WDD LIVE 031 – Web Design Critiques / Q&A / AMA

0:00:00 Good morning everybody.

Welcome back to another WDD Live. When you, when the stream starts, go ahead and say hi in the chat.

I’ve actually got a lot of people here already, which is fantastic. We’ve got Gislaine from France.

Gislaine, Gislaine maybe. Gislaine, Daniel, William, Charlie.

Didn’t know you were sick and still on vacation, thought maybe you had forgotten us. No, no, no, no, I never forget you.

This is my favorite place to hang out. But yes, I was, while I was traveling, I was at WordCamp US in DC, and then the nice people at WordCamp US gave me the vid.

They gave me the vid, just a little touch of the vid. It’s all right.

It’s better now, though. Oh, we got, okay, got an Amazon Music error notice coming up Manny’s here Phillips here David’s here Josh loves here Tony’s here a lot of familiar faces Thank you guys for tuning in Sarah’s here.

Hello from New Hampshire where summer has seemingly just started Amanda’s here Derek’s here all right excellent. We’ve got two websites agenda for today we’ve got two websites to critique.

And then we’re going to do a bunch of q&a. AMA stuff.

I got to set a timer for we don’t want that alarm to go off again. Hey, Siri set an alarm for 90 minutes from now.

I never had to talk to Siri like okay, it actually did it. I was like, do I set a timer?

Do I set an alarm? What do I tell her to do?

She figured that one out. It’s 50-50.

It’s 50-50 whether she’s going to do what I actually want her to do. All right, so I’ve got to cut this off at 90 minutes.

We’re not going to go crazy today. We’re not going to marathon it today.

We’re going to do two website critiques, Q&A, AMA. I don’t really have any announcements.

Frames for Figma launch went absolutely fantastic we crushed our goal by about 50% and we’ve got a lot of great stuff planned for that and yeah that’s it we just need to we just need to dive right into it today so I have website number one about to come up on the screen if I can get the controls correct here we go okay we’ve got CarWaveMadera. com and this looks like a rent a car site.

That’s what the little tagline here says. We’re going to do our no scroll test first.

Remember WDDLive, what we do is in-depth web design critiques. So we’re not just going surface level, we’re going to look at a lot of different stuff copy design UX SEO the underlying code we’ll take a look at the DOM in some cases make sure everything’s accessible we look at as much as possible everything that makes a website successful that’s what we try to look at okay my Siri heard you and set the alarm my fault my fault okay no scroll test it says your key to Madeira.

Discover the wonders of Madeira Island. I don’t even know where Madeira is.

I don’t even know where this place is. I’m going to go on my other screen here.

Where is Madeira? Madeira.

Hmm. Madeira.

An archipelago situated in the North Atlantic Ocean. Hmm.

Hmm. Oh, it’s a it’s a region of Portugal, it looks like.

Okay, interesting. Okay, discover the wonders of Madeira Island with CarWave, your trusted partner for the ultimate car rental experience.

You can book now or you can view our fleet. We also have this little just booking form right over here.

So let’s see if we can throw in a pickup date here. Let’s go with, I’d like to pick up on the 28th, nine o’clock, I guess is fine.

Return date, how about October 2nd? And return time of noon.

Okay. Pick up CarWave office, hotel inside Funshall.

How about the Madeira airport? Return location.

Okay. All right.

I wonder if this is WS form right here. Let’s check availability and see what happens.

All right, we get taken to a book now page. All right, we’re on step two.

So we’ve got a date to step one. What happens if I go backwards?

Okay, goes back to the form. Flight arrival day.

There’s extra fields here that I did not fill out on the main form though. I wonder if it’s, is it meant to skip this?

I don’t know. That would be a question I would have for them.

Was I meant to go to step two after filling out? Because there are fields in step one that I have now skipped by filling out, starting the form in the hero section of page one.

And actually, dates, are these the dates I chose? Yeah, I guess they are.

Okay, it passed those on correctly. I thought I chose a different return location but maybe not.

Okay but there’s definitely some fields that I was not asked to fill out so if this is your site I would I would maybe take a second look at that. Okay but I do have some available vehicles here we do have some issues with these dots I cannot use those.

I cannot click oh oh dear if I keyboard navigate we’re now missing a vehicle. We’ve lost class B.

The Hyundai Bayon is gone. Okay.

Something else a little, oh dear. Yeah, a little technical issue here with this little gallery over here.

Okay, but all this layout is looking really good here for the most part it’s it’s nice and clean you can see all the features of the vehicles you can make your choice let’s see what happens if I make a choice here so we’re gonna go with the the Skoda Scala I don’t know I’ve never even heard of these cars before Toyota Corolla that that I’ve heard of okay let’s rent this one so we’re gonna choose that car all right so it’s it’s taking me to features now, which is odd because now it’s back to like, pick up details. It’s a little bit odd, it’s a little bit odd.

Like, I could see a lot of work has gone into this, but it’s a little, it’s a little odd. Is everybody with me?

It’s a little odd that now I’m on features and it’s back to like, what are your, what are your pick up details? Because these fields were on step number one with the dates.

But now I’m gonna come down, protections and coverages. It’s got my car over here that I chose which is pretty cool.

I can add extras like we can add a baby seat, we can add a booster seat. Okay this is a pretty it’s a pretty advanced advanced form.

We’re gonna go ahead and hit next step here and now it wants my driver’s license number and all my information. I’m not gonna put all that stuff in.

I’m not gonna don’t worry. I’m not gonna submit the form Let’s go next.

Well, dude, I okay Oh before today. All right, so let’s go here Mmm, yeah, I’m in mage four drivers 19.

Okay, that that makes sense Let’s go into how it’s the quickest way to do this. Get me down here somewhere.

All right 1970 I don’t know next step All right. Are we on the final step yet?

All right, we’re on confirmation. Okay, this is still broken right here.

Go down, down, down, down. This all looks good.

This all looks good. All right, I’m not gonna confirm.

Little technical stuff there to work out, but overall, I would like to know, I don’t know if there’s any easy way to tell if this was done with WS form or not. You have some console errors here.

Something else to look at perhaps. Okay.

Call MD car rental two-step image. I do think I think these are used by WS form.

and form post action. Yeah, I don’t know if there’s, I don’t know if there’s any WS forms specific classes

0:08:28 that are ever in these forms.

0:08:30 I’d be interested to know though, if it’s somebody’s, if you’re here in the stream, if this is your website, I would like to know what you used for the form.

Oh, Pedro’s here. He’s good.

Okay, I’m pulling up the chat. Okay, so Pedro says, Dan, this one is mine from my agency Madera is in Portugal.

Okay You can add those extra fields on another step on the front. We’re using an external booking system Most of those things we can’t control HQ rental.

Okay I’m wondering if you could do this with This be interesting if you could recreate this with WS form That would be a project that would be a little bit of a project maybe something for the inner circle Okay, let’s go back to the home page. We got lost.

I wanted to you know it was in the no scroll test. There was a form right there.

It was inviting us to fill it out. Let’s we just we went that direction just to see what would happen.

Now we’re back. We’re back on the home page.

Okay so no scroll test. I know exactly what’s going on here.

Because by itself, it doesn’t really tell us anything. It doesn’t have a lot of impact, at least for me.

It’s not awful, but it’s not the best. I believe that if we put some of our brains together, we could come up with two or three way better options for an H1 and the hero here.

I do like this lead paragraph though. That lead paragraph is is good and then I like the two options.

Of course, you know, book now. It’s kind of like a it’s kind of like the same call to action twice.

Like I have the form but it’s okay. It’s it’s a there’s nothing else more relevant that I would think you could put here other than this form to help people get started with their booking.

So I’m down with it. I would like to see maybe a little bit more spacing here.

Just from a general design perspective, I feel like these are a little close together. But everything else is very clean.

It’s a good shot of the island back here, though it’s a little bit boring. It’s a little bit like all literally all I see are trees and clouds some mountains I don’t know if there’s some great like shot that could include some water I mean it’s an island right so just maybe get a little bit more dynamic of a background photo back here without it be just without it being distracting but maybe just give me a little bit more than like am I gonna see more than just trees when I go to this place because that’s what all I’m seeing right now is clouds and trees that’s it so if there’s maybe a more spectacular-esque shot that we could put in for our hero background image, that would be a good option.

All right, so we’re scrolling down now. We’ve got a sticky header.

I do like the fact that it’s a simple navigation. There’s no drop-downs, there’s no mega menus going on.

I mean, you could have easily seen stuff like this like try to be put into a mega menu. A lot of people, I think, would try to do that.

I like the fact that the navigation has been kept nice and simple. Okay so our fleet finds your perfect ride among our outstanding selection of vehicles tailored to make your Madeira Island adventure extraordinary.

We have a very nice slider. I really like how the cars are sitting on these little yellow platforms.

They’re giving the yellow circle gives the car something to be attached to so these cars are not just floating in space. This is this is really well done.

I like the slider controls of course we do need to see if this is accessible and I can keyboard navigate that so I can go backwards I can go forwards all as well in the world. Okay so we’re passing a lot of tests so far, a lot of tests that other sites don’t pass, we’re passing these, this is good.

We have some feature blocks here, VAT included, insurance included, no credit card, unlimited mileage, 24 hour assistance, free delivery within Funcial, Funcial City, is this how we pronounce it? I don’t know, let me know.

I like these features, I mean, if you just read the headline, you don’t even need to read the supporting text that goes with them. I mean, these all sound like very important things if I was renting a car, right?

I like that the VAT’s included, that the insurance is included, that I don’t need a credit card, that I get unlimited miles, 24-hour assistance. 0:13:06

This is all good. Then we scroll down.

0:13:09 Fueled by love, a family legacy on wheels, our passion for cars and our family values drives us to provide memorable experiences and personalized care.

Join us on this journey and experience the car wave difference where family heritage meets exceptional car rentals. Okay, this is a very friendly copy.

It feels very personal, it feels very islandy, not like some giant corporation. This is interesting.

This is an interesting little, oh, oh, I get it, okay, I get it. Hey, hats off to this designer, whoever the designer is.

Are we all getting this? We all understanding this is the W?

This is the W for CarWave right here. So this is a very unique, this is like tying the branding into the general layout.

So like a lot of people might see a yellow box with three small images here and then a random small image down here. But it is the W from Car Wave, which this actually, I see the cutout W, but I’m looking at your Favicon up here and it’s much more distinctive when there’s two prominent colors, the W’s much more distinctive.

It gets a little lost when the W is the same color as the backgrounds, in my opinion. You might want a logo variation where, like I would love to see the yellow coming through here.

At least show me that as a variation. And then I can tie these things in even easier.

Is anybody else feeling that? Are you feeling like you lose the W when it’s the same color as the background?

But this is fantastic. This is fantastic.

I mean, you could slap just a photo collage there or whatever, or even a single photo, but taking the time to create a layout like this. By the way, this can be used all throughout the website in various different areas, and it really helps tie things together and make a cohesive brand experience.

Okay, let’s keep going. So we’ve got some feedback here, some cards, pretty good, nice and clean.

The only thing I will say is I really don’t like, if the majority of your testimonials don’t have headshots, then just take out the avatars because having the blank avatar doesn’t it doesn’t I don’t know it it kind of takes away from it it makes the it makes the testimonials feel more anonymous rather than from like real people and you have the real names but if you don’t have the photos just get rid of the avatar it’s gonna make it a little cleaner too. It feels very repetitive now because it’s just like this this blank avatar over and over and over and over and over again Okay Let’s go down.

All right. We got a little a little overlap action here Madera guide by car wave selection of our favorite places on the island viewpoints bars and restaurants.

This is really good This is this is fantastic where we’ll talk about this in a minute, especially for like SEO potential. We’ll come here and take a look at that section in just a minute.

All right, we got a panoramic view of URFleet in 360. This is interesting.

Okay, I’m surprised. I wanna know, I mean, you don’t have to share this publicly, but I would like to know the budget of this website because there’s a lot going on here and just to me I would think I don’t know the size of this island the population of this island I don’t know if this is the only car rental company on the island this is very interesting this is probably a third-party service yeah I would like to know like to me it seems like a company like this wouldn’t be able, like, it would be a small company, it feels like.

They wouldn’t be able to afford kind of all the things that are going on here. Because a lot has been put into this site, you can tell, right?

Car Wave Spotify, get your tunes on with Car Wave, experience the ultimate road trip vibes with our specially curated playlists. Wow.

I mean, they’ve thought of everything. Okay.

Let’s go down. Gas stations available on Madeira.

I, oh, this has got to be a very large island. That’s a lot of gas stations.

Fairly large anyway. Okay.

Our team is creating an interactive map with all the gas stations. Let’s view this map.

These are all on subdom, like on different domains though. So it’s, I’m just curious to know how all this stuff was, was put together.

I would almost like to see this, I mean I feel like this section in particular definitely could have been done with CPTs and like if you do keep all this stuff on the domain, there is a lot of SEO potential here, right? Because if you think about like, yes, you’re a car rental company, but you’re a unique car rental company on this island where you also have the potential to rank for a lot of other stuff on the island, right?

You can do a ton of content marketing related stuff and then if you have gas stations directory on the island, which makes sense because you’re a car rental company, and then you have local places to visit, maybe reviews of the different sites that people might want to see. You’re bringing in a lot, you have the potential to bring in a lot of visitors through content marketing, like they’re looking for places to see on Madeira Island or whatever, and you’re coming up constantly over and over and over again and they’re clicking, they’re reading your articles, and then of course when they’re gonna visit there, they need to rent a car, you’re the number one choice.

So that kind of content marketing is really, really powerful but the fact that these things are kind of done, this one is done on your domain, which is good, the guide. Okay, this is good.

But I feel like the gas station thing could also and should also be done on this domain. Right now, this sends people to a completely different website.

And so I think you’re missing out on some potential there. All right, so we’ve got this Madera driving guide.

Okay, is this the same thing as the other thing that I was on? Or is this something different?

Yeah that’s the same thing. Okay we’ll take a look at that in a second.

Let’s go down and check out the footer. All right I like this.

I like the let’s let’s pick a date. Got some translation going on.

Did Okay. Not bad, not bad.

Filterable, sortable. Let’s see if these still work after we sort.

Because I’m wondering, there is a problem with, yeah, they do. Okay.

So whose accordions are these? Ah, yes, the frames accordion.

Oh, this is the frame site. Okay.

So we’re built with frames. Did you guys, would you guys have known just by looking at this website that it was built with frames?

An automatic CSS, you would not, you would not know. Look, it’s very custom, but it just goes to show you, right?

It’s like, it’s not, it’s exactly what we say all the time. It’s not some like generically designed template pack that just everybody uses and every site looks the same.

It’s a starting point for doing whatever you want and it does a lot of work for you. Pedro, you know, if you, if you want to talk about your frames experience at all in the chat, that would be, that would be good.

Would love to hear what you what you had as your experience, but this is important. Like this is a frames accordion.

The bricks accordion, I don’t know and I’m not sure about the other accordions from some other third-party packs, but some of them have had issues where I know we had to do a bunch of extra work to get them to work with WP Grid Builder facets. A lot of them, once you facetize them, they break.

But this one, the FRMS one, does not. So this is good.

This is really good. All right.

So I wanted to look at the Madeira guide and see what’s going on here. I really like this full-screen layout.

Let’s go ahead and click on one of these things and see what we’ve got going on. Okay I can’t read any of this but okay church in Funchal.

All right got a little description and then the gas station map Looks like this is just part of your see I don’t like the fact that I really don’t like the fact that that takes me in another tab to a third-party website Really man if you if you guys go the extra mile I would say get this gas station map thing And we actually have a perfect frame for doing that honestly Let’s go to. .

. what frame is it?

I think I’ve shown it on here before. Bricks templates.

Let’s go to. .

. is it one of the.

. .

is it called a location? No, I think it’s called a contact frame.

I think it’s one of the contact frames. There it is right there.

Contact section Foxtrot. So this would actually give you all.

. .

you could put the island in here very easily. All these dots become your gas stations.

These are all controlled by CPT. Get a little slider here.

This would be a perfect frame, I think, for bringing that gas station finder in-house. There it is right there for you.

Just bang, click, add, design it up. You’re good to go.

Okay, I think in order to leverage content marketing, using these places to see on the island you’re gonna need more than this content right here I would almost get like full-blown blog posts written about each of these places on the island that people are gonna want to visit and you can legit rank for for these places and then that’s gonna bring in the traffic obviously people who are wanting to visit the island obviously when they come to the island they’re gonna need to rent a car. You’re gonna be top of mind, okay?

So I think you’re missing an opportunity by just having very thin content here for the sites to see on the island. Turn this into a full-blown like, you know, well, you called it a guide, right?

It’s a guide. Make it a full-blown guide.

Right now it’s just like places with little descriptions. Go all out.

Make it a full-blown guide, rank for these places, and bring in that traffic. Okay, let’s see.

So Pedro says, working with Frames and ACSS together, I mean, what can I say? It’s just so easy and fast to build a website with these combined.

Thank you very much for developing such amazing tools. Thank you for using them.

Thank you for using them, for sure. Okay, anybody else in the chat me.

What are your general get everybody give your general thoughts? I’ve given my general thoughts I think this is one of those examples where they’ve they’ve really knocked it out of the park We don’t really have to spend a lot of time looking at the Dom.

I mean now that we know it’s a it’s a frames Site it’s going to be clean Dom This stuff is going to be for the most part unless you break the accessibility It’s already been made to be accessible all of these things that are added. So you know we don’t have to do a huge deep dive like we typically do.

I did want to talk a little bit about that SEO side of things, leveraging the content marketing to bring in traffic. All of the pieces of the puzzle are here.

There’s no reason this site is not going to be successful. So this is a really good one.

Drop your thoughts. Great site.

Love it. It just works.

Phillip says something about span classes and opening in a new window. I’m not sure what that is.

Derek says awesome site. I can tell from a mile away it’s frames built.

Alright, so what gave it away to you? I mean, because I built frames.

I couldn’t tell from a mile away that it was a frame site. Go ahead and let me know what gave it away for you.

French might be another great language to add to your site. Portugal is becoming a very trendy place to travel to here in Montreal.

How is the our fleet slider made? Let’s go up and find that.

I believe you’re talking about this one, right? So, I mean, this is, I don’t know if they use the frames slider for this.

There is a frames slider component. But you could easily do this with the frames slider component.

I mean each one of these is more or less just a card. And then we have a slider controls element that you drop in and then you just customize the slider controls.

And you’re going to achieve this pretty quickly. Really what looks fancy about it is the fact that it’s good imagery.

It’s really good imagery with, and if you look at this, it’s probably, this is all one image, which, you know, we could talk about that for a second here. So here is the, actually it’s not, this is,

0:26:39 this is really good.

0:26:40 Okay, let’s take a look at this a little bit closer.

So I’m gonna grab the URL here and I’m gonna open, that is the image. Yeah, okay.

So, see this after pseudo element right here? That’s, and look at this.

I mean, we’ve got, guys, we’ve got locally scoped variables. I mean, this is, this man, this man, I think it’s, yeah.

This man has been studying. This man has been studying, okay?

I was gonna say, what 99% of people would do is they would create these in Photoshop and they would have this what we’ll call the floor because that’s been called the floor here in the localescope variables. The floor would be added in Photoshop and I would say that’s a no-no, something to avoid because if the color of the brand, this main brand color ever needs to change, well my friend you better have saved the source file for whatever you were doing in here in Photoshop or Figma or wherever so that you can go in and manually change all these again and re-export all the images and re-upload all the images and replace all the images.

Don’t forget to make sure all the image names are exactly the same. Oh my god what a mess!

What an absolute mess! That’s that’s not the life you want to live.

That is absolute chump life, okay? What you wanna do is you wanna use a pseudo element and that’s exactly what’s been done here.

So we see an absolutely positioned pseudo element. We’ve got the bottom is attached to a locally scoped variable called space bottom.

The height of it is controlled by floor height, the width, and then we’re probably gonna see a transform. Yeah, you have a perspective transform to flatten that circle out.

Basically, take a circle and you’re flattening it out and you’re changing its perspective and then you’re positioning it underneath the car. This is, this is, this is, this is what you, when you, when we talk about like professional work, this is what I look for.

This is what we look for, okay? This is why all the tutorials exist.

This is exactly like, and you say everything controlled by locally scoped variables so it’s all very scalable and maintainable. Take notes, take notes.

This is what we’re looking for. This is what we want to see.

You don’t see this very often. It’s so rare to see, okay?

And so we got to celebrate it when we see it. Hats off to Pedro.

This is very, very well done. Okay, feel wireframe step also without the headshot filled in.

You can generate random color with initial name for avatar. Yeah, you could do that.

That is a potential as well. So what that means is down here in the grid, I don’t even remember where they were.

Let’s go to the reviews page. Okay, so you can have the circle here, and you can use conditional logic.

So it’s like if there’s an avatar show the avatar if there’s no avatar take the first letter of the name put it right here and You know make a solid background color for the block you can even randomize the colors yet. You can do a lot of stuff there Any other good comments, I’m just searching our comments thread here Which talk are you using on the blog page, the active highlight works, I have problems with the frames talk.

Let’s go to, I don’t even see it. Oh yeah, here’s the blog.

Let’s check that out. 0:30:09

Okay. 0:30:10

Good, good, good here. Yeah, this is a blog template straight out of frames it looks like.

That’s probably the frames table of contents element as well. I think your previous article next article section could be I would just probably make that content with it looks a little odd that big Then you have your related articles there.

Yeah, I mean this is This is good stuff Have we seen the fleet archive and page? Yes.

Let’s see. Go to our fleet.

Oh, no, we didn’t see this. Okay We did the explore the fleet in 360 Oh, no, we didn’t see this.

OK. We did the Explore the Fleet in 360.

0:30:57 We click on a car.

0:30:58 What do we get?

OK. 0:31:01

Ah, here we go. 0:31:02

Yeah, we did not see this. OK, class features, do’s and don’ts.

OK. Good, just a good solid use of custom post types and templates for all of these.

See book now. So one question I have, let’s let’s see, right?

What did I just choose? Class B Hyundai Bayon.

All right, so we’re gonna book now and I want to see if my Hyundai Bayon is chosen. See that’s where I would really like to see we can add more like dynamic intelligence to it.

Now if it’s WSForm, 100%, you can do that. If we built this with WSForm, 100%, when they click on that car right there, they select this car right here, they go to the form, the car’s already selected in the form.

Now, you may not be able to do that because it’s a third-party form that maybe you just embedded here and you’re very limited on how you can hook into it, but if we were able to recreate this with WSForm, 100%, we can have that car auto selected after they selected on the other page Bottom of our fleet page broken pseudo element under car, okay Beautiful site and for me doesn’t matter if it was made with frames or not using pseudo elements locally scope variables. Good job Pager says it is selected.

It’s not available on that. Oh Oh like on these dates that I chose?

It’s not available or something? I don’t know.

I think your comment got a little cut off. Okay, I really like the red percentage on the top there.

I’m an avid ACSS student, been improving my output a lot lately, mostly by watching your content, thanks for that. Yeah, I mean this is, it’s paying off for sure.

This is fantastic. Okay, I think we’ve done enough on this site.

We can go ahead, what are we, yeah, we’re 35 minutes in, that’s about a 30 minute review Oops, I do not want to zoom in our Browser, okay. Let’s bring in site number two If you see the top vehicle selected is the one chosen, okay Let me go back and try it one more time.

Let’s see Hyundai buy-on book now Vehicles All right here I see it there, okay selected vehicle class It kind of looks at first glance it looks like this is all one table I see now that this is a section of this table. That’s for selected vehicles It’s like the you know if the person doesn’t read everything if they’re just kind of glancing and skimming.

This kind of just goes to show like the, you know, UX design, right? If there’s, you could make this more prominent, like I would make this a solid colored box.

So if this was solid colored to my brain at instant glance, it would be like, oh, that’s a separate, this is my selected vehicle, right? Like take your action color, ultra light action, ultra light background, that box, and it’s immediately going to tell everybody’s brain that’s a selected vehicle and then everything else under here is you know just another you could switch the vehicle or something like that.

Okay alright that’s enough of that. Let’s bring that out.

It’s very very well done here. Let’s bring in our next website.

DouglasEasyLube. com, Douglas Easy Lube, your hassle-free mobile oil change.

Let me get this off my other screen. Let me bring up my, I want to be able to see our comments again.

Okay. We provide mobile oil change service that comes to you.

Serving Douglas County, Colorado and surrounding areas. You know why is my first question would be why is this so small right?

Put the relevant because it’s a very localized business so when it’s very localized that I would put that like especially for for SEO purposes as well here’s your h1 drop those keywords in your location in a hyper-local business is a keyword, right? Drop these keywords in this H1 up here.

So mobile oil change, and I also see like, mobile oil change is the target keyword here, but that’s really probably not the best target keyword. Like there’s probably, like mobile oil change service is probably the keyword, if I would just had to guess off the top of my head but the word service is not in that h1 anywhere and then your location is not in the h1 anywhere so the mobile oil change in Douglas County and I don’t even know it says Douglas County right a lot of clients will tell you well we serve Douglas County for the most part but that’s not how people search for the most part most people search by the city names that they’re near, right?

How many cities are in Douglas County? I don’t know, but there’s probably more than one.

And if there’s a major city in Douglas County, then for sure people are using the city names to search. So we need the city, the primary city name in this H1 up here, we probably need the word service in here somewhere if we did our SEO research.

I mean, we can drop this in here. We can take a little side quest into Ahrefs here.

Let’s go to Keywords Explorer. Let’s bring this in here.

So what I would do is mobile oil change and then first thing I would do is oil change and I would just do this very generic, okay? I would go into matching terms.

So I wanna know oil change and I’m gonna go into the include right here and I’m going to say near. I’m just going to say near me first to start out with.

I want to see all the near me variations that contain the word oil change because this is going to give me tons and tons and tons of ideas and a general understanding of how people are searching for oil changes near them. Now in a minute we’re going to bring in the mobilized, like the we come to you kind of keywords, but for now, just doing general discovery on how people search for oil changes.

And so you see cheap oil change near me, you see quick oil change near me, oil change places, then there’s some brand specific ones like Walmart, there’s synthetic oil change near me. Now see, I would be flagging these.

And if you’ve done any of my SEO trainings inside of the Inner Circle, if you haven’t, if you’re not in the Inner Circle, I mean, if you’re interested in SEO, there’s a lot of gold in the SEO trainings in the Inner Circle. But this is what I would start to do.

I would start to flag these, okay? I want to mention, especially if you’re inexpensive okay now mobile oil change probably more expensive than typical oil changes so you know you might not fit into this bucket but quick right quick may be a good one to go after let’s let’s keep going so synthetic we may need to make a separate page for synthetic oil change as a service right we look at this website right here I’m not seeing any navigation of any kind.

Immediately I’m being alerted to this is a one-page website most likely which automatically is not going to do well for SEO. I don’t know if this website is finished.

I don’t know if this is all they could afford. There’s a lot of factors that we just don’t know the answers to but we do know that there’s not a lot of hope for this website in its current state, right, in terms of SEO.

Like oil change, as you can see here. We’re gonna go back to, and we’ll do mobile in just a second, but I mean, there’s some strong competition in a lot of these primary keywords.

Very difficult to rank. The fact that we’re gonna try to rank this with a single-page website, especially when we look at this.

So I’m gonna bring up another tab here. We’re gonna go to Site Explorer.

We’re gonna put in the domain, and we’re gonna see that we have no authority. We have zero authority whatsoever, right?

Google barely knows this website exists, this domain exists. There’s one referring domain.

It ranks for one total keyword. Let’s see what it is.

EasyLube oil change, which is Douglas EasyLube. It’s like part of the brand name, okay?

So not much relevance there. We need a more robust site is what I’m getting at.

If you, anytime a client is like SEO is important to us, immediately robust website, robust website. We need multiple service pages, we need service area pages, we need like if we really want to go after this, we want to be aggressive.

Now they might say, hey, we don’t have the budget for that. Okay, we’ll start with a one page website.

We’ll do some PPC, right? We’ll get some PPC ads going because we can, one page website combined with PPC can absolutely get the job done.

It’s not gonna get the job done for SEO, but it can get the job done with PPC. Then we’ll get you rolling, we’ll get you some customers, we’ll get you some growth.

Then what I want you to do is I want you to reinvest some of that money that you’re making back into the site so that we can make a more robust website and really get you ranking organically. Okay?

And that’s kind of the pathway to go about that. That’s the approach that I take.

One page website with PPC for the low-budget clients, get them going, get them some traffic, get them some results, and then start to build the site out slowly going forwards after that. Okay, let’s keep looking at some of these keywords here.

And what are you looking for with these keywords, by the way? Okay, we’re looking for traffic potential.

Yeah, I don’t care about the volume. For a hyper-local business like this, volume is of almost no interest to me.

I do wanna see traffic potential. I do wanna see, because traffic potential also helps me understand the clusters of keywords that we’re looking at.

See how the volume for oil change coupons is only 6. 8 thousand, but the traffic potential is 80 thousand.

That lets me know that when I rank for oil change coupons, for example, which that’s not really a relevant term for this particular website, but it’s a good example of volume versus traffic potential. It’s letting me know that there’s a cluster of keywords that you’re almost certainly going to rank for.

You’re not just going to rank for one keyword when you rank for this. And look at the parent topic is oil change near me.

So that’s letting you know that there’s a lot more potential in that keyword than what the basic volume is alerting you to. But I’m also looking for what is the cost per click on average of this keyword, right?

If you see like zero or like a very low cost per click, it’s letting you know there’s not a lot of commercial relevance there for that keyword. People aren’t bidding on it.

If they’re not bidding on it, it’s probably because they’re not getting results when they do bid on it. But if there’s a high cost per click for these keywords, it lets you know advertisers are bidding on this keyword, and they’re probably continuing to bid on this keyword because it’s doing well for them.

So this CPC column, even if you’re not running PPC ads, right, if you’re just doing SEO, you’re not doing PPC, you should still pay attention to what advertisers are paying for these keywords because that alerts you to the commercial relevance of the keywords. So that’s just kind of stuff I’m keeping my eye on as I go down.

But you’re looking for variations on these keywords like Jeep oil change. Maybe Jeep I say I don’t even know like I’m not a mechanic but maybe maybe Jeep it needs a special oil change process or a special kind of oil or like I don’t know some special expertise and then my question back to the client is do you change oil on Jeeps oh yeah we absolutely do okay let’s get a page going for that let’s get a page going for that that we can rank for this is an opportunity that a lot of people if they didn’t do the SEO research would not find and then would not create the page for and then thus would not rank for but by doing the research we can find these opportunities, create these pages, and then rank.

Same thing with Toyota oil change. So with this alerting me to me when I see BMW and I see Honda and I see Jeep and I see Toyota, I see all these brand names used in the searches.

That lets me know, hey, we probably are going to create an oil change a Toyota oil change a Honda oil change page all of these are going to get created and we’re going to go after these terms and again that makes the site more robust right so now we have a services CPT we have a cars CPT that we’re going to be working with we’re going to have a service areas CPT see how the website has grown from the client. The client may tell you all the, oh, oh, all we need, all we need is one page.

We just need a simple site, that’s all we need. Well, no sir.

If you have actual goals and you wanna dominate your local area in terms of SEO, we’re gonna need to do a little more than one page, okay? By the way, if a client ever says, we just need a simple one-page site, all that translates to is we don’t have a lot of money.

That’s all that translates to. So start to educate them on what they actually need, and then if they can’t afford it, which they probably can’t, because that’s why they said they only need a one-page website, because they’re broke, okay?

Educate them on a phase-based approach to web design, where we’re gonna start you small, one page, we’re gonna give you exactly what you’re asking for, but if you really want to get results, we’ve got to build on that at some point. And so be ready to build on that.

And in the meantime, we want you to spend some money on PPC because this website, if we just build you a one-page website, we don’t do anything else with it. Just being honest, it’s gonna sit there, it’s gonna do absolutely nothing.

You might as well take the couple thousand dollars, the few thousand dollars you’re gonna pay us for that one-page website and light it on fire. Just do that.

I mean, save us all the time, right? Save yourself the time and the hassle, save us the time.

And I mean, I want your few thousand dollars, but you might as well just light it on fire because that’s all that’s gonna happen, okay? We’ve got to get them investing in PPC.

We’ve got to get them investing in SEO. We’ve got to drive traffic to the site somehow.

Don’t let them pay for a brochure website and then just let it sit there. Don’t do that to them.

Okay. Any questions while we’re here?

I’m going to go back to the site. Any questions while we’re here about the SEO stuff?

I’m going to look at the chat real quick. Chris Chris is here.

Welcome Chris Chris. We don’t have many comments now.

This is your chance to ask, I mean I could come back to SEO later I guess, but now is if you have some SEO questions related to some of this, now is your chance to ask. Go ahead and ask those in the chat.

What I would do now is you know assuming I continued pouring through all of this right, I would come up here and now I would look for the mobile oil change and I would see again near me and I would see what we get with this kind of search. More specifics.

Mobile oil change near me, mobile oil change service near me. Okay.

Ah, this is very interesting. Look at this.

This is what makes SEO a little bit more difficult. This word, M-O-B-I-L with no E, is a brand name.

Right? And it’s saying that that is the topic, the parent topic, of what we thought our keyword is for.

And so now what we have to do is we have to go to Google, mobile oil change. Now I think Google is smart enough to understand what’s going on here.

And so we see an ad, we see another ad, mobile oil change, a mobile oil change service. Okay, so I think h refs is actually incorrect here and what h refs is claiming is the parent topic Google has you know according to the actual searches.

Well, no, there is the brand name right there. There is the brand And they have a oil change near me search finder thing.

And this is why I think There’s a little bit of confusion here. However, it’s really good news that we see two other brands that are unrelated that are actually doing the service that we’re doing SEO for ahead of that.

So that lets us know that Google’s able to sort it out. It’s getting the ranking part down.

So we can go after that as a as a term, no problem. Mobile oil change business near me, not super relevant.

We can use the word business sprinkled throughout the page. These kinds of things are related keywords that you can just sprinkle throughout a page.

You don’t have to create separate. Like what a beginner might do, which would be a mistake, is create a page for mobile oil change business, create another page for mobile oil change service, create another page for mobile oil change.

Don’t do that, don’t do that. Just create a mobile oil change or mobile oil change service, one or the other.

I honestly think Google is gonna see both of these keywords as exactly the same thing. And then just sprinkle the word business in some places.

I doubt you’re 24 hours, but if you were, you would wanna mention that somewhere. And then look how people are using this.

They’re attaching the cities, right? And that’s what you’re gonna see over and over and over again.

So that’s why we need that city name in the H1. Alright let’s see, which HRFs plan do you use?

I don’t know. I selected it like forever ago and I haven’t changed it.

When I selected it, it was the middle tier plan. I think they had three plans, I had the middle one.

SEO is new to me, I guess I need to look through the inner circle SEO content. Yes, absolutely.

I mean if you’re building websites for local businesses if it’s not a b2b thing if it’s b2c Almost certainly SEO is going to be a factor you got a there’s a lot even if you’re not selling SEO I mean, there’s a lot you need to do to not screw up Websites that you’re working on and that you’re even if you’re building from scratch setting the architecture up properly Knowing at least that much is really important How often do you revisit the keyword relevance and adjust the site? We do the discovery once, we figure out what our target keywords are, and then we track those target keywords.

And there are certain industries where it’s just like, the target keywords are never gonna change really. There’s other industries where perhaps the nomenclature, okay, we’re pulling out academic words here, changes from time to time, maybe over the course of years, it’s probably not over the course of months in 99% of cases.

I’m trying to think of a relevant example like the jiu-jitsu gym that I do. A few years back, the term Brazilian jiu-jitsu was like one of the most widely used terms for people looking for Jiu-Jitsu classes because there was, there’s Japanese Jiu-Jitsu, which is not super popular, and there’s Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, which is the most popular.

And so a lot of searchers felt that they needed to distinguish between the two. So they would search for Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu a lot, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu classes, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu gym, blah, blah, blah, blah.

It was Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu everything. And actually that’s changed over very recently, whereas almost everybody just recognizes Jiu-Jitsu now as Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.

And so you don’t need to use the word Brazilian nearly as much, if at all, right? Jiu-Jitsu classes is way more dominant than Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu classes.

And so you’re actually going to miss out on a lot of traffic if you don’t just drop the word Brazilian and just go after Jiu-Jitsu in general. And so that’s like a change that we made and that was a targeting strategy that we created four to five years ago, which now we decided we’re going to switch that up a little bit.

So it’s not something you look at every single month or even every few months. It’s something that may change over the course of years, but also may not, there’s a lot of industries where it just doesn’t change at all, and you don’t have to worry about it.

Okay, let’s see. If we try to rank for quick oil change and have a blog post for how to do a quick oil change, should we adding that keyword to the homepage to prevent keyword cannibalization?

That would not be a, in order to answer that question, we have to talk about search intent, right? There’s people who are looking for how to do a quick oil change.

That is different from ranking for quick oil change, perhaps, right? We don’t know the stats.

You would have to think in your head, what would the majority of people looking for quick oil change want to see? Would the majority of people want to see instructions for doing a quick oil change or would the majority of people want to see a quick oil change service like a place where I can get a quick oil change?

If I had to guess the majority of people want a quick oil change service. So if you create a blog post on how to do a quick oil change, you ain’t going to rank for the quick oil change service people.

Google is smart enough to know, oh we’re not showing them, if they put how to do a quick, now Google knows, you’ve given Google the context of you want the instructions, you want the tutorial. So what Google is going to immediately shift to is like if you have a video, they’re gonna show that.

They’re gonna show videos for that search result. They’re gonna show all the blog posts for that search result.

They’re not gonna show the local service businesses for the most part, I wouldn’t think, right? If you put the words how to.

Now if you just write in Google quick oil change, Google’s probably gonna show you a lot of local businesses for getting your oil change quickly. So hopefully that answers the question.

To me a lot of, now there is the strategy of if I’m in a quick oil change place, like if I have a building where we do oil changes, I may also write a blog post on how to do a quick oil change. And I put all the steps and probably do a video and the video is shot in our location and now that’s on our YouTube channel and it actually links back.

But what we’re doing is we’re basically teaching people how to do an oil change, and then also kind of saying, hey, if you don’t want to do this work, you don’t want to get messy, you don’t want to do all this nonsense, bring your car in, right? Here we are.

And you can siphon off some traffic. Now, is that gonna be a localized URL?

Probably not. You’re probably gonna rank, if you do rank, you’re probably gonna rank nationally for that, right?

So you’re gonna get a lot of traffic that doesn’t really help you but it is also going to help you in terms of authority on your website in terms of Google knowing that you know what you’re talking about and then you can actually localize the video and then the video links back to the site that can help things out. So you know it is a strategy that you could employ.

I wouldn’t say it’s going to go gangbusters and knock anything out of the park but hey you know it’s it’s another angle that you can attack. More about the keyword cannibalization part.

I don’t know what else you want to talk about that. I was a one man shop, so you can only cut so many lawns.

0:55:21 Okay, I guess you guys are having a side conversation here.

0:55:24 You can clearly see where the volume is there.

Mark, Mark from WS4M is here. Welcome, Mark.

Okay. So I think we’ve done enough on the SEO side of things.

Let’s jump back. If anybody has more SEO related questions, happy to go back to it.

And we can look at the site more as we go. I mean, we look up here in the title tag.

So best mobile oil change in Douglas County, Colorado. Okay.

Let’s go down. You save valuable time, no upsell pressure, Okay Let’s go down.

You save valuable time. No upsell pressure at all quality workmanship transparency priority I’m not big on these cards right here because you save valuable time See this is an example where you go quick oil change, right?

Like you you use the UK you have an opportunity here to use the keywords. So instead of saving, you save valuable time, it doesn’t mean anything to, it does mean something to the viewer, right?

But it doesn’t mean anything to Google, it doesn’t mean anything to SEO. And quick oil change, and maybe put in parentheses, like, less than 15 minutes, or something like that.

That still speaks perfectly well to the customer while also giving you an opportunity to use a keyword. No upsell pressure at all.

I would translate this into like language that people are going to recognize. Like what do people normally upsell at an oil change?

I go get my oil change, I don’t know, I mean what they I don’t feel like they try to sell me a bunch of other stuff. So is this even a problem?

Is this even, you know, you don’t want a talking point that people feel is not a problem in the first place. So we would need to verify that this is a problem and then find a better way to word it.

I’m not sure that that’s the best icon to go with this either. Maybe like a money icon would be better to go with here.

Right? Quality workmanship, I mean, let’s be honest, everybody’s gonna say that.

And then, you know, don’t say quality workmanship. Like, we’ve got another opportunity to use an oil change related keyword here.

We might as well use that opportunity. So this kind of just feels very generic.

Transparency priority, again, doesn’t really say anything. Like, I don’t know.

I never go to an oil change place. It’s kind of like hitting on a thing that’s not an actual problem.

Like, do you ever go to an oil change place? You’re like, oh, I feel like they’re hiding something from me.

I really wish there was more transparency in this oil change place. I just don’t, I don’t know what transparency really means here.

And transparency priority is not an actual sentence. So we need, we just need better copy across these featured cards right here.

Why is it that oil changes are universally disliked? Are they?

Are they? Are they universally disliked?

I mean, I don’t, I go to the oil change place I pull into the bay. They change my oil.

I pay I leave I’m never like God these fucking oil change places are just like I don’t know. What’s the problem?

I didn’t know it almost feels like we’re creating like in Copywriting it’s like we’re told to define a problem and then solve the problem and I guarantee there’s problems with oil change stuff that we could harp on but like I don’t think that they’re universally Disliked if the copy just kind of makes this bogus claim it ruins all of the copy Okay, you’ve got to make sure your copy Speaks the things that people actually feel and believe and I’m not convinced that people actually let’s just do a vote in the chat Do you do you universally dislike oil change places? Let’s take a quick vote.

Put yes or no in the chat. Like is there some vendetta that we all have against oil change places?

If it was a used car lot, see they have like a reputation, right, that I guess a used car lot could be universally disliked. I’ve never heard this about oil change places.

I didn’t realize there’s an epidemic of Horrible oil change places that we all need to stay away from We check your fluids and perform a safety check including lights Bragg see yes So now we’re you know telling people what we do as part of our process. We’re using actual terms that people will recognize Oh, yeah, I do want my fluids checked.

I do want to check my brakes and do a quick tire inspection that all is good to be honest for me the oil change is the only part I do myself okay an oil change place killed my dog once just kidding okay yeah see I think we’re kind of creating maybe a problem in our imagination here and then writing copy around it and then that’s just not going to connect with the average visitor. This is a headline is not good.

I don’t like these headlines that don’t actually say anything. They like yeah, it’s like, oh, I’m forcing them to read the bullets, but I don’t know not it’s not great copy here.

Nobody likes to waste a long time in an unpleasant waiting room, be pushed into unnecessary upsells, find out later that the drain plug wasn’t tight enough. I mean, I know this happens from time to time, but again, it’s not like there’s an epidemic of people driving away from oil change places and just oil dripping all over the road and their car falling apart or, you know.

99 times out of 100, probably even more than that, they’re gonna go get an oil change and everything is gonna be perfectly fine. We’re talking about a commodity service, right?

This is a commodity service, almost anybody can do it. It’s just, harp on the things that are actually true.

The actual true thing is, you don’t want to have to jack up your car and get underneath it and get messy and do all this stuff. Just come in, we’re close to you, we’re convenient, we’re a good price, we’re not going to fuck up your car and it’s all going to be good.

Like, you don’t have to manufacture all of this, hey oil change places are universally hated. And your drain plug isn’t going to be on if you go to most places around here.

It’s just, you know, it’s not going to happen. Call or text, what happens if I click this?

Okay, it opens. Schedule your oil change, what happens if I click that?

Oh, off to a third party unbranded booking website Not the best experience I really am a fan of keeping branded experiences, right? Even if you’re forced to use a third-party form of some kind once again, we could use WS form for this We could use WS form to easily create a booking form I think You know, it’s taking them to this blank page.

That’s like we’ve lost all like not even Oh, here’s the logo right here. A Bev is coming out of the woodwork here now, Bev, I could she’s running down the hall right now screaming at the top of her lungs to make that logo bigger guaranteed.

And she actually has a case. Bev has a case right now.

That is the tiniest logo I’ve ever seen. Yeah, this is just it’s it’s kind of like we just lost all of the experience.

Let’s see. Does the employee actually matter here?

You know? There’s a lot going on here.

It’s like, I can’t change my service. So it’s like, I don’t know.

All right, it’s it’s a booking form, whatever, but it’s unbranded. At least I can go back, I can hit the back button.

That’s good. Let’s see what other people are saying here.

I Heard they steal all the parts out of your car when you’re not looking. I Didn’t know oil change places exist.

We do this by ourselves or in a car service interesting I’m weary of maintenance shops in general due to scams, but I don’t dislike companies. I know I can trust But is it like I understand mechanics, right?

There’s a lot of mechanic general mechanics You’re like I really need a trustworthy mechanic. But like an oil change place, it’s just it’s just an oil change, you know.

The guy in the image looks to be happily relaxing. Yeah, he does, right?

This is a fantastic point that Richard has has hit on right here. We’re talking about the supposed awful things that go on in oil change places.

And this guy is just loving it. He is absolutely loving his long time in an unpleasant waiting room.

By the way, not a very unpleasant looking waiting room. I mean, we’ve got a leather sofa that looks to be at a great recline angle, reading material on the, we got wood floors.

This is one of the best glass where I can actually see them working on my car. This is the best oil change waiting room I’ve seen in a long time, but we’ve placed it right next to all of the talk about horrific things happening at oil change places.

So there’s a little bit of a, yeah, this is an area where I would talk about if this is the actual waiting room, okay, this isn’t just a stock photo, I’m guessing this is a stock photo, but if you did have a waiting room like this, you would want to set it right next to, just talk yourself up. You don’t have to make believe that all these oil change places are absolute trash.

Just talk about why yours is the best one and put it right next to the photo where people can see that it’s the best one. That would do a much better job here.

All right. Let’s see.

Can you sync WSForm booking with an existing calendar? So yeah, Mark is in the chat.

He will jump in and answer your WS Forum questions. Phillip says just joined what’s happening here, website feedback.

Yes Phillip that’s what we do every single Wednesday, it’s called WDD live, we do in depth website critiques and reviews. We’ve got about 20 minutes left so I’m going to jump into AMA which stands for, I say AMA a lot, people are like what does that even mean?

It just means ask me anything. You can ask any on any of these topics.

All questions are fair game. Let’s just finish this off real quick.

We got a spacing issue right here. We got a spacing issue right here.

Just general UX UI stuff to fix up. I feel like all of this copy kind of has to be reworked.

Again, go in the inner circle, grab the training, the master’s a whole master class and a workbook on all the stuff you need to do to get your copyright. With these testimonial cards, one, we don’t want to see blurry images.

Obviously, these look like stock photos right here. All three of those are 100% stock photos.

Don’t use stock photos and testimonials. Don’t use pixelated stock photos and testimonials.

And then this text is too small for the size of these images. So just general UI, UX stuff that we can improve here We got a timeline for the process I’m not a fan of timelines for three-step processes timelines or for longer content If it’s just a simple process one, two, three use cards or something like that for this Then we have FAQs which I’m not big on the boxed layout underneath the toggle here.

But it’s you know pretty standard little FAQ. Well see I would take this content right here and put it next to this and then make it sticky.

It’s a better layout right. You’ve kind of just got this giant column of content going on here.

Okay your priority is what matters to us. This obviously I this I don’t know what this photo has to do with oil changes.

I mean the answer is absolutely nothing. It has absolutely nothing to do with oil changes.

So I think a lot to improve here. Then we have a pixelated, this is the oil change shop that looks like a typical oil change shop, but super pixelated here on a large screen.

That’s not going to sell anybody right here. This one’s not Sales are dropping off as we as we go down the page.

Here’s your your conversion rate Was higher up up here. This was kind of the best part of the page But again, all the copy needs to be reworked and then slowly we’re just going to start losing Losing losing losing losing losing losing losing way losing people here And then we and then we get to the bottom.

Okay Let’s go ahead and close that up I’ll leave this stuff up right now and we’ll just do AMA So you can ask anything on business pricing SEO PPC web design frames automatic CSS bricks oxygen Gutenberg Word camp whatever you guys want to talk about. I’ve got 20 minutes.

We have a hard stop at that time. All right, let’s look at the chat.

Every industry has cowboys. You don’t need to tell everybody why you’re not one.

This is true. This is true.

Yeah. You, you really want to go after the, um, you want to, you want to create like an us versus them, you wanna create like a tribal kind of situation, if there’s common problems that people can identify, if there’s not common problems that you’re just like manufacturing nonsense, drama, then that’s not the way to go.

If there’s real stuff to harp on, then by all means, harp on it. But again, we’re talking oil change places, it’s like, you know, this is not a common thing.

Okay, the, the average oil change place is not our enemy. So we don’t have to get the pitchforks out against them.

Okay. 1:09:21

Is it testimonies? 1:09:22

Shouldn’t that be testimonials? Yes.

Yes. A hundred percent.

Okay. What did Mark say up here about booking forms?

Let’s go up here. 1:09:29

A WS form availability. 1:09:30

We have our integration with calendars and our date field coming. In fact, Kevin.

I’ve been discussing. Yes Lot of exciting stuff in the WS form world Continues Continues to be the number one form plug-in for WordPress by a long shot By a long shot It might be a good idea to list what happens if you don’t get an oil change like the car light notice engine lights poor driving performance 100% 100% okay let me go back down they should be using WP Amelia instead of draft so it would be local to the install and keep all the branding on point yeah that would be a much better option yeah any any time you can use something that integrates with the WordPress install and doesn’t have to be on a third party domain, doesn’t have to open in a new tab, can be integrated with other things like your CPTs and on and on and on, way, way, way better to go that route.

Free Wi-Fi and coffee, exactly. Benefits to using, to coming here, right?

1:10:41 Or like, wait in your car.

1:10:43 Do you know how many, like, I love the oil change places where I pull into the bay and I literally turn the car off and I sit there and just do whatever I want on my phone in my own car.

I don’t have to get out. I don’t have to walk to a waiting room.

I sit and watch their stupid CNN or whatever they’ve got on and read their magazine that’s three years out of date. I can just sit in my car and chill, right?

And then they’re done and they’re like, hey, you’re done, all right, here’s my card, pay, drive off. Like, that’s super easy.

All right, let’s see because the thing is if it’s gonna be quick like let’s just skip the whole waiting room thing and in fact let’s skip the I don’t need coffee I don’t need Wi-Fi I can be on my phone if there’s only going to be 10 minutes yeah I’m on my phone I’ll just sit in my car that’s the best possible experience. Okay let’s see Kevin do you not look at mobile?

I mean, I do, but mobile for me is like, if we haven’t, if there’s so many things wrong on the desktop, I mean, we don’t have to go look at the mobile. I would look at the mobile on the site that was really good, that we did earlier.

That would be worth checking out the mobile experience on, especially because there’s a lot going on there too. Like, there’s those sliders and things like that.

But we kind of ran out of time on that one. We looked at a bunch of other things instead.

And by the way you know like I tend to look at things from top down perspective like copy is extremely important it’s the probably the most important part of the website. Well guess what the copy is not going to magically get better on mobile.

So if the copy sucks on desktop, we don’t have to go check the mobile version. It’s still gonna suck on mobile.

So I look at stuff that kind of like is required in all areas. Like if a site’s not accessible, it’s not gonna suddenly be accessible on mobile, right?

Like there’s a lot of things, it’s just, you know, mobile is like, did it break? Like is it still a good experience?

But we’re looking at a lot of the important stuff on desktop. The waiting room looks worse than the bad waiting room up above.

1:12:51 Yeah, yeah.

1:12:52 I wanna grow my team, but most time I can do the job myself.

What would be the best approach to slowly delegate? You seem to be, if you’re asking that question, in a situation where you don’t have a lot of volume of clients, right?

There’s people who are like, you know, I wanna get a team, but I can do the work myself. Well, you can’t physically say that if you have, after a certain point of getting volume, there’s gonna be a point where you’re just like, I can’t handle all this work myself.

I just can’t do it. And like, you’re forced to have a team.

If you’re kind of in that in-between area right now, where it’s like, oh, I could start to build a team. Like I got some extra money, but I don’t really need to because I can still handle all the work myself.

That’s actually the perfect time to start building a team. You don’t want to get to the point where it’s like, oh gosh, we have too much work, and now you’re scrambling to build a team because a team takes time to onboard and to get cohesiveness and get your processes all, like everybody understands what needs to happen and what’s going on and when we do what that takes time and so you don’t want to start that process which takes months by the way the day you realize you have a you have an overflow problem so I would say to do that now enjoying the new f4f frames for figma sorry I’m still learning our own acronyms.

Frames for Figma app, how positive was the initial release window? It was extremely positive.

We did 50% over what our goal was, and I was gone at WordCamp US for like six out of the seven days of the launch. So, it was really, really, really good.

Very positive, very promising. We’re excited about it.

1:14:50 Okay, we already did this one.

1:14:52 How’s the ankle, Kevin?

Does this mean our fight is called off? The ankle is.

. .

I can walk on it. I can jog on it.

Can’t run hard. Definitely can’t sprint.

Not even gonna try. Is the fight called off?

No. Because I don’t need an ankle in jujitsu.

I don’t need I don’t need my ankles Don’t need to stand don’t don’t yeah nothing really involving the the foot is going to be is going to be necessary So all good That only works without lifts and sunken bays Yeah, well all the oil change places around my house anyway, tend to have those sunken bays, where like the workers are all underground, you just kind of drive up and they do their thing. 1:15:46

How would you target the SEO when oil change 1:15:49

had a traffic potential of 800,000 and mobile oil change has 5,000, but you want to be more specific about the mobile portion of this? Yeah, you target mobile, you target what you are.

You target mobile, you can’t say you’re an oil change service as if you’re the same as all these brick and mortars, right? So you really have to go after mobile oil change.

Now what you can do is I go PPC to target the general term of like oil change near me because we do wanna alert people to the fact that mobile oil change is an option, right? So I would probably do that with PPC and be able to control your budget and instantly come up for those terms.

But with SEO, that’s, Google knows you’re not a brick and mortar oil change business, so they’re just probably not gonna rank you. But they will rank you for mobile oil change because that’s what you actually are.

So that’s where you use SEO to rank for what you actually are, and then you use PPC to try to inject yourself in the other conversation, where people are just looking for generic oil changes near them. 1:16:56

What are your thoughts on headless decoupled WP? 1:16:59

I haven’t looked a ton into it. Feels a little over-engineered, is kind of my like, just, I guess, off-the-cuff opinion The agency I work for uses beaver builder for everything.

Are there any plans to integrate a CSS with beaver builder? no, because Last time I checked I don’t have do I have a beaver install.

Let me see Beaver beaver beaver I Don’t have a beaver install anymore last time. I checked they don’t support variables and inputs.

They’re not a class first builder. They allow you to add classes to elements but I don’t believe you can style classes that you add to elements and they have bad DOM output.

It’s not clean code. So they don’t they don’t they just don’t check the boxes for automatic CSS integration unfortunately.

I think we can go back to camera here. Okay, WPACSS theme.

Yeah, our goal is to have an FSE theme with custom blocks and we will be playing in that 1:18:17

field. 1:18:20

How to do keyword research for web design services. Can someone like this be in the inner circle?

Can something like this be in the inner circle? You use the same process that you use for everything else, but I will just tell you it’s very, very difficult to rank for web design related stuff.

Anything in SEO, web design, online marketing, I mean, you’re more or less doing this work against other professionals who do this work daily, constantly, and they’re good at it, right? So you’ve gotta be equally as good at it, and you have to be willing to put in the time and the resources.

I mean, a lot of SEO is off-site. It’s not what you’re doing on your website.

It’s what you’re doing off of your website. You have to build brand status in your local area, you have to, which takes a lot of time and a lot of energy and a lot of effort.

You’ve got to build backlinks, you’ve got to write a bunch of content. It’s a major, major, major project.

The more competition that is in the industry, the more work you’re gonna have to do. And for me, for a web design agency, it’s not worth doing that work, honestly.

Create the pages that need to be created and just go straight to PPC. Don’t even worry about the SEO thing, go straight to PPC and go straight to relationship building.

You’re going to build an agency far faster and far bigger and far better by putting all of your time and effort into building relationships in your local area than you are anything else. It’s a relationships game, okay?

And that’s how you’re going to get the big projects also and that’s how you’re going to get projects easy and that’s how you’re gonna get contracts signed easily. It’s a relationships game.

You can sit at your computer all day. See, an introvert, actually, like me, would much prefer it if we could just sit at our computer and just SEO the shit out of our website and just get all these leads and projects, but that’s just not how web design works anymore.

If you want to build, it’s counterintuitive, but if you wanna build your web design agency faster and easier and bigger, you have to get the F out of your chair and walk outside and start shaking hands and talking to people, 100%. That will get you, the more time you spend away from your computer, the bigger your agency will be.

The more time you spend sitting at your keyboard, the smaller your agency will be. That’s just facts, okay?

So, and that’s not what a lot of people want to hear but that’s facts. So I would I would do that like ASAP

1:20:55 Okay, let’s see

1:20:57 Is it possible to attach a value to a relationship between custom post types?

My use case therapist CPT and service CPT would love to have a price attached to each of their services That would just be a custom field. So the services that a therapist offers, but hold on, I don’t, are you building a directory of therapists?

Because why would you need a therapist CPT and a services CPT? If it’s a site for a therapist, you would just have their services, but are you building a directory of some sort?

That’s what I would need to know When is the next PB 101 episode probably next week. I’m getting caught up on a bunch of stuff this week probably next week We’re all we’re almost done.

There’s only three or four episodes left By the way, Tommy hold the fort while you were gone make sure to congratulate him. Yeah, Tommy is doing a fantastic job How do you create a relation between two CPTs?

1:21:58 Class has students, display list of students on dedicated page.

1:22:02 I can do everything that middle page, I have Bricks Builder, Jet Engine.

I mean, I’ve shown that before. It’s just general relationships.

It’s just used to query loops. You query the main CPT, and then you query anything that’s related to each item with the second loop.

And it depends on if you’re using BRICS or Oxygen, like the process is gonna be a little bit different, but that’s the process. It’s a nested query loop.

If we missed the frames for Figma launch ongoing, is there another LTD window? Yeah, there will be another launch, but there is no date planned.

We’ve got a lot of work to do to get it to where we want for the official launch. This was like the early launch, which we’ve done for all of our products, right?

It’s getting the early buy-in, and the feedback has been phenomenal so far. We’re gonna build out the rest of the frames library.

We’ve got some new features coming to ACSS Tokens, which is really cool, and yeah, then we’ll launch, but I don’t have a date. So we just have to wait.

Which is why you should always buy in the first launch. So many people, it’s like the launch closed, we did 50% more sales than we were targeting, but we’re still getting people like, hey, hey, can I still buy it?

It’s like, we just had the launch, what do you mean? Like, you should have bought it.

Introvert-like, I don’t know about that. Introvert like you.

Oh, are you saying you don’t believe that I’m an introvert? I am what they call an ambivert.

So I tend towards introversion, but if there’s a situation that I’m excited about or very comfortable in or whatever, then I can be an extrovert. I’m a shape shifter, I can go between.

But I am very much like, if I’m around a lot of people for too long, like I had at WordCamp, for example, I had to go back to my hotel room multiple times just to be alone for a minute, like just chill. Like, hey, oh, can my ears stop, like, with all the stuff?

Talking to people for 12 hours, 14 hours, like very exhausting. My wife recharges in that situation, she loves that.

She does not wanna be alone, okay? I’m the opposite.

So that’s what I feel is like my introversion side. It’s like, I can’t take that for very long.

I’ve gotta go recharge by myself. 1:24:43

Okay, let’s see. 1:24:45

Sounds like therapist is the team member CPT. Ah, okay.

So it would be like a practice, multiple therapists, services, prices for each therapist. So when you create your therapist CPT, you just have a custom field for their, maybe their starting price.

Because they probably have like, some therapists have a sliding scale, which makes things even more complicated. But if there was like a starting price that you wanted to publish, that’s just a custom field attached to the therapist.

And so when you query the therapist, you’re just querying that data dynamically, their price. I’m doing a series right now in the inner circle, by the way, on how to build a custom event management system just purely with custom post types, custom fields, all that stuff.

We’re on part two right now, part three is coming soon. And a lot of this can just be translated to a lot of other CPT kind of work that you’re going to do.

Doesn’t have to necessarily be events. But yeah, there’s a lot that we’ve done in the inner circle on CPTs, nested CPTs, custom fields, dynamic data, on and on and on and on and on.

I’m just struggling to pass the variable part of the parent CPT. I’m not sure, not quite sure what that means.

Thank you. What if I want to focus on expats, English speaking, in my country and foreign businesses, networking for sure, but I think that SEO can help here, no.

Well if you’re in a different country, then the SEO outlook might be different. So you do want to look in your local area and see what the SEO outlook is for you.

I’m speaking from a US perspective. Web design, SEO, online marketing in the United States, every major local area is absolutely on lockdown.

These are brands that have been around for a very long time, they have high domain authority, they have tons of backlinks, they have tons of content published. You can’t just say, I’m gonna show up out of nowhere and outrank them.

That’s never going to happen, ever. It doesn’t matter how good you are at SEO.

You’ve got to put in the work and you’ve got to put in the time. Google doesn’t just instantly see a new domain and we’re like, I don’t know, these guys seem pretty good at SEO.

Let’s rank them. Like, that’s just not going to happen.

So like I said, you have to be willing to put in the time. And now we talk about trade-offs.

Is the time better spent fighting that fight? Or is the time better spent walking outside and shaking hands and meeting people, building relationships, not just relationships with random people.

Relationships, go find, I mean I did a whole training in the inner circle, the three best places to get web design clients fast. None of them are, one of them is online, PPC, that’s it.

The other two, not online. I mean you could outreach online, but it’s even better if you go do it in person.

But I would be shaking hands of graphic designers near you who don’t do web design, they do graphic design but not web design, sign shops, every freaking local business that opens up a physical location needs a sign on the outside of their building. Go make friends with all of the sign shops in your area that all these businesses are gonna be going to and say, hey, here’s my card, everybody that comes to you is gonna need a website, I’ll give you a referral fee.

Everybody you send to me, I’ll send you a check, okay? Or just build a really good relationship with them and say hey I got a bunch of clients are going to need signs I’m going to make sure to tell them to come to you if they need a website tell them to come to me ok that’s it and so there’s a network right there that you’re building so you’ve got graphic designers you’ve got branding people go meet all the branding people in your local area lots of them don’t do websites they do great logos they don’t do websites everybody buys a logo going to need a website okay get a relationship going with all these people.

These are the people you need to go out and network with and meet because they will directly give you business, okay? And then, don’t be afraid to give them business as well.

The more business you give them, the more they’re gonna wanna turn around and give back to you. So, what I don’t do, you aren’t gonna catch me dead walking into a local business going, hey, can I talk to your owner about a website?

No, that’s not what I’m talking about. Go meet, go make friends with all the people that the people you wanna talk to, your actual clients, are gonna go do business with.

And then get them to refer you. Those are the kind of connections that you need to make.

1:29:06 All right, let’s see, let’s see, let’s see.

1:29:08 Casey says, love the stream today.

Glad that you liked it, Casey. Thank you for showing up.

John C says, every tutorial I see allows you to post related content on the same page as the parent, but I haven’t been able to build an index based on the parent CPT because I can’t pass the variable. I mean, we could just do this real quick.

I don’t know if I’m missing something because it’s fairly basic what you’re asking. Let’s go.

. .

Well here’s the events. I mean here’s what we’ve been building.

Is this the right? I don’t know this isn’t the right install.

Hold on let me bring up the So here’s an event CPT. 1:30:02

Imagine that this is therapists, okay? And I open a therapist.

1:30:05 Dave Chappelle is our therapist, right?

Here’s a price right here, free or paid, okay? And then if it’s paid, you’re going to have a starting price, okay?

And so what this looks like on the front end, we go here. We can see our grid.

And this is what we’ve been learning how to build in the inner circle, by the way. So if you’re not in the inner circle, you’re interested, this is just one series.

It’s the current series that we’re on with a custom event system. So we’ve got these nice cards.

Part two was how to build a grid switcher, right? So we go from list to grid view.

Notice the cards. What are the cards doing when you switch to a grid view?

They’re actually changing their layout. It’s not just we put the same cards in a grid.

By the way, I will tell you, these are not duplicated. This is not a duplicated grid.

These are the exact same cards. There’s only one copy of every card.

I know a lot of people would take the approach of, I need a grid that looks like this, and I need a grid that looks like this, and then I’ll switch between the two, but that’s not the approach. These are the exact same cards.

There’s only one copy. There’s only one loop.

Okay. So we learned how to do this switcher right here.

All the sorting and filtering, live search, sorting by date. We are hiding dates that have happened in the past.

We’re only showing dates that are in the future. We just added support for multi-day events.

We did a custom event landing page, which this is just the start of it but see here is an example where the price of the event is just simply pulled from the custom field okay my alarms going off so we have our hard stop we’re gonna go ahead and call this until next time but I’ll just finish this up real quick we can sort and filter but we can also put the price on notice the price is on the actual card itself so if we want to look at this from a structural standpoint we’ve got our grid right here here’s your one loop the loop is on the list item so this is an unordered list with list items we have an article card inside of our list items and then inside of this so this is the loop which means anything in here can reference dynamic data right so I’m gonna click on this open the events meta here’s the price wrapper. I have two prices, okay?

One is free and one is the actual price. And then I have a condition on here that basically says, we open this up, if the event type equals free, then we’re gonna show the free badge.

And then this one says, if the event type does not equal free, we’re gonna show the price, whatever’s in the price field. And so if we turn off this condition, we can see right here, we’re just using ACF event starting price is the dynamic data, which means it’s gonna pull that direct from the custom field that is on that post.

Oh gosh, thank you guys. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Yes, thank you, thank you. Screen share, okay.

1:33:05 It’s gotta be one, every WDD Live,

1:33:08 there’s gotta be one look, a non-look.

We gotta look at something that’s not there ever it once every WDD live okay so here we go I’ll go back let me show you the grid switcher because that is I really like my grid switcher here so here’s your grid switcher again those are the same card one loop new layout when you switch to the grid format okay got all your facets over here number of events, yada, yada, yada. Okay, so I was showing the structure of this card.

Here’s your LI, this is the loop. See that little symbol if you’re in bricks right here, that lets you know that’s where the loop is.

So we’re looping the list items, not the cards. Very important, here’s the card right here.

What would happen if you looped the card? If you loop the card, you’re gonna get a bunch of cards in one list item.

Ah, mm, wrong, right? I was gonna actually have Kevin Hart do his laugh, but it’s not hooked up right now.

So you wanna make sure always loop the list item, loop the thing that you need multiple of, you need multiple list items in a list. So we’re looping that, and we have the event card inside of that.

And then here’s the price options where we have the conditions attached to each one. So if the price is free, we show the free badge.

If there’s no free, then we show the actual price. So again, it’s one loop and then it’s just custom fields, dynamic data.

Here’s the field right here. Here’s Dave Chappelle.

You can choose whether this is a single day event or a multi-day event. You can do the event start date.

You can do start time, end time, the time zone. Here’s your free paid toggle right here.

Conditional logic, so if it’s free, the price field goes away. If it’s paid, the price field shows up.

You have your event description that goes on your cards. It’s all very, very, very basic.

So if this was your therapist, you could have just custom fields for anything related to this therapist. And then anytime you query your therapists, you instantly have access to all those fields with dynamic data just easily in bricks.

Anything that has a lightning bolt on it. So if I touch here, see the little lightning bolt?

Anything that has the lightning bolt can be pulled in with dynamic data from custom fields. This is pretty much as basic as the loop gets.

So if you’ve looped your therapist and you can’t get dynamic data to work for some reason, that’s when you go into the inner circle, you post a link to your site and say, hey, I can’t get dynamic data to work here. And about a dozen people are gonna help you, okay?

Like, they’re gonna come out of the woodwork and they’re gonna tell you exactly what’s wrong, if not me. I mean, I could jump in and tell you, but half the time, like, by the time I see a post, six other people have already helped the person.

So, it’s, you know, that alone is worth being in the inner circle. But this is a very, it’s very, you know, we haven’t done anything, the only advanced stuff here that we’ve done with this event system, some people consider, but you know, the facets, some people consider to be advanced, but honestly, WP Grid Builder, like, does so much work for you out of the box on this, like, it’s just too easy, it’s too easy.

I don’t consider that to be advanced. This grid switcher is, you could probably consider to be advanced.

And then the tricky part here is not showing past events. That is a little bit tricky.

And so I walk through exactly how to do that to make sure that you’re actually showing relevant things in the grid. And that’s pretty much it.

All right, let’s see. D123 says, yummy.

That’s a sexy grid there. Thank you.

Yeah, I don’t know, I just whipped it up. I mean, I kept it very, it’s all gray, so it doesn’t even really have any color.

I hate the badge that we put on here. It’s just temporary stuff.

It’s really focusing on functionality more than anything else. But I did want to show, like a lot of people want to know how do you zoom the, like when you hover the card, we’re using clickable parent on the cards, so when you hover the card how do you get the image to zoom in the background?

That’s a real image, not a background image. You know, all the stuff we typically teach, we BEMified this, we made it accessible, right?

So you’re going to get proper, look, I mean, look at this, the grid switcher, guys, I mean, keyboard, keyboard on this, right? This is straight out of Brics, by the way.

No code was written for this grid switcher done via WP grid builder No, 100% custom. I show you how to use what we do if you just want if you want to know if you want to know The sauce, okay.

We’ll just do the sauce real quick and then I got to go so This is a this right here. This list of cards is a one column grid This is a two column grid.

Well, we define the grid with a grid template columns. It looks like, actually, let me just show you.

Probably the easiest thing to do. Let me zoom in here as well.

So I’m going to grab my one column grid, events grid main, and it uses a custom grid template columns function. So normally, I’ll just grab this right here.

See, if I say repeat one minmax01fr, then it’s going to be a one column grid. Now watch this if I make this one a two it turns into a two column grid.

Now the magic of changing the this uses container queries. Container queries are responsible for changing the layout of the card when the container size changes okay.

But to switch it from one to two just requires changing that number. So what we do is we tokenize that number.

So I tokenize it with a variable called column count. And then you can actually use a fallback on locally scoped variable.

So if the, this is undefined, right? Column count by default is has no value, it’s undefined.

So I give it a default value of one. That way when the page is rendered, it renders it based on a one column layout.

But then what I can do is I can go up here and I can create our little icons Okay, which have hidden accessibility text by the way And this icon right here has a you can see this little thing that says interaction, right? So that has a bricks interaction on it.

So on click I’m gonna set an attribute which is an inline style And I’m basically just gonna redefine the value of the column count variable to two on click, right? So I’m setting the attribute style, column count is gonna be two, and then I’m targeting the events grid main with that selector, with that logic, okay?

So if we inspect this, and you just, here’s events grid main right here, okay? Let me scroll down here.

See it highlighted? That’s events grid main.

Notice it has no inline style tag on it. It’s getting its grid instruction from right here.

Repeat column count one. Look at column count as grayed out because column count, again, has no value, but the one is the default is picking it up and it’s making a one column grid properly, okay?

Now watch what happens to this HTML right here when I click this button. See how it now magically has a style tag of the variable column count being redefined to a value of two?

And it puts it right here in the element style. And now the grid renders as a two-column grid because it’s been changed.

Now when I click this one, this one does the same exact logic, but it just changes the value of column count back to one. And they just go back and forth.

They just change from one to two, one to two, one to two, one to two. And then a container query is responsible for monitoring the size of the container that this card is in.

And when the size of that container is below a certain value, I think it’s 640 pixels in this case, it switches the card from a grid layout to a flex column layout. And that’s pretty much it.

1:41:09 And again, I do that step-by-step in the tutorial.

1:41:11 Like I walk you through every single piece of building that from scratch.

But yeah, you don’t need, this is not facets, you don’t need, this is vanilla bricks out of the box. You don’t even have to write any JavaScript, which is fantastic.

All right guys, I got a hard stop, I’m out. Thank you for being here today.

This was a fantastic WDD Live to get back to after a couple weeks of being off. fantastic WDD live to get back to after a couple weeks of being off.

I’m here every single Wednesday at 11 a. m.Eastern if you want to know You know all the things about making a successful website first critiquing other sites and then doing Q&A and AMA

This is the place to be love you guys.

I am out

peace