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Welcome to The Biztape, a show where we highlight some of the biggest hits in business. Whether it's discussing the latest market melody or the newest company with a great beat, hosts Brodrick Lothringer and Zach McDonald will cover all the latest business news, and determine if it's a hit or a miss. So, grab your headphones, it's time to rock out to The Biztape.
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Todd Ross Nienkerk: Recipes from the Web Chef
Get ready to venture into the dynamic world of web design with our special guest, Todd Ross Nienkerk, the CEO and Co-Founder of Four Kitchens. In this episode, Todd sheds light on the evolving landscape of web design industry and how Four Kitchens has adapted to the tides of change – yes, yes, we do discuss the impact of A.I. as well.
Delve further into the discussion as Todd shares his first-hand account of the housing crisis of 2007-2008 impacted his new company, Four Kitchens, and the journey they took to during the storm.
As an added treat, we get an exclusive behind-the-scenes look at Four Kitchens' recent rebranding process. Todd dives deep into the research, testing, and design processes that informed their refreshed identity and how his multi-disciplinary background shaped this transformation.
If you're curious about the tech industry, web design, or just a fellow sci-fi fan, you're in for a treat. This episode is a smorgasbord of insightful discussions, intriguing anecdotes, and valuable lessons from an industry veteran. Tune in and soak up some knowledge!
To stay up to date on The Weekly Biztape, then be sure to check out the link below. Need help with your own podcast? Then be sure to also click the link to learn more about PodPony, a full-service media production company that specializes in helping thought leaders tell their stories through podcasting.
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You're listening to the Weekly Biz Tape. On today's episode, we're sitting down with Todd Ross Neenkerk, co-founder and CEO at Four Kitchens, a web design agency that specializes in supporting universities, nonprofits and non-advertising driven publishers. Today we'll discuss his thought process behind creating meaningful web design user experiences, delve into the impact of the iPhone on web design and tech, explore his thoughts on AI's potential and discover why he ventured into content creation with his podcast, the Future of Content. So sit back, relax and get ready for an episode filled with insights, laughs and a dash of sci-fi, and with that, let's play the track. Grant has a question he needs to know about sci-fi, because we did a little bit of digging and we found out you're kind of passionate about it. So, grant, ask away.
Speaker 2:So hard sci-fi or soft sci-fi, or. Should. I rephrase it how everybody states it Star Wars versus Star Trek.
Speaker 3:Oh, star Trek. But I mean behind me there's I don't know how much you can see, there's some Star Wars stuff back there, lego mostly I think actually between both of you is that Boba Fett's Starship Mandalorian Edition Lego.
Speaker 1:Wow yes.
Speaker 3:I have the same one, the exact same one, on a shelf up there. Wow, okay, that's incredible.
Speaker 1:Now they recently changed the name of that ship from Slave One to Firespray. I know it was controversial. Do you have a take? Do you even care?
Speaker 3:Well, honestly, I have no problem with certain words being removed from everyday use because of how they were originally put into use, and we often don't think about why we use some of the colloquialisms and phrases that we do and we probably should not. Things like oh, this client is paying a grandfathered rate. Well, that is. I don't remember exactly the details, but that refers to voter suppression in black communities in the South. The idea of being grandfathered Correct. I'm sure there's some detail that I'm missing there, but the point is we say legacy rate, right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3:Computers were. There's a lot of computer terminology that has switched around the words slave and master. In particular, you used to have a master hard drive and a slave hard drive and you would attach the slave to the master and like, oh boy, I mean it just couldn't be more literal, right yeah, they were like master databases and slave databases, and I think it was Apple that was the first to start eliminating words like that from their lexicon, like it's not a motherboard, it's a logic board. Right yeah, it's a bit of a gender, you know, a bit of computer hardware. Yeah, anyway, all of this relates to them renaming that ship, great, like, I have not only no problem with it, I support things changing, right, like, as we all grow and learn and get to know one another better and understand what, how people want to be referred to, something as simple as that, like, yeah, absolutely go ahead and change it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I mean I think of growing and learning. I mean you started four kitchens. Hold on, before we even.
Speaker 3:Yeah, before we even before we even asked him that I was like the segue.
Speaker 1:This is already. I know he had a great segue going and I realized we haven't even introduced Todd to the audience. They go who are you and what do you do? Because if we start going off about four kitchens, they're going to be like so I talk about Star Wars, lego and and yeah, is he the? Janitor of four kitchens, or how'd you get him so like we should introduce. Boys are talking about company.
Speaker 3:Well, you did say that I'm the CEO and co-founder. Yes, I did introduce it. And that's all you need to know about me. That's been a great talk.
Speaker 1:That's it. That's the end of this. You know what? Wow, this podcast is so easy. Well, I thought podcasting was hard.
Speaker 2:Is that going to be on your tombstone, Todd? Is that what I'm hearing?
Speaker 1:That's it.
Speaker 3:Right there, podcasting is easy. Yeah, all famous last words.
Speaker 1:So take us through what is a day as CEO and co-founder of four kitchens like.
Speaker 3:Sure, so we are a web design agency. We build websites, and we build websites primarily for universities, nonprofits and non-advertising driven publishers and that's kind of a long-winded way of saying publishers but usually public media or trade publications, industry journals, things like that, publications and media that are not primarily driven by advertising. We used to do a lot in publishing, but one of the the trends that has been going on a long time, for at least the past 10 years or so, in publishing is, as that industry has to find new business models, they also have to find new ways to operate online and new ways to monetize their content. So the tools that a lot of these enterprise publishers and by that I mean, like you know, what used to be called Time Bank, acquired by Meredith, which is the largest magazine publisher in the country, like by far, nbc, you know the economists like organizations like this we've worked with all of those, by the way, they are moving to internal platforms or like things that they've built themselves, maintained themselves, and don't have to rely on an outside party to handle, or some things that are called content monetization platforms, which are often built by companies like the Washington Post, and then they turn around and sell the software. It's called ARC. I think it's one of the reasons why Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post, but that's another conversation entirely. It was to monetize their software. So that's one of the trends that we've seen.
Speaker 3:Speaking of trends and just how things have changed over the last 17 years that I've been doing, this you asked about like a typical day. There is no typical day. I mean, it's different all the time. There's usually there's some common threads, though. So things that I'm usually always working on include making sure that the services that we're providing are relevant and valuable to our clients Pretty basic. As a client services company, we better be doing things that are actually useful and important to our clients, and we produce a lot of content ourselves. So writing things for the blog. We have a podcast of our own called the future of content, which, of course, podpony helps us produce. So thank you for that.
Speaker 3:And a lot of meetings and that sounds like a complaint, but, like in my job is a series of meetings. People don't hate meetings. They hate bad meetings. Like meetings have like useful conversations and important outcomes and decisions are made and people, you know, brainstorm new ideas. So I spend a lot of time doing that, meeting with different people on our team and our clients to learn more about what we could do better, what we can do differently, what we can add, what we can subtract, and then just trying to guide the company with an eye towards, you know, the three to five to maybe 10 year mark. What will we look like then? I'm not really involved in the day to day anymore and I'm not very involved at all in sales, so those are also some things that have evolved over the past 17 years.
Speaker 1:Now you can go Grant. I'm sorry, no, you had a really good question Should.
Speaker 2:I try to use the same segue that I tried earlier too. Let's see if it works. Speaking of growing, hey kind of fits you started. You started your company back in 2006 and went through the recession. Can you describe what that was like? I mean, that's a pretty unique circumstance.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it was. So I don't know if so it was the housing crisis of like 2007, 2008,. You know, collateralized debt obligations, bear sturns, all of that kind of stuff in the fallout that we all dealt with there. I actually don't know if it technically met the definition of recession I am genuinely ignorant as to that but it was certainly a downturn and it definitely impacted our business. Yeah, I mean, it is kind of hard to imagine that we were only about two years into all of that when it hit.
Speaker 3:We had just well, fairly recently moved into our first office, so we had a lease hanging over our heads, and this was at a time we found at the company in Austin, texas. This is a time when the business real estate market was just kind of nuts, and so people who owned offices could demand things like you know five-year leases and a personal guarantee, which in real estate, renter speak means I am. If the company goes out of business, whoever else is signing has to personally pay for the remainder of that lease, regardless of what happens to the company that occupies the space. So that's just one example of all kinds of things that we had suddenly taken on. We had started hiring people for the first time. I think we had maybe two or three employees besides the founders at that point, and what wound up happening was in boy, this would have been May or June of 2008,. We were working with a couple of startups One was a publisher and both of them, in the course of probably two or three days, called us and said some version of the business is being shut down. You need to call this attorney right away to try to get your invoices paid, because it's first come, first serve. I don't have a job anymore. Let me know if I can be of any assistance in the future. Goodbye, good luck.
Speaker 3:One person called us from the street, from outside their offices in New York, where a moving company was actively moving furniture out of their office, and this was like Tuesday morning and they had been at work Monday afternoon. So it was that kind of stuff that we were dealing with, and so we had to cut pay and we also cut time because there wasn't enough work for people to do so. Depending on the role, it was somewhere between 75% to 50%. You'll work 75% to 50%. That's what we can pay you, and we were very transparent with the team. We made a deal with the team where every two weeks we were going to give them an update about what was going on and if things weren't looking better at the four-week mark then we'd certainly understand if they started looking for other jobs and we kind of gave them a whole stair step plan about what we would do.
Speaker 3:About three weeks into it we got a call from the Economist Magazine and guess who does really well in a downturn Economist Magazine? Because everybody wants to know why. So they were investing in a massive migration of their old website to Drupal, which is an open source content management system that we specialize in, and they single-handedly basically pulled us out of this death spiral that we were in. But yes, but it's because it wasn't an accident. It's not like they just randomly opened up a phone book and they're like web design company. There are these seven people in Austin, texas, that we're going to call. We were very deeply involved in the Drupal community at that point and their team was as well. So we were just known by reputation and we were one of two or three shops that they reached out to to talk about this work. So all the community involvement and the giving back to open source that we had done up to that point is what walked us directly into that work.
Speaker 1:And since you started it and where web design was at that point, what's that been like to see it change since 2006 to 2023? And what's the biggest change that comes to mind in that time?
Speaker 3:Well, the biggest change is the iPhone and how that impacted web design and how people experience websites and what clients expect out of not just websites but overall web technology. So that's hot take, but there's a lot of other things that happened along the way, of course.
Speaker 1:Android users have all left the chat.
Speaker 3:Well, the reason why I highlight the iPhone is that was the first touch pinch pull smartphone device. That was the way Steve Jobs referred to it as an internet communicator in his release speech, which is, frankly, like I will nerd out and probably once a year I watch that whole like introduction of the iPhone speech at the Apple conference. Whatever, whatever it's called, that's what. That's the thing that changed. It was people looking at actual websites on a very small screen and having to interact with them in a touch capacity as opposed to a mouse and scrolling and things like that.
Speaker 3:I mean the iPhone singlehandedly changed the direction that people scroll Right, like the scroll wheel on mice changed because of the way that we use our fingers to scroll across a touch surface. That's not that that has a lot of bearing on web design, necessarily, but the point is it impacted so many things about the way we interact with content and technology. That was the single biggest thing that's happened in that amount of time. For sure, lots and lots and lots of other technologies and expectations and things have changed. I mean, ai is currently the one that that everybody's really yeah, everywhere.
Speaker 1:Now I guess probably the industry to capture the sentiment.
Speaker 3:I think worry is probably the overwhelming feeling that people have, and I don't know Should I just dive into that. Since that's, let's just dive right into it.
Speaker 1:Let's make an audio grandma Right, I'm going to timestamp it. Look 1633. All right, the relevant one, everyone looks up.
Speaker 3:Well, I'll I'll preface this with, like I obviously your, your questions are going to be along the line of, like you know, what do I think of this and where do I think it's going and what are we going to do with it, and all of that, and honestly, like as of today, I don't have my thoughts fully formed around it. It is a quarterly goal of ours to develop a perspective as a business about artificial intelligence and how it's useful or not useful, or how our clients could or could not use it. Perspective is just to get on a very short content, marketing and positioning and messaging tangent. Perspective is is a super powerful thing to have. Like having an opinion, having a point of view about something. Like I make websites is fine, but I make websites that do the following things because they should, or because I think they ought to do, and they're best for our clients when we do it this way, you know our university clients should build these kinds of websites in this way, for these reasons.
Speaker 3:That's a perspective, that's a point of view, and winning clients over to that point of view, or them walking in the door and seeing yeah, I agree with them.
Speaker 3:You know, either other people I'm talking to are saying things that I don't agree with, or they're not saying anything at all that I agree or disagree with. They're just talking about how good they are at making websites. They're going to pay attention to the, the company, the team, the organization, whoever that has an actual opinion about the way that these things should be done. So, that is to say, I haven't really formed that opinion, but I have some early thoughts about it. So, like at a macro scale, ai is going to be super disruptive to a lot of jobs and it's probably going to be one of the first technologies in a long time in human history that's touching what we sort of, in a privileged way, call like white collar workers, so people who have quote unquote skilled jobs, which just means you sit at a computer, sit at a desk all day and you complain about oh I don't know, I got to get up and do. I work from home at a computer and life is so hard.
Speaker 1:He gets me.
Speaker 3:Yes, everybody's life. I don't mean to make fun of people Everybody has things that they're dealing with but it's the first kind of technology in a long time that's going to impact those of us who have those kinds of jobs, because people who were maybe doing things like extensive copywriting or content review or like repackaging content I'm just going to kind of leave my opinions to content for the most part, because that's what we deal with on our clients websites those jobs are going to really change and in many cases, they could go away or be so unrecognizable that they're actually a totally different job. Call centers are likely to be one of the hardest hit to step outside of web design and all that for a while, because artificial intelligence being able to understand what you're talking about and help you and do things it's just another way to interact with a company's website. Like I need to change my payment information Well, you could do that on the website or you could call this call center, and it's just another way to basically perform that task. And these digital assistants, these chatbots that you can interact with either over text or voice, are likely to very quickly become capable of doing some pretty complicated things, like Google years ago by the way, I want to say maybe three years ago demoed this technology that's in Google Maps right now.
Speaker 3:It's been in Google Maps for a long time where if a company, like a restaurant, does not have a reservations link that they've populated in their Google Maps profile, google Maps will have this button that says, like, make a reservation, and then it says, ok, we're going to try that. What's happening behind the scenes is that Google Maps calls the business and interacts with them like a human, including ums and aas. Make a reservation in your name at a certain time and then we'll call you back and say, all right, we made this reservation for this place at this time. Oh, my goodness, you can listen to an actual call that they did. That they recorded. It's crazy and I've used it and it works. So that's been around for years. People, you know we're all hyped up about AI now, but this stuff has been going on for a long time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, go to McDonald's and, like any McDonald's you go to, they have some sort of AI system taking your order and sometimes, like every now and again, I like throw a curveball and at first I'm like, all right, no, you know no pickles, extra ketchup, this, that, whatever. And sure enough, it just details everything. And I'm like, oh, by the way, I've got a coupon and they're like great, what's your coupon code? And I'm like, oh, my gosh.
Speaker 1:Yeah, like who's actually making the burger Terminator? Like what's happening back there? So I, yeah, so, having seen what's on the horizon, obviously, you said you're still formulating an opinion, which I think the rest of the world is. I mean, italy just completely banned AI across the board for a variety of reasons and we do have. I get it. Yeah, we have moral, ethical obligations to uphold and you know, I know a lot of designers who are terrified because of a little thing called mid journey where, in seconds and I'll be honest, I've used it from time to time you're like, oh, I just need this cartoon for this graphic or for this resource or this or this, and it's so tempting. I will say I mean this is like super nerdy, but I did use it recently to my big impressionistic art fan and I love a lot of Van Gogh, monet and I'm like, all right, create Hobbiton and the style of if Van Gogh had mentored Monet and what it spit out. I was just like oh my goodness.
Speaker 1:So I'm going to be like sending it off to like some Etsy contractors to like who do impressionistic paintings. Like here's some inspiration. Can you do something like that?
Speaker 2:We've got the hard fantasy with the hard sci-fi, yeah.
Speaker 1:I know.
Speaker 3:So you actually there's a lot that we could talk about in what you just said, but that last part about using this as inspiration and sending it off to somebody on Etsy and actual human to do the work, that is, for our clients, meaning people who produce content either for marketing purposes or because it is their product, like they are a university, they write, they do research, they have to write about the research or whatever it is that they're doing.
Speaker 3:I think it's going to be very useful to generate ideas, to give people a head start in the ideation process or the content repackaging process, and by that I mean you could record a podcast about something, Use AI to make a transcription out of it, Take that transcription, put it in something like chat GPT and say, hey, can you write me a 400 word preview or abstract for this episode and chances are it'll be pretty decent, but it's. You know it may get you halfway there, 75% of the way there, right, Saves you a lot of time. Or you could say, hey, can you summarize? You know the five key points from their discussion. You may not agree with those five points being the most key points raised, but at least, like you know, it gets you started, and it switches our focus from rote copywriting to both storytelling and editing and those are things that humans do uniquely that I have a very hard time believing a computer is really going to replace.
Speaker 1:I love that.
Speaker 3:So what? The analogy that I sort of draw mentally, because, regardless of what countries like Italy will do, this technology is here. It's actually been here for a while. There just been some examples that were like so impressive that people started to think it's the first. It's like they'd never seen it before because it was so impressive. But it's been there for a while. It cannot it really can't be stopped. We can only decide how we want to use it and interact with it. So there are ethical questions around. Who owns that content? Where is that content derived from? So in your example of, I want to make a painting of Hobbiton in the style of if Van Gogh mentored Monet, right? So you've just listed three things that you don't own any rights to right. You personally do not own the rights to the Lord of the Rings IP.
Speaker 1:You don't own. Well, actually, no, right, I am am.
Speaker 3:So now, now you can go tell an AI to do that.
Speaker 3:You could go tell a human to do that.
Speaker 3:In order to accomplish that task, either the AI or the human both have to rely on derivative work, and all work, fundamentally, is derivative.
Speaker 3:We hear things, we overhear things, we see things, we're inspired by something we want to retell, a story we want to like. There isn't a lot that is truly original in what we do, because everything kind of comes from something else and we are constantly building, as a species, on our creative collective consciousness, and AI is just doing it in this way. That feels like literal and antiseptic and threatening, and so the derivative aspect of how AI creates this quote unquote original work feels like more pressing and urgent and is inflaming a lot of people's opinions about it. Now, there are so many different kinds of AI and right now we're in the middle of the writer and actors strike in Hollywood and the kind of eight that there are lots of kinds of AI that they're concerned about. But one of the key things that the actors are worried about, for example, is that their likeness is going to be used without their permission in perpetuity, for just pennies.
Speaker 3:It's something like you get paid the day rate to have your body scanned and your voice recorded and then boom, they own you and you could refuse to do something as a person, but they'll just make your digital avatar do it instead. Uncool, totally uncool, in my opinion, because I think we all own the rights to ourselves at the if, if, anything, right. So I'm not talking about that, that kind of stuff, but as it relates to just producing content on a regular basis, I think that over reliance on AI tools is really foolish.
Speaker 3:I think that people can tell yes, because there's always there's something a little not quite right about it, and if somebody thinks that you're doing that, you've lost, like, all credibility and all respect. So use it to generate ideas, use it to do some of the more rote copywriting tasks, but don't forget that we as people are storytellers and we are editors, and those are things that a computer, at least as far as I can tell, will not be able to replace.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I mean I don't know, since I do produce podcasts, I can always say I spot a chat GPT podcast description like a mile away and I'm like, oh, look at that. And everyone else is like what? I'm like no, like that's chat GPT. And they're like, oh, ok, ok, anyway, it's just me, that's all right.
Speaker 1:No, something else I always think, based out of what you were just saying, is I saw meme ones where it said everyone's so worried about an AI takeover and taking all of our clients away, but for that to happen, clients need to know what they want first. We're OK. I mean, that's true, like they got to know what to prompt, they got to know what they want. And I do think, with a lot of folks like myself when it comes to podcasting, I've been thinking a lot about AI over the next five, 10 years and, yeah, I'll have a lot of discussions with entrepreneurs where they say, well, why should I hire you when I can use all these different platforms? And I'm like for that exact reason, because a lot of people are doing that, and all of this content is going to be this very average level, canva looking stuff, which is fine If you're just in.
Speaker 1:There are people who go out, start a podcast just to put on their website to showcase. Look, we have a podcast. Nothing wrong with that. But if you're trying to do something different, I think a lot of consultants and agencies need to step forward with that subject matter expertise and say, no, I'm going to coach you, I'm going to be go alongside with you and say, yes, like the production stuff, as you were mentioning, that's secondary. How are we going to get you to reach your goals and everything else? So that's where I think there's a new opportunity for folks to be able to do that and think in innovative ways if they don't have to do some of these other tasks. So pretty excited about that. Now, when it comes to podcasting, you're not new to that game either. You mentioned in the beginning you've got this podcast called the future of content. So what's the story behind that and why did you get that podcast going?
Speaker 3:And something that I wanted to do for a while. I want to say we started it maybe three years ago or so. I might be wrong about that, but it feels like it's been around longer because it's something that I've been kicking around at the company for a while. The goal of the podcast is fundamentally just to talk about where content is headed, and content is very broadly defined in our podcast. It's anything from what you think of usually as content like books and journalism and movies and music and things like that, but also really anything that humans make that can be enjoyed or consumed is content as far as I'm concerned. So that also includes a menu at a restaurant, both the literal menu and the chef coming up with what dishes to serve and then making them and giving them to people. That's all content. It's all an experience, it's all something that is created by people to be consumed by other people, and I just really love talking with people who create stuff and I love to learn their process and what gets them inspired and where they think things are headed, and usually it's technology that's changing things more often than not. That was the original idea for the podcast, because it was just fun. It was just something that I wanted to do.
Speaker 3:Forkitchens started as a publishing company.
Speaker 3:We published an alt weekly in Austin for a while and we had to build a website out of necessity ourselves, because we were broke and we just had to learn how to do it and that's how we wound up getting into web design. Ultimately, our roots are in creating content and it's something that I always love to return to when I can. In the last year or so, as we've been getting more serious as a company about our content, marketing and positioning and messaging and perspective and all of those things, we've shifted the purpose of the podcast a little bit to include some things that are really relevant to our clients. We used to have a really broad net and we've reeled that in just a little bit so that people in the nonprofit world and the university and publishing world that this podcast is a bit more relevant to them than perhaps it was in previous seasons. We'll see where that goes. We'll see what the reception there is. We've only released a couple of episodes so far this season, but we're going to give it a shot and see what happens.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's awesome. I wondered, with all this content that you're creating, how do you believe design influences your approach to that digital content? I believe you have a background in psychology as well. What role does psychology play into your design approach to make meaningful user experiences?
Speaker 3:Great questions. Why do I have a background in psychology? I started when I went off to school and I went off to college I went to the University of Texas, which is where all four of the original four kitchens founders met. I started with computer science, and seems logical. I did that for a year and towards the end of that first year I noticed that in the curriculum it was very academic and it was very science. It was very computer science. We were learning very theoretical languages that were almost mathematical or philosophical in nature. It's hard to describe without really getting to the weeds, but I won't. But it was just basically like snooty, science-y stuff.
Speaker 3:I asked the counselor there in the program, like when do you think you're going to start offering some classes in JavaScript or anything related to the web? Like you know the Internet? I was told that the Internet is not programming. That's when I realized that this was not the right program for me. I thought then that that's most likely what I was going to wind up doing. Surprise, that's exactly what happened. But I realized, well, I'm going to have to teach myself this thing, just like I originally started building websites in high school and I taught myself how to do it then. So if I'm going to have to continue to teach myself how to do this, I may as well study something I really like to study. That I think is fun, since this is going to be extracurricular anyway. So I switched into psychology and then I later added radio, television, film, which has two tracks production and media studies. I didn't have time for production, so I did media studies instead, and it turned out that those two things, psychology and media studies, are actually really perfect for working on the Internet, having some kind of Internet related job.
Speaker 3:Psychology is pretty fundamentally about how people think about themselves and other people and how we interact on a more personal level. I'm oversimplifying psychology, but that's really at the core. Media studies is about how we communicate at large scale. So when you combine those two things interacting personally and conveying information at a large scale there's so much about the Internet that overlaps with that Social media and the idea of creating websites for publications. That's mass media, right. I mean, the Internet is the ultimate mass media tool. Reaches more people than anything else ever has. So that's how I academics and my background and all that kind of wrap into it.
Speaker 3:You'd asked about how the user experience of content right and how design can influence that. Speaking of mass media and media studies, there's a media theorist from the 70s named Marshall McLuhan, who's very famous for a lot of things, but one quote in particular, which is the medium is the message, and the idea is essentially that you cannot separate the thing that you're saying from the way in which it's being said or the venue in which it's being said. So when you are reading or when you're experiencing content on a laptop, that is different than experiencing it on a phone. It's different than listening to it as a screen reader. If you have that turned on, or if you don't have full use of your eyes or sight or have difficulty reading, or whatever the reason is, you are then experiencing that content in an audio format. Maybe it started as a video but then had to become a transcript because you are deaf and so you need to have that transcript. That's a bad example, because you can hear if it's recorded. The point is, there are these different media that content can appear in. So there is the element of design in terms of the format and the channel and all of that, and then there's the design in the sense of how you structure the content, and that starts at a very high level, like, let's think of a book.
Speaker 3:A book has chapters. So you decide, as the author, that there are going to be chapters and chapters are going to be divided between each other for some reason. Maybe it's because every chapter, it alternates the character's point of view, so maybe you're going from one character to another every chapter, or maybe the chapter represents a passage of time, or maybe the chapter is just simply a way to leave creative cliff hangers along the way so that you're engaged, so that that last sentence that you read in that chapter makes you want to go on to the next chapter. There are all kinds of reasons for chapter structure. Well then, you can divide those chapters into different parts or acts or books or whatever, and those can all flow together in some way. The way that the words are laid out on the page, the way that you italicize or bold, or the way that you have characters express inner thoughts, or the way that dialogue is expressed in a book, those are all design aspects of the text itself, the text being the academic word for a piece of content in any format.
Speaker 3:So how that relates to websites in particular, most of our clients receive most of their website traffic on mobile devices, so people are on their phones. They got an email from a fundraising campaign and they click on a link that takes them to the website. Now they're scrolling through the website, that page, as a piece of content that has a purpose, and that purpose might be to get somebody to donate to your cause. That has to be designed in such a way to be compelling, and so the user experience of that page has an intended goal. There's a journey that you want the user to go on, where the end goal is they donate. So you have to think about how that content fits into the larger picture of the user experience.
Speaker 3:How did the user, the person, wind up on this page reading this message about why they should donate? Did they get an email? Did they see a link in social media? Did they hear a radio campaign with a URL that they visited directly? So all of those are like steps in the path. How do they get? How do they hear about it? How do they get there? How do they act? How do they convert? How do they actually do the thing that you want them to do?
Speaker 3:And the process of figuring out what works well is a combination of best practices. Every industry has its own concept of best practices that are usually they don't change very often, unless some new technology comes along or something drastically changes. But the finer point of like, ok, well, we know that this, that newsletters that go to websites that have donation forms, we know that that best practice works Right. But how do we actually, how can we say something compelling that makes somebody want to to act? That's where user testing comes into play, and there are all kinds of ways to do that.
Speaker 3:But the version is that the simplest explanation is you try one thing and then you try another thing and you repeat that a few hundred or thousand times and you see which one did better. Right, that's one way to do testing. And then from there you pick the version that did better and then you modify that and then you test that against this new version and you just kind of keep branching out in that way to get to something that works really, really well. The wildest example of this is when Google sat down I'm working from memory here so I might get some of my facts wrong when Google was developing what color they would make their links in search results. They went through something like 32 shades of blue. Find the one shade of blue that more people actually clicked on and they had like statistically relevant data to back this up.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 3:Right. So that's when you take it to its extreme and you're dealing with billions of data points that you can sift through. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:That's incredible. Well, speaking about design and like the purposefulness behind it, you've seen a lot in the last 20 years. I remember growing up in the 90s and 2000s a lot of especially in the 90s, a lot of bright colors, and then 2000s, a lot of 3D and drop shadows and things, and in the last 15 years, things have gone really, really simple. And when looking at your own branding for things, look at your company's design where there's, you know, a few colors, but then you look at the future of content and there's this collage art and there's a lot going on. And so I want to ask about that for yourself how, what is that process like when just helping a client decide what a feel should be for their website when they they want something that not only is aesthetically pleasing for their prospective clients or people who could help fundraisers or whatever, but something they really like as well? What is that process like for you?
Speaker 3:Great question. There are lots of little steps along the way that we take to arrive at something. There are various exercises, there are some tests, there are brainstorming sessions. There's all kinds of things that we do to get there. But for us, specifically for kitchens, who makes websites for people?
Speaker 3:Where we start is our clients already have an established brand and ideally that brand is documented in some way, like there is a brand guidebook or a style guide or something like that. Now they don't have to have it, but boy does it make things easier if they do. But the point is they have a brand already established. We do not do branding, so we're not going to go in there and tell them this should be your logo and this is your color palette for your brand and this and that and whatever. We start with that because usually we're working on an organization's main website. It's not some event sub-site. They do a conference every year and so they spin up this temporary website off over here. We do those sometimes, but mainly we're working on the big main websites. So we start with the brand guidelines that they have established. At that point, hopefully, we understand some basics. They have a logo, they have some colors, there's some stuff that's implied like a palette implied by that. There's ways that they like to talk about themselves, ways they don't like to talk about themselves, and we have all of that in front of us, and usually we start with the process of okay, we know this about you and your brand.
Speaker 3:Now let's talk about your website. What do you want your website to do? It all starts with what are the outcomes that you want from your website. Everything has to be outcome focused. Otherwise, you might build a website that looks great but does nothing. It looks really cool. People go there, they play around, but they're not donating to your cause. Well, that has been a waste of money or there's something that just needs to be changed. So we established what are the underlying goals that you were trying to accomplish? What in a year or two? What would you be seeing that would say this was worth it? This is a success. I want to keep going. From there, we start to translate that goal into what are some of the things that the website actually then needs to do.
Speaker 3:So if the primary outcome is we need more people to subscribe to our newsletter, because our newsletter has become our primary communications channel, let's say that that's an outcome that somebody wants, then we need to be designing a website that is pointing people towards that goal and it's not as simple as like. Well, you just put in. There's always a newsletter signup form on every page. There needs to be like a path that that user follows. How are they getting to the site? Chances are they're not going to the homepage.
Speaker 3:Everybody loves to talk about the homepage of their site and they sweat about the homepage of their site. It becomes like an internal political battle within an organization to have real estate on that website, on that homepage, because they feel that if their department or their cause or their interest is not reflected on the homepage, then they are not important within the organization. That's totally untrue, but it's how some people feel about what the homepage means. When was the last time? Like, think really hard. When was the last time that you went to an organization's homepage first? Or did you get there because you clicked on a link from another thing and you hit an article, or you hit a landing page, or you hit somebody's bio or whatever, and then maybe you go to the homepage or you start to explore a little bit more. You have to think about all the entry points when you build these journeys. So people are probably not starting at the homepage. They're probably starting somewhere else.
Speaker 3:Well, where is that? We need to do some research, we need to do some digging, we need to look at the numbers. How is your current website performing? We can build off of that so we combine their brand guidelines, their goals, the things we know about the journey. The user needs to take, the data that they already have and, through multiple rounds of design, we lay out the case for why we feel it should be done in certain ways. We solicit input from our clients. Sometimes we do tests with either the clients themselves or with their audience to see what is this design that we've created actually going to do, what we think it's going to do, and that can be a really humbling experience.
Speaker 3:Sometimes we actually mock up like a fake website.
Speaker 3:Sometimes we draw it on a sheet of paper and we have like a stack and I've done this with the university.
Speaker 3:There's a stack of papers that represent maybe 20 different pages on the website and each one of the things that they can we ask them to tap with their finger like okay, you want to sign up for the newsletter? Here's this webpage. How would you do this? And you just sit and wait and you watch, and either they're doing it on a mock-up website or they're doing it. However, and it's so agonizing because you're like I hope that they get to the thing that they're supposed to get to quickly and that we have said the right words on the page, we put the links in the right places, we've made them visible, we made them clear and that that pathway is obvious to somebody. And it could be very humbling in that often the things that we think are logical and that are easy are not actually the way that their constituents or customers or whomever think, and we have to readjust based on what their preconceived notions or what how they interpret certain words or phrases or pathways to mean, and then readjust the design based on that.
Speaker 1:Well, now, speaking to you as yourself, as a client here, you recently went through a little bit of a design update. Not a big thing, just a rebrand. So talk us through that yeah, just a little rebrand. Just a small thing just a smidge. It impacted just a couple of things on the site, Not a big deal.
Speaker 1:No but take us through that, because I'm sure there are plenty of companies out there that are going to listen to this and maybe they've thought about rebranding. So what was that experience like for folks that have got that on their mind?
Speaker 3:So we are not a branding agency, and one of the one of the hard one hard learned business lessons that I've experienced in my career is it is my personal opinion and belief that if you don't do something as a company, you should send it to somebody else to do so. By that I mean we make websites for universities, nonprofits, publishers. We do not make websites for digital agencies. We do not produce content in a content marketing capacity. We are not content marketers, we are not CPAs and CFOs. We're not financial professionals, we're not lawyers, we're not podcast producers, we are not branding experts. So why would we try to do any of those things within our four walls, especially when we're so small? So something that I had learned over the years is you think that you're doing yourself a favor by doing things in-house, because nobody knows me better than me that kind of logic. Or also, you go out and interview a marketing agency and you learn how much it costs to hire a good content marketing agency, because they do a ton of stuff. And you learn how much it costs and you think, oh man, for that amount I could hire a full-time marketing person. Yeah, you could. And then that full-time marketing person is going to do the one thing that they're really good at, whatever that is, or you can hire an agency that does 20 different things. But there's this weird common sense but wrong thought that having people in-house is always better and that's just not true. So over the years we've learned and we finally made the call that, unless it's something we actually do, we're not going to try to do it in these four walls. So we went out and hired a branding agency and we did so because we had gone through a lot of changes over the past few years. We merged with another agency, we acquired a second agency, there was a change in ownership at Four Kitchens and I'm the sole remaining co-founding owner and the market was changing and our clients' expectations were changing and the kinds of clients we were working with had changed since 17 years ago when we first set out to do this.
Speaker 3:So we realized that after all of this time it was we really just needed to have a bit of a fresh start and a reimagining of how we talk about ourselves and how we present ourselves to the world. So we hired a branding agency to do that and it was just super fun. We hired a group called Focus Lab. I will unabashedly plug them because they're incredible. They helped us with everything from a new logo to color palettes, typography, messaging, vision, purpose, the language that we use and don't use, things that we avoid, things that we like, slogans and just I mean, imagine, anything related to brand. They helped us with and it was really key to be working with an outside party, because you can't really like you as an organization if you think about yourselves as a box and that box has a lot of labeling on it.
Speaker 3:Right, you're in the box. You're the thing that's being sold all the time. Right, like you're the I don't know, this is going to get lame quickly but like you're the cereal in the box that everybody thinks is delicious or is good for you or is gluten-free or whatever it is that you are that sets you apart. Right, you're this delicious cereal. The box is the thing that makes most people pick it up and eat you. This is where it falls apart, so you can't see the box. When you're in the box is where I'm going with this. So you have to hire somebody from outside your organization to tell you you know, this is what people think of you, this is what your competition is doing. This is how what you're saying is confusing because it sounds like what your you know two of your four main competitors are saying. Here's what you could be saying. That is true. That will set you apart and actually win you more of the kind of work that you want to win.
Speaker 3:So those are all examples of branding, and that process led us to where we are today, which was an opportunity for all of these people that had joined Four Kitchens as the result of mergers and acquisitions and new hires to start to build something together that's new, something that they have a part in helping to build and form and shape.
Speaker 3:Something like 75% of our team, at the time that we launched the new brand, had been at Four Kitchens for less than two years, and this is a total of, at the time, 65 people. So 75% of 65 people had been at Four Kitchens less than two years. So part of the rebrand was about giving them something new to build and something that didn't feel like they were joining an institution that's set in its ways, that has kind of like a playbook that they follow and is known for certain things. Now they're just a cog that fits in that machine. We wanted them to really understand that that's not how we operate. We're going to show you that's not how we operate by actually cleaning the slate a bit and saying we're now all building something new together.
Speaker 1:Wow, that's so neat and I think that perfectly teased us up for the last question here on the show. Typically, in a lot of these business podcasts, you see the legacy question comes up time and time again. So we're going to do the same thing and we're going to ask a legacy question. So, when it's all said and done, all right, this is the biz tape. So let's say, there is a track, one single track, one song that you get to define your impact on the world from your career, a song, what's the song you're going with?
Speaker 3:Oh man.
Speaker 1:We don't prep people for this one.
Speaker 3:I already have difficulty just picking songs in general, but this one is supposed to represent my entire life. A legacy, a song.
Speaker 1:Yeah, one song, and it doesn't have to be and it could be just what you hoped to impact. It could be something fun like closing time or I don't know. Hopefully something positive.
Speaker 3:Closing time is so like it's the sad song you sing at a bar when you got to go home. It means that, like I get your point, all right, I'm not going to critique. Maybe you chose that.
Speaker 1:I'm sorry, I shouldn't blame you. I didn't pick closing time. I actually don't need, all right, we?
Speaker 3:know your favorite song is closing time. We know that you want to be known for closing down the bar.
Speaker 1:It's I'm going to keep that back in my closet and keep it secret, because time may be fun of me and I won't tell anyone ever again.
Speaker 3:OK, I've got a song. The song I would pick would be Super Rad by the Aquabats and OK, nice. They're a late 90s Southern California third wave ska band. They all dress up like superheroes. They sing these great songs that talk a lot about like childhood and growing up and like from an adult perspective and they're just like a really fun wacky zany group and it's just very like high tempo and upbeat. Warning, you would better like ska if you're going to try to listen to that, because otherwise If it's ska better be, upbeat too.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's right, yeah, it is better, but why so? Why that one? I just really love that song and that song is about. It is actually exactly about what I just mentioned. It's from the perspective of somebody who's kind of grown up, looking back on like, hey, there are these things that when I was a kid, this is what life was like, and it was really like Super Rad in this way, where there were these action figures in comic books and video games, go skateboarding and like all this fun stuff. And I guess the legacy that I'd want to leave behind is that people had fun while doing their work and that they can look back on that and fondly, and not with any kind of regret or thinking like work was something that solely just sort of allowed them to live, but that the work that they did meant something and that they worked with really good people clients and teammates and that they had fun doing it. Work isn't always fun, but that doesn't mean it can't ever be, and I think that's what I'd like to leave behind.
Speaker 1:I love that. For the folks who are leaving behind this episode, but they want to know more about four kitchens. Todd Ross, nienker, where do they go? Where can they find you? Where can they find four kitchens?
Speaker 3:Well, believe it or not, it's our website, Fourkitchenscom. Now, that's all spelled out F-O-U-R kitchens like the room in your house, pluralcom.
Speaker 2:Make sure you go to the homepage.
Speaker 3:Yes, you started the homepage. You started the homepage. The only way to get into our website is through the homepage, or you could search for us and whatever. Yes, if you want to learn more about our approach to web design and development, our thoughts about digital strategy and all of that, we have a very opinionated blog that talks about not just the work that we've done and are doing, but how we think things should be done on the web, and we have some great case studies up there as well. And if you're looking for a new website or you just want somebody to point you in the right direction, feel free to reach out. We're always happy to talk about what it is you're looking to do, and if it's not a good fit for us, we'll send you on your way with a good referral, and that way you can at least make some progress.
Speaker 1:Todd, this episode has been fantastic. Thank you so much for joining us for this episode of the Weekly Pistake.
Speaker 3:Oh, thank you very much. I appreciate it, thank you.