You don’t become worth $200 billion by giving away market share easily.
Bill Carr is the CEO and Chief Technology Consultant of Carpe Diem, a customer-centric digital agency that brings together the public, private and third sectors to promote awareness of digital, demand and supply.
Carpe Diem’s unique website design strategy ensures the user interface and user experience reflect the needs of the client’s customers.
In this episode of Velocitize Talks, Carr shares his insights into creative web design, product sales and Headless WordPress.
Designing Change (2:41)
We tend to apply what we call different lenses to the same process. The four steps to evolve around are collect, choose, create, and commit.
When designing a new program, Carpe Diem employs a four-step process to identify and implement the best solution. The discovery phase helps them determine how to creatively assess potential solutions that will lead to the “best-for-now” result.
Although perfection may be the goal, Carr doesn’t consider it a valid reason to keep a client from getting started. “If we start something and get 80 percent of the way there, we’re going to be leagues ahead of most other companies that talk about it and don’t really act on it,” says Carr. It’s from this place of action that ultimately provides data-driven analysis to begin crafting the solution.
Carpe Diem recently partnered with B2B healthcare product company GAMA Healthcare. They developed virtual learning environments as well as a new web presence to help sell their healthcare industry trainings. Additionally GAMA saw a new audience due to the Covid-19 pandemic: consumers curious about the efficacy of their products. Carpe Diem helped GAMA create new ways to communicate and share their product information with consumers.
E-commerce Growth and Product Sales (5:33)
If you’re a company that is looking to e-commerce and growing rapidly, working with the likes of Amazon gives you a tremendous growth of market that you can achieve really quickly.
For companies looking to develop an e-commerce strategy, using Amazon can be a viable and sustainable route to markets. But Carr points out that asking Amazon to be a part of a company’s product sales gives them a good deal of company data and insights. This in turn can be a hindrance towards long-term growth. Additionally, according to Practical Commerce, companies will have fewer opportunities to communicate directly with their customers and will likely be unable to differentiate themselves from competitors.
Amazon’s business strategy is to give consumers as much access to as many products as possible in one place; this won’t lead to product sales or brand loyalty, which will have long-term effects on companies. Carr predicts that in the years ahead, “we’re going to start to see big brands shifting away from the likes of Amazon and having their own customized experience that they can achieve better via their own e-commerce store.”
Design of the Times (7:04)
Our design is now based around trying to create a fantastic consumer experience and trying to make things as simple and as intuitive as possible. That’s probably a lot harder to achieve.
Designing a new website or digital experience that leads to better business outcomes requires a definitive process. For Carpe Diem, this process begins with using multiple templated designs to ultimately find a way that works best and then create an experience around that. In Carr’s opinion, design has been commodified. “It looks very simple but there’s a whole lot of work that goes into trying to create something that looks that simple and works out seamlessly,” he says.
The 10 Principles of Good Design by renowned industrial designer Dieter Rams is an unobtrusive approach rooted in “less, but better” design. In other words, simple design isn’t just about subtracting things from a design; it has to improve the design’s overall effectiveness. Simplicity and a stand-out experience are a brand necessity due to consumers’ limited time and attention spans.
Headless WordPress for Enteprise (8:20)
We adopted WordPress years ago because of the ease of experience for users to manage their websites intuitively. As that has progressed with things like headless CMS, WordPress has evolved. That’s where we see the future of WordPress being ultimately in a headless environment.
According to Carpe Diem, “WordPress is both reliable and scalable, making it ideal for those businesses that demand the flexibility to grow online.” Due to its strong and well-tested back-end system, WordPress has moved from only being a small off-the-shelf B2C/B2B blocking system to an enterprise level platform, as well as a “fantastic online experience,” says Carr.
This is especially true as businesses use headless web architecture to gain more flexibility and control over the design experience. Headless provides enterprise companies the ability to deliver a multi- or omni-channel experience seamlessly, thus providing memorable digital experiences.
The State of Headless: A Global Research Report by WP Engine found the rise in enterprise headless adoption increased from 53% in 2019 to 64% in 2021. It’s becoming the industry standard for large-scale organizations focused on building and maintaining a powerful, connected digital footprint.
Book Club (10:41)
21 Lessons for the 21st Century is a brilliant book. I spend a lot of time looking into technology. It’s enabling me to look back at how society uses technology.
Known for his books “Sapiens” and “Homo Deus,” Yuval Harari’s new book, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, provides readers with an ominous look at current threats, from global hacking to a more polarized and divided society. Harari explores how to navigate the ever-changing and uncertain technology landscape.
Carr finds that he employs a good deal of how-society-uses-technology thinking when developing projects for clients.
For more information on Carpe Diem, visit their website, and follow them on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter at @CarpeDiemAgency. To stay up to date with Carr, follow him on LinkedIn.