Optimize Your Website to Drive Sales

Is Your Website Optimized to Increase Sales in 2025?: 

An Interview with John Waraksa

 In this episode, our hosts introduce John Waraksa, the founder of Sapphire Falls Web Design. John details his journey from a career as a chemical engineer to becoming a web designer. He shares insights into the importance of having a website for modern businesses, discussing various platforms like Wix, Squarespace, and WordPress. John also emphasizes the significance of SEO and adapting to new technologies, including AI. He provides practical advice for small business owners on when to seek professional help, and the benefits of investing in a well-optimized and secure website. Throughout the episode, John highlights the evolution of web design, the role of social media, and tips for ensuring long-term success for his clients.

 00:00 Introduction to Our Guest: John Waraksa

00:32 John's Background and Career Journey

01:50 Starting Sapphire Falls Web Design

04:22 The Importance of Having a Website

07:19 Choosing the Right Website Platform

11:49 SEO and SEM: Getting Your Website Found

19:16 The Role of AI in Web Design and Marketing

22:01 Maintaining and Updating Your Website

27:39 How to Work with John Waraksa

John’s contact info:

www.sapphire-falls.com

Nashville-web.design

John.waraksa@gmail.com

support@sapphire-falls.com

linkedin.com/in/jdwaraksa

Phone: 615.906.6844

Transcript

John Waraksa: 0:00

Here's what typically happens with a person that makes it themselves or somebody that, that maybe has paid a lot of money to have a website made. It looks beautiful, they think it's wonderful, and it's not working. And somebody will call them up and give them a really good sales presentation. You need SEO and what they get sold is pay per click advertising. So if you don't have the foundation built, you're kind of wasting your money using pay per click advertising. It helps, I'm not saying it won't help, but you got to get the website right to begin with and that's what people don't understand. Years ago I heard someone say this and I love this. It's great to have an opinion, and I'm giving you opinions, but it's better to speak with data.

1:17

So Scott, let's give our guest a formal introduction before we go any further. Today we have with us a web designer, John Waraksa, Sapphire Falls web design. Is that the name of the business? Correct. All right. I'm glad I remembered that. And I'm amazed you got my name right. What's the nationality of that? Polish. Polish, yeah. So, I guess in Polish the W would be pronounced as a V, but I never say that. Well, we can start doing that. Let's start doing that. So, let's get to the beginning. Where are you from? Well, I grew up in Lorain, Ohio, near Cleveland. And for careers, my wife has had, also had a career, and we moved around. So, I met my wife right out of college. I had a position in a research center. Actually, my background's a chemical engineer, originally. I moved out to Buffalo. I met my wife there. Going to MBA school. And, we had to move. Several times for our careers, we were lucky to juggle it. We moved to the Boston area, loved it. And eventually Came back to Ohio. I wanted to be closer to family. My wife's family's off from Buffalo. And then we came out to Franklin, here at Franklin, Tennessee. Loved the area. We took a chance. We said, let's go. It was right after the, well, it was 2008 when the banking crisis occurred, right? And, and things were down and we like took a leap of faith and, and Faye got a job right away and I said, well, I can do web design anywhere and, and we're, we're here for, for life. I think this is our forever home. With each move, you got a little bit warmer. You went from Buffalo to Ohio and now to Tennessee. I guess Florida's next. What's in the news? What's worse? Is it shoveling a couple feet of snow or having your car submerged in water from a flood, right? I'm always curious how people got their start in business and, um, and a lot of times it goes back to that first job you had. What about your first job as a teenager? As a teenager? Paper route. There you go. Paper route. And my parents always insisted that, you know, you save half and then half you can do what you want with. The first professional job after college was working for a company called Allied Signal. They were bought out by Lockheed and it was a research center in South Buffalo. So, you know, I had a successful career as a chemical engineer for, I don't know, 22 years plus. And something happened to, it was strange, it was a weird year for me, um, 9 11, it's my birthday, right, and the twin towers got hit by jets and it made you think about different things. A few months after that, my mom passed away. I took a leave of absence and I was able to do that because of my wife working and I never actually went back to a kind of a traditional job. I helped my dad sell his house, move out to Massachusetts out with us and I said, what am I going to do? You know, people talk about midlife crisis. To me, it was a midlife opportunity. I had the opportunity to do something different and I wanted to do something more. fulfilling, useful, and I said well I'm gonna become a teacher and I jumped through all the hoops and I actually taught in public schools a couple years. We moved to Ohio. Right where we were at, there was an Auburn Career Center, which, it was a trade school. Multiple high schools fed juniors there in the mornings, and they learned to trade. I got involved with Cisco Networking, but there was also an adult education, and that's where I started. teaching web design, and I had a few folks ask me, wow, I need, still need help doing this. Would you make a website for me? And that's how I started when I started Sapphire Falls Web Design. I think about working with young people, students and things. I didn't grow up with Xbox and these video games and whatever. We had in town a hobby shop. That was the place to go. And I love. to build things, models, uh, puzzles, and kind of that's why I'm excited about doing web design. It's like you get to meet people, find out why they're passionate about their business services and products, and then you take their dream of having a website and make it into reality so that they are successful in business. And I, to me, that's what I enjoy the most about is actually getting to know people and help them. Scott, can you imagine having a business in 2025 and not having a website? Absolutely not. I know there's a statistic out there, and John, you probably know it better than me. If you don't have a website, you're not in business. I think businesses realized the importance of websites during COVID. I had more people approach me then, and you realize that part of your business is having an online presence. And, and, uh, it is important, you, whether you're just an entrepreneur or a large business, it shows that you're, you're real, you're, you're, you're established and, and you're serious. It's not some, and it could be, that's a funny thing, it could be some garage operation and, but they have a gorgeous website and you think, wow, to me it's about trust. I can trust this by the impression you get from your, this business by the impression you get from your website. It's important. Sure. It's a no brainer. If you're in business now, you have to have a website. So I'm sure you've seen a lot of changes, though, over the years in how websites look, how they perform, how they're built. You started doing it kind of back in the early days, I'm guessing? Yes, I definitely, and it has changed. I mean, look at it from your own perspective, having cell phones, everybody wants to have the newest and greatest thing. What? All businesses are faced today with is keeping up with technology and how do you use it efficiently and economically and getting a payback with it. Right now, in the past year, it's, to me, I've always been interested in artificial intelligence. What is it? It's kind of abstract, but that's evolved so fast. It's exponentially evolving. If you don't utilize that, I mean, this would be a recommendation to anyone young in, in high school, college. You need to understand how to talk to AI, and it's called prompt engineering. That would be something I would recommend everybody research. And somebody that's in a large corporation, how do you get your folks to utilize it in a productive way? It's, it is changing so rapidly. Here's one thing I'm going to sidetrack. I've looked for companies that start up, here's a tip, I've used AppSumo. com and there's companies that are starting there that need seed money to get established. And those companies offer lifetime licenses, unlimited to use on any website you want, where so many people are being pulled in by AI, they're excited, they want it, I can't live without it, and yet, yet it's costing them more than it needs to. Yeah, when I think when a business owner starts trying to address their technology, whether it's a website, whether it's using AI, it's really easy to get twisted around because there's so many options out there now. And for me personally, I get really confused when I started going down those rabbit holes, which is why I think like anything in business, it's good to stick with the experts that can help you navigate through all that. So let me ask you this, John, small business owner, a lot of times I hear they know they need a website. Why can't they just go out and use some of the off the shelf Wix, I think is one. There's a lot of them out there now. that make it easy for you to build a website in two hours. And you're right, and I'm glad you said Wix. The two most common ones are Squarespace and Wix. And they've improved over the years, dramatically. Are they useful? Absolutely, absolutely. So what would be a good scenario where somebody would want to use that? The D D Y I, do it yourselfers, you don't have to be a programmer to use those. Another reason is they're a closed system, so they protect you when you're new at this, you not, don't know what you're doing, you don't want to get your business hacked, you want to be, have some security, they're a closed system. Those are the really positive things. So they have guardrails? They have guardrails. And then any website, even a professional web designer, is going to use plugins. What's a plugin? An example is every website needs a contact form. I kind of know how to program that from scratch. It's very time consuming. It's non efficient. You get a plugin to do it for you. The better plugins out there are programmed with security built into them. And they do some extra things, like a plugin I use. Tracks the IP address. Whoever submits the form, you know what their device IP address is. If they're spamming you and sending you a bunch of junk or trying to put a link to get you to go to some other website, you know their IP address. You can actually block them from even seeing your website and that's a good thing. And so that's why you use plugins. So back to Squarespace Wix. They're closed systems. You can't just use a third party plug in and bring it in. So your hands are somewhat tied and limited to what they offer. One of the reasons I prefer Wix over Squarespace is Wix has more plug ins available. They're both good systems. They're easy to use for someone that's going to start off themself. They're on a limited budget. But here's the thing. Wix isn't, Squarespace isn't free. So these plug ins, that's where they make their money. They're in between, and they sometimes mark those up, and you end up paying more for something than you could do when you're using something like WordPress, which is open source. WordPress, you have the flexibility to do whatever you want, but you have to provide your own website hosting. You have to understand how to connect email to your system. You have to understand security, and all those things combined, and a typical person that's trying to start a website, they don't know how to do those things. But as they grow, they may come to a point where they realize they have limitations with systems, Wix, or Squarespace. It's a good starting point. I'll say if you can't do that, even a better starting point is using a business Facebook page. You create a personal Facebook page, and from there you create a business page. And it's amazing how many people you can reach locally in your area with Facebook, even if you don't have a website. If you do have a website, you should also be doing that. Don't overlook the power of using social media. That's a good point. I've seen a lot of small businesses that a lot of times that is their first entry into having an online presence, even before the Wix or the Squarespace. Is the Facebook page and it works. I mean, you can reach people. So for a guy like me, let's say I have an eCommerce business. Would I be hurting myself or what dollar amount is it makes sense to get somebody like you to build my website and put all of those plugins that are going to help drive that revenue and provide a safe exchange. from a currency standpoint. So, I have three types of folks. I'll, I'll categorize them as three types of folks. Some will be real honest and upfront and say, you know, I, I don't understand this. I need help. And I enjoy talking to those people. I have the other people that are DYI types, and they have used Wix. And then they say, well, it's not working for me. Oh, you can have the most gorgeous, beautiful website in the world. But if nobody can find it, that's a problem. So I just don't build a beautiful website. I do the fundamentals so that it'll get ranked and found online. I have a third type that I spent thousands of dollars on advertising and SEO doesn't work, but I need my website to look better. And I'm like, Oh, okay. There's two types of SEO and there's something called SEM, which. SEM, search engine marketing. A better way to say it is pay per click advertising. Here's what typically happens with a person that makes it themselves, or somebody that maybe has paid a lot of money to have a website made. It looks beautiful, they think it's wonderful, and it's not working. And somebody will call them up and give them a really good sales presentation. You need SEO, and what they get sold is pay per click advertising. So if you don't have the foundation built, you're kind of wasting your money using pay per click advertising. It helps, I'm not saying it won't help, but you gotta get the website right to begin with, and that's what people don't understand. Years ago, I heard someone say this, and I love this, It's great to have an opinion, and I'm giving you opinions, but it's better to speak with data. So here's the data. Anyone listening to this, do a search for, uh, Web Design Franklin T. M. And you're going to find Sapphire Falls Ranking Well both in, in the map, where there'll be a map because I searched for it generically, and, and then below it's the organic listings. Actually, first you're going to say, See, maybe sponsored, or there'll be a word ad. Those are pay per click advertisings. That's the SEM. And then you go down, if you ask generically, uh, nobody knows who Sapphire Falls is, but I got burnt so many times, I don't want to work with somebody in India or somebody out of state. I want to work with somebody locally. Where's the web designer in Franklin, Tennessee? So you get the map listing, which is a separate database. And you have to submit or claim your business in Google, in Bing, in Apple, there's three different ones, and input information there. Most people don't know how to do that. And then below it is the organic listings. So there's local SEO, organic SEO. How do you get ranked well? Now I could talk for an hour about that, but the typical person that uses a Wix site, that's not going to get you to rank well. Your website has to be found to make a conversion. So if I'm a small business owner and I'm ready to take that step from the Facebook page, from Wix, and I'm ready to go to the next level, I want to work with somebody that's an expert, like you. It sounds like maybe the first step might be to really define your goals of what you're trying to accomplish. Because we've already talked about a lot of things, which is number one, is it pretty? Number two, does it tell your story of your company or your brand? Number three, is it functioning in terms of bringing in customers? So that's where the search engine optimization comes in. SEO, SEM. So there's a lot of different things that you have to keep in mind. Before you start taking the tools out of the toolbox and building this house, right? Is it going to be a shed in the backyard? Is it going to be a mansion? What's it going to be? And I would imagine that's something you do when you sit down with new clients, right? Absolutely. I prefer working with clients locally because I can go in and meet with them. Find out what their personality is. You can find out a lot about a company just walking into their shop. How the people interact within a company. Those are important traits and you want to bring that out. But what you said is also important. What's your goal? Why isn't it working? What do you want to be able to achieve with it? And it's bringing that, that passion that a business owner has. and presenting it in a website. Here's something else I didn't talk about, and it's kind of SEO related. Like a TV commercial, 60 seconds, right? Typical person surfing the web might spend two seconds on average. So how do you pull somebody into the website that they stay there longer? I use interactive modules. I'll call them that. What's an example? One example is it layers a before and after image and there's a slider so you can reveal the image below it. So many uses for that. That's my favorite one. And the interactive part is you go back and forth to look at the before and after. So if you're a landscaper, a hairdresser, any type of a repair shop, before and after, rug cleaning, there is a stain on the rug before and after. So, that slider makes somebody fool with it for a couple of seconds, keeps them on the website longer, the website ranks better. So, using those kind of interactive modules, you can't do that with Wix and Squarespace. Or, they might have something, but there's a cost to it. They don't have the variety of tools that you have. So, yeah, your goal is, the first thing I want to do is if, if we agree to move forward. I want to make sure I see a few, at least a few weeks, if not longer, statistics from Google Analytics, Google Console. Um, Google Console's interesting because it shows you impressions. So it's phrases, real words that people type in and Google says, yeah, your website's a good fit. I'll give you an impression. It may not be at the top of the list. You may be down 30, 50. from the top and nobody scrolls down that far to see you. If you're not on the first page. Yeah, exactly. Who goes to the second or third page in Google? This is what I've read in statistics. You'll lose 60 percent of the people who only go to the second page. And there used to be 10 per page. Now this has changed. Now it's more continuous scrolling. And Google It's using their AI tools and providing you information at the top. So the 10 listings don't fit anymore. So now they just do a continuous scrolling. But the point being, you got 60 percent of the people look, look at beyond 10 listings and then you drops off another, you know, 40 percent goes on to the third page or whatever. So you're absolutely right. People want to see who's up on top. You have to be number one and how do you do that? You gotta still have a well built website. Here's another trick. My wife and I had an opportunity to travel to Japan and nobody from Japan ever looked at my website, but when I searched for web designer Franklin, Tennessee. My site came up, but Google tracked that somebody was looking at it from another country. You could use the same technique if you're in a conference and you say, visit my website right now and here's what I want you to do on my website. Fill out this form. You're getting traffic. And years ago, ranking used to be based on quantity. The more the better. The more hits to your website, the more people that link to your website. Now, with AI technology, it's more about quality. So a small business with a well built website can rank very well locally without doing pay per click advertising, and that's where I can help people do that. If you have a business that you want to rank throughout Tennessee or nationally, that's when you need to use pay per click advertising, and that can get very expensive to do it effectively. So let's talk about AI for a second, because I think one of the trends, as I see it, based on my personal use, I have found myself more and more, when I'm looking for something, whether it's an answer, a business, a service, I'm going to chat GPT instead of Google because you know all the negative things that happens when you search something in Google. You start getting all the ads for whatever it was you searched. So as a web designer or as a small business owner who wants to take that in consideration with my website, what's the solution for that? Where people are no longer using a search engine to search. They're now using one of the AI platforms to search. That's an interesting question. First advice to you is use a different browser. There's a browser called Brave. I don't know if you realize this, if you have Google on your phone and you logged into it. Who doesn't? Who doesn't? And there's a way it tracks you when you leave your office, when you go out to lunch, come back. And it's, what I loved about it, I looked at it, it's like, wow, I was on vacation two years ago and it showed me where I went. In Europe on vacation. And I'm like, but that's creepy. It's like, like I'm being watched. It's not like you're being watched. Or being watched. Google and other search engines in the world, it's not just Google. How do they make their money? They make their money by selling to marketers and knowing what you're doing. But there is a way to turn that off. This search engine that I told you is brave. It's free to use. When I was teaching in school, I said, don't use Google search, use DuckDuckGo. And that's their thing, is they don't track you. They block you from these advertisements. I read a prediction once, and it's gonna happen. There's face recognition. Imagine you're walking in a mall, and you're planning to go on a ski vacation, right? And you've been talking about it in social media. You're walking in a mall, a camera recognizes your face and you walk up to an electronic billboard and in another four or five steps and up comes an ad for the sports store which has a sale on ski equipment. That's because there's face recognition, AI's tracking you and Google tracking you and they know what ad to present specifically for you. That's great. But it's also scary, right? Here's the problem with AI. How does it tell what's real and what's exaggerated? Uh, I hate to use the word fake news, but AI, one of the goals, future goals, is it becomes more real time. And how does it find its information through what people are talking about in social media, but that's not always reliable, so how does it discern what's real and what's made up, or what's opinions and what's facts? So if a business owner is working with a web designer to build their site or to improve their site, maybe because you know, just like decorating or clothing, you know, what's fashionable today is not fashionable tomorrow. So you probably need to refresh your website from time to time. So I'm working with a web designer and it's important for them to understand my goals. And it's important for them to build the website in such a way that it's going to optimize my search engine results. And then I would imagine, too, another big thing to look for as a business owner is somebody that's going to be there to support me and to update things and give me feedback on what's working, what's not working. Kind of somebody walking side by side with me as it pertains to my website. I, I think Yuri is spot on. It's, it's very important. There's so many aspects to a website that they don't understand. So, for an option I offer managed hosting to any client that I, I work with. What's the advantages? The tools that I use Anyone can learn them, but it takes time. If you're a business owner, you don't have the time to do that. Maybe you're a small business, you don't have people within your organization. You could be a large business and the same thing. They're not necessarily studied web design. So it's important to have somebody that can help service you. I mentioned earlier, I think I talked about buying into software early, which I have unlimited update. I can use them on an unlimited license. For websites, if I host them. So, when I host a website, I use at least a half a dozen of these, what are now subscription software plugins. I can legally use them and update them. Typical plugins that I use, if you're paying full price, the annual subscription rate would be It adds some up to about 700. So, people don't understand the value of it. I can make a website and make it look gorgeous, modern, whatever, have these interactive modules, have it rank well. If you leave it static, it's gonna drift down in the rankings. There's ways around that. So, there's advantages to have someone help you service it. I've talked to many business owners. They're frustrated because they ask for help and weeks go by before someone helps them. Yeah, and I think the thing that comes across for me is you have a passion for this. You live, sleep, eat, breathe. So, as a business owner, if I turn this over to you, I don't have to worry about it anymore because John's keeping up with it. John knows the latest. John's got the latest tools. He's got the latest subscriptions that he can help me with, right? First off, I, I always offer a potential new client to talk to people that I've worked with for references. And you can look on my website and there's a portfolio page and you can see websites there that I do the managed hosting for. The other aspect of it. is the latest and greatest. I have some long term customers that I did their original website over 10 years ago. You can go for years without updating. Eventually it's going to become a security issue where somebody may hack into your website. A story from the past. I had, when we first moved here, I always wanted to do my own painting. I had a painter come in and help us. My wife was concerned she didn't want me going up. We have a high ceiling in a family room. And, and I looked at his website, it was pitiful. And, and I kind of talked to him about it. And he's like, no, I don't need that. You know, it's word of mouth, good business. I'm like, okay. And then it was a month or two later, he calls me up. John, I got a problem with my website. I'm like, what, what's going on? He goes, go to my website, it's there, but if you go to Google and you click on a link, it goes to a pornographic site. I'm like, what? I don't know how that was done. But I knew how to fix it. And so within a day, I wiped out his website and I put just the local and a phone number, contact information. Then I'd build them a website. Yeah. It's not a set it and forget it. And one of the tricks is to use like a news blog or news. And I encourage people to, to give updates about their business. I'll encourage them to learn how to be able to do that themselves. And technically it's called a blog, but I'll call it a news page. From that, those posts, I have a module that automatically brings in like an abstract, a short description and a link, and they scroll across the page and you put that on the homepage. So the homepage is most important. So as you post new information, that new information gets on your homepage. It helps your ranking because your, your content's changing. Your business might not change that often, but the trends in your industry, what's happening, and it's useful for your clients to understand. If you put that on your website and give it that new content. What do you bring to the table? What's unique? So I often will sit down with clients and say, what are your funnels? What kind of services do you provide? I'll give an example of insurance agencies. So you have auto insurance, home insurance, umbrella insurance, maybe commercial liability insurance. Maybe, you know, some others, but those are your funnels. So on a homepage, describe each of those and give a page dedicated to those topics and get them to rank well. But then, what differentiates you from your competitors? What do you bring to the table? What's unique? And what's new? What's happening? That's what you can bring out in a news blog type. Yeah, that's good advice. So John, if a business wants to work with you and have you build their website, how do they find you? Well, my website URL is sapphire falls.com and on there I, I have a simple contact form, but there's also a, a quote form where I like to get a little background information. If you already have a website, you know, we talked about what's your goals, what, what you can do. My offer always. Uh, open to have a conversation with you, even if it's a zoom call, I prefer that we could share each other's screens and talk about what your goals are and give advice on how you can improve your website, even if you want to do it on your own. My offer, when I get a new client. I typically allow them to have a month free of hosting. And during that time I will do any updates, any revisions, what you need, get it out there, get some feedback from folks, you know, folks you do business with, what did we miss? How can we improve it? So I don't penny dime. Every little thing I do, I, I try to be flexible that I can help people be successful. If they're successful, they're going to be a long term client and provide me references. That, to me, is more important than, than just making a buck and going, see ya. That's perfect. Well, thank you so much, John. You gave us a lot of information to think about and to, well, scares the heck out of me, so I'm just calling ya. Well, I appreciate that. Thank you. Thanks for listening to another episode of Minding Your Business. We want to remind you that while the hosts and their guests share their thoughts and experiences, they are not legal or financial experts. The opinions expressed here are solely those of the hosts and their guests. Content is intended for informational purposes only. For any legal or financial advice, please consult a qualified professional. Your decisions should be based on your own research and judgment. Stay informed, stay motivated, and always keep minding your business.