Introducing Layerly and its Benefits
Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Drug Prevention Power Hour. I’m your host, Jake White from Vibe 18. And today, today I’m chatting with an old friend, Alexander Ramsey. And we go way back to like just after college doing some incredible and adventurous things together. I’ll just leave it at that so we have some suspense for people to keep listening. But Alexander is the founder of Layerly , which I really loved and wanted to ask him onto the show because if you’re involved in a coalition or if you run a nonprofit organization that has a mission and gathers partners, you’re already overworked, you’re underpaid, you’re being split into so many different job roles. And the last thing you want to worry about is your online presence on your website. And I love what he’s created so much because it just simplifies it and to say this, like, I’m just going to say it Alexander, your program is affordable, which is hard to find in this industry. So I just would love it. Xander, we can learn all about what you do. And then I’m going to ask you some tips. Like even if people don’t know about Lairley, they just want some tips to make their, their website really awesome. I’m going to ask you how we can do that. So how does that sound Alexander?
That sounds great. Yeah, I can help with that. I can give you some tips.
Perfect. So can you tell us a little bit about you and then if, yeah, how we know each other? Just give us a little background on Alexander Ramsey.
Sure, yeah. So I ended up graduating college from the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh and that’s how Jake and I met, kind of through school and through a mutual friend group. And I had just started my own business at this time where I was doing all kinds of creative work, a lot of graphic design and websites and video and photography and Jake had started his nonprofit Party.0 at the time and he said, hey, I need a videographer to hit the road with us for three months and you’re cool. So maybe we should just do that together. And I was like, yeah, I need work. So let’s do it.
This guy’s weird, but I need the money. Let’s go. Yeah, that is so good. So we, yeah, and we did it, man. What it was almost four. It’s crazy to think about it, but three, almost four months we were on the road, living in a tiny trailer, throwing drug free house parties at colleges all across the country. There’s such good memories.
Yep, there are some tight quarters between four people.
Looking back, it’s, I think, what was I thinking? But I was also single at the time and you know that changes things.
Hahaha yeah, there was red flags all over that proposal and you just ignored them all.
That’s so good. Well, let’s, let’s jump in a little bit to, websites because this has been your expertise. You went from this creative side and I’ve seen you really excel. So if you like our branding at five 18, Alexander created our logo. so you were there in the beginning. You also helped a lot with our previous brand Party.O and helped us learn like what that needed to be. and now what five 18 is today.
So today you have Layerly, which is different than Alexander Creative, which is kind of like the catch all. If you need creative work done, like that’s what it is, but Layerly is a little bit different, so what is that.
Yeah. Yeah. So I’ve, I’ve had Alexander empty creative, which is kind of your traditional design agency. It’s, more of a boutique creative offering where I, I work with small and medium businesses and I do logo design, graphic design websites. but, in general projects are a bit more complex and they usually take a little while.
When you start working with somebody’s brand or if you’re doing a rebrand for them, it’s usually a complex project where you really need to dig into the history of the business and meet the people that are there and start understanding what their look and feel is. And that can be a rebrand of their logo or their website. But in general, that business is more of a high level business and it’s time consuming.
And as I’ve had that business for nine years, I’ve had small businesses or startups or entrepreneurs come and say, hey, I want to have a website for my business. Can you help me with that? And my answer was often, well, it’s going to cost you. You know, it’s going to be thousands of dollars to get a website up and running for your business. And it’s going to take a little bit of time. And that’s an immediate turnoff to just about anybody. Nobody wants to hear that. So I felt there needed to be some option for those small businesses, for those entrepreneurs to be able to say, I do need a website, but I need it fast, I need it affordable, but I still want it to look great. I want it to perform well, I want it to be found online.
And that’s where the idea of Layerly came about. So Layerly in its most simple form is it’s a website subscription. You sign up for a website subscription just like you would with Netflix and you get a website done for you in five business days. within that website, you get custom design, it’s custom built for you, and it’s managed for you. So anytime you need help with your website, you wanna request changes or edits, you work directly with an account manager who will take all of those changes and implement them on your website for free. So it’s really an awesome product for people that are a small team or on a budget or just starting out, but they still need something that looks great, represents their business and can still be affordable.
Yes. Okay. What I love about this, and before I ask you for all your tips and stuff we can implement, I’ll just say this. The reason why I freaked out about what you offer and why I love it so much and I’m telling everyone is because there used to be just the, like you said, you go to an agency, you’re going to pay five to $10,000 for a website and it’s going to take maybe months to create. And then you have the opposite end, which well, I’m just going to figure this out myself and I’m going to spend like easily 20 to 50 hours on YouTube looking at tutorials and it’s not even going to be that good. I’m going to make all the mistakes myself. So I’m just going to pay for it with my time and my frustration.
And then with both of them, there’s the odds that like, if you get it done really, really professionally, like with these crazy codes and everything like then your business can feel like you don’t have control over it because now you have to hire this high dollar person to change it anytime you need anything. So yours really is this middle like, Hey, we’re going to make changes for you. We’re going to take care of it for you. It’s all on us and it’s low cost. and you’re going to get an incredible design. And I’ve seen your designs. They’re just as good as those $10,000 websites. So I want to see your stuff everywhere. Like everyone needs a layer Lee website.
And if someone is out there right now, maybe they’re in our field, it might be they’re starting a club, a youth drug prevention club, or they’re starting a drug prevention coalition and these community groups, and they need an online platform. What are some tips that they can use just to get things started, to start ideating and getting things onto paper so they can either start themselves hire an agency or find somebody like you and know what to do.
Tips for Building a Website: Mastering Your Homepage
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. you know, Jake, you touched on a couple of great topics here too, because when you’re starting a website, you are either going to pay thousands of dollars and have somebody do it for you. And probably within, I would say three to five years, you’re going to end up redesigning the site anyways, because times are changing, trends are changing, the styles are changing. You you look at big websites like like Apple or PayPal or any big company, they’re changing their website sometimes once a year, where their website is totally changing the look and feel. If you’re paying thousands of dollars for someone to do that, you’re gonna be paying those thousands of dollars every couple years to redesign your site. It is really expensive. And then the alternative that you mentioned is building it yourself.
That could be either hard coding a website yourself by watching YouTube videos or it might be using a platform like Squarespace or GoDaddy or Wix. But then the issue you come across with that is most of those companies don’t even have a phone number. If you want to actually ask a question, you’ve got to go to their knowledge base and their blog and you got to maybe hire an expert within there. And it ends up being a nightmare.
That’s where we see a lot of people move from one of those platforms over to Layerly because they tried doing it themselves and they’re so frustrated. They realized that they did spend 30 hours just trying to build the site. Then they spent another two or three hours to move an image and text like this. And it’s like, that shouldn’t happen. It shouldn’t be that difficult. I’ve been there. I’ve been there before. Yep. Exactly. So yeah, that’s where Lay early comes in. for, you know, for anybody that is maybe let’s say maybe you have a website or you’re considering one.
There’s a couple things that are really important on a website and probably the most important part of your website is the landing page. It’s the homepage. This is the place where generally speaking, probably 90% of your website traffic is ever going to see. If someone’s going to visit you or learn about your brand or your business or organization, they’re going to see the homepage first, most likely. So what I would say is it is very important to master your homepage. You want it to look amazing. You want someone to be able to land on that homepage and very quickly be able to understand what it is you do and why it matters. You’ve got about three to five seconds to engage that person. And if you haven’t done it in that amount of time, they’re probably going to leave and go find somebody else because they’re confused and they don’t understand what it is you offer. So I would say whenever you’re looking at your homepage, just to cover this really quickly.
Three things that you can really look at and consider is that your home page has good design, that is easy to use, and that there’s a clear call to action on that home page. So whenever we’re talking about design, you often have your website organized into three parts. There’s the header, which is kind of that top navigation of your website. It’s got a logo. It’s got links to important pages, high priority pages.
And then it also has a call to action that might be contact or book now or learn more. But that should be at the top of every single page. And it should be, it should be pretty simple. You know, maybe have three links up there. You don’t want to have every page to your 20 page website on there. That’s going to be really confusing. And then as you scroll down, you have the body of your website. That’s the content that is beneath the header.
And that might be so the first part of the body is what we call above the fold. And that’s kind of what is taken originally from a newspaper. When a newspaper was folded in half and it was laying out on the street or dropped on your doorstep or whatever, you would see that content that was on the top of the fold. And that above the fold content is what people are seeing and reading and understanding within that three to five seconds. So you want to make sure you describe what it is you do, why it matters give them a really clear call to action in that section and help them understand, okay, I’m at this website, where should I be going? What’s important? What should I do? And then as you scroll down, you probably wanna have either your services or your core piece of content below that.
If you offer a set of services like you do speaking engagements or are a local business that offers landscaping. You might list your landscape services, or if you’re a blog and you have blog posts, you would want to have your blog post listed there. So one of the statistics is that that list of services or that content that people actually are going to look at, they’re about 47 % more likely to click on it the higher it is on the page. So it’s really important to have that come up really quickly and be easy to digest.
And then as you come down to the bottom of your website, you’ve got what we call the footer. This is the section at the bottom where usually you see your logo again. You might see some social media links, maybe even links to all the pages that are within your website. And another thing that you’ll see in a lot of websites is a contact form. So this is something that you’re going to have on the bottom of every website. Again, it’s kind of repeating all that important information and making it really easy for people to find it and access it on your site.
Okay. That’s super helpful. So that the top part is the menu that has all the options and pages they could go, but don’t make it too busy. Don’t put all of your 20 pages on there. But then below that is really where you’re going to capture their attention and make them know you’re in the right place. And what I understand about this is that you’re going to make sure that the person who’s visiting knows like, this website is for you.
So for a lot of our coalitions, not only are you going to say your mission, but you might even talk about the community that you serve. So we reduce drug use for this county or this city or this state and provide these, you know, these resources. And then you mentioned something too, which I like is that there’s, there’s always a call to action. Maybe there’s a button you want them to press or to contact you and it’s everywhere. It’s right up top. So they know exactly what to do and how easy it is. You’re not asking them to do something outlandish. You’re just saying, contact us now or watch this video or download our PDF, something like that.
Mm -hmm. Yeah. Yep. Yeah, definitely. And that call to action, you you might look at your site and think, man, that seems repetitive. That seems like I’m listing it too often. But what we’ve found is the more time you put that call to action on your website, the more likely somebody’s going to click on because they might be scrolling through quickly or they might be distracted by an image as they’re scrolling down and miss that call to action. And if they see it again, you know, finally by the first, second or third time, they might end up clicking on it because they say, well, this must be important. I’m going to click on this, see what this is about. Yeah.
Okay, I’m going to ask something specific. and I don’t know if you have a strong opinion on it or not, but so I do that on our website and I, it did feel really weird putting it that many times. Cause I was like, how many times do you have to put this? But then when I realized like people are scrolling down to the next section, they’re learning new information and then they probably need that call to action. So for our, you know, our speaking page, it might be, or even our homepage, it’s like, inquire about a date, tell us about your event, contact us now, see if we’re available. Can you use different call to actions that are saying the same thing or do you want to keep the verbiage the same.
Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. And you know, that’s one of those things where you’re almost testing it out. You’re testing out to see what works, what people are relating to and connecting. And that’s why even if you’re running ads, you know, on Facebook or Google or something, you can adjust that call to action to say, learn more or get started or ask a question because somebody might connect with one question or one call to action more than another. So testing that on your website and trying a variety of different calls to action is great. It’s just important to make sure you have it on every single page.
The Importance of Credibility in Website Design
Okay, that’s cool. I think one thing that I learned as well is that when you are mentioning, like there’s top of the fold, there’s the options at the top, you don’t put everything there, is the bottom of your page, like you recommended putting a contact form there, which I love. Whenever you built our sites, I always loved that you did that because then people aren’t searching for the next step either.
It’s just like, you get to the end. The logical thing is to contact you. And then below that can be all the remaining pages that you didn’t list at the top. You can just include them at the bottom with smaller text and it still looks clean and professional. And I also wanted to say this because they’re in business and whether you’re running a for profit or a nonprofit, it is a business as coalitions that are doing drug prevention, the goal is to become sustainable. So getting people engaged in your website is really, really important. And for them to know that the great work that you’re doing. So I’m just going to say this because this is my opinion, but you can’t have a bad website.
You’re not going to get donations and people assume that you’re doing great work if it doesn’t look like you’re doing great work. And what I like to liken it to is if your website looks like a garage sale, you’re going to get garage sale donations. yeah, sure. Here’s $5. Here’s $10. But if you look professional, you have a great brand, you have great imaging, your mission is clear, who you serve, and you have all these great assets on your page, the videos, the photos, like everything, you’re going to attract those bigger donations, those partners that also have more money and have better branding. So it is really aligning yourself to attract better sponsorships, donations, and funds just for your mission. So I think it’s super important.
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And you touched on a great thing of basically that credibility. If your website does not look credible, people are going to leave. I’ve actually got a statistic on that. It’s that 75% of people that land or arrive on a website that doesn’t look credible based on the design are likely to leave so a huge percentage of people are gonna leave your website if it doesn’t look legit, if it doesn’t look good. Another one is 88% of website visitors are less likely to return if they had a bad experience. That bad experience could be the design was bad, maybe it wasn’t mobile responsive, so when they went on their phone, it wasn’t working properly, maybe the menu wasn’t opening or closing properly, or they could have been overwhelmed with so much information and so many links that they didn’t know what to click on. The call to action wasn’t clear. So it really does come down to knowing that your website has good design, that it’s easy to use, it’s not overwhelming, and that there’s a really clear call to action. I would say those are really the biggest three things to focus on, and that will apply to just about any website you’re ever going to visit. you can checkbox all three of those, your website’s going to be in pretty good shape.
Okay, that sounds awesome. Well, let’s end with this. If people want to check out Layerly and how they could take advantage of everything that you’re doing, how can they find.
Layerly: Affordable Website Solutions
Yeah, so we’re a web based company. I’m located in Wisconsin, but our team is fully remote and we serve companies across the nation. We have a couple clients that are overseas as well, but we mostly serve US based entrepreneurs and small businesses and organizations. So if you know someone or if you’re interested in basically improving your website, getting a website started. You can just go to our website. It’s layerly.io and that’s spelled L-A-Y-E-R-L-Y.io and you can sign up for a website subscription there. So the thing that we, what we really are doing to help small businesses is we’re doing three different things. We’re providing you with time freedom because we build a website for you in five business days. You’ll have a website ready to launch in those five business days.
The other thing that we do is we have affordable website pricing. you can pay monthly or yearly and get a website completely designed and customized and built for you all for less than a hundred bucks a month. And, it’s managed for you. get one on one personal support with an account manager. When you have a question about your website, how it’s performing. if you just are, you know, wondering if, if you’re doing the right thing online, you can pick up the phone give your account manager a call, send an email, send a text message in some cases, and actually be able to talk to a real person, to a real human in the United States. And that’s a benefit that you probably won’t have at just about any other subscription website company that I know of.
Memories from the Road: Throwing Drug-Free House Parties
Okay, that’s awesome. And let’s do this, because I think this is so fun that we’re still in touch and Emily and I were out for some work in Wisconsin and stopping over to see you and the family was so fun. So I’m going to put you on the spot. You lived in a trailer with me and Emily and the other Emily from the tour where we were throwing these drug -free house parties and just on this mission to spread spread good but I’m sure there was some experiences that were very unique to that. Do you have a memory from that time that’s either a fun or a funny memory that you can share? And then we’ll say goodbye.
Oh man, I feel like there were so many. One that sticks out at least is just because we were traveling around kind of through the southern part of the US. And I always had this idea that when you’re traveling more in the south, it’s just gonna be warmer, but there’s a lot more humidity as well. So the weather gets really cold and we were kind of, if I remember correctly, we were kind of in the winter months or spring, right? Yeah. Yeah, it was winter. And I remember there was a number of times where we would be parking the camper and we would pull up to, you know, like a, target or a YMCA or something and ask if we could stay there. And sometimes they would say, yeah, you’re like, go ahead and stay and you can plug in your camper here if you want. And there was just one time I remember where we had stayed and it was so cold that evening that Emily had said, like, I don’t, if we didn’t have electricity, I think we all would have froze to death. We would have just all died. And I was thinking, well, that’s a little extreme, but yeah, it is freezing. So it was just like one of those times where you just think, what are we doing? This is crazy. But it was, it was so much fun. I mean, I think about the, there was one house party we threw that it was, it was like a rager. It was crazy. I mean, there was so many games just so many, so many people that just started showing up and piling into the house. And it was so much fun. Like those are like just the really fun, sweet memories of that, that tour.
Yeah, that was so good. The one you’re probably thinking of, I remember Indiana University was really big and Mississippi State was really big. And yeah, those were probably the most fun. The thing that’s, my gosh, that’s, yeah, that was a game we no longer play.
Yeah, Emily got hit on the head with a hammer. That’s scary. That was scary.
If you see me at a speaking engagement or out in our drug prevention space and you listen to this podcast, ask me about Emily’s concussion at Mississippi State University and you’re in for a treat. My biggest warm fuzzies besides obviously the mission of what we’re doing and how incredible it is was the moments because we didn’t often have electricity and we would like cook on this little gas stove in the, in the camper out at a grocery store parking lot. And then for fun, because we were just working and traveling is like the idea of relaxing break was one of us would pull out our laptop and we would rent from those red box machines, would rent a DVD and, no, no, no wifi. So we’d have a movie night. All four of us jammed into one little queen bed watching a movie and freezing in our camper under the covers. And I think we did one, two and stranger things was out. We just parked next to the Starbucks so we could use their Wi -Fi and we watched stranger things that way. And it is funny, just fun stuff.
That was really fun. Good times.
Yeah. Yeah. Well, thanks Alexander for reminiscing with me and for giving us some tips on how we can have a better online presence. And for everyone listening, we know that this is just one part of your job that probably has like 10 jobs in it. You’re the fundraiser, you’re working with youth, you’re doing speaking engagements, you’re volunteer coordinating, you have to get donations, you’re running grants. That’s not even half of it actually if myself or Alexander can be helpful to you. Reach out, you know where to find us. We’re all on the same mission to help spread prevention and get students involved as young as possible so that we can reduce addiction. So keep up the incredible work that you’re doing and we’ll see you next Monday for another episode of the Drug Prevention Power Hour.
