0:00:00
Good morning, everybody. It is 1102, just a little bit late, a couple minutes, okay. Have some kids upstairs, got to deal with them, you know what I’m saying? Marco, welcome. Paul just had a WP Tuts live and on a question, what is the advantage of ACSS over the core framework? His answer was Kevin Geary. Oh, interesting.
0:00:25
I’ll have to go, I’ll have to go check that out. Uh Lewis is here in the house, Tobias is here, is audio good? Let me know if audio is good, let me know if visuals are good. Maya is here, Tobias is here, Derek, D123, Marcel, Edward, good to see you guys, Larry, Gene, Steven, Carl. Don’t ask questions yet, I see a couple of questions in the chat already. Those will get lost, 100%. Those will get lost. So don’t ask yet. We will get to the Q&A section and we will tackle lots of questions today. I was, man, like last week WDD Live, questions absolutely on point. Like probably one of the best Q&A sessions just in terms of like the diversity of the questions, the quality of the questions, it was just all around fantastic.
0:01:17
Louis, Yasser, Tim, I got a few Rubens here, Philip, Team Kylie, welcome everybody. Welcome, welcome, welcome. Let me tell you what today’s agenda is. We have one in-depth website critique that we are going to do. We are going to look at a new insights the new I should say the new insight section on giri.co we’ll talk about what that is why it exists what’s likely to be done
0:01:47
with it going forwards there’s some technical you know considerations that I want to discuss maybe so we’ll get into that and then as soon as we’re done with that segment we will go right into Q&A we’ll spend the rest of our time on Q&A. When we get to the Q&A portion, this is your opportunity, okay? You know, people pay a lot of money for consulting calls with me. This is your chance, like, if you have a question, if you have a challenge, if you have a whatever, this is your chance to get, like, you know, guidance, answers, whatever, 100% free. So use that to your you can ask questions on sales, pricing, business, marketing, SEO, web design, all the stuff we talk
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about on WDD Live. Of course you can talk about other things as well. Even if you don’t have a question, if you just want, if you have a topic that you’re interested in, you’re like, hey talk about this for a minute, we can do that too. It’s kind of a free-for-all. So yeah, we will get to that in segment number three. All right, Team Kylie. Oh, yeah, Kevin pronounce it right? Oh good. That’s good to know. I could have gone Um, I’m yeah, could I could have thought like three ways that could have gone but I’m glad that uh, I’m glad Kylie is the correct one Are your BJJ muscles sore? Actually, I’m a week and a half in I don’t you guys can’t tell you guys can’t tell but that thumb right there is about
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twice as big as the other thumb We were doing it was a little scramble action and I went to I went to I don’t know what happened exactly but I do know that my thumb was kind of out out a little bit and it was just went straight into the ground just just straight into the ground out like that and that did not feel good so a week and a half in the comeback is a little bit delayed because I got to take a couple days off and let that let that thing rest but it’s not it’s not serious you know we’ll be back at it we’ll be back at it Ryan says hello from Buffalo hello Ryan all right
0:03:48
I think we’re I think we’re good here hit some likes on the stream let’s get this party started with some likes and we will jump right into our first our first review let’s go ahead and share a screen here. Make sure we’re sharing well. We are. Okay, we’re going to bring this up right here. Let’s get that tab in there. Perfect.
0:04:10
Okay, we’re going to start off with our no scroll test. And I think you guys can see. Yeah, I’m monitoring the stream over here. Looks good. Okay, we’re ready to dive in. So no scroll test. I’m just going to read the hero here AI voice generator and replicator preserving voices embracing memories harnessing the power of generative
0:04:35
AI to provide comfort to those you leave behind and then if I read the logo up here that says preserving voices embracing memories okay so I didn’t want to hit that so I get the concept of the site right off the bat, which is good. I don’t have to scroll around to figure out what we’re doing here. Basically, you lose a loved one and this will generate their voice,
0:05:03
maybe in like a custom message, even though they’re not here anymore. That’s kind of the gist, I guess. Oh, let me do that. Let’s go up here. I thought I did this. Let’s go to Yeah, get rid of these notifications until later. All right So we’ll talk about the copy a little bit first thing I want to hit on is the general UI and the feel of what we’re looking at so far
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It’s it’s obviously a white base website. So it’s it’s bright. It’s uh, I you know, I like this kind of floating, it’s almost like a floating images kind of feel. Which is, it’s interesting, because it kind of goes with the, I don’t know, the theme of like, they’re not here anymore, they’re floating. I don’t know, I don’t know if that’s what they were going for.
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But it feels like, you know, bright and airy, and relatively calm, so this is good. At the same time, it creates some visual interest, right? So it’s not just another boring hero that you typically see on every single website. So we were able to achieve some visual interest without going crazy and without, you know, yeah, like going overboard.
0:06:14
So I like that, I like that. We have a navigation that looks fairly clean. So we have the home, we have how it works, no drop downs here, contact, my account, pricing. So very, very clean, simple, minimalist style navigation. I’m not sure on the choice of all caps here. I don’t know if that fits the kind of light airy, same thing with the all caps here and here. I might I might want to see a
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version where we just have normal normal typography. It because the you know, I’ll always the uppercase is kind of loud. It’s like interpreted as like loud and bold right and I don’t think that’s exactly what we’re doing here. So I’d like to see a version that’s softer and more toned down in that regard. Okay, so we got the general gist. We see everything is good in terms of the no scroll test. Really what’s left to analyze here in the no scroll test is just how good is the intro copy.
0:07:27
Because as we talk about all the time, the job of this copy, other than getting you to understand where you’re at, like hey, you know where you’re at, you’re in the right place, this is the thing that you’re looking for. But the secondary job is to get you to read the rest of the website,
0:07:44
to get you to scroll down to what is below. Like if you arrive here and you start to read and you just don’t really like what you see, or you don’t understand what you see, or you’re not sure you’re in the right place, well, you’re not even gonna use the rest of the website. You’re going to do what is called bouncing. You’re going to bounce, you’re going to leave the website and then
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nothing else that has been done on this website matters. That’s why we always start with the no scroll test because if you can’t pass the no scroll test then it doesn’t really matter what else you did on the website. Does that make sense? Okay, so I’m looking here at sales copy. I’m also looking at potential for SEO, optimization, and we have to strike a balance between those two things. Now a good way to strike a balance between those two things is to use two different headlines. So we have like an accent headline
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that typically could be used for the SEO kind of optimization content, and then we have a much larger headline that is used for the marketing copy, the sales copy side of things, and that kind of kills two birds with one stone. I’m a big, big, big fan of having, you know, these little subheadings, if that’s your intended purpose,
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if you’re using it for that. Like if you’re just throwing in subheadings for, I don’t know, because you like the way they look, but they don’t really say anything. They don’t really add to the value of the visitor or SEO or any other value, then you can get rid of them. You don’t really need them. They’re just taking up space, but we’re about to see.
0:09:17
So what we need to do here is just do a little inspection and figure out what we’re doing with our headings. Okay, so we have an H1, which is AI voice generator and replicator. So that would be the SEO headline. The H1 is the most important headline on the page in terms of that. And then we have an H2 that is preserving voices,
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embracing memories. Okay. I guess there’s probably some debate about whether this should be, you know, just another paragraph. Like, do you stack an H2 under an H1 kind of thing? I don’t know. I’ll let people debate that all they want,
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but I don’t necessarily think it’s, you know, a deal breaker either way. Okay. Okay, my main concern here is that this is an AI voice generator, yes, technically speaking it is an AI voice generator and replicator. See now we’re going to have to go over here and just see what was done and what is being targeted, right? So I’m just going to say AI voice and we’re going to see all of our options under AI voice.
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So I’m going to matching terms and there you see right there, AI voice generator and 92,000 with a 93 KD. So when you see, let me get my pro, where’s my pro mouse, turn my pro mouse on, okay. When you see something like this, this basically alerts you to, there’s no chance in hell of you ranking for this.
0:10:51
Okay, just interpret this number as no, that’s not going to happen. That’s not going to happen. So, and I was already curious because, and here’s what I, this is what I was getting at. Yes, technically it’s an AI voice generator, but that’s not what we should try to rank for. Because it’s an AI voice generator for a very, very specific purpose. I would gather that 95% or more, probably way more, actually, that’s probably, yeah, that’s probably low-balling it.
0:11:23
99% maybe, I don’t know. 99% of people typing in AI voice generator and no other qualifiers is not looking for an AI voice generator for the purpose that this app solves, right? So even if you were to rank for this, it’s not really going to do you any good because most of the traffic you would get is irrelevant traffic. They’re not going to want what you’re offering, right? So that’s why SEO is not as easy as it seems
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on its face. You can’t just find a great keyword and okay that’s what we’re going to target. We’re in that general category. That’s what we’ll go for. So the next question is, what would you call this thing? And this is what makes SEO even more challenging. We’re almost in like a new realm of things. Like AI is not old. It’s not been around for a long time. It’s like we’re in this like cutting edge market.
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And if you’re in a cutting edge market, it probably means maybe people just don’t even, we don’t even know what to call this thing. And because we don’t even know what to call this thing, and because we don’t even know what to call this thing, people obviously can’t search for it by name. Right? So now it’s like, what is the strategy become now? But what I can, now I don’t know the answer to that. I would have to do a lot more SEO research to see if there’s an opening here or an avenue that we can take. But what I do know is that this is more or less a waste of time.
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Number one, because it doesn’t fit the search intent of the visitor, and number two, because it’s an impossible keyword to rank for. I mean, you’re going to need a Tesla-level website to rank for this term right here. So we would have to do much more SEO research to figure out what a potential avenue is almost at this point and again that this we get into a conversation with the client where it’s like a if we can’t find a avenue for SEO that we really like we probably shouldn’t put money there we should probably put money in other forms of advertising and marketing that would be much better than blowing money trying to SEO a site that’s really can’t even be SEO’d all that much yet.
0:13:42
Right so that’s I would this needs to have a lot of this needs more consideration right here what we’re doing with with SEO. AI speech generator for past loved ones. Okay so AI voice four. So when I add the word four, you can do it there. You can also do it in include any word and four and then hit apply. And it’s now going to say, all right, now the word four is gonna be in all of these phrases.
0:14:19
And now we can just see if, is anybody saying anything or searching for anything remotely close to what we offer. And so now you’re gonna have to wade through this because look, you’re getting for YouTube for free for videos, for music. And it’s like, all right, how deep do we, well, don’t even have to go that deep. Look at what the volume has done. Now the volume drop off right here is tremendous. Okay. Um, even in the fours, there were, there wasn’t really anything like massively relevant. Once you,
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once you put the word for in there, we lost a ton of volume. Now, some of this stuff still has traffic potential, because, but this is still not relevant to what we’re doing here. So at a glance, this does not look promising in terms of SEO, unless there’s something other than AI voice, right?
0:15:09
Now we could do AI generator, and now include the word for and see if there’s any angles in that capacity but I’m not very hopeful at this point in time because I just think this is too new of a thing it’s too new of a concept too new of a market well yeah see this you know you hey you got to be 18 plus on this stream my apologies I mean there’s this is a this is the life of an SEO. People search for some weird shit. So if you do SEO, you’re gonna run into that stuff
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from time to time. That’s all I can say. Okay, I’m not thinking SEO is the way to go for a site like this right now. I would put my dollars somewhere else. Just wanted to go down that little bit of a rabbit hole. I think it’s also very helpful in terms of, I see it a lot, it’s a common thing.
0:16:03
You know, people try to SEO a site that’s not necessarily ready for SEO, or where SEO may not be the best strategy. Let’s jump to chat and see if anybody’s, let’s see, keyword, text to speech. Yeah, I mean, there’s a couple other avenues we could go down, but if you think about the concept in general, like, we just got AI,
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we just got AI voice generation, so now this concept of AI voice generation for past loved ones just seems like a very, very new market. And when a new market is, when it’s this new, there’s just not a lot of people searching within it, right? So SEO may not be the best play. All right, Alicia’s here. Alicia says there’s plans to do marketing,
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but I don’t think SEO will be the focus. All right, excellent. Yeah, so for sure, I think, you know, all dollars just to, you know, other marketing channels, definitely a lot of potential here for probably ads, you know, TikTok ads, Facebook ads, absolutely would explore that path first. WebNestify in the house, welcome, welcome, welcome. Okay, the big all caps heading is the same as the logo tagline. Maybe they can add something different instead of using the same text.
0:17:19
Okay? By the way, and I’m highlighting some of these comments because this is a reminder. This is kind of like not just me talking. You guys are able to chime in in the chat. Tell me what you think as we go through this website. On each section, what are your thoughts? Do you agree? Do you disagree?
0:17:37
Do you like? Do you not like? Because the people who build these sites are monitoring the chat. They get my feedback, of course, but they get everybody’s feedback. So chime in. Chime in. Okay, I hope the floating people were AI-generated and not real dead people. I would gather that they are stock photos. They look to me like stock photos.
0:18:00
One thing I was going to check is are they you know a lot of people would do a background image with these all these floating images embedded in a single image highly highly highly would not recommend going that route so I wanted to see how this was done and as you can see here multiple images every image is its own image wrapped in a figure tag looks like we’ve got automatic CSS and frames on this website. You know, so I’ll just go back. I like to ask this question.
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I mean, just looking at it right here, do you know that it’s a frames website? By looking at it, I didn’t even know. I didn’t even know it was a frame until I inspected it. I didn’t know. This is not a frame, actually. This is, I guess they’ve done this custom, at least not a frame I remember building.
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OK, let’s keep going. We passed the no scroll area. We are able to actually scroll around now and see what we’ve got. Oh, actually, sorry, I’m sorry. We didn’t do this headline right here. Preserving voices, embracing memories. Harnessing the power of voice generative AI
0:19:03
to provide comfort to those you leave behind. My only, I guess, concern with the copy here, so this is not a literal headline, this is what I call like an abstract headline, which is fine. If you use an abstract headline, you absolutely must use a literal description below it. Because not everybody can imagine what you’re imagining
0:19:25
and not everybody can understand what you mean in your abstract headlines, right? So pair your abstract copy with literal copy. So we have the literal copy right here, we have the abstract copy right here. So this is all good. My concern right here would be this market. Does this market know what voice generative AI is
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or means or anything like that? I would probably go much more literal, like fifth grade literal. Like, you know, I don’t know how you would describe it in a respectful way, like basically we’re gonna hear from your dead loved ones. Okay. Now how do you describe that that’s about to happen in very basic terms,
0:20:07
but that are also, you know, the person would accept that as an idea, as a concept. But I think when you get into the using terms like we’re going to use voice generative AI, we’re going to like, it’s also not only may they not understand what it means, but it feels like robotic, right? It feels like, oh, fake. It feels like, I don’t know if that’s, I would probably avoid this, right? I would go just much more warm, soft,
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terms everybody knows, plain language, five-year-old can understand it, that kind of approach with this little lead paragraph right here. Okay, let’s go down. Here for you long after your loved ones are gone with sophisticated AI speech generation. So here’s an area where if we took this out, right?
0:21:02
And took this out, because you know people scan, right? People scan websites. And we just read this by itself, okay? So I come down here, I’m like, all right, preserving voices, embracing memories, and it just says with sophisticated AI generation. Typically I would say that your headlines need to be just readable on their own, with no other copy.
0:21:23
I shouldn’t have to read any of the surrounding copy in order to read every headline on the page. If I can just go from headline to headline to headline to headline, the scanner people will love that experience, right? And then if the headlines are impactful, it’s going to encourage them to read the rest, but they should be allowed to scan
0:21:46
without being forced to dive into the other sections. And this headline right here kind of forces you to, because it doesn’t mean anything on its own, right? So I’m forced to read all of this to figure out what this means. So I would say to maybe work that headline right there a little bit. But let’s read this big paragraph. Saying goodbye isn’t easy and the truth is we always, we don’t always get the chance to say it. We’d all do anything for one last conversation with
0:22:14
a lost loved one. Now with the innovation of generative AI for speech, nothing needs to be left unsaid. And honoring voices make it possible for your loved ones to leave behind the kind of message they’d want to be remembered for, powered by technology and compassion. If you’re navigating grief after loss, create a lasting auditory keepsake that holds their memory close even after they’re gone. So I like the general gist of it. It speaks to, notice there are call-outs to specific emotions the person might be feeling, call-outs to specific regrets they might have, various, like, remember I talk about like super abstract nebulous copy that just kind of alludes to things but never gives any
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specifics is typically bad copy. Copy that gives specific call-outs is typically much better copy. This gives those specific call-outs so this is good, the direction that this is going. I think it can be cleaned up a little bit here like lasting auditory keepsake. That’s very like academic-y sounding, right? And so immediately when you go from, if you’re trying to be like warm, compassionate, the minute you go into like cold, academic kind of vil, you’re going to lose some of the impact, I think. So, again, this is just a situation where you go in and like the approach that was taken is good, just dumb it down even more.
0:23:39
Like, I like the Lupe Fiasco song, Dumb It Down. It’s just, just dumb it down, right? Now, there’s times you don’t want to dumb things down. That’s what that song is about. But there’s times you do want to dumb things down, right? So this is a time where you just, you want to dumb it down. You don’t want any academic language. You don’t want any big words.
0:23:55
You just want warm, easy, soft, compassionate, five-year-old can read it, understand it, vibe with it. Okay. All right, so some CTA call-outs here, which is good. If we haven’t talked about this before, I don’t think we’ve talked about it in a while, but there are, you know, I guess there’s a kind of a debate on like, do we CTA every section?
0:24:18
Do we not CTA every section? And to me, it depends, right? On a homepage like this, I think it makes a lot more sense. One thing you have to understand about the visitor, and I guess it kind of relies on your strategy with the narrative on these pages as well, but if you think about a sales conversation, okay? Sometimes in a sales conversation,
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you’re having the conversation with a person, maybe going over features and benefits or answering objections or whatever. There is a point in time in those sales conversations where that person has decided to buy. And if you just keep running your mouth, it like gets in the way of them buying, right? And some salespeople are so annoying
0:25:13
that the person will literally have to be like, dude, I just want to buy it. Can you shut up? Like, I just want to buy it now. And so when you’re building a webpage, we kind of think of that as a sales conversation. That’s typically why longer pages convert better when they’re well-written because you have more things to cover, just like in a sales conversation. Like if you’re going to create a very short page, the idea is like if you got on the phone with somebody,
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would you be able to sell them in two minutes on this thing? Because that’s all the time you have. And you’re like, well, of course not. I need more than two minutes. I got to go over all the features, the benefits. I mean, we’ve got to process. I know they’re going to ask questions. They might have objections to this thing.
0:25:57
So if you tell me that, you can’t tell me that you’re going to have a super short pay to try to sell this thing. Because it’s the same concept. You got to hit all those different important areas in order to convince them to buy and convince them to take the next step. Right? So the hero is for a very specific purpose. Then we do this for a very specific purpose. Then we do this for a very specific purpose. But here’s the kicker. At any point along the way, the person might be like, that got that sold me right there I’m done I don’t need to know anything else I just want to buy. Well if you haven’t offered them a path to doing
0:26:32
that right like explore packages that’s a path to buying. Up here view our packages that’s a path to buying. We all know guys we all know oh they can scroll to the top and click the button they can scroll to the bottom and click the button they can go to the pricing page and click the thing. But the more obvious you make it, the easier it is for them and the more chance that they actually do it, right? They actually follow through. So this is why you want to provide pathways to the sale from individual sections.
0:27:05
Now you don’t have to overkill it, like it’s not in the testimonial section right here, but it, you know, here’s, and here’s one that makes sense contextually to what we’re doing here. So it’s like a process and then you can learn more about how it works. And so you’re giving people these different avenues to get to what they need easier and faster. So I think that’s good. If you don’t provide those avenues,
0:27:27
you’re gonna find less page to page navigation on your website, probably a lower conversion rate on your website. This kind of the time on site, time on page, all those things kind of go down so it does help it does help and it does work if you look at mine as an example because mine is is actually mine does a lot of different things which typically you would say don’t do that right but again it’s it depends on the strategy that you are taking so if you
0:28:00
If you look at mine, I’ve got one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. I’ve got seven CTAs in the hero section. Below that I’ve got another CTA, which is for the course. Then we go down into all of these different pathways that actually take you off of the site, right? They take you to a completely different site. Most, most cases you would look at something like this and be like that’s not the way to go.
0:28:28
Oh don’t do that. Definitely don’t do that. But again there are outlier cases. What is the actual strategy here? The strategy here is this website exists as like as an ecosystem starting point. It’s like here’s the you are now inside of an ecosystem and there are many, many different parts to this ecosystem. And I don’t particularly give a fuck which part you go to first or interact with first or buy from first. Because as soon as you connect with one part, you will connect with all the other parts.
0:29:05
So I am perfectly okay with sending you off of this site to another part of the ecosystem. If that’s the part you’re most interested in right now, I’m okay with sending you over there because you’re going to end up back here. It’s okay. I know how the flow works. I watch the analytics.
0:29:21
I know exactly how the flow works. You could buy ACSS first and then buy the inner circle and then buy frames after that and on and on. Or you could buy frames first, then buy automatic CS, then buy the inner circle, or you can buy the inner circle, then buy ACSS, then buy frames. It doesn’t matter. It works every which way. Every which way.
0:29:38
So I just say, here’s the ecosystem. Here it is, which part interests you most, right? And then let people navigate to that part. And then let people engage with that part. And then it loops them right back around every single time. So I’ve got CTAs to everywhere, every part of the ecosystem. Or you can dive into the content that’s here, that doesn’t, that’s fine with me too.
0:30:00
So that’s the strategy of this website. But again, it’s kind of an outlier strategy, but it makes perfectly logical sense. So you can’t just look at something and be like, black and white, yes, no, that’s the way to go, that’s not the way to go. You just have to talk through the strategy. What’s the actual strategy of the page?
0:30:19
The strategy of this page is obviously to get people to sign up for this app. So everything needs to be focused on the app right here. And we’re getting people to understand how it works, which obviously this is a new thing, very, very, very important. But we also want to get people straight to buying if they want to do that.
0:30:38
So view our packages, pricing up here. I want to see what the footer CTA is, upholding a heartfelt legacy for those you care about most with advanced AI generation technology. See, I think this is where this kind of a little bit of focus on SEO is kind of creeping into the copy over and over and over again. I think it could just be deleted.
0:31:00
I think just going with the standard marketing copy is the way to go here. I do want to hear, I’m going to scroll down and chat. I do want to hear from some UI designers because here we are again with uppercase text, just give me your general, if you’re a UI person, give me your general thoughts on going uppercase with all this, or if this should be normal case.
0:31:24
I’d like some feedback on that, just see what you guys think. And then we’ll take a look at some of these, maybe I wanna see the how it works page, because that’s gonna be pivotal in getting people to convert here. We’re also gonna look at this section, this little how it works section,
0:31:39
and then the how it works page. But I wanna dive into chat here for a second. Okay. Gigi, I’m kinda confused as to how this even works as a product, customer sends in audio files of loved ones and then AI uses these audio files to produce different messages that sound like the loved one. Okay, I think when we read this how it works,
0:32:02
hopefully that question will be answered. But yes, that is going to be a pivotal question that lots of people would want to know the answer to. The one design decision I would change is to make the buttons have slightly rounded corners like all other elements and images, cards. So let’s see, yeah. So if you see right here, this border radius on the edges,
0:32:24
it would, I think, be nice. Well, this one’s got a very slight border radius. That’s not a hundred percent square and in ACSS this is actually very easy to do So if we if we look at this image and just see I wonder what what our rate is first of all Is the radius on the figure or is it on the image itself? Might be on the image Outline border style let’s just do radius.
0:32:52
Let’s just search. Oh, radius, okay. Mm-hm, that was a variable. There it is. So they’re using FR card radius, which is like a frame specific radius. Now if we go down to the buttons, inspect, and it’s gonna depend on, yeah, there we go, okay. All right, so in buttons,
0:33:16
you would just literally put FR card radius on your button, on your global button styles, and they would immediately match all of your images. I do think that would perhaps be a good way to go there. Because these cards have the same FR card radius on them. These cards have the same FR card radius on them. The pricing table has the same radius. So all radiuses are equal except for buttons. So that might be something to investigate
0:33:41
as well. What if you have a sticky header with it in there? That looks like a follow-up question to something else perhaps. If you can clarify that Ryan, I will answer it. Let’s see 180, yeah Marcel. Marcel looking out for the team. 180 viewers, 66 likes. Hit that like button. Okay. Love to see Gutenberg Rob here, fantastic. I love, I don’t, Bev hasn’t been here in a while. I don’t know where Bev’s been. Part of the joy in life is also pain and loss of life.
0:34:14
We already don’t deal well with death as a society and I feel like this makes it even harder. Unrelated to design, that looks nice. Okay, and then, so this is actually, let me see, part of the joy, okay, we already don’t deal well with death and signing, I feel like this makes it even harder. Oh, okay.
0:34:31
All right, this is interesting, like you’re gonna get, what is this thing? Okay, you’re gonna get various, this, you would put this in the objection bucket, right? There’s probably gonna be a good slice of society who comes to a site like this, and they’re like, oh, I don’t know, I don’t know. So from a marketing standpoint, definitely be talking with
0:34:53
the client about, hey how are we gonna how are we going to address this? How are we going to be compassionate when it comes to that objection? But also maybe the people who came up with the product in the first place kind of had that vibe in the very beginning but then realize what this actually does for people who purchase it or are gifted with it or whatever. Maybe there’s something, maybe there’s some big benefit that people don’t immediately gather from just hearing the concept.
0:35:28
How can we explain that so that those people who might have a little bit of an ick, right, when they arrive can actually be converted? That would be a good thing to think about and discuss. All right, for me the entire concept seems strange. I lost my father two years ago. I wouldn’t want a false message from him. So there you go, another, you know,
0:35:46
again, it’s gonna be common. So doesn’t mean the concept is bad or won’t work. It just means we have to find a way to counter that objection. But obviously, you know, without just being like, nah. You know, we have to have an answer for it. All right, the main button in the header should not be pricing, maybe something like
0:36:10
get your voice or something like that. So he’s referring to this button right here. And I think in this case, well, I think what we should do is put pricing in the navigation, and then yes, I would make this button something else. So that gives you an opportunity. You still have pricing, if people do come look like,
0:36:32
hey, I just wanna know how much it costs, like they might go to pricing right here, but now you can have an opportunity to have a much more literal CTA in terms of like the thing you’re about to do, you know, like upload a file, or like whatever the first step is, we gotta get to the process and see how it works.
0:36:51
But I kind of agree there with this comment that we can do a better job with that CTA right there. All right, all right. I think an example of AI messages you can play and listen to an audio clip or similar would be nice and above the fold. Oh, this is a fantastic, this is a fantastic comment. So as you guys know, I’m a big fan of getting people to interact
0:37:15
with the website as soon as possible. The faster you can get them to interact with the website, the better. We have a concept right here that provides a obvious interaction opportunity. Hey, listen to a sample, right? Listen to a sample. And then tell the story of the sample.
0:37:33
Now you have an opportunity for not just interaction with the website, with storytelling, and we know how good storytelling is for captivating the visitor and marketing in general, and then helping them understand the concept. Why was this AI file generated? Right? By the person who generated it, what was their motivation? And so when I hear somebody else’s motivation and that seems like it might align with my motivation, now I’m much more interested. And it’s almost like that little interaction and that little story did a better job of getting the person to understand what’s going on here and why it’s valuable and why they
0:38:12
should do it than anything else on the website. That’s how powerful something as simple as that concept like that could be. So hats off to, is it Adif, Adif, Atif? So many ways we can go with these pronunciations, I never know. But fantastic comment right here. I think that that is 100% something that should be added. Right, a little player, little audio player,
0:38:37
and then read, you know, Gabriella’s story or something like that. Little link, you click it, it goes to almost like a case study thing, whole full write up, images, the whole shebang. Go 100% lifetime. Go lifetime, the channel lifetime, right, on TV if you’re in the US.
0:38:56
Go lifetime on them, right? Yeah, I think that would be fantastic. Okay, let’s go to how it works. Let’s figure out what’s actually going on here. Let me read that section, then we’ll click on the button. All right, wish you could hear your loved one tell you your favorite story of theirs one last time, or maybe you wanna be able to tell your family
0:39:12
you love them every day, even after you pass, now those heartfelt words can be shared once again, whenever you need them. We might not be able to bring the person, okay, this is more just general copy, but step one, personalized messages, step two, quality audio processing, realistic voice replication handled with care, okay?
0:39:30
All we need is a voice recording, a personalized script of the words you’d like to hear, and your trust that will always leave with respect and compassion creating your deeply meaningful messages. Okay, how it works. All right. I think I would definitely, I’d probably swap these out.
0:39:45
One is, I don’t know if, well, obviously it’s not the dead person that’s listening to the recording. So these are the people that are still alive. But this, she looks like obvious, this is like obviously like, it’s like a model for headphones. You know, it’s like selling me headphones.
0:40:09
It’s not really selling me this concept right here. So maybe somebody that’s like, looks much more real and maybe is, you know, having some sort of emotion while listening other than the, you know, model-y kind of smile. I don’t know if I vibe with this guy right here. Just me, personally, none of these three images really connect.
0:40:34
So I would, and I don’t know how other people feel about that. Everybody else can put in the chat how they feel about these particular images. I like the layout. I like the layout. It’s just the actual image selection I think could get a little bit better.
0:40:50
All right, so saying goodbye to the AI voice generation, making lifetime memories. I think by the time I click how it works, just for me, I just wanna immediately give me the steps. Just give me the steps, because I’ve kind of already read paragraphs on the homepage, especially on that section I was just on, like I just read all of this. So yeah basically get right
0:41:19
to this. That’s what I would probably recommend. I don’t think it needs just have the hero and go right into this. That’s probably the way that I would that I would prefer this to be laid out. Because if you think about it I just went to the how it works page, but really to get to the steps I got a scroll, you know quite a ways down Select your package and check out upload your audio files audio processing and creation the gift of everlasting memory Okay, upload your audio file. I want to read in this section complete the submission form of any additional information You’d like to include please ensure you’ve uploaded the correct audio files and script to be produced. I’m surprised. Okay, so
0:41:59
I I think one question people might have, there is a technical aspect to this. And you can imagine somebody in their 60s or whatever, no offense to people in their 60s, obviously, but obviously the older you get, okay, your ability to use technology declines, all right? Just is what it is. So a lot of people may wonder, is this an app?
0:42:26
Do I need an app on my phone? Is this a web app? How is the interface easy to use? Is it like, am I gonna be able to do this? If I sign up, am I gonna be able to follow the steps, right? So you might wanna include some insight into that as well. Maybe show a screenshot. Like instead of these stock photos, right?
0:42:48
This could be where we maybe show the interface or like what’s actually gonna happen on the inside. To help people get comfortable with the idea that hey, this is not a super technical process, like if you can send an email, you can do this. You know, give them a little more comfort in the technical side of things. Okay, let’s go down to explore packages.
0:43:09
Let’s just check out the buy flow and the pricing packages. See if these make sense. Keep a little piece of your loved one with you. Always get that personal reminder of the one you miss so much. Take comfort in hearing the special words again and again. Okay, up to 10 minutes of recording, handcrafted card from the CEO,
0:43:26
the QR code that serves as a tangible connection to precious memories created. I would wanna see this, you know, like show me a photo of that thing. I don’t think it’s anywhere. I haven’t seen it anywhere yet. So that definitely you can show a visual, standard AI voice processing, higher quality audio,
0:43:44
highest quality audio. Okay, up to 30 minutes, up to 60 minutes. Okay, on a key chain, okay, background music, 60 minutes of recording, highest quality, okay. Okay, okay, 89, 189, 269 Okay, we’re not really using any doesn’t appear to be you know using any price anchoring strategies or
0:44:10
Or or like get them to choose the top one by putting these two these two prices much closer together Just seems like very standard straightforward Three packages. Here’s what they cost. It does feel like quite a big jump from 89 to 189. Feels like a pretty, for something like this, I don’t know. Everybody else can let me know what they think, but kind of a big jump. Okay.
0:44:43
What I would maybe do, if you wanna think about like entry into the funnel, I mean, there’s an opportunity here, I think, for a sample, like a one minute sample, a free one minute sample, a dollar one minute sample, maybe a dollar. Because then you have their card, and then you have their end of the buy process,
0:45:02
and their reorder, if they like the one-minute sample their reorder would be very very easy at that point Do you also have the remarketing opportunities? once that happens Is a minute too long. I don’t know are we giving away the farm. I don’t know I don’t know these are conversation you have to have with the client But I would maybe consider doing something like that All right, let’s go to the buy process and just see how this works and I think we’re ready to wrap this thing up here.
0:45:44
All right, is this SureCart? I’m just going to take a wild gander. I don’t even know if I can tell by, yeah, there it is, SC. SureCart, okay, nice clean checkout page. Shout out to SureCart, I’m a big SureCart fan as well. Everything looks clean, everything looks easy, everything looks simple. I think one thing you can do here,
0:46:06
remember when I said show the photo of the handcrafted card and the yada, yada, yada? I think on this checkout right here, there’s a lot of white space over here, right here is a, like get these actual packages like maybe photographed in some way, I don’t know. Or get a designer to put something together for each package tier and then throw that visual right up in here. Otherwise I mean I think this is a
0:46:35
it’s clean, it’s simple, it’s easy, there’s there’s it doesn’t look like a process that’s going to trip anybody up. Alright so this is uh this is pretty good. Overall it’s a it’s a you know fantastic website. I think there’s some adjustments we can make a little bit to the copy, to the CTAs like we talked about, little, you know, button rounding, matching image rounding kind of stuff. Nothing major, nothing crazy. I’m trying to sum this up real quick. How it works, moving these steps more to the top, maybe showing the inside, how it works on the inside. One thing I am seeing, oh, the big one, the big one, can we get a sample audio file?
0:47:17
Can we get a story of the person behind it? Yada, yada, yada. I’m not seeing any obvious FAQs. Tax pricing, I think FAQs for sure. How it works, just wanna make sure I didn’t miss anything here. No FAQs on how it works. Contact us. I would say same thing with the contact page actually that I saw that I said earlier. I would just get
0:47:48
right to the contact and I put all this stuff right up front and center. They already selected contacts so you know having the CTA again here having a hero that doesn’t really do anything for them in terms of contacting. I’d probably get rid of that. I’d probably get rid of this. And I would, yeah, I just move that straight up to the top. Make this super easy for people to to get to. Got a little login area. Okay. Everything, everything’s good to go. Do we cross T’s dot I’s? We got all tags on these images. Yep. Okay. I mean it’s built with frames, so I can already gather that, you know, things that are supposed to be in lists are probably gonna be in lists.
0:48:32
Inspect here, yep, there’s an unordered list. LIs, everything’s super clean. Built with bricks, so all the code is gonna be nice and clean. It’s built with automatic CSS. Built with, I mean, you know, it’s a good website. We got little tweaks here and there that we can do to improve things and I think this is one of those things because it’s so new of a concept when you start getting traffic when you start getting analytics when the ads
0:48:59
start going out with you’re going to learn so much about your market that it’s easier to make these tweaks and adjustments I do want to say one thing about copywriting right in a brand new market you don’t really know how stuff is going to resonate I mean you’re writing the rules ok it’s not like there’s 80 gazillion of these companies that have been around for 40 years, right? There’s not a lot to go on maybe from the past. So we got to come up with the concepts that we think are going to resonate and then as we get traffic, we get buyers, we get right
0:49:30
people and this is why I think the one minute sample idea is even better. You have an I would do the one minute sample, automated email goes out to that person, hey, you know, this is a relatively new concept, we want to get your feedback, we want to know exactly what you think, good or bad, start a conversation with us, reply to this email kind of thing, and then have one-off conversations with those people. Collect data and insights from those people one-on-one. I know that doesn’t scale, but in the very beginning of something like this, you got to do stuff that doesn’t scale and that can give you tremendous tremendous insight that then goes immediately back
0:50:08
to the website immediately we install those insights into the copy in various places into the FAQs into our pricing whatever we need to do to maneuver right and and make these adjustments that’s what we’re going to do but if you don’t do so if you don’t get any feedback from people, because you don’t have those avenues and those pathways, then it’s going to take longer, it’s going to cost more money, you’re going to have more lost opportunity costs.
0:50:36
Okay, I think it’s well worth it to do a one minute sample, use that as an entry into a connection funnel, a relationship building funnel, get those feedback, get that insight, really good. Okay All right, let’s go to chat, let’s see Email address in the footers begging for spam. Yeah, I typically avoid those as well Missing testimonial stories. Yeah, I think for sure a, you know, it would be called like a case studies section, but we wouldn’t actually call it that, right.
0:51:19
But that’s effectively what it would be. But you could call it stories, something like that. But it’s a CPT, has a little stories template. And yeah, the more detailed stories you can tell, the better off you’re going to be. Use those stories in your marketing. Use videos. Like, I mean, it’s just endless idea after endless idea at this point, but you could have videos of people hearing the audio for the first time, right?
0:51:45
There’s so many opportunities. And then put those on the website, put those in the ads, put those, you know, wow, we could do a lot here. I think Kevin’s sampling idea is for cheap money is a great idea. Use caution accepting dollar credit card transactions, bad actors may use your site to test stolen cards that can get expensive. Okay, yep, that’s, you know, definitely something to consider. My head goes basic deluxe premium. Basic premium
0:52:15
deluxe. Ah, yeah, I wouldn’t even this is a good point. Reuben, actually. I would probably come up first of all, You know, like, what do we do with ACSS, right? Like, I don’t like gold, bronze, silver, okay? Like, everybody and their mom, obviously, using that. See, we went freelancer, it’s like, it kind of speaks to the person. I tend to avoid basic in general, though, right?
0:52:43
It’s like, here’s the basic product. Like, first of all, dog, none of my products are basic, okay, so I’m not even gonna call it that, right? That’s kind of the vibe, right? It’s like, we don’t have a basic product. We have this, this is the lower tier, right? But it ain’t basic, okay? It’s well beyond basic.
0:53:02
You wanna give the correct vibe with how you name things. I know a lot of people go basic, premium, deluxe, but to me, you know what my first thing is, is like, oh fuck, I’m buying a mattress, right? That’s always like every mattress company on earth. It’s like Deluxe, Lux, like that kind of stuff. So they’re overused terms is what I’m getting at. I would maybe go a more unique route.
0:53:26
Because it’s a unique offering, it’s a unique product, I would go a more unique route with what we’re naming the packages. So good comment there, Ruben. And when you do that, then there’s no connotations, right? So what Ruben was talking about is he has a connotation of the order that these are supposed to go in. Well, when you have unique names for your packages, there is no connotation, there is no way for somebody to potentially get confused there. All right. They should say something like
0:53:58
offer your loved ones what they can’t get. The process seems too much for someone who’s suffering, but it would be a heartfelt gift. If I received this, I would cry. Yeah, that’s what we don’t really know, right? And we’re not gonna know. Imagine I was gonna gift this to somebody and I’m like, ah, shit, how are they gonna react? I don’t know.
0:54:16
Are they gonna be the person who really loves it or are they gonna be the person who really hates it? I can’t give this as a gift if I don’t know that there’s a high percentage chance it’s going to go over really well. So you know what would make me more comfortable is lots of videos and stories. Videos of people getting it as gifts, all that stuff is going to make me much more comfortable. And so I think without those things there’s very little chance that people actually follow through getting this as a gift for somebody.
0:54:49
Which I think is going to be a big if I had to guess I mean I was probably going to be a big part of this market so you’ve got to warm people up to this we need the videos we need but again it’s new concept if this isn’t even the website not even live I mean it is right here I’m looking at it but it’s like could this this could been live for three days now they could have zero customers they could have eight customers like we just don’t have enough feedback yet we can’t get a video if there’s no people listening to the thing. So it’s going to take some time. There’s a chicken or egg kind of scenario here obviously. So that has to be considered. But
0:55:21
something that I would make a top priority. Collecting videos, collecting stories. Alright let’s see. Alright I think we’ve done enough here. Are we ready to move on to segment number two? What are we doing for time? Yeah, that’s enough time. That’s enough time. It’s been an hour. Okay.
0:55:44
I think we went, I mean, we went into the SEO area. We went into the offer area. We went into some technical stuff. I mean, we did good. We did good. Thank you for the feedback. Thank you for the ideas on that in the chat. There’s a lot of stuff in here
0:55:59
that I haven’t even been able to read yet. So I know that you know the people who build these sites always get tremendous feedback from everybody in the comments not just me. So this is good. Okay let’s go to the Insights section. We’re going to segment number two. We’re going to talk about the new section for insights on giri.co. So if you go here you should see insights now up here. Now I’ve blogged, I have insights. Now this is an idea, it’s a concept that was partly recommended and then partly like,
0:56:36
I’ve just been thinking like, can we bring it back in a way? It’s almost like a Tumblr kind of concept, right? Which I know Tumblr is a failed platform, more or less. But I like the concept of it. And if you think about how Twitter, like I was gonna use Twitter for this kind of thing, but then of course it’s like,
0:56:55
there’s no indexing on Twitter, there’s no good way to search typically, nobody’s really gonna go to your Twitter profile and then nothing is tagged, nothing is categorized, nothing’s sortable, nothing’s like, it’s just not a good platform for that. So the kind of things that I would share longer form on Twitter but that Twitter is not really the best platform for, maybe go here. And this is just a concept that I’m playing with. So it’s called
0:57:24
insights and it says right here, right, I have a lot of thoughts, ideas, notes, and insights that don’t need to be full-blown articles, right. So if you read my articles, you go to the blog and you read an article like a typical, I mean it’s it’s going to be these things are very detailed, very detailed. The page builder review articles that I’m writing for you, I mean these are 7,500 words, okay, some of them. So this is long form, this is indexed, this is SEO, this is content marketing, this is all those things, this is all the typical stuff you would see with articles. Insights is different. Insights is like, I got this thought, I got this idea, I got this concept, I got
0:58:09
this golden nugget, I got this whatever, and I don’t need to write a lot about it, but I want it, I want it kind of like indexed on the site somewhere. I want it to be searchable. I want it to be facetable. Um, and, and what I think it’s going to do from an experience, like a user experience standpoint, is it’s gonna give people the opportunity to consume a lot of soundbite style content very quickly.
0:58:35
So right now you can’t do that obviously because there’s like five things, okay? So this is gonna grow. But think about this, you come down and you’re just like, all right, it’s just like ideas, like how to set default section padding safely without classes. Components of partially sync patterns
0:58:51
will revive utility classes and page builders. Give every image a wrapper. Stop charging less than $3,500 for a website. It’s almost like little soundbite things. And if I click on this, for example, stop charging less than 30, look at that. Look how short that is. Look how consumable that is.
0:59:08
Like, it gets you the idea. It gets you the concept. It gets you a belief of mine. It gets you a lot of things. It gets to you in like seconds or maybe a minute or whatever. And then you can go back, right? And then you can like, oh, what’s this one? Okay, this double selector technique is a sneaky way to increase specificity and avoid important. Look how short this is. This is not like this long diatribe of like, let me tell you every piece of context that you need to know. No, no, I’m just going to give you the facts. I’m just going to give you the
0:59:37
facts. And you get them and then you go back and then you’re up here You know like give every image a wrapper. Why would I want to do that? Look how short that is? I just read it off a little nugget little nugget and then I go back and what I feel like is if this has 300 things in it, for example as it grows and they’re all like little sound bite easily digestible One, it’s good for people to bookmark maybe or to immediately implement. But just from an entertainment perspective, like an edutainment perspective,
1:00:06
I could see somebody just deep inside this little archive for like an hour, just tidbit after tidbit after tidbit after tidbit, which they would not do with an article. Like you read one of my articles, you gotta take a break, you need a cup of coffee, you need like, you gotta, it’s a task, it’s a chore, right? This is not a chore, this is easy.
1:00:30
And so it’s just a different way to put content out into the world. And what a lot of people have told me is there’s so many like little insights and golden nugget kind of things in your videos, but I can never find them again. Once I’m done watching that video, that shit’s gone. Like I don’t know how to get back to it, they’re not time stamped, because it’s just a little thing. It’s a little thing you said. So what if there was an archive of them? So one thing I want you guys to maybe start doing, because I don’t even know half the
1:01:02
time. I don’t even know half the time. Somebody be like, this thing you said at this time stamp was like, bang. My brain clicked. I was just rattling stuff off as I went. I don’t even know. So if you guys can start tagging timestamps perhaps. Be like, maybe hashtag like insight,
1:01:22
hashtag golden nuggets, something like that, I don’t know. Then I can start collecting those, writing a little bit of a thing about it, maybe one, two paragraphs, publish, bang, it goes in here. And then this is gonna get a search facet on it, this is gonna get categories on it. So if you’re like, I want all the CSS insights, okay? Hit CSS, insight, insight, insight, insight, insight.
1:01:42
Just a whole list of them, right? You’re like, no, I want the copywriting insights. Bang, whole list of copywriting insights. Super digestible, super quick, super easy to bookmark, whatever you need to do, super easy to share. Okay, does this make sense? Okay, Yadira says, I like it. D123 gives me the thumbs up here.
1:02:03
Yep, filterable, searchable, absolutely. Right now it wouldn’t make sense because there’s nothing to search, nothing to facet, but it will get searchable, it will get faceted. Yeah, like Lewis said, we’re not all on Twitter, exactly. So it’s like, yeah. Okay, what’s, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I get it. Look guys, I’m always, I don’t know that I’m ever gonna call it X. I just, I can’t, I don’t, it’s not that I’m like opposed to it, I just, it’s just Twitter in my mind.
1:02:38
It’s locked in, okay. It’s hard. Plus, I can’t be like I X’d it. Like I tweeted it, makes sense, but I X’d it. I don’t even know the damn lingo. I just, it’s like mental stamina, it’s just easier to call it Twitter. I don’t have the mental energy to figure out
1:02:59
what the lingo is gonna be to make it X. I need a shot of tequila after a KG article. It’s actually better to take the shot of tequila before the article. I take two shots before I write the article, so that’s the problem with half of them. Okay. Let’s see, you’re not 60 plus, are you?
1:03:17
I mean, when it comes to X and X, I feel 60 plus. I am absolutely clutching every pearl I have. This is not a situation where Kevin is gonna say X. Okay, TOC may be on that page. Yep, we could do that as well. Are you interested in any engagement for these insights? If so, then comments may be something to consider. I think so, I think so.
1:03:43
I’ve definitely considered. In order to do that, what I need, because I’m already having some issues with the main, you know, like WordPress comments, like everything. It’s like they implemented it 75 years ago and haven’t updated it since, and it’s just not a great experience. So I think I would need to put something
1:04:00
like discuss on here or, why don’t you guys tell me? Does anybody, what is the leading like comment, third party comment platform for WordPress right now? What is the best way to go? I don’t even know. I don’t even know. Give me your recommendations if you know of a good system. I want people to get notifications
1:04:20
that somebody replied to them, that kind of thing. Way easier to moderate. Gotta be able to ban the anonymous trolls, that kind of stuff, you know? Let me know. All right, we’re about to go into, yeah, RSS feed. This will also be probably emailed out as a weekly digest if you’re subscribed, so I’m gonna have
1:04:38
a little subscribe form. Like, you can just subscribe to Insights. If you don’t wanna get anything else, I assume that’s fine. You can just subscribe to Insights, and then you’ll get a weekly feed of all the, or a monthly feed of the, I don’t even know yet. I don’t even know yet.
1:04:52
Like you see here, these two are published on the same day. It’s like for me, it’s so nice to be like, oh, I want to publish this little insight. I don’t want to write a whole article about it. I don’t want to make a whole video about it. I just want to publish this little insight right here. And I can just run over, it’s all CPT driven, right? So new, it’s in here somewhere.
1:05:14
Insight, so I can just hit new insight, bang, couple paragraphs, publish, good to go. Love it. To me, it just feels good to be able to do that. All right, Groot says it’s discussed still. Circle is a third-party platform though, it doesn’t have a comments section for WordPress. See, I don’t, like Discord, Mass,
1:05:35
these are all third-party services, right? Platforms, these aren’t for comments in WordPress. I’m talking about literally right here, right? Let’s have the conversation on the post, right? What’s the best third-party solution in 2024 for that? It should be one insight a day, that way we know every day there’s a new one. See, I mean, I understand, that’s a great, it’s a great idea, Andre, but you’re fucking
1:06:09
signing me up, man. You know how many responsibilities I have right now? I just, that’s a commitment I should be able to make. Maybe one day I will make it. I just don’t know if I can come out of the gate with that, you know? It’s tough, it’s tough, it’s tough balancing all this stuff. I will say, you know, like I just, I was going to say, I felt like someone juggling and Cirque de Soleil, because Cirque de Soleil was on my mind because I just went to Cirque de Soleil
1:06:40
over the weekend. Is it Cirque de Soleil, Cirque du Soleil? I don’t really know. But what I will say is those motherfuckers, they know how to get money out of people baby. Like if you want to know if you want to study like borderline Just robbery. It’s almost like I’m glad they were all wearing masks. Honestly I’m glad the whole show everybody was in a mask It made perfect sense to me because they got they got my wallet. They got my half my bank again
1:07:09
They got everything they got everything. So Have y’all been to this? Have y’all have y’all been to this Cirque de Soleil thing? Oh, my gosh. Family of five, take a family of five to Cirque de Soleil. Oh, my gosh. I did like get on a call with the banker ahead of time. I he was like, what? Why are you moving this much? I don’t I don’t know. I didn’t know I was my wife said we’re going to Cirque de Soleil. I don’t what’s going on. So yeah, it was it’s tough. It’s tough. You got to study them.
1:07:40
You got because by the way, people are lining up to get robbed, just lining up to get robbed. It’s a yeah, it’s an experience. Okay. Schedule them. Yeah, I could I could schedule them for sure. Yeah, you need 500 minimum for. Yeah, that’s for like two people, dog. That ain’t a family of five, my guy. That’s not a family of five. Oh, boy. Wow. I wish I could have got in for 500.
1:08:12
That would have been nice. OK. Yeah, I got there. I was like, damn, I should be, my seat should be on the stage for this kind of money. Just put me right on the edge right there. Man, oh, okay. I still got a little PTSD from it.
1:08:32
All right, we need to move on to Q&A. We’re opening the Q&A now. So yeah, this section is going to grow. It’s going to grow. But let’s go on to Q&A. All questions need to have a capital Q before your question or the word question in all caps or hashtag Q, whatever you want to do to make it obvious that it’s a question that you want to answer it on the stream and not You know banter with with somebody else in the chat
1:08:56
Just as a reminder you can you can ask questions about anything could be pricing sales SEO Web development web design. How do I do XYZ? Automatic CSS frames. I mean, there’s no there’s just general topics You want to hear about Gutenberg Matt Mullen wig like what whatever you want to talk about. It’s free game. I do want to pull up a little dev site real quick for any of those related questions. And you never know what you’re going to get when you pull up a dev site from my local because I don’t know what branch we’re on and automatic CSS. What version does this say? 2.8 VARs. Okay. Okay, some sort of random dev branch.
1:09:39
Okay, let’s get to questions. What’s your view? I don’t know what, something falling off the deck, just jumped, it just, like, literally just committed suicide. I didn’t even touch anything. Question, what is your view on showing recent work versus an extensive portfolio of your sites pros and cons. Your digital gravy site has only three sites. Yeah. Um,
1:10:06
I think it’s like you show the latest, I don’t, you know, I’ve scaled down agency work tremendously, uh, because all resources have gone to ACSS frames. You know, I’m doing a little bit of client work here and there. And honestly, every minute that I spend on it, I’m like, I’m losing money. It doesn’t matter how much I charge, I’m losing money over the time I could be spending on other stuff.
1:10:35
And I just like, I’m trying to, literally trying to scale it all out if possible. So, we have projects, like plenty of projects we could put. I don’t have time to write up write-ups about them, nor do I care at this point. But for you, I would say, you need a steady stream of, you don’t show every project, right? You don’t show every project,
1:10:59
you don’t do a write-up for every project. But when you get a project, every month, you should have a goal to publish one write-up, one little case study of a latest project, and you’re wanting to talk about the process, you’re wanting to talk about some unique challenges that you solve for the client and yada yada yada And so I think that’s that’s good enough
1:11:18
You don’t I think when people try to document every project that they do it’s like yes So the part-time job in itself and it’s not necessary. It’s not necessary You need enough there that people can get the gist Okay, and like I was talking about a minute ago as people go through one thing after another, they’re getting closer and closer to the decision to buy or to contact or to do whatever the call to action says to do and so you just need enough to get them to that conclusion. You don’t need everything, you just need enough. So I you know I wouldn’t spend too much time on it but every month get in the habit of here’s another one. For a customer who has a website built from someone you know, how much would you charge for a site audit?
1:12:07
It’s a Squarespace site and they want digital marketing, but the site is poor. For a customer who has a website built from someone you know, okay. So like a friend of yours built the website and are you saying that you guys mutually know? Like if you shit all over this website, they’re going to be like, Hey, hey, AT said, AT said, you don’t know what the fuck you’re doing. You know, is it that kind of situation? Is that what you’re worried about? Or are you worried about charging the money?
1:12:38
Because it’s like, not only am I doing that, but you’re going to pay me to do that. Is that making you feel uncomfortable? I feel like I need a little extra context here as to what’s going on. AT says, yes, yes. Okay. I think, I mean, without knowing the people, without knowing the actual dynamic, I think the best solution is to make it as professional as possible. You pay what everybody else pays.
1:13:08
I’m going to give you the same analysis I give everybody else who pays this price. And it’s not, this is not a personal thing. This is a business thing, right? And so we got to all keep it that way. I just got I got paid to spit facts I’m spitting facts. That’s it. Okay, it’s not anything about anybody That’s how I treat my streams. It’s how I treat my streams. I Don’t know what else to tell people, you know, this is what I’m here to do. That’s the direction I would take it. I don’t want to sound
1:13:43
like I’m bad mouthing the person. But yeah, yeah, you don’t. I get I mean, people are gonna take it how they’re gonna take it. That’s, that’s the reality of doing this kind of stuff. So all you can do is just say, Look, this is I treat everybody the same. Business is business. I get paid to spit facts, I spit facts, that’s it. Okay, so that’s the, I think that’s the only escape route, right? Cuz now you get into discounts, it’s like favorability things, and then it’s like, I don’t know, now it’s like you’re a friend now,
1:14:19
that’s why you gave me a discount, so maybe you’re telling me like a, I don’t know, I don’t know, it just creates a bunch of confusion, potential misinterpretation. It’s like, hey, just pay what everybody pays. I’ll tell you what I tell everybody, case closed. I think that’s the best, that’s the only way to go, I think. Are we gonna see the continuation of the events, oh, it’s covered up, of the event series
1:14:42
in the inner circle, specifically addressing the challenge of recurring events with a robust solution? We are gonna see the continuation of that, but I’ll tell you man people some of these feature requests are they’re a little outlandish you know it’s like the concept of it was let’s build a basic event system that you can install on a lot of websites so you don’t need a third-party event system that covers a you know a lot of the basic basis I’ll tell you right now the recurring events
1:15:08
thing is not a basic feature especially in WordPress there’s a lot of complication a lot of technical stuff and so I’m not going to I’m not in the business of building an event management plugin for everybody, right? That wasn’t the point of the training. So anything that’s too technical, it’s gonna take too much time, too many hurdles to overcome. That’s the point at which you literally
1:15:30
buy an event management system. That’s what they’re for. The point of the training was the event management systems, the third-party event management systems are dramatic overkill for a lot of use cases. So what we’re going to build is something that fits that little gap where it’s like we don’t need all the advanced stuff.
1:15:48
We need a basic event management system and it does the basics, but the minute you start to need crazy stuff, then you literally should just buy the event management system. Could you demonstrate the configuration of ACF relationships linked to a custom post type, and explain how conditional logic functions within that setup. Could you demonstrate the configuration of ACF relationships linked to a custom post type? The conditional logic is more involved.
1:16:22
If you’re going to do relationships like that with a query loop and ACF in bricks, in bricks. Let’s clarify that in bricks. Once you do a relation bidirectional relationship in a loop and bricks you lose all of your loop controls which is a huge downside and it’s something I’ve been harping on for a very long time now and it’s something that after they come out with components I think they go right to loops. There’s so much to improve even though loops are better than almost any other, almost any other builder. There are builders with better loops,
1:16:54
but almost any other builder. Certainly better than all the mainstream builders, okay? They need to go right to loops. There’s a lot that can be improved on the loop situation. I hope they go there right after components, because they got the class manager thing out the door. That was one thing I wanted to see. So I could show you, if anybody else votes for it,
1:17:13
if anybody else is like, hey, how do you do relationships in ACF, then I’ll do it right now. But I have done it like four or five times in videos. So there could be a bunch of people that are like, I don’t wanna see that again. Okay, I’ve seen it, I know how to do it. Let’s not spend time on that. So I’ll leave this up to chat.
1:17:29
If you want to see the ACF relationships thing, we’ll do it. If not, we won’t. I’ll let some people chime in. Let’s see, I’ve been watching many videos by the website Architect. How about you? Just curious. I saw that video you posted in, I think it was the ACSS group. And I watched that video.
1:17:53
I’d never heard about that channel before. I agreed with everything in that video. So I guess it seems like a really good channel, but I don’t think I’m subscribed to it. And I had not seen it before. How to do the hero section of Apple TV 4K page. I mean, the video effect of a video background turns into a video inside a TV when you scroll.
1:18:17
Apple TV 4k All right, so that’s a video background. I mean you can inspect these things and somewhat start to figure it out It’s easy to go small to large. Actually, shout out to the admin bar, because he published a video recently where he showed you to go small to large using a mask. So it’s like an animated mask that gives the effect. But this is actually the,
1:19:04
you could probably do it in the opposite actually. Actually, I don’t know with a mask, I might present some complications. That looks like it’s just scaling the object. So, you know, the GSAP library, you could probably do this with motion.page fairly easily. But the thing is, is like, I am not a, I’m not a huge animation person.
1:19:24
I actually don’t like this. This actually violates one of the number one rules of animating websites and user experience, which is do not hijack the scroll bar or the scroll functionality. And this is a hijack because when I try to scroll down the page, I’m not allowed to. I’m forced to go through this cute animation before I’m allowed to get to the rest of the content. That is, see this effect right here, does not hijack the scroll. It’s based on the scroll, but it doesn’t hijack the scroll.
1:20:07
So that animation is fine. This animation is bad UX. And some people will leave immediately when this starts happening. Some people get confused by it. Like my mom would be confused. She’d be like, what the fuck’s going on? Like, I don’t, and then she’s like,
1:20:22
instead of actually interacting with the sales copy, she’s wondering why the page doesn’t work, right? Why doesn’t it scroll the way it’s supposed to scroll? Like, it’s just bad UX. Don’t hijack people’s ability to scroll the page. So I just avoid that kind of stuff. Also, I don’t think clients pay enough for this shit. Apple is a multi-billion dollar company.
1:20:44
They can do whatever they want. Their internal teams can work on this shit all day long. Sue down the street with the nail salon, alright, she can’t afford this. If you’re doing this kind of stuff for those kind of sites, you are blowing money. Blowing money. Like, it’s just, you know, it’s not, what is it going to do? Is it going to sell more nail memberships or whatever the hell she’s trying to sell? No.
1:21:13
No, I still haven’t seen an A B. Oh, I added a bunch of fancy scroll animations. Oh, conversion rate went through the roof. Never seen it, never heard it. I’ve seen it go down. I’ve seen it go down. I haven’t seen dramatic improvements. So why?
1:21:30
Why are we doing it? Why? You got it. Before I convince my client to spend money for me to do it, you got to show me some numbers. And I have not seen the numbers yet. So I just don’t want anything to do with it. I’ll do this kind of stuff right here but that’s about the extent of it. Like this, God you can’t pay me enough do this this stuff for a normal client. They better get out their checkbook dog. They want this better get out the checkbook. Pop a zero on the end of that and we’ll talk.
1:22:03
All right yeah now you’re hijacking scroll again right there. Look Apple can get away with this stuff. Apple can do this stuff. You and by the way Apple in terms of UX. Remember what I said earlier when I did my own site about CTAs going everywhere normally this would be a bad thing to do but there’s outlying brand. Okay so and it’s important to understand this. What Apple can do and what Apple can get away with doesn’t translate to you. Okay like just because Apple did it doesn’t mean you can do it. People come to Apple.com
1:22:44
for this kind of experience. They want it, they expect it, they’re in the mindset for it, okay. That doesn’t mean we can take what they do and apply it to the entire general population, okay. It’s important for websites to not do stuff like this in normal everyday life. So this is an outlier brand. I would I would tend to avoid most of what’s going on there. GSAP wins awards not sure how well it works with how they got to improve this pop-up thing. GSAP wins awards not sure how well it works with conversions I think you can use some cool animations but should be subtle yeah subtle animations are fine don’t hijack the scroll bar Let’s see.
1:23:34
How to display the header or footer on certain pages only in WordPress. In WordPress or in Bricks. In Bricks, typically you have a header and a footer and then you might have let’s say you have a logged in area. it’s not a different header situation. It’s showing or hiding items in the header, typically. So we have to kind of get that clear, because I’ve seen people over-engineer it, where it’s like, here’s a header for my logged out people,
1:24:04
and here’s a header that looks exactly the same, it just has some different things inside it for my logged in people. Well, that’s actually not, it doesn’t need to be two different headers. You just need one header, and you need conditions on the things inside the header based on their logged in logged out status Now you’re managing one header and you’re managing multiple items with conditions in that one header
1:24:36
Then the third option typically is I just don’t want a header so maybe we get into like a PPC landing page type situation we get into a Any other conversion page, a login page, a manual login page, whatever, I don’t know. Well you just want to hide the header and footer. Well that’s very easy to do in Bricks. So we’ll go to this page, really any page, go up to settings, go to page settings, go to general, and go bang bang and hit save. Disable header, disable footer, now they’re gone and this page doesn’t have a header footer. So that’s the easiest way to hide.
1:25:16
So if you have a one, my goal with every website is like I want one header to manage, I want one footer to manage. And then I have a footer CTA in my footer template that shows up on every page automatically. But what I do is I create a toggle to show or hide that footer CTA. And I’ve shown how to do that multiple times on a page by page basis. Because you can’t come up here and be like hide footer CTA, because that’s not a thing. So we need a manual toggle for that.
1:25:45
But that’s kind of how I approach it. I don’t want to, I just, if I can avoid it, I don’t want multiple headers to manage, I don’t want multiple footers to manage. I want to use conditions within a header and conditions within a footer, but I don’t want multiple versions of it. Yeah, there’s the insight on how to hide a footer CTA.
1:26:03
Put that in the comments David instead of the chat because the chat I don’t get, there’s no, once the chat’s done, it’s done. There’s no coming back to the chat really. So if you can drop that on the actual comments for this video, that would be super helpful. How would partially synced patterns be implemented on frames, would that interfere
1:26:23
with the Bricks components implementation? Well, frames is not in Gutenberg, so it’s only for Bricks. It’ll use the Bricks native components functionality when that comes out. As of now, that’s the plan. Like I got to play with it and experience it to see if there’s any potential downsides. But my goal is like when we create a card,
1:26:56
that that card is not just bimmed, but it’s also componentized. So the minute you add it, it’s already set up as a component. All that work is already done for you. All the fields are already mapped. Then if you want to add something, you can. If you want to change something, you can.
1:27:12
But it’s 100% locked in for scalability and maintainability. Whereas BIM only gives you global control over the styling, the components functionality will give you global control over literally everything. But here’s like one situation where I’m thinking, right? It’s like, and this is, you know, where does the partial syncing extend to? If you make a component
1:27:33
and you want that component to be a loop, well in some cases I want the card to be a loop, in some cases I want the card to not be a loop. Is that part of the partial part of partially synced patterns? Can I make it a loop in some areas and not a loop in other areas? Like these are the things we have to look at. What if it happens that it can only be a loop or not a loop. Oh gosh.
1:28:03
Well, we’re gonna have to do some brainstorming because that causes some complication. So until I see the exact implementation, it’s really hard to say definitively how things are gonna work. But yeah, I gotta get a copy of it. I’m new to BRICS and took Dave Foy’s course. Gosh, this thing covers this every single time okay I’m new to bricks and
1:28:29
today voice course and I’m currently working through PB 101 I saw something somewhere about auto BEM but can’t remember where is that a feature of bricks or ACSS it’s a feature of ACSS I’m going to do a dedicated auto BEM video on the ACSS channel there’s a lot of confusion around Auto BIM. I understand where the confusion comes from. Auto BIM does a very specific thing. I know people want it to do more things. We are looking into how to get it to do more things. When we did the initial version we wanted it to do more things. It does specific things because there was there’s just not a great solution to do more things the way people want it to do.
1:29:14
Um, but I think I, I just sent Christophe this morning, an idea that I had that was like, well, if maybe if we do it this way, maybe with a little bit of, hopefully it doesn’t say take certain days, so lay money to make it happen. Uh, but maybe if we do it this way, it’ll, it’ll work the way people expect it to go beyond auto-bimming to do a you know mass bimming really I guess you would call it. But it comes down to the way the auto-bim feature I mean I could just show you on here just insert a frame. It’d be a situation like this profile section golf I got to turn on the modal we do not have the modal on
1:30:06
if you ever get these errors I know some people get these errors they’re like oh the frame but it’s just it is using a component that you have turned off so if we go into ACSS and we go into frames see all these are off you can actually I I’ll double check with Wajih but I asked him about this you can actually turn all these on it’s not going to output any code unless you actually use the component on a page so you you there should be no benefit to having them off you just keep them on so let’s save that and refresh and then i don’t know if it imported the images so now the modal is not broken but the images aren’t here let’s go back and do yeah we got to import images
1:30:46
I believe they fixed this so that it remembers your setting. There we go. Okay. So now if we look at this, intro profile. Okay. Here’s what people want to have happen. And I understand why they want this to happen. They want to go to profile section golf and hit BIM.
1:31:09
And they want to be able to rename all these classes, not just rename them, but delete and copy styles to the new version, right? Okay, we have to think about how this logic is supposed to work, because this is its own thing, right there, profile section golf. It has, there’s no profile section golf double underscore intro or any of that, there isn’t anything.
1:31:36
If you look under here, there’s a block and a block these are their own things there in BIM these are their own blocks intro alpha has nothing to do with profile section golf nothing intro alpha can be used anywhere in any section doesn’t have anything to do with profile section golf now profile grid golf because it shares the name golf You would think well that belongs to profile section. No, it doesn’t it actually does not frames is a modular system, which means profile grid golf can actually live
1:32:16
Anywhere you want it to live in any section once again, just like this intro just like this intro, right? So this is not a child of profile section golf. It is a parent in itself, in its own right, it is a parent. Now, if we open profile grid golf, these things are all children. They can only live in profile grid golf. They cannot live anywhere else, okay? So what AutoBIM does is AutoBIM says,
1:32:48
if you have a situation where all these elements have to live with this item, we can auto-bim it for you, okay? Now, if it is a, oh, actually list item, I’m sorry. So, grid golf is actually completely different. In most frames, there is a card that is also its own block that could be used anywhere. Not even, doesn’t even have to live with that grid.
1:33:11
But in this case, because of what’s required to make these things work this way, these are literal children. So auto-bimming works a little bit differently in this section than it would in the others. But people want, here’s what they want, they want to be able to hit it here and it just magically figures out what is a child element, what is a block element, and then restructures how it’s going to auto-name things based on those identifications. But the problem is there’s no way to identify.
1:33:40
There’s no way. All AutoVim knows is these things have different classes than the parent block. So it must not be associated, which is the correct identification. These things are not associated with this parent. So it doesn’t give you the options to delete and rename or anything else, right? It just sees them all as unique children. And so we can’t just rename everything from this, what amounts to like a great grandparent, right? We, AutoBIM has to have a way to identify what is a block and then what are element children of that block.
1:34:18
So that’s the limitation right now. Now again, I sent Chris off a message this morning and I’ll, don’t worry, I’m gonna do a whole video on autobem. It’s gonna go step by step on how it works, when to use it, when to not use it. But I also sent a message to Christoph saying, hey, hey, hey, maybe, maybe if we do it like this, we can actually get it to work the way people want, safely. Because the other thing you have to remember about this is,
1:34:41
if you can just destroy the frame, that’s gonna cause problems in its own right. So we want it to be safe. Also, because of how Bricks works, we cannot just rename classes. Because you won’t ever be able to get a fresh copy of the frame from the library, because classes in Bricks, the styling, is actually assigned to a unique ID of the class.
1:35:05
That’s what allows you to rename classes safely in Bricks. But you want to be able to do more than renaming. You want an actual fresh copy. Well, if you want a fresh copy, you can’t rename. You’ve got to create new and delete old. Until Brics gives us a remapping feature or like a you know generate unique ID or whatever I don’t know. That needs to be part of the class manager by the way up here. So I should be able to select here’s FR header alpha
1:35:31
bang bang bang. Select those and and literally instead of rename it should say like remap or I don’t know what the name it but what it effectively has to do is create a brand new ID class and then assign the style to that instead and let me rename the class at the exact same time. That’s actually what Auto BIM does but you can only use it in certain situations. It’s not as easy as it sounds is what I’m trying to communicate. We’ve put a lot of thought into it. We’ve done a lot of testing. If we could give it to you the way you want it right now,
1:36:10
we would have already done it. I promise you. We’re not just like, no, no, we just don’t want to do it. It’s not, that’s not the situation. We would give it to you if we could figure out a safe way to mass handle it. And we’re still looking, we haven’t given up. We haven’t given up.
1:36:27
But here’s the thing. If we were still searching and didn’t give you anything, that would suck too. You know? We gave you the tool that does what it’s actually designed to do. Now it’s a matter of can we get it to do more things? That’s where we’re at. We’re still trying. Let’s see.
1:36:50
I will be that guy. When ACS has 3.0, so hype to see the jump from.1 to 3.0. Yeah, tremendous, tremendous jump. I saw a screenshot the other day of like of 1.0 or one of the early things. I was just like, I just chuckled a little bit. Yeah, 3.0 is like, I’m super, super excited about it. It’s gonna solve so many problems and challenges
1:37:16
that people have had and that you would have with any framework, right? But I can’t get I can’t I just can’t. It’s one of those situations where I mean, if you saw I mean, I just spent the whole day yesterday. Let me see if I can get in the right branch. Because I can give a sneak peek of like something I did yesterday and then talk a little bit about what was required. And then you just don’t even realize, and this is part of that jump from 1.0 to 3.0,
1:37:47
how massive the framework actually is and all the automatic parts of it. How much logic is involved, how much math is involved. Now imagine taking all that and rewriting it from scratch in record time. Like, that’s what we’ve done, effectively. Now, not rewriting the whole framework, but how the dashboard interacts with that framework,
1:38:13
every part of, I don’t think any part of the existing code base for the actual plugin and dashboard side of things was retained. It’s a complete rewrite And because it’s a completely different experience Okay, so let’s go to I got to go into here All right, I just got us I got to select my I got to select a branch One second. Let me figure out
1:38:36
What branch we want to be in probably this one? Let me refresh. Let me refresh this builder here. Let’s see 2.8 vars. That might have the same branch name uh v 2 point. I’m on a different screen you’re not supposed to see what I can see right now. So if you’re like I can’t see it you’re not supposed to see it right now. Let’s just go to, yeah, this looks right. The version number probably hasn’t been updated, but this looks right.
1:39:18
This is not 3.0, that’s not what you’re seeing. This is 2.8, so 2.8 is about to come out. Let me go to palette, yeah, this is correct. This is correct. Okay, this was actually a feature for, let me get Ecamm back up so I can see our, yeah, we’re sharing the correct things. Okay.
1:39:38
This is a feature that was planned for 3.0, but then I started looking at it more and I was like, I can’t just put this in 3.0, because my goal with 3.0 is that the framework is solidified. We’re not really doing anything with the framework in 3.0. Everything about 3.0 is workflow, dashboard, all that stuff, okay? Just the whole experience of ACSS, that’s what’s new in 3.0.
1:40:05
So there’s a couple new additions like transparencies. In 3.0, I want you to be able to go into the palette area, because right now you are forced to load all transparencies sets for every color that you have on. So like primaries turned off, so now the transparencies obviously will be loaded like that’s gone Okay, but the minute you turn on action for example You have to load all transparencies. That’s main transparencies So action trans 10 through 90 action light trans 10 through 90 action dark trans 10 through 90 action ultra dark trans 10 through 90
1:40:45
If there’s classes associated with those transparencies, like backgrounds and overlays, all those classes are generated. And there was no way to be like, I don’t use these for this color. Well now, we wanted there to be in 3.0, but it’s too much of a, I literally had to go refactor how the color system works
1:41:08
in order to do this. And so I spent like 48 straight hours doing that, blitzing through it to get to this point where you can literally come in and say, hey, for action, I want main transparencies, I don’t want light, dark, or ultra dark. I just want the main ones. Then you hit save and you’re good to go.
1:41:27
So now, not only will you just have main transparencies, but any background classes, any overlay classes associated with those, not generated anymore. So more efficiency in the framework altogether. The other thing I went to do is I turned everything off. So I went through and I was like, I’m literally going to turn every option off
1:41:50
and I’m gonna look at the generated style sheet. And of course you get the variable library, you still have the variable library generated because these just turn off classes basically. But literally the generated style sheet for both Brics and the main ACSS framework is like minuscule, almost non-existent. So literally you can make the framework as small as you want it to be. And I added some other toggles in here as well for some of the stuff that used to be
1:42:18
loaded by default. It’s all going to be on by default, but you can turn it off. So it’s not gonna break anything. Like when you upgrade, obviously, everything has to be backwards compatible. So something like accessibility classes. Like I went as far as clickable parent, focus parent. Okay, guys, these are like, I don’t know,
1:42:41
one, probably not even a K of CSS, right? But if you wanna turn it off, you can turn it off. So like clickable parent, focus parent, all that stuff, you can turn it off now. You used to not be able to turn that off because I was like, it’s not even like, what are we talking about, a couple bytes? But now you can turn it off.
1:43:02
I mean, if you want to turn it off, you can turn it off. So a couple things like that. But yeah, now the transparencies thing, that was the big thing, right? Being able to control, see, we don’t even have logic for it right now. Like Mateo is literally building logic for like, hey if you turn off, because we couldn’t do this before.
1:43:22
So this accordion doesn’t even know that it’s supposed to not be there. Like dog, you got nobody inside you. Why are you here? You can go back to the back room now. It doesn’t know that it’s supposed to, because we didn’t need this logic before. These are the kind of things that you run into. Now imagine rebuilding the entire thing from scratch, all with new logic and all the stuff that happens automatically, all the stuff that happens based on math, and there’s a
1:43:45
whole wrinkle, there’s a whole wrinkle to 3.0 that nobody’s even going to expect would be the case. And you’d be like, damn, you did that too? You did that too? On top of rebuilding everything, you did that too? That’s what you’re going to see in 3.0. So I’m super excited about it, but it’s a massive, massive undertaking.
1:44:08
And I’m still doing stuff in 2.8 and maybe even 2.9 that have to be done framework-wise for 3.0. But it’s all being done in parallel, so nothing is really delaying 3.0, other than it’s just a huge undertaking. But there’s multiple people working on it, working as fast as we possibly can. The progress has been phenomenal.
1:44:32
We have a working prototype. It’s just, it’s not ready for anybody to see yet. But it should not be long. I would say beta group, I’m hoping beta group within the next two weeks. And I don’t think it’s gonna be super long after that, unless there’s some sort of catastrophic issue that we haven’t identified yet.
1:44:51
I think it’s gonna be fine beta group Hopefully less than two weeks and then not too long after that Okay So you haven’t let the team out of the basement yet then now just to pee no just to be I don’t want to I mean We can’t we got to control the smell down there, right? It’s like you get a shower a week you get you get a few hall passes to pee, but yeah, everybody’s still chained downstairs.
1:45:19
Okay, let me go up, there’s some questions that I missed. Any way you slice it, Auto BIM is awesome. Yeah, for what it’s actually designed for, it’s absolutely fantastic. By the way, we built it to auto-bim things from scratch. It was not built as a frames renamer, by the way. Like, that’s a secondary use case for it. It’s actually designed for when you’re building something from scratch that you can auto-bim all of your elements.
1:45:53
And that, I mean, it’s amazing for that. And actually, when I’m building frames, I use auto-bim all the time when I’m building frames, because when you’re working from scratch it’s flawless. It does exactly what you want it to do. Okay. Any news about frames for Figma? I’ll check in with Tommy. I’ll see how close we are.
1:46:12
Shouldn’t be too much longer. In the Bricks Builder, when I right-click, I get an ACSS menu. How can I disable this feature? Okay. Number one, you should not disable it. How do I disable this feature? Okay, number one, you should not disable it. It’s tremendously helpful.
1:46:31
Let’s go edit with Bricks. We’ll see what he’s talking about here. I actually get a lot of comments like, how do you get those to show up? So if I right click here, this is the, oh, you know what we need to do here? So this panel responds to classes you turn off in the framework too.
1:46:50
Did I turn them all back on? So if you’re missing something from those things, and by the way, we are about to hide classes in Bricsys AutoSuggest. So if you turn off stuff, and this should be shipped in 2.8 as well. So even though 3.0 is coming, and we’ve devoted a ton of resources to it,
1:47:08
2.8 has some good stuff too. So these are all on. So look if I turn off, oh basic text I just added this one this one’s new. Opacity, box shadow, okay yes these will leave the style sheet. They will also leave the context menus. So if you’re looking for them in the context menus they will not be there because you turn them off. In terms of classes the variables will still be there. The classes will not be there. And in 2.8, these classes will not be auto suggested by BRICS anymore. By the way, that was another, not just, it seems straightforward guys, it seems straightforward, it’s not straightforward. We didn’t want to delete them from the database. We’re gonna give options.
1:47:56
You’re actually gonna get three options, I think. In 2.8, you get maybe one option. In 3.0, I think you get three options. One option is just hide them, I don’t want to see them. They’re still in the database, but I just don’t want to see them in AutoSuggest, so hide them. The second option is delete them from my database. I don’t want them, I don’t want to see them,
1:48:16
and I don’t want them to even exist. And then I can’t remember what the third option was. There was a third option that I was kind of like in the mix between the two, I don’t remember. But the lot, because we have to be very careful. Guys, if you delete classes from the database, if those classes were used anywhere, they are gone from those elements.
1:48:35
And there is no undo. Like right now, if you activate pro mode, and hit save, all these utilities are gone from the style sheets. But if you’re like, oh, fuck, didn’t mean to do that, you can literally say reset, and they’re all back. And they’re all still on all of your elements. Nothing blows up.
1:48:52
This is very safe. The minute you want us to delete something from the database, that shit is not safe. And so I talked to Christoph, like it’s gonna be one of those situations where you have to type in the word delete or like blow up or something that makes it obvious that you better have a backup before you do this.
1:49:11
Because that’s very, very, very dangerous. Anyway, that’s that’s what you know, it’s not super straightforward. We have to make sure things are safe. We have to make sure things are backwards compatible. We have we have to make sure of a lot of things. We’re not just going to go around blowing sites up. So that means time, time, working through challenges, working through pros and cons working through testing environments work like it’s there’s a lot of work you just you don’t
1:49:39
necessarily see I don’t even know what I was answering now oh the context menus okay so right here you you get this BG right you’re gonna get auto you get auto preview with this this is a better palette than in bricks you get all your transparencies right here okay so this is a this is and this is a whole cheat sheet the whole cheat sheet so if you’re like I don’t know like what the classes are, you don’t need to know. You don’t need to know, type the word pad or even start to type the word pad,
1:50:08
here’s all your padding classes. It’s just gonna insert them for you. You even have them at break points, okay? So this is like the internal cheat sheet. Now, not to mention when I go in here for style, if I wanna add a border radius to something, I could literally type out radius M. In fact, we even have auto auto var wrapping right it’ll hit
1:50:30
enter it wraps it that’s an ACS has featured that’s not a bricks feature we have auto complete you want to do a math equation radius m times 1.1 because you want to be 10% bigger hit enter it auto calcs it and auto vars it right but nothing beats nothing beats right click M done then I just assign that to every side good to go right that’s so fast that’s super fast I mean you do that on all these right and it knows guys it knows hey there’s a width input the width input it’s giving you width right off the bat if you go over here column gap guys what’s it giving you spacing variables gap variables it already knows what kind
1:51:14
of input you’re in it’s already feeding it to you you don’t even have to search. It’s like, here it is. Here’s the thing you’re looking for right here. Super fast, super fast, right? Leave them on. It should just tremendously help your workflow. It took me a while to get used to using it, but once you use it, it’s like, oh my God,
1:51:31
don’t take it away from me. Don’t take it away. I want it, okay? So it’s very, very, very about now with that said, with that said, if you are going to be like, you know, a psychopath and you’re like, I don’t want that. Who wants all that efficiency? Okay. I’m just joking. It’s a joke. It’s a joke. Uh, you can go into options, builder settings right here, and here’s variable expansion and validation.
1:51:57
I just showed that feature. If you don’t want that efficiency, you can turn that off contextual menus what we just looked at off style preview and keyboard enhancement off enhanced transparent color swatches and bricks off automatically create BIM classes for elements hey you don’t like auto BIM you want to protest auto BIM you could turn it off color scheme switcher off that is this little switch right here okay so all those things everything that we do to manipulate a builder you can turn off if you don’t want it right here in builder settings.
1:52:28
Brendan says, I won’t build websites without right click anymore and my typing skills are much worse now, but design time is down. Yeah, it’s, I mean, literally going through and just like bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, all day long, I love it. Came here to say huge thanks for ACSS
1:52:43
as it boosts my productivity, efficiency, and flexibility as a developer who transitioned to page building stuffs highly recommend this thank you thank you thank you I’m glad you are enjoying it it is about to get so much better it’s about to get so much better okay yeah like I’ve said on other streams when you start using 3.0, you’re going to be like, it’s going to be hard to get the smile off your face, I think. For a while.
1:53:20
I mean, you’ll get used to it and you’ll get bored of it. And you’d be like, all right, what’s the next thing, Kevin, that you’re cooking up in the kitchen? And best believe, I mean, I will be, it won’t be long after 3.0, where I’m just, I will be right back in the kitchen. If there is a better way to do things, I will find it. So, and the good news about 3.0 is like, again, it doesn’t mess with the framework.
1:53:44
It doesn’t, the framework works exactly the way it’s always worked. And you would, you do not have to change your workflow. Even though we’re changing the entire workflow of interacting with the framework, you actually don’t have to change your workflow at all. It just creates a whole new paradigm for you to work within. And it’s all the same things. Things are pretty much in all the same places. It’s just a different experience. And it’s an experience where you’ll be like, wow,
1:54:19
don’t know how it could get much better than this. Maybe it could, I don’t know. But I said that with the first dashboard. Before anybody had a dashboard, I created the dashboard. Right, that’s, we were the first ones to have the dashboard at all. And when I created the dashboard, I was like, damn, how could it get much better than this?
1:54:43
I mean, right? So you do, you know, learn over time and things evolve, obviously, and you get new ideas, and you test new things. And guys, as much as the content that I actually put out and produce, the hours of testing things in CodePen, and just playing with different concepts, playing with different ideas.
1:55:05
And this is why, here’s a perfect example. I think it’s important to highlight these things. Because we were like, you know, Kevin so opinionated Kevin so this Kevin so that he’s so confident and duh-duh-duh-duh Yeah, it comes from like Tens of thousands of hours right over like, you know a long-ass time Like I’ve been building websites if I was 12 and then a few years back I got into like academic mode with it
1:55:34
especially with like creating ACSS and all like you have to you just have to know all the options and all the pros and cons of all the options. So I write an article like this. I write an article like this. Every website builder should have a proper semantic section element. And most don’t. And I go into this, now does this article say
1:55:53
this is the only way to ever create a section ever in life? No, no. This is saying this is the ideal way to structure a section. And still people will try to argue. Now can they give examples? No. Can they find the record button on their devices? No.
1:56:14
But do they want to argue? Yes. They want to argue. And then they’ll be like, your way is not the only way. I know. I just so have happened to try all the ways. And this is the one that’s ideal. That’s the whole point.
1:56:27
I know the pros and cons for all of the methods. And they’ll even send me the Kevin Powell video. Oh, Kevin Powell said, you can use grit and you could do it like this. And I said, I know, and I’ve already done it. And there’s a challenge with it. And I’ve uncovered that challenge. And I’m here to tell you that this is still the ideal way.
1:56:47
So it’s not like they’ll always be like, well, you haven’t seen. It’s like, no, I have seen, I have seen. It’s just like, I spend hours testing and playing and everything in CodePen, in Bricks, in Oxygen. And once again, I’ll say, cause I talk about page builders too. I’ve got a local install right here
1:57:06
with damn near every page builder, every like main page builder you could think of installed. All I have to say is open and it’s just there and I can play in it and I can do whatever I want in it and I can see pros and cons of a certain situation inside of it. And so then when I come out and I say X, Y, Z page builder is number one or I say this page voter can do what that page voter can’t do. It’s not just because I love bricks.
1:57:30
It’s not. It’s because I’ve literally looked at all of them and done it at all of them. And I literally know the exact pros and cons. It’s not just, oh, that’s how I feel. That’s just what I think today. No, it’s just objective reality. That’s why I said a minute ago, I get paid to come and spit facts.
1:57:54
So I just spit facts, that’s it. Now the facts may change. The facts may change. Bricks may do something different in the future. Oxygen may do something different in the future. Elementor may do something different in the future. But the fact is they are right now, is that this is the best way to structure a section.
1:58:14
Period, end of story. Does it mean that you have to do it like this every single time and every single instance? No, but by and large, if I was going to develop a section element for a page builder, this is how it should be done. And it gets down to like this inner container.
1:58:31
I mean, at some point I have to stop arguing because I’m just like, people are, they’re not even being, like, it’s just not even, either not honest or they don’t know how logic works. I don’t know. But I made a statement, like the general principle is a page builder should not generate a box that they do not allow the user to interact with.
1:58:56
So Oxygen does this, Breakdance does this, Elementor does this, Divi does this. Almost all the page builders do this except Bricks. Except Bricks, except you might look at like a Buildarius or something like that. But all the mainstream builders create tons of boxes that you cannot interact with. And I have just said, hey, I’ve tried all the page builders,
1:59:20
I’ve done it in bricks, when I’m allowed to interact with every box generated, it is a phenomenally better experience. So the principle is a page builder should not generate boxes that the user cannot interact with. General thing. Well, guess what?
1:59:36
People will come on, it doesn’t matter that you can’t, you know, interact with the inner container. It’s there for a reason. And it’s like, this person is either just not being honest, or they just don’t know what they’re talking about, or they just like argue. I don’t know. I don’t know what it is,
1:59:52
but I can’t argue anymore at that point, because it’s obvious. It’s obvious that if the page voter generates a box, you should be able to click on that box and do something to it. You should be able to get rid of that box if you don’t need that box. Maximum flexibility is best for this kind of environment.
2:00:07
But they’ll argue down to those little details. Then they’ll be like, Kevin, this is not stated anywhere in the W3C. I want documentation for this. I want to know exactly where. And I’m like, Doug, this is not a documentable thing. What’s documented is the use of a section element, which you are correct, is a single element.
2:00:31
This, what I’m describing, is a double element for workflow purposes. Because what I’m describing is an element that a page builder should have, not a W3C section. Because it turns out Webflow, Webflow when you add a section element gives you a W3C certified section. Wrapper. That’s all you get. And guess what? In a page building workflow, that’s dog shit.
2:00:56
Because in a page building workflow, we need to work quick. I got a page builder so I don’t have to do everything. That was the point of getting the page builder, right? I want to, I wanted to write a lot of the code for me. Right? I can easily go into CodePen. Okay, let’s go, let’s do this. CodePen.io. Let’s just do a little short demonstration. Love these little, little demonstrations. This is a W3C certified section element. Okay? Now, how long did that take me to create? Not much time at all.
2:01:40
Probably the same exact time I could add it to the page in Webflow, honestly. The next follow-up question I have is what did that do for me? Not a fucking thing. I can’t do anything with that. Why would I want a page builder to add that to the page? Nothing I can do with that.
2:01:57
What I actually need is something that looks like this. Right, gotta come in here, there’s my container. Now I can put stuff in the container, but we’re still not even done. We’re still not even done. Look at everything that I have to do here, if I’m gonna do this by hand. So there’s my section right here.
2:02:14
I’m gonna come down to CSS. Now we actually, you can’t just do this guys. I actually just wrote an article about this. Where do these insights come from? Let’s go to insights. Let’s click here. This is a learning experience by the way. This is not just a rant.
2:02:28
This is a learning opportunity, okay? How to set default section padding safely without classes. Oh my gosh, that’s what we’re doing right now. Because it turns out, guys, if you thought, if you thought you could just do this, padding block, and let’s choose something, I mean, we’re not even tokenizing stuff here. Let’s just do 5M padding inline 3M. Okay, save. Hey, that appears
2:02:55
like I was I got exactly what I wanted. Just for demonstration purposes, let’s go let’s add a border. Solid black. Okay, so there’s my section, right? I’ve got block padding. I’ve got inline padding. Oh, well, what we don’t have is our content with container, right? Because we have to come down here and we have to do this. And we have to say width 100%. And then we have to say max width. And we have to say var, it would be nice if we had something like a content width.
2:03:28
Okay, so we have a token that describes this, which means we then have to go up here and define that token. Okay, so we come down and we say content width, and then we go 1366, and then we come down here and we say margin inline, and we say auto, that’s gonna center that section or that container. Now I’m gonna say border one pixel solid red,
2:03:50
and now you’re gonna see the actual container here. But guys, you cannot do this. This section right here, sometimes there are sections in sections. You only want top level sections to look like this. Like sections inside of other things should not behave like this or look like this from a workflow standpoint, right?
2:04:13
So what I really have to do here is, and it’s described in this article right here, is something like this. Let me copy this and I’ll paste it in, okay. This is stuff we have to think about in ACSS land, right? So I hit save, look, nothing changed, nothing changed. But what am I doing here? Well, section, not section, section,
2:04:39
basically says I wanna style all sections except for sections that are inside other sections. So if there’s a section inside another section, don’t do any, don’t do any of this. Only do this if this is a section that’s not inside another section and it’s wrapped in a where tag because when you do section not section
2:04:59
section you actually increase specificity a lot well guess what happens when you increase specificity utility classes don’t work the builder class styling system doesn’t work you can’t do any of that in a builder anymore you screwed it up so you got to remove specificity from this statement
2:05:15
and the only way to do that is with a where tag. So we use this kind of thing to do the job of automatically styling sections the way you need them. So really to get to this, not only did I have to do all of this, and not only do I have to put this class on every container that goes into a section, right? I could use like a direct child universal star selector,
2:05:39
but that’s not gonna be as efficient. Shouldn’t have to do that. Okay, not only do we have to do all that, you have to figure it out first. Okay, so do you wanna do that? I thought that’s why you were using a page builder. Isn’t that why you’re using a page builder? Isn’t that why you’re using a framework like Automatic CSS
2:05:58
so you don’t have to figure this stuff out? So that you can go into Bricks and just go, I want a section bang. Oh my God. Look at, look, it’s exactly the way I wanted it to be exactly the way that it needed to be. And there’s an inner container that I can actually interact with unlike in almost every other page builder. And what does this allow me to do? Well, well, why is this better? I mean,
2:06:22
these are demonstratable things. Here’s my heading, right? My little intro. Actually, in fact, let’s just do this. Because I have a whole library of intros. Here’s an intro, intro delta, intro Bravo, intro alpha. Here’s my intro alpha. Let’s insert that. Now I can put that in that section.
2:06:42
But I also want another container for a grid or something, right? I can add another container. Here’s one container. Here’s another container. They both behave the same way, but now what am I doing? I’m doing what I described in Page Building 101, which is a 101 philosophy, group associated content. Why should I group associated content?
2:07:03
Because I don’t have a magic ball. I don’t, first of all, I want different spacing between these items than between these two groups of items. Having them contained separately allows me to control the spacing independently. But it also allows me to move this anywhere I want it to go. If I want to go down here, now it’s down here. These are associated content that live together.
2:07:27
So they should be grouped together. By the way, this is the fundamental flaw, or one of the fundamental flaws, of what I’ve seen in some of the grid implementations of sections, is that people stop grouping the content. Now I don’t think that’s an inherent limitation. I think maybe it’s just the way people are using it. And the method that Kevin Powell showed with grid for sections is a viable way
2:07:51
to structure your sections. It’s a different, completely different workflow. It’s viable for some use cases. And so what we’re gonna do in ACSS, by the way, he’s not even the one that came up with it. He got it from somebody else and then he just showed it. So we’re probably gonna have it as an option in automatic CSS.
2:08:09
So if you want to use what we would call a content grid, you could go to your section and say content grid, and it will remap the whole grid to behave, or the whole section to behave as a content grid section, rather than the traditional section that I described here. And now you have both worlds at your fingertips. That’s why you use a framework like automatic CSS. It’s not a rejection of another method.
2:08:34
It’s just, hey, this is how you would want it to be done 90% of the time. And then maybe 10% of the time you want it done some other way. So we’ll have utilities to do it that other way. And all bases are covered. It’s good to go. But this is like, like demonstratable concepts,
2:08:51
and I just showed you why for a page builder, we wanna be able to do this in one click. You don’t wanna have to figure this out, and you wanna have to do it, so this is what Webflow gives you. Webflow gives you that, and then you know what you have to do in Webflow? You gotta add your own inner container,
2:09:07
and then you know what you gotta do to that? You gotta add a class to it, and you know what you gotta do next? You gotta come in and you gotta style that class with these styling instructions down here. And then you have to style, here’s the kicker, here’s the kicker. How are you going to do this? Right?
2:09:22
Let me zoom in on this. How the fuck are you going to do that in a page builder? You can’t write a selector like that in a page builder. That’s not even possible. So you need either a framework or you need the page builder itself to do this for you. Or you gotta know how to do it and write it in your own style sheet. That’s an option too.
2:09:43
You can write it in your own style sheet. But I mean, how many people off the bat, right? Like, I’ll just be honest with you. When I created ACSS, wrote it like that. Cause it seemed like, well, that should get the job done. But then you realize, you know what, actually what brought it up, somebody was like, Kevin, I have Loom installed,
2:10:05
fucking browser extension, okay? Not even something on their website. Kevin, I have Loom installed, and there’s a big gap at the bottom of my website. And I was like, that’s weird. So I inspected it. Loom injects code at the bottom of the site, and uses sections in that code.
2:10:29
And because we’re styling all sections by default like this, it was getting the block padding and inline padding and creating this giant blank space. And so it takes, like when we do something in a framework, people have to remember, it goes out to tens of thousands of sites. So immediately we are alerted to whether that’s a good fucking idea or not a good fucking idea right and so we
2:10:53
Find these things that normally most people wouldn’t encounter until you know They’re 90% of the way into a project like that’s not gonna work. All right. I got to go back I got to retool it and re-figure it out Well, it’s way better to just have somebody else who’s already figured it all out for you Just do it for you Especially since you can’t if you’re literally trying to use the page builder for most of everything because you’re not a CSS wizard or anything like that,
2:11:18
you can’t even add this to a page builder. You just can’t. The framework has to do it. And most page builders don’t even style the sections properly. They don’t even structure the sections properly, much less style them properly. So it’s just, it’s nice.
2:11:34
It’s nice to have a framework that’s like, all right, all this stuff’s been thought through all this stuff works out of the box all I have to do is focus on building sites and not only that I get to use all these tokens that are already done for me and there’s these context menus that I don’t even need to know the names of the tokens I just insert them with the context menus and if I need to var stuff it’ll automatically var it for me it’ll automatically calc it for me it’s just the workflow efficiency is through the roof.
2:12:02
Then you add on frames where it’s like, oh, by the way, we’ll just do all the layouts for you too. All you got to do is figure out how to make them pretty. It’s crazy. You’d be crazy to not use it, is basically what I’m getting at. You’d be crazy to not use it. And most people who are deep into ACSS will tell you
2:12:21
like they don’t want to touch a site ever if it doesn’t have it. That’s what you get. It does spoil you. That is the biggest downside of ACSS is that it absolutely 100% spoils you. All right. We got five minutes. I’ll do last questions. That was a long one, but it was worth it because we got to see, hey, why do we use page builders? Oh, by the way, when I insert a section in a page builder like Elementor, the reason I would choose Bricks over, I don’t want it to insert 8,000 lines of divs that I don’t need, that I can’t select that I don’t need that get in the way. So you know clean code like the reason I like
2:13:02
Bricks is it pretty much produces code the way I would write it by hand. That’s phenomenal. That’s exactly what we want. We wanted to do the stuff we don’t want it to do, but we wanted to do it right. We don’t want it to do it messy. We don’t want it to do it like the budget guy. Okay, the minimum wage dev that we got on Upwork. Okay, you know, we don’t want that. We want the pro output.
2:13:30
We want the clean output. Bricks gives you that. What advice do you have for keeping CSS within WP Codebox for better code management? Good question. I don’t use WP Codebox for code management hardly anymore. This is a part where we should clarify evolution in tools. I’ll tell you what killed WP Codebox for me.
2:13:53
In terms of writing, now there’s some stuff you still have to do. Don’t get me wrong. I still have it because I also have it for other code integrations, tracking scripts and things like that. But as far as style sheets go, I even, even though you can write Sass in it, right? And I’m a big Sass guy.
2:14:14
Sass is phenomenally powerful. But even though it has Sass sitting over there, I don’t even use it anymore. I’ll tell you what killed, and it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread in any page builder. And I don’t think Bricks was the first to come up with it. I actually mentioned that it should be a feature before I even knew of any other page builders that had it.
2:14:38
But here you go. This is what killed WP CodeBox for me. So this dynamic root selector is one of the most powerful features in Bricks. Specifically because of what it allows you to do with renaming classes, sharing, like we do with frames, sharing layouts from site to site, page to page, whatever, without CSS breaking, allowing people to still remap classes
2:15:04
without things breaking, but also the ability to do BIM, to do styling of all child elements at the parent because of how I can branch off of here. So I can do like, that’s a parent child relationship right there. How I can do modifiers, how I can do so many different things, right? This is, yeah. And, and, and the other benefit here is, let’s say that this is a heading. Okay.
2:15:33
Whatever. And then there’s, let me do that so it’s not broken. Wow, let’s, can’t type, got fat fingers today. So there’s my parent, there’s like a child’s styling, okay. And that’s just on a dummy container or whatever. But imagine I am three months later, okay, we just fast forward, three months later, I come back to this site and I’m like,
2:15:58
that box right there, I gotta adjust how it behaves, I gotta adjust how it’s styled. So the first thought, obviously, is gonna be like, where’s the styling for that? So if I am in WP CodeBox, I mean, I gotta go back, I gotta go into the admin of WordPress, I gotta go to find WP CodeBox, I gotta open it, I gotta find the style sheet in WP CodeBox,
2:16:20
I gotta open the style sheet. I gotta do a command search for this class name and hopefully find it. And if you write in SAS, they’re not always as easy to find. Then I gotta manipulate it. Then I gotta go check on the front end to see if it changed. But then, I didn’t just wanna do CSS to it, I wanted to do some HTML stuff too.
2:16:40
So I gotta, now I gotta open the builder. Now I’m in the builder. Now I got WP CodeBox open. I got the front end open. I got the builder open. My gosh, my gosh. You start to hate that life pretty quick, right? So let’s look at the alternative.
2:16:56
And people ask me, how do you come up with these decisions? Well, this is how I come up with them. Living the life and you just decide, I don’t like this life. So I’m gonna live a different life. What’s the different life I’m gonna live? Well, the dynamic route selector,
2:17:08
I go, I wanna interact with that element right now. So I opened the builder, cause I know it’s in the builder. And then I know where the CSS lives. It lives on the element that I want to interact with. Imagine that. Imagine that. Where would we find this style?
2:17:24
On the thing that is styled with it. And so then we click on it, and then we go down here, and here it all is right here. And if I need to add HTML, guess what? I’m already in the thing that I need to use to add the HTML. One tab, that’s all I need. And I know exactly where everything is at all times. That’s why this is the best for organization.
2:17:47
Also, also, here, let me just do this here. Let me go, let’s name this my awesome box, okay? And then I style my awesome box. Here’s a background red, all right? There’s my awesome box, background red. Now let’s pretend for a moment that I put that CSS in WP code box and then let’s pretend for a moment that I come back three months later and I’m like you know what I did a really shitty name of naming
2:18:14
that my awesome box like that’s a terrible name for this thing and I know that bricks allows me to safely rename things and so I’m gonna go with my my awesomest box, because that’s clearly a better name, and I hit save and nothing broke here, but if that CSS had been written in WP CodeBox, that box is in shambles right now. Because now you got to go back into WP CodeBox, find all the references to the old classes and manually change the names, oh but with this dynamic root selector, you don’t have to do any of that.
2:18:51
It doesn’t break. See, there’s so many benefits to this. And again, it’s how did the evolution happen? Well, when I used to recommend WP CodeBox for this, this was not a thing in existence. There was no dynamic root selector that you could branch off of like this and do everything that you need.
2:19:12
They had a root selector, but it wasn’t dynamic like this. So it wasn’t nearly as useful. So there weren’t as many benefits to doing it in the builder. But now, now it’s crystal clear. You put everything in here. This is how you do everything, unless you’re forced to do something in WP code box.
2:19:31
Because you can even do all the fancy where’s and shit here. Where and then root. Yeah, you can do all this. You couldn’t do this before. You could not do that before. So that’s how things have evolved. The tool evolved. So the answer to the question has now evolved.
2:19:48
All right, final question. Here we go. Let’s find one, find one, find one. Hello, no hostility in the question. That’s always a good way to start, isn’t it? How does ACSS 3.0 compare to Core? Is Core going to be left behind as well or are they innovating to some extent?
2:20:08
No hostility in the answer. I got to preface that, right? People hate this. This is an unwinnable situation. Half the people want me to answer the question, half the people don’t want me to answer the question, half the people don’t want me to answer the question. Half the people when I answer the question they’ll be like, ah you’re hating on a competitor, you don’t have to do that, just talk about how good your thing is, don’t talk about how the
2:20:36
the the the the. Can’t win, can’t win. So it’s just, it’s just business. I just showed up to spit facts, spit facts. Well exactly what we said earlier. Here we are, we’re in that exact same situation, aren’t we? What do you want me to say? You know, core is not it’s not new. Okay, they had it as oxy ninja before I promoted oxy ninja. Because I didn’t have my own thing. I was using oxy ninja. And I was because I was like, I need a framework that works in oxygen. So there was one other, I can’t remember what the other one was called, but it was like a Tailwind style thing.
2:21:20
And you guys know how I feel about that in a page builder. Like I love Tailwind as a framework, not in a page builder. Do not use Tailwind in a page builder. Page builders is not the environment for Tailwind or a Tailwind style framework. So I went with Oxyninja and I was like, this is the best thing that’s available right now, other than building my own thing.
2:21:40
So I’m just going to rock and roll with this. If you never use Oxyninja, it was like many other frameworks at the time. You were given values for everything and utilities for everything. And that was that. Like, you want to adjust spacing? No. You want to adjust typography? No. No, you just, you use what you were given, basically. And you had a bunch of different sizes for things.
2:22:01
So, you know, nothing contextual, nothing like what you see today in like ACSS, right? And so I built a few sites with it, and then I started to be like, man, it’s just too limiting. In fact, nobody at the time, no frameworks were doing fluid responsive typography, fluid responsive spacing,
2:22:18
none of this stuff that I was starting to do videos on at the time. And then I was like, you know what, like this whole framework situation needs to be rethought. And no, I mean, I guess it was ideas were there for the taking, but I was like, a framework needs to be automatically responsive. It needs to have better access to,
2:22:40
and it needs to have some stuff like auto grids. Like you could create manual grids, but there’s no such thing as auto, nobody was doing auto grids. So like we need auto grids. We need math scales. We need, like you shouldn’t have to decide what the min and max values
2:22:54
of all these clamp functions are going to be. We just need mass scales, but then we need a way to override the mass scales. By the way, we need to put all this in the UI dashboard because nobody wants to do this in a style sheet. And so I just started building the whole new framework with all these new concepts. That literally were not being done at the time.
2:23:10
And it started evolving. I built it in the inner circle. I don’t know if anybody remembers those days. I was publicly building it inside the inner circle. And people in the inner circle were helping, right? With determining like, here’s the pros for this, here’s the cons for this, which way do we go? And they were helping decide in those early days.
2:23:30
And everything was done in style sheets. I didn’t know how to build the UI. So then I reached out to the inner circle once again, and I was like, do we have anybody in here that can code a UI? And that’s where Matteo came from. So me and Matteo got together and he built the UI dashboard, the one you see and use today. It’s evolved, obviously, over time.
2:23:53
But nobody was doing the UI dashboard. Nobody was doing any of this, half the stuff that ACSS does, nobody was doing at the time and then oxy ninja basically went away and It was there’s really no updates to it or anything like that for a very long time And then they I guess they started rebuilding the the framework or whatever and I’m not like I’m not knocking them at all look there. They have a very talented team. Okay. I’m just this is the timeline This is just I’m just saying this is how this is the history. Okay, you want the story.
2:24:26
So then they came out with, they decided they were gonna restructure everything and they came out with core. And so they piggybacked on the dashboard concept, right? And they built a beautiful dashboard. Nobody’s denying that, it’s a beautiful dashboard. They integrated fluid responsive typography, fluid. They actually did that in later stages of Oxygen Ninja.
2:24:46
If I remember correctly, they implemented fluid responsive everything in later stages of Oxyninja. But then of course that came into core. And you know, they decided, you know, they decided to not do a full-fledged framework to do more of like, hey, let’s, this dashboard should kind of let people build their own framework. Like, here’s a starter set of utilities, and then you could build on top of them if you want to. That’s, I guess, that was their concept, okay? Which that’s a fundamental difference in philosophy
2:25:18
between CORE and ACSS. The rename everything, the add whatever you want, like willy nilly, like that can very easily become a disaster. And it does break the concept of a framework in a lot of different ways. I detailed all this in an article that is out there for anybody to read.
2:25:37
Again, it’s just the facts, it’s just these are the facts of the situation. So, the dashboard side of things they came out with. So they built a beautiful dashboard. They built a very flexible starter framework that you can definitely add to. It’s not without problems. Somebody asked me, what is the problem with the colors?
2:25:58
Because I mentioned that in the article. And this is just something you’ll see. I mean, I saw it in five seconds because I build frameworks. Like I already knew how users interact with things and what happens when you make changes when a site is built versus before a site is built are two very different scenarios, right?
2:26:14
But if you have shades in core, you, let’s say there’s six of them, okay? And you use them, you just build a site. And then you’re 90% of the way in and you realize I need another shade If you add another shade to the shade palette, you don’t just add it and it’s like hey What do you want that shade to be it changes the values of all your existing shades? and Unless I I mean, maybe I need to dig further
2:26:36
I don’t know But it wasn’t Immediately clear how to not get that to happen because if you built an entire website and now all of your shades shift Just because you added another one or removed one or changed the order of them or whatever, I don’t know. I can’t have my whole site shifting in shades. That’s broken, right? But when you give people unlimited flexibility to do that, imagine building a whole site with what’s available in terms of spacing. And then you come along three months later and you add one or you remove one. And then it’s just, then you have five sites with these spacing options
2:27:16
and five sites without those spacing options and you’re just starting to break the concept of a framework. I understand to some people it seems really valuable to be able to rename things to whatever you want, add whatever you want, remove whatever, but it does cause significant problems. And it breaks compatibility.
2:27:35
Guys, we’re building an ecosystem. It breaks compatibility with the rest of the ecosystem. You cannot rename all the utilities and then use frames. You import frames. How are design sets going to work for Core? Because if you customize all your names for everything and you bring in a design set that’s based on Core’s default utility names, you can’t use that design set. It’s all broken. So there’s tremendous downsides to that, right? Anyway, back to the original question. So they have the UI dashboard.
2:28:08
They basically implemented all the things that ACSS had already shown, like were valuable in a framework. With the addition of the starter framework, add whatever you want kind of thing, and this concept of components. So there’s the components dashboard. I’ll say, like, I applaud the,
2:28:31
like, attempts at innovation are important. It’s very important to attempt to innovate. You cannot knock the ball out of the park 100% of the time. There are plenty of things, ideas, that I’ve had experimented with, implemented with, that I was just like, it’s not as good as I thought it was gonna be, or it’s not as important,
2:28:51
or it doesn’t work into workflow, or whatever. We all take L’s, okay? Like you’re not gonna be, every idea is not 100% knock it out of the park. Some ideas are great, some ideas are just stellar, some ideas are mediocre, some ideas, you’re like, I wish we had never done that, let’s get rid of it.
2:29:08
I can tell you, rattle off the top of my head, like 10 areas of ACSS where I was like, wish we had never done that. And it’s hard to change because of backwards compatibility stuff. But if I could go back in time, I would change it, right? That is just natural part of things. Okay, you have to, and I tell my kids this,
2:29:35
like, look, you ain’t ever gonna hit a home run. You ain’t ever gonna hit a base hit if you don’t get up there at all. Like you gotta get up, the step one is walk up to the plate. Step two is swing the bat. Now law of averages, even if you suck, I mean you’re gonna hit it every once in a while, right?
2:29:51
But you also wanna get better and better and better and better. You want your vision to get better, you want your reflexes to get better, you wanna hone these skills, right? So you can start to identify what’s a good pitch, what’s a bad pitch, what’s a good swing, what’s a bad swing, that kind of thing, right?
2:30:06
That’s what experience does for you. But at the same time, you tried brand new things, you do just have to swing sometimes and sometimes you’re gonna strike out. To me, the components part of that, part of core is a strikeout. Like it’s, I applaud the attempt at innovation, but I’ll explain why I think it’s a strikeout idea.
2:30:27
The concept of, well, first of all, we’re working in a page builder. I don’t know if they built this with page builders in mind. See, this is where Automatic CSS is built for page building environments. It’s not built for everywhere. Built for page building workflows. They’re not. They’re like,
2:30:44
we’re a framework for everything. Maybe this came from that. I don’t know. But if I’m in a page builder, this is where I build my components. All the HTML is here, the JavaScript is here, the PHP is here, and the CSS is here. The idea that I would manage HTML, PHP, and JavaScript right here,
2:31:03
but then go somewhere else to manage the CSS, well, we already talked about why that’s a bad idea just a minute ago, like when I explained the dynamic root selector. But furthermore, you can’t even see the real component in the components dashboard. You’re just, you’re kind of, it’s like the idea of a component. And I don’t even know if you can do multi-element child components there, or if it’s just simple like buttons or whatever.
2:31:24
So I just don’t even, from a workflow perspective, when you’re using a page builder, it just doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. Maybe if somebody used it and I would see something I’m not foreseeing, but it just didn’t make any sense. That you would want to compartmentalize that part of it when you’re literally working in the environment, like this is the environment. So the first principle
2:31:51
that we’ve tried to do everything by now, going forwards, is like, this is the environment that a website gets built in. Anytime you have to leave this environment, it is a workflow inefficiency and it is potential management nightmare, right? So let’s not do that. Let’s avoid that at all costs.
2:32:11
So the problem with a product that is like, oh, okay, this other product did these things, great. Let’s implement some of those things and then we’ll try our own little innovation part or whatever is, you know, it took them a long time to get core out the door. By the time that happened, ACSS was already on to the next thing. Actually the next 10 things.
2:32:35
And so it’s just always it’s like, you can’t if like, as a product developer, like my goal is like, I’m not playing catch up with anybody. I’m not that’s not the business we’re in. We don’t go and look at other tools and go, we’re going to catch up to that. Well, what’s the next thing? That’s where we’re at. That we’re the next thing. And so a tool might get a dashboard because nobody had a dashboard and we show, hey, this dashboard concept is really good. So then these other tools all magically end up with dashboards. Well, guess what? Automatic CSS is already like that. That ship sailed. That dashboard ship, that ship sank,
2:33:13
actually. We’re not even, we’re not doing the dashboard thing anymore. Because the workflow is way better without a dashboard. So what’s the next thing? So that’s a situation I think a lot of products get caught up in is it’s like, it’s like oh, they did this great thing, now we gotta catch up to it. It’s like no, no, no, you wanna be the person
2:33:32
who is already on the next 10 things. And everybody else gotta play catch up. That’s my goal. Like that’s what keeps me up at night. And if you want a, like I, let me just speak from personal experience. Me and Thomas, okay, I like bricks. I promote bricks.
2:33:51
Do I want Thomas playing catch up with other page builders? Or do I want Thomas losing sleep at night going, where’s the next place I need to be that ain’t nobody thinking about yet. Nobody’s even considered this yet, right? Quickly, quickly went to components before anybody else. That made other builders play defense right there. Bricks had to immediately stop what they were doing
2:34:21
and go, we gotta catch up with that. Quickly force them into that situation, right? That’s what a tool should do. Now, Bricks has forced other page builders into a lot of defense situations, right? Bricks has done a lot of innovative stuff, but that’s what I want from my product developer. I want a product developer who’s thinking
2:34:40
about the next five things. And also, by the way, who uses their product, like, and I’m not saying Core doesn’t, not saying Core doesn’t. I don’t know, I don’t know what their situation is. But what I can tell you is I use ACSS on every website, on every project, every day of my life, every minute I’m doing something on the web,
2:34:58
it involves ACSS. I see it in other people’s projects. I do, I’m involved in customer support. I’m involved in every part of it. I know the ins and outs of pros, cons, what needs to happen next, what doesn’t need to happen next. I see it all.
2:35:13
So none of ACSS is built in theory. There’s a bunch of page builder developers, by the way, and this is why I think page builders, a lot of them are so bad. They’re built by developers who don’t build websites. Imagine that for a second. They’re building a page builder, but they don’t build websites.
2:35:29
How the fuck does that work? That’s a lot of page builders out there, guys. It’s a lot of page builders out there. So best believe, I hope Thomas is building websites with bricks, right? Because that’s what it takes. You’ve got to see the thing in action in the real world. Otherwise, you know what your ideas are?
2:35:47
They’re all theory. They’re like, oh, I theorize that this might be good for workflow. I don’t have to do that with ACSS because I use it every minute of every day. I go, no, I know this is going to be good for workflow. It’s not just a theory. Like I just came out with contextual colors right here,
2:36:03
contextual utilities. Okay, super important. Did I just dream this up? Did I just go kick back and grab a glass of wine and sit on my deck and go, wonder what the next thing I can add is? No, I ran into challenges. And then I was like,
2:36:22
I need a solution for these challenges. Ah, contextual utilities is a really good solution for these challenges. Ooh, then I start playing with them behind the scenes. Started playing with them in CodePen. Started playing with them in different situations. I’m like, wow, there’s actually a couple other benefits to these utilities that I didn’t even foresee.
2:36:39
And then it shows up in the framework. Then it shows up in the dashboard. It’s not theory, it’s not theory. I feel like the components thing in core was theory. That was like, well, maybe we could do this. Maybe, maybe that would be benefit. I don’t know. I just don’t see a path to it.
2:36:57
I don’t know. I don’t know. I, I was asked a question. I don’t know if I’m supposed to answer the question or just go, Hmm. I mean, they’re just fantastic. They’re just the best competitor we can hope for. And, um, you know, I wish them all the best and their products just man they’re just great it’s just a plus on that and you know we’ll just keep doing our thing
2:37:21
and they’ll just keep doing their thing and that’s not me like I think reality involves pros and cons I think it’s okay to be like there’s pros there’s cons there’s good things there’s not good things if you want me to sit here for 30 minutes and tell you what’s not good about ACSS, I can do that too. I can do that too. But the thing is is like of all the things I don’t like about ACSS, it’s still the gap between number one and everybody else to me is gigantic. And it’s again, it’s it’s it comes from actual everyday use.
2:37:58
All right. Well, some good feedback. I’m sure the haters will show up later. Love the beginning of ACSS with owl spacing. Yeah, yeah, I mean, that’s a perfect example, right? Something that we actually were able to deprecate because flex gap was actually supported enough to where we didn’t need owl spacing anymore But yeah, no, I mean no other framework was doing owl spacing There’s so many things I mean It’s just a laundry list of like Stuff ACSS either did in the past or does now that other frameworks do not do haven’t even started to do And they’re not just like nice like oh, that’s cute.
2:38:49
They’re like literal, very important features once you’ve used them. Automatic header offset. You know how many people spend fucking hours trying to figure that out? And it’s one click in automatic CSS. Like, it’s just thing after thing after thing after thing. And now, yeah, it was a long answer.
2:39:10
Every answer of mine is long. And now with 3.0, it’s just gonna be like, all right, I understand now. Like, I think what 3.0 will probably solidify is like you wanna be with a framework that is like straight up innovating. And you know, it’s not like when you see 3.0, it’s not going to be like wow this is I’ve never seen this ever in any app or
2:39:44
anything ever that’s not I don’t think that’s going to be the reaction that you have but you’ve never seen in any framework ever and that’s the big difference right so it’s just there’s benefits there’s benefits to using a framework that is like, truly like forward thinking in ways that are actually changing the landscape. We say that’s one of our core missions, right? It’s to change the landscape of front end web design. And that’s we’ve we’ve done that, like we’ve already accomplished that mission in many, many, many different ways. Like I already
2:40:22
mentioned, fluid responsive typography and spacing and a UI dashboard and a framework and this and that contextual utilities contextual spacing on and on and on these are features like the other frameworks are like oh we got it we got it we got to bring those in we got to do that stuff um so that’s just my goal though it’s like i’m not saying that other frameworks are behind because they’re like i’m not even giving a reason the reason is is because i put them on defense. Like that is my mission in life. Like every day I wake up is like, no, the next thing I will think of.
2:40:59
Um, and I’m always looking at a workflow, analyzing workflow. That’s why I write fucking half academic papers on how you should properly structure a section. This is the level of detail that I’m trying to look at this game with. The same way, it’s just, it’s my nature. They made me the head coach of my daughter’s softball team. Best believe, dude, I’m looking at everything. We’re doing fucking film review in Pee Wee, okay?
2:41:27
You understand? You understand we’re doing film review in Pee Wee, okay? It’s just how my brain works. This is how my brain works. So, it’s very analytical and strategic. And it’s just, I can’t shut it off. I’ve tried. I, this is how it works. This is how it works. All right. We got to get out of here. Hopefully you guys have you been away from your screen?
2:42:03
Keeping you Kevin, that’s why we’re here. Okay. I mean, the thing is, is like, the reason people tune into this stuff is because I’m not going to give you like political bullshit on anything. On anything. I just show up, I turn on the camera, I say what I know to be true I turn off the camera I walk away and I do that in pretty much every piece of content whether it’s an article whether it’s a video whether it’s a tutorial whether it’s page
2:42:38
building 101 whether it’s a live stream whether it’s an interview that’s it that’s what you get so you’re not going to agree with everything you’re not being bullshitted to you’re not being talked to like a like you’re an infant you’re not being politicized you’re not being affiliate commissioned to death because I don’t give a fuck about affiliate commissions it is. It’s just raw, real, relevant content. All right. This was a long one. I’ve got to go eat lunch. Tuesday, next Tuesday. Oh, last announcement Thursday. Sorry,
2:43:23
this Thursday, two days, aka two days from now, frames livestream answering all frames specific questions. Anything about frames, how to use a frame, how to style a frame, how to change a frame, frames workflow. If you want to ask more AutoBIM questions because you just love hearing me talk about AutoBIM. Anything you want involving frames is this Thursday on the ACSS channel, I believe at 11am. Either 10am or 11am, I’ll be back soon. Peace.
