What should your website do? Time-saving tips and hacks

Thinking about getting a website but not quite sure what it can actually do for you? Your site can be far more than a digital catalogue — it can save you time, support your clients, and quietly boost your results in the background. In this episode, Nikki Vera (neurodivergent brand and web designer @ Studio Nyx, based in Western Australia) and I unpack practical ways your website can work harder for you, from simple time-savers to features that lift your visibility and ROI. Pop the kettle on and settle in.

Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts, or Podbean

Here’s a quick summary of our talking points:

Sick of going back and forth to find a meeting time? We’ll tell you how your website can save you time by accepting bookings.
Could your website bring in extra money with minimal effort? We explain how you can use your website to sell in your sleep.
Want to capture repeat customers? You can grow a fanbase of loyal followers from your website.
Tired of having to go out to find people? We talk about one way your website can proactively bring clients to you.
And a bonus tip if you stay right up until the end! (A better way to do a LinkTree-style page.)

Links and mentions:

Transcript:

Lou: Okay, welcome back everyone, I am so delighted to have a returning guest on the show and that is Nikki Vera and today Nikki and I are going to talk about things you can do with your website. So whether you’re not sure about what to put on your website or what sort of things it can do for you, hopefully you’ve come to the right place. Because we are going to tell you about some different ideas, things you can add to your website and things that can do beyond just being a brochure that you send to people. So welcome back Nikki.

Nikki: Hello, thank you for having me.

Lou: So I’d love it if you could just give us a little refresher, a little reminder about who you are and what kind of work you do.

Meet Nikki

Nikki: So I’m Nikki, I’m the human behind Studio Nyx, I primarily do branding websites, I work with a lot of creative neurodivergent, disabled, chronically ill, queer kind of humans. Very focused on sort of taking a strategic and holistic view of things so making sure that your branding and your website fits in with your business and your marketing and your life. And also a big focus on things like user experience and accessibility and making brands and websites that work for you.

Lou: Awesome, yeah and in case anyone’s tuned in to us before, when I had Nikki on the show previously, we had a talk about website accessibility and things you could do… Things you can implement to make your website friendly for people with disabilities or disability issues and things like that. So in case you’re interested, I’ll pop a link to that in the description.

Anyway, in this episode, I’d love to have a chat about things you could do with a website.

Doing more with your website

So I was thinking, a lot of people come to me with this sort of idea that a website is like a kind of a brochure or a business card, just something that you actively send people to and I would like to open you up to some ideas that a website can do so much more than just sit there and wait for people to come to it.

Nikki: And it should.

Lou: Yeah, so Nikki, could you tell us about any possible ideas of things your website can do perhaps while you’re not tending to it — while you’re away?

Nikki: I mean, there’s so much that your website can and should be doing for you. It should be taking work off your shoulders. I mean, there’s so many angles that you can come at this from. Obviously, SEO is a big and sort of often semi-talked about but in a confusing way one.

Book appointments without the back-and-forth “Are you free?” fiasco

Yeah, so SEO, obviously, as a marketing thing, your website actively bringing that traffic to you rather than you having to send all of it to it. Things like, it should be addressing the questions that you get asked. It should be giving up people away to contact you, letting you know what next steps are. Obviously, if you do meetings and things, schedulers are an absolute lifesaver. Yeah. I would die without my schedulers.

Lou: Yeah, true. I love that. I love having calendar bookings and I love having them scheduled for me because otherwise I can’t deal with someone who comes to me and says, “Just call me whenever.” How do you live like that?

Nikki: And it’s either that or there’s hours of going backwards and forwards trying to find something that works for both people, especially if you’re in separate time zones and it’s just exhausting. It’s so much easier to be able to go, “Hey, I’d love to have a chat. Book a time that works for you.” And then it just pops up on your calendar. If you’re doing paid consults, it can take the payment for you.

Lou: Exactly. Yeah, there’s a variety of different calendar scheduling apps you can include on your website. And some of them are free. Some of them are free with paid upgrades. And many of them also allow you to connect up a card processor or PayPal or something like that so you can take money on the spot and not have to juggle so many things and go back and forth.

Nikki: Yeah, for sure. It saves so much of my time and sanity. And yeah, like you said, there’s price points for whatever, options for whatever your needs are, whether it’s just the occasional call to chat with people or whether you’re a service-based business taking bookings like a beauty business or a therapist or something. It just saves you so much admin time. Even if there is a little bit of a cost, you’re like, “Is that less than the personal cost of all the time it takes?” And often, yes it is.

Lou: Yeah, like could you be taking another appointment in the time that you’re sort of going back and forth with emails finding a time?

Nikki: Yeah. Or taking phone calls or whatever it is.

Lou: Yeah. And also Squarespace, it kind of pretty much seamlessly integrates with a booking calendar, doesn’t it?

Nikki: Yeah, so Squarespace bought out Acuity quite a few years ago now. They rebranded it to Squarespace Scheduling and then rebranded it back to Acuity.

Lou: Oh, it’s still basically the same thing, right?

Nikki: Yeah, it’s been the same thing all along. And yeah, absolute seamless integration there. Or even most schedulers have the ability to embed them in your website of choice.

Lou: Yeah, so that means you can include it on a page.

Nikki: Yeah, they give you some code to insert into a code block and then it pops up seamlessly, depending on if you design it well and to match you. Obviously, often can’t even tell that it’s a separate system.

Lou: Yeah, so good. Yeah, it frees up a lot of time and headspace just having to sort out, “Oh, are you free this time? Are you free that time?” Just… It’s there. Pick your time. The calendar is linked to my calendar.

Nikki: Exactly. If it’s free, then I’m free and it works, especially because I chat with people from all different time zones, whether you’re on the west or east coast of Australia or Europe or the US. I don’t have to worry about it.

Lou: Yeah, it’s so good.

Selling while you sleep

So there’s booking calendars. And also, I mean, there’s the obvious thing of just selling products, whether that’s physical or digital products.

And I mean, if you’re selling a digital product, then depending on what it is, you don’t even have to be there. No, you can sell stuff and make money.

Nikki: Yeah, so I have a second business, which is an e-commerce business. I’m building up my digital products. I’ve had, I think, five or six orders in the last week that were just digital orders. They came in while I was asleep. They’re auto-fulfilled. I don’t have to do anything. It’s going to just go through my bank account. It’s so good.

Have your people come to you, instead of going out to find them

Lou: Yeah, good. So that’s another thing you can do is sell things. And you also mentioned the SEO aspect, which is search engine optimisation, being visible on Google. Your shop actually is pretty good at coming up on Google. I think that may be because you are like one of the only people in Australia who supplies some of the things that you have.

Nikki: It’s a little bit niche, which definitely helps. It’s not something I rely on for my design business, because I’m competing against SEO agencies with budgets of hundreds of thousands of dollars and full time staff that just do that. So I’m never going to beat them out. But if you’re in a space where you can target something that’s a bit more achievable…

I have a physiotherapy client that we did a basic little website for almost two years ago. It hasn’t been touched then is getting them 100 clicks a month.

Lou: And that’s without paying for any Google Ads?

Nikki: Yeah, that’s without paying for anything. It’s just a little two person studio. They’re not very techie.

But having set that up strong at the beginning, even without any ongoing work, it’s bringing them people.

Yeah. So there you go. So this website automatically brings in people and the owner of the business doesn’t have to go out and seek people. They come to them. So good.

Yeah, for sure. Saving you time and effort and money. And all of the beautiful things that we never have enough of as small business owners. Yeah. And I think Lou also has some wonderful resources on SEO for anyone who’s going, what the #### is that?

Lou: Oh, for sure. Yes, I do have some explanations of SEO. And a lot of this stuff is really straightforward to implement, especially if like I said, you’ve got a particular niche or service area that maybe maybe you’re one of very few people offering that then there’s no there’s no excuse for you not to be discoverable on search engines. Especially if you want the business.

Nikki: Yeah. I might often just [put in] a little bit of work and come with a really big payoff.

Growing your fanbase

Lou: Yeah. So something else I wanted to touch on in terms of what a website can do for you is growing an audience in the form of an email list.

And it’s a really, it’s a really common one. And you see newsletter sign up forms on a lot of websites. And it’s great if you want to implement that. But I reckon you got to do it in such a way that makes people actually want to sign up.

Nikki: No, definitely. I’m like, discount for signing up and then never contacting a person ever again is not doing you any good.

Lou: Yeah. So it’s a great idea. But I think it pays to be a bit strategic about it. So for me, from a consumer’s perspective, like I, I will often sign up to the newsletter for a shop and e-commerce store, maybe not necessarily because I’m excited about the new products, but just to remind myself that they exist.

Nikki: Which is honestly the real big reason I do recommend having things because there’s the, I don’t know what the number is up to now, but X number of people need to have X number of interactions with a brand before they’re comfortable buying for them. And that number keeps going up.

Lou: Oh, wow.

Nikki: Yeah. Every time, every time the stat comes out, it’s gone up again because we are just so constantly bombarded with information that it takes a bit longer for something to stick in for us to actually trust someone. And a lot of people, when they land on your website, they’re not ready to buy from you. Yeah. Like very few people are ready to buy from you the first time they land on your website. And if you don’t have any way to capture and keep those people engaged and nurture them, they’re going to forget that you exist and they’re never going to come back and that traffic is lost.

So yeah, obviously having a social media link is a little bit helpful. But we know how few organic social media posts are actually shown to a decent chunk of your audience because the number of that keeps getting lower and lower.

Lou: Yeah.

Nikki: Yeah, I think people do still really underestimate email because everyone gets them. As in everyone on your list gets your email. It’s a really powerful way to stay in front of people’s mind that it doesn’t have to be a huge thing. I know it feels like an enormous demand, but I generally say, my rule of thumb, I’m like, can you do one email a month?

Lou: Yeah.

Nikki: So that people remember who you are. And like one email a month is not too scary.

Lou: Yeah, I agree.

Nikki: If you release new products or services on a regular basis, that’s it. That’s your email. I might also jump in if it’s okay and recommend Liz Wilcox’s email marketing membership, which is a lifesaver when you’re like, oh ####, I need to send an email, but I don’t know what to say. She’s got like three and a half years worth of weekly email templates.

Lou: Oh my gosh.

Nikki: It’s just nine US dollars a month. It’s so good. Yes, Liz Wilcox is queen of email.

Lou: Yeah, I might have to give that a go because I don’t claim to be the best at email marketing. And I don’t… I sort of like would like to help people with it if they come and ask me for it. But I mean, yeah, if you’re doing, if you’re on your own and you’re doing it, it is powerful. But knowing what to say and having the confidence to actually like put it together and send it out is another thing.

A reminder: People subscribe to your email list because they want to hear from you

Nikki: Yeah. For sure. It’s a lot. It’s a very scary thing. And I think also particularly working with a lot of neurodivergent folks, a lot of us find our inbox very overwhelming. So we go, well, I don’t want extra emails. So I don’t want to email other people because that’s an imposition. These people have asked for you to tell them what’s up!

Lou: Yeah.

Nikki: They’ve asked for you to, um, yeah, to email them and tell them what’s happening. And I think remembering that it’s other people’s choice, whether we, they want our emails or not. And legally, they all have a nice, easy to find unsubscribe button. You’re not forcing anything on anyone. It’s yeah.

Lou: Yeah. That’s it. See you’ve had it for a while, like I noticed that if someone has been on my list for six or 12 plus months, and they haven’t unsubscribed, then I know that they’re, they’re loyal to me. So they must like what I’m saying. Otherwise, they would have unsubscribed ages ago. And they’ve always got that option.

Nikki: Exactly. And I’m also like email hating person. But then I’ve gotten emails back from people being like, I always look forward to your emails. I really love it so much. I had someone who unsubscribed just because they were doing an email sort of cleanse. And they sent me a voice note on Facebook, and they were like, “I just wanted to let you know that I love all your stuff. And it’s, I’m just, you know, clearing out my inbox, but I’m still in your Facebook group, and I’m still following you everywhere. And just wanted to let you know that your emails are great.” A lot of people like do sit there and notice and not say anything.

But every now and then when someone says something, you’re like, Oh, I am doing something right. People do like me. People are reading my emails.

Lou: Yeah. I think one thing that, that still weirds me out, even though it’s been happening since forever is when somebody will meet me in person and say, “Hey, I like that thing that you posted.” And I’m like, “What? I didn’t even see you react to that post. What are you talking about?”

Nikk: Exactly. Yeah. There’s a lot of, there’s a lot of people seeing your things and noticing them that you don’t, you don’t necessarily notice or say. So sometimes it does feel like this is marketing in general, like it feels a bit like you’re screaming into the void. But yeah, there are people who are listening and just not saying things, which makes sense. Because how many of the marketing emails you received your reply to?

Lou: Yeah. Yeah, that’s it. Like there’s, there’s people I subscribe to, not just e-commerce businesses, but B2B business-businesses. I subscribe to their emails, just because I like seeing what they’re up to, just because I want to remember they exist. I’ve got, I’ve got SEO and digital marketing people that I subscribe to, and I have them there, you know, just in case I need to refer a client or someone over to them, because I can do many things, but I don’t want to say I do all the things. I’m finding, I’m finding that in this phase of my life, I’m finding it’s much better for me to be a specialist rather than a complete generalist.

Nikki: Yeah. Do your thing well.

Lou: I know what’s going on in your social media and your ads, but I’m not going to do it all. I’ll point you in the right direction though.

Nikki: And I would also like as a sort of client or consumer, much rather someone who, you know, knows some stuff about a thing, but it’s not their main area. It’s not something they’re passionate about. I trust someone more if they then refer me off to someone else. Like you’re not just in it to take my money for whatever you can, which is also a big problem in our industry.

Lou: Yeah.

Nikki: A lot of people will promise the moon and sort of deliver nothing and sometimes it’s an overconfident thing and sometimes it’s, I don’t know, but for someone to be able to say “No, that’s not my area of expertise. Here’s someone who can really help you out.” That’s my kind of people. I trust them more.

Lou: Yeah. And I think, I don’t know if this has been your experience, but when I first started freelancing, a lot of small business owners kind of gravitated towards the one stop shop kind of people when they needed services. And I was like, okay, like I can understand why you want that, but be careful.

Nikki: Yeah. There’s a difference between doing everything and doing everything well. And also I know starting out in business, a lot of us do want to deliver everything, especially, hello, I have ADHD and I want to do all the things.

Lou: Yeah.

Nikki: As I get further, I go, well, I can do these things, but is this really the best use of my time? Do I really want to be doing it? Will they get a better result if I send them somewhere else? So yeah, I think that’s a big thing to consider.

Lou: Yeah, definitely. And a lot of that, that sort of realisation comes with experience anyway.

Nikki: For sure. And then especially for sort of neurodivergent, chronically ill disabled folks, we, as we go on, we realise, no, I really do need to protect my energy, protect my capacity. If I’m doing something, I want it to be worth it for everyone involved. Leaning into the quality of a quantity kind of vibes.

Lou: Yeah. So on point, that’s so true. All right, well, I’ve just noticed how long we’ve been talking. Hehe. This has been pretty good though.

Nikki: Whoops!

Lou: We have strayed a little bit off what you can do with the website, but hopefully we’ve given you some good suggestions. Yeah, I reckon either of us would be happy to answer any further questions you might have.

Nikki: Yes.

Lou: Are you happy to?

Nikki: We both are always around and helping people out and answering what we can. Yeah. So what are the best ways that someone could reach out to you, Nikki, if they wanted to?

Nikki: I am on most of the socials. You can message me on Facebook or Instagram or BlueSky. Even I’m StudioNyxCo. So StudioNyxCo on all the socials that I’m on. You can also find my website is StudioNyxCo. It’s even got a booking form on there. So you can just straight book a chat and we can sit down and chat. And I also have a Facebook group that I’m very active in and always happy to ask questions and help folks out.

Lou: Oh please plug that group.

Nikki: Yes, that’s Alternative Business Network on Facebook. It is full of some of my favorite people on the internet, including the lovely Lou.

Lou: Thank you. Yes. And that’s so good that you’ve got the same username everywhere. I think that’s one of the reasons why I don’t say that I’m on all the social media channels because my username is different on all of them.

Nikki: No, and I had a stretch where it was and then I found it. And you know, because some as a divider let you add a full stop and some it has to be an underscore and some it has to be a dash.

Lou: Yeah, some don’t let you put full stops and some don’t let you put dashes.

Nikki: It’s annoying. Some will only let you put alpha numeric characters. But no, I’m StudioNyxCo on everything I’m on. I’m not on TikTok. I’m not a video gal. But yeah, I’m around the place.

Lou: And you can find my website, loukoz.com. Then if you go to loukoz.com/hello, that is where you can find my LinkTree page. It’s not really made on LinkTree, but it’s one of those link tree style pages with all the links on it.

Nikki: So I also have that StudioNyx.co/links.

Bonus tip!

Lou: Awesome. Well, that’s another thing you can do with your website. Bonus tip: you can make your own LinkTree page without signing up for LinkTree.

Nikki: Please do. If you have a website, your link page should be on your website. That’s where you want to send your traffic and your link page should have include a link to your website. So many people, I try to find their website and they’ve got links everywhere to everything but their website.

Lou: Cool. It’s been lovely to chat. Yes, indeed. We should talk more soon.

Nikki: Yes, definitely, definitely.

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Season 2, Episode 003: What should your website do? Time-saving tips and hacks (with Nikki Vera)