How Membership Sites Can Boost Engagement Through Smart Design: Strategies from a Top WordPress Designer Memberium

[00:00] Micah: Hey everybody, Micah Mitchell here with the Membership Site Success Show, and our guest today is Ross Johnson. Ross is a very interesting guest. We're going to have a fun time today. I'm very excited to talk to him. Ross, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for having me. Yeah, man. You and I met through Justin Fairman, who's the founder of LearnDash, and we're in kind of one of his mastermind groups, but I think we both also worked for him a long time before that. So I with Nandarium was working with LearnDash, and what he told me, and I'd love any corrections to my memory if I misremember here, is that you have been helping him with web design through multiple iterations of the LearnDash website. Is that right?

[00:43] Ross: Yeah, to some extent. We worked on not the current iteration, but the iteration before that, before Justin exited. There was an iteration of the site that a fellow friend and really talented designer worked on that we didn't. And before that, Justin was kind of managing a lot of it himself, but he would come to me with advice and want feedback and that sort of thing, which I was happy to provide.

[01:06] Micah: Cool. Cool. And so that was my introduction to you, was him telling me how amazing it was, frankly. And I, yeah, kind of misunderstood the iterations because he was going through a lot of design feedback with me. But he kind of, after all the design feedback he gave me, he was like, you should really talk to Ross basically. And then after I talked to you, you sent me a video. And for those of you who are just listening, there's going to be some visuals to this episode if you want to check out the video, the show notes. Ross. But Ross essentially spent about 15 minutes just giving me nugget after nugget of advice on my own website of what could be changed. And what was surprising to me is you didn't mention color. I believe a single time in the whole thing, even though our colors are off. And so when we talk about design, that's what stood out to me about Ross and about what Justin said about Ross was conversion focused design. That is great. It is branding. It's proper, but it gets conversions. It gets sales. And so when I was going through the feedback a couple more times today, actually, that was one thing that stood out to me. It wasn't somewhat about design, but more so about copy and messaging and conversion and kind of simplicity and clarity. So I just think you're a really great thinker on this subject. And of course, everybody watching this, they are trying to have a membership site or a course or community and so forth. So I want to get into those nuances, but before we do dive into some of that, can you tell the audience a little bit more about yourself?

[02:31] Ross: Sure. Yeah. So I kind of fell into design growing up. I had an interest in both technology and fine arts. And I was in high school in like the late 1990s and was helping out some local businesses with just IT related things. They needed help setting up email and all that. And at that time, if you were the tech person, you also did their website. Very rudimentary at the time. I remember doing things in frames and tables and all that and really enjoyed it. I thought it felt like a nice intersection of kind of two things I was really interested in. And I went to college and ended up studying social science and was kind of freelancing along the way and kind of got towards the end of my college career and realized, I don't want to be a social scientist. I really liked this design thing and decided to just try and go for it. And started 3.7 designs in 2005. And been doing it ever since, which is pretty wild to me. Like it feels like an instant in time, but at the same time also forever, which I don't know. It's kind of one of those paradoxes of times. But yeah, it's been great. And I think another thing that's kind of really influenced me and my approach design, which I think you did a really good job kind of explaining some of how I look at it is my dad was an architect. And an architect in a lot of ways is a designer. They're designing buildings and rooms and that sort of thing. And so he kind of always had this mentality of, you know, how can I design something to make this better? And still does. I mean, I go out to his lake house and the sort of things that he has fabricated and designed himself just to make the, like an outdoor play area more intuitive and easier for the kids is, it always baffles me. It's amazing. And then my mom, on the other hand, was a social worker. And so what she taught me was empathy and being able to kind of put myself in other people's shoes. And I think that really kind of creates a nice cross-section in design because there tends to be, when you mention design, a lot of times that brings up ideas of like, like you said, the color, like what does it look like? The aesthetics really. And design is so much more. It's really about intentionally making decisions to solve a certain problem. And part of that is the visual language and having something that, that people like to look at and conveys the right message. But there are so many layers below that, including messaging, copy, structure, flow, those sorts of things. So I guess that's me in a nutshell. I don't know if I totally answered the question.

[05:11] Micah: You did. It's such an interesting combination because for example, when you mentioned empathy, I thought to myself in the video you created for me, you had a high level of empathy for my customer. It wasn't necessarily for me because that wouldn't be very useful, right? But you were looking at it through the eyes of my customer and being like, Hey, I still don't understand this and so on. Right. Um, it makes a lot of sense. Yeah. The architectural part playing into it structurally. I, it makes me think of it's maybe anecdotal, but somebody had asked Steve Jobs, what's more important, the functionality or the design. And he was like, kind of, what's the difference? They're kind of the same, right?

[05:51] Ross: Right. Right. Yeah. I completely agree. And to your point about trying to see things from the perspective of your target audience, I think that's a great place to start for the listeners. If you have a membership site and you're kind of working on the design, both from aesthetics, what are the colors? What's the typeface? What sort of imagery are you going to use? And the copy and the messaging. It can be very easy to kind of get into a place where you're thinking about, do I like this? Does this make sense to me? But the thing is typically, I mean, almost never are we actually the target audience. Like for one, we know way too much about the subject matter to be impartial. Like you just can't separate yourself from it. So designing for yourself really doesn't end up being all that effective. And number two, it doesn't matter if you like it or not. What ultimately matters is if the target audience likes it. So there's been plenty of times where I've done designs that wouldn't resonate with me. Like I would go to the site and be like, nah, this isn't for me. But they're still really effective because we're designing it for somebody completely different than me.

[06:53] Micah: I'm glad you brought this up because I wanted to ask a little bit more about that. For example, would you be better off this kind of a silly question, hiring an outside design firm to do your own site?

[07:04] Ross: Probably. Yeah. And actually we're kind of working in that direction right now. We're working on a refresh and there's a small creative team that we work on. We work with on some projects when we have overflow issues and we're actually having them work on the design and copy. So they're going to kind of basically do what we typically do for clients on us because it's the same thing. It's really hard to be impartial, especially as a designer designing my own website. Like it's hard not to have it look how I want it to look.

[07:36] Micah: Yeah. And probably near impossible not to overthink it.

[07:40] Ross: Yeah. I mean, what typically happens is like I'll get 80% of the way to like a new concept. And then I, one day I look at it and I'm like, I hate this. And then I throw it away and I start over. And I've probably done that dozens of times.

[07:53] Micah: Yeah. I've done that. I'll tell you my initial understanding of design because long ago, believe it or not, I had a web design company, but my understanding of design was you've climbed a client and you find what template they want and you put the client's words in the template. And mostly it works just because I didn't mess with the template. So that was one kind of super practical question. Let's say somebody listening, they're building their membership site. Should they just pick a template or should they hire a designer?

[08:21] Ross: It's a really good question. And actually there's a time, there's a place for both. I think in the design community, there's kind of maybe a stigma about prepackaged designs or templates, like that everything needs to be custom. And that's not true. I mean, ideally in an ideal world, like if you had limitless resources or abundant resources, time resources, I think hiring an expert makes complete sense, but that's not the reality, right? Like if you have a membership site, you're bootstrapping it, you might not have the resources to begin with to invest thousands or tens of thousands of dollars on a professional designer. And you can get a really well-designed site by using a template. You know, good templates out there are really good at conveying a particular feeling, which is part of the design. When people land on the site and they see the visuals for the first time, it kind of triggers this series of associations and thoughts kind of subconsciously. So within like moments of seeing it, you kind of develop this initial understanding of what is this site all about? Who are these people? Are they friendly? Are they serious? Are they technical? Is this more fun? Is it more reserved? Is it energetic? Is it laid back? And if you kind of identify the feeling you're going for and you can find a theme that already has that feeling and it also has the structure that you need and there's themes out there that have these, then that works great. I mean, start there. And I mean, if it's working well and you do get some resources, then you can pull in a designer to maybe iterate on it.

[09:59] Micah: You might not even have to throw it away and start from scratch. Yeah, I think that's solid advice. I think if somebody does that, the next thing they might run into is, let's say they picked a template and they built their website and they're successful and now they want to do a live event and get their members together. Now they got to have like printed things, right? I guess in my experience, it's usually hard to maintain the same design across print or website or whatever, especially if I just picked a template, right? It wasn't initially a whole brand package. And I know you do whole brand packages. Maybe you can, maybe let's start there. Can you describe what you would do for a really high ticket project? They're paying you, let's even say hundreds of thousands of dollars. What do you do design wise? And then let's work backward from there and say, okay, well, someday you might want that. But like, how do you tie that to starting with a template?

[10:53] Ross: Yeah, that's a great way to look at it. So if we were kind of money is no object project working kind of from a foundational brand level. And I guess I'm going to kind of focus this more on like what we call like a brand identity, which is more like rather than kind of defining the full scope of a brand, which there's a lot that's involved in that, like you could really look at every single touch point that your customer or client has with the brand from what is the voice message or the automated voice message when somebody picks up the phone, like that sort of thing. I'm going to focus more kind of on the design and the visuals of the elements that people are going to interact with. You definitely need to start with some research on your audience and your competitors. So we talked about earlier, the most important thing is that your design and your brand identity, which is kind of like the realization of all your design elements. I'm trying to think the best way to describe it if you're not familiar with the term. Like if you think about a big brand like Chase Bank, everything you see that's related to Chase Bank has the same look and feel. Like it feels very consistent to the point where if you're familiar with the brand and you picked up something that didn't say Chase anywhere on it, you would still think this is Chase. And those decisions about those visuals convey a certain message about Chase the Bank. And that's essentially the brand identity system. You're creating kind of a consistent set of visuals and language and tone that's used throughout everything that people are going to interact with so that you're conveying the same message over and over again. And that repetition and message is really important because that's when people start to absorb that message. It's basically, you may have heard that like there needs to be eight touch points before somebody really remembers your brand at all. And that's because we're bombarded with millions of messages a day and we have to be hit with them a whole bunch of times in order for it to kind of stick in our brain. So you want to start with audience research to understand things like what are their pain points? Like what are they trying to solve in their lives that they would interact with your membership site? And what are the specifics of it? Like if you have a membership site that's focused on like what's a common membership site that you've seen? Like a...

[13:06] Micah: It's health and fitness. So they're providing meal plans, workouts, coaching.

[13:12] Ross: Great. Yeah. Health and fitness is perfect. So you've got a health and fitness membership site that you're thinking about doing your brand identity for. So the kind of high level pain point is people want to be more healthy, but that's not all that helpful, right? Like you need to understand like what specifically is happening in their lives that you're going to help them with. For example, maybe it's more about aging. These people are aging. They're starting to feel the effects of aging. They don't like it. They're thinking about longevity. They're thinking about their kids. They want to be around to see their kids get married and have grandkids. Like getting really that specific is going to go a long way. And really kind of understanding who's your core audience because like a health and fitness membership site, you could say like, oh, well, this is anybody could benefit from health and fitness.

[13:59] Micah: So we're going to go from age 12 to age 90 and everything to everybody.

[14:06] Ross: Then you're actually nothing to nobody.

[14:08] Micah: Yeah. Let's say it's women over 40 health and fitness.

[14:12] Ross: Perfect. So women over 40 health and fitness. So you're going to figure out what are their pain points? What are their triggers? Like they were fine for a while, not joining a membership site, not do anything about it. What happens that causes them to say, I need to do something about this? What are their common questions? What are their common objections? What are they looking for in a solution, both from a logical standpoint, but also an emotional standpoint? Like, are they looking for something that's going to feel comforting and understanding? Or are they looking for something that's like, I want to boot camp and they're just going to really, you know, force me to work hard and not let me slack and all that sort of thing. Um, really kind of understanding those things, you start to paint a picture of what sort of message do we want to tell all these people? Um, and the important thing about a competitive audit, like looking at your competitors is you don't want to be saying and conveying and looking the same as your competitors, because then you just kind of blend into the crowd. Again, you're kind of nothing to nobody because you just looked in there. So if you distill down those things and you can come up with maybe what's the primary thing we want to tell these people, maybe it's, we have the most compassionate coaches that are part of this membership program who are walking with you every step of the way in your midlife health journey. And if you kind of distill down to that message, you can already start to get a sense of like, what might that look like? What characteristics can you pull out of that message that would translate to visuals? Definitely maybe kind of softer shapes, maybe warmer colors, maybe pictures of people who feel comfortable and happy doing enjoyable things outside versus if we had kind of more of that bootcamp approach, you would take a totally different approach. You'd want it to feel more strong and intense and energetic and picture people sweating. So that's kind of how you can take, basically you do that research, distill it down into what's our primary message. And then from there, you can move into how do we turn this into a visual language? And that's where it takes a little bit more experience to kind of be able to identify like this sort of look and feel communicates this. But even if you struggle with that, there's ways to find that out. Like one of my favorite tests is called the five second test. You find somebody who's kind of generally in the right target audience. You show them something for five seconds, whether it's like the template or a piece of print work or something else. And then you tell them after five seconds, you take it away. And you just ask them like, what sort of, how did that design feel to you? Like if you could describe the characteristics of it, how would you describe it? And just see what sort of words they use. And what you want to see is like, it's kind of matching what you're going for. So all of that kind of pre-work would then, in theory, lead to at first a brand identity or like a logo and a color palette and a typeface. The most basic components of design language. And once you kind of refine those down, maybe do some testing to make sure that the target audiences resonate what you think. Then you can start moving into pattern. So this is kind of like maybe moving into shapes that we normally use. What type of photography do we normally use? What type of icons do we use if we use them at all? Yeah, like kind of that sort of thing. And really what you're looking for is what are these patterns that can be then incorporated into everything else?

[17:38] Micah: Because like the chase example, what you're going for is having kind of this consistent look and feel. These recognizable elements that you can then put into your website, your emails, your social media, your envelopes, your letterhead, your business cards, your free roll, like your video intro outros.

[18:00] Ross: Like everything should have that same look and feel. And so you're kind of developing those patterns. So again, if money was no object, we would probably start there. Really start expanding out and then creating a brand guidebook where anybody who's creating anything for the brand, whether it's the PowerPoint presentation, a document, anything that a customer is going to touch. They kind of have rules about how they should approach it to make sure that it's consistent with everything else. And we might go as far as like creating templates for them, like for social media. Like here's 10 templates you can use for a social media graphic that you can work from to make sure that it's all consistent. And then again, money, no object, we probably create a lot of that for them. So that's if you were going to go the complete start to finish.

[18:42] Micah: So as far as. No, I'm sorry. I, that was like, I feel anyways, I'm just downloading like a PhD in design here. A basic one, obviously no, no college credit. It makes me wonder, kind of a dumb question. Let's say using the example of Chase Bank, let's say another membership site is a, a finance training company. And they say, Hey, we have the same values as Chase Bank. To what extent is it a good idea, a bad idea to just kind of mimic Chase? If you feel like that's who you're like.

[19:13] Ross: Actually, I would say that's a, it's a great idea. There's, there's some saying that I want to say, like it goes good artists borrow, great artists steal. And that's actually part of the process we typically do when we start a brand identity system for somebody starting from scratch is taking a look at. If you were a brand in a different industry, what would you, what, what brand would it be? And some of the easy ones go with are like cars. Is your brand the BMW or is it the Toyota? Is it the Lexus or is it Ford? Well, I think we, those are so well established that we can kind of easily associate with those. And then pulling inspiration from other brands and seeing, does this have the right impact? And if so, like what can we pull from it without copying it directly? So it's a great idea.

[20:04] Micah: Okay.

[20:05] Ross: Okay.

[20:05] Micah: So somebody getting started out, they can use a template, they can mimic another brand, but when they want to maybe differentiate or just be a little special, a little bit unique, that's when maybe rethinking. I don't know if you would say from the top down or the ground up, but I'll share my example. So we, with Memberian, it's been around a while. And initially I had a guy who had gone to school for design. And so without me thinking about it, everything was kind of consistent. And when he left, things started to kind of drift and move. And that's when I kind of came to you as, Hey, we want to fix this. But it's been an interesting kind of mind game for me to think, well, we have existing elements, but to try to almost create a new brand and then combine them is weird. Versus like you're saying, Hey, you start with this top level idea and all of the shapes and colors and everything kind of falls down from it. And therefore it's consistent from the get go. It's, it's kind of a tricky middle ground to be in. So maybe let's go right between the template and the full package. What's a middle ground that makes sense to you?

[21:13] Ross: So, I mean, I would say there are times where it's valuable to, to basically do kind of like a rebrand. Justin and I from LearnDash, the project we worked on was essentially a rebrand. We came up with a completely different logo. The color scheme changed completely, completely different typeface, completely different look and feel to what he was before. So sometimes it's, it's worth just doing that, taking a step back and saying, we need to do something more. And I think the way, the best way to figure that out is, it's again, it always is beneficial to do that pre-research. You know, revisit your current customers, find out as much as you can about them. Again, what are their pain points? How are they making a decision? Why do they pick you or somebody else? And coming up with what is that message? And then evaluating your current design against that message. Like how well does our current design language reflect this? And if it's close or in the ballpark, then you can evolve the design language as opposed to changing it completely. So in your case, if you found that actually our design, design language is pretty close, you might not change a whole lot. You might just modernize it a little bit or tweak it based on what you've learned in the direction you're going. But if you find that, hey, it's pretty far off, then I think there's a lot of value in saying, okay, we're going to do this very intentionally this time. So we don't have to do this again and completely redoing it. I don't know if I've answered the question completely. I think I've touched on it.

[22:47] Micah: I think it definitely does. Yeah. Just taking what you have and to the extent it's out of line with what it should be from the message down, kind of getting it more at line makes a lot of sense. With, let's kind of talk about colors for a moment because you've talked about maybe warmer colors or whatever. How important is that? Meaning, does somebody need a custom color? Is there like some mix in there that psychologically, you know, how does that work? Or to what extent should people think about the color?

[23:15] Ross: I mean, I would say it plays a role. If anything, I think it probably gets more attention than it should. Unless you are at a scale where you're a really big brand and you're trying to own a shade of a color or certain colors like McDonald's. You see those colors instantly. The exact color you pick is probably not that important or colors. You certainly want to pick colors that reinforce your message and you want to pick colors that your target audience is going to resonate with. Like, don't use hot pink if your audience isn't going to like hot pink, that sort of thing. And you don't want to use colors that your well-known competitors are using too because you'll look similar. But yeah, the exact color I don't think is all that important in the scheme of things compared to some of the other aspects of design. And I think one thing I want to make sure we touch on is it's good to have an aesthetically pleasing website, but I would focus more on the content in the site and the structure of the site and the messaging of the site. Because you can have a beautiful site that does a really poor job communicating why your target audience should become a member and the details of the membership. And people land on it and think, oh, this looks nice, but I have no idea why I would sign up for this. And then I leave.

[24:35] Micah: This is all so great. So thank you. I want to ask now, let's say somebody, let's go on the other side of sales and marketing and say somebody enters a membership site. So let's assume like the brand is generally the same, right? The color, the logo. What things might need to change when they do go into membership site? Or maybe what are some branding elements that help with onboarding, retention, et cetera?

[24:58] Ross: Yeah, that's a good question. I don't think when somebody becomes like an engaged customer. So they've actually purchased, they signed up. I don't know that there's anything in addition to the brand that you would necessarily need to do other than keeping it consistent. I mean, you certainly want to keep it consistent so that it doesn't feel like they've entered into this completely other domain in a different brand.

[25:51] Ross: So if you're a health and wellness membership site, you could identify the fact that they really need consistent reminders for the first eight weeks until it becomes a habit, whatever you're trying to have them do. And that could be part of your onboarding process. And I know this probably doesn't sound much like design, but to me it is because you're designing the experience that you want your customers to have to keep them engaged so they continue to be a member. So it's probably at that stage has less to do with the brand look and feel and more to do with how you're going to design your membership site to maximize the impact on your customers, which will then keep them around longer.

[26:36] Micah: Gotcha. What are your thoughts on, I would almost call it non-branding? There are some of these companies who, like Jay Abraham, for example, right? He's such a content guy, like writer, thinker. It's almost like he just doesn't care about design. And I don't know if that is his brand or if he's not branding.

[26:56] Ross: What do you think about that? Whether it's intentional or not, that is his brand. I mean, he's saying something by intentionally not caring about it.

[27:05] Micah: Basically that who cares about this fluff?

[27:09] Ross: It's all about the, it's all about the content. I don't need fancy branding because my content stands on its own. That's all I need to do. Again, I don't know if that's intentional or not, but it's definitely his brand.

[27:22] Micah: Yeah, that makes sense. And I think Dan Kennedy might have been in the middle, whereas his branding and design was kind of, they didn't put that much effort into it. It might have been the same idea of like, well, the words just pop. Yeah, and that works for them.

[27:36] Ross: Could work for other people. It really kind of, again, is going back to your customer and who you are and like, what is that ideal intersection of like expressing who you are as a company or a brand or a membership site? And how that overlaps with the needs of your target audience.

[27:54] Micah: Yeah, that makes sense. So another question I have is about this design cycle. And Justin was the first to talk to me about this. And the more I think about it, it makes sense, right? Clothes come in and out of style. But basically, he was saying in business design, there's this maybe three, four year cycle where you should be updating about that often. Otherwise, you're falling behind. And once I saw it, I started to notice, yeah, I can tell when I go to a website. It could be so subtle, but you can just tell. What is that?

[28:25] Ross: Yeah, I think it's just like fashion and other trends. After a while, like we get so used to seeing the same aesthetic approach that it becomes boring and mundane. And so to stand out, you have to start doing something different. And there's only so much that you can do that's different generally. And that's why you see these cycles repeat. Like for a long time, we had super rounded buttons and then everybody's sick of that. So now they did like completely square buttons. And then that became saturated. And so now we're going back to rounded buttons, like those sorts of things. And I think also just kind of with the evolution of technology, there's some aspect of websites evolving aesthetically because of that. Like as more people get larger monitors or more people start using mobile devices, that all starts to impact the best way to design a site. So maybe you end up with more white space, bigger text, larger sections. People are more used to scrolling. So there's kind of like a user behavior component of it. One thing I would say about the cycle, and this is something we really advocate for our clients is you can do the, I'm going to redesign the site. And then in three or four years, I'm going to redesign it again. Works. At least you're doing something. But generally what you'll see is that the website is most current and most effective the day you launch it. And then from there, it kind of atropies because it's just getting older. The content isn't evolving. You're not changing things. The design stays static. And instead, you can kind of continually work on it, continually iterate on it. And when you do that approach, you don't need to necessarily redesign it every so many number of years because you're just kind of continually evolving it and improving it. And that keeps the effectiveness a lot higher because it's not this spike. Oh, if we redesign it, it's great now. And then, you know, we wait until it's not working anymore and then we redesign it again.

[30:19] Micah: That. So that slow evolution you just talked about, that sounds more appealing to me. How do you square that with consistency? Meaning if you change something, is it not kind of inconsistent with the old design? Or can you give an example?

[30:34] Ross: Sure. Yeah. It's really, again, kind of about evolving versus kind of throwing away what you had and doing a complete refresh. So as long as you're not in a place where you realize you're completely off with the last design or that you need to target a completely different audience, it's really just a matter of just adjusting what you're currently doing. So we're working on this right now with a client where we redesigned their site two years ago. We've been continually iterating on it kind of in small pieces, but we got to a place where we realized we looked at it and we're like, yeah, this kind of, you can tell it was designed two years ago. So let's make some adjustments. And those adjustments, we're keeping the same color palette, keeping the same structure, content's not changing, but we're adding white space. So the sections are a bit bigger. We're cutting down on text and making text bigger. We're changing different types of imagery, a place where we had gradients before switching to full colors. And the difference, even though it's subtle, is pretty dramatic. You can really take a look at the old example and the new example and be like, wow, that's pretty, pretty different. But it still looks like the client, like the branding, it still feels like their branding.

[31:39] Micah: That makes sense. We, one of the changes we made early on in our design was, meaning this is like six, seven months ago when we first thought, hey, we need to refresh it. Is we just had a ton of blue and we replaced it with white. We kind of just reversed it. And one of my friends had reached, and I hate our site that way. Like it's just, to me, drives me nuts. But one of my friends reached out and was like, hey, your site looks so good. Congrats on the new design and all this. And I'm like a bumbling baby step forward. But to your point about kind of just change. And I had no idea he's even engaged with the site or anything, but he happened to notice and texted me because to him it seemed new, different, bold, whatever. However, the other big change that we made, and I'd be curious, your thoughts on the timing of this is a few people told us to go with a simple black and white logo. They were like, hey, this is trendy now. And as soon as they said it, I started to notice, oh, X, Verizon, like pretty much everybody has this black and white logo. So does that mean it's time now to switch to black and whites or is that trend almost over and it's going to change soon? What are your thoughts on that?

[32:42] Ross: Yeah, this is always a challenge. And I think one thing that should give everybody comfort with this sort of thing is big brands go through the same cycle where you'll see them do a refresh and that on their brand, like Holiday Inn comes to mind. Like I forget, maybe it was like 10 years ago, they did a identity refresh, refresh their logo to make it a lot more modern. So now it had like gradients and shadows and like a 3D effect. And that now is kind of out of style. And you look at their logo and you're like, ooh, like that looks datish. When it comes to your logo itself, I would, you want to change that as little as possible. That is one thing that it's really don't change it unless you really have to. So again, I would rather than think about is this trendy or not trendy? How well does it represent the message we're trying to send? And if it represents it well and there isn't need for color, keep it. And sure, maybe at some point black and white logos will go out of style and that actually will be a good thing because then you'll look unique again. You won't look like all these other brands.

[33:46] Micah: I see. Yeah, it seems like there's layers of this thing just kind of moving around. But to your point about we shouldn't feel bad for changing our design, I think about what you just said about Holiday Inn and how they're not just talking about changing the website. They're talking about neon signs and paint dolls and stuff. So that's a good point. One thing I wanted to do on here is I wanted to show people, based on some of your feedback, some of the things we did. So let me make sure I got the right visuals up here and then I'll share my screen. You guys can see my screen. This is the current Membarium.com. So like I said, it used to be basically blue and then the logo was white and some of the other text was white. So we went to this, we kind of flipped the colors and it already seemed better. But then Ross, you have a whole video very kindly tearing this website apart, right? And maybe, would you be okay if I shared that video with people? Sure. Awesome. I'll put that in the show notes too because you can see very quickly kind of him, like I said, he doesn't mention color or anything, but he starts talking about, hey, the weight of all these things is the same. I don't know where to focus the image. There's all this. And I believe you talked to me about this initially, Ross. It was kind of like just effort, cognitive load, just to understand what's happening on this website. And so the guys have been kind of playing around with your basic initial feedback. And look at the, for those of you looking at the video, look at the text here, right?

[35:10] Ross: And we thought we were doing something good.

[35:12] Micah: And just a real kind of basic thing based on what Ross had mentioned, something like this, it's very clear, right? It's WordPress for ActiveChampaign or Keep. Here's some use cases. Here's some social proof. And there's a bunch more of these, I won't go into them, but just the messaging and the focus difference between this of what we had and this based on your feedback, I think is super handy. And I'll say to people, touching back on something Ross said earlier about it's difficult to work on your own stuff. I feel that way often, even though it's like, oh, I, we have this company that helps websites do these advanced things. I look at my own website and I'm like, somebody help, please. So I'm going to stop.

[35:52] Ross: Me too, for what it's worth.

[35:53] Micah: It's kind of a common thing here. So I'm going to stop sharing Ross. If you want to go ahead and share anything and comment on it, that'd be great.

[36:00] Ross: Yeah. First of all, really nice job on the refresh so far. I mean, that's a dramatic improvement there. And I think that's going to make a big difference. So nice work there. I think what I will share is that example I was talking about of iterating on a client's site and design. I'll pull up kind of the current site, point out a few things, and then show you what we're working on as an iteration. So this is a B2B SaaS product for system simulation and modeling. So engineers typically would use this software. Designed about maybe three years ago. So some of the things I'll point out is we have these, this kind of blue light gradient here. The buttons are pill-like and they have these arrows. Kind of have these illustrations of the product and use in a bunch of places. Yeah, kind of, this is certainly a motif here. Lots of icons. Everything kind of has an icon. Lots of cards. Here's kind of a yellow gradient. You can kind of see overall what the look and feel here is. Now where we're going to try and refresh it. And they actually are starting to target like a slightly different element of the same target audience, but just a different person in terms of like before they were targeting managers. Now they want to target end users themselves. So where we're going from, where we're going to is just trying to simplify it. Let's pull out some of the extra elements. So do we really need that blue gradient? Do we need to separate the header? Do we need those little arrows? Making the type bigger, which is kind of the direction things are going. So that is kind of pulling in some of the trendiness. Still have the illustrations, but they're not the focus. A lot more white space, trying to pull in actual renderings of the software itself. We're still working on the specific icons, but much fewer icons make them bigger, simpler, less text overall. And here instead of having icons, we're just having bullets. So you can tell it looks similar. It's not like we're completely changing it, but the feeling is different.

[38:01] Micah: Oh, it's amazing. I mean, I'm not an engineer of any sort and I want to buy whatever this is. Like, seriously, you showed the first site and that first site is great. That looks awesome. I wasn't sure if it was the before or the after. And then seeing this, it's like, dang, that looks a lot more current and sharp and appealing.

[38:19] Ross: Yeah. And it's not like we're making huge differences here. It's kind of small things. Like, again, the size of the fonts, how much information do we have? How many elements are there? Like these little things can make a big difference. So you can make those tweaks without necessarily having to completely nuke what you have. And start over.

[38:38] Micah: It seems like in most of these cases so far, less is more. To what extent is that because of mobile or because of declining attention span or just a trend? What is that?

[38:51] Ross: I think that's just a good design rule in general. I've got a lot of design quotes that I try and fall back on. And one of them that I love is a design isn't done when there's nothing left to add. It's done when there's nothing left to take away. That can be challenging.

[39:06] Micah: I mean, I've been designing for, I mean, probably 20 years now.

[39:10] Ross: And I still struggle with that. Like, I look at that first site that I only designed two years ago. I'm like, oh, do we really need the arrows and the buttons? Like, no. Like, well, why did I put those in there? That's extra. Like, it's not really adding anything. Everybody knows that it's a button. They see it. So it takes practice and discipline.

[39:28] Micah: It's much harder to do something simple than complex.

[39:32] Ross: And I'll throw out one more quote. And I think it goes something like, I would have written a shorter letter, but I didn't have time. And it takes effort and time to be able to kind of really distill everything down to the point where you don't need anything else for the design to stand on its own.

[39:52] Micah: I was thinking of that same quote. And it's interesting to talk about it, you and I here. But just now when you've showed it, for me to just experience it like that, hey, before, after, it's powerful. And it makes me rethink all of my copy. I know some of the really good marketers. One of my friends, for example, was probably the ultimate of this where he would always write one sentence emails. That was it. Hey, Ross, I've got a video for you. Click here. Boom. That's it. Right. And it was his rule and his click-through rates were crazy. And he's like, well, there's nothing to read. Of course they're going to click through. And.

[40:26] Ross: That's brilliant.

[40:27] Micah: Yeah. It worked like crazy. I guess I'm running out of good questions. So I'll ask you, what should I ask you for the membership audience or what are some nuggets you'd like to share?

[40:38] Ross: Well, let me ask you based on your, we've worked with some membership sites before. So I have some experience, but you know your audience and your customers better than anyone. What struggles do you, like, what do you think they, your audience is currently struggling with that they're, they want to be able to solve when it comes to their website and their design?

[41:05] Micah: Okay. I think they, there's a pressure to make it look really good and perfect. Especially you go see some, you're at some conference, you see some speaker and they're just on point every part of their, right? And you want to do that. And that's, we all, I say this because often we get clients who say, I want to be the Tony Robbins of this or that or whatever. Right.

[41:25] Ross: So they're modeling success, which is good, but I think they might put too much emphasis on it.

[41:30] Micah: And so I think you've done a good job of uncovering so far, you know, Hey, here's what's important. What's less important, kind of when to do different things. But yeah, that's, that I think is their issue is what do they do a good enough job or maybe even a just better than good enough, but they're not overdoing it so that they run out of resources to do the other parts of this multifaceted project to get it off the ground.

[41:55] Ross: Yeah, that's great insight. So what I would say is a few things to keep in mind if you're in that position first, hopefully through this discussion, you've kind of picked up on less is more. Simplicity is a good thing. So actually spending less time and effort on the design is probably better than spending a whole lot of time on it. If you're doing it yourself, I think finding definitely that audience research, I think is critical, not just for design, but just from a whole. Business perspective, the better your customers, the more effective you're going to be at finding them, communicating to them why they should become a customer and then keeping them around. So do that work regardless. But then from there, just find a simple theme that has the right feeling you're going for and stick to what they have in that theme. You don't need to tweak and customize a whole lot of things. Just work within the boundaries that a professional designer created within that theme and let that be your kind of day one brand. And I think that's totally fine. And from that perspective, like as great as some of the tools out there, like the block builders or Elementor or maybe these other page builders. I think for most people starting out, it's overkill. Like you don't need that amount of control. Just get something simple. That's going to present your content nicely. The other thing I would really advocate for people in this position is let go of that perfectionism. And I know it's hard and it's hard for me, but keep in mind that none of this is permanent. Like just get something out there and start seeing how people respond to it and how it works, because you can tweak it the day after. Especially when you're newer, it's, you can change a lot and people won't notice. We tell our clients often that as soon as your, the site we're building for you is better than your current site, that's when you should launch it. Because it's very easy for clients to get into this idea that like, it has to be perfect when we launch it. And it's like, no, like it's better than what you have. Why don't we go with it now? And we can continue to perfect it ongoing, but why sit around with the less effective site if you don't have to?

[44:04] Micah: Beautiful. Yeah. I think it's very common sense advice. One, one more kind of abstract question I wanted to ask about that's maybe less common sense, but I think interesting and probably on people's minds is, can you talk a little bit about logo design itself? I'm sure some of the other things you've already mentioned apply to a degree, but how does somebody pick between this or that shape or symbol? And does it go before, after the word and all these, these thoughts, maybe you can kind of describe that again in the same context of these people. They'd like to know what's possible. They'd like to know what a professional designer like you does, but they also want to know what they should do now.

[44:45] Ross: It's a good question. So really, again, it comes back to like, what is the message that you want to send people?

[44:52] Micah: Because the logo kind of tends to be the element that everything radiates out from.

[44:58] Ross: So whatever the logo is should be reflected in all the rest of the design. Like what are the characteristics of it? So understanding what you're, the feeling you're trying to communicate with that logo is important. And then from there, the next thing I'd stress again is that simplicity is better, especially with a logo, because in theory, a logo could go on a t-shirt. It could go on a hat. It could go on a stamp, an envelope. It could be on a billboard. The more complicated it is, the harder it is to be reproduced in different contexts. So there is nothing wrong with just a logo that's a typeface like Membarian. Like a lot of times that's perfect. Like you pick the right typeface that conveys the meaning that you're going for. And that can be plenty good. Now, certainly a mark added to it can communicate an extra thing. So that's why some people, a lot of logos end up having some sort of mark with it. And with the mark, just keep in mind, it should be communicating the same thing. So like the typeface, the word, how the name of the brand is presented and the mark by itself. Like if you were to see the two of them separately, you kind of get that same feeling. So they should be consistent. Now, as far as placement, I mean, from my perspective, whether it's before, whether it's after, whether it's above, next to it, that mostly comes down to aesthetics. Like based on the shape and where you plan on using it, where does it kind of fit best so it feels balanced? I personally haven't run into many situations where the placement of the mark compared to the name of the brand was significant in the message we were trying to send.

[46:42] Micah: That makes sense. The main thing that stuck out to me about the things you just said were that the mark and the logo or the typeface or whatever need to convey the same thing.

[46:53] Ross: Because I think sometimes in my mind, I thought, well, this conveys that and that conveys that.

[46:58] Micah: And together they convey this third thing. But I'm instantly realizing, oh, that's just effort, mental effort.

[47:04] Ross: Right. Yeah. Kind of the more things you're trying to tell people, the more it takes for them to receive and understand that message, which is why simplicity and repetition is so important.

[47:16] Micah: Yeah. And I think obviously we're talking about all this in a design frame, but we're, I think, talking about design that converts. And so, like you just said, simplicity, repetition. One of the things that I heard, I don't remember where, but like another nice one-liner is clear, not clever. So I ended up trying to do something clever and become unclear.

[47:38] Ross: Yeah. Certainly from a copywriting standpoint, I'm not a great copywriter and I struggle with that too.

[47:42] Micah: Like it's hard to just be clear and leave it at that.

[47:46] Ross: It's the same thought process as design. It's like the messaging isn't done when there's nothing left to add. It's when there's nothing left to take away.

[47:53] Micah: Well, Ross, you've been incredible here. How can people, because there are people listening who have big, massive membership sites and probably do need a rebrand. And then there's people who maybe just need some advice and things like that. How can people connect with you and learn more about your company, 3.7 Designs?

[48:10] Ross: Yeah, you can find us at our website, which is 3.7designs.com, but 3.7designs.co. You can also find us on LinkedIn or find me on LinkedIn. So if you just search for 3.7 Designs on LinkedIn, you'll find the company. You'll find me from there. Shoot me a message. Happy to help.

[48:29] Micah: Awesome. Well, this has been amazing. And thank you again for your help with us. Personally, I'm excited to engage you to actually do the brand package, like you're mentioning and for us to get it right. But in the meantime, you've just been an absolute gem in helping us through that transition period. And I think a lot of our clients are in that position. So thank you so much for sharing with them.

[48:49] Ross: Yeah, you're very welcome. I mean, I'm really passionate about this and bootstrapped my company. So I've, and my plugin company before I sold it. So I've been there and know how difficult it is. So I'm just glad I can help. And I'm glad that, yeah, my quick run through video was providing any value to you as well.

[49:06] Micah: It really has.

[49:07] Ross: So again, for those of you watching, go to 3.7designs.co.

[49:17] Micah: 3.7designs.co. Okay. So the domain is 7designs.co and the sub domain is 3.7designs.co. Check out the show notes guys. Ross, thank you again so much.

[49:30] Ross: Yeah. Thanks for having me on.