Digital Agency Table Talk 006 w/ Jonathan Jernigan From Permaslug

0:00:00
Yo, what’s up everybody, welcome back. Another session of digital agency table talk. We’ve got a special guest, Jonathan, Jernigan. I’m going to bring him on in just a minute. Before we do that, I want to give everybody a chance to pile in. And I know the live chat is already on and popping, but go ahead and drop your comments, because I need to get the live chat pulled up on my side. And let us know where you’re from. Also let us know, I want to see, are you from Inner Circle, are you from my YouTube channel, or are you here from Jonathan’s, because he sent out the invite as well to his group. And I just want to see where everybody’s from. So let us know that and also let us know where you are watching from in the world. I love to see just how we’re getting people from all over the place here. So go ahead and drop those in the comment. I know there’s a little bit of delay, so I’ll wait for those.

0:00:55
And while those come in, let’s just talk a little bit about what digital agency table talk is so that we are all on the same page. This is an opportunity for you to get free coaching, advice, insights, whatever. It’s an opportunity for people in the Inner Circle to come on and actually be a guest live on the show. This is better than a podcast, right? You’re not just pulling up, listening to content. It’s better than a live chat, AMA, I think, right? I could just read questions from the chat and answer them. But it’s better, I think, to have much more of an experiential type of session where people actually get to come online from all over the world. They’re on video, they’re on audio. You can see all of us and they can ask their questions whether it’s, you know, they want coaching, they want advice, or sometimes they just have a topic they want to bring up. We just rip on that topic.

0:01:48
That’s possible too. So that’s all happening on digital agency table talk every single week. We are streaming Wednesdays at 11 a.m. Eastern. So make sure you’re subscribed to the channel. Here’s some things that we discuss. We talk about getting leads, we talk about closing deals, we talk about SEO and digital marketing, feedback on UX or UI or Dev if you want feedback. And that’s actually going to be one of the highlights of today’s episode. We haven’t done a lot of that. I don’t know if it’s because people are scared, you know, that we’re just going to piss in their Cheerios or something. I don’t know. We’re going to be honest, but we’re going to be friendly as well. So if you want feedback on your stuff, that’s going to be a theme of today’s episode. I’m going to ask you in just a little bit to put a comment with a link to the site that you want us to review.

0:02:39
And you just need to make sure that you write review in all caps before you post that link because it’s going to be tough for us to find the links to review in the chat as the chat goes by pretty quick. So make sure that you put review in all caps and you have to be willing to get honest feedback, right? Again, we’re going to be as friendly as possible about it, but we are going to be honest at the same time. So if you’re easily offended, you may not want to post your link for review. And keep in mind, it is going to come up on the screen share. This is a live thing, right? Where it’s, like I said, it’s experiential. So an interactive. I can share my screen. Everybody is going to be able to see it. So if you don’t want your thing everywhere, then you may not want to post a link for review.

0:03:26
We talk about project management. We talk about issues that you might be having with clients, pricing and pricing models, scaling and agency growth, WordPress in general, page builders. If you have questions about bricks, oxygen, today, generate press because that’s what Jonathan uses, ACSS and frames, questions. All of this stuff is valid topics to talk about on digital agency table talk. Again, if you are an inner circle member, you can participate live. I’m going to go ahead and put the link up on the screen. So only inner circle members or Jonathan’s guests in this episode can actually come into the green room and be a guest. You’re going to want to use a chrome browser to join and come into the green room. We currently have one spot available in the green room. When Jonathan comes onto the stream, that should open one other slot. So if you’re trying to get in and you’re not able to get in, just go ahead and keep trying, especially as somebody comes onto the stream, that means typically that another spot has opened up.

0:04:30
Of course, if you’re not an inner circle member, if you don’t want to participate, you can still get all of this value absolutely free simply by watching the stream on YouTube. It’s really, really, really fantastic. All right, let’s go ahead and check out our comments. We’ve got Austin, we’ve got Davey, Callisthenics Ireland. Questions can be put in the chat, but we are going to prioritize people that are in the green room. But if you do want to put a question in the chat, again, just like we did with the review, put question in all caps before you write your questions so that they can easily be found. Andrew’s here, Justin’s here. We’ve got people from Australia, California, the UK, Belgium, Czech Republic, the Philippines. See, this is the stuff I love, man. All over the world. Come from both of you, Kevin and Jonathan, I started taking courses. Look, I can even elevate.

0:05:23
Well, let me get rid of the inner circle link. There you go. I can elevate, chat onto the screen. I’m still working with E-CAM on how to get these things to stay here until I dismiss them. But, because I think it’s probably going to disappear in like a few seconds. But that is what I will do when people ask questions, or when we do a review, Sasha’s here from the inner circle and Permanous Love, she says. And the green room is now full. So you’re going to have to wait just a little bit. But keep that link open. Just keep hitting refresh as people come onto the stream. So what I’m going to do is we are going to get started, and I’m going to bring Jonathan on to the stream at this point. Jonathan, how’s it going?

0:06:06
Hey, doing well, how are you? I got to move over. I didn’t realize this is a picture. Very good. Yes, you’re going to have to fit in a nice little box. All right, man, it is good to have you. We’re just talking about in the green room how we’ve never really talked before. I mean, we’ve talked on Discord. We’ve watched each other’s channels, but this is the very first time that we’re actually having a live conversation. Yeah, the first time we’ve ever spoken. We’ve had it many times, and obviously had a lot of this name experiences as well. So it’s good to finally connect with you. Absolutely, absolutely. All right.

0:06:37
So we are going to waste no time. Well, actually, before we bring on the first gas, we’re just going to go in order here. Now it is still showing Jonathan in the green room, but I believe another spot open up because somebody just joined. So that is good. And we’ve, I just want to make sure we have the right order here. So we had David is going to be first. And we’ve got Cody and then we’ve got Michael before I bring them on just for anybody that doesn’t know Jonathan and doesn’t know the Parmesan log channel. Just give us a little bit of your background. When did you start your channel? What are you focused on? Yeah. So I first got into kind of the YouTube content creation space because I discovered oxygen in 2016.

0:07:21
Use it for a while and started making content in 2018. And of course, my whole business, every facet of my business, both in terms of agency work and my own personal projects and everything was all focused on oxygen for many years. And that was of course great. That’s how I got connected with so many people, including yourself. And then of course through the summertime this year, I made the transition to generate press and generate blocks. And the large part of that is changes that I wanted to make to my agency in terms of pricing model and kind of efficiency and just the scope of the projects that I was taking on. So the way that my channel is evolving now is I want to cover not necessarily a broad range of WordPress topics, but more big picture stuff. Like not necessarily focusing on like the nitty gritty of every single facet of the site, but instead kind of the sort of like workflow improvements and just kind of talking about getting the most out of your tools regardless of what it is.

0:08:22
No, I have no preference for. I have no interest in doing what I did before where I’m so honed in on one builder that I’m blind to everything else. So it’s an evolving process kind of like you, you know, talking about experiential things I want to, I want to experiment. I want to try new things. And I’m totally accepting of the fact that some of this stuff is going to flop. People aren’t going to like it. People unsubscribed. That’s cool. So anyway. Did you have a lot of that? Did you have people upset that you made the transition? Yeah, yeah, definitely. I still have people that try to convince me that, you know, I need to switch to bricks.

0:09:00
Quite often, pretty much every video every post, there’ll be somebody that says, but what about this? And typically, you know, which I’m sure is a topic of conversation today. One of the things that comes up is don’t you miss having classes. And you know, that’s something worth discussing. So I did notice there was a wave of people that unsubscribed, but the net gain was actually you know, positive overall. So yeah, well, I mean, technically you’re in the Gutenberg space now, right? And so that should open you up to a larger market than just bricks or even oxygen. Yeah, yeah, in theory, it certainly should. And you know, it’s interesting because I’m finding like people have such a resistance to Gutenberg, but when I’ve dug in and talked to people, what I realize is they’ve not given it more than five minutes of time. And I’m not, I’m not sitting here saying that Gutenberg core is good. That is simply not the case.

0:09:57
I think it’s improving and it has some, some serious merit, but with the right tools and the right expectations, then I think it is a viable thing. Now to be clear, I use generate press as the theme and generate blocks as kind of the block package. So I mean, in terms of how it might compare, like, it’s a little hard to say. Like your elements come from the block package and most of your global controls come from the theme. Yeah, it’s kind of how it works. Yeah. You still have access to classes though, right? It’s still possible to add classes to things. Or yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, you can’t. So, because I’m right now in the middle of an all fairness, you know, I have called Gutenberg a trash can. Okay, so that is a thing.

0:10:45
In fact, it was just yesterday I called Gutenberg a trash can. And the reason is because I am currently knee deep in there in getting automatic CSS to try to work inside of Gutenberg. And there’s some definite hurdles and challenges. But it is our primary goal right now. I want ACSS to be compatible with Gutenberg. And then eventually, the next step there is with things like generate press. I would love for anybody using generate press to be able to use automatic CSS. Then of course, we have frames. And I would love for frames to just be added right there in the Gutenberg editor. And people can use that flawlessly as well. And so that’s going to present even another option there. So Gutenberg, you know, being the core of WordPress is very important for everybody going for it. I mean, we can’t ignore it, right?

0:11:37
And like you said, my hope is it continues to get better and better and better. And they do something like with what Bricks is doing where it’s they build in developer focused stuff, but they also make it friendly to beginners. And so you can I believe you can serve both worlds. If you if you build something, you know, if you use some ingenuity, you can support both sides. You don’t have to pick. Yeah, I mean, one of the one of the like thing, there are things that are like, you know, like so exciting that aren’t quite there yet. Like one of them that I’m super stoked about that’s Gutenberg core. It’s not any other, you know, third party block package is the ability to lock blocks. So you can say only the content of this should be editable. You can’t move it. You can’t delete it. You can’t change the design.

0:12:28
Yep. And that’s not something that currently exists in terms of like a core setting that you can toggle on. You simply have to add a little attribute and then it’s enabled. But but stuff like that, I’m just like, man, once this gets a little bit more fleshed out, it’s like, it’s a serious contender. I know you said before like you’re of the opinion that clients shouldn’t necessarily be in this site, but a lot of the a lot of the clients that I work with are reasonably technical and have some kind of WordPress, you know, experience already. So for me, that’s a huge piece because typically it’s some some marketing person that’s got enough skill to be dangerous. And they’re adept at changing things, but they don’t need the ability to, you know, remove and adjust layouts. Right. So anyway, I could get off on a tangent in that way, but like realistically, it’s got foundations that like if you look at it when it was released in 2018, all the negatives, you know, press that it got was warranted.

0:13:28
But now a big piece of this that I didn’t touch on as well is that I went to word camp Europe this past summer. And there was some cool talks and really great insight into kind of what the future of it looks like. So, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s, I think unwise to make a determination on what it will be in the future. Yeah. Which is kind of why I’m in the generate press and generate blocks camp right now. Yep. Cool. All right. So I’m sure we’ll continue to have a lot of this discussion as we go throughout the stream. So, chat again is on and pop in. We’ve got about 115 people plus watching live right now.

0:14:06
So that’s really good. We are going to bring on our first guest. And this has never happened before. This is the first time on DATT that we’re going to have three people on the screen at one time. I don’t even know what’s going to happen when I click this button. Honestly, we’re going to find, oh, look at that. Our box just got smaller. We just have to, just have to position correctly. All right. So we have David. David, give us a little bit of your background. Yeah. I built my first website in 1996 actually. It was a Quake Clan website.

0:14:40
Since the early 2000s, I’ve been, I was working freelance. It started my own business. And mostly small to medium sized clients. Those under $5,000 jobs that you talk about. Hand them out. And more recently, I’d worked for several digital agencies. And for the last four years, I’ve been working for a major university in the Raleigh, North Carolina area. And I’m in the Student Affairs Department there. And I wanted to touch on something real quick that you guys were talking about with the Gutenberg. I used oxygen to build a suite of 20 sites, converting them over from droople to WordPress. And what I did was I gave my editor’s block editor access. And no oxygen access whatsoever. So I’m the guy who controls the theme and the CSS.

0:15:38
Excuse me. And my editor seemed to be doing this line with the block editor and who are AKA Gutenberg. Excellent. Excellent. So what’s your topic today? What would you like to discuss? Excuse me one minute. Let me. Well, David, it’s worth some stuff out. I want to give a quick shout out to Taylor, Jason, in chat. And also to my buddy Dave, he’ll know what this is. So shout out to you, Dave. Good stuff. Inside baseball. All right, go ahead.

0:16:15
So, first of all, thank you, Kevin and thank you, Jonathan, for doing what you do. I appreciate your guys’ thoughts and your videos and everything like that. And you’ve really inspired me to want to make the jump from working from an employer with three or four ongoing freelance clients to starting my own digital agency. So I’m here for some inspiration. Excellent. All right, Jonathan, you want to tackle this first? Sure. Yeah. I’m not really shared my long-term backstory. So I worked for an IT company for many years. I actually went to school to be a computer engineer. I wanted to be like in servers and networking and that kind of stuff. So I worked for a company for a couple of years. And I took some web design classes.

0:17:05
I knew the basics of HTML. I don’t even think we touched CSS at the time in those classes. So I worked for that company for a couple of years and I thought, you know, I can do this. I can do this better than they can. And so I left at 19 years old. And when I would go do these cold calls and cold visits, people would say, oh, no, we have an IT guy, but do you do websites? And for months and months, I said, no, no, no, no. And then eventually I was like, wait a second. Why am I turning this down? So of course that evolved and the backstory kind of picks up pretty quickly after that with oxygen and that evolution. But the thing that I talked to people a lot about is I think one of the biggest mistakes I made was not having enough cash reserves to be able to say no to clients early on.

0:17:57
And that was a big mistake. Like I’m not joking when I say I left that company at 19 with $350 in my bank account. And there’s an element of that where I had to make it work. There was no other option except to get clients in closed deals. But I knew I was taking on bad clients. I could feel it before I even accepted the money. And so I think the thing that I try to encourage people to do now, especially in this face, is have enough financial runway that you can afford to say no to clients because you’ll make mistakes. It’s just inevitable that sometimes you take on a bad one. But in hindsight, I always would see the red flags. Like I just knew. I knew something they said triggered a little red flag or some expectation that I wasn’t willing to meet. So I don’t know if that is exactly the angle that you were headed for.

0:18:48
But that was the first thing that came to my mind. I was just thinking back to that initial leap that I took. And something that I don’t regret the way that I did it. But perhaps something I would change if I had another go at it. David, do you have done clients yet on your own or zero? Oh, yeah. No, I’ve been doing pre-lasts since the early 2000s. I started with WordPress in about 2005, I think, and picked up Drupal as well. And actually, I have one client that’s been with me that whole time and I haven’t done 10 different versions of her website. So what’s your vision then? What’s going to be the difference between what you’re doing now and you said starting my own agency? Well, I think the hurdles for me are some of the proposal writing stuff and the things that I’ve done with verbal agreements in the past, getting that all dialed in.

0:19:56
The, I’ve done some larger clients where, well, for me, larger means 75 to $10,000. Yeah. And then I make $100 to $10,000. So what I would like to do is to have more of those kind of clients, the clients who will trust me for my experience and my vision, et cetera, without having to, you know, be able to turn down the small ones. So my first question would be, do you feel like at your core you’re an entrepreneur? I have been, yes, absolutely. Okay. So you feel entrepreneurial? Because I did, yeah, I did earn my living completely entrepreneur freelance, et cetera, for 15 years before going back to other agencies. Got it. Okay. I just ask because I think a lot of people think about, you know, hey, I’m going to make a living doing this web design thing and building websites for clients.

0:21:07
And they don’t realize that, you know, that’s one kind of small part of the job after a while. You know, there’s a lot that comes with just, like you said, processes and contracts and finance and taxes and on and on and on and eventually, you know, scaling a team and managing other people. And then they start to realize, oh, man, I didn’t really have any interest in those things. I just thought it was like, you know, leads come in and I build them websites and that’s the end of the story, you know, so they didn’t realize there’s this whole other job you have of actually running the business. So if you, you know, see yourself being able to do that and not just being able to do it, but being entertained by it. I mean, I think you have to like it to some level, you know, it doesn’t have to be your favorite thing, but you got to like it to some degree. If you hate doing that stuff, then I, it may not be for you, right?

0:21:56
So that would be the first thing that I would say. The second thing is like you talked about contracts and processes and documentation and things like that. That would be the first step for you to really focus on. Get all of that stuff lined up and in place so that when you bring a new lead in, they go through a very specific step-by-step process, you have a project management system, everything is laid out. This is going to make sure that they have a good experience and it’s going to make sure that you have a good experience. And it just keeps everything very consistent. And I think that’s a big mistake that a lot of people make is they just say, hey, I’m, you know, they put their flag in the ground and they’re like, my agency is open. And then somebody comes in and they just kind of deal with them at random, you know, it’s whatever, they’re just being very reactive, right? Through this project.

0:22:42
And then they do that with the next person, the next person. And then as they start to grow, they start to realize that this is absolute chaos and stuff falling through the cracks and there’s no, you know, there’s no processes, no system. So that would be the biggest mistake that you would want to avoid up front. And then Jonathan made a really good point about, you know, and not everybody’s in the position to do it, but if you can have cash reserves piled up because once you get in that loop of, I take a project that I shouldn’t at a price that I shouldn’t, it’s hard to escape that loop because you’re always behind, you know, you’re always playing catch-up basically. You’ve got too much work and too little money. So what that causes is the next person that comes along who’s also saying, I’ve got a lot of work for you and not a lot of money, you have to take them because I need the money. I got to pay the bills, you know? And so once again, you just get stuck in that endless loop. The other aspect of it and, you know, when we talk about sales calls, number one rule that I’ve mentioned time and time again in all the sales training videos I’ve done, you want to have an attitude of positive indifference, which means that you’re positive about these projects that you’re talking about with leads, but you’re indifferent to the outcome, right?

0:23:56
Indifference to the outcome means if I don’t get this project, I don’t care. There’s more fish in the sea, right? I don’t have to have it. I don’t need it to pay my bills. I take the projects I want to take because they’re a really good fit and I’m truly excited about them. And if I’m not excited about it or it’s not a good fit or they don’t have enough money, then I’m okay referring them to somebody else or just telling them that I’m not a good fit. And that positive indifference means that you’re going to land more projects that you want at higher prices because you’re not desperate. And so that’s the number one thing. And if you don’t have cash built up, like Jonathan mentioned, it’s very hard to be positively indifferent when there’s bills on your desk that need to be paid and there’s a lead in front of you that has some money, not enough money, but they got some money, it’s very hard to be positive and different.

0:24:40
You’re like, no, I actually am desperate. So you can put on an act, but the act doesn’t really, it just makes the situation worse and worse and worse. So does that answer your question or do you have any other angles to that question that you wanted covered? Hello, that’s pretty good. Actually, yeah. The, I’ll leave it there. Okay, I’ll do what we do in the masterminds then. What’s your action item? What are you going to do after we get off this stream to move this goal forwards? Well, I’ve signed up for Basecamp and I’ve used it in the past for other projects, but I’ve got some items, the setting up an LLC, setting up the accounting and then moving forward with setting up onboarding processes, like you say, and just listening to all those videos you guys have done.

0:25:38
Awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming on and being a guest today and I’m going to, I’m going to boot you out so you can continue to watch on YouTube. Now we’ll let somebody else into the green room. And while we make this transition, I will let Jonathan talk a little bit about Basecamp because I know he uses Basecamp too. And I’ve talked a lot about it in the past. So what do you, what do you like about Basecamp? I think me and you are both big advocates of it. For me, the two primary things is that it doesn’t have every feature, it doesn’t have every switch in every toggle setting and that to me is a huge benefit because it just gets out of the way, which is what I want out of all of my tools. But probably the most important thing or the most valuable thing to me is the ability to bring clients in and determine what they can and can’t see. And to the topic of onboarding process, what we’re doing is telling our clients, you’ll be invited to our Basecamp, you don’t even have to join, you just simply respond to the emails that you get and you’ll stay in the loop and we’ll stay in the loop with you.

0:26:43
And that has been so awesome. I find more often than not, people do actually come into the project and they’ll comment in the right places and they’ll be a part of the message threads. And they just made their pricing even more attractive like a couple weeks ago, I think. So it’s a very convincing tool. Actually now that you can add additional to do list, you can add duplicates of the tools that they have. So I’m a huge fan and it’s one of those tools that like I simply can’t cancel. They did a great job keeping me as sticky as possible to that thing. Yeah, I love it because it’s, I don’t know what other tools you’ve tried, but you know, I’ve tried, clicked up, I’ve tried a few other tools and the number one selling point of Basecamp is like you said, it is the ability for clients to use it without like training. And a lot of times without even logging in, you know, like you said, because they just reply to emails and it automatically loops it back in through Basecamp. But you know, time and time again, I would have clients who just would refuse to use the system because it was that you had to be trained how to use it.

0:27:49
And Basecamp, it’s so intuitive and it’s so basic that anybody can literally just log in, look around and basically know exactly what’s going on here without any additional training. So that is a huge win for me and then yeah, it’s a bonus when they actually, you know, do the things that they’re supposed to do. I love it when I get a notification that I have a new task from a client. I’m like, oh my God, I didn’t get a random email. They actually put in a task and assigned it to me. Yeah, that is really interesting to have people creating threads and doing those sorts of things. I find there’s a lot of really cool use cases for some of the like, some of the document libraries and stuff like, especially for me, I’m off in recording videos for clients, just quick little snippets. And I don’t want to stick it in a loom because I don’t want to lose it. It’s going to be a long term thing that they’ll reference. So there’s like a sharing mechanism similar to Google drive or whatever, but there’s a lot of other stuff in there.

0:28:47
And the ability to segment conversations between internal team and including the client is so great. They just make it so blatant. You’re not going to make a mistake that you actually send something to a client they were supposed to do. All right, exactly. Yeah. All right, let’s check on the green room here. So we’ve got Cody is going to be up next. I don’t know what Cody wants to talk about, but we’re about to find out. And the guys, there’s two other spots open in the green room. If you want to go ahead and join, we had a couple people in here that looks like they dropped off. But let’s see if some new people can jump in in the meantime. We are going to elevate Cody onto the stream.

0:29:22
Cody, how you doing, my man? Good. How you guys doing? Doing fantastic. So give us a little bit of your background before we get into your topic. Yeah, so I’m actually kind of a neighbor to you guys. I live in O’Cala, Florida. So I believe can’t do anything with the plan ahead. And Jonathan, where do you live in Florida? I’m up in the panhandle near Pensacola. All right, cool. Let me, I definitely, let’s see, I definitely recognize the name. I feel like I drive through there often. Probably. But where is it?

0:29:57
Where exactly is it? It’s right in the middle of the state. It’s about an hour and 15 minutes north of Orlando. Okay. So would I go through there on the way to like Fort Myers? Yep. Yep. Okay. On I-75, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Okay. Yeah. Thought I recognized it. Yeah. So I’ve been following both you guys for a while now.

0:30:22
I started off at a large agency by Arnell Carrier. It’s called Quick Turn Media. It was a project manager there for a couple of years. Moved over to a promo items company called TJ and Promo’s Director of Becommerce there and had a pretty big team. We were running like 60 websites there, all WordPress e-commerce sites. And then I decided to go out on my own and do freelancing, which I quickly realized was a waste of time. And started my own agency, Squeak Media, November 2019. So I have about 30 clients now. I use the Hoth for my SEO services. I don’t know if you’ve heard of them. But I guess the big I’m trying to get to the point where I can hire and make that next step. You know, I’m making pretty good money, but I’m ready to grow.

0:31:26
And I’m trying to debate whether I want to, you know, I’ve been looking into these services. Like, was it GOWP? As like outsourcing, you know. And right now for my copywriting, I’m using Kanna Copy, which is like unlimited copy for monthly fee. So you know, I’m handling my work that way. Would you guys recommend keeping the outsourcing through these new type of formats, or would you guys recommend trying to hire within my community? Or what are your main services that you actually deliver yourself? So I basically do what you guys do, like websites, SEO. And I really do a lot of banner ads, display advertising. Okay. And you do that yourself, the display ads? So I use a company called Traffic Oxygen. Okay.

0:32:24
It’s basically a third party, but they basically handle all the, you know, campaign setup and all that stuff. I do the banner ad design. You know, I’m a web developer at heart, self-taught. You know, I’ve built probably 50 sites in Oxygen and up to about 10 sites and bricks. So you know, I use ACSS, all that good stuff. What is your web design process like? Is it, do you do any wire framing? Do you do, do you have a designer that does design? Do you do the design? How does that all work? So, you know, I started off like everyone else with the element, there are a long time ago. I kind of was one of those people that designed in the browser. But now that I’m starting to get more into like SEO and trying to do these, you know, like 12 month packages and things, I’ve started to go on with a flybar and just like hiring, you know, web designers, which I like doing because I get a lot of variety that way, because I’ll hire a different designer for each project.

0:33:30
And I also like it because my development is 10 times faster when I have mockups. So I’m trying to get it more, like what you were talking with the other guy before me, trying to get my processes down, trying to lay out the whole project. But I feel like I’m so busy with client work, you know, I’m trying, I worked 12 hours a day at least, you know, on client work. So I was thinking about hiring a virtual assistant like to that go WP to help me do this stuff, but I was open to what you guys thought on, you know, how I could make that next step. All right, Jonathan, you want to unravel this? Sure, I was actually curious if you could wave your magic wand, what would be your role? Like if you could have one piece of the business, what would be your ideal role? You said you’re a web designer at heart, so my suspicion is you want to be involved in the dev, is that right? Yeah, I mean, that’s what I enjoy the most is the dev. I mean, if I could, if I could have someone, you know, site map and do all the SEO for me and all the content and marketing and all that, you know, that’d be great.

0:34:45
I mean, with that said, I think the hardest person to find, the hardest hire to make, even if it’s a contractor is going to be a good developer, somebody who’s competent enough to understand a tool like bricks and know the expectations of using ACSS in it and doing a good job understanding all the different aspects of on page SEO and, you know, not make, not setting every heading to an H1 without knowing, like, there’s so many granular details that it’s going to be so hard to hire for that. I just recently, within the last few months, have hired overseas VA’s for just small things, like kind of low risk and especially in the design arena, there are some extremely competent people around the world who are hungry for work and you can build relationships with these people and rely on them and the work will be done to a high standard, you know, affordably. I bring that up because I had some people that I knew locally, the level of pressure and the expectation was so much higher and I had advice from a good friend and business mentor early on to try to keep contractors on your team for as long as possible and wait to make that first hire because your pressure is just going to tenfold, you know, it’s going to ten X.

0:36:08
Right. So, I don’t know, I’m rambling a little bit but I think from the sort of like steps that I see for you, it would be figuring out what do you like doing the least that somebody else could do better than you and find that role. For me, that’s Google ads. I don’t enjoy Google ads but it’s a key part of my business and I have a good friend who I’ve been connected with for gosh, I don’t know, must be six or seven years and he just hands everything. He’s not an employee, he’s the contractor, we came to a, you know, beneficial arrangement for both of us and I don’t have to worry about it. I just handed off to him. They’re still my client, I’m still, you know, the one that’s collecting the check and doing that sort of stuff. But yeah, I think the key is getting the stuff off of your plate that you feel like could be done better by somebody else that you don’t enjoy and that’s probably designed and I think building a relationship with somebody to have a consistent, you know, workflow with that person.

0:37:10
It’s hard to teach somebody the way that you expect it if they’re not actually involved in your day to day process. That’s true, okay. Yeah, I think right now you’re filling the gaps with third party providers basically and I’m not a huge fan of that. I’ve tried to avoid it as much as I possibly can. I don’t currently have any third party providers for any aspect of what we do. And the main reason is because one, you’re handing off your reputation in a lot of ways to this other company and it’s very hard to, one, you know, I don’t even know how it works with communication between these third party providers and the client if you’re just the constant bridge, but it requires you to be on the same page with them and then be able to relay that back and then, you know, just going constantly back and forth. And then you really have no control over what they do, their process is how truly committed they are to getting results for this client that you happen to be working with, especially if it’s kind of a, you get unlimited services for a monthly payment type of thing.

0:38:18
That also, you know, is like a little bit, how many clients do they have and how distracted are they? There’s a lot of questions there that we just don’t have any control over whatsoever. So I’m a big fan of finding your own contractors and like Jonathan said, keep those contractors around as long as you possibly can because it builds consistency and they actually enjoy hopefully working for you and your company and they like the consistent work and they like the clients that you work with and they’re a lot more dedicated to the results and the outcome and they’re a lot more trained on your culture that you’re trying to build with your agency. I mean, culture is going to be a very, very huge thing. Processes are going to be a very huge thing. This is all going to contribute to reputation and the growth of your agency down the line. So I also agree with Jonathan’s first question of where do you see yourself in this agency? Everybody in order for this to work, right? Everybody on your team has to be in the right seat on the bus.

0:39:16
That’s the term that I use, right? This bus isn’t going to the goal, right? If everybody is up and running around, we’re not going to get there in the right time. If everybody’s in the right seat, it’s going to be a nice, smooth ride. It’s going to be fantastic and you’ve just got to figure out what are my seats, right? Right down your whole entire process and all of the services that you want to provide. And by the way, every service is going to have its own little process and you need to make sure that you have people to cover every step of this process. And number one, that starts with you identifying which piece you are in the process. So if you’re the development piece, you’re not the design piece now, right? Because you already said you’re working 12 hours a day. There’s too much stuff going on. Your development work is going to start to slack if you’re having to be distracted by all these other areas that you really haven’t put people in, right? So let’s say you’re the dev person.

0:40:11
Okay, that piece is covered. You’re going to focus on that and you’re going to focus on being probably a project organizer of sorts, at least in the very beginning. Now eventually you want to get a project manager ASAP, okay? So somebody that actually come in and their only job is to manage projects. Now you need a certain level of work to be able to do that. But that would be a goal. And they can come on as a contractor too. That person does not have to be an employee. And then you’re going to outline, like I said, your entire process. So who’s going to do the site mapping? Who’s going to do the SEO? Who’s going to do the wireframes? Who’s my designer going to be? I wasn’t a fan when you said I have a new designer on every project because now it’s like, where’s our, yes, you get different looks on every project, but where’s our consistency?

0:40:56
Where’s our style? Right? Because there’s like, you have to have a culture and you have to have a style, right? If you’re just kind of all over the place, there’s really no reason to choose you. You know, I can just go choose anybody. I want your culture. I want your style, right? So you got to develop that through consistency. And then after dev, what’s going to happen? Who’s going to be the, who’s going to manage these websites? Because I imagine you’re going to want to sell management plans. You’re probably not going to be wanting to dive in and do little tasks here and there. For people, you need somebody that’s going to be able to handle those management plan tasks. And then we’re off into marketing land. You know, who’s going to be the, the driving the traffic to this website?

0:41:34
So all these things I’m mentioning, we got to get people in those seats. And it’s going to happen over time. It’s not going to happen all at once. Right now you have third party providers filling some of these seats. But my main goal for you would be to replace each one of those as soon as you possibly can with a contractor who’s going to be more consistent and more dedicated to what you’re actually doing here. Okay. I make a lot of quick thought on that before we move on. I think it’s, it’s exactly what Kevin said. I agree with one point that I wanted to make is a mistake I made early on with contractors was was not being vicious enough with with feedback and and letting them go when they needed to be like, go, if they didn’t fit, that’s the beauty of a contractor is it’s brutal. But you’re, you got to say, sorry, I got to let you go. This isn’t working. I would always try to be honest with them and say it was because of X, Y and Z reason.

0:42:26
And you know, I’ve made other arrangements and that that’s a terrible feeling initially. It’s really tough and something I don’t, I don’t look forward to doing that at all. But I think it’s critical to this success of your business and I held on to people I shouldn’t have for far too long. So that’s another thing to keep in the back of your mind is if this person isn’t exactly up to the quality standard you’re after, it’s not a good fit and you need to find somebody else. And it will take time. I mean, you know, I said I have multiple people. It took me years to find these people have gone through multiple rounds of different people over the years. So there’s nothing wrong with that. You’re not going to nail it on your first go. If you do, let me know how you did it. And did you say you’re an inner circle member or no?

0:43:07
I am. Okay. So there’s a job board in the inner circle, right? And there’s a lot of really fantastic people from all over the world in the inner circle. A lot of them are just, they’re not necessarily trying to build their own agency. They’re just freelancing and they’re looking for work and they’re looking to be on a really solid, consistent team and they can fill one of those seats. And the beauty of it is, I mean, so I’ve said this many times. Almost my entire team has come out of the inner circle at this point, right? I’ve replaced people who I formerly had with people who are in the inner circle. Main reason is because they’re already in there. They know me. They know the culture that I’m building and they watch my trainings, right? So it’s like, I’ve, they’re already pre-trained in a way. And so I just make sure that there are a good fit culture wise and it’s been absolutely fantastic.

0:43:53
It’s the easiest hiring situation that I’ve ever gone through. And that’s available to you as an inner circle member. So you can go in the job board right now and say, hey, this is the seat that I’m trying to fill. Go ahead and message me. And you’ll get a ton of messages from people. And then it’s up to you, obviously, to go through and see who, what their experience levels are and if they’re going to be a good fit for you. That’s great. Okay. Awesome. One more quick question. You know, I work, like I said, I work a lot of hours by myself. Mental health is a big thing. Do you guys ever deal with that and how do you deal with the loneliness?

0:44:32
Yeah, go ahead, Jonathan. Yeah, it’s a tough one. I mean, it’s something that I think is a constant work in progress for myself. A big piece of it that I struggled with pre and imposed COVID was before COVID, I had a co-working space that I would go to every day. I would work at from eight to three. I was super efficient. I met people. You just naturally interact with people, like bumping into them in the hallway and stuff. And then since being at home ever since, a big thing for me and Kyle from the Abinbar just posted about this the other day is having a room in the house that I can shut the door to. So at night, work is off. I can try my best to step away. And another big thing that I don’t think people give enough kind of credence to is I don’t have any social media on my phone.

0:45:26
I don’t have email on my phone. And the reason why is I don’t want to be pulled out of family time or whatever I’m doing with something that has no immediacy to it. Like I’ve been very intentional about building my business in a way where the types of clients and bringing on do not have immediate needs. They’re not a client that needs this graphic in two hours. It can wait until the next business day. So I can sleep soundly knowing that whatever is happening in my email doesn’t matter because you know, everything is safe. So I think it’s it’s it goes back to processes. I think that’s a big piece of it. And also it’s it’s working less is really, really important. I think being being rigid about your schedule. No, it’s not by do it too. Like I’ll wake up on Saturday mornings and my son’s home.

0:46:13
My girlfriends here and I’ll be in here, you know, working on some site just because I love doing it. But sometimes you just have to step away and and build that time into your schedule. Like I don’t know, maybe try if you have a tendency to work on the weekends when you should be doing family time or doing a hobby or whatever, just try to be more rigid about it. I feel like it’s it’s one of those things that you you’re going to have to work towards. It’s like a habit building. I feel like. Yeah. Makes sense. So it goes back to one of the questions that I asked the last guest, which is, you know, do you really see yourself as an entrepreneur and, you know, how much do you really know about entrepreneurship? Because a big part of entrepreneurship is just getting honestly just getting shit on over and over and over again, you know, for years on in a lot of times.

0:47:02
I mean, there’s going to be situations where you feel like nothing is working and you you have no choice but to keep moving forwards. I mean, or I guess you can go back to a nine to five, but, you know, you have a business that you believe in and you’re trying to push it forwards and it’s not going anywhere. Nothing’s working and nothing is nothing’s going the way that you want dealing with those periods is insanely stressful. And then even when you do have a lot of success, it can very easily just start going the other direction, right? As soon as that success comes and it’s like, wow, that’s fantastic. I’m in a great spot. And then it’s like, bam, back down again, you know, and it puts you back in your place. And it’s just this constant up and down and up and down. Obviously there’s fires to put out and other stressors that don’t exist with a normal job. And so dealing with that and one, having expectations, knowing that, hey, this is part of entrepreneurship, right?

0:47:55
It’s not always going to be roses and rainbows and just successful people on Instagram. It’s going to be a lot of just getting shit on sometimes. And looking back, I’ve gone through huge periods where I was depressed and I was very low energy and I didn’t have a really positive outlook on things. And when I look back on it now, a lot of it is solved by processes and one not taking jobs you shouldn’t be taking. That’s a huge one being stuck in the cycle of like needing the next job. There were periods where I had two kids and eight dollars in my bank account trying to do the work. There are periods where we’re struggling to buy groceries. And it sucks because it’s like, it’s all on me. I’m trying to run the agency and then you start thinking like you’re a failure, you’re this, you’re that. You get bad clients, clients that don’t pay in those situations. Just it can just be really, really, really depressing sometimes.

0:48:58
And you’re also overworked on top of all of that. So a lot of this is if you can hand pick the clients, if you can use that positive indifference, if you can say no to the wrong clients, the red flag clients, right, because these are also clients by the way, it’s not just like, oh, they didn’t pay or they pay late. Some of them are like emotionally abusive, right? Some of them are just bad people to be around and they’re constantly feeding you that energy. And so that’s not good whatsoever. So if you can get the right clients, you can get paid the right amount of money. You can offload a lot of the work that’s on your back by building this team and bringing in people to help you do this work. That takes a massive weight off. And then after that, your main goal is establish boundaries, right? So like Jonathan said, with boundaries with social media, boundaries with weekends, wherever you need boundaries to say, I’m not working now because the last thing you need when you’re depressed and needing to boost your mental health, the last thing you need is legitimate burnout, right?

0:49:59
And if you do it in the burning out in that situation, it’s going to be very difficult to recover. And you know, I humble myself to this day, right? Like I’ve got a car in the driveway that I could absolutely replace. I could write a check and replace it. It doesn’t have any air conditioning. It’s got like, I just keep that shit around because I’m like, hey, it can back come back one day, right? I just keep that car. I just drive it with no air conditioning, no heat. I’m good to go, right? And I just, it’s just a little signal to myself. So it’s all the stuff that we constantly talk about all the time is super important. And a lot of the mental health side of things can be alleviated, not completely, but can be alleviated by just not putting yourself in bad positions by accepting their own clients, not having processes, not building a team to help you do this work, not having boundaries, right?

0:50:51
And there’s stuff that’s going to be a cause of mental health stuff in this business, just that’s normal, but don’t pile everything extra onto yourself through bad decisions. Makes sense. Awesome, guys. I really appreciate it. And maybe one day I’ll run into you guys in person. Excellent. Thank you so much for coming on the stream. All right. Thank you. All right. So we’ve got Cynthia is going to be next. We’ve got Stratos is going to be next after that. Let’s look at the chat here. What do we, if you’ve seen anything in the chat that’s worth talking about here, Jonathan?

0:51:27
I hate to say it, but not so much. People just echoing what we’re talking about, which is good. Good, good. Guys, if you want, I do want to remind everybody since it’s been a while since we started, and we’re still over 125 viewing lives. That’s fantastic. One of the things we want to do a little bit of today that we haven’t done on DATT is to review some websites, maybe. So I think I saw one person post in, just put review in all caps and then put a link to your site. And if we see those come through, then we can pull them up onto the screen in just a minute. Again, you have to be willing to accept some honest feedback on your thing. We’ll try to be as friendly as possible about it. But I would like to do a little bit of that because there’s some learning lessons in those as well.

0:52:15
All right. I’m going to go ahead and bring Cynthia on. And we’re going to see what Cynthia would like to talk about today. Cynthia, how’s it going? Hey, how are you? I’m fine. Doing fantastic. So I know you’ve been on DATT before, but still give everybody that’s new here, a little bit of background on you. So basically, quick thing. I graduated as an application development in 2014, then when part-time freelance as a front and slash web designer in 2018 and then full-time in the summer of 2021. And I do have a small YouTube channel as well. Also doing some oxygen WordPress stuff under its called Tiny Tech Talks. And that’s basically the quick recap.

0:53:06
All right. Shout out to Tiny Tech Talks. Go ahead and subscribe. Also if you’re not subscribed to the Permislog channel to Jonathan’s channel, you need to make sure that you’re over there getting subscribed to that. Obviously, when you subscribe to these channels, hit the little notification bell. You want to hit all, right? You don’t want to let the algorithm exclude you from seeing some content. That would be bad. And then guys, if you’re at, let’s just pause for a second. If you’re getting value from this stream, make sure you’ve liked this stream. Make sure you’ve dropped a comment below. Make sure you’re participating in the chat. All that is very important to the success of these streams and us continuing to do this. All right.

0:53:44
So, Cynthia, what is our topic today? So this is kind of, I guess, more a question for Jonathan this time. I did some research on you, on your business. Of course, I’ve been subscribed to your channel as well. And I saw that you are now like offering monthly packages, correct? All right. Yep, sure. So basically, I kind of want to see what made you make that decision and how do you make sure that you get basically the initial return on investment that you put on in a website while being on like a monthly retainer for websites. Because it’s kind of like a website as a service type of structure. I guess so I would love to hear like your opinion while you did it and like what made you choose to go that route. Yeah. So, for anybody that’s not aware, I shifted over the last six months to my age agency only offering monthly sites.

0:54:45
And there’s a very specific box that the sites have to fit in. A certain size, complexity, no e-commerce, no real estate, you know, stuff like that. There were parameters that this needs to fit in. And the way that this evolved was primarily because of the fact that with the oxygen work that I did for years and years, I was fortunate enough to just have more work than I could handle coming from YouTube and people looking for that level of expertise that myself and a couple of other people I was connected with could provide. But the downside was that these were almost always agencies. So they weren’t our client. We were white labeled. There was no opportunity for us to upsell any SEO, no maintenance plans, nothing like that. So we would get these projects that were often, you know, ten, fifteen, twenty thousand dollars. But that was the end of it.

0:55:34
And the client was gone and there was a huge level of complexity and intensity with these projects. These people being agency owners also had a pretty clear understanding of what needed to be done. So the meticulous attention to detail was very taxing. Especially in ways where it didn’t actually make any difference. So that amongst other things that took place this summer made me step back and really evaluate what types of clients do I want to bring on and what tools do I want to be using. That’s a large part of why I made the jump to generate press and generate blocks as opposed to bricks. I figured I’d like Kevin have all the fun in the bricks sandbox. But realistically what I decided was I want to offer these sites. Well actually also let me back up just a second. I connected with another agency owner in a group that I’m a part of who I’ve become good friends with and that’s his whole model.

0:56:34
He builds sites only for home services businesses. So roovers and power washers and people like that. And he has done exceptionally well. So again his business is entirely monthly websites with upsells, you know through marketing campaigns and emails for SEO packages and you know press releases and all the kind of stuff that you could do. So the determination for me was I knew that I had to get my monthly recurring revenue to a different stratosphere. It had to level up and that’s something that for years was very difficult because again it was all project based very little recurring revenue came from the work we did for so many years. And the way that I’m able to do that is with the tools that I’m using again I already touch on you know generate. And then also the contractors that I have are extremely affordable and very skilled. As I already alluded to their overseas have to go through numerous people to find the right fit.

0:57:40
But it allows me the margin on these to charge only a couple hundred dollars a month as opposed to five seven fifteen thousand you know. So yeah it’s still very early days. I only have a couple of clients on this and be perfectly candid that it’s still a very new experiment and I still am taking on the right fits for project based work in the meantime. But in terms of my long term goal the way that this will evolve is that yes each client is only worth a few hundred dollars a month but over the course of eighteen months or you know two years suddenly you have you know let’s say fifty or a hundred of these clients. And the scale becomes far greater than I could ever manage. There’s no way I could ever do I could ever you know do fifty sites at a time. But if you’re if you’re building that that client base it’s just an interesting angle and it’s one that I’m experimenting with and so far it’s gone reasonably well. We’ll see we’ll see how it evolves. So hopefully in that long winded explanation I answered your question. Yeah just like one thing do you have like an agreement with clients that they have to be subscribed for a certain amount of time.

0:58:54
Yeah sorry so the arrangements are different prices but it’s twenty four month commitments and the contract is if you cancel early the full balances do so you’re going to get the the price one way or the other but they’re the whole idea is that the sites are simple but they’re conversion focused because the behind the scenes upsells are on Google ads campaigns SEO those sorts of things so that’s really where I’m trying to reduce the barrier to entry for those marketing upsells. Okay yeah that does answer my question. I think it’s a very interesting thing and I’ve seen people talk about it as well in different like groups and Facebook groups it’s something that comes up in the inner circle every now and then as well. So I guess it’s something that a lot of people are kind of like trying out especially also with you know subscription based builders now you know everything or a lot of industries are going to subscription based so it’s very interesting to like hear your experience as well even though you’re just starting out but yeah that you definitely answer the question I had so.

1:00:01
Awesome and glad if there’s anything else you can reach out to me that’s like I said it’s very new but having this friend in this face that’s done it well and has showed me you know behind his curtain has been really the influencing somebody else that succeeded so massively in this just I knew I knew I know I can do it too so that’s why I’m headed this way. Yeah I think for me the most interesting thing is that I do enjoy working with startups but then they don’t always have the financials some have like some startups are you know very well funded but some you know they have the ambition and I like the project but then yeah they don’t have the funds just yet so that’s kind of where I’m like thinking about maybe putting an offer up for those people you know that do want to grow that have that ambition but just don’t have the funds right now so that’s kind of where I’m looking to maybe put in like some of my effort in that type of investment. Yeah some people use it as a down sell if the client’s not willing to go for your you know $7500 site you can you can offer that as a down sell after the fact for me I’m leading with it purely because I know there’s like I said there’s a proverbial box that they have to fit in and if they don’t they don’t get offered that so that’s kind of that’s the approach.

1:01:21
I think it really depends on your workflow some people just some people just can’t or don’t have the desire to do it that way they want to be in the project so deeply and they want that type of you know huge project but for me it’s not exactly the approach that I’m trying to take. Okay awesome thank you very much. You’re welcome. Alright thanks for coming on Cynthia. Alright so there’s a couple of follow up questions that people had to that and I’ll talk a little bit about website as a service. So Gerson says do you have sole access to the hosting and the site admin while they are under subscription or do they have access as well. Now they have access as well but it kind of goes back to what I was talking about earlier on where most of the time there’s just a small degree of expertise that allows them to get into the site and make changes but nobody is coming in that understands how to migrate a site and change DNS.

1:02:19
The level of technical prowess there is not strong enough to do that and the risk is so low for us because we’re going to deliver on the promises and they’re going to get their site updates they’ll get exactly what they asked for so they have no reason to leave and if they do the full balance of the site is due anyway so one way or another it’s not a problem. Yep yep. So yeah I’ve heard a lot about website as a service. I have people in masterminds who are asking about switching to the website as a service model. There’s some other people in the industry that I’ve seen just kind of go full in on it switching over to the website as a service model. Just in a way it’s intriguing and when I think about the pros and cons there’s definitely a pros list there’s definitely a cons list and I’m kind of in your boat where it seems like experimenting with it would be a good option. The way I’ve chosen to experiment with it is rather than experiment on the front end with it I experiment on the back end meaning that I try to sell projects the way I always sell them when they come in the door and then if it’s a straight up objection to I can’t afford that and you know it’s I actually just need a kind of a low scope website and I’m not that picky then I move to selling the website as a service model to them.

1:03:40
So that’s an experimentation phase right now as you said and I just want to get a few clients on that and let’s see how it plays out because there are some definite long-term benefits to it. There’s some short-term challenges but long-term definitely it’s a huge benefit. I think a big part of the hesitation for people is the as we already talked about earlier financial runway required to float something like this because you’re sort of air quotes missing out on the front end of the you know the big project based fee but you’re you’re you’re making it up in the long run and also I want to make it clear that this is not a good fit for the types of like custom sites you’re capable of building bricks or oxygen. I would never ever offer that to a site like that. That’s a regular project scope with discovery and all that kind of stuff but for like small business sites is really where this shines because I tasked my team with you know essentially coming up with a way to get sites launched in 30 days or less. I want from from the day that they pay their deposit the site needs to be live in 30 days and again not every site is capable of that but we’re doing everything on our side to make that happen and we can do that with these monthly sites and quickly touching on the tools behind the scenes.

1:04:57
I mean that’s part of the reason why I chose generate press and blocks is I know bricks has it too but like cross site copy and paste and inheriting of styles as you move them between sites. That was a huge thing because we can build as we already have or beginning to build a big kind of design library of our own. So we’re not having to rebuild sections every time we can go pull from existing assets and that just speeds up the process tremendously. Yeah and it’ll be actually a strong use case for frames and automatic CSS with just theming you know being able to drag and drop frames into a page you’re theming it all with ACSS and it just dramatically increases the build time or cuts down on the build time I guess I should say. Yeah so yeah that is like you said don’t try this model with traditional custom websites because you’ll be way you’ll be way underwater. Yep absolutely. All right so we do have people so we was putting out a little fire there they were trying to put their links to review in the YouTube chat but YouTube is just not posting the links.

1:06:03
So I had them scramble over to the inner circle and just post their request for reviews in there apparently there’s definitely a few people doing it. We have Stratos in the green room I’m going to bring Stratos in and he’s done with his turn then we can dive into some of these feedbacks where you’re about to say something another YouTube creator that I’ve seen for many years and never spoken to in person so here we go and here we are. All right let’s bring him in. Stratos! Hi guys. How are you? I love you man. Go ahead and plug your channel and tell your background everybody while you’re here and we’ll get into your topic. I’m going to do YouTube at this moment so the channel’s YouTube is last Stratos that’s tutorials I think.

1:06:50
Cool cool. Something like that. Okay so we don’t need to give in. I’m the first time that I’ll talk to you to Johnathan so bye bye. That’s getting so far from my own screen. Yeah. So how’s going? I’m fantastic. I was more fantastic before I got caught out of my screen but I’m still okay. It happens. You never know. So I dropped in the live thing when the other guy said about how you cope with loneliness. Now I don’t want to go into this topic but I would like to share my workflow because I think that it has to do with how do we manage the projects and everything that we do in the day that we work.

1:07:36
So basically my opinion about the workflow is when I start I make a list with all the tasks that I have and I prioritize all of those tasks based on what’s the most important thing but also what are the tasks that will take less than 10 or 5 minutes to do because if you remove all of those tasks if you have 20 tasks and 10 or 15 of those are 5 minutes tasks if you remove all of those then a lot of pressure that you have in the day that you will have to do all of those tasks will go away immediately. So if you are going to do a lot of work do a little sort of breaks every one hour if you can just time that go 45 minutes walk do something else of course don’t go into YouTube it just watch something but when you work and you go over in one hour I think that your workflow and your speed drops. So if you go and take a 5 minutes break just go and talk to someone make a call listen to something just 5 minutes you will come and you will see that your speed is way over then that was before you take a break. Now of course I know that if you are calling it’s a little difficult to take a break because you will not remember where you were but if you are building something with a builder or something you can take a little bit of break.

1:08:59
So this is how I usually work with my days and of course when you are in a project in a task I mean do not go and see other emails because if something comes in then you will get another pressure. If it is an easy task that you will finish in about half an hour the email I think it can wait even if it is important it can wait half an hour. So that was I think something that yeah. Email thing is so important I think keeping your email closed is critical. I was part of a webinar and the gentleman I am blanking on his name I apologize. He was discussing the idea of your email being a whirlwind and as soon as you open it you are exposed to the whirlwind and everything you are doing is screwed up and it is so true it is so true that like you are going to be working deeply in thought on something and email pops in that has no real significance at that moment but it is enough to pull you out of that focus. So I totally agree. I was not going to say you are stressed.

1:10:00
Yeah. When you are doing now because you have to get onto that email and complete all the tasks that you have. What you are opening and giving up on this is don’t open YouTube unless you are going to watch one of our three channels. It is true. 100% Yeah. So that was all. Happy to see you all guys. Thank you. Are you going to come to Greece for the word comp? I am planning to absolutely. I will ask my wife. Okay.

1:10:34
So I am planning to create some videos about what you can see in Greece and what you visit and other things to do or to avoid because I live here so I know stuff. So if you have any question about that I will put some links when I create those videos and I will answer every question. Bob, I would love to connect with you. Hopefully I will see you in Greece. So thanks for having guys. Absolutely. Thank you for coming on. All right. Excellent. Excellent. Excellent. All right. So we have got a bunch of sites here actually in the queue.

1:11:10
So I can start pulling these up in just a second. I was going through the comments just to see where we are at with that. Now crack it in the live. Yeah. We need him to be here. No. He is not. You are muted. Jonathan. Thank you. Let me hear. I can unmute you. There you go. There we go. All right.

1:11:32
It goes weird. Randomly, when I kicked him out of the green room it randomly muted you. So that’s odd. But yes we do need Krakka. He is another one that I have spoken to but never spoken to. We need to make it four for four. Is that how you pronounce it? Have I been pronouncing his name wrong the entire time? Oh, I don’t know. I think it’s a, hopefully it’s a potato potato thing. I got to, I got to go study more of his videos. I’m sure he says it in there. Yeah, yeah, probably so. All right. Okay.

1:11:59
Let’s go ahead and do this. I’ve been going through and seeing which ones would be really good. I want a diversity here of sites. So we’ll start with this one. And I don’t know. Obviously the people posted them in the inner circle but I pulled them up into, in tabs. So I no longer have access to like whose website is who’s. So I’m just going to be, we’re just going to be going through these. Let’s see if we can get screen share rocking. So the intent with this segment is to just go through this and provide feedback on everything from layout to conversion. Yeah. Yeah, I think so. Layout conversion optimization. We can, you know, I like to dive into some of the technical back in how it was constructed.

1:12:43
You know, is it scalable, maintainable, best practices, all that. It’s really whatever you want to focus on. Really there’s no rules because we’ve never done this on. So let me just let you see table talk. This is the first review session. So this is, it’s just up to us, whatever we want to do. So can you see it on here? Everybody should be able to see it. I can, yeah. Okay. Unfortunately, it’s only going to, well, here, why don’t I just close that for now? Okay. That should be good. Alright, so now it’s both of us. I don’t think I can put both of our pictures down there.

1:13:13
But let’s just go through here. We’ve got digital starter pack. This is an agency website and I will just kind of scroll down and then we’ll go back to the top and start talking about some stuff. And yeah, if you want to pull these up on your own side while I do this, that’s fine too. Alright, it would be good too if the people posting these links. Since you’re posting these in the inner circle, guys, me, if you really want to be brave if you really want to be brave, go ahead and jump into the green room and you can talk with us as we go through your site. Because I don’t know. Sometimes I have questions for people based on when I see a website design. It’s, yeah, I can just give feedback on it. But sometimes I just have questions for people. It’s things aren’t black and white, right?

1:14:08
So based on their answer to the question, I might change my feedback. But you would have to be a little bit more brave and come into the green room and let us know which site is yours and then we can go through it. And I understand if you don’t want to do that. So Kevin, quickly a question for you that spawned from looking at this, which is more your workflow as it relates to something like this. How are you approaching accessibility in terms of basics like color contrast and stuff like that? So first thing I do is I plug the brand colors into automatic CSS and then we start building the site and then I’m paying attention to some potentially problematic areas. So as we go through, and especially when I get the design back, we’re going to see text on certain background colors, text sizes, obviously, are going to make an impact on that. And what I do is just kind of like flag them basically and sometimes we’ll adjust them in the actual design process, which does help a lot. And then we make tweaks in automatic CSS to make sure that those things happen.

1:15:13
And then a lot of times what we do is we just have these things flagged of potential problem areas and when the site is done, then we go through and we do that final color contrast check and another accessibility check. And we just button up anything that is an issue basically. Cool. I was just curious. Yeah, because sometimes the problem with it trying to address it all at the beginning is sometimes things iterate during the actual process. And like you can spend time trying to cross all the T’s and dot all the eyes in the beginning. But then things change in the middle sometimes and then you’re just having to do that work over again. So to me, it’s just very efficient to kind of flag potential problem areas. And then when we’re done, we’re in the punch list phase of the website and we’re getting ready to launch it. That’s when we really do like an SEO audit on the site to make sure there’s no structural issues.

1:16:07
We do the accessibility audit to make sure all the accessibility stuff is checked. But we just kind of do all that stuff at the end to that’s when we cross all the T’s and dot all the eyes because we know once we do that work of finalizing this so to speak, nothing else is going to change after that that’s going to mess any of that stuff up. So then we’re just free to launch it. Yeah, perfect. Well, cool. I didn’t mean to distract from this thing, but this site kind of brought that to my forefront. Yeah. Yeah. So you want me to go first? You want to go first? Well, I’ll quickly mention one thing that I noticed that I love is the fact that there’s prices. There’s base prices visible on the site because I’ve had that on my site for many years.

1:16:47
And whenever somebody comes to me and says, I saw your site, I saw your prices, I cheer quietly in the background because I know that they saw the prices and it didn’t steer them off. So I haven’t looked at these in depth. I don’t know if there’s room for improvement on this stuff. But in terms of having pricing on your agency site, I think that’s really, I think that’s pertinent. I think it’s something worth doing. Yeah. It’s a firm price, right? So it’s not a firm price, but it lets people know, if you don’t have this much money, then we’re probably not a good fit. But if you have at least this much, then we can work with you. So that’s a good one. All right, let’s start back at the top here.

1:17:27
So there’s a lot of colors going on. And there’s a lot of visual stuff going on in this hero section. Of course, it’s got a little parallax action there. You know, I like parallax. I think parallax is cool. I think a lot of people think it’s cool. I think clients think it’s cool. What it does do is sometimes confuse his visitors. And so I’m not a huge fan of it from like a UX perspective. I think it depends on the niche you’re trying to target with your site. If you know that the people coming to your website are more technical in nature, then it’s not a problem whatsoever. If we’re talking about a site where it’s going to be senior citizens using it, parallax can be a big problem. And you know, so it really makes sure that you’re tailored to your audience in that regard.

1:18:19
But there’s just visually, there’s a lot of stuff going on in this hero section. Maybe we’ll just take this section by section. That’ll be easy. I’ll do my feedback and then you can do your feedback. But to me, with the way that this content is overlapping, it’s blending a little bit. There’s a lot of colors, a lot of shapes. My eye doesn’t really know what it should be focusing on here. Plus, you have the fact that the text is off to the right-hand side instead of normally in the left in this gaping hole that I would tend to be looking at. And then the text is also moving in addition to all this other stuff going on. This button kind of is blending in with this ball right here. So there’s just a lot of movement and action and activity that my brain is trying to comprehend. Instead of me just my brain going, oh, let me read this really enticing copy here. And knowing instantly exactly what this site is all about and if this is the right place for me.

1:19:19
Yeah, I agree. And another big thing is that there’s four buttons above the fold. So it’s like what is the actual call to action? There’s C more twice, viewer prices and getting touched. So it’s like, I don’t know which way I want to go. And beneath the header, but above the hero, there’s the reviews and all the social links in the phone number. To me, I would stuff that further down the page or even in the footer because it’s like, I don’t want them to leave to my Facebook because then Facebook is going to do its job and distract them and then they’re going to forget who I was. So yes, I think the other big thing is I also, like when the sentence is, like, backspace and delete themselves, it’s like, oh, wait, what did that say? Do I need what now? And then it’s gone. I’m like, uh, overwhelmed by, you know, so that’s my initial thought.

1:20:10
I think you could probably get away with this hero image if it just had some kind of overlay that made it a whole lot less, what’s the word? Not opaque, you know what I mean? A lot less. Yeah, if you had it, if it darkened it or muted it or something like that, that would be doable most likely. Yeah. Clearly there’s an emphasis that this person has wanted to put in the web design from only 899 pounds. So is that not something that they wanted to showcase? It seems like there’s a bit of like a, you know, with the scrolling text, we try to do everything. But then it says web design from 899. So it’s like, what’s the focus, I guess, is my initial thought. And it looks like both of these, there’s two C more buttons.

1:20:56
They both go to the exact same place. Yeah, like you said, there’s a lot, there’s just a lot here above the fold. I am, I am, I despise almost putting social links on websites. I put them in specific places. Here’s a really good place for your social links. On your thank you page, after somebody has converted. Then, then I’m like, yes, please go check out my social channels now. You’re obviously like, you’re wanting to be in my tribe. You’re accepting my offer. Now I want you to follow me on all these other places. But to me, it’s like everywhere else that they could be, if this person hasn’t converted yet, is an opportunity for that person to leave your website. Now yes, they’re, they’re opening in a new tab. But look, I’ve got a bunch of tabs open. And now I’m on Facebook and I’m doing a bunch of other stuff.

1:21:44
And it’s like, I’m not any longer on your website reading your copy, reading your offer, thinking about converting. I’m over here on a social media platform. So I’m definitely not a fan of them in the header. Phone number, yes, absolutely. But these social links, if anywhere accessible to main visitors should just be buried down here in the footer somewhere so that if people are truly looking for them, then they can find them and go there. Otherwise it’s like, if you haven’t converted yet, I don’t really, you know, there’s no point in me sending you off to social media channels. Yep. Totally. Alright, let’s check out. We’ve got this section right here. We write off the bat for me.

1:22:24
We’ve got a lot of text that is very close together. So this block is right next to this block. There’s a very small gap here. We have a nice, obviously this stands out with the heading and no nonsense, jargon free web design agency. And you know, this is justified text. So I’m not, you know, really a huge fan of that. It’s justified in the sense that if you don’t know what that is, all of these are going to be exactly the same length. And then it uses spacing between the letters to actually accomplish that. And it just makes your text really, you know, the tracking on the letters just really spaced out. And it’s obviously different from what’s going on down here. And it’s obviously different from what’s going on right here, which is just normal centered text.

1:23:09
So we’ve got justified text. We’ve got centered text. We’ve got left-aligned text. We’ve got colors. We’ve got again, we’ve created a section where there’s a lot of visually different things going on, which makes it difficult for the client to just absorb the copy. And that’s what you want them to do is you want them to actually read the copy. And the more distractions you have in place, the less they’re going to be reading that copy. Yeah. And what’s very clearly taking place in this section is the attempt to mix in the brand colors. Because that first sentence says digital starter pack in three different colors. But my brain reads it as digital starter pack. Like I interrupt almost when I’m looking at something like that. So then I just skip.

1:23:52
I’m like, that’s clearly not for me to read. And then the orange on top of that green is really difficult. I think that could do with being black or something else. Some other color that stands out a bit better. And also I feel like the don’t take our word for it. That should be its own section. That could be its own section with multiple testimonials to pull the attempt for distraction away from your first hero, your first headline up there. Because that’s the first introduction. I think we already touched on it. But above the full hero, you don’t quite have a sense for what it is you’re going to get until this point. And to me, the testimonial pulls away from that. Yep. Yep.

1:24:32
I agree. So I’ll give a little copy tidbit here so we can focus on that and less on the visual for just a second. This is all about you. So we all pretty much know that, and I’ve said time and time again in my trainings that an about page, which every person on earth tries to make about themselves, is really about the customer. And if you write it from the standpoint of it being about the customer, it’s going to be a stronger about page now. So we kind of have that focus here. It’s all about you. But there’s a disconnect because I read it’s all about you. And then look what I see. Hour. We.

1:25:10
Right? It’s just like there’s a lot we again, we’re. And so it’s like it’s all about you, but let me talk about myself. So this really needs to be, and you can say the exact same things. You just say them in a perspective of talking about your ideal customer rather than. So I always say the rule is like, if you find yourself writing hour or we or we’re or whatever, then you’re not making it about them enough. You’re making it about you. And there’s other ways to word that where you can make it truly about them so that when they read it, they feel like you’re really talking to them and not just about yourself. So you’re on the right track with this little subheading, but then it kind of started to fall apart in the actual copy of that section. And I’m not saying you can never use those words. I’m just saying that in in sections like this where you truly want it, and obviously that was the goal here.

1:26:02
It’s all about you. That’s why I’m pointing this out. In an area where you want it to be about them, don’t allow yourself to write hour and we and we and we and all these other me terms. I think it’s worth pointing out in that context too that like I was encouraged recently and tried to do this where I read the sentences back out loud after I’ve written them or come across them on a site. And it’s like, would you actually say that in a real conversation? Is that your real voice? Right. Would you say we we we we over and over? Is that your sales process? I imagine if it is, it’s probably not very effective. So what would you actually say in that context? Yeah.

1:26:41
And this is the challenge with writing copy because if you if you record a sales conversation and and the person’s engaging in the sales conversation in a productive way, which pretty much means they’re asking a lot of questions and getting the other person to talk about themselves a lot. They the challenges they can’t ask those questions because there’s nobody on a website to reply to the question, right? They’re like, what do I say? How do I word this stuff? And then they just resort to me me me me me me me we’re we’re we’re we’re we’re and that’s that’s where the challenge comes in. So it’s going to take some extra time to make really good copy, but it’s it’s worth it. All right. So we’ve got this section here. We’ve got some cards and we’re talking about basically just I guess the four primary services here.

1:27:29
I’m not sure with this. Okay. So DSP is digital starter pack. But I’m not I’m not sure what the intention behind the sticker is here. Are you still there? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I was just reading the text copy in these cards too as well. Yeah. Um. I agree on the the heart thing though. Like it feels like that should be way smaller and the cards padding and and font size should be bumped up pretty considerably because it to me it doesn’t fit.

1:28:02
I’m immediately drawn to the heart and it’s like well, I don’t yet heart DSP. I don’t even know. Right. Or else and it was um you know we just talked about it’s all about you and then it’s like I love DSP and it’s like, but do I you know I just got here. So right. I don’t know why I do. Uh I know you do, but you know that’s kind of another disconnect in that regard. Um I you know this from a UX standpoint the fact that these cards hover but they’re not clickable is a big thing for me. Obviously you can click the read more and what you would want to do here is the technique of clickable parent right. So you have your link that’s in the card which ideally should not say read more. Um it actually doesn’t even need to be there. The link can be the link should be the heading right.

1:28:47
So you make the heading the link and then you use the clickable parent technique which makes the entire card hoverable and clickable based off of that one link right there. Because read more as a link has no context whatsoever. So no good for SEO, no good for accessibility whatsoever. When the link is web design right and they know they’re going to the web design service page and they know they’re going to the UI UX service page. Okay that’s that now contextually makes sense and it’s technically correct and accurate. So for me it would be um fixing that UX part. Yep. Totally agree. I’ll also do one quick inspection here and then we’re going to finish this side up and get onto the next one. So we actually do have somebody we have Nick in the green room who messaged me in the green room and said I am willing to put myself on the chopping block. Fantastic.

1:29:38
We’re going to get Nick on here and then we can actually interact with Nick as we do this. So we’re seeing so we’ve got some automatic CSS going on that’s creating our grids and then we have this card right here. I should probably zoom this that way this can be seen by people. Okay. And then we have another div inside the div which has this is interesting. Okay. So I guess that’s like a wrapper container of some sort and then we have our card. So we’ve got home services underscore card. So this is another interesting thing to me right where you see we have a custom class but we also have utility classes. It’s like a mix of things going on here which the utility classes being on here defeats the purpose of having the custom class because now if you need to change the padding on these cards you’re faced with the task of removing these utility classes and adding new ones. And you should just take that custom class and use a variable for a space XS in the padding of that custom class.

1:30:50
You can attach the box shadow styling to this. You can attach the you could use a gap with flex box here on that custom class. All these utility classes can go away. Everything should be housed in here and now you have styling control of all of these cards from one central class and that is going to make this scalable and maintainable. The combination of utility and custom classes doesn’t really do you any good from a technical standpoint. All right let’s take a look at here’s our pricing and then we’ll just do we’ll do the pricing and then we’ll jump over to Nick. So first off on pricing that animation doesn’t work. Yes it does not. Unfortunately because it stays you can see on my screen when I’m actually aligned with how I would read this section my the pricing is broken. Yeah. Well first of all again there’s three buttons in every single pricing card details examples and contact.

1:31:56
Should just be like sign up or get started or something. Three there’s there’s nine buttons there’s actually ten buttons as it as it. You see what happened when I needed card it won’t blow it. Yeah everyone I clicked on. I don’t even know where I’m at. Yeah it actually it took me to a different page and to a part of that page. So it’s like I don’t even know now I gotta scroll okay so there’s another grid right there but that’s on it so it took me to the web design page and to a location on that page so that’s a little confusing for visitors. I think if somebody is going to be engaged with your pricing card their their their likelihood of them wanting to take the next step is pretty high. I don’t think they’re going to look at a pricing card and say I kind of want to see the examples in my opinion that I think we’re not I think you’re right testing but and nine buttons is too much. Oh and off to a different page.

1:32:56
We’re off to a different page in a different tab we’re literally sending the person to this other website and you know I’m not a fan of this because especially if we’re if you are an agency where you’re positioned where your client is going to be editing things but we have no idea what the client’s done to this thing you know and this is our portfolio piece. So you know any any errors that are on this page right here are immediately like attributed back to you. So that’s that’s rough that’s tough. I also don’t like what do you like what do you think about the call to action of contact us I’m I’ve never been a contact us call to action fan I feel like visitors the last thing they want to do on earth is just contact somebody. Yeah. If we look at you know how this goes. Okay so I’ve got to fill out this form and you know I’m basically like I don’t know is this person going to contact me back ever is it going to be 24 hours is it going to be 40 I how long am I going to have to wait.

1:33:55
So if it’s more inclined to a specific goal like I use you know free strategy call on mine it’s like we know what’s going to happen right when when we when we make this contact versus just hey yeah shoot us an email and I guess we’ll we’ll get back to you at some point. That’s it’s a very boring call to action. Yeah I mean if you think about like a service business like a you know an electrician or somebody like that where you need some kind of service from them first of all there’s likely not going to be a contact form on their site anyway but the most likely call to action is going to be the phone number that’s that’s their conversion and that’s what you’re going to find so for from my perspective I don’t want to fill out a form hardly ever if I do have to fill out a form I’m annoyed because I know it’s going to take me two days before I get a response so if that’s the way that it works in your workflow though I completely agree setting the expectation like you know in a H3 or H2 or something like you know 24 hour response time or something like that yeah definitely. So I have a friend who is encouraging me to significantly simplify that getting started call to action form separate from contact so the header is removed footers removed it’s super simple text in a form there’s no distractions and the objective is very clearly laid out in front of you and it’s not something I’ve tried but I see the merit and it’s almost the inverse of of this contact page because there’s like a huge wall of text on the left and then the contact form with multiple questions on the right.

1:35:23
Yep. Absolutely. Alright so there’s more we could do here but I think we’ve given enough value on this particular one. I want to go ahead and bring Nick on and we’re going to pull up Nick’s site as well. So Nick how’s it going? Hey real quick I want to prop this if I just leave it’s because I’m watching my daughter and she’s about to hop off a table. Oh yeah no I look at my kids they yeah they try to off themselves at all times so it’s you know. You understand? Yes if you need to just you know leave that’s fine. Alright I want to make sure I pull up the correct website here so you are. Yes so I have a dev site and a live site. Got it alright which one do you want me to pull up?

1:36:08
So I’m redoing my current site on the new dev site so it’s a whole new copy whole new layout. Alright. So it kind of depends if you want to look at the original versus the new one or not. Let me take a look here. Okay. Alright. Let’s see if yeah there we go. Alright. Yeah we should all be able to see this now. Alright so it’s magnified web this is your agency yeah. Yes. Okay. Alright so I’ll just instead of scrolling through the whole thing let’s just sit here and just talk about what we see right off the bat.

1:36:40
So this obviously much cleaner okay my eyes not going anywhere on the page except right to the main headline which is front and center. It says we build converting websites for service based businesses customers will ignore you if you have an unclear message complex designing complicated direction let us handle your websites you can focus on delivering great service. Okay. Overall copy I think is good. You’ve got a call to action of let’s talk you’ve got a call to action of your portfolio and then you have a main image here. So Jonathan any thoughts on this right off the bat. I actually wanted to bring. For you which is how do you feel in these cases about a double call to action like this like let’s talk plus portfolio you see it all over the place where there’s there’s two different action as compared to one which may be kind of the target. Target conversion yeah so I’m just curious from from in your opinion how do you handle it I like the dual call to action because it speaks to people who are in two different situations it’s for the people who arrive maybe this is not their first time arriving on this site maybe they’ve been on it before they were they’ve been doing some consideration and now they’re back again because they really want to talk to me and so when they arrive the let’s talk button is right there front and center for them they don’t have to hunt around like how do I contact this this place but for the first time visitor who I haven’t convinced yet and knows really nothing about me if my only option is let’s talk then it’s like a little too pushy for them and they’re like well I’m not I’m not ready to talk yet you know I would like something else to look at and so you know it was like I’m what you put as this alternative call to action definitely matters I don’t know if they would be wanting to jump right to the portfolio to see my work I don’t know if they would want to jump right to the services page to see what I do there’s there’s some options there and that’s that’s you know something that you could a b test if you really want to find out the data driven answer to that but to me you know if I just consider what most people will be looking for it would be like okay I found this web agency I know web agencies do a lot of different stuff what does this one happen to do and so I really want to take them either to my services or it could be an anchor link to you know get them down to the main content on the page if I’ve laid the page that page out according to like a certain narrative that I want them to go through sometimes I do that so but I I like the fact that this fits regardless of the situation the person is in they have an option that’s more likely to fit their need cool yep totally follow the one thing I’m not big on here is the image I don’t know if this is a placeholder Nick placeholder yeah I got a replace it with something different yeah so yeah it’s interesting with with agents sort of across the board that I find is like you it’s really like rare to figure out who’s actually behind it without digging hard often you’ll go to the about us page and the people aren’t still there so I the reason I bring that up is I was curious like do you have any general idea of what image you want to replace there I was going to actually make a video of a website kind of being built from the UX to the UI to actually being developed so just a video placeholder was something more more visual an image just doesn’t fit very well so that was kind of my idea are you thinking more like having like my team is that what you mean kind of like who we are what we’re about I was thinking some some kind of personal touch not necessarily like a picture of you guys or or something like that but you mentioned a video and there’s multiple people in chat that are that are saying you’re an awesome dude so I’m curious like multiple people yeah so a lot of yeah so I was curious what are people coming to this site for and I’m not I’m only a lurker in the inner circle so I don’t don’t have experience with you but I’m curious like are you just helping people kind of on the side or are they coming to this site to seek out that help with you are they the target client no actually mine mine is service based businesses that’s my new clients how that I’m reaching out to you but I’m a part of the inner circle just helping people out when I can chat and you call this is hopping on bricks and oxygen stuff so I think that’s how some of the people know me here gotcha okay I was just kind of I was trying to brainstorm like what what sort of personal touch could go in that spot that would be a little bit more engaging than maybe just a random photo I was going to say I do like the principle of that photo for like an SEO section like we’re going to take your rankings to the top or something like that actually I did I did put that for the down the page there’s that same image just not on the laptop it’s more expanded so you’ll see that yeah baby sorry which section did you say to go to oh it’s the next section so we build the 24 7 sales to all right about building the website and then this is just talking about our services so we really don’t offer to which is building a website getting a optimized for conversion and doing SEO we don’t do anything outside of that you know we’d hire our partner with external companies to do any of that stuff cool and then you’ve got the ranking part the good graphic I like your recent projects layout this is nice thank you try to keep it simple yeah I mean to be honest with you I’m not seeing a whole lot I would change in this site it’s nice and clean how much is a poorly designed website costing you I like the focus on right away from a hand to lose like you’re creating that juxtaposition of like yeah there are good websites there bad websites there are expensive websites there are cheap websites the design actually matters and how much is a poorly designed website costing you is alerting them to that customers leave your website in seconds you’re appearing on the eighth page of Google so this is great like you know as if I was a prospect like yeah I don’t want customers to leave my website in seconds I don’t want to appear on the eighth page of Google I want my website to get leads and then potential customers don’t buy your site I want people to buy okay so I want all of those things and so you know this is educating me on like I need to start really caring about design which means I need to care about who I’m hiring they may seem obvious to a lot of us but to a lot of prospects you know they’re just I just need a web designer they’re all the same and you know they’re not educated on the website they’re all as long as I have a website I’m good to go no actually you’re not good to go if you just have a website so highlighting this the what you’re going to lose and then what you offer instead is a good little process here and you’ve got your process detailed out here okay are those yeah I was kind of I was number between that I didn’t know that was really nice but I couldn’t I feel that’s a it’s hidden if people don’t click it they don’t see it so yeah it’s also not I mean if you’re caring about accessibility it’s not it doesn’t appear to be accessible yeah that would be another issue yeah no I got to figure that out I’m not sure how to get that to work excessively but we’ll see I mean I like the cards it’s just and I I definitely think highlighting your process is super important and I just don’t know if I would make them interact I don’t know if they need to be interactive like this I think they you would you just yeah you would just get by just telling them kind of the overview of each step so I just noticed your book your free discovery call is that like pretty much final call to action is it is it not emphasized yeah it’s where did I just miss it no it’s the same as the let’s talk same same link it’s just a different text and I actually took a took some cues from you Kevin on your website and you know so you kind of something similar you had the same call to action but different text in different areas kind of trying to draw them even more into it so I’m I don’t want to see how it works instead of like a just a let’s talk yeah I would put the call to action here too I put one right here is what I was really right here yep took a while to to for me to find that even scrolling through this like five times already yeah and yeah and yeah so I was worried about overwhelming them when now it’s really it’s it’s you’re not going to overwhelm them because they just they scroll past it if they’re a lot of them don’t even notice it until they’re actually make a decision in their brain to like con then their brain starts like looking for the area to contact and these are key aspects of this sales page right whereas you’re telling them we build your 24 seven sales tool so up here it’s here’s that here’s the narrative that we’re going through right you have an introduction section let’s say they bypass these buttons right here so they’re going to continue scrolling now they’re being educated on okay I need I need to care about web design and who’s designing this I don’t want these bad things to happen to me so I’m going to keep reading and now you’re telling them here’s what we do we build yours a 24 seven sales tool here’s the steps and at this point they could very well say you know I’m interested in this I want to I want to contact this person but there’s nothing there’s no way for them to do that right now they you have yeah actually it’s because I was scrolling up see I don’t even see your header right so until I scroll back up now if that doesn’t entice them they come down here and they’re like oh okay rankings I really care about rankings so now you’re starting to talk about rankings and if this really appeals to them same situation there’s nothing for them to do here so you’re you’re going to be missing out on those conversions with here you don’t want them obviously because you’re now your call to action is let’s go look at projects down here you have it so that’s good and then here your call to action is to get them to you know if they’re interested in you know your history and about and all of that your call to action is to get them deeper into that so that’s good then you’ve got your testimonials then your FAQs and then you have your final so I think you’re just missing the two one here and one there okay okay awesome and you can have the only other thing I would look at is see here let’s just use this as an example let me just technically from a technical standpoint all right so we’ve got automatic CSS home portfolio card we’re using BIM we’ve got the ULLI proper structure bonus points for proper structure and it looks like everything you have global control over everything so yeah this is this is passing the test mr. Nick yay right on glad to hear thank you guys all right you’re very welcome thanks for coming on all right so let’s go back to this dream okay so where are we at on time we got about 10 minutes we got one more site that we can do I’m going to Jonathan if you want to monitor I’m unable to like monitor chat at the same time I’m I’m doing all this so I don’t if you see it is interesting uh that’s passing that was some discussion yeah the the main thing was testability in the card stuff we were talking about and the question was proposed how do you know it’s not accessible without looking at it the thing that that I think is worth considering for that is Nick didn’t actually have that much content in those cards so they could have very easily been just present on the page and there’s a really interesting uh kind of yeah I don’t even know what what you would call it bit of context in the Mozilla developer docs talking about as consider accessibility and not using tools because if it’s important enough to be uh if it’s important enough to be present on the page why is it hidden so that that to me I’ve I’ve thought a lot about when I’m coming up with those sorts of hover effects I’m like well I actually don’t really want to hide this text and I just have to imagine I don’t actually know what element was used to do that little flip box but I bet it’s something that’s not very accessible friendly yeah probably yeah it’s the you know all the builders have this challenge it’s like there’s these pre-made cute little elements you can add to a page but they’re not you know a lot of thought hasn’t gone into the accessibility side of things is there like a flip box and bricks is that what that is I don’t even know honestly because I don’t use like I literally only use divs like I just that’s all I use yeah I want a builder that just can you just give me boxes to put things in yep and I’ll take care of the rest thank you blank divs yes all I need and people ask me they’re like when are you gonna you gonna make a builder and I’m like no I really don’t want to go down that path but if I did it would only have divs in it that’s what I have it would have heading spare grass divs and buttons that’s eventually what generate blocks is you might like I might like I’m I have to try it because I have to eventually make automatic CSS work with it so it will it will happen at some point all right let’s see um we’ve got Alicia in the chat we’ve got Eric and we’ve got Dan you know I tend to give Alicia preference she is our community manager for digital ambition um let me let me bring her on it for just a second hey Alicia hey hey are you here for website feedback or are you here for a topic of some sort website feedback okay all right do you want to did you put it in somewhere at the link I have not yet okay there’s um where’s the best place to put it if you have the interview chat open uh there should be a little interview chat button and then you can just drop it in there and we can on on YouTube uh in the green room there should be a green room I don’t know if I when I bring you on the screen I don’t know if your green room goes away or how that works on your end but yeah there we go yes check okay oh there it is okay all right so this is a dev site dev link all right we pull this up and transition over okay thank everybody can see that now all right so 87 web give us a little background oh my son is waking up okay all right perfect timing yeah always perfect time I go back this week though I’ll make him a second okay well if you need to jump away that’s fine uh obviously you’ll be able to see feedback on the recording and all of that so yeah just give us a little feedback if you can or a background yeah how long have you been doing this and um just for everybody watching um so this is all new branding so several months I tried to try to do it last year before my son was born but the guy I had doing the branding just kind of didn’t work out so anyways and it’ll work with your designer and um they actually did the design for all the branding and most of the web pages and I I adjust the stuff here and there um it is about 95 percent done there’s images such as um kind of in that first intro section where it’s kind of got that stock image of the girl um I like the design layout but just all these stock images you’ll see them on the other pages as well um I just I’m not sure what to replace um there I do have a photo of myself coming then I’m gonna do I probably put on here and maybe on that that page but for the other images I’m not sure what to do um and then I think I’ve got some tweaking for like the um the mobile navigation and a few little things like that but other than that I think it is mostly done cool all right Jonathan what you got for us I actually was just in in my chrome inspect wanting to take a look at that mobile nav as well is there is the bricks menu component better than oxygen surely it’s better but it’s not not for yeah not for them I’m not even that for mobile I kind of um I saw Kevin just posted his sites I was like oh I’m gonna take that yeah is you did the uh is this the that’s the exact question yeah rick’s extra okay yeah cool I’m just curious but it is the bricks um navigation on desktop there yeah awesome well I like the colors it’s unique it’s not a typical agency color and also Colorado shout out to you my dad lives up in lovelin okay I don’t know where you are exactly but um yeah yeah I really feel like if there’s a picture of you I was I was alluding to that in a different you know review that it’s it’s like I think it’s so valuable to put yourself it visibly out there and and let people know who they’re going to be talking to and who they’ll see I I feel like that’s such a tiny thing but it’s such a big win that that that will be huge I’m looking forward to you getting that photo there um yeah I’m just the other thing I noticed get it back on the photographer yeah yeah for sure the other thing I like is that as I’m scrolling everything is big enough that like there’s a central point of focus so as I’m scrolling down like the section with the soon to be picture of you it’s very clear there’s one you know text area for me to look at and one call to action then I scroll down and it’s like oh okay cool so there’s these two big cards it’s very very clear I wish I had more to add at the moment but I haven’t discovered anything yet so I mean I just made a couple little tweaks just in the inspector um you know I don’t necessarily think that you need all of the space that was in the hero section um so I think that can be squished up just a little bit and then I just I just took away the padding from the top of the section I know it probably creates I can’t my contrast on my screen it probably creates some sort of little divider line here I don’t know but if you can get you know that content a little bit higher up on the page that might help things out and that way I’m starting to see more of the if I refresh here I you know there’s really nothing down there for me there’s just a lot of you know negative space here more than probably is necessary um so we can clean that up and then you know I might just go a simple headshot photo here especially if is are you positioning more of like you know you or more of like you have a team that’s going to be working on these projects right now it’s primarily me and then I kind of do um a little bit I think one of the other guys that was on earlier where I have a company that does copy writing that I work with um but I always work with them and I work with the same people and then I haven’t done too much SEO stuff but I want to get into it but at the same time I don’t necessarily want to be doing it I’d rather hire um but anyways at this at this point it’s it’s just me okay so that’s mostly what I’m pushing I don’t want to advertise falsely and make it seem like I have this team when I don’t it’s just me um and that’s kind of what I tell clients if they ask most of them don’t know and they don’t really ask and don’t really care yeah um so yeah okay I would yeah I would just put you then just put a photo of you uh and I wouldn’t worry about like cutting out in this frame and all that I don’t think that these shapes necessarily really um add anything to what’s going on here in fact the seas they almost look like seas I think they’re just unclowed circles but they to my brain it’s like there’s a sea and there’s an upside down sea and I’m just trying to figure out kind of what’s going on there versus if it was just a photo of you that’s all I have to focus on and then I can focus on reading the copy over here um and then just some kind of like maybe little hierarchy stuff like I don’t this text size is a little I obviously this is bigger and it’s bolder but they’re still they’re relatively close together right so if this text was a little smaller or this text was a little bit bigger I think instead of this being white it could be muted just a little bit so it’ll create a little bit more contrast in this section uh and then maybe a little bit more padding inside of these buttons um so that they right now they kind of look like links that have padding uh instead of just literal buttons um okay so I could improve that same same feedback I would kind of have in this cards area right here so these are not bold and they’re the same color now they are in uppercase so that does create a little bit of a hierarchy there but I would like to probably see these bold just like these are and then this text because there’s more of it either you know cut the amount of text down or I’d like to see it one step smaller so this is like an automatic CSS which you’re using this is where this is uh in size text most likely that’s why we drop it to s size text um and you’ll get your natural hierarchy happening there and then again maybe mute the color a little bit so that it’s not pure white like this is pure white other than that I mean these these are clean and they and they look good um same same issue here with the find out more so from an accessibility standpoint and you know we hover over these it’s just everything is telling me find out more find out more find out more it’s not giving me any context as to what that is um yeah that is the one bit of copy I definitely still have to fix yeah yeah and so I to me it’s just I just get rid of them all together and I like I said in the other one I link the actual heading and then I use clickable parents make most people this day and age you know and I think it’s better for user experience it provides a larger clickable area but it’s an object that we’re clicking on it’s not I want to find the thing that was linked inside this card that I’m interested in I just want to be able to click on the entire card and then I go there and it’s just like magic yeah yeah so if we link this and clickable parent and somebody mentioned you know in the chat I think it was stratos he was like I I don’t know if I agree with that because we weren’t going to see that it’s a link they don’t have to see that it’s a link actually because the entire card is clickable so they hover over their mouse is going to change signifying that it’s a link you would create a hover style so that card needs to move or shift or something visually different needs to happen to indicate that they’re hovering over a clickable area so you combine all those things together they don’t need to know that it’s that thing that’s linked because they can literally click on the entire card and it’s obvious to them because of the hover effects that it’s that it’s clickable but from a technical standpoint SEO accessibility having this be the link is the best way to go okay I’ll let you all continue and I’ll have the one later because I’m waking up so for sure for sure all right thank you for coming up all right thank you one comment that hopefully she can answer later is the top like you know above the fold hero says get seen online da da da da da but then the second heading where her photo will eventually go says helping service businesses improve their online presence so I wanted to ask is this geared towards service businesses and you know home services or whatever and if that’s the case shouldn’t that be more clear and perhaps that what is now the current intro heading become the subtext or something like that yeah I’m all so I’m like I’m like yeah no you’re right yeah 100% and we can’t really answer that now I guess but we can’t ask her obviously but there is definitely a question there to be asked looks good though yeah it’s nice and clean put to put to good focus on everything you know just like we tightened up the spacing up here it’s kind of down here I just feel like there’s a lot of negative space between the sections where maybe there could be some color differentiation things like that but overall very clean yeah yeah definitely people are talking about the the kind of card linked comment that you made and the heading thing I agree with I think an easy win for people that are talking about like the the on mobile you don’t have hover effects and that sort of thing it’s like you could simply just underline the the link text the headline could just be underline to indicate a link and that’s that’s very simple I think or have some sort of you know icon after the text or something like that there’s there’s ways to get around it I think what Kevin saying is that valid you just have to you know think about the experience yeah you can throw you can throw a little dummy icon in that’s not actually linked you know a little arrow or something like that you can throw in a fake learn more text that’s not actually linked to anything but it’s but it’s there it can look like a button but it’s not actually the link the active link in the element because the other thing that people do wrong is they link here and then they also put a learn more that also has the same link and now we have duplicate links to the same place which also breaks accessibility so yeah it’s uh and you also have to understand you know if if it’s a card it’s it’s mostly we’re going to assume that a card is a clickable element versus assume that a card is not a clickable element so you know I don’t think that they’re going to have any any issues uh figuring out that oh wow it’s you’re giving me your list of services and cards I bet I can click on them you know so they’re right you know a hundred times out of a hundred times they’re going to try at least to click on them and guess what if you’ve made it a the entire card clickable it’s going to work for them I don’t think they’re going to be like oh well there’s no visual indicator here so I’m not even going to attempt to try I’m just going to keep scrolling I don’t I don’t think that’s going to happen if you look at uh let’s make heat maps of websites people click on everything yeah stuff that’s obviously not a link they they try to click on it you know so they they will try heat mapping is so interesting for sites I have enough traffic it’s like there have been times around like oh holy shit I didn’t realize that wasn’t linked like that’s so painfully obvious to me but it wasn’t immediately clear until I saw the report that you know that these people are pressing on this quite often yeah and it wasn’t it didn’t take them anywhere yep well I think you have yourself hours and hours of content with these website reviews I think so I think so so let’s go ahead and uh we’ll jump back to here so we’re going to wrap this up it’s been uh nice two hour stream here with Jonathan we still got a good a good viewership it’s always hard to leave the the peeps you know that they’re here it’s hard to leave them but uh hopefully we’ll get a chance to do this again um I’ve got something coming out very soon that is going to be interesting for everybody a special event we will call it um but I’m not ready to give the details on it yet but maybe I’m going to talk to Jonathan behind the scenes maybe he’ll be a participant in that event other than that thanks for coming on the show it was really fun and hopefully we can get you back soon and we we mentioned doing some other maybe live stream stuff so that’ll be good yep absolutely thanks for having me this has been super fun and say everybody next time awesome so guys make sure you go subscribe to the Parmesan log channel uh drop your likes if you haven’t already drop your comments subscribe to both of our channels and we’ll be back next Wednesday with another digital agency table talk peace