WDD LIVE 040: In-Depth Web Design Critiques + Q&A/AMA

0:00:00 Yo, what’s up everybody? Welcome, another WDD live.

I am back in Atlanta. We have a lot of stuff to catch up on. Hang on, let me get my screens all situated here.

What do we want? Comments and reactions, that’s what we want. There we go, there we go.

What’s up Steve? What’s up Demetri? John?

Manny? Everybody say hi when you arrive. Drop something in the chat.

What’s up, Derek? Calisthenics Ireland, good to see you. Darius, Maya, MDN, Striped Goat is here.

Jason is here. Welcome, welcome, welcome. Nikolai, is that how you pronounce it?

Maybe Nikolai. Sylvia is here. 0:00:48

Sebastian. 0:00:49 Derek.

Michael. this year, Sebastian, Derek, Michael, hello from Germany. Got Steven, Emmerich, Liz, Steve, Cyprian, Johanna, Johanna, Johanna, Johanna, Johanna.

I always get confused by that one. SK, flip back, okay. All right, we have got a good crew.

I expect the numbers will continue to go up as we get into this stream. I believe the last stream was done in Sarasota and so let’s talk about what happened last week. I’m in catch-up mode right now.

I’m in absolute catch-up mode. Everything is on fire. It’s just, it’s craziness.

So all of last week, my family, all kids, wife, everybody, totally sick. Sicker than I’ve ever seen them in a very, very, very long time. We thought it was COVID.

My daughter actually started getting, my older daughter started getting sick when we were in Florida and thought it was COVID. The rest of them got sick when we got back to Atlanta. You know, I just started pounding vitamin C, vitamin D, you know, bobbing and weaving.

Yeah, just I’m like, no, it’s not getting me, dog. Not getting me. And I did manage to evade it.

But they had 103, 104 degree fevers, like just straight up can’t move, can’t get off the couch, can’t get out of bed. It ended up being the flu, apparently. And we found that out because the two youngest actually started to recover and then like after 24 hours of like almost being better they just went like straight downhill.

Their fever spiked again, couldn’t get off the couch, so we ended up taking them into children’s and they tested positive for the flu and strep at the same time and then my wife and older daughter tested, they didn’t test for the flu at all, but they have, they had pneumonia. So they had pneumonia, the other two had strep and flu, it’s just been, and they got the pneumonia from the flu, they believe. So yeah, everybody was down for the count.

So could not do a live stream last week, could not work really at all much last week, you know, aside from a few things here and there that I was able to do on my laptop. But yeah, so like a week of travel before that, and then a week of everybody being down for the count, like I’m so far behind. I’m so far behind, but we are here.

We are here today. And that is all that matters. Um, man, your audio is crisp and clear.

0:03:32 Okay. 0:03:32

That is good to hear. That is good to hear. Um, oh, uh, new development.

So got a new toy, got a new toy, got a new toy, little Christmas gift for myself. So, you know, I talk about photography often, like I’ll use photography as an example for various things. And over the last, I used to literally do photography for my family, right, like take photos of my kids.

Like I have this whole archive of like, I was, you know, storytelling from like when they were super young when they were born basically you know documenting various aspects of their life and I’ve done photography for people and even businesses in years past but last couple years I haven’t done it literally at all and I got the camera obviously right here for video and because it’s kind of like the way that it’s set up, I just, I don’t like taking it down. I don’t like taking it down cause it’s just a pain in the ass. So I just leave it there.

And because I’ve left it there, I don’t do, I haven’t done photography at all for the last year or two. And I’ve been really, really, really missing it. So got myself a little, got myself a little, uh, this is the six, the R six mark two, little Canon R six mark two action.

Very, very nice camera and so basically what that means is 2024 I now Have a camera that is independent of the one I have to use for this channel Which means I can actually get back to some photography stuff so that is going to be fun. What’s up Suzanne? Hope your family gets better soon.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you everybody Appreciate it appreciate it.

Okay, we need to talk agenda today and then get right into it. I’ve got two websites that we’re going to do in-depth critiques on. If you are new here, what we do is we hang out and we talk shop, which means we talk about all of the things that make a website successful.

We talk about SEO. We talk about conversion optimization. We talk about the DOM.

That’s why it’s called Web Design for DOMMIEs, like people who care about quality, care about clean code output, accessibility, all that stuff that we talk about constantly. This is where we actually put up a live website and go over it. We dissect it.

We take it apart, right? We look at every aspect of it. These are websites that are submitted to us and by the way I know gary.

co is down right now right before the stream I was like there’s a problem with the Google Sheets integration with the with the form that you fill out and I was like let me do some updating and tinkering with this Google Sheets integration and effed up the whole thing so that kind of blew up and Andrea should be fixing that shortly, hopefully. But yeah, because I was like, I got a live stream. I can’t deal with this right now.

So anyway, what people do when the forum is working, when the site is not down, because you know, WordPress constantly can’t, WordPress can’t handle a little hiccup, right, without the entire thing going and getting a white screen of death. So when it’s normally up, you can submit a site for critique. So these are all people who have submitted a website.

These are all people who have presumably watched the WDD live streams before. In fact, one of the ones that were submitted today, the person literally said in the submission, they were like, feel free to completely tear this thing apart. I want to know everything.

You know, you get it. So people understand what we’re doing here, right? And I’ve said time and time again, this is one of the most important streams you can watch when we do these in-depth critiques, because it doesn’t matter, some people can make pretty sites, but they don’t get everything else right.

Some people do get a lot of things right, but they can’t make pretty sites. And sometimes we make good UX and UI, but the copy’s bad, and so it’s still not gonna convert. Sometimes we do a lot of things right, but we mess up the SEO side, so it’s never gonna rank.

It’s like, this is the stream where you can come to learn how to put all of these pieces together and see how other sites are doing it or not doing it and just really learn like, you know, here’s some best practices, here’s some things to avoid, here’s some things to commonly look for and maybe tweak and adjust and so on and so forth. And because they’re real world examples, this is real world learning very very very valuable stuff okay I assume yeah I assume we’re ready to rock and roll we’ve got really strong numbers Oh last announcement before we get started I’m going to share my screen I have been I’ve been resurrecting the the the Twitter side of things because you know I’ve been focusing like intently on just YouTube, well, and Facebook as well. So Facebook and YouTube, I really wanna have that third channel and I feel like there is a strong way for me to use Twitter that is different from the other channels.

And for example, I’ve bookmarked two of these threads that I’ve done now. First thread I did was very interesting is a little discussion about Elementor, right? And going, because a lot of people continually ask, you know, what are the problems with Elementor?

Like, I want specifics, okay? So I did a whole thread on Twitter going over the specifics. I also did a thread very recently, very valuable to everybody who’s a freelancer or business owner, closing web design deals at higher price points.

Okay. So I did a whole list of, I think it’s 11 things, 11 things. If you want to start closing more deals consistently at higher price points, this is a very, very, very good thread for you to read through.

Uh, it’s nice because it’s not a full like blog post situation. It’s not a lot of reading. It’s very easy to digest.

It’s very easy to comment back and ask questions. You know, it’s just I find it’s a good format. And so I’m going to be doing a lot of this kind of stuff over on Twitter.

If you want to follow me again, that is at the Kevin Geary. And yeah, go ahead and hit me up there. Oh, they Yes, the cool kids call it x now.

I don’t know. It says Twitter. I still call it Twitter.

I don’t know. I don’t know how that changes is Actually gonna happen, but yeah, that’s where we are And I know like you know, there’s there’s a it’s very campy. It’s very campy right now it’s like 50% are in the never Twitter camp and the 50% are in the Twitter’s great camp whatever.

I’m not interested in all that stuff. What I’m interested in is it actually, as a platform for kind of doing this kind of content the way that I wanna do it, it’s a really, really, really good fit. There isn’t really anything else like it.

So it works for me. So yeah, go there and whatever you guys wanna do. My gosh, what is going on with all these windows?

Okay, yeah, we don’t need local sites right now. We don’t need any of that. What we need is to pull up the actual sites that we are going to critique.

I’m gonna bring in the first one. And this is Saltwater Solkona. Saltwater Solkona.

Okay, so we basically got a Hawaii kind of travel site here. Let me get my other screen back up so I have comments. By the way, this is kind of interactive.

I’m going to. . .

your latest X thread goes to 11. I don’t know what that means. I don’t know what that means.

Yeah, it was 11. It was 11 tips. Okay, so interactive in the sense that I’m going to give my feedback on a website, on the website we are looking at.

I’m going to do my breakdown and my critique, but you guys are free to put in your thoughts in the comments as well as we go through this thing. And I come back to the chat often to see what other people are saying about the site. If you notice something that maybe I’m not noticing, go ahead and drop that in the chat.

Okay, that’s what this is for. We’re going to start with our no scroll test. So saltwatersolecona from the banner here, the little header action.

I don’t know what this is about. Like I’m just going top down. I don’t yet know what’s going on here.

This logo is, it’s artsy. It doesn’t give me any meaning. I think this is Hawaii right here in the middle.

I think this is an arm and an arm. Maybe mermaids, are these mermaids? I don’t know.

Yeah, there’s a tail. Maybe that’s a, is that a whale? I think it might be a whale.

Could be a whale, could be a mermaid. If it is a mermaid, I apologize. I don’t mean to, I don’t mean to call you a whale, but I don’t have any clear indication of what’s going on yet.

Our, I’m not good with Hawaii terminology here. Clear bottom kayak rentals. Okay, now we’re onto something.

I see something in the navigation that makes sense. Activities and tours, okay, now I’m starting to get an idea. Gift shop, contact us, waiver my account.

We’re gonna come down here to clear bottom kayak rentals. Got it, very literal headline. Let’s check and see if this is an H1.

Just wanna make sure that, okay, it is. So we’re off to a good start here. What better eco-friendly way to enjoy the sights of beautiful Kailua, Kailua, Kailua, Kona, Hawaii, both above and below the water.

We offer the only ocean safe, clear bottom kayak rentals on the big island in Hawaii. Okay, good, good, good. So we’ve got clear bottom kayak rentals from $29.

How do we feel, chat, how do we feel about the drop shadow this is the first one that I wanted to ask people about how do we feel about the drop shadows on the text let me go ahead and see what we’re built with here mm-hmm okay so this is a frames site okay this is a frames website automatic CSS bricks okay see I Okay See I don’t you don’t even know like I can’t even tell really off the bat by looking at it that it’s a frames website How do we feel shadow no good shadow no good drop shadows a bit sore on the eyes Drop shadows a no-no Okay, so I there’s your feedback if this is your website. There’s your feedback on the drop shadow situation kind of across the board. Oh, Derek says he likes the text shadow.

Drop shadow does not improve legibility. I think it makes it harder to read. Not a fan of the drop shadow.

Okay, I think most of the chat is not a fan of the drop shadow. Okay, big island activities. No ka’oi.

God, I am probably just absolutely murdering these words right now. Experience the very best of Hawaii’s island, of Hawaii Island. There are so many fantastic things to see and do from the manta rays, hiking volcanoes and waterfalls, snorkel trips, sunset sails, stargazing, waterfalls, zip lines, and sports fishing.

Choosing can be downright confusing. We decided to put together a selection of our very favorite activities and tour companies for you. Let’s go ahead and go down this little rabbit hole here.

I’m interested in Okay, so this is Oh, this is very interesting. We are now on a sub domain called activities. saltwatersulcona.

com. This is a whole this is like their blog I guess well, it’s kind of bloggy, but it’s all activities. So my first question here is, you know, does this need to be a subdomain?

What is the advantage of making this a subdomain? And this is kind of one of the areas where I’d probably like to have the person who created it in the chat. I mean they might they might be in the chat.

We’ll see if they want to pipe up. But what do you guys think about like does this need to be a subdomain? And are we, you know, how do we benefit from this?

Oh you can actually book here. Wait a minute, hold on, now I’m real confused. Leave checkout.

I just thought we were gonna go, because it was like talking about a guide, like it was like, hey we put together a selection of our favorite activities and tour companies for you and all of a sudden I’m seeing book now buttons, like I can actually book these things. 0:16:28 Does this confuse anybody else?

0:16:30 Because now I’m like, who am I booking with? You just mentioned about, I guess.

Okay, so if I’m putting this together correctly, this is a company for renting clear bottom kayaks, and that’s basically it. 0:16:50 But then, okay, there’s the clear bottom kayak rentals.

0:16:54 But what is the sunset view cruise? What is the wildlife encounter?

Who are these things through? Captain Chad’s charters, Captain Zodiac, Hawaii. How are we booking for all these different people?

Is this like a, are we on a directory site now? Can these charters, can these other companies pay? Powered by Fair Harbor.

What is Fair Harbor? Powerful booking software. Okay, that doesn’t help us.

I just want to know who I’m booking through and who, you know, I’m just a little confused. How do I get out of this? Oh, you can’t, look, you can’t escape this modal right here.

You’ve got to click up here which if you scroll down the X is gone and so you can’t see how to close this. Clicking outside of it does not work, escape does not work, that needs to be improved tremendously. Definitely some people that are going to get lost here and don’t do this to me, don’t do this to me.

I click the X I want to leave the checkout okay, don’t make me confirm. Literally on every modal I’ve got to confirm that I want to leave the checkout. Don’t do that to me Okay, let’s get in here and see if anybody else is confused booking site subdomain The section separations are distracting doesn’t add value.

Okay drop shadows Okay question. Is it easy to put the title as an h1 and other subtitles as h2 on regular pages? But not as easy on the home page page.

One solution is putting text and slider h1. Okay, I’m not sure exactly what you’re asking, no media, but if you can rephrase I can come back to that. Maybe this booking was built previously and the website is new, a little confusing when you look at the URL, but when on a mobile, which most people probably will be and they don’t.

Oops, it’s a catalog of other services in my opinion. I see, I don’t think it’s a catalog of other services. See I think I think everybody’s confused just like I am because this is Captain Chad’s charters and this is Hawaii Geo tours and this is Kona cowboy sport fishing.

These are clearly different providers what I want to know is like how did all these come together into this one site for this little kayak rental place. I’m just really interested in what’s in the relationship here. It’s not a traditional affiliate play.

It’s not like all these people have affiliate links. This isn’t software, right? These are local businesses, all on this one website.

I would need to know for sure how this all happened, how this all came together. Brian says this should all be on the primary domain for SEO purposes. I have not seen a reason to have anything on the subdomain.

That’s exactly what I was going to bring up. I mean, you’re basically splitting, because Google treats both of these as completely separate domains. And so you’re trying to build up the authority of one site and build up the authority of this other site completely separately.

And yeah, they do link back and forth and such, but it’s just, I don’t see a reason to have that on a subdomain at all. It would be saltwatersolcona. com slash activities.

This is the way that that needs to be structured, in my opinion. All those activities are just the custom post type, and you organize them that way, and they can be categorized, and you can do all of the same things that we just saw without making that a subdomain. They book activities and tours through a separate company.

Okay, so there must be some third party, it’s just not clear who’s controlling all of this. As a user, what I’m thinking is, who am I, if I don’t know who I’m booking through, if I don’t know who I’m paying, I just don’t have the confidence to follow through with it. So from a conversion standpoint, I can’t imagine that this converts really, really, really well, unless I just, unless, I don’t know, people already have trust from somewhere else that’s just not their first time visiting the website.

I don’t know. But I can definitely see that this could be dramatically improved. I mean, we’ve got to add some trust signals here and some like, who is who kind of stuff going on.

All right. It’s the number one thing that I want you to clean up. Okay.

Is this Chris’s site? Is this Chris’s site? Ah, Chris says, aloha.

It must be Chris’s site, because he said aloha. And he says he’s driving right now. So he’s, hopefully he’s safe.

Hopefully he’s safe and we’re not gonna get, he’s not gonna go off some, what is it, some Kona Mountain. Don’t drive into the volcano, Chris, while we discuss this. Okay, yes, just whatever you want to, whatever you want us to focus on in the critique, go ahead and let us know in the chat.

Just keep yourself safe. We have an eco-friendly gift shop with the desire to offer clear bottom kayak rentals to our big island visitors came a bigger responsibility to keep our ocean healthy. Thus, the idea of a gift shop was born.

Okay, so I think this needs to be reworded a bit. As is this, this feels a little bit wordy to me, this paragraph right here. This is just, this doesn’t like, to me, I’ll be honest what this sounds like.

This is like, dude, we have to say clear bottom kayak rentals as much as we possibly can. And so they were like eco-friendly gift shop with the desire to offer clear bottom kayak rentals, there’s our keyword, to our big island visitors came a bigger responsibility to keep our ocean healthy. So the premise is we want to keep the ocean healthy, thus the idea for our gift shop was born.

Does anybody see like a, what does a gift shop have to do with keeping our ocean healthy? This all seems forced, right? It seems forced.

All products carried in the shop are either made from recycled material, reusable replacement. Okay, now we’re getting into why we’re keeping the ocean healthy. I think we have to lead with this, right?

Just lead with, hey, all products carried in our shop are made from recycled material, yada, yada, yada, because we have a big responsibility to keep our ocean healthy. Like, this copy is out of order. Things like don’t follow, non sequitur, right?

It’s challenging to read because it feels forced. All right, we have reviews here. I don’t know that the double slider situation, I don’t know that I would go with that.

This looks to be driven by a plugin of some sort. This has got to be like a reviews plugin. Because you can tell it’s completely different from the site, we’ve got a different font here going on.

Yeah, all of this is just pluginized right here. Doesn’t really feel like it fits. This is why I add all reviews to my sites manually and use my own sliders and own presentation and all of this.

I know it doesn’t pull things in automatically the way that this does, but you get a lot of extra benefits. The ability to place certain testimonials in certain areas of the site or create associations with bidirectional relationships. I’m just not a fan of these plugins right here.

And I definitely wouldn’t put one on top of the other like this. And this section right here needs a heading as well. Like semantically, we just have a section with no heading.

No, there’s like no topic for this section. Semantically, so I think a little improvement there. Same thing with this down here.

We have a new section of content, but it has no heading. It just has a map stuck in it. And it doesn’t really indicate like what this map is for.

See how, you know, the person that added the map was like, I know exactly what this thing is for. But anybody else visiting is like, well, okay, there’s a map. But what am I supposed to do with it?

Okay, I see this is the business. But the problem is, and I know what a Google map looks like, right? But look how many markers are on this map.

For a first time visitor or somebody that’s not super technical, they’re just looking at a bunch of markers. Like I’m seeing coffee and tea, Denny’s. To somebody technically oriented, I guess it makes sense.

Like, oh, there’s Saltwater Soul right there. There’s their business. But, and here’s up here, I can get directions and such like that.

But add more context around here of what’s going on. Add more contact info. This feels a little bit lazy of just like, oh, just drop a map in the last section on the page and we don’t need anything else.

I would clean this up a bit. Okay, so let’s focus on their number one thing, which is clear bottom kayak rentals. To me, it’s like, does this website do the job of getting people to rent clear bottom kayaks?

That’s really the only question we need to answer. So I click on clear bottom kayak rentals and I get to clear bottom kayak rentals and our title tag is clear bottom kayak rentals I mean we can also hop over to hrefs Yeah, I really want to know like keyword Explorer here. Let’s go after this so we’re gonna do kayak rental and kayak rentals and We’re just gonna see what our options were like under matching terms under terms match, what is a kayak car rental?

Come on, see, this is why SEO is hard, right? On your bingo card, on your SEO, on your kayak rentals bingo card, did you expect kayak car rentals to be the number one option? Like this must be a brand.

Like I immediately think we’ve got a brand going on here. Kayak car rental. Kayak car rental.

Yeah that makes sense. I knew them as as flight rentals. That’s what I knew them as.

Yeah I didn’t know they did car rentals. So kayak is I guess they’ve branched out. I used to use them for flight.

Did I say flight rentals? Airline tickets. Airline tickets.

I used to use them for airline tickets. I didn’t know that they branched out. 0:27:15

Okay. 0:27:16 So, that’s tough.

So, now what we do, you know, this is why you use something like Ahrefs, right? You don’t use something like one of those free keyword, because the free keyword tools, they just don’t have stuff like this. So, you can exclude car, right?

So, we can just say, hey, get rid of everything with the word car in it. Now we have kayak rentals near me. You’re gonna find some brand terms here.

And okay, yeah, there’s a lot, okay. You’re gonna get a lot of brand related terms here. So then we can say clear, we’ll just say clear bottom kayak and see what comes back to us with that.

So clear bottom kayak, clear bottom kayak Florida, clear bottom kayak near me for sale. Okay, Orlando, Crystal River, Tampa. I’m not seeing rentals yet.

We can do a quick is rental. There we go. Clearbottom Kayak rentals near me.

Okay. All right. You know not super high on our volume here, but traffic potential, if we look at traffic potential column, it does stand out a little bit.

We got a little bit of CPC here. Here’s Maui. Now, see, I’m not from Hawaii, right?

So I don’t know how relevant Maui is to where they actually are. I know there’s a lot of islands, okay? There’s a lot of islands in Hawaii.

But I’m starting to think, let’s go to their homepage again. Let’s go back to their homepage. See, now I’d have to do a bunch of research.

Where is Kailua Kona in relation to Maui? How many searches? I mean, can’t imagine that there’s a lot.

Kailua Kona. I’m just gonna do Kona Kayak, Kayak Kona. Kona Kayak Rental.

Now again, Kona could be a completely separate place from this other, I don’t know. I don’t know anything about Hawaii, all right? I went to public school, don’t quiz me on Hawaii.

Never been there. But I’m starting to think that like, you know, there’s some other potential keywords. First of all, the title tag.

Typically, we want to lead with our target keyword. We don’t necessarily want to lead with the brand name. And if you see here on the title tag of the homepage, there is nothing about kayak rentals.

So we’re already dismissing our targeting right here. But I’m starting to think that they are obviously going after clear bottom kayak rentals. The question I guess would be more in line with how many people just look for kayak rental, right?

But the people just searching for kayak rental in general, probably once they learn there’s such a thing as clear bottom kayaks, would love to rent a clear bottom kayak. So we’re going after very specific right now. When, you know, Kona kayak rental, for example, is sitting right here looking pretty good.

And then we also have Kona Kayaks. But I don’t know if Kona Kayaks, let me do this on another, Kona Kayaks. All right, there’s another problem.

This is why SEO is difficult sometimes. Kona Kayaks is a brand, okay? So now we’re in the Trans Territory.

Kona Kayak Tours. 0:30:53 This would take a lot of analysis.

0:30:55 This would take a lot of analysis to go through this. But my first guess is we can do better than this.

Now, do we want to target this keyword? I mean, probably, right? Let’s do clear bottom kayak.

And just put in their whole thing. What did they, here’s what they actually targeted. Let’s go to the overview.

I mean, look at this. Clear bottom kayak rentals. Did I spell, let’s make sure I spelled it right.

Let’s just paste it in. Okay. Look at the exact keyword.

Yeah, there you go. So not much going on here. Not much going on

0:31:27 Now they’ve got a near me variation 0:31:29

with some relevant data, matching terms. I think we should do better here. There’s a lot more to look at here in terms of SEO, in terms of what our strategy is.

I think we’re leaving a lot of traffic on the board by what we’re choosing to target right now. And then of course, you’ve got some technical SEO stuff like title tag is not optimized. So just, if again, we’re doing a critique on everything right now, but in terms of SEO, I would say there’s a lot of room for improvement here in the SEO game.

I’m going to hop over to chat here real quick. Let’s see, a video of the experience, this is a good one right here. Big fan, big fan of videos in these kinds of situations for sure.

A video of the experience as a hero would probably be really impactful on the homepage. I agree with this. I agree.

Would someone search for glass bottom? See that’s the thing like I you know I’m just now learning I’m not a big kayaker obviously if I was traveling my first thought wouldn’t be like I need to rent a glass bottom kayak. Now if I wanted to kayak I would say I want to rent a kayak if you informed me that there is such thing as a glass bottom kayak and then it’s really awesome I would probably rent one of those but see I didn’t start out I didn’t go to Google and say I want to rent a glass bottom kayak so what we really need to know and this goes into discovery of your market you know the the overall market who would rent something like this what percentage of them know it exists already versus just the existence of kayaks.

And if you find that the vast majority of people don’t really know that there’s such thing as a glass bottom kayak, or maybe they do know it’s a thing, but when they’re on vacation or they’re traveling, it’s not their first idea to rent, right? Maybe their first idea to rent is just a kayak. They’re like, they know they wanna go kayaking, and their first thought is kayak, it’s not glass bottom kayak, okay?

Or clear bottom kayak even. And that’s a good thing, variation between clear bottom kayak and glass bottom kayak. So let’s just do clear bottom kayak and glass bottom kayak and just compare those two instances of the phrase together.

And here you go, you see glass bottom does win, but they are very close. And this is another instance where we probably should talk about Google’s algorithm and its interpretation. Google probably at this point understands these two things to be the same thing.

So if you put in Glass Bottom, it knows Glass and Clear in this context are basically the same thing. you’re gonna get, if I had to guess, very, very similar results, even if the website itself is not targeting that specific variation. But this is why we’re seeing, like SEO is not always super easy and straightforward and the strategy is not always easy to figure out and it bleeds into understanding the market and the customer for a specific business, like I would have to go back to the owner of the company and say, hey, based on what you know about people, like when they pick up the phone and call you, like did they already know they wanted a glass bottom kayak or did they just want a kayak rental?

Like, you know, and there’s a long list of questions that we would have to ask them to really figure out how people go about finding something like this. And then base our strategy off of that information. Nikolai says, are you saying not to use my company name and instead use new quality customers instead as example?

It’s a good idea to put your company name up here in the title tag, but it’s not first, right? So you wanna put your target keyword dash your company name. That’s typically the approach that that’s taken.

And then in the description we have to have a optimized description as well. So I think we’re good on this. We can close this stuff up.

I’ll leave that open for just a second. But in terms of SEO I think there’s a lot of room for improvement here. I’m going to go back to Clear Bottom Kayak Rentals and see what our little flow for actually signing up for this is and then we probably are going to run out of time on this one and have to move on to our second website.

Okay, age 3 plus, great for couples, rentals by the hour, conveniently located across from the Kaluakona Pier. Okay, my gosh, dude, I could not live in Hawaii. I mean this is like, I would spend, they’d be like, have you seen the beaches yet?

Have you seen the, I’m like, no, dog. I’ve spent my entire time trying to learn how to pronounce these things. That’s all I’ve done so far.

I’ve been here three months. 0:36:32 I’m still working on pronunciation.

0:36:34 I haven’t seen a damn thing. I would never make it to the glass bottom kayak because I’m spending all my time learning how to pronounce everything.

Let’s see, one person, $29 per hour, $44 per hour, play all day, rent for two hours, okay. I can check availability. Oh, now I’m finally here to some photos.

You know, that’s one thing that’s lacking here, along with the video. It’s just like, this doesn’t really sell me. Let’s move into photography land, right?

This doesn’t sell me. I mean, this could be a damn kayak floating in a backyard pool right now. I mean, show me a damn sea turtle.

Show me a something great. Like, I see one down here but this is you know I’m not scuba diving okay like you know what am I gonna see from my from my glass-bottom kayak here. And these are very tiny pictures right they’ve taken what would probably be immersive pictures in big size and they put them all in a collage right here and it really just like man okay is that a dolphin?

Or like, I’m very far away. It’s very difficult to see. Look at this waterfall.

I would love to immerse myself in this waterfall and these people enjoying the scene. But this thing is 100 pixels wide. I can’t really get into the enjoyment aspect of this, you know?

We’ve got a random like, zip lining thing going on here. I’m not going to do that from my kayak, okay. So I’m not going to, I don’t think I’m going to deep-sea fish from my kayak and this is a volcano at night.

I don’t know if I’m going to see that from my kayak or not, but the images is a little bit, you know, lack of relevance and then definitely lack of experience here. Like you’re not really giving me an experience. It’s not, the presentation can be better here.

Okay, we have the gift shop photo. That’s again, not helping me rent kayaks. There’s nothing really making me, like, you know, when you come to the site, it’s like, if you can make somebody’s be like, and think about, you know, maybe they’re with their significant other or something, or their family, they’ve got kids.

And you know that one decision maker, not everybody is immediately on board with like, yes, we have to go glass bottom kayaking. That’s, it’s probably going to be like one or two people in the group are super excited about that. Maybe not.

Everybody’s excited. And maybe it’s just an idea. Maybe it’s like, well, here’s one of the things that we could do.

Keep in mind competition now. Okay. Your competition is not just other glass bottom kayak rental companies.

It’s not just other kayak rental companies. What is it? It’s every activity that they could possibly do in Hawaii.

They’re trying to choose an activity. If I go to this website and then I go to some other, let’s say now I go to a website that is a hike, it’s a hike, it’s a volcano hike, and I get there and I’m just, it’s an immersive experience with like all these amazing, all this great photography, a video of the hike actually happening, of the volcano bubbling up, all this stuff, right, other than the fact that you might die, that’s probably going to win out. They come to a site like this, it’s like not immersive experience, it doesn’t really make you want to do it, like, you know, people, we have to give them the feeling that this is the thing that they have to do.

When you come to Hawaii, this is the thing that you have to do. One of the things that you have to do. That is the vibe that we have to give them.

If we don’t give them that vibe, we’re not gonna convert nearly as many people as we should be converting. And I’m just saying that this, the way things are set up right now, we’re not giving that vibe. The vibe we’re giving is, hey, you know, this is one of the many options.

And if you can imagine yourself, because we’re not showing it, if you can imagine yourself having fun in this situation, here you go, here’s a kayak you can rent. That’s kind of the vibe that this ends up giving off. 0:40:32

Let’s check availability. 0:40:34 All right, here we go, book online, familiar form.

Why aren’t these photos? I mean, look at this, oh, oh, I can get that close to dolphins. Okay, why wasn’t this photo on the homepage?

Like, you know, find your, what is your best photo? And by the way, absolutely pay for great photography for a site like this. Like, you’re trying to, think about what National Geographic does.

How many millions of dollars does National Geographic invest in videography and photography? And why do you think they do that? Because it creates an immersive experience.

And if you could just do a little bit of that, you don’t have to invest millions of dollars But just get a legit photographer get a legit drone operator get a legit videographer You only have to do it once right once all this content is created It’s going to serve you for years and years and years to come But if you try to sell a service like this with shoddy photography and no video work You’re just gonna have a much harder time a much much harder time making this work. All right, so I guess I have to use this calendar right here. Let’s go with, I want to go in February.

All right, let’s go with February 7th. You selected February 7th, okay. Let’s do, I gotta call to book unless I want to do the morning.

All right, let’s do 9. 30 AM, right? Early bird gets the fish okay clear bottom kayak rentals all right man single single double double all right now see I’m at a point where I have to pause and like study okay which is not a good thing for conversions you never want the person to have to study okay what am I doing single kayak one hour rental single kayak Oh No special two plus hours.

0:42:25 What the fuck is an ONO special? 0:42:27

I don’t, rent two hours, keep until closing time. Okay, just make this say, single kayak, hold on, rent two hours, keep until closing time. Okay, you pay for two hours.

You pay for, you’re not renting it for two hours, you’re paying for two hours, you’re keeping it until closing time. Okay, so you don’t have to say all of that. Single kayak until closing, okay?

Like just tell people, you get the kayak, here’s the, you pay $58, you get it until closing. That’s all they need to know. They don’t have to know that it’s, you know, the equivalent of two hours of rent.

They can do that in their head. They’re like, all right, 29 for one hour, or $58 until closing. Obviously, that’s the better deal.

But I had to sit here and study it to figure out exactly what’s going on. You never want the person to have to sit here and study. Double kayak, one hour rental, double kayak for the entire, just say the entire day.

You get it the entire day. Just say that. Make it very easy, okay?

$29, I’m dumb, so I want it for one hour. I’m gonna pay 30 bucks for the one hour. The other thing too is, yeah, I mean, I guess people, how many people jump at this?

Are they done after, like after an hour, are most people like, all right, I’m ready to come back? Does anybody really wanna kayak the entire day? I don’t know, I’m not a kayaker, so I wouldn’t know these things.

All right, $29 and I guys, I, okay. Oh, all right. So I’ve been clicking on it.

Like hope it does something. No, I got to come over here and do this. All right, I want one of these.

0:44:11 And then this appears. 0:44:12

There’s some things that we can improve here for sure. But the problem is this feels like a plugin that’s kind of a closed system. And I’m not sure how much control they’re gonna have over the user experience here.

But I will say it’s not a fantastic user experience. Single kayak, one hour rental, okay. Okay, gosh, now I’ve got more options to choose.

Two liter blue custom dry bag. Peace of mind, protection from the elements, hold several pocket-sized personal items. Dang, that costs $20, do I got to buy it?

Do I get to keep it? Five liter bag, custom dry bag, $25, okay. All right, I don’t know.

Am I renting it? Am I buying it? What’s going on here?

I don’t think I need these. I’m gonna let my phone teeter on the edge because I live on the edge. Okay, we’re going zero of those.

All right, Kevin, age, man, hate putting that number in, don’t you? Youth, no, I need adult, small, medium, weight. Come on guys, come on, come on.

All right, 190. Don’t judge, don’t judge. All right?

I’ve had a hurt ankle, OK? I haven’t been able to do my sprints. I haven’t been able to get to jujitsu.

I’ve got an Achilles issue, OK? Don’t judge. All right, I attest that, OK, combined weight.

Now I’m down here. What are we doing now down here? Contact, got phone numbers emails address card number okay this would be the final this would be the final thing all right you know it’s not it’s not the worst I’ve seen we got to leave the checkout now it’s not the worst I’ve seen it’s not fantastic I think it can be improved there for sure I yeah okay all right I think we’ve kind of summed up exactly what needs to happen here if it were me let’s just do a little bit of a recap.

This whole subdomain situation I’m not convinced needs to be a subdomain. I need to know more about what’s going on right here. I think that this if we want to sell these other things legitimately we’ve got a lot more work to do on the site in general.

I think this could really benefit from a you know strategy session. I think in terms of SEO we’ve got a lot of work to do. Creating an immersive experience we’ve got a lot of work to do.

So there’s a lot of stuff that can be improved here for sure. Alright I’m gonna close this one that we’re gonna put this one in the books. I’m gonna go back to the chat here and see what people have to say.

Somebody’s agreeing on something with a color palette tons to unpack here. Okay in menu, clear bottom kayak rentals and menu takes you to a page where a ribbon is floating over the menu. I didn’t see that.

That might, oh, it’s probably this ribbon right here if I had to imagine. You must be on a browser, a different browser. I don’t know.

I’m not seeing that exact issue, but okay. Hence why my question about, okay, you’re talking to BG if we put first title as an h1 we assume that that’s what the site is about but it’s just one part and they all have the same importance okay you guys are having a side conversation icon links on footer don’t don’t open on a new page they forward okay single kayak all day rental there you go Rubens got it all day rental it’s all you got to say. Mental load is absolutely a thing.

Make it easy for me to learn, add to cart and pay. Absolutely. And the thing is, is every time you, you, you prompt the user to have another question in their mind, well, most users have to find an answer to that question before they will proceed.

So if your checkout flow or your copy or anything else triggers a question in their mind you better have an answer for that question because if you don’t clearly have an answer for that question they will not proceed in the flow and your conversion rate is going to go in 0:48:11 the tank.

0:48:12 Oh no is a Hawaiian word that can be used to describe something that is pleasing or enjoyable. Got it.

Okay now here’s here’s a good this is a great great thing. Okay. how many people renting these are actually from Hawaii or live in Hawaii versus people visiting Hawaii.

Because if you’re visiting Hawaii, you can’t use, let’s say 70% of the people renting these things are visiting Hawaii. You’ve got to stop using all the insider terminology because they probably don’t know the insider terminology. And that’s just going to confuse them and it’s going to make it harder for them to understand what’s going on here Now if you tell me Oh 70% of people that rent these things live in Hawaii like they know Hawaii culture They know like then fine.

Okay, maybe you have an argument to use these terms everywhere But that’s another conversation that we need to have with the client for sure Me and my wife are personally offended by the assumption that you don’t want a kayak for more than an hour. You want a kayak for weeks. 0:49:18

Okay. 0:49:18 I, I, I get it.

I get it. Okay. 0:49:20

I get it. 0:49:21 Let me, should, is this, is this a good time for me to bring up how great canoes are?

Should we have that conversation? I don’t know. Maybe we should.

I personally despise full name fields as opposed to separate first and name. Change my mind. same fields as opposed to separate first and name change my mind.

Well, I don’t disagree, Mark, I don’t disagree. I think for, you know, CRM purposes, like it’s, I think a single field is terrible, right? It’s like, what, what if they got that double dash situation?

What do they got a, you know, crazy first name that’s actually has a space in it. Now we don’t know what a first name is versus last name. And if we’re personalizing emails, for sure, I mean, that becomes very, very challenging.

Yeah, I like the separate fields. I’m on board, Mark, I’m on board with separate fields. Okay, the 0% 0% I don’t remember what the question was.

I’m sorry. Yeah, add context to your comments because I forget what I asked and then people just answer and I don’t even remember what the question was. All right.

It’s really easy to be critical of other people’s work and I’ve been on the other side of harassing feedback but this is a really good website for someone with little, no experience building 0:50:46 websites.

0:50:47 Yes, yeah, but people know the drill here. That’s the thing.

When you say, it actually, when you go fill out the form, it, you consent, you consent to what we’re doing here. And the thing is, is like, if you want somebody to do, there is an angle, if somebody wants to start a channel doing in-depth critiques where they sugarcoat everything and everything that they say is a thousand percent with everybody’s feelings in mind we all wanna sing kumbaya and hold hands around the campfire and every website’s fantastic and A for effort and I tend to think that like you know just direct feedback and like honesty and just tell the truth about the situation that’s you know you learn you don’t have to cut through all the nonsense and noise and and so that’s just me right and that’s what we do here. And if somebody else wants to start a different version of doing this, that they feel like is much more whatever, however you want to describe it, then yeah, I mean, do you, right?

But everybody’s got their own method. I can tell you this. I get emails from the people who I do the critiques for, and they thank me up and down for like all the stuff that we discuss and all the improvements that they can make it like they’re big boys and girls, they’re big boys and girls.

And you know, I’ll go back to the photography reference. Here we are, we have the camera right with when I was learning photography, when I was learning photography, like everybody, when starting out of photography, I absolutely sucked. And I knew I sucked.

And what I would do is I would go to photography forums, and I would post the photos and I would be like please like tell me what I need to do to get better at this thing because I really enjoy it and I have this vision in my mind here’s the picture I saw in my mind but I can’t fucking create it okay how do I how do I get better at this and it would be more beneficial when people were like just tearing it apart and be like here here do this do this do this do this versus the people who were commenting on my photo going, man, this is just such a great effort, I’m just really excited that you’ve fallen in love with photography, and I never got anything out of those comments. Those comments weren’t helpful at all, right? It was the people who were actually like, here’s what’s wrong with it, here’s what you can fix, here’s what you can adjust, here’s what you can do differently next time.

That’s the comments I got value out of, not the people who just wanted to give me a hug and pat me on the back and like, oh man, so great, so great that you’re involved in this now. And you know, like big boy, big girl, it’s like just tell me what I need to do to make this better and I’ll do it. 0:53:28

You know, it’s not like we’re not sitting here 0:53:29 calling people names and just tearing them down and personally attacking them.

It’s just, here it is, it’s a site and we’re just gonna critique it. We’re gonna talk about what works and what doesn’t work and then we’re gonna move on and we’re gonna give as much value as we possibly can and it’s just up to, you know, be a big boy, be a big girl and here we go. Okay, said not complaining, this is real feedback.

Okay, good, yeah, yeah, yeah, perfect. Okay, we’re on the same page. We are on the same page.

Okay, and same with jiu jitsu. Like, you know, when my jiu jitsu instructors like, like, literally, and jiu jitsu instructors are not that, you know, they’re not Patty on the backy types, right? They kind of have like a what the fuck are you doing attitude, which, by the way, is important, because you know, there’s a safety issue.

There’s a lot of issues, right involved that they have to make sure everybody is on the same page in jiu jitsu land. And so they will not hesitate, they will not hesitate to just tell you exactly how it is. And it ends up making you a lot better, right?

If you can’t, if you cannot get butt hurt about it, you will get a lot better. Okay, we’re moving on to site number two. This is the Elementor site where the user said, hey, I’m switching from Elementor to Bricks.

Feel free to tear this thing apart. Do whatever you want, say whatever you want. That was their comment in the chat or in the email that they sent.

All right. JXD or is it JX designs? Is it JX designs or JX?

Okay, I guess the D stands for designs sometimes the three letters is like I don’t know what the J X is for yet May a lot of times it’s like their first name middle name last name kind of situation. I don’t know I don’t I’m just guessing. I don’t have anything else to go by No scroll test.

I like the logo It’s modern it’s clean. It’s well balanced It’s sharp. 0:55:37

I like it. 0:55:38 Okay.

0:55:39 You know, it’s very simple, clean navigation up top. Home about services portfolio blog.

We’re not doing a mega menu thing. We’re not doing a, we’re not even doing drop downs. It’s like, Hey, here’s your options.

Very simple. Elevating your brand’s identity and online visibility, creating professional web designs and unique brand identities, helping you stand out from the competition. I can explore projects or I can collaborate.

I like this little design accent here because I know there’s a lot down here, right? But this almost visually contains me in this situation right here. It’s almost like helping me focus on what’s going on right here, which I actually like and it’s very subtle and it’s very on-brand.

You know, we’ve got the gradient color and the gradient color here and the gradient color here. So, so far, visually, everything is very nice and balanced. I like the use of white space.

I like that it’s not overcomplicated. I know what’s going on. Yeah, I mean, we’re good here, so we’ve got logos scrolling across the screen

0:56:54 I’m trying to figure out how I feel about this so you know when we talk about 0:56:59

Flow and narrative and copy this this right here is you know you I don’t know if everybody would See this as copy. I see this as this is copy. This is part of the copy.

It’s basically the brands that this designer uses. But in terms of flow and the narrative that we’re trying to tell, the question that pops into my mind is, is this the most important thing that we should show the person second in the site experience, right? What value does this have to most users who come here?

And to me, the answer is probably not much value. So there’s this idea that clients don’t care about the tools that we use. That argument is used terribly.

But in this case, clients don’t really care that much. Like, they may not even know what Figma is. They may not know what Brics is.

They probably see WordPress and know what that is, but I’m not saying that this is not important to have. I’m just questioning, should this be the second thing that they see on the page? Is there anything more important that we could put here?

Because I could think we could put testimonials here. We could put case studies here. We could put examples of work here.

We could put a lot of things here. An introduction, personal introduction. We could put a lot of things here.

I don’t think that this is the best use of flow in this site. I would move this to somewhere else. Recent designs.

Okay, we got a little Bento grid action going on here. I’m interested in this logo design right here. Okay.

I think the portfolio area like the this I guess we would call this like a case study template is severely lacking you know it looks very templaty just Looks like almost like a default blog template kind of thing You know the lines now suddenly coming out of nowhere the miss spacing here This leaves a lot to be desired and I think we could just well let’s go over this this is the finished logo this is the finished logo on yellow this was the process of getting there I think we could show more detail in the pro I know for sure there’s more detail that goes into the process of getting to the finished logo I think it’s very beneficial to show that like where their hand sketches to start with where they’re you know show I think showing more of the process would be good. And talking about it, you know, like I think there needs to be a write-up here. What did the client ask for?

What kind of decisions did you go through? Like this is a perfect time for explaining your process, explaining how you will work and arrive at these things, not just like, hey, here’s a logo. Okay, so, you know, recent designs, I think in terms of flow, it’s good to have this up top.

Then we get into design services. Building a strong brand identity. Blending creativity and strategy, okay.

Da da da da da. Okay, I’m just checking little keyboard navigation here. All right, become memorable.

Get noticed online. Showcase your product. And I’m looking now at the accent headings.

We’ve got brand identity, web design, print and packaging, clean icons. We blend creativity and strategy to create brands that leave a long-lasting impression on your audience. So here’s where I would flag this, okay, for us to come back and think about more.

And here’s why. We blend creativity, notice that we’ve talked about this before in the past, like we, us, versus you, them language. That’s not really what I’m honing in on right now though.

We blend creativity and strategy to create brands that, okay, let’s stop there. This is a good opening. This is a good opening.

The question that we need to have is, leave a long-lasting impression on our audience. If we polled businesses, and let’s say that there’s five things a logo can do. One of them is leave a long-lasting impression on the audience, but maybe there’s four other things.

The question becomes, is this the thing that they care about the most or the most important thing and if it is we keep it but if we decide no there’s actually some other outcome that people care about much more we have we’ve pulled 500 businesses and we’ve given them five options and they chose a different option well the other option is to be inserted right here okay so when I read this I’m just wondering is this the thing that they really care about you know because when you write copy you’re writing copy with a lot of theory sometimes, but this is an example of one where we can actually know the answer. You just, you poll a lot of people and you will find the answer and then you insert the answer right here. So I would just flag that as like, are we sure that this is the thing that people care about the most?

Because we only have one sentence to get their attention and you know, we have multiple different options that could be inserted in this position. We need to know that this is the actual correct answer. But overall, I mean, spacing, balance, color, typography, this is all good.

There’s nothing, this is, I mean, it’s good. It’s great work. The copy is not bad, right?

It’s just, there could be maybe some tweaks and adjustments here, but overall, everything that we’re looking at is good Multi-frame catalog, okay Beauty World graphic and design, okay Okay, so we see right off the bat That is not accessible. So and this is where you’re gonna run into issues with like Okay, because we’re using Elementor versus, you know a better builder, we don’t have the accessibility thing nailed down when we decide to use a tabs component like this. So yeah, I can click on them and such, but I can’t keyboard navigate them at all.

It completely skips that entire section for the most part. So that’s a downside of things. Here’s our design process, so we can get a glimpse of the creative journey.

I really like these icons, I like these, it’s almost like a two-tone icon, but it’s also kind of an offset, like background shape kind of thing. I really like these. Define scope, collect information, brainstorm ideas, deliver files.

Think of this in terms of a marketer like put your marketing hat on right now And I’m just gonna ask you a question about these four things Does defining scope? Sound fun or you know like we know it’s important right, but does it sound exciting not really collect information hmm very dry Brainstorm ideas now client may want to do that like they may be excited about they that’s kind of the thing that they want to get to the most probably. They would love to start brainstorming.

Deliver files. Very dry. Very dry.

So in terms of like marketing, right, copy, this does not, I don’t think, it’s not creating any excitement for the visitor. So I would just rename these things. Like we need more exciting ways to describe this process.

Even though this process is fine, we need more exciting ways to describe it. Like get the person like wanting to do it, wanting to go through it. You got to sell the process, you know.

Okay, so we come down here, why choose us? Stunning designs, excellent SEO, enhanced speed, okay. Mm-hmm.

We can just do a little side quest here. Just be curious about this We can come back we can come back we’ll let that run in the background 1:05:18

Just because it said, you know, I high performance and fast loading times and we know it’s element or and I know you can optimize 1:05:25 These speed optimize these things to death There’s also ways to cheat you can cheat on the speed optimization as well We’ll check on that in just a second frequently asked questions what services do you offer?

How much do your services cost? I don’t think this needs to be there. This is a waste How much do your services cost our pricing varies based on the scope of the project.

Please get in touch with us for a personalized quote. It’s kind of a frustrating answer for people to hear, even though that’s the truth. I would give people a starting point, but then of course, it’s gonna depend on the service they choose, right?

So I don’t think this is a frequently asked question in general, it’s a good one to have here. When I click on brand, for example, okay, I go here. Now I need an FAQ.

See, I need FAQs down here for branding. Give me branding FAQs on the branding page. That’s what I expect to see and then you can tell me what price branding starts at and I would do that to qualify people because you know you do if especially if you’re kind of a higher priced designer you don’t want everybody contacting you.

You just want people who are serious contacting you. Okay, let’s keep going. Let’s dash over here.

Okay, so you know, well 69, 93. This accessibility score by the way is nonsense. It’s not looking at like, it’s looking at 5% of accessibility.

Same with best practices. You can’t take these scores literally, right? Like there’s very minimal things that it’s actually checking here.

Same thing with SEO. You know, it’s I’ve shown people how to run a technical audit in the inner circle and and that’s much much more valuable. The only score you should be paying attention to is this performance score right here.

And then these numbers down here. Let’s see what it gets on desktop. Mmm.

Mmm 86 on desktop. Mmm. It’s very easy to get a high desktop score.

Mobile can be tougher for various reasons, by the way. People will rag on elements or, and here’s where, you know, I think we have to be fair in our analysis, right? Because the other thing too, I mean, you’re gonna go to, you could go to giri.

co or you can go to automatic CSS and you can do a page speed score and be like, oh, it’s not 100, oh, it’s not even in the 90s. And the thing is, what are you actually attributing that to? Because if I take a, you know, just a normal website, and it could be built with automatic CSS, and do a page speed score, it’s fine.

It’s like, it could be 98. But then I put in, like a help scout widget, and I put in all this EDD payment architecture that loads all this nonsense jQuery bullshit on the back end, and it’s like, I need these tools to actually run the business, but those things impact the score. And then some people come and they’re like, well, it’s an ACSS site, so I get 80.

And it’s like, dude, look at every, like how much JavaScript are we having to load for all this other shit we’re doing that has nothing to do with Bricks or ACSS or anything else. You know, so you do have to kind of analyze what’s actually going on on the website and what is the poor performance actually attributed to. Now we do know that having four DOM elements for every one DOM element that should be there is not helping the situation, okay?

It’s actually, you know, just not great whatsoever. And there’s a lot of other reasons we don’t want that happening. So, you know, I’m not giving Elementor a pass for the absolute div-ception nonsense.

I mean, you can open one section and it’s actually, they’ve improved it over time. But I mean, geez louise, like just the amount to get to a paragraph. It’s like, okay, all right.

Can’t just put a paragraph on that page, you gotta put it in eight different wrappers. And that definitely does not help, okay? But when you’re doing page speed tests on live websites, there’s a lot going on.

You know, like I had one where it was, 1:09:52 what was it?

1:09:52 They wanted a, what is that? What’s that super expensive CRM?

Salesforce. I don’t know why it was like evading my mind. They wanted this like Salesforce live chat widget thing that loads a shadow DOM and all this other stuff and it’s like oh my God, oh my God, like we had it at like 98 and the minute you put on the Salesforce thing, it’s in the 60s, like that one fucking widget was just destroying page speed.

And they were like, no, we want it in the green and I was like, well, you can’t have the chat widget because you couldn’t, we were trying to optimize the different JavaScript files, I was loading like eight different JavaScript files, we’re trying to figure out which ones we can defer or delay or whatever, but then the chat kept breaking and it was just, it was an absolute nightmare. And so you have to look at what the site is actually doing beyond just what was it built with, right? It is quite important.

1:10:44 Do you think the oxygen repeater can cause an issue 1:10:46

with IDs? They fixed that, I believe. But yeah, the old repeater for sure was, it duplicated IDs and that was a major, major issue.

1:10:58 Okay, let’s see here. 1:11:00

I’m just looking at chat, I’m just looking at chat over here. 1:11:02 Hello Kevin, thank you very much for the critique.

1:11:04 All texts were generated using GPT-4 since English is not my main language. I’m trying to show visitors that I do both web design and branding.

Yeah, I mean, you’ve done a, I think you’ve done a good job here. Do we need to look at really anything else? I mean, I know you’re switching to BRICS, so on the infrastructure side of things, that’s going to help tremendously.

I mean, I think what I can do is point out, you know, like these cards, for example, okay? Just point this out to people who just aren’t, still aren’t necessarily on the same page, right? Elementor styles everything more or less at the ID level.

Now, some people will chime in and be like, who did this classes right here? Can’t you see it’s classes? And it’s like, okay, they’re unique.

They’re unique classes. They might as well be IDs. This is not, when we say use classes, this is not what we’re talking about when we say use classes.

But we have more or less these cards, the way that they’re designed, right? And if I wanted to change this gradient, if I wanted to change the spacing of the card, if I wanted to change this gap value, if I want to change anything, maybe I want to change some of these things at different breakpoints. You are going to have to come in and edit every single card individually, manually.

And this is a small site, okay? But I mean there could be on a larger site. Here we are again.

Here they are. They’re cards again on another page. Not only are you going to have to remember what pages these cards are on, you got to remember like every instance of the card.

Otherwise a few of your cards are not going to get the updates that you want them to get. And then how are you going to make the updates? You can’t copy-paste.

You can copy-paste on this page but you can’t copy-paste across multiple pages. So we have this conversation all the time. So you can achieve, and this is what people will say, look at this beautiful site that was built with Elementor.

You can use any builder you want. I’ve never said, not once ever have I said you can’t build a beautiful site with Elementor. Never once have I said that.

Of course you can build a beautiful website with Elementor. What I’ve said is the scalability, not there. The ability to now iterate and build a bigger site going forward, that is not a maintainability nightmare.

That is impossible in Elementor. It is just not possible. The bigger the website gets, the bigger the problem gets.

It becomes an absolute atrocity in terms of scalability. That is just a undeniable objective fact, okay? That you cannot get around.

So, and then, if you use pre-built elements, I get the feeling that this person built this card themselves, which is good, okay? But Elementor has pre-built elements, like they have a card element and such. If you use those, you run into another problem with scalability and iteration, maintainability in the sense that you cannot add DOM elements to those pre-made elements.

If we’re dealing with a client situation, like for example, this little accent heading. Let’s say that’s not a feature of the pre-made card that you’re using. But you’ve already built 700 of these cards.

And now someone decides, you know we really need an accent heading. And you go, well fuck. Because we got 700 of these cards that we cannot add an accent heading to.

Just, it’s not a, oh it’s going to be difficult. It’s, you can’t. You just can’t, it’s a no, okay?

Unless we rebuild every single card. And you do have to rebuild every single card. Unless some of these are done with loops, which that saves you a little bit, but still does not save you nearly as much as you need to be saved.

Let me tell you that right now. So this is just, you are inviting disasters when you use a builder like Elementor, that’s all you’re doing Versus when you build with a builder like bricks not only are you getting clean code? But if you if you’re building it according to best practices you are getting all of the scalability and all of the maintainability That you should have in a professionally built website just like when we You know build things with code the reason people are using PHP and JavaScript and all this is so we can create components.

We can create things like global single sources of truth so that we don’t have to do all of this manual labor. Because manual labor is not only terrible, like from a time and efficiency and cost perspective, it opens the door to errors and issues. Like I said, are you going to come back three months from now and remember every page you use this card on?

In every location on every page? Because if you miss some, then those are not going to get the update. And those are going to look different from your other ones.

It’s just, this is not how we build sites. If you’re taking an organized, logical, professional approach to building a website, you just can’t use Elementor, period, end of story. It does not allow you to do the necessary things to make a website scalable and maintainable.

Unless you’re willing to manually go into the advanced panel on every element and add a class and then go into a separate style sheet and write all of your CSS, custom CSS for it, maybe now you’re starting to get away with it a little bit. But this is not how Elementor was designed to be used. Elementor encourages you to build sites that are not scalable and not maintainable.

Period, end of story. And if you care about professionalism in your work and making scalable, maintainable websites, you would just decide that is not a tool that’s acceptable for me to use. And by the way, I’m writing a, I’ll show you right here.

Because I got to continue making this. OK, Andrea’s still not got the white screen of death fixed from my other form issue. But I’m writing a big takedown.

Like, it’s a, I’ll say, a breakdown of element. Or it’s like, I mean, very in-depth. I think I’m halfway done, and it’s like 2,000 words already.

I’m only halfway done. I’m going to break it down as objective and logical and you know, examples, screenshots, like everything. And I’m taking one for the team guys.

I’m literally in Elementor doing things. I’m doing things in Elementor. Like I mean, I’ve got bruises.

I don’t know if you can see them. I’ve got like, it’s tough sledding, all right? But I’m doing it for you guys.

I’m taking one for the team. But I’m going to publish this article because we’ve just got to stop the nonsense about any builder can get the job done. No, it just can’t.

It cannot. If you care about scalability, maintainability, and efficiency, and organization, and just doing things in a great approach. I try to say like, you know, the best way, but then people get butthurt about that.

It’s like, but prove there’s a better way. And then maybe we’ll adopt that way. But it’s just, you just can’t use it.

It’s just gone from the list. It’s off the list. It can’t be used.

Okay, D123 says next. Okay, we’re gonna move into, I don’t think we have to do anything else on here. I mean, if you wanna know, this guy does good work, right?

So you can go to his site, it’s right here, jxdesigns. info. If you need a designer, maybe hit this guy up.

And I welcome this guy into the BRICS ecosystem, for sure. The more, you know, actually, he’s obviously talented, right, so the more talented people we bring into the BRICS ecosystem, the better, the better. This is a good transition that’s happening here.

Okay, let’s go ahead and go into Q&A land. It seems there isn’t enough interest in scalability, education, education, education. There is interest in it.

You know when the interest happens though? When a client has, they pay $10,000 for a website. Guys, this happens all the time.

I’m gonna go back to camera. We don’t have to screen share here. Hopefully if I have to screen share something else, I remembered a screen share.

But guys, I can’t tell you how often this happens. A client will contact us and be like, here’s our website, our developer abandoned us, okay? Like, how often do you hear that thing?

Our developer abandoned us, more or less. Or the developer says they can’t do X, Y, Z. I get that a lot, right?

We wanna do this, but the developer says they can’t do that. And so we dropped them, and we’re looking for a new agency. All right, so we’re having this conversation.

And then I open the site, and I start looking at it. I’m like, all right, what are you wanting to do? And the first thing I look at is, okay, they want to make a bunch of styling changes that are like not to this one page, but like across the entire site, to cards, to various elements that repeat and so on and so forth.

And so I look like, all right, what’s our template situation look like? What does, because then, you know, what do I see? I see, oh, good, they’re not using CPTs at all.

This is going to be fucking fun, a lot of fun, right? So they’ve got services, not custom post types, FAQs, not custom post types, team members, not custom post types, everything is in the pages area, okay? Because these best practices that we talk about, sorry, I have a canker sore on my tongue.

So every now and then, because it’s swollen, I’ll just bite my tongue again. That’s just the life that I have to live today. And I’ll start slurring my words at some point soon.

But that’s the situation right now. But I’ll go in and everything is in the pages area, just a nice junk drawer, just everything’s thrown into the pages area. And then I’ll look at the builder, and it’s like, all right, fucking Elementor site again.

All right, and then we go look, obviously I already know the DOM is absolute trash. I already know accessibility is probably not there. And then I go look for like, okay, like I already know because it’s Elementor that classes were not used properly.

And so, you know what I have to tell the person, I have to say, I hate to inform you, but this entire website has to be rebuilt. And oh, what do you mean it has to be rebuilt? And they start freaking out, because they just spent like $10,000 on it or whatever it was.

And I just have to explain, well, it wasn’t built properly. So the things that you want to do going forward, we could absolutely do. Don’t get me wrong, we could absolutely do it, but it’s going to take three times as long and it’s going to be three times as expensive.

And by the way, the bigger the site gets, the worse this problem is going to get. So it’s actually cheaper to fix it now before all these other grand ideas that you have are put into place. This is when people become interested in scalability and maintainability.

Mainly the client going, I don’t ever want this to happen again. I don’t ever want to hire somebody that doesn’t really know what they’re doing. Throwing pages, everything in pages, no classes, no scalability, the wrong templates are being used.

Like, it’s a nightmare. People who don’t adhere to these practices create real, okay, this is not fantasy land, real nightmare scenarios for clients who are spending real money. And by the way, if we have to rebuild the whole website, this is three months potentially that we’re not going forward.

Look up the broken window fallacy, right? Broken window fallacy says, hey, you throw a rock through a window, it’s great for the economy. Let’s give a little economics lesson right now because a lot of people say, oh I love to rebuild sites for clients.

I love it. I love it when people do things wrong. I don’t love it when people do things wrong.

I don’t like the fact that clients come to me and I have to tell them that their whole website has to be rebuilt and it all boils down to the broken window fallacy. You know what that is? You take a rock, throw it through a window and some people will say, that’s great for the economy.

Why? Why is it great? Well, because now the glass man gets to come over here and he gets business because he’s got to replace this glass right here.

And he pays an insurance company, right? And the insurance company, it’s good for them. And it’s good for all these people that are involved in the fact that this glass got broken.

And it’s a fallacy because all of the resources that have to go into fixing a piece of broken glass could have been put into other areas of the economy not into fixing a piece of glass that was working yesterday. The glass did not need to be replaced yesterday. So those resources can go elsewhere.

Now they’re not going elsewhere because they’re coming here and if we break that glass every single day those resources will have to keep coming here and they will not go other places. That’s the broken window fallacy. So every time a website has to get rebuilt because it wasn’t built right the first time, that’s time and energy and money that that company is not spending on SEO and PPC and Facebook ads and YouTube and whatever else they need to be doing.

Or in terms of the surfing or the kayaking place, drone videos and photography and everything else that they need to be doing right so no this is not good it’s not good that people don’t follow best practices it’s not good that people suggest that there’s no such thing as best practices these companies are spending tens of thousands of dollars and they’ve got people building websites that are just throwing shit together and I don’t know why we think that’s good or acceptable or that that needs to continue happening but it’s not it’s objectively bad it’s objectively bad and that’s why we do this because we’re trying to elevate everybody’s game that’s what we’re doing here we’re trying to elevate every it’s for our benefit is for the clients benefit is for the benefit of our industry ok it doesn’t look good on our industry when sites are not scalable not maintainable and everything is a nightmare we don’t want to create nightmare scenarios. We’ve got to stop doing that. It’s not good for anybody.

Ok, 10,000 is not even that much for a website. You’re right. Some of these companies are spending way more than that.

100%. Alright, Q&A. Open Q&A, AMA.

Any questions now? I’m going to let me check time here 12 26 Okay, we’ve got at least 20 minutes If the questions are really good 30 minutes or so But we’ll see All right question for KG I’m about to offer service websites for my future clients Would you recommend having three different website packages ranging from 1. 5 thousand to 3,000 and one custom package for bigger projects?

No, I would not recommend that. Here’s why. Three different website packages.

Package one, $1,500. Package two, $3,000. Now in your mind, Nikolai, now again, everybody’s gonna say well depends on where Nikolai lives, depends on who his clients are, depends on okay but just from a general pricing strategy standpoint there is not a big enough gap between 1.

5 thousand and 3 thousand. For the clients that I work with first of all my minimum right now is around 6,000. That’s for a one-page website.

And then it goes up from there. Okay, so the starting point would be 6,000. Like we’re not doing anything for less than 6,000.

It’s just, there’s gotta be $6,000 worth of work or we’re not a good fit. So that’s where that starts. Now your minimum is 1.

5 thousand, you’re saying. That’s your bottom package. To me, you know, the jump from 1.

5 to three is not even a consideration point in the clients that I work with, right? And even in most clients, if you can get somebody to agree to 1. 5, I’ll just tell you this right now, let’s just make this known, let’s go on record.

If you can convince somebody to pay $1,500 for a website, you can convince them to pay $3,000 for a website. There’s not, that is not a big leap, okay, that people have to take. That gap right there is filled by just skills in communication, sales, presentation, process, right?

You can, it’s very easy gap to close. So the fact that you’re putting those two plans as options next to each other is a waste. It’s a wasted opportunity.

I would start honestly at three, let’s say you want to start at 1. 5. I immediately, if I’m coaching you, I go, no Nikolai, you’re starting at three.

Your minimum is now three. Now what would be the next plan up if you wanted to actually design a plan? I don’t design plans.

What I do is I look at what the client actually needs and I scope that out. Not just what they need by the way, what I would do in their shoes, which by the way is usually a lot more than they actually need. But then what I do is I scale it down.

So they say I need a website for XYZ and here are my goals. And so I say okay if these were my goals and this was my brand I would do all of these things. And that might add up to $50,000 in work.

But then they go oh well I don’t have $50,000 right and we use we talk about this in the inner circle like I’ve got a bunch of sales trainings on how to how to figure out what their actual budget is without saying what’s your budget don’t ever ask what their budget is don’t that’s not a question don’t ask don’t ask that question but I tell you exactly how to find it out right and so I let’s say that I figure out that their budget is about $7,500. Okay, so there’s $50,000 of work that I would propose if it were my company and my website, but we have $7,500 to work with. So what we do is we figure out, okay, what are all of the important boxes that we can check and the necessary boxes for $7,500?

And that’s what we’re going to propose with the understanding that all this other work still needs to be done, but just can be done in the future. And it’s explained to them that, look, if you really want this thing to be successful, we do need to do all these things. You just don’t have to do them now.

We’re gonna start here with your budget, and then we’re gonna build trust, and we’re gonna get results, and we’re going to get business in the door for you. And then as your business grows and your budget grows, we’ll be with you the entire way to piece on these other aspects. And it doesn’t have to all be done at once.

This could be 10 different phases, right? So they know, okay, you’re not just gonna build me this phase and then abandon me. You’re gonna build me this phase and then you’re gonna be there to guide the next phase and the next phase and the next phase as I’m comfortable doing those phases.

That’s the approach that we take. So I don’t do like plans and choose this plan versus that plan. Everything is scoped out based on what the client would actually need.

So if it were me coaching you I would say I wouldn’t even do the plans thing. I would do a $3,500 minimum or a $3,000 minimum and then we’ll talk about how to do scoping, how to do the sales process, how to do the proposal process, how to actually overcome some of the objections that they might have and how to find better clients and how to say no to the ones that aren’t a good fit and there’s a lot involved there right but I think you would be on a on a much better path forwards with that. I’ve made this point before that like if you have predetermined plans you’re basically communicating to people that you don’t really look at their needs all that much you just put them in a bucket.

It’s like oh your business is like that business okay we’re just going to do the things that we do for those businesses over there. Same with like templated websites. It doesn’t really communicate that you care all that much about the client.

It communicates more that you’re treating them like an assembly line. Like this is fucking Ford or McDonald’s or something. And like, yeah, the fucking same burger comes down the same line and gets the same fries and the same drink and goes in the same bag.

If I have a legitimate business and I’m like, you know, I really want to leverage this internet thing to get a lot of traffic and sales and leads, I would rather you not treat me like I’m McDonald’s or Ford. Like, I would like that you would take more of a custom approach. That’s just me.

So, yeah, that’s kind of the vibe that we want to give off. 1:32:24 Hopefully that helps you.

Question how would you rebuild portfolio page you 1:32:26 reviewed using frames grid builder and meta box?

This page right here? Yeah I mean this is just tabs use the frames tabs component. They’re just putting grids inside of the tab body pretty easy to do.

This would be super easy to do with frames. Yeah, super easy. 1:32:56

That’s it though. 1:32:57 Okay, and this is not even WP Grid Builder.

These are just the tabs. You don’t even need WP Grid Builder for this. Those aren’t facets, those are just tabs.

I don’t really see facets anywhere on this site. OK. 1:33:17

Let’s see. How would you like to implement? 1:33:19

Is this a different question? OK. How would you like to implement a grid builder in ACSS or frames?

The other day, two big extensions for Oxygen and Brics, Recoda and Advanced Themer, have released their own versions. Well, that’s a good question. I think that it should be, if it’s going to exist, which it exists in Quickly, it exists in Webflow, I believe, I think that these should be native tools.

Here’s the thing, we’re going to, let’s say you use Advanced Themer, you put it in, and you learn how to do that one, and maybe you really like it, but then Bricks releases a native one. Now you got two situations going on. And then let’s say, you know, I don’t know what Maxine would decide at that point, but what if he’s like, well, it’s got it natively now, I’m not going to continue supporting this one.

So we’re going to take it out of AT or something. And then you’re left with this BRICS one that you now have to relearn because it’s like a different experience and it does things a different way. And I don’t know, I just, and then I just asked myself, okay, is it a feature I really need?

No. I mean, I’ve done, how many trainings have I done where I’ve shown you just, you type on the keyboard and grids appear. And if you know what you’re doing with grid, you can do whatever you want.

There’s no limitation there. So if I was going to do it with, you know, an advanced grid, it may be better with a UI. It may be faster with a UI.

It probably is faster with a UI, but for basic grids, it’s probably not. I don’t even need it for basic grids. I can use a grid variable and I’m done and it took me a second.

Like why do I need to open a UI? I don’t, I don’t need a UI for that. So then it has like limited use because I only need it for super advanced grids that are a hassle to do otherwise.

So now I’m putting this third party layer in only for advanced situations that I might need. I’m trying to, I don’t want that many layers to the workflow. I just, I want bricks and I want ACSS and I want frames and that’s pretty much all I want.

And I don’t want anything beyond that that I don’t have to have. That’s kind of the situation that I’m in. 1:35:31

What are your thoughts on running a niche web agency 1:35:34 versus a full service non-niche web agency?

Where do I start? Where do I start? Because I was gonna I was gonna make a statement but then yeah, another question is niching a good idea?

It’s a it It can be helpful. It can be helpful for sure. Yeah, absolutely it can be helpful.

It can also be limiting though. This is not a black and white scenario. This is like a we’ve got to live in the gray area.

You’ve got to know the pros and cons. You’ve got to weigh the pros and cons for yourself. There are benefits to niching.

There are cons to niching. One of the cons is that you may very well wake up one day and absolutely hate your life. I know personally that would be me.

If I tried to niche my agency, I would want to jump off a bridge face first. Because think about this, like you’re niched to chiropractors or something, okay? So there will come a time, like it’s very easy to get business in a niche because like chiropractor refers you to another chiropractor and another chiropractor and if you reach out to a chiropractor you get to be like, all I do is chiropractors, I know chiropractors up and down, I know exactly how to make your business successful.

And so then they buy into that, they’re like, fuck yeah you do dude, you’ve been like you’ve done a hundred contractor sites, chiropractor sites. And so it does make things a lot easier in that regard. But there will come a day where you wake up and you rub your eyes, get out of bed and you’re like, oh I’m ready to attack this day.

And then you’re like, what’s on my schedule? Another fucking chiropractor website. Shoot me.

Shoot me right now. I don’t ever want to see another chiropractor again. You will reach that day.

And then you know what happens is that person starts just handing off all the work. They don’t really care all that much. It’s all everything’s templated and it all turns into a fucking factory.

That’s what it turns into. You can look at any niche agency, pretty much that’s what it turns into. It turns into a lot of people who don’t care all that much and who have, you know, systematized everything and templatized everything and it just becomes McDonald’s.

And then we all know how that works. It’s like, yeah, you can get a hamburger, but it fucking sucks, right? I just, I don’t, I’m not interested in going that route.

I would rather wake up and it’s like, oh, new business, new industry, new challenge, new, like, all this stuff I gotta, oh man, this sounds fun. I wanna attack this project, this sounds fun. New challenges to solve, new designs to create, new things to experiment with, that’s fun.

As a marketer, as somebody who actually enjoys this stuff, I want those new challenges. I do not want to be hamstrung to working with another person in X industry doing the same shit again. So you gotta weigh that.

You gotta weigh that. That is a big, big, big side of it. But if you’re not gonna niche down, you do have to be better at marketing.

You do have to be better at copy. You do have to be better at sales. You do have to, because the niche thing plugs a lot of gaps for you automatically, right?

Same thing with website as a service. I feel the same about both of them. Some people have to niche down.

Some people feel they have to do website as a service because those two things cover up a lot of lapses in skill. Like, if you’re not good at selling projects, you go website as a service because it’s like the sales take care of itself. Because people go, well I can get all of that for $199 a month and I don’t have to pay you anything else?

Okay, I’m sold. Like, see how you don’t actually have to sell at that point? Like, so if somebody sucks at sales, they can cover for that by switching to website as a service.

If somebody sucks at marketing, they can cover for that by niching down because they don’t really have to market. They get all of this exposure in this one little niche. So, you know, there’s that side of things.

There’s a lot, this is a big topic. There’s a lot to talk about here. But I think ultimately you have to decide, are you okay with working on the same types of sites in the same industry day after day, week after.

To me, that is the biggest downside of having a niche down. But by the way, by the way, by the way, I guess I should say, you know, cause everybody, you know, there’s these, these topics are so big and people like to clip one thing I say and be like, well, you didn’t mention this, this, this. I’m like, I’m sorry, off the top of my head.

Like I didn’t write a speech okay I didn’t write a whole blog article and spend days thinking about it so I’ll just say this that’s not the only way to niche by industry you can niche by saying I’m only going to do e-commerce businesses okay and I actually think that that is a good way to niche I only my agency does not do e-commerce we only do service based businesses so in a way we have niche down just not super tight the way a lot of people suggest. Ok so if you’re going to say we only do e-commerce that’s actually a good niche to do because you can do any kind of e-commerce site but you’re only going to focus on e-commerce. That’s still a specialty but you get to wake up every day and do new projects.

For me same thing service business side of things and they’re different skill sets. E-commerce requires a different skill set than a service-based website. It requires different SEO than a service-based website.

So that’s a relevant way to niche as well. You don’t have to do it by industry. Let’s go to, what are we on time?

Yeah, we still got time. I have a client who has an Elementor website with WooCommerce, modern events calendar, LearnDash, affiliate P, recipe maker. Oh my God.

Oh my God. Run. Okay, hold on.

Oh, where did my screen go? Oh, no. Did I?

Oh, we still okay, we’re still streaming. Wow. I thought, uh, I thought our whole thing went down.

Okay. Not built by me. It’s slow, of course, which he hates.

How do I tell him that he needs to rebuild? Okay, here’s how I approach this. Wow, that’s a lot, that’s a lot.

And here we are in that situation, the bigger it gets, the more expensive the problem becomes, right? So what I would do is I would look at how is this infrastructure impacting your ability to grow the business going forwards and how well is the business doing right now or not doing? Now I will tell you this, I can’t tell you how many clients come to me and they’re like, we got WooCommerce, we got Modern Events, we got LearnDash, we got affiliates, we got recipe makers.

And then I go, how much traffic do you have? How many clients do you have? Well, you know, we did $8 in sales this month.

And I’m like, what the fuck’s going on here? So if they are and they’ve spent, you know, $20,000 building all this, because they don’t understand the concept of an MVP, right? There’s a lot of people that don’t understand the concept of a minimum viable product or a minimum viable brand.

There’s an MVB as well, right? This happens all the time. This is a common, common, common mistake.

So if it’s a situation where they’ve done all this stuff and they don’t have any sales, they don’t have any traction, they don’t have any momentum, you pull up their site on Ahrefs, the domain rank is two. It’s like this has gone nowhere so far. Well, then I’m presenting them with, listen, if you want this to be a legitimate business, one, we have to rebuild everything.

I know that sucks. I’m sorry to be the one to inform you. But the good news is, we can do it right this time.

We can do it in a minimum viable way, and I can help you with all the marketing side and actually make this thing successful. Because so far, you are driving a car at zero. You basically bought a Tesla, but nobody’s pushing the gas pedal.

Like, it’s just sitting in your driveway. That’s what it’s doing. And in fact, it doesn’t even work.

So that’s a situation where it’s pretty easy. It’s just you give them the bad news and you paint a picture of what’s gonna happen going forward. Where it’s challenging is when they’re like, well, we actually do $100,000 a month in revenue and we rank for all these keywords.

And okay, now we really gotta weigh this situation. There are times where it could be like, listen, until you guys are ready to do like a major overhaul for a really important reason, you probably just got to keep driving this train wreck as far as you can get it. And we can maybe clean up bits and pieces here and there or focus on other areas.

But for me, I would be like, I mean, we’re not going to do it. You got to find somebody else to manage. I’m not managing an Elementor website with all that nonsense going on.

So I would tell them, I mean, it may be in your best interest to keep it. I’m not going to manage it, but you should probably find somebody who is willing to manage it going forwards and just kind of protect what you’ve built. Unless you tell me, like, there’s a reason we can’t go forward with this, then we’ll have to rebuild.

Is there a gas pedal on a Tesla? What’s it called, Derek? I mean, come on, Derek, what’s it called?

It’s still, what is it? Does it legit have another name? I know they don’t have gas, okay?

But it’s still called a gas pedal, isn’t it? I don’t know, I don’t own an electric vehicle. Okay let’s do one or two more questions.

Slider section Foxtrot, query CPT. Can this be changed to, get this thing off my screen. Okay.

Can this be changed to show on two lines? Slider section Foxtrot, query CPT. Let’s take a look.

Templates, slider, Foxtrot, view. Oh, it’s a ticker. Okay, what’s your question now?

Can this be changed to show on two lines? Ah, no, you need two of them. So let’s make sure we don’t save any changes here.

So slider section, Foxtrot, enter. Here’s the actual slider. So you can duplicate that slider.

You probably put a gap between them and then you can actually go two different directions with the slider. So you have one going one way and one going the other way. You’ll see commonly see that on sites.

But no, you can’t, you can’t just break this into two lines. Splide would not be happy with that attempt. It’s on my microphone.

Okay. Yeah, I would just I would just duplicate the slider. But then you need enough ticker items, obviously, to, you know, not have too much overlap.

But I’ve seen that before. I know, Manny. Yes.

See, I just, man, I’m just trying to keep it top of my mind. We don’t want any disasters here. Uh, yes.

Accelerator. Is that what we’re doing now? Okay, accelerator.

Hey, I’m old school dog. It’s a gas pedal. How about one more question?

That was kind of an easy one. Can you show how to use properly the frames switch component please yeah I will do a whole video I’ve got a list of that’s like four or five components that I have to do videos on I don’t know that I have time to do it right now 1:47:58

I’m reading chat. 1:48:01 Process grid delta, how can I make the steps to go pointing down on mobile?

Process grid delta, I don’t even know what process grid delta looks like anymore. 1:48:11 Templates.

1:48:12 By the way, I’m gonna do, next week I think, we’re gonna do another frames live. So we should probably move all these frames questions to frames live.

Process section Delta. Just look at this real quick. I didn’t even build this one.

Tobias built this one. So you want to move these arrows to down. What did you say?

Oops. Yeah, because it stays a, so what you would have to do is turn it into a vertical slider at that point most likely, and then I believe that’s, if I had to guess, that’s a pseudo element. And then you can just reposition the pseudo element.

Let’s see what that actually is. Li is there a before and after in here. 3 div there it is right there.

So the line is an after, the arrow is a before, and at that point once you make it a vertical slider I would imagine that you can just reposition these arrows or that divider. I’m not saying it would be super easy. It’s designed to stay horizontal, but I wouldn’t say it can’t be done.

At that point, I mean, I think Manny, you got enough experience, Manny. I think you can probably work it out. At least give that a shot.

This is another thing, like you can post these kinds of questions in the ACSS community, and a lot of times we will be able to play around with it and help you out and kind of guide you through it. What effort I need to put to build a site with only Bricks, no other plugins, would it be efficient? I mean that’s what I did.

I did that with the Zendesk. com homepage rebuild. I mean, I used ACSS, but that’s not really a Brics add-on, right?

You could literally do the entire zendesk. com homepage with no plugins, just Brics, no plugins. The only thing you need a plugin for is, custom post types that I showed, but Brics has a, I believe, a syncable slider.

That would be necessary right there. Let’s go to the zendesk. com homepage.

This right here is the hardest part. I did this with the frames slider component. It’s actually three sliders linked together.

This is all on the ACSS YouTube channel. If you guys want to see this the rebuild of this homepage. So this would be the hardest part right here.

So the question for me is I haven’t used the Bricks native slider in a very long time. So I don’t know if you can sync three different sliders together. If you can’t, then you need either frames or Bricks extras to do this.

Everything else, native Bricks, 100%. Everything else is native bricks. You would not need anything else.

Then that’s the power of bricks. I mean, even you can’t even do this with ox. You can’t even start to do this with oxygen without add-ons.

Can’t do this in oxygen for sure. Can’t do this in oxygen without add-ons. Not even sure you can do this logo slider.

When I when I built it, I just did this with custom CSS. But if you’re relying on a component of the builder to do it, like in Bricks you can use the slider to do this. I didn’t want to, I wanted to show the manual way to do it.

But even Oxygen would need add-ons for this. This menu right here, I use the Bricks you can. So yeah, there’s some, you don’t, like that’s, it’s the good thing about Bricks.

You do not need a bunch of add-ons to do most things. Okay, let’s go look, look, look. Let’s find one last good question.

Final call, final call. If I don’t find one up here, I’m scrolling up. I think you can learn a lot from UIs and start from there when you know what, I hate this little pop-up thing that comes in front of the comment.

Learn so much from Kevin and his 101, so I can write my own CSS, never thought I would. Love to hear that, by the way. I love to hear people being more empowered to not have to rely on the builder to do everything for them.

Getting more self-reliance is really, really, really good. Really good to see. I have unlimited frames license, but only three sites, ACSS, can I build a website then remove the one license and implement the ACSS license on another site if I’ve implemented it already on three?

You can, we can’t remove ACSS when you remove the license but then that site won’t get updates the license is for updates and Support so if you don’t have an active license you can’t be in the support community That’s for people with an active license, and you can’t get updates to the site so manage it from there I Would say get the I mean it depends on the size of your company already, but I’m doing, I’m about to release a spreadsheet that breaks down costs, costs per project for all different plugins in the ecosystem. It’s gonna be a phenomenal resource. But what you’re gonna see, it’s gonna open people’s eyes to like, this shit is dirt cheap, absolutely dirt cheap compared to like cost per project analysis.

These plugins are dirt cheap. So it’s just get the licenses. That’s all you have to do.

Just get the licenses. 1:54:28 Don’t limit yourself.

1:54:29 There’s no point. 1:54:30

Is there a secret connection between Kevin and helpful CSS guys? 1:54:34 Michael, I don’t know who helpful CSS guys are.

I need to know. I need more details. All right.

This might be the last one. I’m reading a couple others. What do you suggest in terms of niche selecting to freelancers experience in WP e-commerce?

1:54:54 Okay, I’ll tackle that in just a second. 1:54:59

That’ll probably be the last one. How do you link facts with categories? In the past, we’ve not reused the same facts, not because, okay, I’ve already shown that in tutorials.

These would be good for when we do WDD Live and we’re not doing website critiques and it’s an open call for like, how do you do XYZ? I would save some of these questions for that. Because we’ll probably do one of those next week, actually.

Where do we submit sites for critique? Well, once I fixed giri. co’s plugin error, there was an add-on I was upgrading and it blew up.

Then you go to, there’s actually a link in the YouTube description down below. I was referring to a grid video from Kevin Powell and your videos and noticed that both of you are the helpful guys. Oh, I mean, Kevin Powell’s fantastic, obviously.

Probably now the most beloved person in the CSS niche, right? You know, nothing but good things to say about Kevin Powell. Is ACSS 3.

0 going to be the goat of frameworks? Hands down. It’s not even a question.

It’s not even a question. Because of what it’s going to do to workflow. Okay, where was it?

Where was it? Oh, are you planning any quickly based content, working on a project with it and enjoying using it? I think so.

I think so, yes. I don’t know when, but yes. I’m also gonna be doing more, believe it or not, more Gutenberg content.

There’s gonna be some Gutenberg content coming. We’re gonna start branching out a little bit here and exploring some different areas in 2024. It’s going to be fun.

It’s going to be fun. It’s going to be all for learning and education purposes, but we are going to be branching out. We can’t confine all of the content to these small niches.

As much as I love BRICS, it’s a very small niche, right? And in terms of channel size and influence size. We just have to we have to start branching out a little bit.

It’s time. It’s time. ACSS theme.

Don’t know. No comment. Do you use an email service with WS form?

Yes. We use postmark. Highly, highly recommend postmark.

Where was that one question that I said I was going to do? Okay, maybe this one. What you suggest in terms of niche selecting to a freelancer experienced in e-commerce websites on WordPress and can build any kind of website, he also knows how to build custom WordPress themes.

I would just niche to e-commerce and I’d make that your wheelhouse and I would go all in on that. And the thing with e-commerce is, you know, what I recommend, let’s just finish with this. In terms of agency strategy, it’s not all in websites, okay.

I’m a big fan of having a marketing expertise outside of development that you can tack on as an ongoing service. So for example if you’re a web designer but you have an SEO expertise you have the possibility to sell an SEO retainer to all of your clients. Good!

That’s really good recurring revenue, really good value to the client, really good from a cash flow standpoint for the agency. It’s not just build a site, ship it, build a site, ship it, build a site, ship it, and then never touch it again, and not do anything to help it grow. You’ve got to have something that you can offer the client to help it grow.

Now let’s say you don’t know anything about SEO, but you decide, I kind of like the PPC route. So maybe even learn PPC, whatever you need to do, but now PPC is a thing you can tack on after you’re done with the website. Helpful to the client, helpful to you, retainer, recurring revenue, yada yada yada.

If you’re going the e-commerce route, for sure SEO and e-commerce go hand in hand. PPC and e-commerce often go hand in hand. Facebook advertising, Instagram advertising, TikTok and e-commerce all go hand in hand.

Pick one of those. You know what also goes hand in hand with e-commerce? Email marketing, very lucrative.

Very lucrative email marketing tied in with e-commerce. Very, very, very lucrative. Have that as something you can tie in.

So what I would tell you, Mr. Freelancer, I don’t know if you’re asking for a friend or you’re asking for yourself, I would say niche into e-commerce, build awesome WordPress e-com sites but have a secondary piece that is part of your process, your secret sauce if you will, okay, that you were going to offer and sell to clients that is a recurring retainer based service. Let’s just say it’s email marketing.

So what happens is you approach these clients and it’s not just let me sell you on my e-commerce knowledge, right, it’s hey not only can I build you this e-comm site but I’ve got this whole implementation on the email marketing side of things that is immediately going to drive sales for you and so that’s a much better sell right and again you are generating recurring revenue and you have something to offer beyond the website that you’re building for them now I’m not saying it has to be e-comm or I’m not saying it has to be email marketing, I just gave you many other examples, but you’ve got to have something in the marketing lane to offer this client to nurture this site for them going forwards. That’s what I’ll say, don’t just build it and ship it, build it and ship it. That is a failed strategy in my opinion.

It’s not going to get you to where you want to go. Alright guys we got to call this, put it in the books. Yeah, we’ll be back next Wednesday.

I will try to make next Wednesday a kind of a free-for-all like, hey, how do I do this? How do I do that? We won’t do any critiques next Wednesday.

We will just focus on answering questions, mini little tutorials, whatever people want to know and do. We’ll have fun with that next week. So until next time guys, keep practicing, keep working hard, keep studying, keep doing good work.

I’ll see 2:01:38 you very soon.

you very soon. 2:01:40 studying, keep doing good work.

I’ll see you very soon.