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Three questions to ask yourself when going through your annual studio website update. Whether you’re just making small tweaks to keep it fresh or doing a complete overhaul, these three items are always important to consider.
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Items Mentioned and Other Related Content
3 Ways to Look at Your Studio Website with Fresh Eyes (Plus, My Studio Website Overhaul!)
Keep Your Studio Marketing Fresh with New Branding
Transcript
Hey there, friends! Amy Chaplin here – host and sole producer of this podcast. Today, I’m celebrating the 275th Friday Finds post on the Piano Pantry blog, which was published this past Friday. If you don’t know what that is, Friday Finds is a weekly series I started publishing the first week the blog launched in 2016 and have continued ever since – albeit less frequently in recent years.
Besides teaching piano, a little personal passion I have is seeking out fun finds, good products, and interesting things. I have always enjoyed reading similar posts on other people’s sites and wanted to do the same for my own people—that’s you.
Get the link directly in your podcast show notes or visit the full show notes page, which includes a transcript and other items mentioned today at PianoPantry.com/podcast/episode122.
One thing on my annual to-do list for my studio this time of year is updating the studio website. Some years, it’s a matter of changing a few photos; other years, I freshen up verbiage, and perhaps every 3-5 years, it needs a total overhaul.
When was the last time you looked at your website? I’ve found that when I’m not looking for students, it’s easy for them to become hands-off and fall by the wayside. Now that I’m at the point where I generally have only one open spot every year (if that), I believe it’s still important to keep our front-facing space fresh.
In today’s episode, we’ll discuss three questions you should ask yourself and consider when it’s time to update your site—whether it’s small tweaks or an overhaul.
The most important question to start with is this: Who are you speaking to? Make sure it’s clear who your audience is. Are you talking to prospective students, current students, or a combination?
That decision can often depend on the size of your studio. If you’re running a larger studio—especially with multiple teachers—you may need to have segments of the site that speak to both, but be sure it’s very clear how each audience segment should navigate your site from the home page.
If you’re a smaller studio like mine, I prefer only speaking to prospective students in a fairly generalized way. At one point, I did try using my site as a landing place with studio-related information for current students but found it took more time to keep with than it was worth. Most families these days prefer text and direct communication—even over email. Expecting them to seek out info on my website on their own is definitely not happening when attention to emails isn’t always happening.
So, who are you talking to?
The second question to ask yourself is: Is it easy to navigate, and can you simplify it even just a little?
It’s a known fact that attention spans are getting shorter and shorter. Don’t make people have to dig around. Put yourself in your visitor’s shoes and look at it from their perspective.
If you were a parent looking for piano lessons, would it be clear right when they land on the site what your studio is like without reading a 500-word essay on your teaching philosophy?
Don’t get me wrong – it’s OK to have a 500-word essay on your teaching philosophy, but make sure the front-facing version contains short highlights with powerful words about what you believe about teaching. Then, make a statement that if they want a more in-depth version of your teaching philosophy; click here to read more.
Essentially, what you’re looking for is this: Are you making it easy for them to see answers to their questions without having to dig three or four layers of pages into the site?
Along those same lines of being easy to navigate – consider if things look visually cluttered. Can you say the same thing with less.
Do you need ten photos of happy students, or would 1-3 good ones suffice?
The third question to ask yourself is: does it look good on mobile?
I don’t have to look up the stats to say with certainty that people are viewing things more from mobile devices these days than from desktop computers.
We don’t work on and design our websites from a mobile phone, so it can be easy to forget that what WE see when we’re working so hard to craft that pretty site will look different from a device.
The easiest way to ensure that it will look good on mobile is to make sure you’re using a mobile-responsive theme. These days, it’s a lot more common for website themes to be mobile responsive, which means that they will automatically adjust the layout so it looks good on mobile.
Even so, don’t rely on the theme to do the work for you. Make sure you’re checking as you go along that things are transferring in a visually pleasing way from the website layout to mobile. Always double check.
Here are some examples of adjustments I had to make to my site even after designing it with a mobile-responsive theme.
- If a web page has a column format built-in, a mobile responsive theme will reorder the columns into one column on a mobile device. (The question is, does it reorder them in a way that makes sense?) Sometimes, it doesn’t, and you may need to adjust the layout on the desktop in order to make the mobile version look better.
- The layout of photos may shift or look off-center.
- One year, I experienced a weird text break between two words I had in bold. On mobile, it shifted the second half of the sentence two rows down. When I removed the bold font, it looked just fine on mobile.
Strange things like that happen, and unless you know how to code and can tweak some of those things sometimes, it’s easier just to change the layout.
I’ll admit, the longer I teach and the less often I take on new students, the harder it gets each year to want to work on my studio website. It’s so easy to just let it go and not look at it, but I know, as do you, that like with anything, it doesn’t have to be a big thing unless we make it.
Just like the weeds in our garden wouldn’t get out of hand and take two hours of weeding if we would just walk out there and pull a few weeds for 5 minutes every evening, so our studio websites won’t need hours of updates if we just give it a little look-over and TLC every 6-12 months.
I’m preaching to myself at this moment: Just bite the bullet and go do a little work on it, even if it’s just changing out photos so they’re from this past year and not students you had 5 years ago or removing excessive text on the home page.
Small steps add up!
Before we go, I would like to thank the supporters of this podcast, including Sharon S., one of my newest patrons. If you would like to support the show, visit PianoPantry.com/patreon. You can also find me directly on Patreon by searching piano pantry. Join as a silent partner for just $4 a month or gain access to exclusive content for $7 while regularly supporting the podcast.
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I hope you all had a great holiday weekend and are getting some downtime between your school term and summer lessons. I’m looking forward to hosting my digital organization retreat here in just a few weeks and will be welcoming six teachers, all of which you’ll get to hear a little from in episode 125, so stay tuned!
