WDD LIVE 045: 1 Critique + Q&A

1 0:00:00 Welcome, welcome, welcome friends to another episode of WDD live.

It is Tuesday, it is not Wednesday. And we are on our new schedule. Welcome Rupal, welcome Philip.

Chris is in the house. Andrei is here, Dehunzey, Tudor, Klaus, Dave. It’s four over here in Japan.

Is that 4 p. m. ?

4 a. m. ?

2 0:00:28 I would imagine 4 p.

m. , right? 1

0:00:30 Will the new schedule for WDD Live be every Tuesday now or every other Tuesday? I certainly don’t want to miss any.

Every Tuesday, Charlie, every Tuesday. Excellence does not take a week off, my friends. So yes, every Tuesday.

Triteco, welcome. Carl, welcome. Dave V1, Dave V1.

Which Dave is that? Which Dave are you? I know a bunch of Daves.

Ruben in the house. House Columbia, Ruben. 3

0:01:00 House Columbia. 1

0:01:01 I gotta tell you guys, I’m not happy with this. I am not happy with this.

It’s gonna be 15 degrees tonight in Atlanta. Unacceptable, absolutely unacceptable. tonight in Atlanta unacceptable absolutely on X I Makes me want to jump ship go right to Florida right now.

I can’t I can’t do 15 So yeah, I’m not a happy camper Might be a little Little ornery on today’s WDD live Hey Ross welcome, it’s a mere welcome. All right, so let’s talk about the agenda today. We’ve got one website critique that we’re going to do and then it’s been a while since I’ve done open Q&A so we’re just going to spend the rest of the time hanging out.

Q&A means you can ask any question that you want to don’t ask him yet don’t ask him yet you can ask any question you want could be on business, pricing, sales, anything agency related it can be on SEO, it can be on copy, it can be any any of the stuff that we talk about On these streams it could also be related to frames or ACSS of course There’s going to be an ACSS related live stream later this week on the ACSS channel So maybe save ACSS stuff for for that It could be on Just general topics if you’re like a talk about let’s talk about this We can we can talk about whatever so we’re just gonna hang out do a bunch of Q&A and have fun Ruben as always wants me to leave breakdance alone All right, so the BJJ Jedi welcome DJ welcome welcome Let’s go ahead and hop right into our first our first one. Why don’t we do that? We don’t I don’t really have any announcements or anything like that.

So I got a bunch of stuff in the works just can’t talk about it so therefore no announcements let’s go ahead right into our first website critique let me go ahead and get this queued up on the screen and let’s get right into we already got good numbers like good numbers today already out of the gate new day new day same time but new day still good numbers right out of the gate. All right we’re gonna go with a little screen share here we have GPTShed. com this is submitted by a longtime WDD-er a WDD a dummy a longtime dummy silent Phil might know silent Phil from the chat say what’s up to silent Phil and we’ll just we’ll just go he said feel free to tear it apart do it say whatever you want to say do whatever you want to do so I mean that’s the spirit of WDD live that’s exactly what we’re going to do let’s check it out don’t ask questions yet because they’re going to get lost in the chat so save your questions for the Q&A section and we’ll get to them at that point so got a little logo up here GPT shed I see that’s a shed you know Then we’ve got a search.

We’ve got a fairly simple navigation a collection of custom GPT’s resources and Developers connect with specialized GPT’s insightful resources and talented developers at the GPT shed first thing Just nitpicking. We’ll just start out nitpicking right off the bat man. I am allergic to orphans, right?

I mean, not real human orphans, obviously, but like this kind of orphan, I’m not. . .

does this irk anybody else as much as it irks me? It just feels like it’s just stabbing me in the face right now. Just from a general balance and flow perspective.

You gotta get rid of these orphans. We’ve talked about how to do that before on the stream, multiple times, like easiest way. If you’re new here, little non-breaking space action.

Okay, well we could just do this right here. So we’re gonna put in an and non-breaking space like that. And well, it’s not gonna do it in the DOM, you gotta do it a special way.

But in the normal editor when you do that, it’s gonna join those two words together. And really because this is an ampersand, I would probably just make it the word and. And that’ll at least get you two words down there on the second line, but we wanna avoid these orphans at all costs.

There’s almost, you’re very, this is like very orphan adjacent right here. Like there’s another almost orphan happening here, which this can really be controlled with width, right? Notice that the, this is using, it looks like we’ve got frames going on here, automatic CSS.

So we’ve got this FR lead which has a max width of 60 characters on it. But you could come in here at the ID level or with a width utility. I wonder if he’s got his width utilities on.

You could do a width S or something like that, or you could just come in here and say max width is going to be 40 characters instead of 60. And look how it sculpts that. Like doesn’t that look a lot better than it just looked a second ago with just little two little words on the second line?

I feel like this looks much more balanced, right? You could actually do the exact same thing here. So sometimes you can do the non-breaking space trick or in cases like this, you can just control the width.

So let’s do width of 30 characters and that might be a max width. Let’s do 20. Okay.

And then we can just dial it up like even like that. See how it’s like more sculpted and balanced looking. It just, it’s just like instantly it looks a little bit better.

It just instantly looks a little bit better. We’re just manipulating some widths here and there. All right.

So little search box here, which we’ll try out in just a second, or I can go to the GPT library, or I can submit a GPT. Okay, I do feel like, you know, this copy could be improved here. We might come back to that.

I see categories here, which is nice, which is nice. Once again, I like to harp on this, but not every page builder allows you to query categories. I assume this is a query loop, and we’re querying the categories that our GPTs are in.

I’m assuming he’s got a custom post type on the backend for these GPTs. And then the taxonomy is applied to that CPT. Okay, right now I’m kind of looking at colors and things like that in terms of UI, just basic stuff.

I mean, we already know what’s going on here for the most part. So it’s you know fairly well branded. The only the only thing I would say about GPT shed is like a brand name and and you kind of get the vibe right here the background don’t you?

Like you know I get it like it’s like a tool shed like you go to your shed you got there’s all your tools in the shed but a shed is kind of like you know nobody wants to really nobody’s excited about owning a shed like they’re excited about the utility of the shed I guess but not like it’s not a it’s not like a luxury item. I mean look at it in the background it’s like all rusty and I mean that shit might fall down. Strong wind comes by that might go down.

It feels a little on the lower end you know I’m saying like it’s just there. But, you know, that would be a whole new ballgame. Like, new domain needed, new logo needed, new everything needed, so I guess we gotta rock with it, at least for right now.

You can always rebrand in the future, that’s the good news, right? You can always rebrand in the future, nothing’s stopping you there. As far as colors go, I’m not super excited with the color scheme, especially in these cards right here.

These cards look very, you got the outline, strong outline, went very strong on the outline. Usually I like to see those outlines much more subtle. I’m talking about the border on these cards, by the way.

Let’s go to here, and let’s, you know, the good thing about automatic CSS is you can adjust, oh gosh, you didn’t even use automatic CSS for that. Look at this man right here. Phil, Phil, what are you doing, Phil?

What are you doing, Phil? Look, we go in here. It’s super easy in ACSS, because you got all the transparencies at your fingertips of all colors, of white, of black.

So you can make that much more subtle. I mean, look how I just made that much more subtle right there. Yeah, okay.

But it’s still like gray, you know? It’s like a, and it’s that, what I call like a tweener gray. It’s like a in-between version.

It’s not like a strong gray or a very, very light gray. It’s that tweener gray. And I’m not, the tweener gray, it does not motivate me very much from a UI design perspective.

And it feels like, I don’t know if you guys can tell with the stream quality or whatnot, but the background color here, and this one, you can definitely see it in this one has a bluey purpley kind of tint to it and so you’re you’re working with like blues and purples back here but then you’ve got this tweener gray going on right here in the cards and to me it just clashes a little bit now keep in mind this is WDD live is fully interactive you guys can put in the chat your thoughts okay if I’m if you think I’m completely out of whack on my UI design critique, and you’re a better designer than me, you go ahead and chime in. I wanna hear what everybody thinks in the chat. Does this stuff need to be tweaked in your eyes as well, or do you feel like it’s good the way that it is?

And I’ll bounce back and forth between the chat, and I’ll highlight some comments here or there. John said, or TextWrap Balance. Unfortunately, TextWrap Balance does not get the job done a lot of times.

It’s very heavy-handed. There’s something coming called TextWrap Pretty, which just handles orphans, which is going to be much better, but it’s not here yet, so we can’t use it. TextWrap Balance often has unintended consequences, but it is definitely an option that you can try.

2 0:11:10 Okay, let’s see.

1 0:11:12 I see it on two lines, a collection of custom GPT’s resources and developers.

Well, it is right now, like I’m gonna refresh. See that, see what just happened? Now, if you’re on a smaller screen, okay, actually I don’t wanna do that, let’s just do it this way.

The screen size sometimes, and this is why you have to test on all different, I’m gonna go into where it is, where it breaks probably. What is going on? What are you doing?

Maybe we have an issue altogether with response. What is it doing? What is it doing?

What is it doing? Okay. Let me refresh here.

It still has not, still has not broken to two lines. No, I don’t know how you would be seeing it on two lines because it still is not broken to two lines. Okay, GPT toolbox.

Oh, oh, GPT toolbox, get a little alliteration. Does that count as alliteration when the end of one word has the same sound as the beginning of the next word? Or do they have some fancy other term for that?

Feels a little bit like alliteration. A design revamp is needed. No content on the about GPT shed page.

All right, we’ll get there. We’ll get there. It’s an American thing about the shed.

Probably, probably. I have no idea how this is a GPT or anything related to that. Okay.

Fair enough. Fair enough. Well, let’s go down and you could see that.

Let’s give an example. He actually showed me there’s a automatic CSS GPT. Let’s go see the latest, actually, sorry, let’s see if it’s under featured.

It better be under featured. There it is, look at that, okay. So there’s an automatic CSS and it says chat now.

Okay, so you go here and it’s gonna pull this up. Awesome, perfect. And you can just talk to it so you can talk to this just like you talk to any other GPT except it’s trained specifically on automatic CSS right so Let’s throw something at it.

Let’s throw something at it. Let’s say how can I? set the border Color of my cards to a light transparency.

Huh, see what it says. It’s searching its knowledge. See how good this GPT is.

Maybe I asked it a too complicated of a question. Maybe I didn’t give it enough context. It’s trying very hard right now.

Oh, to set the border color of your cards light transparency, you can utilize the color partial. Oh, that’s over engineered right there. That is an over engineered response.

Let’s ask it a follow up question. Okay, I’m gonna put some documentation links in here. Okay, can’t I just use VAR white trans 10 for example?

Let’s see, what does it think of that follow-up question? Justin says, you in here sweating bullets, silent Phil. There’s silent Phil.

Oh, he just logged in. He just joined us. It seems that there is no direct reference to VAR white trans 10 and the provided knowledge source about automatic CSS.

Okay. However, based on the structure naming conventions used in ACSS, it’s plausible to assume that a variable like this could use to apply a white color with 10% transparency. In ACSS, color variables typically follow a pattern where the color name is followed by the transparency level.

That’s correct. This is all correct. Okay.

All right. So, you know, it’s. .

. but this is what the site is. So basically, he’s got GPT’s for all of these different individualized things like there’s a bricks builder GPT.

Let’s click on that and let’s interact with the bricks builder one. What should we ask the bricks builder GPT? Let’s ask it, how can I, where do I go?

Let’s say I’m a beginner where do I go to build a header in bricks okay let’s see let’s see what it gives us it’s gonna search it’s gonna search I’ll check out chat while it’s searching not sure what GPT even means okay that’s fair too that’s fair too. That’s fair too Someone drop in the chat someone drop in the chat Generator generative pre-training transformer, here’s the you dear right here So you’ve I’m sure you’ve heard of chat GPT, right? But I do think that I do think that and that’s why I said that hero copy needs a little bit of tweaks It was one one thing.

I was gonna hit on was it’s kind of it’s all using insider language, right? So anybody new to this concept is going to have no idea what’s going on on the site, but we’ll revisit that in just a second. How many websites are there in the queue for website critiques?

I mean, a lot gets submitted, a lot gets submitted, but like I’ve said in the past, we don’t do all of them. What we do is I choose ones where they’re really good, so we can learn a lot from a really good site. Also, when a site’s really good, it gives us a chance to dive into areas that we don’t often get to talk about, because we never get there with sites that are not as good.

Then there’s the sites that are normal target site for WDD, which is like there’s some good things and there’s some not so good things and there’s a lot to talk about of how to actually improve this. Then there’s a lot that are just not anywhere near good enough to even be helpful. We would just be talking about like straight up, they haven’t even checked the basics boxes in so many ways and it would just be very, very repetitive.

So I kind of pick and choose, but I just take a glance at it and then pick and choose. Oh, so a lot get you know excluded. I would say there’s probably three or four in there right now that are still to do and then those get spread out and then more you know more gets submitted, but This is how it is To build a header in bricks.

You should start by creating a new template and naming it appropriately for example my first header Okay, let’s start creating a new template this template is where you’ll design your header by dragging and dropping elements. Okay, you can align these elements. For detail and guidance, you’ll follow a step-by-step instructional and provide a YouTube tutorial, which can be found here.

Can it? 9 0:18:14

Can it? 1 0:18:15

Hey, look at that, creating your first template. 2 0:18:17

Okay. 1 0:18:18

So you see, it can be very helpful, like if you talk to normal chat GPT to try to get help for stuff, it’s not going to be, if you’re trying to ask normal chat GPT stuff about BRICS, it’s just not really going to be great, right? But if there’s a GPT that’s trained specifically on BRICS documentation, videos related to BRICS, on and on and on and on and on, that’s a much better experience, right? And I’ve actually been very intrigued by this for ACSS specifically, because documentation is fantastic, but having a GPT that you can go to and just talk with it and interact with it and it can answer your questions in real time.

And it also learns on the back end, like it learns if you’re a beginner. And so it’ll talk to you in more beginner language. And it can also determine that you’re like more intermediate or advanced, and it’ll stop like talking to you like you’re a third grader, and it’ll actually give you more advanced answers and short and concise answers and things like that.

So that’s the whole concept is this GPT shed, what Phil has created here is a resource where you can go and you could see a bunch of GPTs that have been trained on specific things within really our industry, right? These are plugins and tools that we are very likely to interact with. Right, so Fluent Booking, obviously, if you’re in the WordPress space and you’re using a booking tool, like here’s a new one called Fluent Booking and he created a GPT for that.

We have some featured GPTs down here, then there’s popular GPTs, all right. There’s an ACF one. So that might be decent.

Here’s let’s ask this one just as an example, cause I actually had a question. I already had a question. How can I query?

I had trouble doing this. I actually know, I know the theory of how to do this, but I just had trouble getting it working. How can I pull values from a group field when creating a custom block.

Okay, I was I was able to pull values from everything else except for the group field. Let’s just see what the little GPT comes back with. And let’s see how helpful it is.

You know, does it give a helpful answer? When creating custom blocking advanced custom fields, you understand our ACF saves and loads. Okay, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, grew field name hero retrieving this group returns an array thing, each subfield this format allows you to access okay Can you provide sample code for this?

Let’s see 2 0:20:56

Okay tree values you need to use the get field function, okay, that’s a wrong answer 1 0:21:00

Let’s see what the actual code snippet gives So it’s assigning the get field hero to hero and then if hero image, yeah, this is not gonna pull from a group field. 3 0:21:09

So, you know, they have to be, 1 0:21:12

the things with Chad GPT is like, you know, it has to be trained really, really, really well. I think that’s what Phil’s working on, getting, like, trying to improve this. He can speak to this more, right?

But they actually have documentation on pulling from a group field and it looks nothing like this. That’s why I know it’s not the right answer. And it could have pulled the right answer because that documentation does exist.

But it’s a matter of getting it to that point or it’s able to do that. Is this like a free CodeWP site? That’d be a good question for Phil.

I actually haven’t used CodeWP yet. I’m interested in it and I’d like to. How to make a back-to-top button.

Oh gosh. Carl, are you trolling us Carl? I feel like Carl’s trolling us with this question.

Okay let’s go down, let’s close this up, let’s go back to our critique of the actual website here. Resources, developers. One thing I know this is easy because you don’t have to think much or change much, but we have the GPT cards look exactly the same as the resources cards, which look exactly the same as the developers cards.

And to me, visually UX wise, like we wanna train the visitor to recognize something at a glance, and they can’t in this situation because all the cards all look the same. Right, so I should know if I’m looking at a developer card because it’s styled differently and it’s laid out differently. And then a resources card would be different as well.

That way as I’m using the website, my eye can spot, oh, there’s GPT cards. Oh, those are developers. Or, oh, these are resources.

That’s a real thing. Like training the visitor on understanding the layout. And you do that by not making everything look exactly the same.

And that’s the problem with how things are right now. So I get a little bit more creative with your developer cards, which you’re using frames. So there’s many, many, many, many, many, many options available to you for how to do team cards or whatever.

And then same thing with resources. There’s a bunch of different feature cards, there’s a bunch of different blog post style cards. You could use any of those for resources.

And that’ll instantly, without a lot of additional effort, give you variety in what’s going on here. I would also choose some different layouts, right? So right now it’s very, you know, heading, grid, heading, grid, heading, grid, heading, grid, heading, grid.

We can get some more diversity in layout, which is very easy to do with frames as well, because there’s so many options in there available to you. Let’s check our search out and see how that’s working. So let’s search for automatic CSS.

I hit enter and there you go. So we’ve got a good results page here, pretty easy to use, looks pretty accurate. What’s under developers here?

Ah, okay, that’s the developers area. Okay, I’m wondering, are these people actually creating the GPTs, Phil? Are you creating all the GPTs, or are these people helping to create the GPTs, or what’s going on there?

Let me know, let me know. Because I think we need a little bit more context. Yeah, I mean, I guess that’s what it’s saying right here in the heading.

We’re just, you know, we could we could stand to use a little bit more context and text. See how our filters work here. Okay, we can sort.

Okay, it’s all pretty standard. Probably this looks a little WP grid builder ish. That’s what I’m going to guess is being used there.

Let’s submit a GPT. Okay, we can go name, email, submission type, GPT, there you go. Title, URL, okay, get a little category.

Oh, look at this. This is WS form. This is pulling the category straight from the CPT taxonomy, I would guess, so that this does not have to be managed separately from the taxonomy in the back end.

At least that’s how it should be set up. I’m just gonna guess that that’s how it’s set up. Okay, all right, got a pretty standard submission form there.

Let’s go to our blog and see what we got going on there. No posts at the moment. Okay, general rule of thumb is if you want a blog but you don’t have any blog, just don’t put it in the, up here, right?

Just don’t link it up yet. And let it chill on the backend until you have some posts. Because you don’t want to give people the vibe that like, you know, first impressions, first impressions are important, right?

So the first impression people might get is, um, you know, this isn’t, uh, it’s half baked, right? It’s not fully there yet. And then they’re, they’ll, you know, in their head, they might be like, but I like the concept, maybe I’ll come back later.

And then they just never come back later, you know? Um, so, you know, at least try to get it to the point where they’re enticed to stick around or maybe opt in. That’s one thing right here is I see no way to capture traffic.

So, you know, there could be people who, they’re like, all right, I don’t have time for this right now. It’s a cool resource. I mean, you’re gonna basically rely on them to bookmark your site.

I would rather see you trying to get them on an email list somehow. Right now, there’s no offer for that. So I think you know any website like this if you believe in the concept and you really want to give it a good solid go like do all the things you know make them go to ConvertKit start a little email list for it.

Help it be as successful as it possibly can be. Help it get a good good head start. Let’s go to the context, probably just gonna be another, yep, basic form.

2 0:27:17 Okay.

1 0:27:18 So I think if we had to sum up everything, a little bit of tweaks here on the copy, we got to make things more clear.

What is GPT? Like to a lay person, right? What does GPT mean?

What is the value in this website? I mean, there needs to be some text on here that explicitly says something like, hey, talking to Chad GPT is not relevant when you need help with specific tools. That’s why we built custom GPT’s trained on the tools, you know, use and love or whatever, you know, got him got to write the copy, but you get the gist, you get the direction.

I’m I’m saying that this should go in. Dude, I almost had a hard, I don’t know why, but I just like my brain was like, I don’t think I’m screen sharing. I just got a spike of PTSD.

Just went right through my body, because I’m like, but then I looked over 3 0:28:10

and I can see it. 1 0:28:10

We’re all good. We’re all good. The second thing, other than the copy, so this needs copy work.

Second thing is, again, I get it, maybe we’re not trying to spend a bunch of money on this, whatever, but you got to give things you know a helping hand get a little bit of a UI designer involved here that can help better with the colors the color scheme the overall aesthetics of the website that would help tremendously that would help tremendously I would redo the cards get different card styles like we talked about those are the major things those are the major things to hit on. The other thing I would look at maybe is on the SEO side of things. So this says right now specialized GPT’s resources and developers.

Just based on what I know about SEO that’s probably not targeting any relevant keyword. GPT shed is the beginning of that title tag. So I would go into Ahrefs immediately I’m start looking at hey what and and by the way, by the way, I mean, if you want to go like traffic prioritization kind of thing, rank prioritization, it’s not a matter of sitting around going, what’s the next GPT I should build if there’s search volume for specific types of GPTs, like for specific tools or whatever.

Uh, you build those first. So Ahrefs informs you on what should be built and in what order, kind of in that regard. All right, let’s go to the chat, see what chat’s saying.

2 0:29:44 And we’re about to get into our Q&A portion of this,

1 0:29:47 because I think we’re pretty much, there’s not a ton else to look at on this one.

I did kind of like the concept of it. And, you know, Phil is a long time supporter and, you know, participant in WDD lives. So I wanted to bring his site on here and give it a little look-see.

It’s hard to get them to reference videos and articles, but they are getting better. 2 0:30:14

Okay. 1 0:30:15

Talking about training the GPTs and stuff like that. See, Justin says, I hate searching Bricks documentation. Yeah, I just, it’s not, documentation is typically not a good experience, right?

That’s why when I was wanting to build that custom ACF block, yeah, I can open ACF’s documentation and I can read it, all right? And I talk about PTSD, I get PTSD from my days of school when I do that. Like, I feel like I’m opening a textbook and reading a text, and I’m just like, this is not the life that I want to live.

So if I could ask a GPT questions that gave accurate answers I would do that or what I did in the case of ACF blocks is I phone up Mark Westgard and I’m like I know you built custom ACF blocks why don’t you just kind of give me an overview why don’t you just kind of walk me through it on a little zoom call and that’s exactly what he did and then I was like okay now I’ve got enough I’ve got my mind wrapped around this enough to explore it on my own and go off and try to build my own custom block and that’s what I did and then I did a whole training on it and by the way that training is now available in the inner circle how to build a custom ACF block I built a rating they haven’t seen it yet let me go ahead I’ll just pull it up for everybody let’s see if we can actually I built it on gary. co for my element or article so we can just log in there and give you a little look-see at this. So all posts and we’ll go to edit.

Okay, so what I need is, I’m going to do all these page builder review articles and they’re going to be super in-depth, like the most in-depth page builder reviews in existence. And right now I’ve only got the first two in there. That’s where we stopped the tutorial because the second part of the tutorial, see, I was going to go into Chumpville.

Hey, why don’t I just pull up the, I wonder if I can just pull up the code for this. We could talk about it. Cause it’s kind of important, right?

And this shows you a progression, all right, it shows you a progression of, but being able to think about things in the right way, even though you don’t necessarily know a hundred percent how to do it yet, making sure you know how to think about it and approach it is very important. It was why we talk about these concepts all the time on here. Let me go into here.

I’m going to pull this over here. You won’t be able to see what I’m doing for just a second. Let me go into pbrating.

php. Okay, let’s open that with VS. Let’s come in here.

Okay, right here as an example. So this is the block right here. And if you notice, there’s rows in the block.

So I’m gonna collapse that and collapse that and collapse this. So this is the header right here. This is the header of the block.

So if I go over into, let’s go back to the front end for a second. Oh, is that it? Yes.

So this overall score 28 right here, that’s the header. And then we have each row. So a row is like reputation and general, and this, this, and then the rating thing.

So if I come in back to here, there’s a row right here. And notice that it’s pulling in the reputation value. The bar right here is, okay.

The bar right here is automatically like the width of that bar is based on the value okay that should be pretty obvious and then it’s gonna add all these up and divide them by 10 to get the overall score it’s gonna do all of that automatically for me so literally all I have to do and this is not real ratings right now but when I’m doing a new page builder review to create this output on the front end I literally add the block and then I just score it I’m like all right that’s gonna be my score for this category, for this category, for this category. Well, this is Elementor, so I should just do all this, right? I just, we should just do this.

Something around, I’m just joking, I’m just joking. It’s not going to be, it’s going to be very objective and very honest, okay? And we’re going to go ahead and hit save there.

And then that’s pretty much all I have to do. And then I refresh and you see the score updated this updated this updated this is animated and it looks complicated on the front end but when I’m actually doing this in the post it’s very simple for me to just add a new one of these so it’s really nice right well here’s the thing here’s why there’s only two of them because this is how you have to even though you don’t necessarily know how to do something you do have to know how to think about it, right? So this is if I want another row, like for the next thing, okay, first of all, you got to find the row.

I like collapsing them like this because it makes it very digestible. Then I go, here’s another row, here’s another row, here’s another row. And then I go manually change the name.

What do you start to feel like? What is the word that I’ve said over and over and over again? Wow, you start to feel like it feels very chumpy, doesn’t it?

Feels very chump like I don’t want to be in the business of copying and pasting rows of stuff and then manually changing. So what I need to learn how to do, because I’m not a PHP expert, right? I’m getting more into learning PHP.

But I just know from working with SAS and working with just general websites, querying data. Like I need to loop this. Like I need to create a loop somehow in PHP to tell it here are the names of the rows, now go ahead and loop this for me.

That way I’ll have one row to manage, which will be like the master row, and the rest will just be dynamically looped through. And then I’ll just have one row to manage and I don’t have to worry about copy paste, copy paste, copy paste, chump like behavior, right? As we talk about.

So that’s gonna be in my follow up. The follow up is gonna be like, all right, now here’s how you loop it to make it even more maintainable. And a couple other things, a couple other bells and whistles that I wanted to add.

That’ll be in the part two follow up. But if you are interested in how to build a custom ACF block the training is an hour and 15 minutes from scratch, nice pace, like I’m not assuming you know anything we’re going from scratch every little detail is explained from start to finish so you don’t have to read documentation you don’t have to figure it out on your own you can literally just watch the tutorial you can work alongside me if you want to it’s it’s fantastic it’s got a lot of really good feedback so far so that’s in the inner circle right now available. All right, let’s see what everybody’s saying here.

Okay. I saw you in WP Tuts just before this live. I saw you in WP Tuts just before this live.

Where was I in WP Tuts? I wasn’t in WP Tuts. I ain’t never been in WP Tuts.

I mean, I would be in WP Tuts if if you would invite me, but I’ve never been in WP Tuts. Yeah, think dynamic and you will get the equation, right? I did a very similar thing and used a loop too.

Yeah, a lot of docs are hard to understand. Yeah, that’s the other thing. You know, how good is the documentation in terms of did they write the documentation like for advanced people or did they write it for you?

Like, can you understand it? it. And I found that just like, the thing I hate, the thing I hate about documentation is they’ll give you an example.

And you look at the example and you’re like, I would never fucking do that. Like, I don’t, I wouldn’t ever want to do that. You’re giving me an example that doesn’t apply to my situation.

And it doesn’t even seem to apply to like very common situations. And so it doesn’t, I can’t make the leap, I can’t get from what you gave me to where I need to be because they’re so far off. And so it ends up being not helpful.

And it’d be much better to have like a person, like, you know, like I had a mark where I could just ask the question and he’s like, oh, this gives me the relevant answer where documentation can’t really do that. And it’d be nice if GPT can do that, but it’s still a little bit far behind as well. Okay, let’s go through maybe Bricks documentation will get better with the upcoming price increase.

Maybe it’s a documentation guys is one of the hardest aspects of all of this. You feel like here’s what you feel like you as the developer you have to do a bunch of hard work problem solving just like try this, try that, try this. And by the way, it’s not just getting to a solution.

There’s, just like in web design, there’s often three different ways you could go. And they all kind of arrive at the same place, but they end up having different pros and cons. And so you’re trying to weigh those pros and cons, which often means you have to build the same feature three times.

You build it this way and see what the pros and cons are. You build a version this way and see what the pros and cons are there. Because you can’t always see ahead of time what all the pros and cons are going to be.

And sometimes you might be very confident with an approach and then you get all the way into it and you’re like, fuck, it’s going to have like this big limitation. And then it’s like, all right, we got to undo all that and we got to try it this other way instead. And it’s a lot of that that people don’t see.

So you get done with all of that, and then you’re tasked with now, now just write about everything you just did, like in great detail. And by the way, while you’re writing about everything you just did, make sure you’re getting screenshots of everything, pull those in, make sure you’re linking from this doc to that doc, and like, if you really wanna create robust documentation and not just half-ass it, and you end up taking as much time, it’s like literally as much time as I spent on the damn feature, I gotta spend documenting the feature. And what’s going through your head while you’re documenting that feature is like, I could be working on a new feature, but I’m not.

I’m sitting here documenting this feature. And it’s a constant battle. And then of course, you get in a situation like, it’s like a womp womp, like where’s my, do I even have, let’s turn these up.

Where’s my volume on that not that one that sound that sound goes through my head because it’s like you know look at this I’ll give you a perfect example let’s go to automatic CSS slash docs okay let’s go to this oh a shout out to the hater shout out to a hater got it got to give a shout out to a hater because I love this and I just do want to explain it a little bit okay. So I’m gonna do height. I’m gonna do height.

We got a nasty nasty nasty message okay because of this. So you click on height classes and it says coming soon. Oh my god oh we got the nastiest little message from an anonymous user okay always from the anon user and it’s like and by the way they what they closed with which kind of points to part of the problem is do you expect me this is what do you expect me to just know what a height utility does and I was going to answer back well yeah kinda I kinda did just expect you to know.

I kinda did, if I’m being honest with you, I kinda did just expect you to know. We prioritized because we’re trying to build very robust documentation. And so in my mind, I’m like, let’s prioritize the things that are actually complicated in ACSS.

Like the things that actually need explanation. And so the high class, not really in that category. It literally does the fucking thing it says it does, okay?

Like height 60 is min height 60 VH, right? So and there’s 60, 70, 80, 90, and by the way, you could just apply it to something and it’s obvious what it just did. So yeah, that one’s coming soon because it was like, oh, I can spend time reiterating common sense or I can go document an actual feature that people probably don’t know how to use out of the box So something like clickable parent Focus parent right header heights all that kind of stuff that all got documented Prioritized where height class was like, okay people can figure that shit out on their own So when we get to it, we’ll get to it But in the meantime, I think they’re going to be able to tackle that one.

Not gonna trip too many people up. I did trip this guy up though, and man, he was heated. He was heated, because this says coming soon.

So yeah, it often takes as much time to document a feature as it did to create the feature in the first place. So it is a full-time job in itself, just to do the documentation. Okay.

Let’s see here. Oh, WP Tuts is here. What’s up?

Welcome, welcome, welcome. He said he’s been trying to get Thomas on for about two years. Yeah, I think I asked Thomas about two years ago and he said he is just too busy to come on, but maybe he’s going to start making the rounds.

That would be nice. We need to hear from Thomas more. Okay, how did they contact you anonymously?

They sent an email to our support system from a fake email address and they had no data on them whatsoever and they Tyree says, height classes adjust width, I believe. Yeah, it’s like, man, what are we doing here? What are we doing here?

I just, I think fairly highly of our customer base. And so when I, you know, wouldn’t it be worse if I was like, ah, none of these dummies are gonna know what a height class does. So let me document this one first.

No, see, I think the opposite. I’m like, we’ve got a very intelligent customer base. I don’t necessarily think they need that.

I mean, it’s nice to have it, but I don’t think they need the documentation on the high class. I think they’ve got that one under control. So I’m going to go focus on the other ones.

And apparently that doesn’t work for everybody. Best documentation I’ve ever seen is grid panes documentation. I will check more of that out.

I haven’t looked at it. You know, WS Form, very, very good documentation, WS Form, which is another reason why I highly, highly, highly recommend it. He is like, he is on point with the documentation side of things.

3 0:45:03 Can you give us a little bit,

2 0:45:04 okay, let’s move into the Q&A phase.

1 0:45:06 So make sure you put question or Q in all caps, and then you can ask your question.

But now it’s open season. Again, I’ll just reiterate, it could be on business, pricing, sales, dev, SEO, copy. It could be on ACSS or frames.

It could be on any number of things, any general topic that you wanna bring up that you think is important or that would be exciting to talk about, we can get into that too. Okay, I’m gonna go back up in the chat just to make sure I didn’t miss anything before we get into the questions side of things. Grant says, I’m a chump, but learning.

Would love to see teaching that’s geared more towards building a down and dirty site for non-developers who aren’t churning out and managing multiple sites. Let’s parse this here. 2

0:45:57 A teaching that’s geared more towards 1

0:45:58 building a down and dirty site. I don’t know necessarily what a down and dirty site is or means.

To me, it doesn’t matter what kind of site you’re building. You follow the same principles, the same practices, use the same tools, and that’s it. That’s just what we do.

And so I don’t, there really is no difference there. I think what maybe, what you might be saying is like hey, I’m not I don’t aspire to be a developer I don’t aspire to have an agency. I just want to build my own site and in that case, you know, it’s like Is this the platform for you is WordPress the best now if you if you’re like why I definitely wanted to be open-source Okay, there’s just gonna be a learning curve.

That’s just the bottom line, end of the day kind of thing. There’s gonna be a learning curve. I mean, you could buy some sort of template thing, but you know, I don’t know.

At that point, it doesn’t really matter. Then I’m like, what’s the site for? Is it a hobby site?

Is it a business site? Is it a, what does it need to do? All those questions absolutely factor in to the conversation.

But most of the people here, 99% of the people here and in my community are either freelancers or you know in the agency space and they want to do things the right way. They want to cross their T’s and dot their I’s. They want to learn.

They want to continue learning and they want to build the best possible sites that they can build and they want to get the best possible results that they can get for their clients and that’s why they’re here. So my community, my content is not really a best fit for somebody that just wants to build like a hobby site or something like that. There’s probably other channels that would serve you better in that regard.

All right, let’s dive in. We’ve got some questions rolling in. Let’s see, you’ve been working together, both you and Paul C have colds.

I don’t have a cold. I have dry air syndrome. Fucking it’s too cold in Atlanta.

And when the air gets dry, my my nose situation gets all dry. And then it sounds like I have a little bit of a it’s not really a cold. It’s just it’s just being in fucking Atlanta.

It’s gonna be like I said in the beginning 15 degrees tonight. This does not work for me. It doesn’t work for my body.

It doesn’t. I was not built for cold environments. 8

0:48:26 Okay. 1

0:48:27 All right. Let’s see.

Question, as a Bricks newbie, how do I access image, media, metadata from the media library such as alt text, caption, description, et cetera, in a query loop for dynamic data in a Bricks template? Wow. That is a mouthful.

Okay. Let’s go ahead and get into it then. That’s the beauty of WDD.

I mean we could just pull stuff up. Okay, so I’m gonna go to the media gallery right here and Let’s go to this car photo right here, okay Okay, love I I just don’t doesn’t this look fantastic I mean Look at the the interface. I mean, it’s just pure beauty.

Isn’t it? No, it’s not so it’s the worst interface in CMS land at the moment, I believe. And they give no love to like, when is the media gallery going to get any love inside a WordPress?

We got block stuff left and right. We can’t get the media gallery a single ounce of love at any point. It’s just terrible.

This alt text right here, you can put on the photo, and in Brics, it will automatically pull that alt text in. You do not have to worry about alt text in a query loop in Brics. Now the caption is going to get automatically pulled in when you use this in Gutenberg.

So if you add the image in Gutenberg, you’re going to get the alt text. You’re going to get, I believe, the alt text. Let’s check this.

I am alt text. All right, let’s go ahead and we can just do little experiments like this and see what happens. We’re going to add new post here.

We’re going to go to an image, add an image. We’re going to go to the media library. That was car 07.

That’s this one. I’m going to go ahead and select. So see how the alt text is already set over here in the sidebar?

Bricks does the exact same thing. Now if I add a caption, let’s go down here. I’m a caption.

All right and let’s update and let’s go back here. Let’s go ahead and publish this post. This is just a local dummy local site.

So that doesn’t really matter. And you know, they say that hold on, I gotta switch mics. Hang on.

I hate like looking around that thing while we’re actually working. Everybody can hear me still good. You should be able to shouldn’t be a problem.

Uh, look, it’s, you know, where. . .

Where do I go to add the caption dynamically? I don’t think you do. It’s down here, you gotta like manually add it.

And they, you know, they don’t. . .

It’s just not easy, it’s like, where. . .

Because everything’s fucking hidden in Gutenberg all the time. 2 0:51:12

Okay, let’s take it out. 6 0:51:15

Let’s go to image. 1 0:51:15

We’ll do this in Bricks in just a second to compare. See, okay, so it doesn’t update itself. 2

0:51:22 If the caption’s already there and you pull the image in, 1

0:51:25 it puts it there automatically. But look over here, like I swear, didn’t there used to be a caption field over here?

How would one, how would one edit the caption when it’s not there? See I just deleted the caption and there’s no obvious way for me to get the caption back. What is this thing?

Oh, oh, a good, once again we have to have the, this is my knock on quickly too, the icon only interface, right? Where you have to memorize what every single icon is for, even though they’re not very descriptive and they’re not very obvious when you look at them. But this little icon right here gets the caption back and it doesn’t even pull in the caption that’s from the media library once you’ve removed it.

So you’d have to remove the image and then add the image back. My God, what a just terrible experience. Okay, once again, it’s like every corner of Gutenberg that you look at is just fairly terrible.

All right, let’s go into pages and let’s go into add new. All right, let’s do media here, publish, publish, and let’s jump in. Okay, and you said maybe in a query loop.

Okay, all right, let’s think about that. Let’s add a div and let’s add the image in the div. You need the div to be able to loop through things.

I’m just gonna put a dummy image in there for right now, but if we query loop this and we do, post type is media, okay? There it’s gonna pull in a bunch of stuff. Let’s go ahead and grid this real quick.

Okay, just to see how that goes. So notice that Bricks is pulling in the caption automatically. Now this is actually a setting you can turn off.

If you don’t want it to automatically pull in captions, it won’t automatically pull in captions. Then I inspect here and you’re also going to see that the alt text is pulled from the media gallery by default. And then you can come in if I wanted to turn the caption off just on this loop.

I’ll go in and it’s one of these, it’s actually on the image itself, come down here and caption type, set that to no caption, and then all the captions will disappear because this is being looped and you’re controlling it from that source instance, I guess we could say. So that really, unless there’s anything else you wanted to pull in besides the caption and the alt tag, you can ask and we can investigate, but those two things are pulled in automatically. The only thing that trips people up is they’ll put the image in the container and then they’ll be like, there’s no query loop.

There’s no option to loop it. It’s got to have a wrapper. So if you wrap it with a block, now you can instantly query loop it.

So you’re good to go. That’s really I think the missing link that a lot of people don’t get at first glance. So maybe that’ll help somebody out.

Okay. Let’s see. Inner Circle is highly undervalued in terms of price.

Appreciate it. Live to you. Do you have any views on a BRX2 beta or something?

If so, how is it? No, I don’t. I don’t.

The thing I’m waiting for right now is components. Question on frame. Can you open up login frame and show how to do a log out frame and a registration please?

We’ll do that on a frames livestream. There’s going to be a frame specific live stream. I’m trying to limit the frames and ACSS questions on WDD live just because I do want to, I do you know, it’s nice to answer them and it’s nice to promote the tools but at the same time there’s a lot of people that don’t use the tools and I want them to get value out of WDD live and we have dedicated streams for ACSS, we have dedicated streams for frames so it’s better to just do them there.

Not using a lot of calc clamp type stuff. I think Grant you still the one thing you have to answer is are you building sites for other people or you just building a site or two for yourself that’s kind of the situation I need to know. If once I have the answer to that question I can guide you better.

How do you do SEO for a national company versus local? That’s a good question. It really depends on the kind of business that it is.

There are national brands that are still, in SEO terms, local businesses. Think about Starbucks, for example, okay? Starbucks is, it’s not arguable, it’s a national brand it’s gigantic it’s massive it’s a global brand even how do they do SEO they have to do SEO according to how Google determines the ranking of keywords related to what Starbucks does that would be things like coffee shop near me well guess what that’s not there’s no way to make that a national search okay and I know this is hard for people to wrap their brains around in the beginning.

That’s why the question is asked. It’s asked very commonly. And so I’ll try to explain this in a way that makes it click.

Because once it clicks in your brain and you understand how these pieces fit together, then you kind of understand the whole thing. And you can better serve your clients. So Starbucks national brand, you might think, hey, we need like some sort of national SEO.

I’m putting that in air. Can you guys see the air quotes? Putting that in that national SEO.

7 0:57:18 That’s what we need,

1 0:57:19 because we’re a national company, right?

But no, you need to think local because every search related to that is a local search in Google’s eyes. If you are searching for a coffee shop near me, Google knows that is a local search and they instantly look for your location and then they try to serve you coffee shops near you. So you need every instance of a Starbucks listed on the website with their address, with the cities that they serve, yada, yada, yada, yada.

Now there’s enough Starbucks that there’s, you know, 80 of them in every city. So you don’t even need like a service area network type thing. You literally just need a location network.

So imagine building the Starbucks website and not having a location network. You’ve just erased all of the SEO. But that’s not national versus, that’s not a national thing.

That’s all local. It’s all local. So even though it’s a national brand, you approach it from a local SEO perspective.

Now, the nationality of the brand feeds all of those local sites, right? Starbucks is so well known nationally and has such a dramatic, let’s go look up starbucks. com.

So we’ll look into here and we’ll go to Keywords Explorer. And I think this is very important to understand. We’ll go to Site Explorer.

Let’s go to starbucks. com. They are a DR88 website.

Okay, so just to let you know, I’ve never seen 100. I don’t even think Google itself. Let’s see if Google.

What is good? Google’s a fucking 98. Google’s not even a hundred.

Okay, so That goes to show right Starbucks is pretty up there. They’re pretty up there Now they’re they’re General page rank is like a little lower than I would then I would expect look at the backlink profile Look at the referring domains. Okay, this feeds down to all of those other location pages.

If you had, let’s say that, I’m just making a number up out of thin air, let’s say that Starbucks had 250 location pages and let’s say you overnight, you know, managed to have 250 locations for some other coffee shop and you built a website and you put those 250 location pages out so you have all the same things that Starbucks has. Starbucks is still going to absolutely merc you in the results, in the results pages. Why?

Because of all the brand authority that they have, right? You can’t just have that overnight. You can’t just have that overnight.

So you can have all the same pages, all the same strategy, but you’re still going to lose because of the authority of the business, the brand, the domain, etc, etc, etc, right? So when you’re explaining all of this to your clients, like you’re gonna sell them a location network, or you might sell them a service area network, but you gotta be up front with them and be like, but if you don’t have the brand authority as your competitors, we’re still not gonna beat them out. If they’ve got all the same pages, we’re still not gonna win.

So we’ve gotta get the brand authority up. I just put out a really like you, I don’t, people got to understand like how much actual like value and gold there is here. I’m going to go into gary.

co. Where did I put this? I started doing this new format instead of everything is a video.

I started doing some text format stuff. Let’s go to I don’t know which category it’s in local SEO, maybe SEO general, maybe SEO, or maybe actually I put it up here, SEO talk. That’s probably where I put it.

Yeah, and I pinned it. So it’s called Backlink Acquisition, the Jeeves Trap, and Doing SEO Without Doing SEO. Now this is exclusive Inner Circle content, so I’m not gonna read the whole thing to you, but if you go and read that, you will have a fundamental shift in understanding of how SEO works in Google’s eyes and it’s not what most people focus on.

It’s not what I call Jeeves content, which is like answering common keyword queries and it’s not technical SEO, it’s not on-page SEO, it’s none of those things that everybody wants to focus on and talk about. It’s something much, much, much more high level, right? And so the minute you understand that, you understand how sites win and lose in Google, and why a site can have all the same things as another site, but they’re still not winning, and how a billboard, a billboard on the side of the road, that old school shit that nobody wants to think about, that billboard on the side of the road is actually SEO.

And a van that’s wrapped in a company’s branding that’s driving all around the city, that is actually SEO too. And when you tie all this stuff together, it’s a very important, very valuable shift, but it’s also a very important shift. Because if you are only doing technical SEO in Jeeves content and service area networks, but you’re not focusing on the number one ranking factor, then you’re still going to lose and your clients are going to lose.

So very very important. Okay. Let’s move on.

Did I answer some sort of question in all of that? So yeah, you don’t think national versus local. Now, the one thing, if you want national attention on a brand, if you want national attention on a brand, that’s where we go into content marketing, which is kind of a subsection of SEO, but it also bleeds out of SEO into many other areas.

But national exposure, national visibility, national rankings for things have to be non-location specific pieces of content. And then there’s two different approaches, which is actually explained by this article right here. I mean, it’s a detailed thing, okay?

Highly recommend. Like, if you signed up, if you’re interested in SEO, just put all of the actual SEO video trainings aside for just a second. If you paid the $25 for the inner circle, which is just absolutely dirt cheap, it’s like I, everybody is, I’m being robbed at every moment of the day.

Okay. Now it’s fine. I consented.

I consented by putting it at that price. I love the fact that nearly everybody can access it. That’s, that’s what’s great about it.

But you pay the $25, you go into the inner circle, and you read this post. And maybe you have to read it three times in a row. You already got way more than what you paid to get it.

Just that one post right there. Now, never mind the fact that there’s also videos where literally you watch the video, implement what I say in the video, and instantly you’re making $1,500 or more per project extra that you weren’t making before. I mean, you cannot calculate the value to price ratio of the inner circle.

Not an ad for the inner circle, just telling it like it is because I’m pointing you to the things I’ve already done, like to answer these questions in a way that is way more valuable than I can just spit out an answer right here on a live stream. But content marketing is your answer for national SEO. And then everything else that is legitimately a local query has to be thought of in terms of local SEO.

4 1:04:57 OK.

How do you sell accessibility as a unique value proposition? 1 1:05:01

Key points. Very, very good question. I thought about it for a long time.

And I was like, OK, do we go down the, because you can go down the lawsuit defense route, which is like defend yourself, don’t get sued route. That could be a narrative that you try to paint. You could go the narrative of you’re losing out on revenue because there’s a certain amount of people who cannot use your website, and if they cannot use your website, they can’t possibly convert on your website.

So you could go the revenue loss route, which by the way, a lot of people think about accessibility in terms of like, you know, people literally using screen readers. Okay, that’s not everybody. That’s when we talk about accessibility, there’s colorblind people.

You know how many people are colorblind? And so if the contrast ratios are off for them and they’re like, man, this site is just too hard for me to use and they leave and go somewhere else, that’s a lot more people. That person’s not using a screen reader they’re not using assistive technology they just literally can’t read your fucking site and so they’re gonna leave that’s that can be a lot of people that can be a lot of people so you could go down the route of like well you’re just losing conversions because a lot of people are not having a good experience on your website okay we could go that route I didn’t like going either of those two routes because accessibility for the first route I general principle, general business principle, I never want to be in the business of selling insurance.

Never, ever, ever. It’s a terrible product, okay? You’ve gotta, and just go watch, what was it, Chris Rock?

Did Chris Rock do the encase shit bit? Is that, who did that? Chat, help me out.

Is that, was that Chris? I don’t want to give it to the wrong person, right? I think it was Chris Rock.

Go watch Chris Rock’s in case shit bit about insurance. And you’ll understand, like, nobody wants to sell insurance. It’s not an exciting product and people don’t care about it until they need it, right?

And that nobody wants to buy it. People don’t enjoy buying insurance. So any insurance-like product or pitch is just typically a loser in my estimation.

So when I say something like, well, we could talk about the lawsuits, defend your, no, now you’re just selling insurance. Accessibility now is just insurance against lawsuits. That’s not a good sales pitch.

Then we could go into the, all right, you’re losing business, but then you’re going to have to play a game of, well, how much business? And it’s like, well, we don’t really know. Well, well, if you don’t really know, I’m not going to fucking pay for it, am I?

Right? 2 1:07:35

So that’s not a good pitch. 1 1:07:36

Okay. Okay, so the route that I went was we build accessible sites. So we build to the AA standard.

That’s our goal. Is every site going to be perfect? No, no.

But are they going to be a fucking disaster like most of them? No, right? We’re going to be as close to perfect as we can possibly get it.

And that’s just part of our process baked in. Now, how much does that cost? Well, obviously we’re not the cheapest agency.

So it’s in there somewhere. I don’t know, but it’s not a choice. You can’t opt out.

We’re not gonna build inaccessible sites. It’s just, this is part of our process. And you get what you pay for when you hire our agency.

And it’s just that I present it as like an extra benefit to them. So they’re looking at a price and I don’t go, by the way, you know, 30% of that price was all the accessibility stuff. Don’t even mention it.

they ask about accessibility, I just go, that’s already baked in. That’s part of our process. That’s just standard.

And so I don’t have to sell it. Don’t have to sell it. We just have maybe higher prices than a lot of people.

And that’s part of why. Now, there’s a lot of other reasons why, but that’s part of why. So that’s how I positioned it.

I didn’t, I was like well if you’re gonna force me into a situation where it’s like there’s a bunch of bad options I’m just gonna play a different game So that’s that’s the direction that I went Okay, let’s see hopefully that helps you I See we have the frame for login would we be getting frames for registration password reset and password loss just asking well I’ll answer it without demonstrating, but this is what I mean, okay? And it helps to think about certain frames in this regard. 2

1:09:20 So let’s go to templates. 1

1:09:22 I think you’re talking about dashboard alpha. 2

1:09:25 No, you’re not, sorry. 1

1:09:26 That’s, I don’t know what I was thinking there. Let’s go to, it’s literally, is it literally called login?

There’s been a lot of debate on like, wow, what do we call it? It’s like the hardest part of anything in development land is what do you name it? What do you call it?

That’s like literally the hardest part. Okay, so see how it says I’m already logged into my account. Okay, if I wasn’t logged into the account, I guess we could log out, that’s kind of annoying.

I could, I would see a form. Now this is actually based on Bricks’s element. Bricks has an element for this.

And see, there’s multiple ways to go about this. See that form right there? Okay, this is Bricks native, all right?

They do this out of the box. Now, if you wanted a registration form here, you would have to build another instance of this page and replace this with a registration form. That’s all you have to do.

But the same layout, the frame is the layout, right? We gave you this split screen, full height kind of layout situation going on. The form that you drop into this, or the text that you drop into this is totally up to you.

So for me, I use WS form registration, WS form login, WS form everything. So I would immediately when I use this frame, I just delete this form right here. And I drop in my WS form version for my login page.

Then I assign that to the login template. Then I go create another instance using the same frame because I want the same layout and I just use a registration form on that version and hook it up as the registration form. And then I would create a logged out version.

Same frame, same layout, but different text right here saying, hey, you’re logged out. You need to log back in, whatever. I might even create, use this frame.

Here’s another thing, guys, you gotta think outside the box, okay? It says login alpha. Does that mean that’s the only thing you can ever use it for?

No, I mean, this could be a squeeze page template if you wanted it to be, right? So use it for whatever you want, rename it to whatever you want. You have AutoBIM to rename the classes for you automatically to create a brand new unique instance of this thing, the sky’s the limit, right?

You can do whatever you want with these things. So even though we call it login alpha because that’s what it is when you add it to a page, you’re free to do whatever you want with it. We don’t need a registration alpha that looks exactly like this and then a logged out alpha that looks exactly like this.

The login alpha can be used for all of those things by swapping the form and the text. So that’s why I said it’s super easy to do this with the exact same frame. Hopefully that makes sense.

All right, let’s close that up. Okay, let’s see. Okay, question, question, question.

Why do you want to return to BJJ? If you said that I missed it, sorry. I mean, why do I not want to return to BJJ?

I’ve been doing it since I was 20 years old. Off and on. Off and on.

I had an injury. I injured my Achilles over the summer doing sprints. And so that put me out for a while.

Before that, just got way too busy with, we were doing softball stuff, travel. That took me out. And then the thing about jujitsu is like, it’s hard, it’s very difficult, very taxing.

And so when you’re in it and you’re in a rhythm, it’s you feel good, right? And you’re like, let’s keep that rhythm up. When you’re out of it for a year, your brain is like, you know how fucking hard this is gonna be to go back?

And you just kind of keep talking yourself out of it until you stop being a bitch and then you actually go do it. So, but I just, I need to get back into it. And I just, cause I’ve been, I don’t want to go more than a year out.

So it’s just time, it’s just time to do it. But yeah, I’ve been doing it since I’m 20. So it’s like, it’s just part of my life.

And I’ll just tell you right now, if you’ve never done it and you don’t really understand the like, what it does for you. It’s almost like there’s a therapy component to it. There’s a being in the moment component to it.

You can’t be preoccupied doing jiu jitsu. There’s no, that’s not possible. So like if you have a problem being preoccupied all the time, or not getting your mind to like, you know, be in the moment, there’s no better way to do that.

Then you get all the physical benefits of it. It’s also very mental, very, it’s especially at a high level, very, it’s like doing, it’s like human chess, right? It’s like that, there’s that much, maybe even more complexity than in chess.

It’s insanely complex. So it’s very stimulating from a strategy standpoint, from a competition standpoint, from a just like it exercises the logic, reason part of your brain just as much as it exercises you physically. There’s just a lot.

It offers a lot. Then there’s the camaraderie. There’s the general community, the vibe of the gym, the you know, knowing all these people and getting to train with them.

There’s nothing like you know strangling another human being to really bring you very close, like literally very close together. But that’s, people don’t even understand unless they’ve done it before. There’s just way too many benefits.

So you realize like my life is not nearly as good when I’m not in jiu-jitsu than when I am in jiu-jitsu. So I should probably be in jiu-jitsu. That’s kind of the conclusion.

All right, let’s go back to questions. When did you say the ACSS and Frames live stream would be? ACSS this Thursday, Frames the following week.

I’ll post the ACSS one probably right after this stream, but it’s already on my calendar for Thursday. What do you recommend for animations on the site? 3

1:15:36 Okay, good question. 1

1:15:38 First thing I would say, unless you’re really good at animations, don’t do anything with animations. Second thing I’ll say is it’s kind of like with UI design, subtle is better, subtle is better.

You try to go all crazy with it, it can very easily get out of control, very easily turn into a very bad situation. I will say by and large, the animations I see on websites are bad. They are bad animations.

Great animation is rare. So keep that in mind. Now, if you can bypass all of those things that I just said, all of those disclaimers, I think motion.

page is a great tool to use. Makes it fairly easy. There’s gonna be a learning curve there for sure, but motion.

page is good. Haven’t used many tools beyond that. I don’t do a lot with animation myself because I don’t like it as a user all that much.

Even, and then you get into the realm of subtle stuff and I just find myself asking the question like, why am I spending my time on this? Like has anybody ever shown like show me a conversion rate increasing because I added some subtle animations? Please do that.

If you can show me that data I’ll be much more interested in subtle animations. But I’ve never seen that data. I’ve seen tests between them.

I haven’t seen any strong conclusions. So it ends up being a situation where it’s like, it’s not worth it to me to spend the time on it. And I can’t sell it to my clients because again, I don’t have any data to show them that’s gonna be like, and when they ask for it, I’ll be like, are you sure you wanna pay for that?

Because it probably ain’t gonna do anything for like, objective reality, 100% right now. What also is bad on most websites? Copy.

Okay. Would you, it’s on top of your head, based on what you know, listen to WDD Live, would it be better for a customer to take $500 or $1,000, let’s say, and invest it in copy or invest it in animations? Go.

Give me the answer. Okay. It’s copy.

The every day of the week twice on Sunday. And so that’s what we should do. Let’s stop animating things and let’s start writing better things.

And then your business will do better. The animations don’t help. So I just stay away from them.

How will the upcoming Brics components affect the development of frames and ACSS? Some of them will be componentized in theory, but I’m waiting on a test copy from Thomas before I can answer that question. Once I actually play around with it and see how the implement, I don’t even know how the implementation is done.

I have a sneak peek from like a month ago and many things could have changed since then. So it’s just I you know, it’s hard to answer that question because I got to see it before I really know How good it’s gonna be how valuable it’s gonna be whether there’s gonna be any limitations We’ll see Who’s gonna who’s gonna waste the $2 to super chat leave WP alone they suffered enough with with Gutenberg What is your best advice for one that wants to get started as a freelance WordPress dev. I mean I would go work, I would go work for somebody who’s already doing a lot of the work in this industry and learn from their processes learn from you know their workflow how they manage clients at least get some sort of experience in that regard I guess.

You know you could try to do it just on your own from scratch. The Inner Circle, once again, is a great resource for getting your pricing set up, your SOWs, how do you do your proposal, how do you do sales calls, what are the sales call checkpoints, how do you actually land clients, where do you find the clients, all of that stuff’s covered in the Inner Circle. So you could go just do it on your own from scratch.

I talk about the concept of working for free in some of the early stage areas and how to do that strategically. You can almost do like a freemium type model. There’s a lot of different approaches.

I think it’s good to have mentorship or coaching along the way at some point. Like for example, people will get on a sales call and they’ll record the sales call. And because you know, they’re in the early stages and they don’t know what they don’t know and they don’t know how to grade themselves necessarily, or clients will ask them things and they just don’t know how to answer or there’ll be some sort of objection that they don’t know how to overcome.

And so I’ll tell them, I’ll be like, we’ll just record your next sales call and send me the recording. And then we’ll get on a call together. And like, you can go to gary.

co. Anybody can schedule a call and we’ll get on a call together and we’ll listen to the recording. And then I’ll tell you, right there, right there, here’s what we need to do.

Or sometimes the order of what people talk about on the calls is way out of whack. It’s just, there’s a really good, just systematic approach to sales calls. And it’s very, it’s not anything salesy.

In fact, like I hate salesy type sales calls. It’s very natural. There’s a free masterclass I did called Processes Everything.

I’m just thinking about all these resources that I’ve already produced, like so we don’t have to keep repeating the same things. 6 1:21:31

Look up Processes Everything. 1 1:21:32

If you have not watched the Processes Everything masterclass, it’s 100% free, okay? It’s long, it’s long. 2

1:21:40 There’s a lot of value. 1

1:21:41 It is one of those required trainings. I would say it’s a requirement to watch Processes Everything.

Because it literally is, the name of it, Process, it literally is everything. If you don’t understand process, and I don’t talk about process in the way most people talk about process, hint, hint, okay? You gotta go watch the training.

That answers so many questions and it opens the door in so many ways. Because a sales call ultimately is all about process. If you think about process the way I think about process, every sales call, all it is, the entire sales call, is just about process and then price.

It’s process and price. And the price is determined by the process, which is why process is everything. So go watch that, like 100% required watching.

You have to go watch Process is Everything. 4 1:22:32

And then go into Inner Circle, 1 1:22:33

there’s a whole bunch of follow-up trainings and yada, yada, yada, yada. Like, it’s probably the best resource for you. 5

1:22:38 What are the odds that you get Matt Mullenweg 2

1:22:40 on a live stream? 1

1:22:41 Have you tried? I haven’t tried yet.

I think the odds are very high, if I asked him. He seems to be you know here’s the thing I have no personal like I saw Matt at WordCamp I didn’t meet him I didn’t go up to him like introduce myself or anything because I’m an introvert I don’t really do that all that much I just I just and me and I’m not on a mission to like let’s meet everybody I can possibly meet that’s not that’s that introvert side of me. Okay, I’m an ambivert really but that’s the introvert side of me.

That’s not, that’s not me. So, but he seems like a very friendly person. He seems like a, you know, cool guy, whatever.

I don’t have any personal issues with Matt. I also think that Matt, I don’t know that at that level of the game with that amount of investors and that amount of money and there’s a lot of politics. There’s a lot of politics and don’t even know if you know what Matt says, what he’s allowed to say, not allowed to say.

I don’t know how much restriction is there. There’s just a lot of unknowns. So I just I don’t have anything personal against Matt, I would love to have him on the stream, I would love to have a conversation with him, I’d hang out with him, I’d have a beer with him, I’d just, whatever.

I think he would come on, I think he would come on because he’s gone on a lot of shows. And so what I was going to get at is, that’s what I would credit him with, in terms of him at least appearing to be transparent, appearing to be open to criticism, he seems to be willing to put himself out there. So that’s a good thing.

The best criticism of BRICS I’ve heard, it’s easy to convince clients of the technical benefits of using BRICS, but larger clients worry about the long-term viability of the product. They know the block editor is going to be supported for the long term. How would you respond to such concern from a client?

It’s a legitimate criticism. I don’t know that there’s a better answer for the block editor though. Other than it’s native WordPress but what are we going to act like native WordPress never changes?

We don’t know what the future holds. Nobody has a crystal ball. So we also have to think about what is the nature of the website?

How complex is the website really? Are we pulling data from external APIs? Are we like, you know, if it’s a standard marketing website, what I would ask them is, what is the typical lifespan of a marketing website?

And the answer is two to three years. So is Bricks going to be around in two to three years? And if it is, we can double down and stick with it.

And if it’s not, we can shift to whatever else we need to shift to. But in three years, the website is going to be outdated, and it’s going to need to be either freshened up or redone. Now, if we’re sticking with Bricks, the freshening up and the redoing of things, well, way, way easier, right?

We built a site to be maintainable and scalable, and that’ll be fantastic. But if we have to switch platforms, it’s just something we have to do. A lot of people do that.

It’s not a huge headache. And a lot of the data, honestly, is in WordPress already. All of your blog posts, those are in WordPress, those are not in Bricks.

All the custom field data, those are in WordPress, that’s not in Bricks. Bricks is just a skin on a lot of the content. All your CPTs are still there.

All your taxonomies are still there. All of your forms are still there, because I don’t build forms in native bricks. So that’s not a thing.

Your forms are in WS form. Is WS form going to be around? I don’t know.

Mark could decide that he wants to sell off and go ride his boat around the lake in South Florida, I mean, South Georgia. We don’t know. Nobody’s got a crystal ball.

So all we know is we need this site to be around for the next two to three years and do its job. Is it gonna do that on BRICS? Yeah, absolutely.

Undoubtedly, 100%, it’s gonna do it. Because it’s not gonna implode, right? I mean, it might, but it’s all open.

I mean, we could just, somebody could grab the code. I mean, that’s where Maxime, fucking where’s Maxime? Call Maxime in.

Someone like Maxime comes in, fixes bricks right up, right? Solves the little implosion, Thomas is gone, we don’t know where Thomas is. Someone like Maxime, he’ll come in and fix it up for us.

2 1:27:25 Right?

1 1:27:26 Probably, probably.

So, I don’t think it’s a big thing. I don’t think it’s a big thing. You know, FSC lands, that’s much more like, you know, undeveloped territory.

Like, man, that could have major changes perhaps they’ve already introduced breaking changes to FSC and the block editor in the past so we know they’re willing to break things that’s kind of a headache how often is that going to happen there’s pros and cons to everything so don’t overthink it just just just go with it oh let’s see hey Kevin have you ever checked out live canvas for website building it seems like a solid builder. What’s your take compared to Bricks considering your day to day? I haven’t looked at it.

I have, I looked at it. I haven’t looked at it deeply enough to have an opinion on it that’s fair to Live Canvas or to anybody that’s listening. So that’s just going to be something I look at more in detail at a later date.

I am starting this, this page builder review. I mean, look at the detail on this review. Look at, there is not gonna be more detailed reviews.

Look at this, look at this. What’s this? This block contains unexpected or invalid content.

The joys of using the block editor, right? Okay, I mean, the detail, and I’m not even done with this. Guys, I’m not, let’s go to the outline.

We’re 3,700 words and I’m not even, I’ve still got sections, look at this, I’ve got sections that aren’t even done yet. I mean this could be, look at this, look at this, this could be 6,000 words by the time I’m done. There will not be more detailed reviews on PageBuilder.

So, Live Canvas eventually will get something like this. I’m doing Elementor, then I’m going to do probably divvy because of the size of the ecosystem. There will be a beaver version.

That’s just the silliest name, isn’t it? I can’t say beaver builder without a little internal chuckle. I don’t know if you guys feel that way.

I can’t see and no knock to that. They’re very talented people, but I can’t tell my clients, my serious clients that we’re going to be using a Beaver Builder for this. This is not, see I can’t, I get a little, I get a little, a little tickled every time I say it.

I don’t know about you guys but yeah, but we will be doing the Beaver review. Yeah, so this will all be coming. Live Canvas will probably be in there somewhere.

3 1:30:03 All right, thank you for your explanations

1 1:30:04 on captions and loops.

Look how far behind I am in the chat. Where are we at on time? Oh, we got 30 minutes, man.

2 1:30:12 We are good on time.

1 1:30:12 OK.

I like these questions today. These are really, we’re going off in so many different directions. You guys are doing a fabulous job.

I just got to let you know with the questions today. The viewership numbers, I mean, this is good too. I want to be steady over 200, you know, a few months from now would be nice.

2 1:30:33 Okay, let’s keep going.

1 1:30:35 How do you decide which features to prioritize for a product?

EG, ACSS, just curious about, this is a, again, SK, absolutely fantastic question. These are, sometimes these are things that I was like, I was going to write an article about this, or I was gonna do a video about this, and here they are as a question. Because I think, I think the roadmap kind of, how about this, the voting of features, the voting, let’s go to, we just need an example.

I like to have real world examples, okay? So we’ll go to bricksbuilder. io slash, is it ideas?

Or is it, maybe that’s one of them. And then there’s a roadmap right here. That’s probably the easier one to look at.

Okay, so see how you can go down and you can upvote all this. Now, I think, you know, this is a very popular approach to SaaS products and Oxygen did this. And I think it is a failure of leadership of the product if this is all they go by.

So if it’s like pure democracy and just whatever is most popular that’s what we’ll do. Okay that is a failure of a product development workflow. Let’s go on the roadmap.

That’s how you get things like element back to top. Look at the number, look at the fucking vote tally on this thing right here. Wow, right?

Useless, useless feature shouldn’t be wasting our time on it. Don’t care what you think about. You can at me, you can send me nasty emails.

This is a useless feature. And I would just prefer that the Bricks team not waste their time adding this to BRICS. I want them to focus on far more important things and there’s only so much time in the day.

There’s only so many resources. Now that’s one thing, right? If you do pure democracy, you get stupid ideas somehow rising to the top.

Ideas that don’t align with the direction of the product or the culture of the product or the vision of the product, those things will occur. And if you just do it based on democracy, you end up with a product that has no identity anymore. And you end up with a product that’s trying to be built for everybody, which I’ve already talked about as like a bad way to develop software.

But let’s think about the early stages of a product. In the early stages where there’s no customers, in the early stages where there’s no voting and there’s no feedback, the only thing that exists is a vision. And that vision determines whether that product is like a lot of other products or very unique and very different to how other products tend to operate in that sphere.

And it’s that vision that makes or breaks a product, right? And so for some reason, at some point, a lot of these products develop, and I’m not saying Bricks has done this, okay? I’m not saying Bricks has, notice that Back to Top has not been implemented yet, even though it has so many votes.

You know what that tells me? Thomas knows how fucking useful it is, useless it is as well, and he’s just naturally prioritized other things, which is good to see. Good to see.

A lot of people might think, Hey, Thomas is not listening to us. And he should not listen to you. If that’s the thing that you voted for.

Um, because you cannot as a product developer, abandon vision at some point. What is the value in that? The value is in the visionary.

Okay. To be like, what is the next thing that this product needs to do that. Nobody’s even thinking about yet.

Okay, there’s there’s that quote the The Ford the Ford guy Here’s what my brain my brain is Really awful at if you say who’s that and I need to recall a name fucking blank It’s it’s gonna be I’m I am NOT your guy to come up with names of people who are associated with certain things. If you ask me, you will immediately break my brain. If you ask me to think of a name, never, not in the next 72 hours will I be able to think of a name.

Okay, so just don’t even ask. I may think of a name if you don’t ask me, but the minute somebody tries to query the name from my brain, you’re not getting it for the next 72 hours. So that’s why I can’t think of his name.

The Ford thing, right? If I asked people what they wanted, they would have told me a faster horse. And so we wouldn’t have cars.

The visionary is where the value is. I need Thomas to continue to be a visionary, to not hand over the visionary part to democracy, okay? Because democracy is not going to get that job done the way that Thomas will get the job done.

In ACSS, we could have continued just build out, build out features that people are asking for. Well, then it would get super bloated, right? Then it would become open ended.

And then there’s so many downsides to an open ended framework, which I’ve detailed in a blog post. We have to maintain a specific culture, a specific vision, and a specific path forward. And we have to maintain a certain level of innovation.

And that innovation comes from the vision of what needs to be next, not in terms of what people are voting for, but in what I know about X workflow, X users, X etc. That’s super important. So hopefully that answers your question.

Prioritization is feedback, yes, it’s good. Voting, yes, it’s good. But that doesn’t mean we’re going to do it.

That means we’re going to consider it. And it always comes back to our team and we have internal discussions about should we do that, should we not do that. And then we also have a lot of internal discussions about what have all of these people not thought about yet?

And what have all of these other products not thought about or considered yet? And so half of it is our vision, half of it is weighing our options in terms of what’s been presented in terms of feedback and voting and all of that. But there is, this is not a democracy.

It is, there is a leader that goes yes or no at the end of the day. And first or last at the end of the day. And I’m that person, and by the way, I can take heat on certain things, okay, that aren’t necessarily perfect.

I use the tool and go, fuck whoever made this, right? Where is he? 4

1:37:30 Show me him. 1

1:37:31 Show me that guy. I got some words for him.

Hey, I say that sometimes to myself about my own product, right? Because no product is perfect. But that’s just the reality of the situation.

Somebody complained earlier today, you know, if you turn on pro mode, Brics still auto suggests all of the classes in the framework. That’s dumb. That’s dumb.

Now, there’s a good reason why we haven’t fixed that yet. It’s not natively fixable in Brics. It some extra, you know, logic and consideration.

There’s also, we can’t just remove them from the database because that would cause mass breakage. That’s not a solution. So there’s reasons why it hasn’t been done yet.

But what I told them is, just being honest and transparent, is we prioritized other things. Pro mode does what it’s designed to do. The fact that it still suggests classes in Bricks that aren’t active is annoying.

It’s annoying, 100% agree with you. That’s very annoying. But I chose to focus on other things rather than fixing that.

Are we fixing it? Yes, but there were other things that had a greater priority. So I can take the heat when people wanna complain about things like that, it’s fine.

But I do not think products are successful when they are completely turned over to democratic voting. It’s just not good. All right, hopefully that answers the question.

2 1:38:53 For responsive font sizes, clamp or CQW,

1 1:38:57 container query with container query is at 91% browser acceptance thoughts.

I don’t think it’s at 91%. Not all of them are at 91%. Like the concept of it, the base level of it might be CQW Here’s the container query length units see that’s at eighty seven point eight six percent I try not to touch anything under 90 really like I want 92 93 is like good comfort zone Here’s container query units still sitting at 87% I’m looking at US that’s mainly where my customers are So we’re not there yet.

We’re not there yet looking at US, that’s mainly where my customers are. So we’re not there yet, we’re not there yet. But I still don’t even know if those units are the way to go for responsive font sizes.

Font size to me is not container-based, it is viewport-based. So I’m gonna have to, that’s going to be a thinking discussion and more of a debate with that regard. I don’t want the font size necessarily changing all that much.

Like an H3 is an H3, whether it’s in a card or some other format. It might look really janky if your H3 size is changing because it’s in a smaller container. I don’t know that that’s going to be a good situation.

I think when everything is responsive to the viewport, that’s a much better consistent situation. What if you don’t have a physical location? How can you do local SEO?

2 1:40:31 Fantastic question.

1 1:40:32 There are what’s called service area businesses.

They don’t have a physical location. They need service area pages, what’s called a service area page network. I have a training on service area pages and a service area page network in the Inner Circle.

You can go see exactly how to build it. You can see exactly how to do the SEO research from it, the site mapping for it. It’s all there.

It’s not something I can really just answer. Like I just gave you the answer, but I can’t really go into more detail or we’ll be in an hour long tutorial. So just go watch the tutorials that are already available to you.

But that is the answer is service area network. 2 1:41:16

How do I overcome the freelance issue of I do everything 1 1:41:20

such as UX, UI, coding, SEO, copywriting, what’s the best practice for outsourcing, collaboration? Really good question, David. I say, my view is there are no freelancers.

There are no freelancers in web design unless you pick a very specific lane and stick to it. There is a freelance UI designer position. You can be a freelance UI designer.

You could be a freelance UX expert. You could be a freelance copywriter. You could be a freelance developer.

In the all-encompassing like I’m going to build you a successful website there’s no freelancer. That person is probably doing a lot of things at a very low level. They’re not a high level performer in all of these different areas for sure.

There are very very few unicorns. So we need to stop the idea of this is a freelance business at that point and just say you’re an And now you don’t have to be an agency with employees on W2 payroll, but you are a network of providers because you got to have somebody that knows how to do the copy if you don’t know how to do the copy. Saying, well, I’m going to rely on the client to give me that.

Well, you’re failing the client. You’re failing the client. Saying, well, I’m okay at UI.

How many people are okay at UI and that’s why we see all the things we see on WDD Live. You’re not okay at UI. If you’re okay at UI and you’re doing the UI, you’re doing your client a disservice.

So you gotta find a designer to network with and partner with and bring them in on your projects. If you wanna serve the client the way the client deserves to be served. So there’s no such thing as a freelancer.

Just consider yourself an agency, build a little network of providers who can actually serve your clients in the way that they deserve to be served, and then that’s it, you move forward in that capacity or if you want to be a freelancer pick one specific thing and just do that so ui design copy ppc whatever you want it to be and that’s just your wheelhouse and that’s all you do and that’s all you provide and that’s all you sell now you’re a freelancer but this this all-encompassing like i do everything to make a website successful you’re not you can’t really be a freelancer in that regard. You’re also going to be dramatically limited in the amount of work that you’re able to handle. You’re presenting dramatic risk to your clients.

If you get sick for two weeks, everybody’s fucked. So that’s just not a good situation for your clients to be in, and it’s not a good situation for you to be in either. It is very risky for you to take on that kind of a business model.

Because again, if you’re sick for two weeks, you’re fucked. Everybody’s fucked. So this is not a good situation.

If you have a little network of providers, guess who can pick up the slack while you recover? Okay? Things can keep moving forwards and that’s good for you, that’s good for your clients.

I just, I’m not a fan of that model. I think that model is a fairy tale. Everybody wants that to be a thing, but it’s not a thing in reality.

So we should stop pretending. Marcel, good looking out my man. 180 viewers, only 72 likes, hit that like button.

Ted P says yes, Chris Rock, in case shit happens. Yeah, it’s a hilarious bit. Go watch the bit.

I like it. Is there a checklist to ensure we meet the standards. There’s the accessibility documentation, which is a freaking, again, that’s a textbook, like go open the textbook.

And yeah, it’s, there are accessibility lists out there. Yes. But it’s very, it is very technical.

I’ll, you know, it’s a lot of people are turned off by that. It’s, it’s, it’s like, damn, are you telling me that I just spent all this time learning all these development best practices like I learned classes I learned clamps I use this and that and templates and loops and and then it’s like oh by the way you’re just getting started welcome to the party and I just dropped like a 300 page textbook on your desk all about accessibility I’m like have at it right and you just get depressed at some point you get a little bit depressed but that’s just the name of the game. This is a very hard industry to be in.

It’s not for the faint of heart. It moves at light speed. There’s a gazillion and a half things that you have to know and learn and keep track of.

And then, you know, there’s real implications for the work that you do in terms of whether businesses are getting traffic or not getting traffic, getting sales or not getting sales Putting food on their table or not putting food on their table So yeah fun What happened to golf? great question Michael if anybody knows there was a about five minute span where I was super into golf and You know what happened to it Time time happened to it. It turns out golf requires a shitload of time.

One thing that I don’t have a lot of. And so the idea that like, man, not to mention, not to mention my kids, right? It’s like, imagine this, imagine you’ve got three young kids and you know, you’re, you’re working a lot.

And then when you’re not working, you’re trying to spend as much time as you can with them. You got other hobbies though, like I got jujitsu, I got to get that in, okay. Then imagine I’m just going to be like, peace out, I’m going to shoot 18 holes, like what, every fucking Saturday this is going to happen?

And then I’m coaching softball, I’m the head coach of my daughter’s softball team. When’s that going to fit in? I mean, there’s only so much time in the day.

So golf, I love the concept of being a golfer. I love the concept of playing golf. Once again, this is just not reality.

It’s not a reality that I can seem to manifest. So that’s what happened. That’s the long answer of what happened to golf.

Let’s see. Do you think the Bricks component will bring the functionality to build Gutenberg blocks in the form of a Bricks template and feed them with custom fields? Bricks functionality to build Gutenberg.

Oh, don’t know. Don’t know. That would be a fantastic, hey, is WP Tuts still here?

Ask Thomas if bricks is going to allow us, empower us to do anything with anything, of any kind, with Gutenberg blocks. Would you jujitsu Joe Rogan if you had the chance? 100% not even a question.

I might just double leg him the moment I see him and just see let’s just see let’s just go let’s just he he would know he would he would get it because I would do the little fist bump ahead of time if you fist bump ahead of time uh it’s okay anything goes after that so you just come up to him bang hit a double leg immediately uh just check his sprawl game out you know how is the Joe Rogan sprawl game let’s find out right now yeah it’d be fun it’d be fun how relationship from to that he’s a black belt in jujitsu right so you know it would be a it would be a handful not gonna lie but it you know, let’s go. Let’s find out. Okay.

Any other sneak peek of the much awaited v3? Now there’s no sneak peeks of this. Would you recommend to someone that is using Elementor since years and wants to start using Bricks because of all the cons on Elementor side, how and where to start.

Yeah, page building 101, make the switch immediately, watch page building 101 here on YouTube, 100% free, and we’re good to go. What would you recommend to someone that’s using. .

. Okay, that was the same question. How is the beta testing for 3.

0 going, assuming the team has been. . .

Now, the beta testing has not started yet. But, but I have a, you know, what’s been done so far guys is very, very exciting. And I cannot wait to actually be able to use it on a real site.

We’re working right now on, you know, saving all the settings to the database, which is a quite important part of it. is mostly done and working. And like, man, it’s just going to be really good.

Like, I want people to feel like, man, this is like a joy now. This is like a joy to, because you know, there’s a little bit of hassle involved in the current iteration, let’s say. And I think you’re just going to be like, wow, this just, this makes this so much more joyful to use.

Like, I want everybody to have a smile on their face while they’re using it. Just being like, wow, this is the experience that we’ve always wanted that we maybe didn’t necessarily even realize at first. That’s kind of the vibe that I want you to get.

2 1:50:40 Have you ever done cold calling?

1 1:50:41 No, I don’t beg for work.

How’s the beta testing? Okay, we already did that one. Is the page voting 101 course complete?

I thought there was supposed to be another video or two. There was gonna be a full build, but we already do plenty of those. So it’s like, it doesn’t really have to be part of the series.

Yeah, it’s done, it’s finished. Is that a masterclass you created? Page voting 101 is a course, it’s for free on YouTube.

Then there’s a, what I was talking about earlier It’s for free on YouTube. Then there’s a, what I was talking about earlier was the Processes Everything. It’s called a masterclass, yes.

And it was a live stream. So you can just look up Processes Everything Geary and it should come up. 2

1:51:26 Matt just did a podcast with Tim Ferriss. 1

1:51:28 It’s good. Okay, I will check it out.

Any thoughts on the new Global CSS Manager panel? I like it. I like it.

It needs some couple more little things but it’s a really good start. Okay getting into more comments, comments, comments. My issue with FSE land is they’re not willing to make changes that break backwards compatibility.

I’ve seen them break stuff I don’t know if that’s 100% true. Some comments about Beaver Builder. What are best practices for passing site to clients that wanna manage content on their own?

ACSS frames brick, should we make these templates or what’s the best way? I have a video for that, go watch, let me pull it up. Go to, FT log.

There you go. Watch this video right here. That stands for, for the love of God, stop letting clients edit their own websites.

There you go. Just watch that video and you’ll have your answer. Okay.

There’s somebody else saying, can you please talk about it, I kind of just did. I would say we are a couple weeks away from the beta group and then it will, after that it’s hard to be like, you know, I would love it for us to give it to the beta group and they’re like, this is fantastic and then they just pat us on the back and then we release it but surely surely there’s gonna be some bugs and some issues and some things like that that we have to work out and How long will that take? I don’t know.

I mean if I You know could wave a magic wand. I would say it comes out in February But I don’t have a magic wand So don’t quote me on that and don’t hold me to that and just I don’t know when it could be early February could be late February I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know I all I know is Wajih, Christoph, Mateo, Andrea they’re all literally like right now tied to chairs in my basement that’s the best I can do like they’re literally tied to like it’s not good conditions down there. And so that’s as fast as like they get bread and water, you know, on like an eight hour rotation.

That’s, I don’t know how we can work any faster. But yeah, so it’s coming. It’s coming as quickly as it can possibly go.

2 1:54:21 Okay.

1 1:54:23 Okay, 95 still not good enough for the value Kevin gets on the table.

I don’t know what that, I see 95. I don’t know, I don’t know what you guys, I don’t know what that’s referring to anymore. Let’s see, I’ll be in Atlanta this year, I’ve got a sweep, single leg headed your way the minute I see you.

Hey, I told you, you have to fist bump first though. You gotta give, you can’t, there’s no from behind, there’s no like, you can’t just jump on the back, you know, like, you gotta face, you gotta fist bump, then it’s fair game. 2

1:55:00 Did y’all get any snow yesterday? 1

1:55:02 No. Is there any alternative for WP Codebox?

I’m not an agency nor a freelancer, just do things for my business and they are actually selling just the agency plan now I don’t know I mean yeah there are alternatives I just don’t know a ton about them Andrea says it’s my turn to drink let’s say you know someone will hold you to February 1st I know I know 100% I know oh no 95 talking about likes on the stream okay looks like we’ve exhausted I’ll do a last call let this is last call for questions we got to get out of here like I said we came in right at the two-hour mark that’s just fantastic timing it was fantastic questions today really really really good stuff would you offer an unlimited websites deal on 3. 0 no the plans are not going to change when 3. 0 comes out what will change here’s the only thing that’s going to change.

People will see 3. 0 and they’ll be like, I think, I think the general sentiment will be like, you’re right this is exactly how a framework, how we should interact with a framework in in our workflow. And you’ll be like, this is just this solves so many challenges and complaints that I’ve had with ACSS 2.

0. And I think a lot of people, you know, not using ACSS at that point will have sad face because the traditional idea, just first of all, consider this. There was no concept of a dashboard, like a UI dashboard before automatic CSS.

So when automatic CSS introduced the UI dashboard for manipulating a framework, everybody had a revelation like, fuck, this is the way to go. This is how we should be interacting with a framework. Because you had before that, you had frameworks that were just static.

You couldn’t even really adjust anything. It was just, you went with the values the framework gave you and that’s that. That was the thing.

That was the thing when ACSS came out, right? Or they were very technical to change. And so automatic CSS was like, no, no, no, no.

We’re gonna have a UI dashboard. All this stuff’s gonna be customizable. We also did a bunch of other stuff that nobody else was doing at the time.

All the fluid typography, all the fluid spacing, none of that was being done at the time. Math scales, none of that was being done at the time. That’s all standard now, but it wasn’t done at the time, right?

Well, we’re doing that again. We’re doing that again. What 3.

0 introduces is, imagine us being like that UI dashboard that we brought to the game that like nobody else was doing that everybody thought was fantastic. We’ve evolved beyond that to a degree to a degree but it’s completely changed now like the game has once again changed and if you’re not with the people changing the game like when it changes you go wow this is if you are with that team you’re like oh this is fucking life’s fantastic this is so good if you’re not with that team you have sad face and you know that’s but the good thing is is we’re open to everybody so once 3. 0 is released I mean anybody with sad face can go from sad face to happy face any time that they want to Fully open and and you know able to make that transition, but this is just once again It’s like we’ve looked at and this is not a feature request.

This is not nobody requested this feature This is again Mike goes back to my example of we have to remain the visionary for the product and not just build what people are voting for in terms of feature requests, right? So once again, I looked at, guys, should we be doing it this way? Or is there potentially a better way?

And it turns out, oh yes, oh yes, oh yes. There is a much better way. And it solves a lot of headaches along the way, basically, immediately.

So really, really, really good. Would you consider to do something similar to core marketplace to sell pre-made layouts with ACSS? Yeah.

Yes I think that I think standards are very important in that regard. Like I don’t want I don’t you know the idea of a bunch of I mean anybody can build with ACSS right now and release their own thing. I mean, you see that already happening, right?

My caution has been like, just inspect the DOM, inspect the methodology. If they’ve littered utility classes everywhere, that’s gonna be a problem for you. When it comes to maintaining it and styling it, that’s gonna be a problem.

Just, it is 100%. So maybe stay away from that. If they’ve done BIM and they’ve used variables properly now you can take a harder look at that.

Is it an opinionated design set? If you want to go the opinionated design set route, whatever. If it’s for a one-off project, fine.

Just know that the utility of that is very low. You can’t just reuse that over and over and over. I mean your whole portfolio is going to look exactly the same or you’re going to be tasked with undoing a bunch of design work, right?

The opinions that were given to you and then redo and that’s just not efficient. That’s why frames is unstyled and unopinionated. So there’s there’s there could be cons but look Bricks Maven, right?

I tell people all the time if you’re look if you don’t want to use frames for whatever reason then go buy Bricks Maven because I look at it I look at the person developing it I look at how they’re developing it and I go that’s on point that’s on point you know he’s in the inner circle right you know I hired him to do UI design work right so he’s a very talented person and it’s a very good product and he’s trustworthy and he checks all the boxes. Can I vet third-party products at that level as more and more and more come in? I don’t know that I personally can.

So you guys have to do it. You have to do your own vetting but these are things that you have to look for. Now could I create an official, see the thing with me is if I created an official thing then I feel like I would have to vet them all myself and I just don’t know that I have the time for that or the energy for that or anything else.

I’ve got enough stuff going on. So it’s hard for me to create like an official thing without feeling like I have to do it to that level. So I think right now I’m just letting people do their own thing and then I’ll vet the ones I can vet and you guys have to vet and make the decision on your own before you buy, basically.

3 2:02:03 Let’s see.

2 2:02:03 Is Tommy in the basement with the Bread and Water team

1 2:02:06 or is he working on Frames for Figma?

No, he has a room branched off of the penthouse up here. No, I’m just joking. Yeah, he’s working on Frames for Figma.

He’s also working on, there’s a lot of stuff that he’s working on, actually. Because the whole frame site’s being redesigned and redone. He’s working on that.

He’s helping with the, with ACSS 3. 0. He’s helping with some UI stuff on ACSS 3.

0. Yeah, yeah. The whole team, the whole team is working very hard, very hard.

And it’s going well. But it is, look, the entire thing. Just think about how many utilities there are.

Think about the complexity of automatic CSS. Now, the framework wasn’t rewritten or touched. It’s all still written in SAS, and I still manage all that.

But everything related to the plugin, everything related to every input field, everything related to the JSON files, everything related to everything about that was rewritten from scratch. That’s a lot of work. And so where we’ve gotten to on the timeline from when we started to where we’re at is a very fast pace.

I know it’s hard to wait from the outside and not really have anything to look at or see, but the progress has been tremendous up to this point. So that’s all I can really say. It’s not like it’s going, I wouldn’t say it’s going slow.

Like it’s actually going at a very fast pace. There’s just a tremendous amount to do and to manage. And to check.

How long would it take you, for example, to go check every setting in Automatic CSS? Like if you sat down and started, like how long would, and in different scenarios, by the way. It’s a lot.

So how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time, but it’s still a fucking elephant, right? Okay, we got to get out of here.

I’m just seeing if there’s any last minute stuff. 2 2:04:18

I think we’re good. 1 2:04:22

I can’t answer any questions about Etch. that all has to be very systematic approach to how that’s going to be presented. Because if I told you what it is in the wrong context or without context, it may not be well received.

So I just can’t really talk about that one. Do you know Brixie’s? I haven’t looked at it in detail.

2 2:04:51 So I don’t know.

1 2:04:52 But I love the fact, I will say this, yeah, I love the fact that people are building products in our ecosystem.

That’s a big part of having a successful product. Like we need that. I just encourage people who come into the space, guys, there’s been some scammer dude tried to build some fake ass ACSS hosting company where you can deploy ACSS sites with, I don’t know what the whole situation was.

But I basically put out a PSA, don’t fucking buy that. And so that’s annoying, and that’s unfortunate. I think we’ve created a culture though, which this is really fantastic.

When a third party design set comes out, a lot of people look at it and go, why are there utility classes everywhere? Why aren’t you using BIM? Why aren’t the cards and lists?

Why aren’t, like people are already checking and vetting. Like we have a culture of excellence. 2

2:05:50 That’s really, really good. 1

2:05:51 This other, other products don’t have really this culture of excellence. And I think like Bricks, I want Bricks to have a culture of excellence, right?

That’s why we teach the way that we teach. So another page builder comes out and Bricks users will look at it and be like, why doesn’t it have a class first workflow? Why can’t you change the HTML tags?

All this stuff that I talk about, why can’t you loop things? Why can’t you query categories? Why can’t, why can’t, why can’t, why can’t?

Like culture of excellence. It’s not just like, oh, everything is the same. Everything’s like everything else.

Everybody can do whatever they want. Like, I think that’s important. And I’m proud of the fact that the ACS community thinks like that.

2 2:06:30 ACS and WooCommerce, I don’t want to touch WooCommerce with

1 2:06:34 it with 100 foot pole.

Absolutely. It disgusts me. It’s I hate WooCommerce.

It’s so bad. It’s so bad. Oh, it’s so bad.

And so if you wanted me to integrate ACSS with WooCommerce, we asked this question a million times and people couldn’t even give answers. Like, they were like, well, we want the buttons to natively be styled. I mean, okay, we could probably do that for you.

But what else? Like, you want all the tables to have a spacing from like using spacing variables. Like, what would we have control inputs for this?

How would we even approach it? It’s a dinosaur mixed with a trash can. Like it’s just, it’s so bad.

And the code is so bad. And the styling is so illogical. I looked at it and there’s the naming conventions make zero sense.

2 2:07:36 It’s bad.

1 2:07:38 Like it’s really bad software it is number one by far because it’s the only one let’s just let’s just tell it like it is it’s there’s nothing that comes close to the integrations or the functionality but it is god-awful like the the code base everything about it is awful I just don’t want to touch it if I don’t have to.

So that’s it. Alternative to WooCommerce is Sure Cart, but it’s not there yet. You know, Adam will tell you it’s not there yet.

So, but it will be, I want it to be there. I’m behind it strongly, but it goes back to the elephant, eating the elephant, it’s a fucking elephant. It’s gigantic and it just takes a while to eat.

So we got to be patient. Okay I think that’s it for today. I’ll be back next week.

Tuesdays, Tuesdays, Tuesdays. Got to make that change in your brain and on your calendars. Tuesdays at 11am.

Really appreciate all the questions today. Like I said they were fantastic questions. Got us going in many, many, many, many, many different directions, a lot of variety in today’s questions.

I think a lot of value in the answers. And we’ll be back to do it all again next Tuesday. If you need or want your website or a website critiqued, you can find the link down below in the description, fill out the little form, hit submit, and you are officially on the list.

There’s no guarantee that it’ll be selected, but it gives you a strong possibility, especially if you think it’s like a good candidate for what we do here for the critique side of things. We need more submissions, so go submit them. Oh, I’ve got some really, really like out of left field type announcements coming, okay?

Like things I’m about to get on a call right now with somebody who you would never have thought that I was going to be on a call with and very likely to make some announcements that you would have been like, wow, that’s, that’s just out of left field. I never saw that coming because I like to keep people on their toes. Okay.

So be ready for that. I’m out. Love you guys.

Thanks for the support. Thanks for the likes. Thanks for the comments.

Thanks for the chat. Thanks for the the likes. Thanks for the comments.

Thanks for the chat. Thanks for the questions. I’ll be back.

Peace.