Notion to rise: from content strategy to building a brand

[00:00:09] Jonathan: Welcome to the Webflowers podcast.

[00:00:11] Jonathan: This week. I'm talking with Kendra Rainey. Who's a brand strategy and content leader. Edgar Allen is a digital agency focused on brand strategy, content design, and no code philosophy in webbuilding They're all over the place with folks across the U S South Africa, south America, and the Philippines. They think and work story first and build almost entirely in Webflow and believe that research and close collaboration across contents, UX and design disciplines makes for much better experiences But first a word of thanks

[00:00:50] Jonathan: octopus. Do that's octopus dot. Create your visual site map and interactive flow. Taking full advantage of drag and drop. Dive deeper with page content blocks that make your structure, simple to design handle and discuss. Your client can add content to the site map. Ready for you to design new pages.

[00:01:10] Jonathan: That's octopus dot O

[00:01:14] Jonathan: Hey Kendra. Welcome to Webflowers.

[00:01:20] Kendra: Hi, Jonathan. Thanks for having me.

[00:01:22] Jonathan: Absolute pleasure. What's your favorite flower?

[00:01:25] Kendra: My favorite flower is the Iris specifically the bearded Iris. And I like it. I mean, for a couple of reasons, it's a, it's a really interesting, kind of a, a showy plant pops up in the spring and the, in north America and has some really interesting flower kind of petals in that beard that falls off the front comes in a lot of colors, but.

[00:01:46] Kendra: My grandmother, whose name was Virginia Rose. So you would think her favorite flower?

[00:01:50] Kendra: would have been rose, but it was actually Iris and she grew a bunches and bunches of them along the property line between our two houses. So when I was growing up, so I have that connotation and now I grow them in my garden and

[00:02:02] Jonathan: But, okay, so bearded rose sorry, iris. W where does, where does the, what's the beard

[00:02:09] Kendra: So it has that kind of crown of fluuff on top, which set of petals. then it has this thing that kind of falls out from the bottom that has, I think that the statements and the pistols, like the, the, the kind of reproductive organs of the flower are in the middle and they're kind of furry and fuzzy, and then it comes off the bottom.

[00:02:27] Jonathan: Okay.

[00:02:27] Kendra: like it's wearing a little beard.

[00:02:29] Jonathan: Right. Okay. Okay. Any particular color?

[00:02:32] Kendra: They come in a really beautiful, deep, purple, almost black. And that is probably my favorite.

[00:02:38] Jonathan: Okay. Deep purple slash black. Right. Okay, nice. So okay. So color and, and branding and logos and stuff. So I kind of want to talk about what branding is because, so Webflow was designed initially for, or was created initially for designers to be able to take their designs and create websites out of them. That was its sort of initial purpose, I think.

[00:03:05] Jonathan: And so a lot of people come to Webflow as designers, but more and more people are not designers they're coming and they're having to learn design at the same time as learning web flow learning about, about the web. So give us a quick rundown on what is brand in terms of logo and color, palette and font.

[00:03:26] Jonathan: And then what does, what's a brand strategy look like for you?

[00:03:30] Kendra: Yeah.

[00:03:30] Kendra: so there's a lot of different answers to this question. I will give you the answer that we sort of run our business on at Edgar Allen . And it's the answer that, that I kind of have cultivated over years of doing this brand. If you ask most people is a, it's an architecture, it's a foundation of choices that are made from a variety of different inputs that will influence how a product or a business is seen and perceived and behaves in the world.

[00:04:02] Kendra: When it's presented to people who want to buy it or align themselves with it or use the product People see it as a foundation, it's color it's type it's logo. It's all those things that you've mentioned. But it's also it's also a story at its foundation. It is also a a bunch of collected research that tells you what, a certain audience of people wants to hear and see and know and understand about the product or the brand.

[00:04:28] Kendra: And it's also a look at, into the competitive landscape. Like what are the, what are the positioning holes that we can fill that nobody else is filling up with their stuff, with their communication and their, their visual design. But beyond that, to me, brand is more, it's less than architecture or some who call it an umbrella , we think of it more as a club that you build for other people to join around a product or a service or a, or a company. So whereas if you think of it as a foundation and architectural and all of that, it sounds very stodgy. It sounds very like it's made of concrete. Like you can't change it. It is an unchanging, so it really should actually, we call it DNA.

[00:05:10] Kendra: And I think that that's maybe a little more accurate at least it's a little more organic sounding. But we think of it as a club that you joined or a club that you build and for other people to join, because the club is something like a book club or, or even like a band. If you're a musician, it's sort of a club, right.

[00:05:24] Kendra: That you join because you want to be with the other people there, you, you share certain things in common with them, certain ideologies, certain preferences, certain likes and dislikes. And you let it into your life by choice. So it's not something that is forced upon you. It's not something you just happened to step on or in it's something that you, you say, I want to be a part of this.

[00:05:45] Kendra: I want to, you know, and it's active, it's alive. It changes when, the way that it communicates with you or with the world. so we see brand, especially in, if you're talking about a company that's like a Coca-Cola or a Nike of the world, you have certain things that are maybe bigger and more. More unmovable about brands like that.

[00:06:07] Kendra: They have a lot, they have a lot to do if they need to turn a position, right. They have a lot of weight to turn with them, but a lot of the clients, you know, companies are a lot smaller than that, all the way down to one or two people are funded startups or people that are doing things in spaces where things change really quickly.

[00:06:22] Kendra: So we think of brand as something that is that club that you join, it's alive, it's moving and you can shift directions eventually. As long as you kind of do your research and you make sure you're shifting in the right direction. So we, we try to build things that are less heavy and solid and more turnable mutable and alive and, and changing

[00:06:42] Kendra: as they learn more.

[00:06:43] Jonathan: Ok, you're giving me lots of theory there.

[00:06:46] Kendra: Yeah.

[00:06:46] Jonathan: Have you got practical example of a brand or a site that you've recently launched, maybe from Edgar Allen, that, that sort of encompasses this and in terms of so that we can go and have a look and see what it is that you're, you're really trying to.

[00:07:00] Kendra: Yeah.

[00:07:01] Kendra: absolutely. So I'll use one that isn't maybe, you know, a big flashy complicated thing, but that has a lot of beautiful design associated with it. So you can kind of see the story and design and the, the, the feel of it. So a few years back, we and this isn't even that much of a recent one. We have, I could tell you some recent ones, but we'll start here a few years back.

[00:07:20] Kendra: We helped a. We'll call it the modern quilting company. They make modern fabric patterns, but they saw them under a very large fabric companies umbrella. And they're just a, they're called Ruby star society. They're on the front page of our website and you can kind of find them in their story there.

[00:07:38] Kendra: And it's just a group of five women across the United States who are amazing artists and, you know, have this incredible kind of aesthetic and they come together and create collections of this modern quilting fabric. And they came to us and said, Hey, we just left our old kind of master, I suppose they, they had left another large brand and we're moving on.

[00:07:58] Kendra: And we need to think about what we, how we come out of the gate, new. Like, it was kind of a sad ending. They, you know, we needed to kind of break ties with them. We, you know, there was a lot of, kind of not great stuff going on. We need to rethink ourselves. So what we did for them is we sit down with all of them and then we have them tell us their story.

[00:08:18] Kendra: And we talk them through a number of different exercises around tone and voice and audience needs and understanding what they do and their industry and how they sit within it. And then what we came up with was this, basically this kind of rebel sisterhood, which was the story that we centred everything around, which is very true to them.

[00:08:37] Kendra: It's not a lie. They are kind of rebels and there are certainly a sisterhood. And turn this, you know, fabric, especially quilting is an old ladies game, but there's a growing number of young. Very vibrant, creative people out there that are taking up this as a hobby, especially, you know, during pandemics.

[00:08:54] Kendra: That's not a time that it kind of, you know, got a little bit bigger and wanted to give these people that are, that have this sort of sensibility that aren't old lady culture, somewhere, some, a group of people to. To love and align with and be, you know, excited to buy their stuff. So we did that. We created some taglines for them, one of them, which is my favorite is "Notion to rise".

[00:09:15] Kendra: And it's just about all of, you know, sewing notions and also this idea of this Phoenix rising from the flames. And they have this beautiful Phoenix as their logo. And then we created out of that that brand strategy, which kind of puts them in a certain place in the quilting world, it tells you a lot about who they are and how they will act and behave.

[00:09:33] Kendra: When you see them online, it tells you their story it puts all of this great visuals and color and logos and things around it. And then we create a website for them,

[00:09:42] Jonathan: Yeah.

[00:09:43] Kendra: which had to do a certain number of. To, you know, help sell their product. We created some brand video in which the founding

[00:09:50] Kendra: the founding sister voiced for us and it was very authentic and lovely and then they their own.

[00:09:56] Kendra: We, we did some content strategy. To help them kind of guide their social media and kind of their, their voice out there and that world. And they eventually took it over themselves. they started telling their own stories and building on that foundation that we've created for them or building that club even bigger and more robust.

[00:10:12] Kendra: you can go and see Ruby star society.com see where took those things. And then look at them on their social media and see how they've sort of owned it.

[00:10:22] Jonathan: yeah.

[00:10:22] Kendra: they're living it in the world.

[00:10:23] Jonathan: And that was a few years ago. So, so

[00:10:25] Jonathan: presumably now they've got, they've got lots of their own stuff, which has started by, by you teasing out that story from them as to who, who they are and how they yeah. How they should, as you say, present in the world. Ah, that's really nice. Okay. Okay. Cause I'm, I I'll I'm currently in the process of sort of rethinking my brand and I I got the name of my company.

[00:10:50] Jonathan: Cause I needed it. The name of a, of a limited. Yesterday. I just did some stupid things and I found some stuff and I really hate the name. Sebacic nobody knows how to say it. It's horrible. And it doesn't reflect who I am or where we want to go or who w who we are now. So I should, I should listen back to this.

[00:11:11] Jonathan: So the, what you've just said and tease out those little points really think about how, how we can. Take that story bit and, and, and run with it. I think that's really, yeah, really. It exciting. Um, so I mean that, that's got quite a nice potential story already because you've got these five women and, and, and, and I, I can see that, but if we take a story that's a little bit more.

[00:11:35] Jonathan: Don't know, boring or mundane or, you know, what, what about the local local shop that sells? I don't know. Well, I was going to say a florists, but even though a florist definitely can have stories and stuff. I know Alex, Alex, who was on the podcast a couple of weeks ago. He does sweaty startups.

[00:11:53] Jonathan: He does But window cleaners and, and housecleaning and people like that. Okay. So how, how do you, how do you make a window cleaner into a story and how do you, how do you create a logo and a brand for that? Where would you start?

[00:12:04] Kendra: Well, we always start and I say that this is most of my job is just to ask questions. And so we start by asking a whole lot of questions. Not unlike interviewing for a podcast. And, and to be honest with you there, I mean, I've been doing this for more years than I would like to admit, and there's never not a story in there somewhere, even for a law firm, even for a bank, even for, you know, the window cleaner down the street.

[00:12:37] Kendra: Where our brand lives I in my mind is the intersection of that unique story, whatever that tiny nugget interesting thing is, and the intersection of that and what a, your potential audience expects, wants and needs from you. And so what we kind of do is create the, you know, what lives in the overlap of those two places with brands.

[00:12:58] Kendra: So you have, you know, a window cleaner who has a certain amount of history, or they have a certain way that they approach their work, or they have a certain feel to the way that they interact with their customers, or they have a certain range of products that they, that they find particularly effective.

[00:13:14] Kendra: And then you have a set of audiences, out there. People who need window cleaning services. And they have a whole panoply of things in their lives that affect their desire to have that service, their ability to pay for it the way that they expect their window cleaner to behave and want. then you just try to try to find those two points and like find where the overlap is.

[00:13:34] Kendra: And that's where brands story, at least in position lives.

[00:13:39] Jonathan: Yup.

[00:13:40] Kendra: It could be that, you know, this is a family business and they've been around for 50 years and this is like kind of a softball one, but you know, let's say that they are, they have this great legacy of being this like hardworking blue collar down to earth, no nonsense window cleaners.

[00:13:57] Kendra: And, you

[00:13:58] Jonathan: Yeah.

[00:13:58] Kendra: That the rest of the world of window cleaners is they make a lot of empty promises or they hike up their prices or they, or they they're kind of untruthful and other ways. And then you play on that honesty, you play on that kind of, that feeling of like, this is like my grandpa coming to clean my windows or like somebody

[00:14:15] Jonathan: Yeah.

[00:14:15] Kendra: trust, you know?

[00:14:16] Kendra: And then you'll catch people. That'd be like, Yeah.

[00:14:18] Kendra: this other guys are shysters. Like, I don't want to work with the other guys. These guys are at. Look at how solid they are. Look at how much I can really trust them, not to scratch my glass or use the wrong kind of chemical. you create a visual design that lives around that, right?

[00:14:33] Kendra: So you have choices that you make about color, that telegraph trust and, and, and and longevity or safety, and you have design logo and design exercises that get at those feelings too. And so brand works hand in hand. it's a very collaborative thing if you do it rightwith design. and then if you're also, you know, like we are a brand to no code, build agency, if you're doing it right, you see the things that you've figured out during that brand exercise, all that great story, all that great insight.

[00:15:04] Kendra: You see it reflected all the way at the end of the process. When you know, the developer has done his work and you're reading a webpage. Yeah.

[00:15:11] Kendra: that's how it all kind of

[00:15:11] Kendra: fits

[00:15:11] Kendra: together.

[00:15:12] Jonathan: That's great. I mean, I, so Thinking about sort of content design, which is, which is what, how we got to know each other was, was through Content Design London. And we'll talk about that a little bit after the break, but I'm kind of curious about this idea of yeah.

[00:15:27] Jonathan: What does the customer needs to know that you're reliable, that you're not going to scratch the windows? all of these needs, you can actually sort of write them down and think about. And and say, oh, this, these are the things that our customers need. How do we create content that will allow them to understand that, you know, I'm the right window cleaner for them.

[00:15:50] Jonathan: Right. Okay. Well, we're going to take a break now. And when we come back, we're going to talk about this content design where it comes in with using Webflow.

[00:15:58] Jonathan: Octopus do that's octopus dot D O create your visual site map and interactive flow. Taking full advantage of drag and drop. Dive deeper with page content blocks that make your structure simple to design handle and discuss your client can add content to the site map ready for you to design new pages. That's octopus dot D O

[00:16:25] Jonathan: . Welcome back to Webflowers . This week I'm talking with Kendra Rainey who's brand strategy and content lead at Edgar Allen. So Kendra what's content design.

[00:16:34] Kendra: Oh, content design is basically treating content as important as, or as an element of design when you're creating a digital experience. And that has a lot of things that kind of go into it. I would encourage anybody who is curious about content design.

[00:16:52] Kendra: to read Sarah Winters book . Called Content Design. It's a great overview and also to follow Content Design London on the internet.

[00:17:00] Kendra: But it's basically, you know, a way of conveying information that honors audience needs and wants and mindset at every possible point that you, you can imagine. So you're basically saying the right things to the right people at the right times.

[00:17:17] Jonathan: The right things to the right people at the right time. Okay. Okay. That's interesting. One of my, one of my problems with, with content design in my own personal experience is that it's great when you're giving out content. So when Sarah Winters was working at gov.uk, working at redesigning and rebuilding the UK government website, and she. was this position where there was a lot of content. We need to tell people how to claim for this, how to do that taxes, how to pay these fines, how to do things.

[00:18:00] Jonathan: And I can see content design there. You know, the, the user, the member of the public needs to do this thing. And, and we got a glimpse of it. And the first half of this podcast, when we were thinking about the window cleaner and what the customer wants, they want clean glass. They want knowledgeable people who are not going to scratch the glass.

[00:18:21] Jonathan: We're not going to break anything. We're not going to go peering through the windows to see what they can see. How do you more into, into what content you need for a website where we're trying to sell a product, ultimately.

[00:18:35] Kendra: Yeah.

[00:18:36] Kendra: so that. A very interesting question. And one that I found myself asking myself immediately after discovering content design a few years back, I thought how this is amazing as a copywriter and digital copywriter, I've always wanted to be more involved in the planning of the individual like web page experience and the way that a website flows copywriters are typically sort of locked out of the conversation until much way too late.

[00:19:03] Kendra: In my opinion. We have so much to give in terms of like owning the story, that's going to be told and the language and knowing kind of a lot about the audience coming in. And then often we're kind of relegated to the end of the process and said, Hey, I've got. You know, 15 characters of headline and 30 words of body copy, and here's the box, please fill it for me.

[00:19:25] Kendra: And you're like, wait a minute. I could have helped you. Like, why did you put that there? You're like, where's your rationale? You know, like I could have helped you figure out weave together as not just me together could have used our collective brains to figure out what the best way to present that information is.

[00:19:41] Kendra: Maybe it wasn't a headline and a body copy block. Maybe it's a map. Yeah. Bulleted lists, maybe it needs to connect with another thing on the page, in a, in a different way. But anyway, so what you're asking is, you know I think I've gone away from your question, what

[00:19:55] Jonathan: Does he have, I don't think you have, I think, well, I mean, you have, you're coming back to it now. I think.

[00:20:00] Kendra: yes. Which is, you know you're going to have to ask me the question again, because

[00:20:05] Kendra: I've totally derailed myself.

[00:20:06] Jonathan: question is, how do we, how do we know,

[00:20:09] Kendra: Oh,

[00:20:10] Jonathan: out what, what the

[00:20:11] Kendra: yeah,

[00:20:12] Jonathan: needs in, in terms of, you know, they don't really need to buy a new swimming pool.

[00:20:18] Kendra: But we really want them to

[00:20:20] Jonathan: But we, we, we

[00:20:21] Kendra: yeah.

[00:20:21] Jonathan: them to cause the, otherwise we don't make any money selling swimming pools. Okay.

[00:20:25] Jonathan: That's fine. But how do we find out what their, their real needs are? The things that will ultimately make them buy something

[00:20:35] Kendra: And I remember where I was going with that. I was saying that content designed for four deep informational sites makes a lot of sense in the way that it's presented in the book and with a lot of the people that, that do this work around the world, that is a lot of what you're doing. Right. You're taking large amounts of information and culling it down and figuring out what's most important and presenting it in a way, but that is not a lot of what it's not what everybody does, who writes for the web or who creates websites.

[00:21:00] Kendra: A lot of us serve a different God, I guess, and that is the God of brand or sales or, you know, or commerce. And, but the principles are kind of the same. I see. That initial view of content design is kind of like where all other kinds of content designs spring off of. And the one that we practice most most at Edgar Allan is about brand oriented content design.

[00:21:22] Kendra: I guess you could call it. It's still content first. It's still audience first, we don't have that big bank of information to organize and create, you know, order out of that chaos. We have to figure it out. So what you're asking is how do you figure it out?

[00:21:35] Jonathan: Yeah.

[00:21:36] Kendra: You start the same way that you would in any other instance.

[00:21:39] Kendra: So that's, you asked a bunch of questions, for us writing a website before the idea of content design was we were taking a lot, we're making a lot of guesses. We might've had some audience research that was done during the brand phase. We might have an idea about the industry or access to people inside the, you know, the client company to ask questions of, to say, Hey, what do you think needs to go here?

[00:22:04] Kendra: What do you know? And a lot of times we're also working off of what already existed, which is often not what needs to exist. So we needed to. Have more of a reason or more of a process around Just research basically. So we research, we do desk research, we do interviews, we talk to clients the best people inside that are internal to a company to talk to in this, in these cases are usually customer success people, sales people, people that are in contact with the actual audience day to day that are getting all the questions that are annoyed by the things that they're being asked, because people don't understand them. Those are the words you find. Those little things you're like. Yeah.

[00:22:44] Kendra: somebody really needs to know this because this, the sales guy is.

[00:22:48] Kendra: Just completely flabbergasted by the amount of time someone asks him these things.

[00:22:52] Jonathan: Yeah.

[00:22:53] Kendra: So we do a lot of research. We always think from the audience perspective, and then we hope, or in case of which we've done the brand work, we, we ensure that that audience discovery, which is a bigger thing.

[00:23:07] Kendra: It's a little more kind of a feely touchy thing than this down and dirty. What kind of information do you need? research that it all aligns, that it all ladders back up to the same big idea, and that we're all kind of singing the same song and moving forward you figure it out by asking you, figure it

[00:23:22] Jonathan: Yeah.

[00:23:23] Kendra: polls.

[00:23:24] Kendra: You figure it out by. Getting on the phone with 15 customers and letting them tell you about, what's annoying about window cleaning, you well you need to do the research and you talk to all the people and you'd all say all that stuff is you can do that on a very low budget by yourself, in front of a computer.

[00:23:39] Kendra: Like the best thing to learn how to do well is desk research, like, you know, learn where to look for stuff, join all the Facebook groups, read the Reddit threads, a great place to get information about stuff, especially things people hate is I store and Google play store reviews. People complain endlessly about stuff.

[00:23:58] Kendra: there.

[00:23:59] Kendra: So you're like, gosh, like everybody's complaining about this thing. So we should probably address that. I mean like the one company that addresses this thing might be the winner, you know, so. know, and then, and then you, you move forward little by little trying to figure out, you know, okay. What's the structure of the website needs to look like from that point, what kind of information?

[00:24:17] Kendra: How can we organize all of this mess into something that would make sense for a person. It goes down to the page level and down to the component level and down to the word, even like, you know, the microcopy, like how do we, what do we say to lead somebody from point A to point B.

[00:24:35] Jonathan: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's nice. Okay. I think one of the things that I'm to do with, the Webflowers podcast is to, is to think about, okay, the single freelancer on his own, trying to do the, trying to do the work trying to make a better website.

[00:24:52] Jonathan: Then just I can design your website. No problem. And got a rough idea of what we need on a window cleaning website or on a swimming pool website or whatever. I mean, it's, it's pretty obvious, but, actually then to differentiate that particular. Window cleaner or pool company say, is our story.

[00:25:12] Jonathan: This is what we're about. We are different to other people, and this is why. I think that's, that's probably quite hard for just one person on their own, trying to make enough money to, you know, to pay the bills to keep the baby fed. but I think, I think there are things in there that we could, we could, we can take away, you know, just sort of even.

[00:25:33] Jonathan: Putting yourself in the mindset of customer

[00:25:37] Kendra: Exactly.

[00:25:38] Jonathan: what do I do? I want a swimming pool. I wouldn't mind a swimming pool but . What questions would I ask? What do I need to know? You know, do I need to get planning permission? I need to think about how big this pool needs to be? How deep does it need to be?

[00:25:52] Jonathan: You know? And so you can ask all of these questions yourself and then you can start saying, okay, well, what does that look like on the page? Well, there's going to be a page about. Getting a survey done and whether you need planning permission and those kinds of things. And if you're dealing with a local.

[00:26:08] Jonathan: Local swimming pool company, then they they'll have that information. Presumably they'll know the answers. They know which department you need to talk to. put a link to the department that in the council, local council to, to tell you what they are, the answers to those questions are, and then you need, well, you know, what shape do I want it?

[00:26:24] Jonathan: You know, do I need a guitar shaped swimming pool or not probably do. In which case, you know, What other shapes can I have? What do they look like? What are they roughly they're going to cost or pricing. That's always the killer, isn't it. it's, it's asking those kinds of questions and thinking about how, how we've sort of developed the page and put it together in different ways so that all the pages so that, so that we can make that happen.

[00:26:49] Jonathan: So, so why is Webflow the best solution to building websites? If we're content designers.

[00:26:56] Kendra: So, I mean, I happen to think Webflow is about the best solution to building a website period for a number of reasons. And I think there's kind of two answers to that. One has to do with what web flow is and how it functions and how accessible it is to people who aren't technical code minded people.

[00:27:15] Kendra: And then there's another answer that centers around what Webflow sort of represents in the, and the world and the community that they're building around the idea of no code. So with Webflow specifically, We started using Webflow because we were tired of building digital things in print software.

[00:27:31] Kendra: And that was like nine years ago. So it didn't make any, it didn't make any sense format wise to, to you do something in InDesign and create a flat PDF. And then try to explain that to a client or someone who has never. Never designed their own website, or doesn't really know what they're looking at, how this is going to function in the real world.

[00:27:49] Kendra: So we use it first, mostly for prototyping reasons because we could very

[00:27:53] Jonathan: Right.

[00:27:53] Kendra: create a set of primitive items that would be brand like, and show them on an iPad. And, you know, and say, Hey, scroll through this and click through this and see how this feels to you, rather than showing them flat comps on a screen and

[00:28:06] Jonathan: Yeah.

[00:28:07] Kendra: them to make the connection.

[00:28:08] Kendra: So that was the first reason. Then we found out very quickly the things that had been frustrating me and my content team about being digital writers could be solved by using the web flow editor. So you could stand up. can, you could work very closely with your design team, who was, you know, creating components or with your front end developers who was coding in Webflow or using Webflow to create the pages work, sit next to them and help, you know, they can move things around on the screen really easily. They can say,

[00:28:36] Jonathan: Yep.

[00:28:36] Kendra: you know, do you think this works here? Do we need a headline? do we need, do we need eyebrow texts here? And the answer is almost always, no, you do not need eyebrow texts there.

[00:28:45] Kendra: I'd like to say that to the designers of the world. You don't need like seven headlines. That's just my own personal crusade. But the, but then I'm off. Then when we get into the point where we would need to be showing the client, like, what is this thing gonna say? What's, what's the real, like, what are the words and the pictures on the page and where we would normally hand over a copy deck, which is a word document, which, I mean, imagine how difficult that is for someone to say, okay, here's the word document I'm going to try to interpolate this onto a fully designed screen and imagine how that's going to work. It just doesn't work very well. So we would write our sites in the prototype phase, in Webflow with the editor. And then it has evolved since then. So, you know, in terms of like the entire idea behind no code.

[00:29:31] Kendra: It's about the democratization of that kind of skillset, Right.

[00:29:34] Kendra: Development was this gigantic black box that nobody could access, except for a

[00:29:39] Jonathan: Yeah.

[00:29:40] Kendra: specific few. And if you watched any of the NoCode conference this year, the, you know, the keynote all about this, this opening up of this new.

[00:29:49] Kendra: Potential. And I think for awhile it was scary to some developers who thought, oh no, they're coming for my job. But I think the way that we approach it is kind of two ways. We look at it as a way to give companies and brands, control of their marketing layer back we're intentionally working ourselves out of a job and saying, Hey, We can make something amazing for you.

[00:30:11] Kendra: and we can teach you how to maintain it and how to change it

[00:30:14] Jonathan: Yeah.

[00:30:15] Kendra: that are going to be useful to you. Over time, we train our clients on Webflow. We have a course called Webflow for Teams and several others in the works right now. And so we say, Hey, you guys, can, you guys can work this yourselves, you know, come back to us when you need to do something spectacular or something really big, or you need to start over.

[00:30:31] Jonathan: Yeah.

[00:30:32] Kendra: kind of work we're interested in any way. but Yeah.

[00:30:36] Kendra: In terms of, for content designers, all no code tools create an enormous amount of potential for collaboration. And that's what you need in

[00:30:43] Kendra: content design. You need

[00:30:46] Jonathan: along. Yeah.

[00:30:47] Kendra: right need. Yeah.

[00:30:49] Jonathan: that are, yeah, I'm just thinking back to, to that idea of having the copy the text in a word document and seeing it on the screen and especially seeing it in mobile, you

[00:31:01] Kendra: Yes.

[00:31:02] Jonathan: having to scroll through.

[00:31:04] Jonathan: With your finger 15 times just to get through one, one paragraph of text and you suddenly go, oh, this is too long. Isn't it? Nobody's going to read this. Let's get rid of it. Yeah, that's

[00:31:16] Kendra: Yup.

[00:31:17] Jonathan: one sentence instead of three paragraphs, but what's that one sentence really going to say, what are you really, really trying to say?

[00:31:25] Jonathan: And I think that's something that Yeah, that we have problems with, you know, even, even if you're sort of writing. No, I mean, I did quite a lot of writing in Google docs rather than Word. But it's just too big. You've got this space and you want to fill it. It's a blank page and you want to get it filled.

[00:31:41] Jonathan: And I think as content writers we should be writing on this tiny little space. That's that's 20 characters wide. And think about using that long word, that's not going to fit on one line, right? Well, let's not use it because otherwise it's going to cause problems with design wise. I mean, if it's the right word, it's the right word, use it, but

[00:32:01] Kendra: Well, all content, no matter where you're seeing it. I'm, we're talking about the digital realm of things, but it all exists in a context.

[00:32:08] Jonathan: Yes.

[00:32:08] Kendra: it's outside of its context, you have so much more room for error room for miscommunication room for, I mean, all of those things work together. It's not like you're your brain separates the text from the website and the design for a website and the experience of from a website into three tracks in your mind.

[00:32:26] Kendra: I see it and experience it all together.

[00:32:28] Jonathan: yeah,

[00:32:28] Kendra: why not create it that way? And that's what we, we've been working on at Edgar Allen for a long time, just, you know, how do we marry up all the disciplines and let everybody kind of do their own do their own great thinking, but together and bounce off one another collaboratively.

[00:32:43] Jonathan: Yep. Absolutely. Absolutely. Kendra, thank you so much for your time. It's been lovely talking to you. I hope our listeners have something to think about while working in Webflow . I mean, Personally go back and listen to that. So that first half again about branding, because as I say, we I'm trying to rebrand myself and not my self as a person, but myself as a company.

[00:33:02] Jonathan: And just trying to think where that should go. And so I think there's some definite some, some super ideas right. At the top of the show again for us. Yeah. So thanks very much indeed. If you have a question for Kendra or in general for the Webflowers' podcast, go to web flowers, podcast dot com. And hit the appropriate button.

[00:33:19] Jonathan: Kendra, thank you so much for your time, once again and goodbye.

[00:33:24] Jonathan: fluff to this bit completely. Fortunately it can all come out.

[00:33:41] Kendra: You know what you can edit it.

[00:33:42] Jonathan: Absolutely, absolutely. Right. So. Dah, dah dah, that's the music

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