932 – Save your money: Tom talks Why I Don’t Waste Time On Web Design

Summary by ChatGPT

In episode 932 of the Screw the Commute podcast, Tom Antion discusses why he doesn't waste time on web design, emphasizing the importance of using tools like WordPress instead of paying for expensive web design services. He explains that before 1997, coding was necessary to build websites, which was time-consuming and costly. However, when Microsoft FrontPage was released in 1997, it revolutionized web design by allowing non-technical users to create websites easily. This shift saved him time and money and allowed him to take risks with new products like his eulogy and wedding books, which generated substantial revenue.

Tom highlights that WordPress, while not the best design tool, has become the gold standard due to its wide availability, user-friendliness, and extensive plugin options. He advises against using off-brand platforms or services advertised on TV, as they often lead to wasted time and money. He stresses the importance of choosing responsive WordPress themes to ensure compatibility across devices.

By using WordPress themes and plugins, users can quickly create professional websites without relying on web designers. Tom advocates for learning how to handle web design in-house, as it saves both time and money, making business success more achievable. He also critiques students who ignore his advice in favor of others who lack experience. Overall, Tom's message is to take control of your website using simple, affordable tools rather than outsourcing.

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Episode 932 – Why I Don’t Waste Time On Web Design
[00:00:08] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey everybody! It's Tom here with episode 932 of Screw the Commute podcast. This one is why I don't waste time on web design. This is part of my why I Don't Waste Time series. 929 was artificial intelligence. I don't waste time on that. 930 writing books. I don't waste time on that even though I've written 25. 931 was customer service. That's all about autoresponders, so I don't waste time on customer service, even though I'm a customer service freak. And upcoming is why I don't waste time on podcasting. And you say, Wait a minute. This is 932 episodes. What do you mean you don't waste time on episodes? On podcasting. Well, you'll see why. On that episode, why don't waste time on social media is coming up and whatever else I can think of in the next week or so. Make sure you grab a copy of our automation e-book at screwthecommute.com/automatefree. Check out my mentor program at GreatInternetMarketingTraining.com. And anytime you want to get to one of those back episodes like Artificial intelligence, writing books, customer service, and this one web design, you go to screwthecommute.com, slash, and then the episode number.

[00:01:39] All right. See, prior to 1997, remember, I've been in this since 1994 when the commercial internet started, but prior to 1997, you had to code everything to make a web page. It took me this is literal. It took me a year to get the picture of my wake em up book on my website.

[00:02:06] Okay. Year to beg and borrow and find a coder that knew what to do, how to do it. It was. It was a nightmare. My whole life. And the world's life changed in 1997 when Microsoft front Page came out. Microsoft Front Page changed the world. Okay, whether you like Microsoft or not, it changed the world. A normal person could make a reasonably nice looking website and it would look good. See? So that's when the whole thing changed for me. When I could slap up web pages on a dime without waiting for web designers, without paying any money. The thing was cheap, and I think they had a free version of it, I can't remember. I think it was some kind of element I can't remember, but that changed the world, and I used it for years to make a fortune. Okay. A fortune and save a fortune. See, a lot of the things I did in those early days was too risky to do. If you had to pay thousands of dollars for a website. Case in point, my eulogy book, my wedding toast and wedding speech books. All of those would have been far too risky to do if I had to spend three, four, or $5,000 on a website. But when I put them up for $15 or pretty much for free after Front Page came along, the eulogy book made $42,000 a year for nine years straight.

[00:03:47] The wedding and speech and wedding Toast books made $72,000 a year for nine years straight, but they would have never happened at all had I had to pay for websites and I tried various other ones that came out over the years, but nothing beat front page until WordPress came out and then WordPress became the gold standard. Here's a kind of a comparison here. I'm not saying that WordPress is the best web design thing on Earth. I mean, it started out as just a blogging platform, but it's pretty much the gold standard now. But here's the comparison. Back in the day when we had video tapes. Vhs tape is the the one that everybody knows about. But there was another one called beta. And most engineer types would say that beta was a better quality picture and better quality tape. But guess what? You hardly even. A lot of you never even heard of such a thing. Beta. A beta tape because VHS won the marketing war and it took off like crazy, and you couldn't even find a beta tape or a beta machine around, so you could still find used VHS machines anywhere on eBay. So it's the same thing with WordPress. I'm not claiming it's the best. It just won the marketing war. I mean, I always tease about it, and it's almost true, is that you could wake a kid up from his nap at preschool and get him to help you with WordPress because it's so prevalent.

[00:05:29] Everybody designs for WordPress. All the hundreds of thousands has to be millions of plugins for WordPress to make it do all kinds of great stuff. So when you avoid this, you're just asking for trouble. You're asking for for, uh, paying a fortune to find somebody and wasting a lot of time to find somebody that can help you with these off brand things. And and here's my other big thing. If you see something advertised on TV with regard to websites, you can be damn sure it's designed to take advantage of people that don't know any better. All of these ones that tell you how easy it is. Good luck with it. You're going to waste time and money, and then you're going to crawl back to WordPress. Eventually, when you finally get, somebody hits you in the head with a two by four to to knock some sense into, you see. And as I said, it may not be the best, but it won the marketing war and it has the most features, the most plugins, the most people that can help you with it. I mean, it's the gold standard on Earth, and there's the only people that dispute that are the ones that are trying to sell off brand stuff.

[00:06:44] So don't waste time on this. Now, why do I say that? I don't waste time even though I have to do it myself, or get one of my guys to do it because of what we call themes. See, WordPress is like the engine to a car. Every car has an engine and the plugins I was telling you about are like the accessories to your car. But the theme of of a website is what it looks like. And there are thousands or hundreds of thousands of themes to pick from, where you can just apply it to your WordPress engine. And now you have some professional designer that laid out a whole site for you, and you can pick and choose what elements you want. And you just put in your pictures and your text and and whatever plugins that make sense for you. And you have a world class website for less than $150, because the themes do cost something. And here's one. Whenever you're dealing with themes, you want to make sure it's what they call responsive. See, for years and years, long before cell phones and tablets were real prevalent, you could just you just had to use a browser window on a computer. But now when cell phones and tablets kind of much, kind of pretty much took over, you have people on looking at your website, on computers, on tablets and on cell phones.

[00:08:10] And so the theme that you have has to be able to adjust itself automatically for those different places. And that is called responsive. So make sure whatever theme you get is responsive and don't go for free themes. Because what happens is, is nobody is going to support those. They don't have enough money to keep things going to support them. Yeah, there's a million of them out there, but if you cheap out like that, it's hard to tell how bad your site's going to look when some change happens in the internet and nobody updates your your theme for you. We happen to use nowadays. It was different in the past. We change as things change, thrive themes. And if you get it through our affiliate link, we give you a training on how to use it so you can make your own world class websites. So don't waste time on web designers and money and wasted time. And every time you want to put a page up or something, you just, you know, don't give me this crap. Well, I'm not very technical. Well, get technical or blow a lot of money and time and make the chance of your business being successful infinitely harder. Okay, so learn how to do this in-house. It's not hard. A little bit of tutoring. You'll be making web world class websites. And I have students in mind that just will not listen.

[00:09:35] They listen to their their kids who never made a nickel online and and and they just go forever and don't make any money because they won't listen. Right. And they get frustrated and they cry. Oh, this is hard. Yeah. Well, where do you see what happens to you? You're going to go forever without making any money, and then you're going to come crawling back to me again, you know? So, so no listen, you know, one of my favorite sayings is a guy named John Kramer. He's a famous book marketing expert, and I heard him in a speech one time say, you know, I'm $500 an hour for consulting, but I'm thinking about raising my fee to a thousand an hour and giving people a $500 an hour rebate if they just do what the hell I tell them, all right. That's the way I feel a lot of times with my students. Just do what I tell you. You paid me a lot of money, and I make a fortune doing this. And then you go listen to your kid who's just stupid. So, anyway, don't waste time on web design. And watch out for the next episodes and go back to 29. 929, 930 and 931 for this. Why I don't waste time series and I will catch you on the next episode. And I'm not going to waste your time on that one either. All right. Catch you later.