1136 – The Design Advantage In a Vibe Coding Era

Not just pretty pictures, but real revenue impact. We're going to be talking about vibe coding, whether websites still matter in 2025 and when design investment actually pays off.

This is James Schramko.

Greg Merrilies has designed everything from my book cover to my website, all my logos. And today he's going to be sharing what he's learned about design that that actually drives business results. Plus, Greg will be revealing a couple of mistakes successful business owners are making with their brand. Welcome along, Greg Merrilies from studio1design.com it's so good to have you on the show again.

So good to be back, buddy. Thank you so much, James. I'm excited to be here.

You're a bit of an og, an old classic. We came together because of a podcast, because of that one I did with Ezra was sending in designs for us and we said, well, maybe, maybe not that one. And he sent a better one and we, like, we ran with it. And then from then on, you just designed everything. He sent us T shirts and hats and all sorts of really cool stuff. And you've just been there the whole time, just helping me out with my own designs and brands. I think actually when you consider that 50% of all searches on Google are now brand, I'd have to say things look like they're getting stronger in your field. Is that your perception of the market?

Yes. I would say with the rise of AI, it's more important to stand out and be positioned different to your competitors and build your own authority. And whether that's through social media, through YouTube, through any channel possible, whether it's speaking on stage, writing a book, et cetera, it's really something that AI can't replace, which is you and your personal brand.

So would design go beyond just how things look? Right. Just aesthetics. I know you've got a big focus on driving actual business results, which seems actually not. It's not a prerequisite for most people in the design or branding industry by the look of it. Like, I know unsophisticated business owners put a huge emphasis on the way something looks, but it may not actually translate to people buying. Where's your stance on that?

Yeah, look, this is something that really annoys me about designers. Like, I get it, we all want to design beautiful things and we get bored easily as a designer. Right. And so you just want to keep creating new looks, new, you know, effects and all these crazy things that just make websites look exciting. And business owners get lured by that excitement. You know, they look at people's Folios and they go, oh, wow. I want my website to have all those bells and whistles and, you know, autoplay video backgrounds, and as you scroll, all these things fly in from the side and all that. But the problem with all that is that it doesn't help conversions at all. In fact, it does the opposite. It really does distract people from the most important thing, which is your messaging and your call to actions and your strategy behind the design in the first place. So, yeah, and that, that's, yeah, my bugbear with other designers. And yeah, I absolutely go against that.

If designers get bored all the time and they're constantly craving new stuff. Craig, answer me this. Why do they always wear black T shirts?

Well, I'm from Melbourne, so I've got an excuse.

Well, when I first met you, picked me up in a black car, you had a black T shirt, black. Black pants, black shoes. Like that is typical. Like, it's a thing, isn't it?

It is a thing. And I don't know why. I think maybe we're all just secretly, you know, a little bit chubby and try to hide it.

I think it's. I wonder if it's because you. You don't focus on that and all your brilliance comes out in your work.

It's a good theory. Yeah. I like the Steve. Steve Jobs approach, though. You know, you just pick with my T shirt. Sorry, my cupboard has like 25 t shirts, all black V necks. I just pick one and it's no thought wasted.

That's. That's the often rotted argument, I think, from Steve Jobs, you know. Yeah. So if we're designing for things that actually drive results, do people think about design the correct way or are they doing it backwards sometimes?

Yeah, look, we are very results focused. You know, we design websites that convert, essentially. And I think people do think about it the wrong way. They do think about the aesthetics first. And you know, honestly, there's that old debate between copy and design, which one's more important? And as a designer, I'm going to say that copy is way more important. And it is, because it's what people will read to see if you have a unique solution to help solve their problem. And that's what the copy needs to be focused on. Sure. The design is going to enhance that, essentially give it wings. But yeah, I feel like people focus on the design first, then it's an uphill battle from there.

So what sort of things about design can directly influence conversion rates?

Yeah. So if you think about brand positioning. Right. So if you Study your competitors and study your target market as well. And you can obviously use AI to do a lot of this studying for you. And then you figure out, okay, what is, what is unique about them as far as you might pick the top five competitors. And then you have AI say, right, if this is their unique angle, how can I differentiate from that? And you do that with, say, five competitors, then you will find, find like an avenue to take. And then you relate that back to what is unique about your offer. It might be your, you know, money back guarantee, or it might be the way you deliver. It might be your experience. It could be anything. That's really, you know, something that you will find and you'll know yourself and then you really want to own and put it into all of your marketing messaging, from your websites to your social media to everywhere else you market your product. And really that is the piece of people leave out. And if you first find that messaging and then design around that messaging. So it might be from the color palette to the imagery. And, you know, obviously you want to try and use real photos of people and that could be AI generated. They're still real people, right? But yeah, don't use stock imagery ever again. Like, it's just not needed these days. Even if you do use stock, we use like branded stock imagery to match that look and feel that talks about the uniqueness. So, yeah, it's all about zigging, where people zag, essentially.

Well, it is very easy to generate new images that have never been seen before versus the cheesy handshake stock photo from business in terms of design impacting conversion rate. I think that's such an important point, what you just said. You said it quite subtly. But we've just been through this. We changed our product suite recently as part of a positioning and branding exercise to align everything we do with a central focus, especially around the mentor program. And then of course, we had to go and update all the assets. Even the bios is such an overlooked thing. But on every social side of banners, so you got your website, but you've also got social sites, you've got YouTube mastheads, you've got LinkedIn X. I mean, the list goes on. It's very, very easy if you're a small operation to have a pretty scrappy representation across multiple platforms. So that's one thing. We actually have a checklist in my team, we've just gone around all the socials and align the bio and now they go around and align the imagery to make sure the ports, the core theme but that's probably an easy win for most people who haven't done that step.

Yeah, exactly. And if you think like, if you do figure out what that uniqueness is and then you have that as your North Star and with every bit of content you create, you're always thinking about that. That's the core message you're trying to get across. And look, people like the audience. They may hear it 20 times before they associate that with you. And, and that's why it's important. Like, you may think, oh, I'm just saying the same message again and again, people are gonna get sick of that. Well, A, they don't really give a shit about you and B, they won't even realize that you keep saying the same message. It'll just subconsciously get ingrained into their brains and you'll be known for that.

I had an email from a guy the other day. Actually, it wasn't an email, it was a social post. He did send me a message, but it was a social post acknowledging me as the inspiration behind his 10 year success in a particular business that he had because of just one thing that I drummed into him was zone. The racecourse.

Yep.

But once you hang on to something like that and you push it out there consistently, then you become known for that. I like that saying about brand that. It's what people say about you when you're not there.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I think Jeff Bezos sort of did a version of that. But yeah, it's exactly that. I think about your brand, for instance. Right. You know, just like often this happens to me on calls, people say, you know, because I'll tell them roughly, you know, what I do and as far as, you know, helping business coaches and things like that, and they say, well, who do the business coaches go to? And I say, well, James Ramco, I said, because he's got a no BS simple approach. And to me, that's your brand, you know, and yeah, that's been a transformation in my life. You've been my business coach for over a decade and yeah, it's not easy to do, but that's how you look at everything and reinvent even your brand again and again and again.

That's true. And since I rolled out my framework and my AI tool to support what I do, I've made sure that that is at the absolute core of it. Simplicity only signal, no noise. So we are talking a lot about the psychology around the position. For me, changing model lineup was a very distinct and specific positioning play. Because if you try to Like a lot of us, we take on multiple things. If you're trying to spread across multiple things, it can really, you can lose a little bit of that brand perception because people, they know you for one thing, but also something else, and it can be quite confusing for them. Is he that guy or that guy? Is he premium or is he accessible? And so that was one of the big things around it. But I do want to just shift onto another topic and we have to talk about this, Greg, because it's 2025.

Yeah.

I keep hearing these terms like vibe coding and, and I've done this myself. I built out a page for my own AI software using Lovable. It came up with a very good out of the box design. And it did. What I needed to do was to have a placeholder. I'm now in the process of the trademark. I've got a business, I've got the domain, and so it's becoming a thing. And I will build the brand, but at some point I know to go and engage the proper designer. Well, in your case, you usually come to me and say, I saw that website, it's okay, but would you like me to put together a logo or, you know, a design guide or whatever? And that's invariably what happens. But it's kind of like the brand grows up. Yeah, I think there's. The way I look at Vibe coding and all the website builders is I think they're great for prototyping.

Yes.

And I think they're good to get going quickly. There's no excuse not to be in the market tomorrow if you have a great idea. But at what point do we go and switch to pro design or do we not need to do that anymore? Like, are you seeing, is this attacking your world? Is it a big discussion or is it still early days for you?

It's. It's a massive discussion. Absolutely. And yeah, Lovable. And there's so many tools out there now for vibe coding. I love it. And yeah, we do it as well. We use it for creating lead magnets because we offer a conversion optimization service. We're doing it for clients and we're just saying, right, take this business model and, you know, give us some calculator ideas and various, you know, ideas, and then we'll just vibe code and have it done and put on their website, you know, so. And then we just put a skin around it. But yeah, it's a big thing. But it is. It's exactly like you said, it's for starting out. But the way I see it is when you are starting to make money from your website, that's when you may think about investing in professional design to help separate you from your competitors. But, yeah, use it for starting out. Put ideas out there and yeah, vibe coding, there's nothing better.

It's incredible, actually, I. I get it. To rip off your design a little bit.

Yeah, why not?

Like, I. I built a page for Tracy's site, my wife's site.

Yeah.

I got it to go and match the color and design of the homepage that you designed for us.

Awesome.

So that, like, it looks and feels like I did the same for my surf website. I had to build a news page in an app. I did the same for Lloyd, our friend Lloyd's side. I built him a little a chaos calculator and I got it to go and bring in the purple and all this. But actually, when I was working with Lloyd on that, I said, gosh, your website looks so good. It just looks amazing. Like, I cannot believe how far he went from scrappy bootstrapper without a web developer to having this beautiful website. It's a work of art. If that's virtual dbleo.com I'm talking about, I'm using the professionally designed site to inform the vibe coding stuff. And then if the minimum viable product works, then we can get it properly skinned. But it all starts by having, like, your color palette or your design outlines. You know, do we do rounded corners or do we do square or do we use this particular. What do you call them? Hex color or hex code? Yeah, yeah, hex code. All that sort of stuff. So I think people probably do judge the credibility as soon as they get to a site, and especially when they're switching from a sales page to a cart or an app to the site. Do you think it's important that that seems seamless or is consistent or is it not that important?

I think it's extremely important to be consistent with your brand overall. However, having said that, on social media, you want to mix it up a bit, you know, because it can be pretty. Pretty boring.

Classic YouTube thumbnails.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And we use AI to help us create a version of, you know, as obviously, I've trained AI myself, and so our team has fun creating AI versions of me with different expressions, and then we pair that with really good design. But at the same time. Yeah, what you're asking really is about, you know, do you create a brand style guide first, essentially? And you can use AI to create that as well, to create a unique look for you. From scratch, which is awesome. But, and that's a, you know, it's a really good starting point, but it doesn't really know how to position you different to your competitors. So that's, yeah, one aspect of it. But we, we're lucky. We have a secret weapon which is actually my wife, who's our brand director, who puts together these elaborate brand new boards when we're creating a new brand for a client or reinventing a, you know, a client's brand. And that really does start with having a, you know, 40 question questionnaire and then a deep dive call. And, and it's really from that point she'll just take all that information and spend like three days creating something that's just incredible. So yeah, that's, that's kind of our little secret weapon. But you know, and look, it can do a version of that and it may keep getting better, but for now that's what we're doing.

Gosh. It's the same in my team. I've got one lady in my team who is just a brilliant designer. It's like a God given talent. I remember seeing her sketches on her social profile once and like, did you make these? And she said yes. And I said, they're amazing. Fee. Like she can hand draw anything on a tablet, like from scratch, anything. Like all the illustrations we used to do were hand drawn and created. But even when she's using the tools, she has that human experience to be able to say good or shit.

Yeah, yeah.

Now I imagine that for your wife. And by the way, your wife is amazing. I've seen her. I mean, I've experienced that because we've sent things over and, and got back stuff like multiple times. Like we have several websites out there that we've done work together. Even that AI process you've talked about with modifying images and getting. Right. So that's been a wonderful thing. That's where we're at at the moment. Isn't there some human subjectivity or taste making or experience that the tools cannot get to yet?

Exactly, exactly. And also on top of that, so, you know, we think about our target market because obviously websites are kind of a commodity, but they have been forever. Right? So there's always been template websites. Now there's just AI template websites that are a little bit more customized and unique, which is good. But I really feel like there's always been a market for that at the bottom of the market. But if you're $1 million to $20 million business and then beyond that, forget that they're never going to use AI to create a full website. But that's our sweet spot. Let's say a million plus. Right. And clients come to us with a thousand page website or more and it's, you know, they want to rebrand. So you have to be really meticulous about, you know, being respectful for everything that they built up with SEO. I know SEO is kind of not dead, but it's not been. Websites aren't being searched as much in, in search engines or found as much, I should say. But I kind of think of SEO like Stephen Spencer says, search everywhere optimizations because, you know, we get a lot of inquiries from AI now, which I don't know. We're not doing anything to cause that. But it's incredible.

Yeah, you are doing something to cause it, Greg. You're publishing content.

Oh, that's what it is. Okay, there you go. Yeah.

Like I was going to say, a website's still essential in 2025. I was going to ask you as a designer, but for me as a business owner with an online business.

I.

Mean if people search for me on AI tools, which is going to have like your perplexities and your groks and like that happens, the things it's coming back with will have been seeded by your own website or where you appear as a guest. Like even this episode we're doing here would contribute to the knowledge base of On Greg Merrilies. Right.

Makes sense. Yeah.

If you want to appear in those things, you just got to publish. And even if you're not going to get people searched directly in Google anymore, which they still do by the way, but let's say they didn't. When they do half the time, it's a brand search and it's easy to own your brand and then that look and feel that's only that people know you as will contribute to that. But having more content will get you in those other things. And a lot of them are citing sources. Now when you do research mode, I notice in Claude and also Manus, it does list the sites that it's used to draw from and you can click through to them. So it's just one level back, I suppose. But do you think websites are still essential?

I do. Because of the fact that they're an asset. Right. You could build your whole brand on social media and as you know, on the race course they could just pull the rug out instantly. Right.

Tends to happen a lot. I've seen a lot of Facebook groups got slapped with thousands or tens of thousands or hundreds of Thousands of members and it just got turned off.

Yeah.

And I've always thought that was insane.

Same. Yeah. And so if you think about, if you just have social media, how are you going to build an email list? That's another asset. And it's so much easier to build an email list from a website. Okay. And then not only that, you know.

You can put those link tree things.

Link tree, yeah.

You can get third party lead pages and those sort of things. But I think you really dialed in on the, the criteria at a certain point for a business. There's an expectation like in, in my online coaching space, every man and their dog uses Google Docs as their sales document.

Yeah. Right. Wow.

Scrappy. And it's low rent. It's like you got Google right there. And I did ascend it. And the way that it was probably working was it looks kind of friendly and low key and not salesy. But it's become so commoditized. It's really just so generic that you can easily stand out if you had your own beautifully designed website that, that has all the cool stuff on it, but exactly. That you don't need. Right.

Yeah.

I think there's an argument for you can definitely have campaigns, you can definitely have funnels and you can definitely have a website. But I'm using a bit of a hybrid approach these days because we have two platforms on James Schramko.com I've got the front end is WordPress, the back end is Click. I've got apps that I'm building in Lovable that I push to subdomains, which you can do with the click of a button, which look and feel like the main site. And if you know what the brand guideline is, if you have a style guide, if you know your colors and your fonts, then it's all easier. So I reckon that might be one of the minimum steps. A big takeaway would be at least dial in your design positioning that you can inform anything else you do, even if it's a PDF. I remember you used to make me PDFs for my transcripts. They got a consistent look and feel and logo and everything, right?

Exactly, exactly. Yeah. And look, I would say that like, as your business does grow up, then you really want to make sure, like if you want to be seen as a leader in your industry, they're not going to just get an AI website or a template website. They want to be seen as a leader. They invest in design and their brand essentially is what they're. They built. They're Investing in their reputation. You know, and that's the thing that if you don't invest in reputation when you want to be seen as a leader, then it's going to be subpar. People are going to look at you and think, oh, if they see that Google Doc as an intake form, going to think, oh, maybe this guy or girl isn't as professional as I thought they might be.

I just think they've bought someone's course and they're copying a biz op model. Oh yeah, I mean that's, that's my. Probably a bit harsh, but I wonder, is there an ROI from design threshold or indicator that could guide you as to when it's appropriate to upgrade? Like, I know I, I started in this game trying to figure out how to build a website. I'm a rubbish website builder by the way. I spent days on just the font and colors and it still looked crap. But I knew at a certain point, I don't know what it was, but probably a million dollars a year revenue. Like there's a minimum standard and I came from Mercedes Benz and I know that people pay a premium for a beautiful brand that earned the premium by having great product and they were meticulous on how spacing between the star and the words and the size and the font, like they would come around and inspect every piece of collateral in our dealership to make sure we weren't breaching the brand guidelines under the penalty was massive. You'd lose a lot of money if you messed it up. So what is the ROI threshold or the design investment sort of methodology do you think someone could use as a rule of thumb?

Yeah, so it depends on, let's say, how much money you're making and your price point. So obviously Mercedes are going to be like high end, high level, they want that premium look and feel. But if you're just like a lower end brand selling, let's say lower price products, then sure you want it to be like a certain look and feel but at the same time you might have started on, I don't know, might be a hobby type business, who knows? And you might have just built an email audience and I guess there's lots of different situations. But the point is you might want to just think about, right, am I making enough money to invest in just a homepage, you know, and then test that and see if that's going to help attract better quality people to you and opportunities as well. It's not just customers, might be JV opportunities or other people in your industry. Finally they've got an eye on you now thinking, oh, okay, I might keep an eye on this business and invest in them later on, like things like that. So. And then just test to see if it is attracting a better quality clientele or audience. And then potentially, I guess Lloyd did the same thing. We sat on his homepage because he wanted to be seen as more of an industry leader and then he decided to roll it out into all pages because it was working, you know. So, yeah, I would say just be careful of your budget. Don't invest a website if you can't afford it, you know, and there's different price points, of course, but yeah, just do it smart from a business strategy perspective.

So don't be the person who invest all the money on design before they even validate a product.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Nobody gives a shit about your logo, for instance.

It's classic, isn't it? I'm starting a business so I'm going to go and get my business card Logo.

Yeah, business card and a logo.

Like seriously. And sometimes I just, in the course of my coaching, I look at some websites. I'm looking at one at the moment that has not been updated for about 12 years and the words on it haven't been updated for 12 years and it's a fully functioning little business and it goes well.

Yep.

But it's about to go through. Like it's going to 5x or 10x. It's a cheap question, but it is going to go off the charts. There was one use case where I found a website where the conversions did not improve with the more professional design. And even then I think it's because of the definition of professional design. But it was a scrapbooking website for grannies.

Got it. Yeah.

And they just resonated with scrappy, messy, cheap, no frills, spotlight level, you know, like. Yeah, for Aussies, that's like a low cost textiles store. Yeah, like an everyday store.

Yep. You have to be careful, position it correctly for the price point.

Exactly. So what are some other red flags that you think would, would indicate where your design is costing you money?

I would say have a. No strategy behind the design. So the look and feel is one thing, the copy is another. But the strategy is another. You've got to cater to cold, warm and hot leads. Right. So for instance, cold lead, they may never have heard of your brand before they find you on social or YouTube or wherever they come to your website. They're not going to buy, so don't try to sell on. Hello. Right. Just have a Lead magnet of some sort, you know, email. Ask for an email in return for some value. It's gotta be value and it's gotta help them on their journey. And it really does help position you as a trusted authority. Obviously you get their emails so you just nurture them over time. That's for cold leads and then for warm leads. Like they're people that have been following you for a while. They're able to invest a little bit more time essentially. So you may either have like a webinar or, you know, some sort of video or podcast training or something that's sort of just enough to tease. It might be a challenge, a daily challenge where they invest 10 minutes a day or things like that. You can test all various things. And then if you think about your hot leads, you just want to make it easy for them to buy. So have a landing page and potentially segment as well. If you have different audience types to, you know, to have landing pages for each of the audience types. But yeah, make it easy for them to buy. Don't put them through all those funnels, just make it easy for them to buy. And if you even think about, let's say an E commerce business for hot visitors, you want to change your image on your homepage all the time or your offer, you know, don't keep it the same for six months because it'll be stale. So you're really doing a disservice to your hot leads in that case.

Gosh, you know, everything you just talked about is. It's what I built into Hammond AI.

Oh, wow.

It's like audience temperature detection. And then it goes into seven different audience types. You know, whether they're super analytical or they're very pressured and desperate or in a hurry, you know, like an injury lawyer type market. And then it has a look at are we dealing with an E commerce or a service business, a high ticket or low ticket. And like if someone was looking for design being a probably a reasonable expense that they're going to have to spend, then I think it usually will lean itself towards a diagnostic and an educational sort of process. Yeah, warm up and then have a look. Is that how you work with people? Just out of curiosity, do you generally chat to them, find out what they're doing? Do they do that for free or do they pay for that stage?

Yeah. So we're in the process of changing our offer. We've already changed a few months ago to a scale, what we call a scale engine. Thanks Chatty, for giving us that acronym. Right. But we call Chatgpt. Chatty. But so it's really just encompassing everything we do. And the reason we're changing it is because I've always had this thing in the back of my head from James Schramko saying you've gotta do recurring income. Right. So it's a six month minimum commitment. Then after that it's a trailing conversion optimization service. Right. And so, yeah, realistically what we're trying to do with the scale engine is do the audit initially like conversion audit. And we're using AI tools, Microsoft Clarity. If anybody does not have that on their website, put it on. It's a free, free tool and has AI reviewing every visitor of your website with heat maps and video recordings and gives you a summary. It's incredible. It's called Microsoft Microsoft Clarity. Yeah.

What are they having? Having another lash at being popular again.

They are.

I mean, RIP Skype and Skype.

That's hilarious. We, I think we had our first calls on Skype, James. Many movies.

Oh yeah. I mean I milked Skype to the end.

Yeah.

I was one of the last people to have to reluctantly go across to Zoom. And I was using GoToWebinar for my webinars, so I didn't really need an extra tool. But even now, like for podcasts, I use Riverside. Like I'm, I am reasonably progressive. I'm not the first and I'm not the last, but I'm in the early majority for where things are at. So it's interesting to hear this. I know that people used to use other tools before.

Yeah.

You know, like in 2006 or 7, there was a platform was called something like tape stop tape or something and it would actually record visitors on your site and show you a replay of them. Like that is. Seriously, that's almost 20 years ago. I cannot believe that. So it's natural to think there's a lot of evolution in that market. So in order to do these sort of programs, do you. How do people discover that and then get on board?

Yeah. So we do have a. To answer your other question, like we do have a strategy call which, you know, we put people through a bit of a, a few hoops before I'll do the strategy call. Right. But we are changing the process in the next six months to have somebody, you know, sell in the scale engine and then I'll do the strategy call or we'll have a strategy person after they paid the first month type of thing. But, but yeah, so basically, yeah, somebody would come to us and we will deep dive, you know, we'll, we'll do that strategy call and that's just because I want to build trust with them and we want to understand their business on a deeper level and there's all different aspects of their business from what's working on the website to what's not. Their audience, pain points, challenges, aspirations, what's holding them back to their brand, into their competitors, to all the different funnels and lead magnets and the works. Everything involved in, you know, it's not just the website but it's understand their business on a deeper level and how the website plays into that. So, yeah, that's the diagnostics and yeah, we're using AI as well to help with that before I jump on a call with the client. And then we've got some frameworks like you've got with custom GPTs and projects include to really help, sort of help us before we jump on a call and then after the call that will help brief the team. Yeah, so it's a pretty good process, but yeah, it takes not much of my time. I just have to jump on the call. All the work before and after is done by AI authority team.

So for my clients, I've been having them sell that thing, sell that diagnostic.

Yeah, nice. Yeah, yeah.

Like then it's fully paid, front end marketing and super valuable to clients. And then, yeah, a little tip, you can give people a credit of that diagnostic towards the service.

Ah, excellent. Yeah, cool.

I call that greeting. But you can greed the client into the next stage by giving them a massive bundle and excellent.

So we do something similar. As you know, I've just launched my book and I have this AI interactive.

Yeah, I should, we should mention that this book.

Oh, you've got it.

I did. It arrived today.

I love it.

I'm not even joking. I went to the gym, I then got some lovely Japanese food. After the gym, came home, checked the letter box, there's this box in it, of course. I took all the boxes to my wife and then she goes, what about your package? And I'm like, what package? I'm not expecting a package. She goes, no, that's got your name on it. And I opened it and here it is. I know. And I said, oh my. Oh my goodness, I think I actually have a podcast with Greg today. And she goes, aren't you worried? Do you need to read the book? And I said, I'm not worried at all because I already read the book. I read the book before the print version. Yeah, yeah, it's actually got. Oh, it's even Written in the front.

Yeah.

It's like, thank you, James, for all your guidance and friendship over the past decade and a half. This book wouldn't have happened without you, Greg. That is awesome. And I couldn't have done this book without you, Greg, either.

I love it.

Beautiful. I love it. I like design. I mean, of course we're going to mention the book, but everything we're talking about here is relevant to what's in the book.

Yeah, really is. And so what I was leading to, similar to your Hammond and your Tramco method, is I've uploaded the entire book to custom GPT, given us some parameters, and so it's a free lead magnet on nextlevelwebsitedesign.com for slash free. But there's a whole bundle. We've got nine lead magnets bundled in, including case studies and mood boards and training and lead magnets and, yeah, color and you name it, brand, positioning and. But this AI interactive author, you can just like, put in, you know, fix my website, basically, and you can ask anything about your website and it's got all the knowledge in the book that's going to help guide you no matter what kind of business you are. So, yeah, it's really powerful. And then obviously the goal of that is for them to either they can buy the book, it's all seeded throughout the book as well, so they can buy it first or do the lead magnet first, but it's really just to build authority and eventually one day they might reach out for a website.

Just you being on the podcast. You're my authority, Greg. You're the top dog designer in my world and I appreciate. Sorry, that's just telling me I should pick up a child. Talk about key takeaways here. Design is a business tool. It's not just decoration. True or false?

Yeah, it's. Yeah, it's more than that. Yeah, absolutely. It can be an asset.

Every visual element should serve a strategic purpose. True or false?

True.

Yep. Vibe coding. Still got a place.

Oh, absolutely. It'll just become more important, but, yeah, everybody should be just playing with these.

Tools and professional design as an investment.

Yeah. When you're ready for it.

Right. When it's right. If it pays for itself. I mean, yes, obviously they could go and get a design from a shit designer and just blow their dough. Right. So there's that possibility. Like. Like anything you've got to choose carefully. You could buy the wrong car or the wrong handbag or pair of shoes and it, like, you get the wrong size shoes, you're going to hate them. And they'll be on Marketplace before the second block. Right. But yeah, so websites are still here to stay 20, 25. And it's. And it's important. And if your website's under design, it probably is costing you some money. It's really just redirecting whatever you're losing back into making the money increase faster with good design. Right?

Yeah, exactly. Yep. Couldn't agree more. Sounds like you need to pick up Lucy.

I give myself plenty of scope here.

Yeah.

So next level website design. That's the book. That's the book on design. You got your website. Studio 1, design.com.

Thank you.

If you need a personal introduction to Greg, if you think you're special or they've got a situation or whatever, by all means, just reply to any email I send and I'll happily introduce you to Greg as well.

You're a legend, James. Thank you.

You are Greg. And I, you know, most of these episodes I do these days are just solo episodes, so I know they're amazing. When I have a guest, it's a special occasion. I appreciate it. You've got your GPTs and all sorts of cool stuff made. It's very progressive. I love watching your business grow from the beginning. When you had an office and everything.

Yeah, exactly. You told me to get rid of the office. You came to my office in the boardroom there and you said, why didn't this office.

That's sort of honesty you want, isn't it?

Yeah, exactly. He said, what if I could show you a better way? And that's when I joined silver circle for 10 years. That's it.

It's not just about making things pretty. It's about making a profitable design. Right, Totally. I mean, these websites are up there all the time. It's good if they are working in your favor and you're attracting the right people and. And making sure that people resonate with you. I think people will pay a little more if they resonate with the brand. It's hard to measure emotion, but it's something that pulls. And people do buy on emotion. Right.

And they really do.

Design is a way to tap into that in an ethical way, to put yourself out and say, this is who we attract, this is who we are. If you're the same, if you're like us or you want what we've got, then come, let's talk about it.

Exactly. And be relevant. Like constantly update your website. It's like a Formula One car. It's never finished. It should be finely tuned for the next race. The next race. Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, just treat your website like a never ending asset that just always needs a performance tweak.

I love it. Super metaphor from Greg Rocket Merrilies.

Spot on. That's my nickname. Thank you.

All right, well, Greg, it's great to have you. I hope you come back in the future and we'll. In the meantime, also, thanks for helping me out with my logo the other day when I needed in a. In a jam like, it was back the same morning. Like, that is just incredible. The service you guys offer is off the charts. I appreciate it.

Thank you. Great team. Thank you, James.

See ya.

This is James Schramko.