Earlier this week the new look of Bootcamp Ideas appeared for all the world to see.
The old design (seen below) was put in place over a year ago. At the time my design skills were pretty low, I knew what I wanted to do but lacked the skill to create it, so I opted for a less is more look.
This time around I felt more confident in my ability to create something awesome, so that’s what I did.
Now I want to share with you the process I went through to put out this design. Along the way I will highlight some tips that you can use with your own web design.
Setting a goal
The first thing I did was I worked out what the point in the redesign was going to be.
Was it just to look nicer? That’s not really a well defined goal.
Was it to have people interact with the site differently?
What kind of interaction did I want them to have?
How can I build trust with them quickly so that they will want to come back?
The answer for me to this questions was to get them on my email list. I’ll explain why a bit further down.
Tip 1: What do you want people to do when they come to your website?
Join your email list? Sign up for your bootcamp? Fill out a contact form?
More email sign ups
My email list allows me to keep contacting someone even after they have left Bootcamp Ideas.
Rather then just having them arrive on the site, grab a workout and go, it lets me share more workout ideas and drills with them which hopefully proves that I am a good guy who is interested in helping them.
This opens the door to building a relationship with them.
So one goal of the redesign was to guide more people to sign up to my email list.
More trust
Like any good relationship trust is an important factor.
One way to build trust with someone is to give them something without any expectation of something in return.
Another way to build trust, mainly in one to one relationships, is to trust someone else with something.
Trust builds trust.
Online it’s a bit harder. So I try and give people something that will help them; free workouts, drills, business tips and guides.
With the new website I wanted to make it easier to find this content too.
Tip 2: How can you start building trust with someone who has just come to your website?
Some ways to do this is to share information with them, associate yourself with other trusted brands (your qualifications and media features) ‘as seen on’, have real photos of yourself and your clients on your site.
Be specific on what your goal with the design is
Don’t just have a pretty website.
As I wrote above, my two big criteria for the new site was to get more people on my email list (which will hopefully one day turn into some customers) and build more trust. Now I had to work out how to do that with the design of my website.
This is what I came up with:
To increase my email sign ups:
Give away a free guide to a problem that I know a lot of trainers have
Direct people to a page that talks about the Bootcamp Trainers Toolkit
To build trust:
Put a genuine picture of myself on the front page
Improve the logo
Find out what the best/most popular content on my site is and make it easier to find
Look at what pages people are landing on when they find bootcamp ideas and make those pages make more sense
Don’t make the website look like it was built in the 1990s
Everything else should be secondary.
When someone comes to my site I want them either join my email list or find some sweet workouts (and then join my email list).
Let’s go in to how I actually achieved that goal.
The importance of the picture of me
People don’t connect with brands. People connect with other people.
Any time you can humanise your business is a win for how effectively you can connect with them.
Think of the story of the personal trainer who lost 40kg and started running triathalons to raise money for charity. You can connect with that story. The story of another human being’s struggle and attempt to give back.
Now think of the real estate company that just announced it had donated $20,000 to charity. You are probably thinking, ‘Good for them’. Right? But does it make you want to do business with them vs. another real estate agency?
Knowing this I really wanted to add a human face to Bootcamp Ideas. My face!
When you load up Bootcamp Ideas now, you see a picture of me – grinning and squinting in the flash of the camera – welcoming you to my website.
There is no doubt in someone’s mind that their is a real person behind this website.
But that is not the only reason to include a picture of yourself on your website.
There is another reason, one that marketers have known for years.
Pictures of people or faces naturally draw the eye. Especially when there are no other pictures like in the case of my new design.
Now here’s the cool part.
After the eye is drawn to the picture of me, the eye then looks where that person is looking or directing their body language. In my case, that is towards the text on the left which invites them to take action and ‘Start Here’. More on that in a little bit.
Tip 3: Pictures of yourself will help people connect your site with a real, live person and can also direct them to where on the web page you want them to look.
Logo redesign
The old Logo Nerds logo with the dog tag was starting to look a bit tired and tacky.
As Bootcamp Ideas is growing into a website, community, store and event host I wanted give it a new logo to tie everything together.
I also knew this was out of my depth so I looked for a designer to help me. I went to one of our own for help, a trainer in the BCI: Ask group who makes her bread and butter in web and brand design, Loren Williams.
Loren and I worked through a few iterations before finally deciding on the following three versions for different applications:
We did it all via email which was really impressive. I highly recommend her work, check her out at Native Creative. Just don’t keep her too busy because I may want her again soon.
Making stuff easier to find
In my goal of building more trust, I identified making articles and workouts easy to find was important. To do this I created a few new areas on Bootcamp Ideas.
Blog Page
Not alienating my existing readers was really important. I still wanted them to be able to find their way around easily. So I added a ‘Blog’ page which looks similar to how the old website looks.
Visit the blog.
Start Here Page
For new visitors I wanted to send them to a page that would get them familiar with the website, show them what we are all about and get them set up with what they came here for, workout ideas.
I created a ‘Start Here’ page to do just that.
This along with my About page provides plenty of information on Bootcamp Ideas.
Visit Start Here.
Popular Posts Page
So many of the articles and workouts on this site are never visited by regular readers. The only people who find them are people who search for something related on Google.
I wanted to have a place where the most read articles could have a home.
Visit the most popular posts.
New Home Page
Lastly, I needed a new home page to tie all this together.
Underneath the box with the picture of me we have the Trainer’s Manifesto to introduce new comers to our values.
Below the Trainer’s Manifesto I’ve created an area to see what has been posted on the website recently. You can see the latest workout, business article and any other new posts. There is also a cool new feature that selects one workout randomly from the archive and displays it.
While I write about a lot of aspects of running a bootcamp business here, 52% of visitors to Bootcamp Ideas say that their biggest struggle is trying to come up with new workouts and exercises for their sessions.
This featured post area was an important aspect of the new design.
Tip 4: Identify who the people are that are visiting your site, what they are looking for and then make it easy and obvious to find it.
Increase email sign ups
I went into a lot of talk about the building trust side of things, but this section is going to be quite short.
That’s because a large part of getting someone to sign up to your email list is to build trust with them. So I’ve actually already covered a lot of it.
However, you may notice when you are viewing a workout that there is no longer a place for you to enter your email into the newsletter on the sidebar.
Instead I’m trying something different that involves clicking the Give Me That button which will then take you to another page and asks for your name and email.
I’m hoping that this will create an engaged and active email list, rather then just someone putting their email in on a whim. I believe the Bootcamp Ideas community will be stronger for it.
Still, this is a work in progress and if it doesn’t pan out it will be time to look at something different.
Conclusion
Before I go let’s recap those four tips that you can take and use on your own website:
Tip 1: What do you want people to do when they come to your website?
Join your email list? Sign up for your bootcamp? Fill out a contact form?
Tip 2: How can you start building trust with someone who has just come to your website?
Some ways to do this is to share information with them, associate yourself with other trusted brands (your qualifications and media features) ‘as seen on’, have real photos of yourself and your clients on your site.
Tip 3: Pictures of yourself will help people connect your site with a real person and also direct them where on the web page you want them to look.
Tip 4: Identify who the people are that are visiting your site, what they are looking for and then make it easy and obvious to find it.
The website has changed but it is not finished.
There is a bug on the category pages I would like to fix and I will keep an eye on my stats to see if my goals are achieved or not.
I’m also looking for feedback. If you come across something that seems broken or is confusing, please let me know so I can make it better.
Or if there is a feature that you liked to use on the old site that is now missing, please let me know as well.
Please share with me in the comments below (or shoot me an email if you prefer).
Until next time,
– Kyle
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