why do we even have an agency?

Like. Yes, we may have done it out of necessity, like trying to make an extra couple bucks freelance and you apologize, but now you have an agency. Why do we do this? Um, and I had a lot of reflection, internal reflection on that. Um, of like, yeah, why am I doing that? Yeah. Um, the, the answer to that, I guess, is, you know, putting our heart and soul into client work and going from a meeting where you're talking about the strategy of something, and then you're designing it, you're developing it, you're launching it, and now you're seeing a return, their conversion rate has gone up, the CEO is super happy.

The executive team, whoever it is, like you've gotten the compliments. And that is that like warm and tingly feeling that we get as humans. That we've made other people happy, so we're happy. , and I think that's all that I can really hope for is like, I like... Getting in the weeds with the clients and really hashing stuff out and putting in the hard work and the grit and everything, but then seeing the return once we launched the site and even hearing, um, so me personally with Timberyard brewery debris that I mentioned that I'm a part of is doing all the design work and stuff, and then seeing people buy the merchandise and saying, Oh, this is such a cool t shirt design, or, Hey, that, you know, that can artwork that you did is really sick.

Like that looks awesome. Like that stuff is like, that's what I do it for. , when I'm working with the brewery, um, but for other e commerce sites and stuff, it's more just like that gratification that the client is happy and that's, that makes us happy. 

[00:49:01] Chris: Love it, man. That's why we do it, dude. Seeing it come to fruition and helping people is, is the bit of it, man.

So cheers to you for that, dude. Um, all right. In conclusion, man, if somebody is listening to this and they're going, man, I need to talk to Marcus or I want to learn more about perfect evolution. I mean, what do you guys have going on? Where can with you?

[00:49:21] Marcus: Yeah, so the easiest way is craftbeer. marketing. , that'll, that's a nice little landing page. You can sign up for the email list there. Um, so if you're in the marketing world, which I would assume you are for Craft Breweries here by listening to this podcast, um, Chris and I actually run a little Facebook group for craft beer marketers.

That's linked there. Um, you can actually get to the, , Perfect Evolution website by clicking on design and marketing solutions. , we got a link to get optimized in there as well. , another product that I'm working on for craft beer product mockups. So everything craft beer and marketing related, just go to craft beer dot marketing, um, and then, , that'll kind of redirect you everywhere.

And find me on LinkedIn too, if you want to, you want to connect with me personally, I'm pretty active on LinkedIn or I actively creep on people on LinkedIn, I guess we'll say. 

[00:50:07] Chris: Nice. Everyone's on LinkedIn begrudgingly. , we're all there, you know, hanging out at the, at the water cooler. , well, Marcus, dude, thank you, man.

I'll put these links in the show notes as well and on our blog and all that stuff. So people can find it there. Um, if you're not at a computer at the moment, you can go check out the spots and get the links, but. , this was super educational. Thank you for going as long as we did. , I know this was valuable for the folks that listened and I, , can't wait to do something similar again down the road.

[00:50:38] Marcus: Yes, please. Thanks for having me, Chris. I had a blast. Appreciate it. 

[00:50:41] Chris: Of course.