WDD LIVE 037: Web Design Critique + How-To / Q&A / AMA

Hello, hello, hello, everybody. Welcome back.

It is another Wednesday time for WDD live. Today we’re going to find out who the real OGs are, right? It’s I did not send out any email notifications.

I posted the event earlier this morning. So yeah, not a lot of heads up on this one, but real OGs, right? The WDD OG, they know it’s 11 a.

m. On Wednesday every Wednesday So we’re gonna see who is here Rob is here Manny’s here Peter Wilco William d123 Derek is here striped goat Sees, yes, so you’ve got a lot of familiar faces a lot of ogs in the house Josh is here SK is here from Singapore Awesome as Justin says who needs email notifications? Not the ogs.

That’s who All right, let’s see film genius is here finally made it to a live. Well, we are glad to have you film genius Calisthenics Ireland is here Maddy is here Welcome. Welcome.

Welcome everybody Donna toss Darwin Andreas here Suzanne Ryan from South Africa Awesome. Awesome. Awesome.

I’ll tell you guys I’ve been man Awesome, awesome. I’ll tell you guys, I’ve been, man, softball, softball coaching, it takes some time. It takes some time out.

Yeah, we’ve had a string of, so last week, just to let you guys know, because this is, you know, my schedule’s already kind of full, okay? 0:01:33 Practice on Tuesday.

0:01:34 Practices are an hour and a half long and then of course you know there’s 30 minutes of drive time and stuff like that so two hours we had practice on Tuesday practice on Wednesday practice on Thursday getting ready for a string of games that were coming up on well it was really going to be Saturday and Sunday were the games but then we had a game rained out the week before that just popped back up on the schedule for Friday, they put that back in and they were like, nah, you got a game on Friday too. So we had a game on Friday, a game on Saturday, a game on Sunday, and then one day off, we had like six straight days of softball, and then one day off and then a game again last night.

So I didn’t get home last night till 10 o’clock, went to bed at like one. Man, I’m tired. It’s a lot now.

Thankfully thankfully We’re five wins in a row plus a tie right five and the tie gets me guys I got to tell you that the tie gets me it was it was the Sunday night game We had just won four in a row. Okay, we’re playing our fifth game. We got a shot for a five wins in a row Let’s be honest we didn’t we didn’t play our best game.

It ends up 6-6, OK? Now, they give the coaches the option, do you want to break the tie or do you want to go home? Of course you know what I said.

You know what I said, right? I went over there, we’re breaking the tie. Let’s go.

Let’s go. We got another inning. Let’s play.

Other coach didn’t want to break the tie. They didn’t want the smoke, okay. They decided to go home and pack it in, right.

So we had to end on a tie. I don’t get it. I don’t understand it.

Number one, even if you’re not competitive, it’s another inning that your players get to develop their skills and get more experience. I mean, get your players more experience. Who cares if you’re worried about winning, losing, whatever.

It doesn’t matter. Get your players more experience, but they didn’t want to break the tie. So here we are.

I’m just tired. That’s all I’m trying to say. I’m a little tired.

All right, we’re going to get right into it today. We’ve got a review of a website. We’ve got a, after that, it’s going to be an open call for, hey, do you have any, like, I mean, you can do Q&A.

You can ask questions, but do you have any calls for, like, how do I do XYZ? You know, if you’ve got, and that can’t be some crazy thing, requires all this JavaScript and all this, but if you’ve got like, just, hey, I don’t really know how to approach this. I don’t know how to tackle this.

If it’s workable, then I’ll open up a little dev environment and we’ll work through it together. So you’ll have an option to do that today. Or if you just have general questions, you can ask your general questions.

We’ll be here. Maybe, I’ve got a lot of stuff to catch up on today. Definitely like an hour to 90 minutes.

If we’re on fire and we’re on a roll, we can go the full two hours, okay? SK says, great videos this week for the video you made for the Zendesk site. Can’t we use animation fill mode to make it stay at last frame when it moves to the next slider?

Good question, good question, I will check on that. I’ve got another plan for how to approach it as well. But the next video in the series is moving on to the header.

So I’ll be doing the main navigation and that little top navigation. We’ll be handling the stickiness of the header, all that kind of stuff will be in the next episode. And then I’m gonna revisit all the other stuff that we’ve left.

So if you’re noticing, the way I like to work typically is I get big chunks of the simple things done, all the low hanging fruit, and then I come back and cross the Ts and dot the Is later. And so the next piece of, the next big chunk that needs to happen is that whole header situation. So we’re gonna get that done and then we’ll come back and revisit everything.

All right, let’s see here. 0:05:37 Okay.

0:05:38 Uh-huh, I’m just checking on chat real quick. 0:05:40

Okay, alright, well let’s go ahead and get into it. 0:05:42 Let’s go ahead and share this first website.

This is AMAdvance Group, and we’re gonna do our no scroll test to start out with. DeHunze, welcome, welcome to the stream. It says, designing perfect spaces for you.

All right, so I’m a little confused right off the bat. I’ll just let you know. Designing perfect spaces for you, to me, is like interior designer, but what I’m seeing in the photo is construction.

So there’s just a little bit of a question of what exactly is going on here. My point is it’s not immediately clear, right? Is this a builder?

Is this an interior designer? Is this, what exactly is going on here? I’m recognizing that this is a slider situation happening.

We all know how much of a fan I’m not of hero sliders. 0:06:40 And in this slider,

0:06:42 it’s really just giving us different images, which also, by the way, don’t answer the question that I just had in my mind. I mean, it’s, I guess, all right, it’s cool.

As far as a slider goes, this is probably the best way to implement it because it doesn’t slide content out of the way, right? I’m not forced to try to digest quickly multiple narratives that are coming at me. The main narrative is staying right there, and this is just really sliding through the images.

So it’s a simple kind of slider situation. I just don’t think we’ve done a very good job of making all of this abundantly clear. Oh gosh, what is this?

I was going to select this text and I don’t think that’s text. Is this an image? No, it’s not an image.

Can’t be an image. An RS layer. What are we doing here?

What is going? Okay, it’s a slider. What is in this slot?

Okay. This is super interesting. What builder is this even?

X div, X masthead, banner, where are we right now? Where are we? I’m just, is this what the X theme does?

I’ve never looked at the X theme, but I know there is an X theme. Is that what this does right here? Does it put X in front of everything?

Built with, let’s see. What we got here? Bakery, WP Bakery, hmm.

Slider revolution, man, this is like a blast from the past. Revolution slider, okay, the builder is pro, pro. Is that from, is that Cornerstone?

What is that, Manny? All right, this is Manny’s website. Is this Cornerstone?

What what what I? Know the builder is not just called pro right who’s it from? Answer that question when you get a chance All right, let’s keep going see what learn more does our services all right, okay?

Yes pro used to be X theme at some point got it okay? All right, I assume it’s like a page builder, right? Yeah, okay, it’s Cornerstone.

Oh, it’s all the same thing. All right, Cornerstone X Pro. All right, they got an identity crisis, it sounds like.

All right, let’s go ahead and start to scroll down. Welcome, let our construction specialist bring your renovation dream to life. So if this is a construction, I’m not sure that designing perfect spaces is the best hero to go with here, but I’m also, the reason I was inspecting this is, I guess Manny, you’re missing, do you have an H1 on this page?

Hmm. 0:09:21 Let’s go ahead and look here.

0:09:23 Wait, where is my, here we go. 0:09:25

Here we go, okay. Let’s just take a look here. Banner, list, link, link, main, article, generic, generic, generic, generic, generic.

main article generic generic generic generic generic static text static text static test generic generic not a lot of we as we see like we finally get okay we finally get to a heading right here and that is an h2 so Manny I don’t do you have an h1 on this page Manny that’s my question for you because I am I’m not seeing one but here’s where you see a lot of divception involved, right, lots of divs, right? Lots of, you know, not semantic stuff happening here. So we’re definitely, we can improve the semantic value of this page, for sure.

All right, let’s get out of there for a second. Okay, benefits, expertise and experience. As a general rule of copy, what am I going to say about this right here?

Everybody jump in the chat. What am I gonna say about this heading right here? Manny says, that was the last site I created before jumping into Bricks.

I have to revisit it soon. That’s why I want you to destroy it. Awesome.

Where are our original watchers, Ruben and Tyree? Hey, good question. Good question.

All right. 0:10:48 All right.

0:10:49 If you don’t, if you, if you’re new here, you know what, you don’t know what I’m going to say about this, but if you’re an OG, you probably know what I’m going to say about this. Everybody can say this, right?

Every, if, if everybody can say it, there’s no point in you saying it. We’ve got to say something unique and valuable. Yes.

There you go. So calisthenics Ireland nailed it. Too general of a heading.

You have an opportunity to be very general right here. This should say expertise and experience. Then you should put something big and bold and catching and draw people in with some great headline right here.

And then let’s let’s just read the copy together. The AM advanced construction and design team have years of experience transforming kitchens bathrooms commercial offices and entire homes. Okay a we, we, we, we, we, us, us, us first sentence.

Our aim is to create spaces that are customized according to our clients’ renovation goals that accurately reflect their personal aesthetic. We provide as little or as much design input as desired for a truly collaborative remodeling solution. Whether you have specific ideas in mind or you’re looking for comprehensive renovation guidance, we build your ideas with expert precision.

We finished with a little bit of you, right? Whether you have specific ideas in mind or you’re looking for comprehensive renovation guidance, we build your ideas with expert precision. This is why this last sentence reads better than the originals, if you’re truly interested in the service, right?

We gotta get rid of the we, we, we, us, us, us talk. I got a little gallery over here, a little sticky situation happening. Okay, are these all individual images?

Let’s see what’s going on over on this side. X, oh my gosh, look at the deception. It’s just so hard to find what you’re looking, oh no.

Oh no, it’s a collage. Oh, where’s my sound? Is it not, oh, is it muted?

Hold on, hold on, hold on. No, not that one, there we go. 0:12:46

No, no, no, no, no, no, no. It’s been a while. 0:12:49

It’s been a while since he’s made his appearance. But yes, there we go. We gotta get rid of these.

This is the old school way to do image galleries like this. Okay, we need a little flex box, gritty situation going on here, right? Not a single image that is a fake collage.

All right, let’s scroll down. Style and function, impeccable aesthetics without sacrificing practicality. This is a better headline.

I do tend to like write for fifth graders though, like impeccable aesthetics. These are big words, these are big words, right? Sacrificing practicality, I mean this is just big word, big word, big word, big word.

Copy tends to be better when it’s dumbed down, when it’s just super obvious and blunt and like a fifth grader can understand it that’s better copy typically but this is better than just being like style and function and that’s it that’s all you had to say okay residential remodeling commercial remodeling impact windows and doors okay so we can tab navigate we haven’t even looked at accessibility yet I’m just gonna guess right off the bat that this I’ll just go back up here just to check this real quick I’m just gonna guess that this is not accessible. So let’s go tab tab tab tab tab tab and We’re lost no idea where we’re at. Oh, we’re on the services link.

I don’t even know where that is Now we’re on the about link. There was a hidden link in there somewhere. All right.

So tab navigation, we are at a loss. Okay, why don’t we take a pause in general chat? What I mean, obviously, the UI situation going on here is is good.

I think we would all agree on that right UI situation is good. Like we look at a website and go, Hey, hey, hey, it’s a pretty good looking website. Would everybody agree with that?

Put your thoughts in the chat. So what we’re looking at, we’re not gonna harp on UI stuff too much. We’re gonna go look at more technical details.

We’re gonna go look at things like the DOM. We’re gonna go look at things like accessibility. We’re gonna go look at things like, is there an H1 tag?

Where’s the H1 tag? We’re gonna look at a lot of the other important stuff. So if you’re new here, if it’s your first time, this is what we do on Web Design for Domies.

It’s not just like a, ooh, how beautiful is the site? Okay, let’s move on, kind of a beautiful site. Yeah, so Justin says, visually, the website is great, good-looking website.

And this is what we want to understand is the distinction between like, hey, we’ve got true, you know, student of the craft versus just a good assembler of a website. So I don’t know if Manny is the UI designer for this site or if he just built from an existing design. Maybe Manny can speak to this.

Manny, do you have a design background and you’re coming into dev? Or did you have another designer work on this and now you’re building it out? What is the situation here?

It would be nice to know a little bit of the background on that. But we have visually a great looking website and what we have to do now is say, were the other Ts crossed, were the other dies dotted, have we accounted for all the things we need to account for as professionals? Not just arriving at a good looking site, but everything else is taken care of under the hood.

So Manny says he did everything, design and dev. Okay. All right.

So residential remodeling. Notice that we just did a video on cards, right? These entire things are links, not the entire card.

So the image is not part of it, but the heading and the text are part of the link. I prefer to see just the heading as the link. Find out how we can spruce up your space, contact us.

Okay. I want to go to the services page. I feel like this feels like one of those pages that I’m interested to see what an individual service page looks like but I feel like the UI dropped off a little bit from the homepage, right?

We did a bunch of creative things on the homepage, right? Fairly creative stuff. And then we got to this page and it just kind of feels like we phoned it in a little bit on this page.

It’s like, all right, here’s some cards, they flip flop. They’re all different dimensions, like this one’s skinny, this one’s very tall, and it’s all really based on the amount of content, which I feel like the content in here is too big right and unfortunately I mean look at what these builders do guys look at this I mean what where’s my where’s my oh gosh where’s my zoom no it’s not there we go I mean top right bottom left wait wait it’s just like wow okay a lot going on here. I’m trying to figure out why, why, okay, there’s bottom margin on everything.

All right. So font size is in M’s. Hmm.

0:18:09 One M got real small, didn’t it? 0:18:11

Okay, I would say somewhere in there is probably where we, oh gosh, I just clicked something on accident. Oh God. Okay.

Well, you saw it for, wow, what is going on? Oh, the entire card is clickable. See here I was thinking it’s just it’s just the read more button but the entire card the entire card is clickable now the question is is the entire card a link?

This is cornerstone Rubin or X theme or pro theme it has an identity crisis apparently. Let’s see so we’re gonna inspect this and ah a a a a a so the whole thing everything in it. Well, let’s just do a little listen then.

0:18:55 VoiceOver on Chrome. Entering services, AM advanced group web content.

Visited link heading level two. Residential remodeling is your family growing? Does your existing space not feel as comfortable as it should?

Let our experienced contractors redesign your kitchen, bathroom, garage, or upgrade individual elements such as roofing, fences, windows, and doors. We are trailblazers in the home improvement industry and no job is too big or too small. Read more image, article.

You are current voiceover off. 0:19:21 Man, I hope people who have to keyboard navigate this have cleared their schedule, okay?

Because it’s gonna be a while. It’s gonna be a while to get through all these services. Yeah, so this is why we don’t wanna link the entire card, right, because it’s just, man, it’s a really, really bad experience for people with assistive technology All right, so we’re gonna go down here.

Let’s let’s take a look an individual service page Residential remodeling It’s an h1 Okay got our h1 in here It’s your family growing? Does your existing space not feel as comfortable? Then we go back to us, okay?

But redesign your kitchen. All right? Now, you could drop this off right here.

Like, we are trailblazers in the home improvement industry and no job is too big or too small. Okay, like everybody’s gonna say that. Again, it’s like, you could make your copy more efficient here by dropping this off.

0:20:27 What we can do. 0:20:29

Uh oh. 0:20:29 All right.

We’re a leading construction company. 0:20:31 We’ve worked.

0:20:32 We, oh, we went right back to we, we, we, we, we, us, us, us, us, us. Wait a minute here.

Okay. Residential remodeling. So this is like a catch all.

0:20:39 Hmm. 0:20:40

Okay. 0:20:40 Nice little photo gallery here.

Oh no. Oh no. So for a service like this like I need details I need like I need to see up close and personal I can’t touch it and feel it you’ve got to show me a really really good Rendition of it.

Why can’t I click on these? I’m just forced to look at little thumbnails right now You know that meme with grandma with her glasses like she’s staring at the screen trying to figure that’s what she’s doing right now okay you got poor grandma squinting okay not being able to see the details of the of the work that’s being done here and these look like beautiful little renovations I really wish I want nothing more than to pull this up full screen right now and see a really high-res version of all of Anybody agree with that? I think we probably all agree with that.

All right. What’s it look like to schedule a consultation? So let’s go through contact, drop us a line.

That image took a minute to load. Okay. Pretty standard.

Pretty standard. No big issues there. Is that WS form?

Looks like it might be, I don’t know. 0:22:05 No.

Do they have their own form? 0:22:09 They must, I wonder if they have their own form.

Oh, formidable. It’s a formidable form. Okay.

Agree, yep. 0:22:17 Okay, yes.

0:22:18 At first glance, mobile looks okay. We can take a look at mobile in just a second.

Regarding the photos, that’s what the gallery is for. Oh, yes, right here. This would be a really, really good time to talk about this, a perfect time to bring this up.

This, guys, is the old school way, right here, both of these links is the old school way of web design. You create a gallery page so that we can see all the work that’s done and there’s the gallery and yada yada yada FAQs is the same. Hey guys, here’s all our FAQs.

Why don’t you just you know again clear off your calendar and Just start going through and see if you can find the questions that pertain to you Good luck, right and I’ve been this is not terribly long, but I’ve seen them longer and longer and longer. But guys, in modern web design, what I would say is these two pages don’t need to exist and probably shouldn’t exist, okay? What we’re asking people to do, when I go to the services page and I say, I am interested in residential remodeling, click on that.

I just raised my hand and said, hey, I vote for that. I wanna learn about that, okay? So I’m doing everything with residential remodeling and I get down here there needs to be a residential Remodeling gallery.

This is the whole point of building a dynamic website that we have everything organized. We have a nice Architecture behind the scenes we’re using query loops. We’re using bidirectional relationships Why are we doing that so that when we know somebody is interested in residential remodeling on the residential remodeling page, we can show them photos that are categorized as residential remodeling.

And then we can show them FAQs that are categorized as residential remodeling. And I don’t know if this was done with a query loop and a CPT situation, but it should be, right? But here’s the thing, if it’s like, well, look, this gallery is just, you know, it’s not really designed for you to see the projects.

What we want you to do is, by the way, the navigation is not even there, okay? So I have to remember somehow, some way, that there’s a gallery page, or just maybe go off wandering around looking for one. It’s not a good experience to be like, oh, no, no, no, no, if you want to see those, you got to go somewhere else.

You got to go up here, you got to click on this. But then, and then the problem we see here is when I arrive here, what are these projects? I don’t, there’s no categorization, there’s no faceting, there’s no nothing.

It would be much better if this interactive gallery was on the page I already raised my hand for. I raised my hand for this one, put the gallery right here so it’s front and center so I don’t have to go anywhere else to interact with it. And then same thing with the FAQs, those should be all query looped based on either bi-directional relationships or another taxonomy something else.

Okay I think that’s a really really really great UX improvement. You can keep these pages if you want to but don’t force people to go there. Ground Pet says is that someone’s site in the chat?

Yes it’s Manny’s website. Services is a CPT, that services page is a loop. Every service page is also a template with custom fields and conditions.

The site uses query loops and bi-directional relationships. Good, excellent. So the only adjustment we have to make is this should be an interactive gallery so that we don’t have to leave the page and go somewhere else to interact with the images.

Everything else is good. Good, good, good, good, good. 0:26:00

Okay. 0:26:01 All right.

So basically every service page is going to be more or less the same, which means it’s built by the same template. It’s going to have all the same downsides, unfortunately. See?

0:26:17 Okay. All right.

About. . .

Alright, about. . .

See, yeah, visually, I mean, this is all decent. 0:26:28 Someone says alt tags.

Peter Williams, alt tags. Ooh, oof. Oh no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

0:26:36 Mm. 0:26:36

Alt equals image. Alright, got some work to do. 0:26:40

Alt equals image. 0:26:42 All right, got some work to do.

Got some work to do. 0:26:45 All right.

0:26:47 Okay. Mr.

Mendez services commercial remodeling. Yeah, I kind of like these. H6.

Oh, oh, let’s see 0:27:16 Yeah, okay, so let’s check this out we’ve got this is an h2 oh

0:27:20 Oh, hold on. Whoa, hold on.

Hold on. Hold on. What’s this?

Okay, that’s a paragraph. So this is a section heading. Do we even have sections on this site?

Oh gosh, hold on. Hold hold the phone. Hold the phone.

We got an article, div entry content, another content wrapper, and then it’s just div, div, div, div, div. No semantic sections. Guys, this I’ll just say this is why the page builder matters, okay?

And you know this whole, oh use whatever page builder you want, no, no, no, no, no, no. I don’t know anything about cornerstone or X or whatever, but I’m guessing they don’t have a section element right so we don’t have any semantic sections we got a lot of divs for sure though we’re not short on divs all right here’s this div I’m still in more divs before I get to anything this needs to be an h2 right here I’m guessing you made it an h4 just no it’s it’s it’s the same size regardless of what I put it so it’s just has the wrong tag so that’s H2 these should be H3s instead we have like H5s happening here oh H6s okay a lot to clean up on the semantic on the semantic side of things Manny he said he wanted me to tear it apart, I mean. Yeah, no, Ruben, I checked that.

Ruben said he’s using the Hs for styling, but he’s not, he’s not, that’s the thing, right? Okay, here’s Manny’s got a question. What is the difference between alt tag and title for the images?

Okay, so the alt tag describes what’s happening in the image and there’s a lot of debate on like how descriptive should you be. Remember that assistive technology announces this. So it’s a situation again where we don’t want to write a novel.

It’s not like we just need to make sure people know what the image is about. So if we were going to write an example alt tag for this, we would say something like am team and I don’t even know what is it just called am that’s so advanced group. Okay, so I maybe say like advanced group team photo Really I mean you could be like in front of in front of their truck or whatever But that’s starting to get a little too descriptive Advanced group team photo isn’t that enough to describe like what’s going on right here?

So that I would say is good. This one, you could be something like advance group team members planning a project. You could put, you could throw some key words in here, right?

Planning a construction project. So, and I spelled it advance wrong, but you get the point, right? So look, it’s team members planning a construction project.

We’re not planning a construction project. We’re just trying to describe what’s going on in the photo. And yeah, Peter Williams says, you want people doing image searches on your services to pull up your stuff.

So, and if this was on the residential construction project page, what did you call it? Services, residential remodeling. Okay, let’s say we were on the residential remodeling page, right?

Advanced group team members planning a, what would this say? Residential remodeling project. So we’re able to kind of assist with the SEO keyword side of things, but we’re simultaneously truly describing what the image is about.

We’re not stuffing a bunch of nonsense in there. We are giving a true description of the image, but we have an opportunity sometimes to toss in a keyword or two, right, that goes with the page. So that’s really what you should be focusing on with these alt tags.

Okay, I think we’ve done all the most important parts. I think somebody said earlier, yeah, in terms of like SEO, there’s a huge opportunity here to do case studies. So like every project in every key area and then of course you know we can ask what’s missing.

Well the most important thing possible is missing from this website and that is a service area it’s a network of service area pages. So we have a we have contact info I don’t see any like areas we serve or anything like that. Guys for a local business like this number one it’s the most important part of the website.

Number two, it’s an opportunity for you to make a lot more money, a lot more money. And I will just say this, this is where the inner circle just pays for itself by a thousand X, right? You go into the inner circle, you go do the SEO trainings, you go do the service area network trainings, specifically if you’re working with local businesses like this.

And it’s a whole nother aspect, a whole nother sub-project of these websites that you can bill for and work on, and it’s gonna bring your clients a lot of great results, and it’s gonna bring you that extra revenue. And by the way, when your client gets results, it’s gonna bring you extra testimonials and extra happy people and extra referrals. It’s just a really, really, really good situation.

So anytime I look at a local business I immediately first thing I say is do they have a network of service area pages? No, they don’t okay That’s a huge missing piece of the puzzle that we’re gonna immediately work to sell them on And then the second aspect of this which helps with the local SEO is The case study side of things so you are in I don’t know Hialeah, Florida. I don’t know.

I don’t think I’ve ever heard of Hialeah, Florida. And I’ve spent a lot of time in Florida. Okay, downside.

Yeah, I don’t normally go on the Miami side of things. All right. But you’ve got, I mean, let’s say you do, you know, five different projects in Miami.

And so you do a case study for every Miami project and you name them as such, right? Residential, what do they call it again? Dude, my short-term memory, it is literally like a floppy disk, dude.

It’s like 6KB of storage. Residential remodeling, okay. So residential remodeling project in South Miami.

Residential remodeling project for XYZ in XYZ neighborhood in Miami, Florida. And you’re actually naming these like Alipada or whatever, Little Havana, right? So residential remodeling project in Little Havana, Miami.

Okay, and so you’re creating this network of case studies that now have all of these keywords for these specific areas. Those go hand in hand with your, let’s say you had a Miami service area page, right? So what I would do with these case studies is also bidirectionally relate them to the service area page that they most closely match.

So you go to a service area page, it’s all about residential remodeling in Miami, and now you have FAQs about residential remodeling in Miami, which may, by the way, go into detail on like what permits are required in Miami, what like everything local to that area and then case studies tied to Miami. All of the photos are from Miami projects. Everything is Miami, Miami, Miami.

And that’s for one area. And then we figure out, oh, there’s this other area that we wanna dominate as well. Maybe we pick some of these surrounding areas to go after, like Pinecrest maybe is a thing.

Maybe that’s too far away from you, I don’t know. Maybe Miami Lakes or West Little River or Palm Springs North, right? We need a network of service area pages to dominate this local area right here.

This company is growing a lot lately, case studies are coming soon, we’re working on the information assets put up on the website. This company now has contracts all the way from the Keys up to Tampa. If you want to rank in Tampa, you have to have a service area page for Tampa, okay?

And so they need for all these key areas, they’re going to need, and this is why this is money. This is where a lot of money is made, all right, on these kinds of websites where we went suddenly from, alright, we got a nine-page brochure website to we’ve got a 70-page behemoth of a website that’s absolutely dominating the state of Florida. That’s a huge difference.

Huge difference in scope, in the revenue that you’re gonna make, in the results that you’re gonna get for your clients. Their growth potential hinges on your ability. Now I know they’re probably getting lots of referral business, they’re getting lots of, what we wanna do is do our job on the web side of things, on the digital side of things so well that they’re absolutely drowning in leads, which gives them the ability to be like, hey, do we wanna stay where we’re at and just maybe have a waiting list or turn down?

Here’s the thing, this is very important to talk about because I have these conversations all the time with clients. And what I’ll say is, look, you’re gonna get to a point where you’re drowning in leads, okay? And I wanna know what you’re thinking about when that situation happens.

And they’ll be like, oh, well, here’s the thing, you know, we don’t really need any more leads. And I’m like, well, hold on. Time out, time out.

What do you mean we don’t need it? Well, we got enough work, we gotta wait. And I’ll be like, okay, what about that project you did last week that was a $5,000 project?

You know, I’ve noticed some of your projects are $25,000, $15,000, $30,000, right? What was that project you did for $5,000 last week? Oh, we came in, we did that project.

But here’s the thing, if you have more leads, you now get to pick and choose. Now you can suddenly say, oh, we don’t want or need the $5,000 projects. We’ve got a whole bucket of leads being piled on us.

Let’s only take the best projects, the highest revenue projects, or the highest margin projects. So even if you don’t want more work, like you don’t wanna scale, hey, we don’t wanna add a truck right now. Hey, we don’t wanna add more people right now.

Hey, perfectly fine, you still need more leads. Why? Because you still want only the best projects.

And so it’s not even a situation of, oh, well, we’re forced to scale. You’re not forced to scale, but you have the option of taking way better projects. You don’t need the smaller projects now.

And then if it is a situation where you want to scale, then you can scale. It’s completely up to you. Or you can do both.

You can do a little bit of both. We’ll just get rid of some lower end projects, so we’ll only take some higher projects, and we’ll add a truck, right? So more leads, you always want more leads.

Don’t ever let your client tell you, we don’t need more leads. You do need more leads, whether you wanna scale or not. All right, I have a client in Arkansas, a roofing company, and I’m getting him about 100 leads a month.

It’s a two-man team, and like Kevin is talking about, they are picking the best ones. Yes, so if they’re not ready to scale, they can always just have better projects, right? And they can get rid of the, same thing, think of you as a web designer.

What if you had more leads to the point where you don’t want to add more team members, you don’t want to take on more projects or a higher workload, but wouldn’t it be nice to be working on a $20,000 project instead of a $4,500 project? I think so. That only happens if you have the opportunities.

My I was being expressive with my hands and my hand hit a random button to make some noise. Okay. I’m glad we got that out of the way.

I think that’s so important. I’ve witnessed marketers just accept that from their client. Be like, oh, okay.

Well, you’re saying you don’t want more leads. 0:39:30 I don’t want to get you more leads.

0:39:31 Right. 0:39:31

And then it’s like, well, why am I even here? What are we doing? What are we doing?

I’m not the brochure guy. I don’t build brochures. I mean, why are we having this conversation?

If you just want a brochure, I can get you somebody who builds brochures. I don’t do that. I build businesses, right?

I don’t build brochures. So maybe there’s a little confusion here. We can get you over to the right department, right?

Yeah, don’t let clients tell you that. That’s absolute nonsense. And it’s why I say also, find clients that actually have a vision, you know, and actually want like bigger things in life.

If you are serving clients who just want brochures and don’t really wanna do much, they’re wasting your time as well. Because the clients who wanna do things and wanna grow and wanna dominate, guess what? They’re gonna come back to you over and over and over again.

Hey, what’s next, what’s next, what’s next? Tell me what’s next, we’re ready to do it. I got money, tell me what’s next.

That’s the client you want. You don’t want a client that’s like, thank you for that beautiful brochure you made, we’ll contact you again in a couple years and maybe get it updated, okay? Like, that’s not the person that’s gonna grow your agency.

That person’s doing you no good whatsoever. Maybe you paid a bill, okay, with their project right now, but they have got nothing for you in the future. That is not a client that you want to have on your roster.

Okay, let’s see, let’s see, let’s see. I think we’ve done enough here. I think we’ve done enough like visually all the stuff.

We’ve talked about all the important things. You know, Manny wanted this one dismantled a bit. It sounds like he’s probably gonna end up rebuilding it, potentially in bricks.

So that’ll be a good thing. Yeah, man, if you want help on the service area, SEO side of things, the good thing about the Inner Circle, too, is you do the trainings, and then it’s like, hey, but I got questions. Like, I need this or that, or this company’s unique in this way, or whatever.

Or a lot of times, it’s just, hey, I’m new to this SEO thing, here’s the keywords I feel like I should be going after. Can I get some other eyeballs on this? Can somebody else tell me, is this the right direction that we need to go in?

Because I get it you don’t want to fail a company like this. You don’t want to build a network of service area pages and spend all that time and money and then realize I did that wrong. I got the architecture wrong.

I got the keyword targeting wrong. I got the page content wrong. So you need people to be like hey this is the direction I think we should go.

Is this correct? Can somebody jump in and put eyes on this and let me know that I’m on the right track. So very, very, very important for both regards.

It’s not just education and watching trainings. It’s the community of people that are there and able to help you with your stuff. Okay, do you keep a running notes while you build a site to know which one to come back to and tweak?

Just wondering since you build the easy parts first and I feel like I’ll end up forgetting something. I mean, I have a running checklist in my head, obviously, but we’re also typically working as a team. And so what the answer is, we have a final checklist.

You know, it’s like, if you watch, you know, I don’t think I could ever, I don’t know if I could work up the courage to do it. Like in my mind, I would love to be, I would love to have a private pilot’s license, right? In my mind.

It’s like a super fun thing to me. And, you know, I could absolutely do it. I’m also terrified of it.

And so I don’t know if I’ll end up doing it. But because it’s like me and another life, I watch a lot of private pilot videos. Like I love, you know, there’s a lot and there’s some ones that film fantastic.

And you see, you know, what they see when they’re up in the plane and they’re going over the Grand Canyon and these other places. It looks super fun, absolutely super fun. Anyway, my point is, if you watch their videos, what you’ll see is before takeoff, because flying a plane is quite important.

You only typically get one shot at it, right? If you screw something up, it’s done, right? So what they do before takeoff is they have this giant checklist and literally they are anal.

They are anal about going through the checklist and it’s like, did we do this? Did we do this? Did we do this?

Is this ready? Is this checked? Is this checked?

That’s kind of what you need for your websites, for your agency. You need a pre-flight checklist, okay? And so I’m not worried about T’s that aren’t getting crossed necessarily as I’m progressing through a site or I’s that are not getting dotted because I know there’s a pre-flight checklist that we’re going to go through and we’re going to button all of those things up.

We’re going to do browser tests. We’re going to do as much as we possibly can to ensure that all of that stuff is accounted for. So I don’t really have to remember it as I go.

I know that there’s going to be other eyes on this project and we have a pre-flight checklist that works really well and we’re going to get it done. So that’s the answer to that question. Let’s see, when you use Logo Ipsum in a frame is the whole file an SVG or is the text part actual text?

When you use Logo Ipsum, oh, Logo Ipsum, it’s just literally an SVG, it’s just this site right here. You can go, you can, you know, any kind of logo look that you want to go for. There’s a bunch of logo ipsums to choose from.

It’s just a placeholder. It’s just an SVG. That’s all it is.

Any updates on frames for Figma? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, let me show you.

Thanks for teeing that up, my friends. Thanks for teeing that up. Where is the video?

Hold on. I just got a video sent to me. Let me look.

I’m gonna bring this over here. I don’t want y’all looking through every conversation. Let’s see.

Let me see if I can find, there was a sneak peek that I just, okay, here it is. I found it, I found it. We’re good.

Okay, there’s no audio. 0:45:26 I don’t think.

0:45:28 Good, good, good, good. 0:45:29

Okay, guys, here’s the thing. Tommy sent me this video, a little sneak peek action. Let’s see, let me get it to the right spot.

And I know you guys can’t see this, so just chill out for a second. Okay, this is fine right here. All right, let me just tell you guys, let me go back to chat.

I gotta be able to see my chat while I’m talking. Okay, so for the people that bought into frames for Figma, and this is the same situation that’s happening now with people who bought into frames. And there’s a lot of people, the thing that I hate hearing the most is like, oh, you know, I decided to wait, and then the LTD went away, and just pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty, please, can I get one?

And it’s like, dog, you should’ve known. You should’ve known that great things were going to come. Like, I’ve tried to just make it clear that like you buy into an initial concept and I get it, I get it.

I mean you’ve bought a lot of things in the past that just went straight downhill or went nowhere. But you should know by now that that’s not what happens in the automatic CSS slash frames ecosystem. You should just know that by now.

And I’ll tell you when I brought Tommy on board, I did the deal with Tommy because I recognized talent, okay? You can recognize talent, right? But what you never really know until you get started on something is things like work ethic and attention to detail and going the extra mile.

Obviously, these are all things we want and it’s just something you just gotta, oh well, I hope he does. And with Tommy, it’s a situation where he’s always going the extra mile. There’s always the attention to detail.

It’s way better than I ever could have hoped and imagined. And so, for people who bought into Frames for Figma, I mean, you’re gonna be getting things that, and I’m not even, the thing I’m showing you right now is not even close to one of the other features that’s coming to Frames for Figma. There’s an entire form builder coming to frame like you can literally build a custom form inside of Figma with what Tommy has produced.

But I want to show you this right here. Okay, so we’ve got sliders in frames, right? You can add sliders to a frame.

But the challenge is how do we replicate that in a UI design tool, how do we replicate that in a prototype situation, and I get it, if you’re doing $2,500 website projects, you have no idea why a prototype would even be necessary. But for those of us who work on $30,000 projects, $50,000 projects, $75,000 projects, where there are multiple decision makers, you ain’t catching me dead in a dev environment. 100% I’m prototyping this out.

100% I’m wireframing this. We’re not, until people have made their mind, until Bev and Fred and Becky have all done their little arguments back and forth and changed all their pet shit, I’m not doing anything in dev. We’re doing all this in prototype land.

So what we need is a way to, let me full screen this here, what we need is a way to prototype all this stuff. And these are challenging things to do in something like Figma. But then Tommy comes along, and Tommy’s like, well, I’ll just make a slider for you in Figma.

And you can actually use the slider in Figma. So there’s a little sneak peek that he sent me, where you can change the number of slides. Look, you’ve got the navigation down here, changing as the number of slides are chosen.

So you can choose the number of slides, the active slides, the animation, the visible slides. Hey, we got two visible slides, we got three visible slides. How many visible slides do you want?

You know, you can do a lot with this. And this is just, this is like the prototype. This is like an alpha of this.

Does it auto play? Does it auto scroll? And watch, I mean, when we take this into the prototype environment and see it actually working?

Imagine being able to send this to a client and this is guys this is hours and hours of work that you would have to spend in Figma to do this. So here he’s playing into the prototype and so now this is actually going to demonstrate the working slider with the working navigation bullets you know everything going. I mean none of this was advertised okay none of this we didn’t say this was coming.

We didn’t say, oh yeah, there’s gonna be this and there’s gonna be this. This is like this Christmas morning. I mean, you just go down and there’s presents under the tree.

We didn’t promise any of this, but yet it’s being delivered. This is the kind of stuff that’s being worked on in frames for Figma right now. And I’m gonna, again, if you wanna impress clients, if you want to really nail things before it goes into dev, before all the.

. . the back and forth needs to happen in a tool like Figma.

It doesn’t need to happen in a dev environment. Look, it’s auto-playing. It’s auto-playing.

Right? In Figma, this is really, really, really fantastic stuff. So, you know, frames for Figma users really got a gold mine here.

Let me go back to, all right, let me go back to chat. How much will the LTD be on Black Friday? I don’t know that there, we may not be an LTD.

I mean there will be an offer the next time it is released, but it may not be an LTD. That ship may have sailed. Which is why I would say don’t let the ships sail.

In the frames and automatic CSS ecosystem, you do, there’s gonna be more coming, okay? There’s gonna be another thing. There’s gonna be, I promise you, there’s gonna be another thing.

And you’re not gonna want the ship to sail. Do not let the ship sail. 0:51:23

Okay. 0:51:24 Love the Figma logo inside the frames logo.

Thank you, that was Tommy. All right. Please explain how the sticky scroll and automatic header spacing in ACSS, how to adjust the variables inside settings.

A client is insisting on a sticky header, so any help will be good. Okay, let’s go ahead and star that. We will definitely do that.

Here’s an easy one. Pixels, M or rim media queries? Well, I would go to YouTube.

I have a whole in PB 101. I go through every unit. Here’s how pixels work, here’s how inwards work, here’s how rims work, here’s how media queries work, here’s how clamps work.

I go through everything one by one and I say, use these in this situation, don’t use these in this situation. So that’s already answered in PB 101 in detail, so I would direct you to that. 0:52:20

Okay. 0:52:21 Good, good, good, good, good.

All right, we’re caught up. We’re caught up on questions. Let’s see.

I know you have an in-depth look at events inside the inner circle, but could you show how to list events only when they are active by start and end dates? Ah, that’s it. It’s 100% answered in the inner circle training.

It’s one of the key parts of that build. So I will just direct you there. Frames for Figma is invaluable.

I know you hate Mega Menu, but clients love it. Can you work your magic and do something good and ADA compliant with every T-cross and every I-dot? Well, Manny, this again, my nose is very itchy today.

So that is another thing that, again, we did not promise this for Frames users. So anybody that bought into Frames, we did not promise this. I guess I can go back to camera.

Oh God, dangerous. Oh, so dangerous. Please, please, I just, let me ingrain in my brain real quick.

Okay, we have got to screen share again. If I show something on the screen, we’ve got to screen share. All right, hopefully it’s there.

Hopefully I planted the seed. I planted the seed. We did not promise this for frames.

And we could, I mean, 100%. This is what we’re building. And this is not the thing I was talking about a minute ago We could we are building a mega menu builder as you probably know I’ve been quite vocal on the fact that I I just don’t like I don’t like the one that bricks built I don’t like the one they created.

I mean, it’s way better than nothing. It’s way better than not having it But I I think we can do a lot better and you know, I told Waji Waji is primarily working on this I told Waji, I was like, hey man, we could package this up as a separate thing. Because I look at the landscape of menu builders, absolute dumpster fire.

There isn’t a good one. There just is not a good one out there. Every one I see, I hate.

I hate all of them. And the ones in the builders aren’t really any better. And so we’re gonna start out by building this mega menu builder for bricks and it’s going to be put into bricks and if we nail it it may become its own product it may become its own product however frames users in bricks are going to be able to access it for free they’ll be able to keep it for free they’ll always have it that’s just the good parts of being a frames uh user right again we didn’t promise a mega menu builder but it’s coming and um it’s it’s going to be great.

Frames people are going to get it for free, but it may get packaged up because I see opportunity across the WordPress ecosystem that if we had a builder agnostic accessible menu builder, that’s actually easy to use and flexible and ties into the WordPress menu system. I mean, that would be absolutely phenomenal because it doesn’t exist. I haven’t found one.

Okay, just a little insight on where we might be headed there. Would you please show how to make the frame called footer foxtrot a fixed width and not full width? I think I did it correctly by adding a container.

I’ll star that, maybe we can. I mean, the answer is it’s not designed to be a fixed width footer, or like, I’m sorry, a content width footer. It’s designed to be a full width footer.

So if you take something It’s like you designed it to be this can we make it into this? Sometimes it’s a little hacky, right After the thin desk build will you offer sections as frames? Yes, most likely.

Yeah, I know a ton of people have asked for that multi slider thing as a frame. That’s gonna be a frame Okay, let’s see. I want to do the easy questions before we dive into Devland.

Can you show option one, best practices on building a results page template or option two, your approach on replicating the mobile version of HRBlocks. com? HRBlocks.

com? Like the tax company? Or HRBlocks.

com? Oh, it’s the same thing. Okay, same site.

Well, what are they doing on mobile that’s so special? Let’s see. I mean, I don’t see anything crazy going on here.

0:56:37 It’s just stacked content more or less. 0:56:40

I mean, did you have a specific question about a specific part of this? Did something catch your eye? It looks fairly standard.

Oh, well, here we go. Here we go again. Screen share, screen share, screen share.

It looks fairly standard. Why is that? Oh, wrong screen.

Sharing the right screen, sharing the screen, sharing the wrong screen. Okay, this is what we’re seeing. It’s just stacked content like that footer typical typical typical typical typical typical just stacked cards nothing nothing crazy here there’s a slider but I think that was a slider to start with yep that was a slider to start with okay so nothing crazy there is there anything in particular you’re looking at here because I don’t see anything, you know unique or standing out about this Standard little mobile menu there Okay Check the mobile menu the way it loads Oh the little animation?

I mean, it’s just animating links, right? See? Same thing.

It’s just animating links. If you go watch my, I might have, I think I did a little walkthrough of how I did it on the automatic CSS website. I think it was a WDD Live, I can’t remember what number it was, but it’s the ACSS website walkthrough.

Go watch that, go to the menu portion and I talk about how that is handled. All right, so hopefully that answers that question. I did click on the burger.

Manny. All right, have you checked CodeWP? Do you think that can somehow scale the game of building better Bricks websites with AI?

So I haven’t used it personally yet. I know James, hung out with James a ton at WordCamp, talked to James a bit about automatic CSS. So imagine this, imagine you go into CodeWP and you’re a new automatic CSS user.

And so you ask CodeWP some questions about automatic CSS, and it can just answer you. It can tell you what utility classes you’re supposed to use or what variables you’re supposed to use. It’s almost like instead of a cheat sheet, you can just talk to CodeWP and be like, hey, this is my situation, what do I need to do here?

And it tells you how to use automatic CSS to solve that situation. That’s absolutely possible with something like CodeWP. We can teach CodeWP all about the intricacies of automatic CSS.

So I’ve actually talked to James about doing something like that. Now, we’re just in talks right now, right? So good things may be coming on the horizon, but I’m not ready to fully answer the question right now.

But other than to say, you know, James is a great guy and I’m super interested in what he’s doing with CodeWP. Okay. Would you please show an example of a case study page?

1:00:09 What would be on it? 1:00:10

I assume the problem, the solution, 1:00:12 old, new website, screenshots, GT metrics, images.

Oh, you mean, are you talking about for an agency or are you talking about for the business we were just talking about, which is like a interior not an interior construction residential constitute my brain dude it’s like maybe it’s a softball I don’t know okay it’s probably just working working too much on too many different projects how can I ensure I don’t miss the announcement of the next ACS project by signing up for a newsletter, I’m not always logged into the inner circle. Well, you don’t have to be logged into the inner circle. The inner circle has the ability to send you notifications.

So you should probably have your notifications turned on. It will email you notifications of new posts. I would definitely do that.

Be on the email list though, for sure, right? Go to giri. co.

Go to giri. co. Gotta be in the right tab.

Let me get out of, yeah, let me get out of the browser over here, because I’m still thinking we’re in that window. All right, look at this. Join my list.

Hey, pop in your first name, pop in your email, hit send me emails. That is the absolute best way to get notified of anything and everything that goes on in anything and everything that I’m involved in, okay? So yeah, I would go do that immediately if you have not already done that.

ACSS is the goat of frameworks for WordPress. I appreciate that. I feel the same way.

Let’s see. I discovered the amazing content you provide for us when I just recently started using Oxygen, 1:01:51

moving over from Divi. 1:01:52 Do you have an Oxygen versus Bricks video?

I don’t have an oxygen vs Bricks video. You know, I got to give the facts, even though, you know, I like Elijah. I really do like Elijah and I really love oxygen.

I mean, I wanted, okay? Are you going to get the gist of this? I wanted nothing more than for Oxygen to be madly, wildly successful.

I wanted Oxygen to be as big as Elementor. I want Bricks to be as big as Elementor, bigger than Elementor. I mean, the sky’s the limit, right?

I wanted these things for both builders. And I think there’s room for both builders to be huge. I would love to see the Elementor market go in the absolute gutter or or or or let me back up let me you know it’s nothing against Elementor I just don’t like bad tools I would like nothing more than for Elementor to clean up their their act right like clean up your DOM clean up your accessibility add classes be a be a real builder be a real builder Elementor please I would like nothing more than that why because you’ve got a gazillion users and I would love nothing more than to make automatic CSS for Elementor.

But if Elementor is not gonna do that, then they need to go in the gutter. And I would like to see Oxygen and Bricks take their place. That would be absolutely fantastic.

I don’t need one builder to just be out there being amazing. Hey, let’s have a couple of builders to choose from, right? We can have a little bit of different workflow, a little, but right now the situation is, Bricks is light years beyond oxygen Oxygen has very little hope of catching up Quickly is is beyond oxygen.

I have quickly is my number two builder right now I’ve quickly is the number one builder for the Gutenberg ecosystem So we have bricks is the number one page builder for WordPress in general quickly is the number one page builder for the Gutenberg environment You know I Gutenberg environment. You know, I just oxygen is is lagging behind and it doesn’t I don’t see a I’ve said this from the beginning to you know, like, because people criticize me like you can’t say oxygen’s dead. I mean, I can I can say it, I did say it.

I’ve continued to say it. And I’ve tried to explain to people, maybe I see things that you don’t necessarily see. They take things literally.

When I say oxygen is dead, they’re like, no, it’s not, it’s right here, look at it, it’s right here. Dog, I’m talking about the future, okay? When I say it’s dead, I say might as well be dead.

That’s kind of how you need to read the statement. Might as well be, okay? And so where do we find us?

Well, we find us in a situation where their ecosystem still appears to be shrinking, which I hate. I absolutely hate that. But what I saw is you can’t have a second builder that cannibalizes all the features of the first builder and is built on a more modern framework and is marketed heavier and then still expect the other builder to survive somehow.

It just doesn’t make any sense. Not to mention it’s on LTV. Not to mention it’s not even funded anymore.

Not to mention that the person who built it said I already got all their money, I don’t care what they think. That was actually said, right, by the person who initially created oxygen. These things all add up to a dead builder.

I don’t know what else y’all want me to say. We can all gather around the fire and sing Kumbaya and just pretend that oxygen has a bright future, but I’m not in that business. I’m not in the business of pretending.

I saw this was the scenario that was obviously going to play out and it’s just continuing to play out. Now how long it is on life support before we have to pull the plug, that’s anybody’s guess. I don’t have to make a prediction on that, but it’s on life support and it doesn’t have a high chance of recovery.

The doctor already came in with the results, okay? It’s just now like how long before the family decides it’s time, right? That is the situation we’re in, and it sucks to say.

And it could hold on for a long time, right? But it ain’t going home, it ain’t going to the beach, it ain’t gonna live a fulfilling life from where it’s at right now, unless something drastic changes, like something drastic would need to happen. So I’ve told people, you know, they come in and they’re like, why don’t you keep making tutorials for oxygen in the inner circle?

I thought this was what the inner circle was about. No, the inner circle is about the fundamentals. The inner circle is about learning advanced new things.

The inner circle is about learning business. The inner circle is about SEO. The inner circle is about all these things, right?

It’s not about a specific builder. By the way, anything I teach in Bricks can be done in Oxygen for the most part. I mean, it’s like it’s a similar workflow.

You can’t do interactions, you can’t do, you know, the query loops of pain in the ass to work with in Oxygen versus Bricks. Like, there’s going to be a lot of headaches when you’re using Oxygen, but that’s your fault. I told you to stop.

I told you to move to Bricks. It’s the best builder. It’s just that’s the facts.

If you want to stay on oxygen, you can stay on oxygen, but you are with a builder that is on life support. That is just the facts. I hate saying that.

I hate that that is the reality, but I didn’t do it. It ain’t my fault. I didn’t make Breakdance.

I didn’t release Breakdance. I didn’t say the things on that live stream. I didn’t do those things.

All I can do is tell it like it is. Okay I apologize I’m so sorry I hate that I have to say it but that’s that’s just it is what it is okay. Let’s see here.

All right I’m just catching up on chat here. Did you finally review Greenshift? GreenShift, those guys are doing a really good job.

I have not reviewed it yet. I’m gonna do a first look video at GreenShift. I am impressed.

I’m impressed with a lot of the things that they’re doing. I think the classes area may be a little bit overengineered. Quickly did this too.

Quickly overengineered the classes section. But they’re taking, they’re open to input. They’re taking that input.

They’re developing things very quickly. A lot of the stuff they’re doing is very impressive. But I can’t really give a full opinion on it until I actually use it.

That’s kind of one of my boundaries is, I’m not gonna go off giving opinions on something that I’ve yet to really use. So I’m not gonna say anything else about GreenShift until I use it. 1:08:48

Okay, let’s see. 1:08:50 All right, we’re good.

Maybe we’ll go into a little tutorial mode. How are we doing on time? 1:08:56

Stop the alarm. 1:08:57 Okay, we got time.

We’ll finish up with this. There’s a couple of people, I favorited the questions. So please explain how to use the sticky, scroll, and automatic header spacing in ACSS.

Let me get this microphone out of my way for this. All right you guys should still be able to you should be able to hear me on the other mic now. If for some reason you can’t let me know but I don’t care.

All right, let’s go to Bricks October. Seems like a good site to use. Okay, good.

Everybody’s good on audio. Okay, so header heights. Well let’s go to Bricks templates.

It’s like we have a header template in here already. Blank. Okay, off to a good start.

All right, remote templates. Let’s refresh. Let’s just drop in any header.

So let’s go to headers. Let’s just drop in alpha. Save.

We’re going to go immediately up here. We’re going to go to template settings. We’re gonna go to header.

Let me see what version of bricks I have too because they fixed a bug recently in the header. Looks like I have the latest version. All right, let’s go do sticky header, sticky on scroll and scrolling background should be fine.

I think it’s see what we got here and we’re gonna need other content on the page to be able to scroll in the first place. Let’s go to pages. Let’s go to home.

Edit. Okay. Nothing better than a giant flower on your page.

Okay, so we have a sticky header right here. Let’s go into automatic CSS. And in fact, let’s, yeah, let’s review a couple things here.

Let’s just see if I can get refresh this. Refresh this. There we go.

Okay. I just had to switch branches real quick. Okay.

Header heights right here and then offset page. This is the section that we are going to be focused on right here. Where’s our home page?

Edit with Bricks. Okay. Oh you know what we need?

Overlay header. This is not, this is just sticky on scroll. This is not an actual overlay header.

Let’s see if we can make this overlay. 1:12:07 Template settings, header,

1:12:10 sticky on scroll. Does Bricks even handle the overlay header on its.

. . Or do you just have to do this with like position absolute?

Well, you can’t do it with. . .

Let’s get rid of the background color on here because I want to see if this is actually floating in this section. 1:12:35 It is, okay, good.

1:12:36 So if I do like BG base, 1:12:39

just to give us something back there so we can see it. 1:12:41 Good.

So if I do like BG base, just to give us something back there so we can see it. Okay. Two things are happening now.

Let’s, let’s, let’s do BG base ultra light BG base ultra light. Okay. So we’ve got a little light blue background back there.

Two things are happening now that are undesirable. Okay. Number one, uh, we do have our overlay header and it is sticky but look how close this is to the content right because this is literally sitting in the padding of our first section okay so if I go back let’s go into I can’t get to yeah there we go go to the template from here try to not get these all confused let’s go to template setting header turn off sticky.

Now I’m gonna refresh. Actually, we’ll open this in two different tabs side by side because I want you to see the difference side by side. So here’s a normal header, right?

There’s a normal header, it’s not overlay, it’s not sticky, nothing crazy going on. This is really with overlay headers primarily, okay? This is an overlay header.

Look at what’s happening to the content of the flower, right? The flower is now encroaching on the header situation here. And if you have, instead of a flower, you actually have content there.

Like, let’s put in a heading. Let’s go add a section. Look, I can’t even look.

The Bricks controls go behind the header. You can’t even click the Bricks controls because of the overlay header. Let’s go into settings here.

Let’s go add a heading. Okay. Hero heading, make it an H1, save.

I mean that’s clearly too close to our content. Well, what’s going on now? Oh yeah, we have our standard header again.

Okay, let’s go back to having our sticky header, save. Immediately we see, bang, like clear difference, right? Clear difference, this is undesirable, undesirable.

So how are you gonna fix this? You know, this is a pain in the ass to fix because we can’t just fix it. This is happening on every page of your website, on every template of your website this is happening.

You can’t just go, oh well just add a little extra padding and I think this is what people will do. I think a lot of people do this. So let’s go edit with bricks.

We can get out of here. We can get out of here. They’re gonna go into this first section right here and they’re gonna go, well, you know what, we’ll just add some padding.

Well, how much padding are we gonna use? Well, maybe I’ll just use a section space variable that’s bigger, like XL or something like that. Hey, problem solved, let’s move on with our life.

Well, problem not solved. You solved it on that page, but what about the other 50 pages of the website? That you’re gonna go one by one?

And then, have you thought this through yet? I mean, what if you decide to unsticky your header at some point, but you’ve already done this in all your sections? What, you’re gonna now go back through like a chump, be like, oh, let’s remove them now, okay?

All 50 pages, one by, no, no, that’s not the life we wanna live, okay? So then your next idea is, well, we’ll make a class. We’ll make a class.

We’ll go something like header offset. Yeah, just make a class for it. And then we’ll assign the padding, section space XL to header offset.

And then what we’ll do is we’ll just use that class on every page in our hero section. All right. And then you’re like, and if we ever need to remove it, well, we can just do this and it’ll fix it across our entire website.

Man, we have solved this problem. Not really, not really. I mean, what if you need to move a section from the hero to somewhere else on the page, damn it, it’s still got the header offset.

Now we got to remove the header offset there, okay, and now we got to come back up here, put the header offset on this one. I mean what is this dance? You want to do this dance throughout your entire website?

No, nobody wants to live that life, okay. is an automatic programmatic solution for handling this. And so we’re gonna put this in, we’re gonna put in our heading.

And what we really need to know, because we do wanna be super consistent when we attack this, how much room is being taken up? Well, there’s the still section in padding right here, it’s just being consumed by this header. So what we really need to know is what is the height of that header.

I’m gonna move this to the bottom. So I’m gonna hover over this and you see right here the header is 98. 5 pixels high.

So the header is consuming 98. 5 pixels of the hero section or the whatever the first section on the page is. So what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna go over here and we have this header height section.

Alright, see do you know my my short-term memory has already forgotten that fucking number? 98. 57.

Okay, so we’re gonna go over here and I’m gonna say 98. 5. You can do whatever you want here and I’m gonna hit save.

Now we’re gonna refresh and nothing is going to happen. Absolutely nothing is going to happen. However, I do have a variable that I can use for my header height now that equals 98.

5. Now that’s useful for other situations, not very useful for this situation. What is useful for this situation is this little toggle right here that says offset page content automatically.

And so you hit save on this and then you refresh. Voila! Fixed.

Everywhere on your website just like that. And if the height of your header ever needs to change you can just come in here make the adjustments on what that new height of your header is. You can do this at every single break point right?

So as we scale down on mobile because you’re gonna run into a different situation on mobile right? Is it gonna properly stay away on mobile? Uh-oh!

It doesn’t. Why doesn’t it? Well I didn’t tell it the height of my header on those devices, but when I go down and tell it the height of my header on these devices, it will.

It’s gonna stay away from all of my content. This is a very powerful magic trick inside of Automatic CSS. Guys, I will tell you this right now.

There are no less than 20 key features like this that do not exist in any other framework. So everybody wants to think about automatic CSS, it’s a CSS framework. No, no, no, no, it’s well, it’s way beyond a CSS framework.

That no framework on planet Earth has this feature besides automatic CSS, okay? So, and there are no less than 19 other features like this, helper features, that solve major problems that other frameworks simply do not have, haven’t even thought about not even a twinkle in their eye. Okay, so here we go.

That is that is header height offsets. Now the other thing too that you should probably know when you scroll to a sticky element on a page and you have an overlay or sticky header, the same problem happens. The header will cover up the sticky element, right?

And so we go over here and you’re going to see there are scroll offsets that you can add, but look at this offset sticky elements automatically, same toggle. It’s going to use your header heights. When you toggle this offset sticky elements automatically on, it’s going to go up here and it’s going to know the height of your header and it’s going to protect all of your sticky elements from being covered up by your header.

Automatically, it’s just not a problem you’re going to run into, because Automatic CSS has already accounted for that. Automatic CSS already knows that you’re going to have that problem, and it steps in and says, don’t worry, hey, I got this, I’m gonna solve that for you, all right? So you don’t even have to worry about it.

Okay. Overlay headers was one of the earliest Bricks videos he made, yeah, I did. I did do a video on that.

Okay. All right. So it seems like that is the answer to the question.

Would you please show how to make the frame called footer Foxtrot a fixed width and not full width? Okay, so we’ll do footer Foxtrot. So let’s go into pages.

Let’s get rid of this, get rid of this. Let me actually, I’m just gonna get rid of our header situation. I just don’t want it to be sticky.

Theme files and template settings header and get rid of sticky. Okay. And then we go back.

We’ll turn off offset content automatically and automatic CSS. Save. Okay, now we’re looking for footer Foxtrot.

Insert footer Foxtrot. Okay, we will add a color to this so that you guys can see it better. Okay, let’s do something like action ultra dark or something like that.

You can take this, make this white, whatever. Okay, so this is the situation that this footer gives you right. This is I’ll just say it like this is designed to be a full width footer.

This is designed to live over here. It is not designed to live anywhere else because the techniques that are required to make this happen just don’t really align with page width content. Now you’re saying you took the inner and what you put it in well that’s the inner right there.

So Derek what did you do? Can you make the header white on scroll? Yes, you can make the header white on scroll There’s a setting for that in the in bricks header That header section we were in there’s a background color on scroll.

It’s it’s it’s a built-in option But let’s look at how this is positioned, right So it’s positioned absolute with a right coordinate of zero and a bottom coordinate of zero So what what that should tell you right away is that that is not moving right that’s not doesn’t matter what you do with the section it’s um well it could be aligned to its parents right so if you change the parent it could move with it but you know it’s this is designed to just be a full width scenario here the inner content doesn’t even expand all the way out because it has a max width that’s protecting it from ever touching this section over here. There’s just a lot going on to make this thing work the way that it works. And then on mobile breakdown.

So what I would say is if you want this to be a content width footer, or if you want or need a content width footer, don’t choose a full width footer. Like you’re choosing the wrong footer. If you want something that looks like this, then we have to build, we would build that as a separate frame.

But I mean, what do you like about this? Just the fact that this overlaps? Is that, what we need is like, which part of this appeals to you?

This part over here is very basic. So is it just the fact that there’s an overlapping like card kind of thing for the nav part of this? Maybe that’s it.

And we can just do that as a separate frame. But I wouldn’t like try to hijack this frame and hack it into being a content with frame. I don’t think, unless you’re super advanced at CSS, it’s not worth that, like you would just build it from scratch and probably be done faster.

You put the inner inside a container. Well, the inner what wrap in container. Yeah, that didn’t do anything by itself.

So I would just say, you know, choose a different footer. Or you can request that we make one that is content width that kind of has a similar look. But there’s a lot going on with this footer to make it full width, or no, made it, I guess you were trying to say content width then made the extended overlap section using a pseudo.

It was indeed hacky. Yeah, yeah, it’s gonna be hacky because it wasn’t designed to be a site width. Okay, any other questions?

And again, calls for how-to’s, how-to’s. D123 says it’s a must have WordPress framework. Talking about automatic CSS.

Appreciate it D123, I do feel the same way. I used it on a site recently and somebody pointed out that it was not aligned with the rest of the website. Yeah, that’s life.

I mean, stripes of content with, there’s plenty of non-content with footers and headers especially right? Would they point out that a full width header like there’s tons of full width headers that are not the content width of the website. It’s just a it’s not a problem it’s it has to be explained to the client that hey Mr.

Client you know do you have a design degree? Are you up on modern web design trends? Or is this just a general personal feeling that Becky in accounting had?

Because if it’s just a general personal feeling that Becky in accounting had, in our minds, frankly, nobody gives a shit what Becky thinks, right? Nor should we. It’s like, what are her, shouldn’t she stick to accounting?

I think that’s what she should stick to. It is okay to have a full width footer when you have a content width website. That’s 100% okay all day long you’re gonna see it on countless websites across the internet so yeah just tell Becky to go do some books right all right by the way when you have some things that are full width and other things that are content with it helps break up the boxiness because you know what other Becky’s will complain about and Fred’s and and everybody else oh everything looks so boxy okay well do you want everything to look boxy or do you want everything not look boxy I mean what do you want right like they can’t make up their mind which is why we shouldn’t care what they think so if you have full width headers and full width footers and content with websites and some some sections of the website go to full width when others don’t this is how you break up the boxiness of the website.

Guys, we build with boxes. Go to page building 101, everything is a box. It’s literally right there in the title.

Everything is a box. So if you want things to not look boxy, you have to make boxes different sizes. Now you don’t want it to look janky, obviously, but we have to break up the boxiness with, you know, the Beckys are in there too.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s not just Bev. We can’t put it all on Bev.

Would you add data attributes to a CPT archive page? I would love to answer this question. I just need more data.

Like what are we trying to accomplish is really the need to know information so give me a scenario and I’ll tell you how I would approach this scenario careful with full width sections they may look funny on large screens when peeps have their browser windows large yes that is a thing there you have your next build Kevin the Stripe homepage they always have a great design. Yeah that would be a great one to do except I don’t have a month. I’ll have you know that you know the Stripe team is probably quite large.

There is a but I just learned this I just did you guys even know that I bet you didn’t even know this I bet you didn’t even know this guys. Did you know these are buttons? Did you know these are actual links?

Did you know these are tab navigatable? I didn’t even know this. First of all, I think this is atrocious UX.

My brain has seen the Stripe homepage for months and months, I don’t know, years. I’m a Stripe user. I just learned yesterday.

I was yesterday years old when I learned that these are actual links. My brain completely dismissed this section as like just a cute little animation Just that’s what my brain was like. That’s a cute little animation never in a million years What I think that these are clickable that you can actually use these to go to these different pages Did I am I the only one that was late on that bus?

Did anybody else know that those things are interactable? I Don’t get don’t get me wrong. I don’t think it’s good that they’re interactable because it’s like you can’t even read them until you hover them and then it’s like Atlas I don’t even I don’t even know what Atlas is I mean it’s a cool effect right it’s a cool effect it’s awesome whatever it’s also sticky now I will say it’s not accessible because watch as you tab navigate where are we now?

See we’re down there. We’re down on the page further but if the page didn’t go with us. Why?

Because the section’s sticky and it’s all one section. So the browser doesn’t know that we need to scroll to see what we’re currently selected. Stripe is failing accessibility right now.

If you’re an ambulance chasing sue happy accessibility kind of person, go after Stripe right now. I’m telling you dog that’s a payment waiting to happen okay I’m just kidding don’t do that we don’t want to be those kind of people so yeah they did it’s cute it’s fancy it’s yada yada yada it’s not accessible and it’s not good UX and my look this fucking thing is clickable right here look at this these are all buttons these all go places this is just, man, why? Why?

This is question number one, why? I feel like Stripe’s dev department is just like, dude, they threw oodles of money at us. It’s almost January where our budget is about to reset.

What should we do? What should we do? And you know, Darryl, Darryl stands up and he’s like, fucking throw buttons everywhere, everywhere, animations and buttons, let’s spend it baby, let’s spend the money.

Why I don’t know. I don’t know. Why does it help anybody?

No I don’t think it helps anybody. I don’t think 99. 9% of users are not going to know that this is a button, right?

So I either just spending dev money That’s what I think they’re doing. That’s my conspiracy theory Strike department just loves they just their dev departments love spending All right. Oh, we’re in we’re in just pure entertainment mode now.

Daniel says didn’t know their buttons, but I found a few months ago about enter the Kona Konami code on stripe up, up, up, down, down, down, left, right, right, a B, a B. Yeah, I just they’re just flexing. Absolutely.

They’re just flexing at this point. So no, no, no, this will not be the next build with ACS build because I don’t have this you know how many episodes would be in this series we’d never be done it’ll be 2025 right we’ll still be doing the stripe home page all right cool what else what oh did somebody was somebody asking a question and then we go yeah yeah we were talking width footer thing. Oh man.

Alright let’s do a last call because I got to hop off if we don’t have anything else to talk about that’s of importance. I love how they do the gradients using grids. Yeah I mean they got a lot of cool stuff going on there for sure.

Kevin Powell did a video on that stripe header. Yeah, yeah literally every section would have to be, would have to be its own video. It’s not that it can’t be done, it’s like who wants to invest the time to actually, to actually do that.

And, and it’s one of those things where I mean yeah you’ll, you’ll learn a lot of stuff along the way, but I mean you’re not gonna replicate this for a client, right? It’d be nice to know how it was done. But again, it was like the real question is why?

If you wanted to replicate something like this, just make it a cute little animation. Don’t make it clickable and interactable and all this other stuff that they’ve got going 1:33:51

on. 1:33:54 I’m looking at anything else that might be cool if there’s any other individual see this is the kind of thing you know somebody might be like let’s make that for frames I mean why so you can have a direct replica of what stripe did and then you know you have to have a multinational company to even use something like this so how many multinational clients do you have and then you know what you’re gonna use this on every website that you have a multinational it’s like a this is not a this is not what frames does right this is not what we’re in the business of doing we’re not in the business of copying like one-off things that you’re probably only going to use on one website ever we’re in the business of common layouts that you’re going to constantly use that really save you a ton of time and get you going into you know some sort of a creative mode.

Like let’s look at this section as an example. This I feel like would be a pretty decent section to replicate. This is actually a slider.

This is actually yet again a triple, a triple You know what I’m going to do here? 1:35:12 Pow!

1:35:13 That lets you know, might be doing a little cooking in the kitchen. Okay?

Yeah, I think this kind of section is something unique. Now you have to have, well not necessarily, I mean they’re using it for brand reviews. And here’s case studies right here.

We were just talking about case studies a minute ago. Now this is more like a blog post little mini case study but still it’s important it’s important. I think this is a really this is a really cool section that we could do for sure.

Let’s keep going down here. I do think we need I don’t think we have a features it’s really would be actually it would be I believe we have a timeline that looks like this. You would use a timeline section for this.

1:36:06 But I’m just gonna make sure 1:36:07

that we have something like this. And we can call it a feature, we don’t have to necessarily call it a timeline. Might be good to have a feature section like that.

This is what I do by the way, with like hours of my day. I peruse the website looking for unique but helpful, very helpful and good UX, good UI, good balance, that kind of thing. Helpful layouts and then this is how we get the inspiration for new frames.

Which by the way, if anybody wants to, I’ve said it many times, we’re going to set up like a little portal where people can submit ideas as well. We already have this layout. This layout is already achievable very easily.

It’s two little grid frames on top. Oh my gosh, two little grid frames on top of each other. Where’s my drawing?

There we go. So it’s one. This already exists as a frame right here.

And this already exists as a frame right here. This intro already exists as a frame. This already exists as a frame.

There’s a lot of stuff that already exists. You just have to get into the visualization mode of what am I looking at right. This already exists.

This footer situation more or less already exists at least you’re very close. Yeah then we could go into multi into other sub pages and just keep looking for ideas. Question how would you do the BG lines that they have on Stripe?

I think that’s pretty cool as it goes down sections and become bullets for some elements. I did it on, did something very similar on Digital Gravy. If I remember correctly, it’s hard to see in.

Yeah, if you go, yeah, it starts right here. There’s lines coming, it’s very hard to see, especially when my lights are on. Let me turn my lights off.

Yeah. You can definitely see them. And they extend down through this section.

And it’s just look right there. They join together. It’s just a background pattern.

That’s all it is. And I apply it with a utility class. I think it’s called I call that BG lines maybe or BG architect because it was kind of like an architectural like background pattern Probably not the best name for it, honestly But you see it there you see it there and then it just it always matches up because it’s always applied exactly the same way So, yeah, that’s that’s pretty easy to do Timeline update for ACS 3.

0 and ACS theme. I don’t I don’t have a timeline on that yet. Not styled too surely right otherwise every website will look the same.

Yeah exactly that’s yes yeah that’s why that’s why design sets are are mostly useless like what are what you’re gonna how many how many websites you gonna make that look like that right that’s kind of boring yet so what you’re gonna notice is this is the value of frames you could go to stripes website you can go to ten other websites and they look completely different but if you learn to view sites in boxes what you’ll recognize is they all use the same common layouts. Right? They just style them completely different.

That’s why frames exist. It gives you all the common layouts that every website is using and then you’re able to do whatever you want with it. And you can have a portfolio of websites that all have your style but still look completely different and you had the starting point of frames doing 60 to 70 percent of the work for you.

That’s the value. You just have to learn to see in boxes, right? Don’t look at all of the details of the design and be like, oh, we don’t have a frame like that.

Yes, you do have a frame like that, right? You have all of those fundamental components already. You just have to apply the styling to them.

And if you’re not a good designer, what is the answer? Find a good designer. Stop trying to do everything yourself.

Stop trying to be a one man band. Stop working in your non-wheelhouse, okay? Put people in the right seats on the bus.

You don’t need a full-time person. You don’t need to scale a whole agency up. You need to go make friends with a good designer and be like, hey dog, I’m gonna give you some work, okay?

And I’m gonna pay you to do the work. Is that cool? Yeah, that’s cool, okay?

And then what you do is you bill the client for that. And now the client is better off because they don’t have Jack who doesn’t have a lick of design talent, right? Trying to do the whole website project for him.

No client wants that, right? They’re just, a lot of them are too dumb to be like, hey, do you, have you designed anything in your life? No, okay, maybe you shouldn’t design on this, right?

Maybe do you have a designer that’s gonna do this work? Like, just a shred of due diligence on the part of a client would be nice sometimes, right? I think the biggest problem we have in web design, you know, when we talk about like, people hiring people and not getting the result they wanted.

Well, the number one reason that’s happening, there’s two main reasons, right? Number one is developers who don’t actually know what they’re doing. They only know how to use an elementor.

They just, hey, I drag and drop. I drag and drop and click buttons, that’s what I do. I’m a web designer.

That’s problem number one, because everything under the hood is a disaster. Scalability, maintainability, disaster, right? Problem number two is developers not being able to call themselves out and say, look, I will tell you, I’m not a horrible designer.

I can do some stuff, but I’ll be the first to tell you I’m not a real designer. I just play one on TV, okay? And so, are you gonna catch me designing websites for clients?

No, no, no, nope, not me. Will you catch me hiring designers? Yep, yep, all day long.

Because I recognize, I don’t try to pretend, like, oh, I’ll just handle the whole thing, right? I want to put somebody with actual talent in that position so that my clients get the best possible result. We’ve got to stop this trend of, I have zero design talent, but I’m still gonna tackle every design for my client.

It’s a disaster. Every single time, it’s a disaster. And I gotta tell you, it’s like a drunk person who thinks they can drive, right?

You’re like, dog, you’re not walking straight, give me the keys. I’m fine. That’s what these designers, these web designers are doing.

They are drunk. They don’t know that they suck. I’m sorry.

They just don’t know that they are not walking straight. Okay. So we need to take the keys from them.

I think we need to take the keys in. That’s why we do WDD live sometimes because you’ll hear me say, dog you’re not a designer. Stop designing stuff.

Go hire a designer with actual talent. It’s not a knock on you, it’s just something you have to recognize. I am not right-brained, okay?

Easy to say. 1:43:21 It’s easy to say.

1:43:22 We don’t have to get all up in our feelings about it. Just admit you’re not a designer and go hire a designer.

It’s very easy. And then by the way, that’s workload that’s off your plate and off your shoulders. You don’t have to worry about it.

Everybody wins, including you, when all you have to say is you’re right I suck at design let me let somebody else handle it that’s just hey you’re right I’m drunk here’s my keys please drive me home so we don’t all die right easy very easy all right let’s see if not a designer what do you call yourself I am a I’m a marketer and a consultant and I also am fairly decent at death. I am NOT a designer though. Easy to say, easy to say.

We need more people willing to admit hey. We also need by the way mmm let’s flip the switch. Let’s have this conversation to everybody in Figma land and 99% of people in Webflow land let’s all admit hey when you’re a great I love these talented designers but for fuck’s sake stop pretending you know development because you learned Webflow and Elementor and these other things we’ve got a whole tribe of great designers who think they’re developers and dog you are not a developer.

You’re an assembler. But you’re not a developer. And you don’t know a lick of scalability.

You don’t know a lick of maintainability. You don’t know a lick of accessibility. They’re drunk.

They’re fucking drunk. And someone needs to take their keys. Okay, they need to step up and admit and say, Hey, look, recognize my design talent.

You know where you should be working dog, you should be working in figma. You should be working in figma and leave the development to somebody else. Unless, unless your first stop is page building 101.

And you’re like, hey, I recognize I’m drunk right now. I can’t drive this car. I’m gonna go to rehab, okay?

And so you go into PB101 and you actually learn scalable, maintainable, accessible dev practices to go with your design skills, perfectly fine. Perfectly fine. You don’t have to stay a designer your entire life.

You’re not like locked in on that. You can be a dev. What I’m saying is stop pretending.

Stop being drunk. Because we got a lot of people who are great designers who are pretending that they’re developers because they know how to use Webflow or these other page builders. You’re not a dev, okay?

And stop trying to teach dev because you don’t know dev. We just need more people to admit that they’re drunk. Take their keys, let’s get in our lane, let’s do the right thing.

1:46:09 Okay. 1:46:10

And a softball coach. 100%. 100%.

1:46:17 Okay. 1:46:18

The downfall of letting clients upload content to, say it louder for the people in the back Peter. Oh my gosh all these people coming in going hey hey how do I make it easy for my client to edit the page? What?

Excuse me? Huh? What’d you say?

I don’t want my client anywhere near that website. You think I want Becky in the website? Becky doesn’t know the first thing about anything.

Becky doesn’t know dev, she doesn’t know design, she doesn’t know SEO, she doesn’t know copy. What is Becky going to change? What is Becky qualified to change?

Tell me right now. What is Becky qualified? I already did a whole entire video on this.

Okay, go. Go. It’s just search it.

It’s a don’t let clients edit their own website. The title can’t be more clear. And the point that I made in that is, look, if we’re going through wireframing and then we’re going through UI and we’re going through content with our whole professional process.

Aren’t we doing that for a reason? Why are we doing that? Because we know how to get the best results.

We know the best practices. We know how to make this work. So the idea that fucking Becky from accounting is is gonna come in and make changes

1:47:38 to what? 1:47:39

Based on what? 1:47:40 Has Becky looked at the analytics lately?

Does Becky know the keywords that we’re targeting? Does Becky know about alt tags? Does Becky know about fucking anything?

No, she doesn’t. So why is Becky editing the website? Because all that work that we did for a reason is now being undone because Becky has a hunch.

Okay, Becky’s fucking hunch is not running the business, is not running the marketing, is not running this online platform or shouldn’t be. Okay, let’s not do that. Let’s not go there.

See what I’m saying? You’ve got to give me a reason that this person needs to be in here editing stuff. Oh, well, well, it’s just simple changes.

Okay, no, the heading level one on the homepage is not a simple edit. The H2s throughout the page, not a simple edit. Swapping photos, not a simple edit.

Didn’t we choose photos for that particular reason? How many times on WDD Live have I said, that photo’s not a good representation of this product. That photo’s not a good representation of this business.

1:48:43 Who put it there? 1:48:44

That matters. That kind of stuff absolutely matters to conversions to everything else. And so I will tell you, if you’re in a situation where they want Becky in there making changes to the website, this is what you tell them.

You just look at them and you tell them this, you brought me on to get you results, to get you rankings, to get you conversions, to get you sales, to get you all these meaningful things in your business. If Becky goes into this website, I am no longer responsible for any of those things. Becky is now responsible for those things.

And if you think Becky is qualified, then go, more power to you, right? But don’t come knocking on my door when rankings drop. I mean, I’m like, wait, well, what was Becky doing in the website?

Right? Let’s go check that. So just look, you can let Becky touch it, but I’m no longer responsible for any of the things that you hired me for.

I’ll still work on your website, right? But I’m not responsible for anything else that happens going forward. Because there are real implications in Becky touching that website, in all these different areas, right?

Now, what can we let clients do? What can we let clients, can we let them do anything? Well, first I say, I mean, what’s it worth?

Like, send us an email, tell us what needs to happen, we make it happen. We’re very responsive might be done in less than 24 hours. I mean, what is the what’s the race?

What’s the hurry? Right? But let’s say there’s a team member section or something.

Let’s say it’s a yoga studio. And it’s like, hey, instructors come, instructors go. And sometimes we need to delete the instructor.

And sometimes we need to add an instructor. Is this a mission critical area of the website? Not really.

Not really. I mean either an instructor is gone or she’s not gone. And if the Becky in this case, the yoga instructor, Becky is going in and they’re just filling out custom fields.

They’re hitting add new. Okay. Oh I fill out her name.

I fill out her position. I fill out her bio. I pop her photo into the featured image area and I hit publish and then I go home.

And that’s all I do. That’s fine. That’s 100% fine.

Okay. There’s no implications there. There’s no problem with that.

Yeah, let them do it. Let them do it. Right.

But what I’m talking about is should Becky ever be in bricks? 1:51:01 Fuck no.

1:51:03 No, no, Becky should never be in bricks. I have a client recently actually built the whole site for him.

Got all these great results. Everything is buttoned up, dialed in, okay? And then they’re like, all right, we’ve got a couple internal people.

You know, we are, we’re gonna try using them for a while, see how things go. All right, cool. Hey, all right, I understand.

You know, some companies wanna test the waters with having an internal marketing team that handles this kind of stuff. Hey, go for it. And I visit the website, two months later, grids are broken, shit’s out of place.

I mean, how did your little internal marketing department experiment go? How are your results lately? What do the analytics say?

But hey, it’s their website, right? It’s their website. But I’m not on board anymore.

It’s not a situation. I don’t want to be involved in that. Do I want to come rescue them?

I mean, maybe if they’re willing to pay, but it’s like, hey, like you already disrespected me by just, oh, yeah, we’re going to let these people handle it. Are those people qualified? Apparently not.

Why did you switch? We were doing good. We were doing a good thing.

I understand if like we screw something up and you’re like, dog, we got to go with somebody else. Hey, all day long, I’ll own that and be like, all right, yeah, you’re right. You should do that because it’s your business.

But if we’re on a roll and you’re just like, well, maybe, maybe we should just hand this off to an internal team, maybe save a little money here and there. All right, dog, let’s see how expensive that mistake is. Let’s see how expensive that decision ends up being.

And it’s like, hey, all right, well, we’re off the team. Guess what? I’m on somebody else’s team now.

It’s kind of how that goes. So yeah, you just, you know, it’s, this is the life, right? That we live.

But Mark says, hold up. You don’t let the client manage content though, like add a blog post or a product. Well let’s talk about that.

Should the client add a blog post? Okay, once again, first of all, why are we blogging? That would be my number one question.

If you’re saying, well we blog because we are firmly committed to SEO and content marketing and getting conversions through our articles. Then my next question is, well first of all that’s fantastic, but my next question is, is Becky gonna be writing the articles? And what the fuck does Becky know about content marketing?

Because if Becky writes a 600 word blog post that’s half AI generated and slaps a stupid photo in there and doesn’t target any actual key words, Becky’s a waste of fucking time, is what Becky is. So again, it seems like a friendly little question. Well, why can’t Becky just post a simple blog post?

I mean, she can, but what’s the goal? What are we trying to accomplish? What is Becky going to do for us?

So again, now if you say, oh, well, we just want Becky to have a little fun. We just want Becky to just be able to do her thing. And okay, sure, if there’s no implications, like, go ahead, Becky, go ahead.

The problem is the disconnect, where a company says, well, blogging and content marketing and SEO are very important to us. We’re gonna have this person who knows nothing about any of those things publish blog articles. Do you think that’s a good idea?

Well, of course not. Of course I have to step up and say, not a good idea. And then suddenly people are shocked when I say that.

Why are we shocked? Shouldn’t you be saying the same exact thing? It’s always, is this person qualified to do what you’re asking them to do?

Because content marketing, I mean, let’s look at content marketing when it’s done correctly. How about we go to, I mean, HubSpot is fucking dominating in content marketing. Let’s go to their blog.

Now, I wouldn’t say that they’re like, you know, a lot of their domination is based on brands. But just guys, guys, I mean, the first thing I clicked on, this is a fucking random click. This is if you showed up for the rants, I mean, you’re, you’re in for it.

Okay. You guys asked for it. 1:55:07

Random click. 1:55:08 Do you think fucking Becky is going to make an article like this in her life at any point in time.

Becky doesn’t understand the first thing about making a blog article like this. Becky still thinks a blog article is a little diary post. That’s what Becky thinks a blog article is.

This is content marketing, my friends. This is what actual real content marketing looks like. Becky ain’t doing this ever.

She don’t even know the first thing about it, right? But again, people are shocked that I would say Becky shouldn’t be able to post blog articles. Well, what is she going to be posting?

This is the reason why we have to have these conversations. Now Peter says, get the client to pay for some training if you can. 100%.

So now we have the conversation. By the way, we have the conversation very nice, right? So the client will be like, well we want Becky to do some blog posts for the site, is that doable, can you make it easy to add the blog post for the website?

And I say, oh yeah, sure, yeah, I mean we can make it so anybody can post a blog article, but before we get there, just curious, you know, we’ve talked about SEO, we’ve talked about content marketing, we’ve talked about your rankings, I do think blogging is going to be very very important for that but I have to I have to inform you that there’s a lot of skills that go into doing blogging and content marketing the right way on the modern web. These articles are very involved there’s going to be a lot of media assets involved there’s going to have to be some research we have to understand internal linking and external linking we have to understand proper heading hierarchy we have to understand alt tags and images. This is a very technical thing it’s not just anybody can write an article.

Does Becky have any content marketing training? And then they just say, oh shit, I didn’t know any of that. No, don’t think she does.

And then they’ve already come to the conclusion that I guess Becky probably can’t handle this. And you say, hey, no problem. Well, we’ve got a couple different ways that we approach this with our clients.

One, we can do it all for you. Now, obviously that’s going to be more expensive. We’ll write all the articles, we’ll format all the articles, we’ll do all the technical stuff, we’ll publish it to the website for you.

You don’t have to worry about it. You can sleep easy at night knowing it’s all being done the right way for you. Or we can do a hybrid approach where we can do the outlines for you, we can do the keyword research for you, we can submit those to Becky.

Becky’s going to write the article, it’s going to come back to our editing team, we’re gonna edit, format, publish, and make sure all the Ts are crossed and the Is are dotted. That’s a little bit cheaper, right? But it allows Becky to be involved.

Or we can train Becky to do the whole thing on her own, but that is gonna take some time. Which one do you wanna do? And let them decide.

But the solution is not that Becky, with no experience and no know-how, is gonna just take over the blogging. That’s not one of the possible scenarios, right? This is all very logical.

It should be very logical to everybody. I think people don’t want to hurt people’s feelings or something, or they don’t know how to approach it and discuss through it. So they’re just like, well, they want Becky to do it, so I guess we should let Becky do it.

No, you’re not doing your client a favor if that’s the conclusion you come to. Clients don’t know what they don’t know. You are the consultant.

It’s your job to step up and be like, hey, remember me? Guy with the consultant hat. Guys you hired.

Okay, I got to tell you something real quick about this Becky situation, right? And then have the conversation. Don’t just be like, oh, well, they want Becky to do it.

So I guess Becky’s going to do it. Be a leader in your projects. Be a leader in your projects.

Okay advanced case let’s say your client has a group membership site with users and e-commerce are you handling the user management and products and such got to be significant money to handle I feel. As a group membership site with users and e-commerce are you handling the user management? Well no because user management is not a content issue of the website.

User management can be handled internally that’s just fine. Because that doesn’t influence like the marketing, the SEO, the content, the site speed. That’s another thing, you know.

Oh, we’re gonna let Becky handle the blogging and suddenly you’ve got 18 megabytes of fucking images in your blog post. Like, because you have to understand the first thing about it. She does it, so now our whole site speed situation has gone in the tank.

The SEO has gone in the tank. We’ve got thin content pages that Google’s like, the fuck is this? What happened to this domain?

Right? Guys, you’ve got to stop letting unqualified people touch these websites. It’s a disaster.

It’s an unmitigated disaster. And people don’t even realize it. They don’t even realize the level of disaster that Becky can unleash on a website.

Okay. All right. I gotta get out of here.

It’s two hours. I’ve had fun. This has been a good ending.

I love you guys. Thank you for being here. I’ll be back next Wednesday with another WDD Live.

Until next time, I’m out. Until next time, I’m out. Peace.