0:00:00
What’s up everybody? Welcome back to another episode of Digital Agency Table Talk. We’ll give everybody a few minutes to scroll in. I should say I’m scrolling through the chat. My brain is on scroll mode. Go ahead and tell me where you guys are watching from. Just say hi. Drop it in the chat. We’ve already got a few people here watching. That’s fantastic. We actually get my counter up. Okay. There it is. All right. You can see all these different windows.
0:00:34
Let’s see. Okay. All right. We’re good. Chat’s working. Make sure audio is good. I assume you guys will let me know if it’s not. So I wanted to see this time. We’re going to talk a little bit about how Digital Agency Table Talk works in just a second. Just so anybody that’s new understands what is going on here. But I wanted to see this time. Just who shows up organically? I didn’t send out my typical. I’ve got a big email list.
0:01:01
A fairly big email list. And usually what I do is like an hour before I’m like, hey, I’m going to be live in an hour and all of that. And I post a few times in the inner circle and make sure everybody is remembering. Because people do forget, obviously, and then they get upset that they forget. Then they get upset that I didn’t send them an email and all of that. But I just wanted to see what is our turnout looking like when it’s a little bit more organic and we’re not just sending out the typical series of reminders that we normally do. I sent out one email 10 minutes ago, just a quick reminder that we’re going live. But obviously, if you don’t check their email every 10 minutes. So we’ll just see who shows up. We’ve already got pretty decent numbers. California is here. Finland, the Netherlands. I mean, we have a very, if you watch any of the other Digital Table talks, we are absolutely worldwide.
0:01:53
You know, people from everywhere. And I think that’s was great about the inner circle as well as there’s just so much diversity. And if you are somewhere else in the world and you feel like, I don’t know, is everybody going to be in the US or they’re only going to have US challenges? No, no, no, no, there’s people from everywhere. Look at this. Arminia, Bucharest. We’ve got people in China, Nigeria. Oh, Akram’s coming out from Wuhan. All right. Let’s see, Marcus is here from Austria. Amanda’s here. Oh, it’s on the Bricks Facebook group. Okay, somebody must have posted in Bricks, I guess. Fantastic.
0:02:31
Jamaica and the building. Dublin. Central Pennsylvania. See, there’s one. One US. I’ve listed out so many here. Denmark. We’ve got one person in the US. Of course, I am in Atlanta. And yes, our numbers are looking good. So let’s talk about what Digital Agency Table Talk is. The goal here is to provide just as much value as we possibly can for agency owners and freelancers. So if you are a digital agency owner, if you do web design, SEO, PPC, whatever, it doesn’t matter.
0:03:05
If you’re a digital agency owner or you’re a freelancer working in this field, this is for you. Digital agency table talk is a place for you to come and see some great discussions. Of course, we have live guests, this is not a podcast, this is not a ask me anything type situation where I’m just reading through the chat. This is a situation where you’re going to see real live people from all over the world come on as guests. And we’re going to have a discussion about whatever they want to talk about related to digital agency and freelance work. We talk about getting leads. We talk about closing deals. We talk about SEO and digital marketing. And this is, you know, when we talk about digital marketing, SEO, things like that, it can be for your agency, for your own business, or it can be for your clients, right? If you’ve got a client that’s got some challenges and you’re trying to solve those challenges and you want some strategic advice for them, you can come on as a guest and get that strategic advice.
0:04:01
If you want feedback on UX or UI or dev work that you’ve done, I can do feedback. We can do screen sharing. We can do a lot of different stuff. We can talk about project management. We can talk about issues that you might be having with clients. We talk a lot about pricing and pricing models, scaling and just growing your agency. WordPress in general, page builders. We can talk about automatic CSS and frames. We can talk about a lot of different stuff. And you guys get to all watch for free. If you want to participate, if you want to actually be one of the people that gets to come on the show as a guest, live in in person, then you have to be a member of the inner circle. You can put the link up on the screen as digitalambition.co slash inner circle. That’s my private community where there are over, I think we’re probably about to cross 900 active members again from all over the world.
0:04:53
This is your spot for getting education on all the topics that I just talked about. So, education, discussion on all of those things is found inside the inner circle. Then you get the benefit of coming on to digital agency table talk as well. Basically just getting free coaching, free insight or just an entertaining conversation if that’s all you want as well. All right, let’s check on the chat. Gavin says, love the channel. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Stuff from New York City. There we go. Another person from the U.S. Mexico. And Germany and Portland, more from Nigeria, Los Angeles, Yorkshire, Western Australia. Love it. Okay. This is going to be, I think, maybe the last digital agency table talk without a guest.
0:05:41
I wanted to do five solid sessions with just me. And now I think I’m going to start going into it. Now we’re not going to have a guest like every time, okay? But I want to start mixing in the guests now. And when I talk about guests, I mean like another person who has another content creator or another coach or another industry leader or another app developer or whatever, we’re going to bring somebody in as a guest and you’re going to get access to them as well. So if you’re going to be a guest on the show, you can actually ask them whatever you want to ask them. And so maybe we get somebody like Thomas from Bricks. I don’t know. You can ask Thomas, whatever you feel like asking him. Maybe we get designed with crack up. Maybe we get some of these other content creators. You can ask them whatever you want to talk about.
0:06:32
If you have an idea for somebody you want to see on digital agency table talk, then what I would highly recommend you do. And this again is going to be intercircle people are going to be the people I listen to most on this. You go in the intercircle and you just let me know who you think would be a great guest to have on digital agency table talk. Who is somebody that you want to question or hear from? And I will see about getting them on the show. All right. So today we’ve got a couple people waiting in the green room already. We’ve got Poin and we’ve got, I think that’s how you pronounce it. We’ve got Rubin. And so we’ll be bringing them on his guests here. I’ve been debating, you know, if we have a little downtime here, I’ve been debating giving you guys a sneak peek of my new agency website.
0:07:20
I’ve been working on redesigning my agency website really moving it from oxygen to brick. It wasn’t just like I want to redesign the agency site. I never want to do that. It just doesn’t sound fun to me. But I did need to move it from oxygen to bricks and moving it gives me that opportunity to rebuild it, redesign it, make everything new again, and put some new ideas into it. And as you may know, well, you could just go to the existing agency website and see that I’ve been operating basically with a one page website or a very, very long time because I don’t use my website to get new clients. But for 2023, I do want to start moving in that direction. I want to make it a legit website that actually can go out there and bring in traffic and leads and will work better for PPC, even though it’s already working very well for PPC. I think it could work even better for PPC. And I do want to scale up the PPC campaigns locally a bit. So this is just moving from oxygen to bricks gives me this opportunity.
0:08:25
I’ve been debating maybe on digital agency tables, I give you guys a sneak peek of what’s going on. And because there are some unique things and I want to show you maybe on the back end a little bit, I don’t want you to show you the front end, we can actually go into the back end and have a little bit of discussion about how some of the aspects of it were built and organized. Because these are questions that I get all the time. And of course, as you guys know, I put a lot of thought into scalability and maintainability and what’s the easiest way to do these things and make sure that we’re not creating a giant mess for the future. Because you do have to scale sites and you do have to maintain sites and we don’t want that to be an absolute nightmare. So let’s go before I bring on a guess. Let’s just drop in the chat. If you want to see a sneak peek, if you guys want to go through some of the aspects of the redesign that I’m working on, it’s not ready yet.
0:09:14
It’s not ready yet. But it’s very close. It’s getting very close. So if you want to go see some of that and have a little discussion about it, you need to drop it in the chat and let me know that you are interested in seeing that. Nicholas as Elijah would be more interesting in my opinion. I mean, look, Elijah is welcome to come on the show. He is very unlikely to do that. And he’s very unlikely to do that. And I know he’s very unlikely to do that because I already invited him to have a discussion about it once. So you guys could invite him. You guys could encourage him to come on the show. It would be, I would love to have that conversation. And I will try to make it as absolutely productive as I possibly can.
0:10:02
But that is up to him. And the invite has already been open. The invite is open to Thomas as well. Thomas is a busy guy. Of course, I’m a busy guy. And here I am every week for you guys. So I don’t know. Busy is not an excuse to me. It’s like, what is more important than our community? That’s kind of like what I feel. So we’re going to make the time. I’m going to make the time. We’ll see who else is willing to make the time. All right. So everybody saying yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, go through the site.
0:10:32
OK. So if we have some downtime, we’ve got two people. I want to prioritize the two people in the green room. Sorry. My cord was stuck on my chair. I’m going to prioritize the people in the green room, which the green room does have a spot open right now. So if you are wanting to get in the green room as a guest, then and then he says yes, also your opinion on website as a service. OK. So I’ve got the sneak peak and I’ve got website as a service as our downtime topics. But right now what we’re going to do is we’re going to bring on Pawan and we’re going to have him as our first guest. Let me bring him in. Pawan, how are you doing?
0:11:11
I’m good, Kevin. How are you doing? I am fantastic. So you’re coming to us from India. Is that correct? Yep. Right. I’m coming from India. Did I pronounce your name correctly? Yeah, but when that’s how it’s going to be. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good.
0:11:29
Good. So basically I’m a log graduate and I started off working as a corporate lawyer after I graduated from law school. But back when I was in law school, I used to do this side hustle of creating websites, whatever I picked up from YouTube with the elemental stuff and pretty basic stuff. But eventually I was just doing freelancing on the side with my full time job and I was struggling with element of basically how bloated and everything it is as soon as you kind of get a bit of an understanding that you what you expect from a page builder. And that is how I discovered oxygen and I found you and I found Jonathan from Perman’s log. And that is what helped me to kind of make that transition from going from element to brick, element to oxygen. Did a couple of sites on oxygen and now I have kind of moved on to bricks and have been doing my current projects on bricks only. But the thing that I’m mostly struggling with is kind of scaling it to an agency apart from being just a soul freelancer.
0:12:34
And I tried or you know hiring a bunch of interns and training them but the process is like very time consuming and everything. I set up a physical office and everything but just things are not kind of falling into place and it’s hard to find the kind of talent in my city basically. So location is also kind of an issue that you could find developers who could use oxygen or bricks very, you know, like professionally or something like that. Yeah, for sure. So what’s the biggest challenge is it is it getting clients and filling the pipeline or is it finding talent to help you? So basically it’s like I’m kind of stuck in between both of those. It’s like I could actively go on looking for clients and trying to get into prospecting and everything but then how would I tackle if I get the project is like if you have too many clients but you’re not able to deliver then that is also an issue. So it’s just like a lot of confusion going on like some of it is like I am kind of responsible it for as well.
0:13:35
But then it’s also about getting quality clients like in India you would get small businesses who would want to do their websites below a thousand dollars which is not much and it is hard to get clients who are based in you know first world countries while I’m in India so that is also a challenge. So is that where you get most of your clients right now or have you managed to get any clients outside of India? So most of the clients that I do get is like just word of mouth from past of the clients and like most of them are Indian only but then early on I went on Fiverr but that just seemed like an exploitive space as well but I was active a bit on a freelancer group for oxygen professionals on Facebook and that is how I find a found Nate who runs an agency in Vermont called group six interactive and I did one project with them and it was a big project so that was like a good starting point like stepping out from India doing client projects abroad but yeah it’s hard to find clients abroad like especially quality clients not the ones on Fiverr who are just like you know people pretending to be clients but are people who are actually just outsourcing their own work.
0:14:46
Right right okay so I made a video on this in the inner circle it’s the three best ways to get clients fast I don’t know if you’ve watched that video yet. Yeah I think a strategic partnership and PPC and there was one more. The other one is free work free what I call low scope free work and you’ve already seen success with one of those things which is strategic partnerships right now it doesn’t sound like you got a whole project but you got to work on a project which is good right. Right right and that project can can start to go in your portfolio as well so those are the three things now I wouldn’t say you’re in the spot really to do PPC yet probably but if you focus on low scope free work and you focused on strategic partnerships you need many more strategic partnerships right. For those of you watching strategic partnership is you partner with it’s the Melkin cookie strategy right it’s not you’re not partnering with other people who do what you do you’re partnering with other agencies and freelancers who do complimentary work to what you do for example I’ve gotten a ton of business from a branding partner it’s just a designer all he focuses on is branding he gets branding clients all the time you know thirty five hundred five thousand dollars for branding sometimes more than that he also does some UX work but he doesn’t do web design really well he does he doesn’t do web development he does web design and he doesn’t really do web UX he does like app UX which is different from web UX and so these businesses that he does branding for which you know he gets he’s got a long list of people coming to him for work they need websites as soon as he does a rebrand for them or a new brand for them well they need a web presence right so he passes them on to me and I pass him branding clients and a lot of times we work on the projects together and we create co-proposals together that’s just one strategic partner right I have many other strategic partners most of my clients come from strategic partners so strategic partners and then of course my own referral network for this word of mouth from clients that I’ve worked with that’s primary then ppc is a supplement to all of that and because of that I don’t have to do content marketing I don’t have to do YouTube I don’t have to do all these other platforms social media any other types of advertising it’s just that just feeds the pipeline there is strategic partnerships that are really I think going to unlock the keys for you so have you sat down and really made a list of targets of like these are people I want to go after in terms of building a strategic partnership yeah it’s just like I am kind of getting there like there I kind of followed this step and there’s like a design studio based in Mumbai and India only so yeah I am kind of getting into that direction maybe I should implement that overseas as well and it might work out I would definitely focus on focus a little bit in India but focus heavily on strategic partnerships overseas because if you if you do feel I don’t know anything about the market in India so sometimes look people I’ll be honest with you people in the US tell me all the time well in my area people only want websites for a thousand dollars or less right and that’s in the US where I’m like I know that’s not the thing I know that’s wrong right I don’t know anything about India you could be a hundred percent right or you could be just like these people and so I don’t know but I do know that if you know I do know that there is opportunity in the US and the UK and all these other places so if you are building strategic partnerships in those areas that’s going to be very good for you I think location is also like one factor but like it’s I have done clients for three thousand four thousand dollar in India as well so it’s more of like a client thing as well but just at the probability of such clients is higher abroad there’s also one technical question that I have although you have made a very detailed video on it when do you use utility classes like from the frameworks such as your ACSS and when do you create custom classes because like the entire point of classes is that you do not have to replicate the changes all over the site again and again right like you just build a class once slap it to a similar component and you have it running but like with utility frameworks this is you are adding padding onto a section or something like that and on a box you have done it on three places now you just want to change it so you have to go element by element and change the class of your utility frameworks how do you factor that situation yeah that’s a really good question it’s a popular question people ask me that all the time so let’s what we will have I will answer that 100% I want to say something about the price point okay and you’re scaling right because you said you’ve done a few sites for it’s like most people want a size for under a thousand but some I have done a few for two thousand three thousand and I’ll tell you this right now if you’re doing sites this is for everybody listening if you’re doing sites in the two thousand the three thousand to four thousand dollar range you are destined to be a freelancer okay there is no agency coming out of that there is no there is no room to build an agency in those price points so they’re okay price points for a freelancer if that’s what you want to do I still think freelancers should be charging more but if that’s the range you’re in you’re a freelancer you’re going to be a freelancer until those prices get to 7500 plus okay when 7500 plus starts happening then agency can start happening that’s that’s prime that’s what I would say is the cutoff unless and that’s if you’re doing like custom websites if you’re just doing templated websites for people and you’re pumping out as many as you possibly can and you’re going for a hundred percent volume then maybe you can build an agency in the in those lower price points but because you’re obviously the labor you’re not doing as much labor right but if you’re doing legit projects first of all you can’t really do a legit project like if you’re talking about discovery site mapping UX UI dev like in those stages copy writing there’s no way they come in at the low price point right so that it’s not it’s not an agency pricing model at all so we got to get you to where you’re at 7500 plus for these projects and then it’s not going to be a problem of how do I how do I pay people how do I bring people on that are that have enough talent and experience and things like it’s not going to be a problem at that point and by the way you are in the inner circle there’s a space in the inner circle when it does come time for you to need people to help you there’s a job board right post in there and say hey I’m looking for somebody in bricks or I’m and you have the benefit the great thing I’ve hired everybody that’s on my team pretty much out of the inner circle because I have the benefit of them like all the training is already there they already know my process and they either use oxygen or bricks and so I don’t you know I don’t have to worry about it so it’s just like go in there grab the talent and you’re good to go and you have the same opportunity that I do their job board is there for you as well so you can go get talent from there at any time so let’s shift gears and let’s talk about classes versus custom classes utility classes I should say versus custom classes and I think this is a good overall conversation because there is a debate obviously on what are called utility first frameworks so utility first framework is the philosophy that we should style everything with utility classes so you’re not going to create custom classes you’re not going to style at the ID level you’re just going to put a utility class on everything okay this would be a tailwind approach tailwind is a utility first framework I’m not calling it that they call it that themselves that is their philosophy that they themselves state with words out of their mouth okay so I’m not painting a picture that’s not real here okay this is what tailwind is is right tailwind is designed to be used in the code editor it’s like it’s for it’s for not page builders yes right and in a code editor it’s fine because you have multi cursor editing you have a lot of different features that code editors have the page builders do not have page builders force you to add one class at a time right and it’s a very slow process and then you can’t edit those in many different places at once and so what you and there’s no real components there’s pseudo components in page builders so there’s a lot of downsides to using utility first and in a page builder utility first and utility classes in general this is you have to be very careful with where you’re using utility classes utility classes it’s almost like styling at the ID level it’s more efficient in terms of code output right but it’s still one instruction in one place and on one element and if I have three elements that look the same but they all have individualized instructions when I want to change the way that that element looks which is effectively one element but it’s in multiple places I have to go from place to place to place to place changing the utility class so that when you’re when you’re developing site and when I go if I go through if we get to the sneak peak which we may get to we don’t have a lot of action in the greener we got one of their we’ve got Ruben in the green room he’s next we’ll say so we may very well get to the sneak peak we get to the sneak peak then I’ll kind of walk through this a little bit but when you’re building the site everything you put on the page you ask yourself this question and I going to use this again and when I use it again do I want it to look exactly like this and if the answer is yes or maybe or possibly or potentially or any other synonym of that term then you use a custom class you don’t you don’t use a utility class and you 100% don’t style at the ID level okay if the answer is no I’m confident that this is the only instance of this thing of where I want this styling to be use a utility class now there’s a trade-off in the sense that if you don’t use utility classes and you don’t style at the ID level then what do you do well you make a custom class so the custom class has to be organized because you can very easily create a bunch of custom classes all these different names and then in three months I call the three month rule everything that we do in web design should follow a three month rule which is if I leave this project for three months and then I come back to it am I going to be able to easily decipher what the hell I was doing what what how I organize this thing what these things all do and if the answer is no you’ve created a site that’s not maintainable and not scalable and that’s a problem right so we create these custom classes I’ve taught the BEM method of organizing these custom classes block element modifier right so we can keep all of our custom classes organized but it is tedious it’s time consuming to create custom classes and this is the argument that people that use tailwind or utility first frameworks make like oh I love the fact that I don’t have to come up with custom class names anymore I can just slap on my utility classes and move on with my day and my argument to that is okay it takes a little bit more time and a little bit more planning to create custom classes but you have to look at the result the result is that I have a scalable maintainable website with global control over all the elements that I need global control over which saves a tremendous amount an incalculable amount of time on the back end when I need to scale the site or maintain the site later the savings of like oh it takes a little bit longer to come up with a custom class name and that’s why it’s such a bad strategy these people are in a horrible situation later with scalable maintainability right and they’re telling their client oh that’s going to be hard to do it’s going to take all this work we got to move backwards and then they hate their own life yeah they hate their own life when they’re editing and maintaining these websites but they argue against me because they don’t want to take a little bit of time on the front end to just plan accordingly right and do something that is obviously more scalable and maintainable so when you hear people argue against it you have to understand the context of the entire situation which many of these people don’t do let’s be honest there’s a lot of people out there saying oh you don’t need to worry about this you don’t need to worry about that these people would be using wicks right if bricks that exist or square space if they these weren’t closed systems these are not professionals right so it’s you have to take there what they’re saying with the grain assault their arguments also like the uh… them convention also there was a discussion today on the inner circle as well there’s a lot of confusion between you just name everything uh… like on on what it is basically is just say it’s a hero section so yeah the paid block you just uh… give it a class hero inside that there’s a container so you go hero container and then uh… there’s a heading hero container heading then you have the right most heading so you give it a modified class whatever like i’m not like a pro at it but then someone was saying that you don’t have to name the class on what it actually is but kind of overall what it is like you don’t name that if it’s a hero section you don’t name the first thing as hero you rather name it as section so that like you have a universal section class wherein you have defined the top and bottom padding or something of that sort basically you you go for a parent level element such as you have classes for heading you have classes for you know the elements itself rather than where that element is situated yeah okay so that this is where a lot of the challenge comes in there is another type of class called it what i call a contextual utility class all right and this is a utility class the most utility classes have no context to where they’re used margin bottom margin bottom doesn’t tell me what has the margin bottom or where this has been used anywhere on the website no idea could be use on a heading it could be used on a container it could be used on an image it could be used anywhere and so i have there’s no context right there’s a concept that i and i’ve been promoting it lately and i use it in frames called a contextual utility class this would be like a grid gap okay or a container gap or something like that and or content gap is a very popular one i say popular one like the only person talking about it’s a popular one for me i use it all the time i use content gap all the time container gap all the time grid gap all the time now so what content gap does is gaps my content it’s like the owl spacing technique that i use except it actually uses flexbox gap and it creates that equal spacing between elements on a page all of my content right so if i ever want to tighten up my content spacing or widen up my content spacing i can edit i’m free to edit the content gap utility class which is not a specific class to an individual component it’s a class assigned to a concept right and i can safely edit it which is very very very powerful whereas margin bottom if i ever decide like oh that has margin bottom on it i want to tighten that up nope nope you can’t touch that class because you don’t know where it’s been used you’re going to just yeah you’re going to mess up everything right so yes contextual utility classes come into play as well now in your hero example we can’t just do that you’ve got to be very careful doing that because there’s more than one type of hero on most websites right you would see uh…
0:30:10
yeah you would see a home page hero is typically maybe larger has more padding than a subpage hero so we can’t just have a hero class now we’ve got to oh we’ve got to add more context to it and this is where the tailwind people would say see this is too much work but right it’s no what’s too much work is all the nonsense you have to do with uh… a website built purely with utility classes that’s that’s legitimately too much work uh… this just a little bit of thinking in brain power and ingenuity which is not hard for us so uh… it’s not an argument all right thank you so much for all the deep inside it’s a very valuable and it’s uh… pleasure to be a part of the in a circle it’s very valuable and i would try to kind of just convince everyone who’s watching if they’re not a part of it join it there’s a lot of value there excellent thank you so much appreciate you for coming on today thank you all right have a good alright so we’re going to bring in rubin in just a second i want to go through the chat here and just see what is going on so it says uh… yes Kevin puts Jonathan combo got me into oxy first and now with bricks uh… by the way shout out to uh… johnathan go ahead and uh… if you’re not subscribed to the perma slug channel on youtube don’t do it now right here in it you’re already in a thing right now but after this broadcast go ahead and have hop over to perma slug’s channel go ahead and subscribe to him and uh… give him a shout out well automatic no longer be supported by oxygen automatic css still works in oxygen we’re still supporting oxygen that is no uh… not an issue uh… let’s see here tell one that i’m from india and can help him on oxygen so uh… one just admit is in the the chat here go find him connect with him jason barges has got to be in india for some time and this is accurate got to be in india for some time this is accurate they usually look for the cheapest convincing clients at all those are needed is sometimes a challenge unless you get into servicing corporations and larger companies i don’t know i wouldn’t say that i wouldn’t see that there’s uh… there’s startups that have uh… you know funding from various places that have fairly large budgets uh… there’s a lot of small businesses with fairly uh… large budgets really depends on your area though obviously uh… but you’ve got a little beyond your area and know how to and know how to branch out beyond your area as well because we live in a in a world wide marketplace and uh… there’s nothing stopping you from going and getting clients from anywhere in the world i think a lot of people stopped themselves from doing that because they feel like it’s going to be difficult for me to go and get clients from another country but people do it all the time all the time so the seven number one to all of this stuff is stop stopping yourself that’s another pricing tip by the way too most of you who are stuck in the low level pricing are keeping yourself in the low level pricing it’s just it it’s all a mindset in fact you can probably prove this to yourself like when you’re scoping out projects i almost guarantee what you’re going to find yourself doing if you’re if you’re introspective and honest with yourself and self-aware to any degree whatsoever you’re going to realize that you’re trying to discount the project for your client before your client even ask you to discount the project if you find yourself doing that you’ll have pricing mindset issue uh… most squares based websites make me cry uh… absolutely i don’t know how people use square spaces it’s awful absolutely awful uh… the best way to learn custom classes and bim naming is to mess a project up and have to redesign it absolutely which we’ve all done we’ve all done and i that’s that’s the thing guys i’m not i’m not telling people to use bim and custom classes and create scalable maintainable websites is because it’s like my personal opinion it’s like i’ve just i’ve been in enough absolute disasters and i’ve created enough absolute disasters just to know that what these people are you and for like pure utility clients all absolute nonsense uh… and i know this from experience and one of the things is we also have to be careful of is there’s a lot of people who are uh… maybe working on frameworks i don’t know anything about the actual creator of tailwind and i’m putting tailwind aside because like i said tailwind is not designed for page builders and you shouldn’t be using it in a page builder but i have no problem with the tailwind framework when it’s used where it was designed to be used that’s fine i don’t have any problem with tailwind so everybody’s like all your just a tailwind hater i’m not i’m not a tailwind hater i don’t think tailwind should be used in page builders that’s the that’s my argument that’s my that end of my argument okay for using tailwind anywhere else hey have fun have fun using tailwind anywhere else i personally could care less and at and at fact use tailwind in a page builder i could care less there too you know why because i’m not the one that has to maintain your website so if you feel like all cabins just wrong i should i’m gonna use tailwind in page builders all day go for it go for it right i don’t have to live your life i i’ve built plenty of of websites that are not scalable and not maintainable so i have fun with that do do your thing um…
0:35:17
but what i’m saying is one thing and again i don’t know what the background of the crater tailwind is or any of these people creating any of these other frameworks but you have to be very careful taking advice from people who build things for agencies and freelancers but who don’t actually work with clients who don’t actually build websites in the real world be very and this goes for people who develop page builders not even just frameworks right page builders in general there are people who build page builders okay we’ve got some of the bricks we’ve got oxygen we’ve got all these page builders and all of these developers of page builders are going to have their own opinions on how things should be done i don’t really know the background on any of these people but what i will say is be very careful taking advice from people who don’t actually build websites for clients in the real world okay i build clients for websites in the real world so i’m in this off day in and day out if other people are not you’ve got to figure out okay which opinion perhaps has more weight okay we can all have theories theories are fantastic but how those theories play out in real website builds with real clients in those situations that’s uh you know that’s that’s a thing you could be the greatest boxer you have seed fighter in in the gym but until you’ve actually been in a match we don’t really know do we right you could be the best golfer on the practice uh whatever the fuck it’s called if you haven’t been in an actual match with other people oh we don’t really know we don’t really know how well your theories stack up or how well you perform right so it’s it’s kind of like that it’s you have to be very careful if they’re not going blow for blow in the real world with actual client work how much does your opinion really matter and again i don’t know their backgrounds i’m just saying just saying if we if we do find out the background at some point that should inform you a little bit as to uh their opinion for context design has already been done in a doby xd i was just scoping the work okay that’s part of another conversation Cynthia says tailwind is great but indeed it must be used where it was designed to be used for okay i agree just started learning bricks and bim concept trying to figure out how to also use jet engine for dynamic data uh i’ve seen a lot of jet engine talk recently and i’m not sure why i’m not sure why i’m seeing it i don’t know if it’s they’ve done some marketing push or their communities growing i’m not sure i’ve never personally used jet engine i haven’t felt a need to use jet engine i’ve used advanced custom fields i’ve used uh metabox i currently use metabox for pretty much everything um so people do have a lot of jet engine questions unfortunately i have zero experience with jet engine uh so i can’t really answer those all right let’s see i think you accidentally said i build clients for websites in the real world i i yes okay it’s talking is hard all right cool so we are at the end of our live chat for right now i’m going to go ahead and bring Ruben on as our next guest i have no idea what Ruben wants to talk about we’re gonna bring him on and see Ruben how’s it going hey it’s going good Kevin how are you doing good good what are we talking about today all right uh it actually is with uh custom fields uh metabox i i’ve been using it for a while now and they have this feature called creating custom tables it is an extension called metabox custom tables and basically it just is supposed to speed up the website i’ve noticed you have really used this in your tutorials um is it might just you know barking up a tree that doesn’t matter or is it worth looking into creating custom tables for the custom tables let’s see uh custom you’re you’re bringing this news to me imbi custom table all right helps you save custom fields values to a custom table instead of the default wordpress meditable all custom fields for a poster saved in a single row where each column contains the value of a corresponding field so the goal here is to reduce the number of rows in the database which helps improve performance when the data grows unless you have all your data in one place you can easily view at it import and export it well first glance it sounds very interesting to me uh second glance it seems like there’s some research to be done here now we’re gonna have to weigh pros and cons we’re gonna have to do a bunch of digging to see exactly uh do you do are you confident that this actually in this format works with bricks yeah i’ve actually been using it on oxygen and now it’s last use sites with bricks and yeah it does work okay well what do you think about it what’s your what’s your first take it’s extra work because you have to check a field to say created table yep and the plugin will create the table automatically but you have to you have to give it a name and so i’m sometimes worried that if i accidentally name it something that another table is created in the website that there might be a conflict um i think maybe like products like maybe i have a products custom field and then i end up installing WooCommerce some stuff like that yeah that’s really the only concern i had and i wasn’t i wasn’t sure if it’s actually beneficial or is it just extra work and yeah i mean it sounds like it’s more efficient from a database perspective of course i’m not a database expert engineer um so what i typically do in these situations is i go to my team and i say hey there’s this new thing called metabox tables and it and i they give them the link to it and then we all have a giant discussion about it and there’s people who know more about database stuff on my team than i do and i take their word for it and what if they if they say yeah this is going to be a lot more efficient we should do it this way then we start doing it that way and if they say yeah juice isn’t worth the squeeze i say okay we’ll keep doing it the way we’ve been doing it okay yeah so but you’ve brought it in as a topic so what i will do is take it to my team we will have this discussion and then i will let everybody know in in the inner circle especially but maybe even in a future video if we adopt it okay hold on so here’s there’s an example some Mateo in the chat custom tables might be useful if you either have a lot of data because it will require less queries or if you want to simplify data migrations and staging like with WooCommerce orders and then kashav says custom tables are helpful when you have a lot of products or post in single category or taxonomy and it would work well with import export plugins et cetera custom tables is better to write to database queries performance specifically when i can put my own indexes okay so it sounds like there’s a lot of love in certain situations for our custom tables okay so something i’m going to need to look into deeper and and potentially adopt okay um i’ve got one of the questions about google ads i just uh was doing a weekly review and suggestion popped up to do the google ads enhanced conversion tracking yes and uh that’s the first time i saw it was just uh last week is that something you would definitely go with and generally do you follow google’s recommendations or how do you do you know what that is i guess the enhanced conversion tracking that they’re talking about yeah there’s a well first of all the recommendations thing google kind of annoys me it’s like because half their recommendations are absolutely terrible and just like you know you you they lack context a lot of times uh and then some of their recommendations are are really good and then if you look at the optimization score on your ad campaigns and your ads and such right it’ll be like your ad is 67% optimized if you go through and look at their suggestions and you just dismiss them all then your then your campaign in your ad is 99% optimized right uh and you have any you haven’t even done anything you just dismissed all their recommendations so um yeah it it really it depends on what stage of the game you’re in anything that’s optimized based on conversions typically does better when you have a lot of conversion data in the system already if you are if it’s a new campaign if it’s a new account uh and you haven’t put a lot of conversions through the campaign yet and doing that either you know by max clicks or some other method then it’s going to be tough for google’s algorithm to really figure out who should be targeted to get these conversions um so what i’ve been doing lately is i’ll run a max clicks i’ll get as much traffic to the page as i possibly can obviously a lot of that will convert over time good that conversion data is still there for google to use then i go ahead and switch it to a conversion model uh and that that’s been working fairly well okay all right yeah that’s still a question i have i’m looking forward to seeing uh the website your new agency site cool all right so uh we will probably bring it up in just a second here all right thank you so much for coming on the show today thank you all right uh i did want to i saw another thing in the chat about website critiques uh somebody had mentioned do you ever would you ever do website critiques on uh digital agency table talk the answer is yes yes um and actually we have a situation where you know there’s downtime in digital agency table talk i try to go for at least an hour i i’ve booked 90 minutes for everybody so i i will stay here for you’ve got a lively discussion and guess and things like that or just more things to talk about or people interacting in the chat but at least an hour and so we’re 45 minutes in right now we’re doing well we’ve got close to 100 people watching live which is fantastic um i want to talk about yes so the uh website critiques you don’t have to be an intercircle member to get a website critique so if you want a website critique because i would love to do this and i haven’t done any yet on digital agency table talk you don’t have to be an intercircle member you can just drop a link in the chat or you can email me the link and i’ll pull up my email in just a second please don’t spam me don’t put me on your on your list okay just email me kevinadigitalambition.co uh with a website that you want critiqued and let me know did you i need to know if you built the site okay i need to know some background i’m gonna be honest with you i’m not i’m not going to butter you up okay i’m not gonna put sunshine in rainbows all over your your pile of shit if it’s if it is one um but you know if you want honest feedback then then that’s what i can give we’re gonna need a video on custom tables okay yes well i will make one as soon as i know something about it jett engine uses custom tables since using it i do have a question i would love to ask but i’ll be off the way another week as my kids are going properly bonkers in the background today man i know exactly the michael exactly that works half my half my sales calls my kids are going bonkers in the background kevin would be great if you can prepare one of your awesome tutorials and how to properly migrate a local bricks bill to fully deploy and live server for a client um um well i don’t first of all i don’t build on local um so we build on development servers and that way our entire team has access easily to to the website so that they can go in and change whatever they need to change and work on whatever they need to work on and then we just deploy from development server to live server which in grid pane is like a it’s like a few clicks and you’re done do you use the similar audiences in google and how are you adopting because they won’t be supported in the future yeah audience tracking is tough um it really depends on the account it depends on what we’re doing with the objectives are what kind of ads we’re running at no campaign is like we we don’t set up like any campaign the same way and we do a lot of testing and a lot of switching between different models for traffic and conversion and things like that uh well there be more templates added to frames on the launch we’ve been adding templates to frames the entire time so there is a um there is a change log for frames and it lets you know what’s been added or changed recently um but we’re just doing we’re adding frames on an ongoing basis and actually the agency website that i’ll pull up in just a second by the way guys the green room is still open if you’re in the inner circle you can go in grab the link jump into the green room if you want to be a guest on the show let me put it on here if you want to become a member of the inner circle get all the good stuff the inner circle members have access to the link is on the screen right now and you can also get into the green room through there um but yes we’ve been adding frames and the the agency rebuild that i’m about to show you uh was built with frames um so it’s going to give you a good glimpse of uh how how frames turns out when you use it on on real websites and by the way i’ve used frames now so i i did a lot of testing with frames early on get frames that i of anybody doesn’t know what frames is or what we’re talking about here um it’s a rapid wire framing and what i call like a pre design tool uh and it’s basically does all of the accessible development for you and gets you to the pre design stage where you’re ready to just apply the styles to customize the design of the website and you know i did a lot of early testing with it and when i was doing a lot of early testing i was like man this just feels like it’s going to save a tremendous amount of time and we just talked about the BIM classes right and how kind of time consuming it is to come up with names and apply the class to every single element on the page a custom class to every single element on the page so that you have global control over all of these things it is more time consuming right i’ve said many many times that i could fly through building a website or a page if i just styled everything at the ID level i could move light speed if i used utility classes purely for everything i can move at light speed but the problem is on the back end and this is where anybody that talks about and you can see other creators too they compare builders and like how fast can i build a page in element or how fast can i build a page in bricks how fast can i build a page in oxygen none of that shit matters because what matters is the scalability and maintainability on the back end and if you build it very fast on the front end right just like i’m saying front end like the early stage of the project then you’ve completely screwed up the scalability and maintainability on the back end which creates a tremendous amount of time and work that you’re not accounting for in the time you saved or the speed to build a webpage right so none of that stuff actually matters what matters is scalability and maintainability and when you use frames all of the custom classes are already there for you you don’t have to think about any of that stuff you don’t have to apply them to anything they’re just sitting there waiting for you and so early stage testing i was like this just feels like it’s going to be fantastic then over the past few weeks i’ve actually used frames on two sites one was a client website and the other is our new agency website and the results of just first of all there’s a lot of and i’ve been doing this for a long time and with the agency website especially i wasn’t working from a design i did not send it to my designer i wanted to use frames in a way that i think many people will use frames which is you add frames to the page and then you figure out how you want to style everything as you go right and you come up with ideas in your head and things that you want to try and i wanted to make sure i already know it works if you wireframe a page with frames and send that page to a designer designer designs it and then you come back and style it that of course it works like that i wanted to see how well it would work if we just add the frames to a page and then decide as we go how we want this page to come to life how would it work in this kind of situation and one thing that i found is that when you are building pages and you care about accessibility and you care about scalability and you care about maintainability building a new section that you want to test which is like a theory here’s the theory on how i want to lay this out and if you do this in bricks it’s a lot of work and it’s because you’re you’re dotting every t and crossing every i as you should be but then you’re like it’s just not working this concept that i had in my mind is not coming out on the page the way that i imagined it would and i want to scrap this section and start over you have just burned a serious amount of brain power and like you know creativity and just you start to get worn down by it right with frames if you have a concept you’re like oh i want to test something out you just pop the frame in and style it real quick all of the structural work is already done for you all the t’s or cross all the eyes are already dotted for you you’re just playing around with styling now and it’s very easy to bring something in so i don’t like that take it out put a new one in and then style it okay that one works perfectly and then move on to the next section all of that actual leg work is taken out of the equation so it’s actually it’s just more fun to work on a website again and it’s way less like mental effort to get things done and so these two builds that i’ve done with frames have gone like they’ve been the easiest websites that i’ve built to date all right so let’s go ahead and do this shall we do this i can either talk about website as a service or i can do the sneak peek of the agency website i feel like you guys just want the sneak peek of the agency website so let’s go ahead and let me get down to the bottom here you have me curious about bricks oh oh i have you curious about bricks okay well mr. Nate let me tell you something i’ve got a video concept this guys this is it’s going it’s unfortunate it’s unfortunate it’s going to put the nail in the coffin of oxygen okay and you know i’m not attempting to do this i’m just i’m just telling it like it is that’s all i can do that’s all i can do is report what i know to be reality okay i have a video coming out it is i don’t actually have a final number on it yet but there’s a lot of people and it’s aimed at people who still use oxygen is not aimed at people who are thinking about purchasing oxygen which i don’t think you should be thinking about uh if you but if you still use oxygen you are in a legitimate situation where you are still deciding like okay do i do i jump ship do i go to bricks right there that’s pretty much your your main choice right now you could go somewhere else but your main choice is to go to bricks and if you’re an agency you’re probably still with oxygen because the migration to bricks has a lot more moving parts right there’s other people on the team maybe they’re really good at oxygen but they’re they’re not really familiar with bricks yet even though the transition is not hard to make okay it’s not a hard transition there’s still considerations and i still realize there’s legitimate reasons why someone would still be using oxygen and i’m not knocking you if you’re still using oxygen you’re in that situation some people are more conservative with switching platforms than other people are some people are more positive on the outlook okay than other people are but i’m about to do a video and i again i don’t have a final number but i think we’re up to something like thirty seven is thirty seven examples of why bricks is better than oxygen and these are not like minor things these are legitimate examples of why it’s better and because i’ve made the claim and and people have called me crazy that bricks one point five points whatever we’re on right now but the one is the critical part there one point okay one point five is better than oxygen four point whatever it’s on okay the one and the four are all that matter and people are like that can’t that can’t be that can’t be right he’s just he just matted oxygen he’s it did it did it did it did it people tell me this all the time for some reason people still think that when i say something it’s because of a personal vendetta or i want to sell a product or did it you you should know by now i just tell you what i actually think that’s it the reason i move to bricks is because i think it’s better not because i hate oxygen or or the people who develop it or whatever it’s just a better platform it’s just that’s it that’s it the reason i made a css is not because i wanted to make money or because i want to do this or because i want to do that or any of these other things people charge me with it’s because i wanted a better framework for myself and my agency and so i built one and then i opened it up to everybody else that’s it okay there’s no underlying vendetta is i tell people what i think that’s all i do tell people what i think and when my opinion changes i tell them i used to think this now i think this right so i’m trying to be as transparent as humanly possible so when i put out this video there’s going to be a lot of people who say oh kevin’s just attacking oxygen please don’t think that right when i put out the article about you shouldn’t use tailwind and page builders that’s just because he wants to sell a css no it’s because you legitimately should it use tailwind and page i’m just trying to educate people okay and so you can’t fault me because i have products and say well nothing he says can be listened to because he’s got this underlying uh you know vendetta no that that that is an illegitimate argument pay attention to the context and the and the content of what i’m actually saying am i making legitimate arguments against why you shouldn’t use tailwind and page builders quite yes yes absolutely obviously okay so pay attention to the content when i put out this video this 37 reasons why bricks is better or it’s probably actually going to be more than 37 by the time the video is made i’ve been tallying them up it is because those are legitimate reasons they are undeniable reasons it doesn’t have anything to do with what i think about oxygen or the people who create oxygen okay and bricks doesn’t have an affiliate program guys i’m not selling bricks i don’t sell things for bricks you can get a css with oxygen if you want to so there there’s no personal gain for me whatsoever in talking about oxygen versus bricks but people will somehow try to find an angle of why there why there is but really i’m just telling you reality and there are because people are like how could it be how could it be better it’s not just better it’s 37 reasons better it’s it’s probably going to be over 40 reasons better by the time i make the video that’s a lot of reasons that’s a lot of better okay and so i want to make the video because i want people to clearly see because the people who aren’t quite sure i don’t really think of use bricks enough they haven’t used bricks a lot okay so i want to make the video once and for all here’s the decision if you’re on that fence trying to make that decision then i’m going to help make it for you all right uh let’s see okay people want the sneak peak okay this site is not done yet let me close my base camp here get base camp out of the way the inner circle out of the way all right i am uh i’m shutting this i’m shutting the green room down we’re going to go straight into screen sharing mode we’re just going to finish up with talking about this as we go through this site if you have questions if you have comments whatever put everything in the chat i don’t care put everything in the chat and i’m going to try to monitor the chat as best as i possibly can uh let’s go ahead and screen share let’s see if we can get this up on the screen and let me know if you guys can see the screen this is the inner circle by the way um okay it’s going up by a lot will still be an LTD i don’t see the urge we need to think more okay all right people talking about child themes so let make make sure you guys can see the screen just need to know i know there’s a little bit of delay on the on the broadcast just waiting for better integration between bricks and jet engine it will be a powerhouse is jet engine on their road map i haven’t even looked at the at the road map in a while all right good all right screen is on okay so let’s go to all right we’ll talk about some of the decisions that were made we’ll talk about some of the underlying infrastructure um okay so let’s let’s go through it so this is the this is the homepage uh nice big bold headline here this is very very similar to the old one keep in mind that this was built with frames as we go through this okay you should not be able to tell that this was built and that’s the thing is i could show you another website that i built with frames that looks completely different and that’s what is amazing about frames is it gives you that starting point across all your teeth and that’s all your eyes but you can still create a fully custom website with it you’re not locked into like a certain look and feel and if you do start with a certain look and feel like you do with other design sets you don’t have to work backwards you don’t have to take away styling in order to add your own styling you get a clean slate to work from you can make your own design decisions so one thing i wanted to do is put a very faint just accent photo back here and actually i converted that to black and white actually took away all of the uh the color information so it really kind of like muddied it it made it very muddy looking i didn’t want to have a lot of detail just a little bit of a a feel to it um and so that is the the hero section we’ve got our uh links here calls to action for let’s talk tell me more and you can see that those animate uh when when we do any sort of like you know engagement animation type hover effects all that this is kind of the extent of what i do i don’t do any heavy animation bring things in from the sides and up and down and scroll around i don’t do any of that stuff all right i just i focus on content i focus on clean i focus on messaging i focus on conversions that’s it i don’t focus on let’s win animation awards all right uh this is something that really is is difficult to do inside of oxygen um it is a dynamic slider uh carousel really and it shows the lat the latest three projects and this is driven by custom fields and metabox and a custom post type so our projects and i’ll show you guys this on the back end our projects are all a custom post type and so this content right here from this paragraph down to the end right here is one custom field specifically for the featured projects area so this is a latest slash featured projects areas featured because it’s on the homepage right so this is for featured project content when we actually click through to the actual project page which i’m really excited to show you guys in just a second uh it’s that’s made with uh Gutenberg and uh different custom fields separate custom fields again i’ll show you all this in the background or in the back end but we have a project so if i if i do a new project and i’m like i want to get this project on the website literally all i have to do is go add the project to the custom post type fill out the field and hit publish i put the images in all that and it’s going to populate these two images and it’s going to populate this content inside of the slider this slider will only ever have three things okay it’ll never have any more than three items you’ll be able to rotate through those three items right and on the back end on the actual project single page itself it’ll have a completely different design but all driven again by the custom fields and the Gutenberg content which you’ll see in just a second so all of this is dynamic scalable maintainable okay i never have to touch this slider in the actual template it’s all populated dynamically that is the goal when you’re building these kinds of things okay so we go down uh we got a little quote here great fantastic uh we’ve got our services and what i did on this page is i put our services in manually because i grouped them in a specific way so i wanted to present it on the home page instead of talking about everything that we do i’ll show you this actual services page in just a second but i just wanted to group them into web design website design which this is going to be something we’re going to be trying to to rank for right and and really position is the main offering the main offering is website design but we do do other things so what i listed here is like the components of website designed to let people know you know we’re not just designers right we do the website strategy we do ux we do ui we do the copywriting we do development we do conversion optimization okay we do all these things as are just letting them know here uh that that is part of that and that’s nice and sticky so it kind of follows them down since that uh those that photo group on the right is a little bit taller and then here we have digital marketing and advertising where we list things like digital strategy and white hat SEO and digital PR and Google advertising some of these other things that we do to drive traffic so it’s really like let’s build your home base and then let’s get you a bunch of traffic and leads that’s really the two groups uh and the way that i’ve chosen to present the content on the homepage this section is a placeholder right now it is um waiting for i’m testing two or three different testimonial layout designs and so that’s just kind of sitting there that’s one of those areas waiting to be finished but that’s where testimonials is going to go and then i’ve got this y us section on the homepage because i want a little bit of a write up uh just kind of a personal note from me uh as to why people should choose us right and i design this little uh card with its you know little tricolor box shadow here that’s done with the box shadow um and that works really well i think and i’m going to put a video on this page but i have to record the video it’s not recorded yet okay so that is your homepage and we’ve got our footer down here again the guys this footer straight out of frames um but what you’ll see also you’ll see on the buttons a lot of people ask me about automatic css buttons they’re like i’d love to use the buttons an a css but i can’t have custom buttons i’m just i’m just you know relegated to square buttons because that’s what the a css dashboard has guys you could customize the a css buttons all you want this is an a css button right here right it’s it’s a button action right button action right there you see it it’s the new action button and all i did is i made it look exactly i wanted to with a little bit of custom css so every time i add a button action it’s going to look exactly like that uh i think that’s the only button on this page but you’ll see it on other pages as well all right uh this i added a little glass morphism it may not come through on screen sharing there’s a very faint background pattern here and you can actually see through uh with the glass morphism technique on this and yes so that is the end of the home page okay so let’s move on to the about page this is a page again we’re still working on this still under construction i’ve got the same kind of header hero here where we’ve got the very faint uh background image again just really focusing on on content here uh i’m going to make a video right here i just have a placeholders our frames video uh but this is going to talk about expertise process and communication right it’s going to talk about really why the three things we focus on you should choose us as an agency because there’s a lot of talented agencies out there right there’s a lot of talented freelancers out there but really it comes down to you want to make sure that the person you hire the agency you hire has the expertise that you need to get the job done but they also better have a rock solid process or your ship’s going to go off the rails it’s going to be late it’s going to be over budget it’s going to be a lot of things going wrong so you need the expertise 100 percent you should hire for expertise but you need to hire for process and you need to hire for communication because there’s a lot of talented agencies out there who can’t communicate where the dam and uh lots of project problems come from lack of communication people constantly wondering where’s my where’s my project at what’s what’s the progress you want an agency that proactively communicates with you and that is completely open and honest with regard to all parts of the project so these are the things these are the talking points that I’m going to hit on in my video which is also going to be just a nice introduction to uh you know me and how our agency does work our philosophy all that good stuff uh because we want a little bit of personal uh you know aspects of this so there’s going to be a homepage video there’s going to be a bout page video there’s also going to be a section I am going to record some videos designed for education towards the type of businesses that I target and so we’ll eventually have a page for that as well so people that come to the site are now going to really get a nice personal feel from it they’re not just going to see words and photos they’re going to hear from the actual agency owner and the people in the agency we’re still working on our uh about page here we’ve got our experts page uh again custom post type guys custom post type all queried onto the page which also gives us the ability to have each person having their own individual page at some point but I can query those anywhere that I want to that’s the about page frame right here hero frame frame right here this is a content frame this is a features frame this is a team member frame all all frames just customized okay uh so that’s the about let’s go ahead and check out the services page I’m gonna go into the back end in just a second we’re gonna take a look at some stuff so the service is what I really wanted to do with this is I wanted to lay everything out again in groups um this is not currently services is a custom post type and I’ll explain how that’s going to work in a second right now I’m not querying on this page from that custom post type I have all of these in here manually and the reason I’m doing that is because it’s so new that I just want to get it out there and we don’t have the content for each of these and we’re not linking to them as individual pages yet which we will in the future and when we do start linking to them as individual pages then they’ll be queried dynamically but all of the infrastructure is there so these services are a custom post type and they are all input as a custom post type I’m just not querying them I’m putting them in manually for now um so all of these use a sticky concept of the headings on the left hand side and then uh these are actually process cards and these are frames okay so I all I did literally it took me five seconds to pop this frame in these process cards count for you automatically so when I put a new one in it’s gonna say seven when I put a new one in it’s gonna say eight it counts automatically all of it is structurally sound okay and I didn’t have to cross any of those teas or dot-n of those eyes I literally just popped it in and then I put in the content and then I moved on with my life second one down here talks about SEO all the things that go into SEO again we want people to understand that they they hire a web designer but they don’t really realize what goes into the web design they hire someone for SEO but they don’t really realize what goes into the SEO so this gives them a glimpse into like the key components of what they’re hiring for that we have paper click then we have our analytics all right so that’s just a simple page kind of does services overview now we have our latest projects our latest projects this page took me all of eight minutes to build because it’s a frame all right we have a frame that does alternating feature content like this but all I did was put in one of those frames this is a query loop this first block is a query loop that then queries the following two they alternate automatically and they pull the featured images from the custom post-iped they pull this this is the same content that was on the homepage right just queried onto this page so this page this latest projects which you know I think looks pretty good I like the little dual layer image concept here for kind of giving a glimpse of the work eight minutes eight minutes to build this page this page was again probably eight minutes content putting in the contents it took longer obviously but actually getting the structure there you know another eight ten minutes about page not very long at all again 15 20 minutes I don’t know even even like you know doing a lot of the styling it’s just so quick because all the custom classes are already there for you homepage should a bit longer because I did a lot of you know moving stuff around experimentation building the slider because we don’t have a frame slider yet we are building native carousel components native toggle components maybe a native menu component there’s a lot of stuff coming natively to to frames but it’s not there yet so this is built with the carousel the native carousel inside of bricks all right so latest projects let’s hop into a project I’m going to do the project’s detail page let me look at the chat real quick frames is basically accessible wire framing component okay so people are asking what frames is really like the sticky idea on the side note with taller content on the other side yeah use that technique a lot I just you know it’s really doesn’t do any good to have blank space there is somebody scrolls down so the sticky element just kind of keeps that in their vision and usually that sticky element like this the heading and stuff is kind of important right so you kind of want it to stay in their vision wow neat do you record the build of this new site it would have been great to follow no I did not record the actual build process here can we do a tutorial on that newest processes newest projects section I think you’re talking about the carousel on the homepage we could we could do that yes love the hover styling on the main menu items okay all right good so everybody’s liking this all right let’s let’s take a look at the project details page now this is a challenge for me the project details page I’ve I’ve thought about this many different ways we as web designers because you know pages can be very long oh oh I also want to say let’s just pause for a second before I forget I don’t want to forget some things guys this image and I will say up front this is not the most efficient way from a performance aspect to do this but this image is auto cropped I did not want a I did not want a situation where I had to create like spend literally you know dozens of minutes or potentially even hours taking all these screenshots of these different projects and cropping them to exact specifications and then uploading them to specific areas that’s very that’s a lot of work that’s a lot of work what I wanted to do is go page by page like a full screen screen capture and then just load it in and then the CSS and the website actually does all the magic so this is a full page gigantic screenshot and it’s just the CSS that I’ve written here auto crops it so it never gets higher than a certain height and then it does the same thing for this one so these are not cropped images these are full now I do have bricks has source set right so I’m only loading an image size I have short pixel on the back ends when I upload a gigantic screenshot it creates about 12 different versions of it at different sizes and I just load in the version that’s the exact width that I need here so it still appears to be full resolution it’s a lot taller than it is in real life so yeah there’s a lot of information that has to be downloaded that’s not actually being seen by the visitor in terms of like the size of this but I’ve converted them all to web p so we’re loading this all in web p and it’s I haven’t done any performance tests on the site if we need to make other adjustments we’ll make them but right now I’m focused on ease of me putting in new projects because if I if it takes me too much time and effort to put in a new project you guys know what’s going to happen right I ain’t going to do it I’m going to put in the new project as we’re going to have the same three projects sitting here on the site and by the way it does say this I did not want to create a there will be an archive okay but when somebody goes to my latest projects page it says right here in the text we truly believe in the motto your only as good as your last performance that’s what this page is about it’s a detailed account of our three latest projects so you can get an idea of what we’ve accomplished recently the other reason I’m doing this is because I don’t want to generate a lot of overwhelm I think it’s overwhelming for people to see a gazillion different projects right I want to take our latest stuff and I want to say here’s three examples of our latest stuff if this isn’t good enough for you right then we’re probably not a good fit like of all other stuff you’re looking at if you if you’re like oh I need to see 80 examples of your work sorry you’re you’re a little too needy for me honestly so probably not a good fit but you could clearly see by these latest three projects exactly what you need to see and know if we’re going to be able to get the job done for you that’s kind of the concept here and for most people it limits the amount of stuff they have to digest three projects that’s it let’s take a look at them okay so let’s go in and look at the project details page and as I was saying this page is a challenge because the content is so tall and so big and so what I’ve seen a lot of people do is they use those auto scrollers so you hover over the image and it scrolls through the page for you two problems with that major problems with that one you don’t that’s there’s actually a third thing that I’ll get to in a second one is you don’t really it’s in a window it’s in like a little frame so you don’t really get a experience right you just kind of scrolling through a well basically a master of thumbnail so you don’t really get a good experience with it too they’re horrific for accessibility I don’t think I don’t think there I don’t think there’s any way to make them accessible as far as I know so that’s out of the window right off the bat the other thing people do is they link to they show a screenshot and they just link to the client’s site I don’t do that either okay because things change right and clients make decisions over time that maybe we don’t necessarily agree with sometimes clients go in against our will and make changes to things and things break and like people will go to a client site they know that I built a long time ago they’re like hey something’s this XYZ’s broken and I’m like yeah well I didn’t break it right they broke it and so even though I tell clients all the time like hey don’t edit your website you have no business editing your website sometimes they get hard-event and they go in and try to do things on their own and they know that if they come back to me and say hey I broke it they got to pay for me to fix it all right so it’s not too big of a problem but sometimes they don’t do that sometimes they don’t even know they broke it and I’m not just scanning their website 24 hours a day looking for errors so I don’t want to link out to a project site because then somebody goes to the site and they’re like oh shit’s broken that looks bad on me but it’s like I didn’t break it right it’s like they have access just like I do and so things happen so I want somebody to see what we actually built right and so the best way to do that I felt was full page let’s go like it’s why does we can get it not like full browser with but full page with and so that’s what this is about so we’ve got the title of the project this is that same screenshot guys look it’s auto cropped it’s exactly this image right here it just looks different because the CSS is treating it differently it’s auto cropping it and it applies a little layered box shadow all right this is all dynamically driven from a template these are not individual pages I don’t ever have to touch this page or this template everything is happening from custom fields on the back end these things right here you see these little badges these are these services queried from their custom post type with a bidirectional relationship so I’ll show you how we edit one of these project pages in just a second but when I’m editing a new project page all I do is tell it which services we did by selecting them from the database then I hit publish and these labels show up right here so every project is going to have unique labels showing what we did for that specific project and eventually when these pages actually exist as service pages they can actually be links so somebody could click and go to the branding page they could click and go to the UX design page or whatever so that’ll also become sort of like a tag-based navigation of sorts okay so then we scroll down and we’ve got this little divider here that goes subcaption or project details so look this is put in dynamically and then I just wrote the word project details statically so it’ll always say the name of the project and then project details and then there’s a little call to action here and this is a glass morphism box you can see through it you probably can’t see through it on screen share because there’s the resolutions too low but there is a faint background pattern down here that you’ll be able to see and you’ll be able to see the text through it because this is a sticky element I really wanted because this is a long page you’re going to see in just a second there’s a lot of write-up there’s a lot of examples and photos and so it’s like a very long blog post almost and so I didn’t want people to just get lost in the content I wanted the heading like here you’re reading about subcaption or the project details and a call to action to follow them down the page the entire time they’re reading because they may have an aha moment at some point while they’re reading this project they’re like dammit this is the agency I need to work with well that work with us button better be right there waiting for them okay so as we scroll this down you’re going to see it sticks to the top you can see the text a little bit blurry through there that’s the glass morphism technique so that is a sticky little bar that you run into on your way down that’s going to join you on your journey through this project okay and so we do all this write-up we have branding and now we go into full screen page width I should say it’s not really full screen it’s full page width examples of the work right we get to the web design and this is what I like about this is because you almost get to have an experience as if you’re scrolling down this web page it’s not you know as big as it normally would be obviously but you still get the full experience and so you just get to scroll and it’s easy there’s nothing to interact with okay nothing to hover your mouse over you just scroll like you would on a blog post and then you read in between and it just works out really really well to create like an immersive experience of going through these screens and we talk about you know some of the challenges that we ran into and yada yada yada and then we eventually get to the end and we see a call to action we run into our footer call to action sandwich technique again you got the call to action at the top call to action at the bottom content is the meat of the sandwich so we’re all good here so I really like this experience what I did to create this little layered effect because you notice all the content the text content is narrow for easy readability okay because you don’t want these paragraphs going left to right the problem is what about these images I did not want to have to remember again three month rule three month rule says can I go can I come back in three months and create a new project without fucking it up and if you have to put a class like a breakout class or something like that on every image in a project right up you’re going to forget or you’re going to miss one and then the whole shit’s going to look broken or if you have to put a class on paragraphs to make them a paragraph with instead of page with that’s going to be a problem in three months too you’re not going to remember how any of this stuff works so this is all done automatically with code right so CSS finds the headings and the paragraphs and targets them to bring them in and give them an auto left and right margin and a specific content with and then it allows the images to just take up the rest of the container the full width of the page with container so it’s very easy to go in and add a new project let’s go ahead and and show you that in I don’t want to edit that in bricks let’s edit the project and I’ll show you the template in just a second but here we’re using the Gutenberg block editor to create the write up that’s all we’re doing so I’m literally just writing a blog post okay and then we get to the end and then of course in the media gallery I’ll show you guys a little tip trick too because we want to make sure we don’t forget all images we all tags we want to make sure that we have captions on all of these as well you’ll see they all have a caption so I’m going to go to the media gallery here and I am going to go to I’ve got it all organized into folders so we’ll go into subcaption or as an example and I’m using what is this plugin called I never think of admin columns pro so I love admin columns pro because notice on my on my gallery here I have in line editing I have the ability to see and you can see here that we’re still working on the subcaption or one where we need to add alt text and captions to all these photos well you could try to go normally you would have like edit a photo and then come down here and add the alt text add the caption go back you know all this nonsense well with admin columns pro I can literally just click and I can edit the alt text right here click edit the caption right here and I can just do that down this screen and then when I pull those images into Gutenberg they’re are going to have their alt text they’re are going to have their caption so prep work of just let’s upload all the screenshots let’s add in all the alt text add in all the captions and then when we build the blog post the project post it’s all going to be there and ready for us so that’s kind of the workflow there let me go back to yeah here’s our project okay so we get down to the end and let me go to the project box over here on the side panel so there you see the featured image right that is a tall featured image but remember where it shows up in these different featured image areas it’s auto-crupped so you only see the top part of it and it this is tall as that container asks it to be sometimes we ask it to be full with sometimes we ask it to be a lot shorter and it just adapts accordingly and so we only need one featured image I don’t have to worry about different images for all these different spots that’s kind of the way we’re we’re rocking and enrolling with it right now here’s your related services right here this is a bidirectional relationship field for our services custom post I’ve got you see over here our services so they’re all put in his posts right here and then all I have to do is choose the ones that we actually did you sit add more select a service it’s going to query there’s all my options I choose the one that I did I’m going to delete that one so I don’t put it on by accident as a duplicate and then hit update and that’s what creates those little labels on the project page all happens dynamically we we come down here and we’re going to see your hero lead so I have the hero lead which if we go to this page let’s go to here okay that’s this so this hero lead this is the hero this is the lead paragraph all right so there’s our hero lead right there and then on our featured projects we have a it can have its own headline let me refresh this it’s going on with it auto save the post okay this scroll down there we go so you can see the featured project headline so on the homepage that’s this headline right here so that’s what controls that and then your featured project summary it’s just a a wizzy wig box right and so I can easily type in the little summary here and that’s where it shows up here that’s this paragraph with the little bullets and they all follow the same exact format so this is not a single custom field here a single custom field for the list a single custom field here now I wanted to make it way easier than that way easier than that so all you do is literally do a little mini write up and then that’s what’s going to show in the project summary field and then here’s your mock up one mock up two that’s what creates these overlapping images right here so adding a new project is as easy as just hitting add new fill out all these fields write up your write up hit publish make sure you have your related services tacked on and a new thing is automatically added to the website it shows up here as a full page it shows up in the slider on the homepage it shows up on the latest projects page it’s going to show up on the archive page where all the projects will be listed and that’ll be paginated so yes that’s how that all works with dynamic content let’s go to the let’s let’s talk page this page took um 12 seconds to build because it’s a frame the entire page is a frame all right we have a frame that this works just really well for like simple little contact pages we have a frame designed for a contact page it’s got a it comes with a bricks form but this is actually a WS form this WS form routes into HubSpot because I send all leads into HubSpot so this has a direct HubSpot integration on it and it already came with the bullets and already came with a little five star badge on google and i want to show you something about these badges right because sometimes you want to use these badges in a loop in a query loop but you want to like you can’t use it in a query loop unless they’re all five star reviews right wrong wrong so this is kind of the thought that we put into frames like the level of when I say cross your t’s and dot your eyes this is the kind of shit I’m talking about so we go in here and we’re going to check on this little label see it’s fr badge alpha icon we’re going to go to style mine the icon or yeah there’s the label so the label is on google so you can change that to whatever you want or that can be dynamic content someone’s calling me I’m going to mute them real quick okay um we’re going to go five star and we are going to go look out says icon look in the uh uh uh uh uh the structure panel over here and up here in the heading icon with data attribute so it’s kind of giving you a context clue because we were like oh how do I change there’s no there’s no content here how do I change the five stars well you go to attributes data attribute badge value and you can change it to whatever you needed to to say and if you’re using this in a query loop all you have to do is make a custom field for the star rating and then insert that dynamically here and you can use these badges in query loops dynamically to display whatever the star rating actually is for the item being displayed it doesn’t always have to be static one value so again this is the kind of detail that you get inside of of frames which is why also you know there are two things two things about other similar offerings most of them are are layout packs they’re not like frames they’re not for wire framing they’re like pre-designed stuff okay I’ve talked about a lot of the differences before but one thing I want to note is how fast are they able to pump out new frames one the speed is related to how many teas are getting crossed and how many eyes are getting dotted so again when I talk before about speed and scalability and maintainability it’s very important that we don’t just try to pump out as much as we possibly can it’s fast so we possibly can’t we need to pump out stuff that has every t-cross and every i dotted we’re even still going back through older frames that we did in the very very beginning and making sure all the teas are crossed and all the eyes have dotted there but it’s also about this kind of stuff right here like just the making it easy for people to make scalable maintainable websites not just easy to add a layout to a page right we want to help you build sites that are more scalable and more maintainable so this is the kind of thought that goes into that and then you’re also going to see the system say we’ve got five gazillion blocks and then you actually look through the gallery and it’s like take this frame imagine this one right here all right content on the left and form on the right and this is a frame this is a layout for them whatever they want to call it then they take this content and this form and they swap them and they’re like that’s number two we don’t do that we don’t do that with frames we know you can easily drag one thing to the you could swap them if you need to swap them we don’t need to create a whole new frame for that and call it another thing and inflate our number of frames okay it frames is designed to give you that starting point knowing that you’re working in a page builder you can drag shit around all right we don’t need to make this checklist go above this text in the there’s another one right of five thousand we’ve got five thousand we’re not doing that all right we’re creating legit every frame is different from another frame fundamentally and you’re going to get something out of using a different one it’s not like oh I need this one because this one has the form on the left and the text on the right and that one has the form on the right and the text on the left that’s not what we’re doing here so two little comments there what else did I want to okay let’s go in the back ends we do back end stuff now so you guys saw the CPT so I’m going to met a box post types here’s what we’re working with so we’ve got our team we’ve got our projects we’ve got our services our FAQs are going to be dynamically generated and then our reviews as well so there’s your custom post types there’s going to be a new one called service areas so that’s going to be for our service area pages those will be coming after we actually launch the site and then we have our custom fields so we have our team custom fields so this controls our team members this is very simple I think there’s only like one field in here probably two so there’s their position which is like they’re you know they’re a web designer they develop her whatever and then you have their headshot and then we’ll go into page options you guys have seen this before on tutorials this goes back to you know do you actually build real sites for clients and and and do you actually teach things that are useful in the real world I use the shit on my own sites this the stuff that I teach is not like oh this would be a good topic oh let’s do something fun let’s do something cool uh no it’s it’s is it actually usable then I’ll teach it because if it’s not usable I don’t really have any interest in teaching it I don’t teach stuff because it sounds cool looks cool uh it’s going to win a design award or anything else I teach things that are practical that I actually use on my own sites so there’s your footer CTA visibility because guess what guys why would you want to go to a let’s talk page and see a fucking call to action for contacting you right here remember that call to action look out big my mouth is look how aggressive my mouth is right here do you want to see that look because you see it on every other page you come down here this thing right here do you want to see that when you’re already on the let’s talk page no that’s not a good situation right so we have the ability to click a little toggle and hide it on that page very simple I’ve taught the technique before I’m just showing you we actually use the stuff that that we teach so that’s what that is let’s go check the next one out projects detail page so we’re going to see how this is set up in the back end so we have our project hero lead along let me go into this other one projects featured okay we’re going to combine those there you go so you have your featured project headline your featured project summary I can probably combine those two I don’t know we’ll we’ll see there’s your mock up one there’s your mock up to I just chose the single image now before in bricks I think you are forced to use image advanced and then like limited to only having one image and because that was like the only field that worked with bricks dynamic data but I tested all these now and pretty much they all work flawlessly and I think single image makes the most sense for these kinds of fields so that’s the one that I’ve been using just a little I know I did it to tutorial a while back where I said you have to use the advanced one because that’s the only one that works that’s not the case anymore you can actually use the single one now all right so testimonials is going to have I don’t even know if this one’s built out yet yet it is okay so you got to review the title and then the company that they work for so it’s very simple guys it’s not there’s our relationships right here we have a bidirectional relationship between projects and services I’ve done a I think it was oxygen maybe that I did bidirectional relationships on it’s let’s go take a look at the template I’ll show you because this is probably a good little mini thing here so I’m going to go to and while you guys are here let’s this let’s turn into a tutorial and I love it okay all right cool so yeah let me know what you guys think let me know what you guys think of the new site and what you’re seeing and all the little tidbits here that we’re talking about drop some comments below I said we still got a lot of people watching drop some comments let’s go look at the template so we’re going to go to bricks templates and we’re going to go to project single notice how they’re named right you got to keep these things these this can get out of order very very very fast so I got my header I’ve got my footer I’ve my project single post my projects archive template and then my hero main which is not that’s just a section notice some of these are actual templates some of them are sections I think you can use happy files to organize these in the folders I think I think and I might look into doing that all right so let’s go into single edit with bricks let’s take a look at this template so here is the magic you can see that we oh and if your guys are building a template and you’re like I can only see short codes I can’t see my actual content look go up here settings wheel template settings you set your conditions for your template so my post type is projects and then it’s this thing that you’re looking for right here populate content single post page and choose one of your posts to preview and it will dynamically insert the information inside of the builder itself okay so this is all very very standard if you’ve ever built a template with dynamic data before here is look at that see that image that’s obviously not what you see right here because of the styling that’s it I’m just using styling to manipulate the image the same image the way that I needed to appear wherever I needed to appear um then I’m choosing the one that best matches look at all the ones that are generated right so that you’re using source sets you can kind of choose the size you need um that’s how that works there let’s take a look at this so we’ve got our services block in here with our services label the services label is the query loop because you can’t query loop a text element notice that it’s not available to you so you can only query loop a container so this this uh services label is just a div but it’s actually an li because this is a list of items okay so stick with me right the services box this box that houses these labels is an unordered list right this is why I talk about when I say cross your T’s and dot your eyes everything can’t be a div all right semantic html matters so this is an unordered list this is a list item this is a query loop so only one of these labels actually exists it’s this one right here these are just dynamically generated so we look at our query loop here you can see when you create this is another thing that’s better in bricks the oxygen remember my list I told I told you I’m going to do a video I’m going to be a 40 fucking things of why why bricks is better in oxygen is one of them right here query loops better and when you create bidirectional relationships check this out it just knows there’s one there normally this drop down only says post terms or users but the minute you create a bidirectional relationship in bricks or in a metabox bricks detects it and it’s like hey do you want a query that bidirectional relationship like well yeah actually I do thank you and so I click that and it’s done that’s all you got to do all right so if you set it up in the back in properly bricks has got your back it’s it’s just one click away from getting those things queried up and then you just dynamically insert the post title which is the name of the service right so that is how that is created this this little section right here very important we didn’t make this and I didn’t make this another section okay so let me go to here’s our like come our main window right here’s our sticky nav so the sticky nav I use a section but I convert it into a div right so if I take that away it’s going to say section but this is not really a section of content it is just a div and it’s sticky so I just went in and I don’t know where did I do this right here in this there’s this VSS right there so it’s got a background color it’s got a box set of these are all ACSS variables guys I’m when I say you can do anything like ACSS does not create limitations right you would think that like okay I I want to create this sticky thing that has a custom class and I’m still referencing all the colors from ACSS even though they’re transparent variations of the colors this is my base the ultra dark shade the transparent version at 80% okay this is the ultra dark at 40% so I’m still referencing these straight out of ACSS and then we’ve got a backdrop filter of blur on there and then a little bit of a tiny border and even the border I’m just like hey I want the base color but I want the light version I want the 10% transparent version and that’s why on the front end if I go to that let’s see how do I get there let’s go here now that’s just going to be the template let’s go here let’s go here okay and then scroll down you see that tiny little very faint light border on there that’s still referenced in ACSS I didn’t have to just come up with some random color some random variation of white or something like that I’m still referencing everywhere ACSS colors okay all right so that’s that it I want I want to point out is that that is actually part of this section right here and then it’s just given a negative margin top of five rim so that kind of pretty much perfectly centers it on that divider but it’s also set to be sticky right so if we go to layout you can do this inside a bricks disposition at sticky top of zero z index to keep it on top and so the negative margin that puts it in that position right there actually has zero effect once it becomes sticky so once it becomes sticky it’s just top zero right so you don’t even have to do any adjustments there for that so that’s all good there like I said that’s dynamic data you can see it right there post title project details and then this is just post content so use the little post content module whatever you put in the Gutenberg builder is going to get dynamically inserted here that controls all of that and then that’s it that’s that’s the end of that template so it’s very simple you know but the bi-directional relationships is really really helpful because what a lot of people would do probably on the back end of this so I’m going to go to edit project is they would create a custom field that has checkboxes like I even thought about doing it this way I was like I have maybe I create checkboxes of the services and then I can check them off and then why because that’s not that now you have to maintain a checklist that’s separate from all your services that you put in your CPT why would you want to maintain two pieces of data that that’s just a recipe for conflict it’s a recipe for inaccuracy it’s a recipe for bad maintainability and scalability so you should have your CPT that’s already the data there’s your services right there in your CPT so it makes sense to just use a bi-directional relationship to pull them into your projects depending on which one you want to choose so there it is right there the related services all pulled from a CPT all right what do you guys what do you guys any questions bricks looks slick yes bricks is very slick loving this new site looks great also making me realize my own site can be so much more than I was planning any thoughts on quickly no not at the current time I need to use it more I will give you guys a heads up we are we have officially started working on Gutenberg integration with ACSS so there’s your little sneak news piece for today so that’ll open the door to working in quickly that’ll open the door to frames being available as blocks in Gutenberg oh there’s another sneak there’s a thumbs down from somebody whoo okay I don’t know what your thumbs downing that was some good that was some good updates right there I don’t know what your thumbs downing do you build differently in bricks for accessibility than your oxygen video main and primary templates uh yeah a little bit because bricks puts the main tag in the template for you you don’t have to do that like you do in oxygen it is a tiny bit of a limitation in certain scenarios but it’s not a deal breaker this ACF have relationships yes but it requires a another plug-in that’s why I got away from ACSS metabox everything happens in the metabox system one plug-in with ACF with ACF you need ACF pro you’re going to use the pro version then you need like to the CPT UI plug-in to actually create the custom post-hives then you need if you want to do relationships the bidirectional relationship add on thing it’s just like plug-in after plug-in after plug-in after metabox is all it’s just one ecosystem one plug-in and it just does it and it works flawlessly so I don’t know why would I want to use ACF all right I have more than five reasons to review this session okay this bricks have a mega menu that’s the only thing okay and that’s one thing I’m not done with yet I actually haven’t addressed this really at all on the site that’s still on my to-do list so this menu right here is the default bricks menu all I did was add a little little underline animated effect to these links I’ll show you what the out of the box mobile menu looks like and I don’t even know when it’s going to trigger and it’s the wrong color because I haven’t even done anything with it yet but if I click that this is basically what you get you get this little slide out and it’s inheriting the normal styling of text links on the site which is that needs to be fixed but this is not good whatsoever so I’m not even going to use this what I’m going to do is I’m going to turn this off okay so there’s either going to be a bricks menu or there’s not going to be so when it gets the mobile there’s not going to be I’m going to put in my own hamburger icon and then I’m going to do like what I’ve done on the automatic CSS site I have bricks extras which has a light box and I’m probably going to use a light box style menu for the mobile menu and we’re going to see how that’s going to work out instead because this I if I’m going to fault bricks in one area of course I would fault oxygen in this area equally it’s the menu is is atrocious so I believe they’re working on a rebuild and I hope that they’re working on a rebuild but the menu is 100% atrocious and so I will be honest about that and I could do a video guys on 30 things I don’t like about bricks I absolutely could but there’s no there’s no value in doing that because one it’s still 1.5 it’s still getting better and I know that you know when I when I put in a feature request when I put in a bug fixed thing it’s it’s taken care of by the bricks team it doesn’t sit there for years and years and years so you know there’s I want to focus on the positives of bricks because it deserves to have the positives focused on all right so let’s see what everybody’s saying in the chat I think we’re running out of time we are 100% over time and I know people are people are well we still got actually good viewership here thank you guys for sticking around there’s another plug-in yes yes there is version one of mm in pop-up been promised by this year I would love that absolutely cannot wait this bricks loop query post in parent post per page or metadata query yeah believe all of those where is yeah let’s let’s go I’ll show you guys the loop on the other page let’s show you that slider on the homepage you guys can get a feel for how that’s done because that’s all natively done in brick you cannot natively do this in oxygen you can do with oxy extras but the UX is actually better here in bricks than than even oxy extras so here’s the slider now look this is what people are gonna be annoyed by okay people some people are gonna complain about this they’re gonna be the back end doesn’t look like the front end and yeah okay I can’t see the styling because this is a wizzy wig custom field and you know I don’t know what’s going on here I don’t know why you can’t why this doesn’t look like the front end but it looks fine on the front it looks exactly the way I wanted to look on the front end obviously okay this is what I wanted to achieve and I achieved it so the fact that it looks a little different on the bag doesn’t bother me it’s like to me it’s like this is just a placeholder letting me know what’s going on I mean the slider actually so functions inside the builder and and this is all native now what I did let’s let’s look at the actual so you select the nestable slider right here and you’re gonna get and by the way this is all way better than this is in oxygen right I can even add a slide from right here and guys this wasn’t even a slide let’s start with this this was not even a slide this is a frame straight out of frames that I customized and then I dragged it into the nestable slider element and bricks and it works it you don’t even have to like build in the slide that they give you you can just delete all the slides and drag whatever you want any container into that slider and it’s going to behave the way that it’s supposed to and you don’t even need to add custom classes to it or or do anything else to make bricks recognize it so that was fantastic that was absolutely fantastic now and you see it was a featured project card is what I built then I just dragged that into the nestable slider and it became this so now we’re going to look at the query the featured project card is the query loop in itself so it’s querying projects it’s only querying three of them and that was literally it that was the only thing I had to do but you can see here that they have like is it a child of you can do a child of the current page you can do the child of another page very easy to do that there this whole setup right here the query loop is one of the things when I do my video of like 40 things that bricks is better than oxygen the query loop is better but it also has like a sub list of like 12 different things the entire it’s more powerful it’s easier to use everything about it is better so you can offset if you want to create offsets for how you’re querying things you can ignore posts that are sticky with a little toggle here if you’re you know the hard thing to do in oxygen is I want to exclude the current post from my query if you’re on a like a blog post and you want to do related posts and the related posts when you query them always contains the post you’re already reading imagine that and so you need to exclude it well you need to figure out how to do that inside of oxygen using the advanced query builder using an actual WordPress hook and filter and you don’t have to do that in bricks you can just literally just click the toggle big yeah I just want to exclude the current post and it will exclude the current post there’s your terms include terms exclude you’ve got taxonomy queries down here you’ve got meda queries and of course you can query other things like you can query taxonomies you can query users you so you’re for your author pages you can’t query users in oxygen you can’t query terms in oxygen you can only query a post and there’s my little bi-directional relationship sitting there whenever I want to use it so yeah it’s that’s that’s how this is built let me show you the actual controls here for the slider so there’s some options here so I wanted to fade right you can loop you can slide you can fade I wanted to fade so I got a fade effect hide I just switched the auto so that it actually conforms to the height of my card instead of trying to force them all to be the same height there’s your delay of how how fast is it fade then I come down here to my arrows this is the only part that I would say is a little bit tricky so in oxy extras they do this better because you can actually create your own arrow icons and you can put them anywhere on the page that you want in any position you want and they’ll still control the the slider with bricks you don’t really have that option so these arrows are right here they are not there by default I’m going to take yeah I’m going to switch to my class there you go so you can actually see what’s going on so I can control the height of them and the width of them that’s fine but then I have to position them absolutely and so I need to move that up by one M and then I had to bring it from the right side a little bit and then auto from the left and then I do that with the next arrow there I can’t actually put them where I want I can only absolutely position them around the container you can choose your icon in fact and they have more icon libraries than oxy I need to add that to my list more icon libraries than oxygen by default okay adding that to the list but you can choose your arrows if you want to customize those and then the little dots down here are controlled by the pagination section so I can hide those or show them and then you can style them a little bit but you can’t really put them where you want them other than absolute positioning so yeah that’s it I mean it’s fairly it’s fairly simple okay let’s jump back to chat that’s going to be it for today I am going to back to main camera okay well good by oxygen switching to bricks the only thing I still use oxygen guys it’s okay if you feel like you know man Kevin’s really dog and on oxygen and all this it’s it’s okay because I mean according to them I don’t really influence sales so you know that was pretty pretty much said explicitly so no harm is being done to oxygen and the making in these videos that’s that’s been made clear all right so I know the price of frames should I share hmm okay oh okay you know the price I don’t think you know the price yet you know what it was you know the price was I don’t think you know what the price is but we shall see official launch date of frames is black Friday uh bricks extras is a thing that I’ll probably take some time for to catch up the oxy extras yeah it’s it’s it’s coming along um it’s still missing some stuff that oxy extras had but the thing is is bricks is natively gonna put them in and by the way frames is gonna have these components natively frames is gonna have a carousel frames are gonna have a light box frames gonna have a menu probably it’s gonna have all these things natively because we don’t want you it should all work in the same ecosystem by the same developer that would be fantastic right so you know all T’s are crossed all eyes are dotted everything is designed to work together you shouldn’t need to go to bricks extras you shouldn’t need to hope that they put it natively inside a bricks it’s just gonna be an AC assessor frames you have those two things every base is covered why because I need it for my own agency everything I would ever need to build a site in my own agency is gonna be in either ACS there’s gonna be in frames so there you go I have a recent project and I need to build a mega menu what do you recommend I don’t know I don’t know uh mega menus are tough the menu situation in WordPress in general not just in beige builders WordPress in general is an unmitigated disaster um all right my phone’s blowing up I got I got it as much as I would like to hang around and continue to converse I’ve got to get out of here love you guys thank you so much for being here hit like hit subscribe make sure you drop a comment and I’ll be back next week we’re doing this every single week peace guys love you
