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Hey, everybody. Happy Tuesday. It is time for another WDD live. I’m still, I’m out of town. I’m traveling. I’m still, I got to shave.
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I got a whole, got a whole situation going on here, but we’re going to have a good, we’re going to have a good stream. Mark is in the house. Hola, Grant, Kobe, Ulf. Welcome, welcome. From Germany.
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Fantastic. Dominic is here, Sarah’s here, Justin is here, Derek, good to see you guys, good to see you guys. Manny, who else is in the house? Matt’s here, Reuben, DelSingh, Lizzie, Sharon, Rob, good to see you guys. Okay, all right, we are in the house today. Here’s the agenda. Number one, we’re going to do a little recap, a little recap of the Bridge Builders live stream. Second thing we’re going to do is our website
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critiques. We have some, we have two websites to do today. We do live in-depth critiques here for the most part. And then what we’re going to do is some open Q&A. Let’s go ahead and dive right in. Bridge Builders recap. First thing I want to know in the chat did you watch that stream did you see my appearance on the bridge builders livestream we did a little build off okay there was an example of using Gutenberg and then there was an example of my example is using bricks with
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automatic CSS and all of that. So the first thing I want to see or ask is if you saw that live stream, what were your thoughts on the live stream? What was your conclusion? How did you feel about the comparison? Now to be, to be, well, yeah, the thing that, see, I didn’t, you know,
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Gutenberg is good, it’s like everybody says Gutenberg, but it can be used in so many different ways. Like you can have a builder that’s like in like existing Gutenberg. That’s kind of like quickly, right? That’s like a full fledged builder interface inside of that’s not native Gutenberg, though, right, then you can have a block system like generator, cadence or whatever that’s still technically Gutenberg.
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But it’s not really Gutenberg, is it? It’s like it’s not native Gutenberg. Then there’s native Gutenberg. That’s like opening the twenty twenty four theme and just trying to build something with the 2024 theme. And then there’s custom themes that could leverage Gutenberg, but that’s not native Gutenberg either, is it?
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And then there’s, you know, what we saw there, which is kind of like a hybrid, which is like, okay, we use the block editor, but then there’s some special stuff going on behind the scenes that make the block editor do things that we want it to do because of its limited, you know, so it’s crazy. It’s always crazy, right? Like this talk about Gutenberg trying to compare because there’s so many different ways to use it. And I want to go in, but before I give you my thoughts, I want to read and see what you guys think. So I’m going to scroll up here. Was very interesting. Yes, yes, yes,
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A lot of people saw it. Okay, fantastic. Watched it, liked your approach much better. Okay, good, good. Mark says he missed it. You held your tongue quite well, Kevin.
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You know, I’m not, I’m just there to, I’m just there to see what happens. I’m just there to participate. I checked out the stream after the fact. Your site building with bricks is insane at one point in 5x speed. Yeah, I would recommend Watching it, you know at that speed for sure where it’s already I think fast enough I felt that bricks together with someone with your level of expertise is unmatched at Gutenberg
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Okay from my perspective it was clear-cut choice for bricks builder and ACSS, but that’s just me Maybe a squished biased Maddie is here Maddie is in the house. Welcome. Welcome You got to go catch up for sure. You don’t have a great poker face. What were you reading on my face?
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What did you think I was thinking the entire time? Sometimes it feels like the voices arguing for Gutenberg are not paying attention to what page builders are doing. I think Brian took some takeaways. I love your resting asshole face. Okay. All right. Let’s, um, let’s talk about it. So first of all, I was very interested to see, I want one, I didn’t know what the Gutenberg approach was going to be ahead of time.
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So, you know, Brian said he was going to use the Gutenberg and that was it. That was all the details that we got until the stream started. And then, um, we find out that it’s like, you know, kind of a custom theme situation where the blocks have been set up in such a way to make them kind of do what needs to be done to fit that specific layout. And we didn’t unfortunately get to see any of the setup. I don’t know how long the setup process takes in that regard. I would like to see a lot of the setup there. And hopefully Brian will do a video just walking through the setup. That would be fantastic. One thing that I’m not a fan of is, and this is with Gutenberg in general, because of everybody that says
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well custom block styles of custom theme and it’s like now you’re introducing a completely different environment. You’re introducing different languages And while you could say that, okay, yeah, like, you know, if you’re going to WordPress, maybe you should learn how to do that side of things. But why, when you have page builders where that’s not necessary, so why should I go to that level when it’s not necessary, right?
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You have to tell me an advantage to spreading out my workflow across multiple different tools and platforms and areas and all of that, right? I don’t even like magic areas in a page builder. I don’t like it when I have to leave the page builder I’m in to go to a different area to create a template or something like that. So for sure I don’t want to leave WordPress and go to VS Code and do stuff like that.
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This is not great. It’s not fantastic. So that’s number one. Like the more I’m very like firm on this, the more work you can do in a singular environment, the more efficient you’re going to be.
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Now, if that creates a ton of limitations and you have a really good reason to have to go outside of that, then by all means make that argument. But what I hear is, you know, what are the advantages of doing that?
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Well, I don’t know. I, it’s not really ever communicated. It’s not really ever communicated what the advantages are.
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Right.
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Um, people could look at a class based workflow and say, I don’t have to do that. Uh, that seems a little bit too complicated and I could just, you know, do it this old way I’ve always been doing it. And if that’s what they say, I can make really strong counter arguments and have as to why a class first workflow, why it’s necessary to go to the level of using a class first workflow. Plenty of arguments to be made there with really good reasons.
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OK. Same thing with tokenizing. It’s like I could just put in raw values for things. I don’t need to tokenize things. Well, actually, you do. And here’s some really, really strong reasons for doing that.
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And we can talk about the consequences of not doing it. We can talk about the consequences of not doing a class-based workflow. So when somebody says, you know, hey, you should go to this level, like you should go write PHP, you should go write JavaScript, you should go do this custom block theme, you should make your own
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blocks, you should… Then I say, why? And I haven’t heard a good reason. I just, that’s their thing. That’s what they like to do, prefer to do. They think, one thing I hear is, oh, well, it’s closer to native.
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Okay, why should I care about that? There’s never a good reason. And there’s never like a, well, because your page voter thing can’t do this over here. And then they demonstrate something. That never happens either.
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So you’re wanting me to do all this other stuff that’s outside of my current workflow that’s more complex, more spread out and can’t give me a reason to do it. That’s not a great sales pitch. Not a great and that’s what Gutenberg is asking of all of us essentially. It’s like no no no stop messing around in these very powerful page builders where you can do everything very fast and very efficiently and very scalably and maintainably and all of that.
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Stop doing all of that and come over to our environment over here, where it’s really just more limitations.
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Okay.
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And it’s, it’s more learning is more limitations is okay, but what’s the advantage? Well, I don’t know. I haven’t heard. I haven’t heard. Um, and so what we saw is a, you know, uh, it was kind of like a presentation.
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I would say it wasn’t like a, um, let’s build this thing from scratch. Like where with bricks you saw, my goal was let’s just build this thing from scratch. Now I debated, should I set up the colors ahead of time? Should I set up the typography ahead of time? Should I set up the whatever ahead of time, spacing?
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Those were really the only three things that I set up ahead of time. And when I did, because I did a dry run of that little of that situation because I needed to just know what my time was because we were confined to like 45 minutes and so I wanted to just make sure everything would fit in and when I did the dry run without setting
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up ACS as ahead of time it was like 50 minutes it was it was a little bit beyond the 45 and I was like okay it’s only five minutes to set that but it but I do need that five minutes I would like to spend that five minutes on those cards. I would like to spend that five minutes on the Bento grid extra or whatever. So I decided to set up the colors, typography, spacing ahead of time. And they had already said in the chat, you know, that stuff’s a little bit boring too.
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But like I said, I could show people how to do that, but it wasn’t as extensive. I would think if I had to guess that Brian set up okay with all of the VS code and the custom block styles and all probably more than five minutes probably a bit more than five minutes and that’s what we really need to know is like what was the setup time to get to that point to be able to start. We all know with Bricks and by the way with ACSS I mean I wanted to look the way the page looked, right? But I could have actually
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built it and then set up the colors, the spacing, the typography after it was built. You can do it that way too. If you know what you’re doing, if you know, if you know the correct usage of the tokens and things like that, you can actually set up those things after the fact too. So I debated almost doing that because that actually shows a ton of power, extra power that people don’t even realize within the framework. But anyway, yeah, so I am still unconvinced. My conclusion is I am still unconvinced that Gutenberg is a
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platform that we should be entertaining. I think that once again, seven years into the production of Gutenberg, it is insanely limiting. And every time I’ve seen it being used by a Gutenberg proponent, they have to do very special things to it to make it work. Now, you will see people build certain things, you know, Jamie Marsland speed build series. So far, I think everybody has used native Gutenberg with like the 2024 theme or whatever.
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What you will notice is one, and just so we’re all on the same page. What you will notice watching that, and what you will notice watching Jamie Marsland’s videos in general, they are highly, highly curated, specifically selected layouts
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that the block editor is capable of reproducing. So they’re very simple for the most part. You won’t see, and you also won’t see any like query looping being done. You won’t see a bunch of dynamic data being used. You won’t see any, any of the advanced stuff that you see on this channel. You will not see in those videos.
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You will not see any of it because the block editor can’t, can’t, it cannot handle any of that. It can’t do any of that. They would, they would have to go immediately into code and start writing PHP and JavaScript and custom block styles and custom blocks and dah, dah, dah. They would have to do all of that.
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As we saw from our friend Rob, who attempted to do requirements that I put out there, and it took him like four hours. And it took me, literally it took me 15 minutes in bricks. It took him like four hours of custom blocks
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and all this other crap. So I’ve just not, I’ve not seen any reason to use, in fact, I am trending further from Gutenberg. I am not, nobody’s bringing me closer based on what I’m seeing. I’m actually going further away. Now we need to have a whole discussion about
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some of the political side of Gutenberg because there’s some red, there’s some huge red flags there. I am actually at a point where I am not sure the Gutenberg is going to survive. Like that is, there is a real possibility that it is becoming more and more complex and convoluted behind the scenes.
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I don’t know if you guys knew this, but one of the top contributors to the Gutenberg project essentially quit and publicly quit and was like, I can’t even read the code base anymore. I don’t know what’s happening in the code. I can’t, it takes me hours to read and understand
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what’s going on enough to be able to just work on it a little bit. It’s like, essentially, it was, what would be like an analogy, right? It’s, he almost hung a lemon on it. Like, almost like, that’s the vibe I got,
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where he was like, this thing’s like a lemon. This is done. This is a done deal. And I know people will not admit that, that still work on the project and still believe in the project and all of that, but to me that’s a huge red flag. Huge red flag. And then we look at the seven years of development
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and the state that it’s currently in and it is just not a good, it’s not a good situation. It’s not a good environment. It’s built for the wrong kind of person. The core mission of Gutenberg doesn’t even make sense. Which we need to do, I need to do a whole new stream conversation about all of this. Because there’s been more developments,
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there’s more stuff going on behind the scenes that I think people need to know about. It’s tough, it’s a tough situation. So I’m actually moving further away from the block editor, further away from the Gutenberg project. I feel actually that Gutenberg should be a plugin,
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if anything, it should not be, and WordPress, once again, I will say, needs to focus on the core CMS functionality, of which is not trying to build an editor environment. So, all right, that’s my recap. That’s my recap.
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I was disappointed that we didn’t get to see the setup. It, and, and the reason I’m really disappointed actually is because a lot of people will say a lot of people who say no, no, no block editor is great. It’s this, it says that. And then I say, show me. And always, always, there’s this like magic whipped up behind the scenes that
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you never get to see. And then they’re like, okay, we’re going to start at this point right here. You won’t get to see all the technical stuff that I just did behind the scenes, but we’re going to start right here. And now I’ll show you how the block editor actually works just fine. But it’s like, hold on, you had to do all this magic and I don’t even know how long all that
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magic took. And I didn’t get to see any of the magic. And now you’re just going to pretend that this is like this for everybody. And we know it’s not. We know that’s not the case. So that’s why it’s really frustrating that constantly happens when I’m in conversations with people regarding Gutenberg. So yeah, it’s it’s I’m not convinced. I’m not convinced. And I like to do the streams because when you watch the demo of Bricks, especially when combined with automatic CSS, I don’t think I would I
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would love people anybody can turn on their camera I would like to see somebody else working at that speed efficiency level etc and yeah you could say that it is it’s an experience thing it’s a practice thing for sure for sure there’s a lot of experience and a lot of practice behind it but the point is the tools namely bricks namely automatic CSS facilitate the speed and efficiency and ability to do the things that we do like what I did with data attributes like what I would do with dynamic data like you know the class-based workflow auto BIM yada yada
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that is the tools are creating a lot of that efficiency and speed okay knowing what to do and how to do it and all of that is very important. But if you put me in a, in a, in a subpar tool, you, you aren’t going to see that I’m going to constantly run into roadblocks and challenges, and it’s going to be way slower and it’s going to be way less efficient and to be way less maintainable and scalable because there are legitimately a lot of tools, Divi, Elementor.
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It’s these, just, these things are not possible. You can’t even, you can’t even use a class-first workflow in most builders. So, like, right off the bat, I mean, if you put me in an element or a divi situation, there’s no classes, there’s none of that stuff, it’s going to be a nightmare. Put me in generate, they have a new selector system. I don’t think their new selector system is nearly as efficient in terms of adding classes,
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styling classes, all of that, as Bricsys. The tools do contribute a lot to speed and efficiency, assuming you know what you’re doing. Now, people will say that they can work very efficiently and fast in the block editor, but again, if you look, what are they doing?
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It’s just, they’re styling everything at the ID level. There’s no tokens, random values, magic numbers, hardly any real responsiveness. I mean, for fuck’s sake, Gutenberg doesn’t even have breakpoints. It doesn’t even have breakpoints.
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I don’t know what we’re talking about. I don’t know. This is a this conversation is very, very silly to me. This Gutenberg trying to sell this to everybody. It’s as I’ve said before, it’s a glorified word document is what it is. OK. Tyree says, I’m just going to say Kevin is murdering these opposing methods swiftly, and I love it and shout out to the opponents
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who will eventually be friends. Yeah, what we want, all we want. See, I’m not opposed to a new editor or page builder or whatever. It’s not like, oh, I just love Bricks. Oh, like Thomas is my best friend.
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I don’t even fucking know Thomas. I don’t know, I hardly know anything about Thomas. I talk to him in an email once like a quarter, okay? Why do I like Bricks? Why did I pick it as the builder? Because it’s really great,
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because it’s a phenomenal workflow, because it’s a phenomenal tool, because it’s superior to all of the other tools that I’ve looked at and tested. It is as simple as that. The answer can be that simple, okay?
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It’s not like, oh, this is just my personal favorite. I don’t have, my personal favorite is the one where it can do all the things I needed to do and it’s a very fast efficient workflow. That’s how I pick a personal favorite. Okay, it’s not because I like its colors, I like its branding, I like its copy, I like, no. I like it as a tool, okay, because it does certain things at a certain level and the other tools don’t do that. That’s the only reason, that’s the only reason.
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All right, so let’s move on. I know there’s, I know the people with the websites that are getting critiqued today, they want to get their critiques in, so we’re gonna have a whole conversation though about Gutenberg, an updated conversation, and where, you know, we should probably, it won’t just be about Gutenberg. It’ll be about the current state of page builders, I think. Because I think we’re quickly narrowing down as well to like, you know, there’s some, there’s, there’s the ones we really need to pay attention to and support and uplift.
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And then there’s all the rest that we probably just need to start forgetting about. Okay. Let’s go to number one. Let me see if we can get a little screen sharing going here. All right, let’s go here. We have Fawn River Doodles. Oh, if you’re new to WDD live, we do in-depth web design critiques. That’s what we’re about to do right now.
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You can participate in the chat. Whatever your thoughts and feelings are as we go through this website, go ahead and put them in the chat. If you have questions, go ahead and put them in the chat, but they need to have hashtag Q or hashtag question. Okay.
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So that I can search for them. Real quick, let’s just see what some people are saying here in the chat about that conversation. Okay, the setup was just there at the start. I suggested to Brian to make a video about the setup. He’s considering it. I mean, I think it’s mandatory. It’s mandatory. You have to show that. Okay, the Gutenberg advantage is fine-grained control over the code resulting in potentially leaner outcomes. Not really, though. Not really. Because while I don’t have control over Bricks’s code, we’ve already
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checked the output, right? The output is clean, almost as clean as it could possibly get. So yes, if you’re going to compare the code output, actually Gutenberg is not all that great. The block editor is not all that fantastic. So for the people that say that’s the cleanest possible code output, no.
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I mean, if you’re using the block editor, it’s actually not. So, um, Bricks is very, very, very clean though.
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Okay.
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Lizzie says I’m struggling with a huge learning curve as a newbie, but I’m so grateful for your channel and content. Plus Dave Foy made tons of my starting out decisions so much easier and clear. Well, that’s good to hear. That is really, really good to hear. We are not, um, you know, this channel is for everybody.
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This channel is for advanced, uh, users. It is for intermediate users. It is for beginner users. We’ll say web designers, right? Or developers, or whatever you want to call yourself. Now don’t make the mistake, Gutenberg says that they’re a tool built for everyone, right?
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We’re for everyone in the sense that if you want to actually learn and know what you’re doing, this channel is for you. And so we welcome beginners, obviously, because we want to level you up. But a tool like Gutenberg, who says we are for everyone, what they mean is like, they want beginners to be able to use it
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without caring about what they’re doing or learning anything. And that’s just a ridiculous concept and notion.
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Love the tutorial you just put out
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showing how to finish that ghost page using custom fields. Mind blown. Okay, fantastic. Good, good, good. We got some questions in.
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That’s good.
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I just want to make sure there’s nothing we missed in terms of comments. Maddie says, massive thanks to you for joining us. It’s invaluable. And same to Brian. Yeah, you are very welcome. Okay.
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Good, good, good, good, good.
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All right.
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We’re good to go. So we have Fawn River Doodles. We always start with a no scroll test, which is essentially like, do I know what’s going on here without scrolling around and clicking on links and getting additional context and information? And is it well written?
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What is the copy like? What is the general UI, UX, et cetera? So Fawn River Doodles, you know, pretty clean logo up here. I’m never really a fan of the, well, I don’t know. To me, there’s a little bit of spacing issue going on in this logo like I feel a little close together but I’m never really a fan of the centered text with
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the left kind of alignment on the actual whole block kind of situation I don’t know but overall like you know I’m interested in the the typography good good little picture icon thing there litters puppies parents reserve puppy Reserve puppy. And then I’m just going to read all of the hero text here. So it says barn doodle and golden doodle puppies. I don’t think this was translated by the way. I don’t
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know how to check on that. I don’t think it was. But let’s inspect this. I want to see. Okay, we have an H1 followed by an H2 followed by a div followed by a button group. Okay, so we’ve got a little, it’s called web design for Dommies by the way, because we do look at the code. This is the Dom, if you don’t know what a Dom is.
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And so we do inspect this from time to time and make sure that things are on the up and up as far as this goes. But this is built in bricks and it says get a loyal friend to brighten every day. And the H1 is barn doodle and golden doodle puppies. Add a family member who is always excited to be with you and always looking forward to you coming home.
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Available puppies, upcoming litters. Okay, unwrap a surprise, put a smile on a loved one’s face. Live active and healthy, experience the outdoors and activity, find companionship, a friend always excited to see you. So these right here, these cards are kind of like our,
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those are like the main selling points. At least that’s what they’re attempting to put here. You know the top three things they want you to feel and believe and buy into in order to get you to want one of these little puppies here. So as far as the no scroll test goes, I think that first of all you know the typography in the logo does not match the typography on the site. It feels a little off. Like this feels much more elegant and this feels much more just bleh. So I would do a
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little bit of work. I am not a fan of this font situation going on here. Let’s go ahead and see inspect and okay what is that? So that’s Montserrat. Yeah I’m you know not not great. The left alignment here is a no go. Let’s not do that. We definitely need to make that. Why is this text basic with a P inside of it?
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Is this dynamically brought in? I don’t, I wouldn’t think so. I don’t know what’s going on with that. Cause usually the text basic is just, unless they used, I can’t remember based on the class names, if the rich text element is Bricks text or Bricks text basic,
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I thought basic was the not rich text, which should be a P by itself. But anyway, that needs to be centered text there. And then I’m not, you know, the H1, H2 situation. The H1 is all you need here. This is not another, like,
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it’s not like a section heading or a new topic or anything like that. This is all one topic right here, right? So you have the H1, okay, and then this just needs to be a P, and this can be a P as well, P tag, a paragraph tag.
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Available puppies upcoming litters. This button text right here, I think we could probably work on that. I’m gonna brainstorm that a little bit and come back to it. But it’s not really, you know, I don’t think it’s the best choice. You have reserve
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puppy up here. Right away we’re met with three different calls to action. I can reserve a puppy, I can see available puppies, or I can look at upcoming litters. I’m actually just makes me kind of curious now what does reserve a puppy do? Reserving a puppy. Process is easy. So they go through the pro… oh okay is this the footer? That’s the footer down here. So there’s not much to this page. Connecting with your new best friend only takes a few simple steps. Process is easy. Okay let’s while we’re
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here let’s just talk about this. We have a hero that does literally nothing for us. Okay so if I think some people feel like a page has to have a hero it’s like oh put a section up there it’s got to have a hero section and then we’ll just put this intro in it but this intro doesn’t tell me anything new, it doesn’t like all it does is refer me to the next section right. I can’t do anything with this hero section. So actually this page would be better if that section just didn’t exist right. So I go to reserve
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puppy and I met with now what the process of reserving the puppy is. What did that be? Just let’s just get to the point. Isn’t that better than having a hero section that just refers me to the next section down. So that’s one easy easy win for this page right here. But now we need a different heading okay. And you know you have an option to put like some keywords in your heading and all of this. So you know the process is easy. How about just reserving a puppy. That was
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terrible. Reserving a puppy is easy. And then we also need this to be an H1. So we’ve done some reconstruction here. You’re definitely going to have to change some DOM stuff around. Okay, reserving a puppy is easy. But hey, I mean, it’s like, okay, you know, there’s a lot of links in here. I’m seeing link, link, link, link, link, link, link, link.
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I thought I was just gonna be able to reserve a puppy on this page and I’m seeing a bunch of like stuff I have to do. Links I have to figure out what’s going on here. There’s a phone number I can call. So now I’m thinking in general this thing just needs to be dramatically simplified. But let’s see what the actual process is.
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So I got to fill out an application. I got to pay a deposit. Okay, and the application of course is on a different page it looks like. I got to pick a puppy. Hmm hold on hold on hold on. Hmm shouldn’t I pick my puppy? I feel like I should pick my puppy first. Shouldn’t I? Either check out available puppies or okay hmm this seems like out of order. Available
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puppies or your puppy isn’t born yet. Okay okay all right now you’re now you’re pointing me to the upcoming litters, all right? And then take home a lifelong friend is step four. Well, I don’t even think we need a step four. Okay, this is a going home kit, available to answer any questions.
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What is the going home kit? See, now we’re in a mode of like, I gotta figure out what this business is doing in order to like now figure out how they gotta reframe all this stuff. Because it’s not feeling like
0:31:34
it’s the most efficient method possible here. So the going home kit eases the transition for your puppy and your family. It’s worth about $240 and includes the following items. Wafer sample pack, training coupon, pet insurance, sample, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh.
0:31:50
Okay. All right. I don’t, yeah, those are good benefits obviously, but I don’t think, I would take out step four. I would take out step four. It’s you fill out you first of all you pick your puppy. I would say you pick your puppy then you fill out an application and actually pay deposit, fill out
0:32:13
application, pay deposit. Why is the deposit a separate? Does that have to be a separate step? No, it shouldn’t be a separate step. First of all you’re going to make me fill out my whole life history right here. Just collect the deposit in this step right here. Just collect the deposit in this step. Very easy to do. Is this WS form?
0:32:32
Looks like WS form. Should easily be able to collect the deposit right here. Um, first name, last name. So another thing I’ll say, uh, just real quick for forms in general, we actually don’t talk about forms all that much, uh, on WDD live, but this is one instance where we need to talk about the
0:32:52
form for sure. Multi-step form. Needs to be a multi-step form. Number two, I’m not a fan of inside labels on some inputs and then top labels on other inputs. If you’re gonna have top labels on any of the inputs, put top labels on every input. So now, because it’s very inconsistent. And then we got, what’s this gap going on here? It’s just not a great experience, right? And then we’re missing some spacing between our,
0:33:19
oh, we got, well, we got spacing here. We got no spacing here. So that situation needs to be figured out. But just, yeah, top align all the labels. Yeah, we can clean up this form. All right, let’s go back.
0:33:31
Now I need to go see upcoming litters. I need to see available puppies. And then we’re going to talk about remapping this whole process and what the reserve puppy page should actually be. Okay, let’s let’s see what available puppies looks like. All right, so we’ve got some nice looking cards here. What elm, birch, pine, ash. Okay, these are the puppies names, I guess. Oak, dogwood, magnolia. Yeah, I guess when you’ve got so many, you just you just, hey, pick some, pick some trees, name them after trees.
0:34:04
Okay.
0:34:05
So ready to go home. Adoption fee, 3000. Bernadoodle. Am I saying that right? What is a Bernadoodle? I’ve never even heard this before.
0:34:12
They just making up fucking dogs left and right over here in the US. Which I assume that’s where we’re at here. A Bernadoodle. Bernadoodle, Bernadoodle.
0:34:20
And then what’s this?
0:34:21
A golden doodle. Okay. Glazed donut. Donut hole. All right. That’s cute.
0:34:27
The option fee, golden doodle, F1. I don’t know what F1 is. What does F1 mean? What does mini mean? This is the color, I get that. Hmm, hmm.
0:34:39
Okay, so now what I’m thinking is, well, let’s click on this. Hi, I’m Elm. Let’s try to figure out what F1 means. Oh, see, there it is again. No context. Now I got to know like I got to be an expert. I didn’t mean to click on that.
0:34:55
Got to be an expert to kind of know what’s going on here. Wavy is this what the hairstyle or something? Oh my god, I can FaceTime the dog. Look at this. Look at this. A little about me. Here’s where I want my new family. No, it’s small, but I’m sweet. I love to explore. I’m learning so many new things. Okay.
0:35:11
Golly, this is a lot of work. It’s a lot of work. Um, all right. Raised on the BAB program. Golly, there’s so much stuff to click on and learn. Okay.
0:35:21
Don’t do this. Don’t do this. Uh, that needs to be a like modal or something like I shouldn’t go to another URL to just get a little paragraph of, of, uh, badass breeder program. Okay. Um, to get a little bit of context for what’s going on,
0:35:41
that could be a fucking tool tip or like a modal, a little pop-up thing.
0:35:46
Okay.
0:35:47
There’s a lot to digest here.
0:35:49
Low shed, energy, moderate, trainability, eager to train. There’s a lot to digest. Okay. So I can definitely choose a puppy. This should be step number one, right? Step number one.
0:36:03
Let’s go to what does upcoming litters look like? So now what I meet the parents or something, what’s going on here? Jade and Marshall summer drinks.
0:36:13
I don’t know what this means.
0:36:14
What is the, I know you’re trying to be cute, but it’s a little confusing. I don’t know what the context is. Tree litter, the chocolates, donut shop. Oh, it’s just, you’re just nicknaming the families or something.
0:36:29
Spring flowers, spring 2024. But now there’s two called spring 2024. I don’t know. I’m a little confused here. These are definitely not accessible labels. It’s a lot of work to do here. There’s a lot of work to clean up here. Okay, what do we do here? Tree litter, Bernadudo. I’m going to go to the chat in a minute.
0:36:52
You guys got to help me out. Let me know if I’m missing anything because I’m about to do a wrap up on this where I just talk about like kind of rethinking the strategy that’s going on here. Recent litter. If this is a recent litter, isn’t this like, hold on. I’m so confused. Aren’t they just available after they’re born?
0:37:18
Like, what if it’s a recent litter? Aren’t they available? Or is Okay, maybe there’s a certain time before they can become available. But but like you have ready to go home here. Look at all these filters. Look at all these filters. Oh my god. Oh, these are generations. F1 multi-generation. Okay.
0:37:39
Female, male.
0:37:40
By size. I guess, you know what size, I guess that’s based on their parents.
0:37:44
Maybe I don’t know.
0:37:45
Red, Fanta.
0:37:46
Okay.
0:37:46
Filter by color coat. I don’t like the two row filter thing. Obviously we want to tidy that up a bit. When you get to this many filters, maybe, maybe it’s time for a sidebar filter situation. Okay we’ll talk about how to make these cards a little bit better we’ll talk about how to make
0:38:11
the flow a little bit better. I just don’t know the difference between upcoming litter and like if it’s expected in one week. Okay ready to go home on or after 5-10. I feel like this could all be in the puppies. Like, go into puppies, and then, because you have ready to go home, this badge could easily just say, like,
0:38:31
ready in one week, or ready in two weeks, or ready in whenever, you know, upcoming litter. But I don’t, I’m not convinced that we need to have two separate areas for that. I’m literally just, if we’re boiling this down to the most simplest thing, I’m picking a puppy.
0:38:45
That’s what I’m doing. And if the puppy doesn’t exist yet, I can’t pick it. But if it’s upcoming, I just need to know it’s upcoming. If it’s available now, I just need to know, like ready to go home, I just need to know it’s ready to go home.
0:38:57
Got it? Okay. So I think that’s the simplest approach. It’s just, let’s pick a puppy. So I would actually say, this would become, like, let’s get rid of this. And at this point now, it’s like,
0:39:09
we actually should put different things in our nav up here. And yeah, it shouldn’t even be reserve a puppy. Let’s let’s go to it is so hard to do in the in the DOM but I okay right here. Pick. Pick my puppy, something like that. Pick a puppy, pick a puppy, maybe pick a puppy. Maybe that’s that’s a little more casual.
0:39:37
Pick a puppy. Okay, choose a puppy. Choose. Do we wanna pick or do we wanna choose? Choose a puppy, okay? Up here, I would say like there needs to be links
0:39:49
to various types of info, like an about, okay? There’s no like, is there even an about page for this whole situation going on here? Who do I know who’s behind this and all of that? You know, we need that. We probably need a resources area, training puppies. We know there’s a lot to put up here. Okay. What we probably don’t need is litters. And, you know, obviously you have, you’ll have puppies here because that’s
0:40:16
the main thing. What is, what does parents do? Meet the parents. Okay. Thor. All right. That’s probably good to have as well. So you have puppies, you have parents, but then we need some other informative and helpful things up here. I think the main call to action would be, you know, choose a puppy. And then let’s talk about the process. This would be choose a puppy here too. So I think you can get rid of, look how we can simplify this, right? You can get rid of a whole ass button right there. And
0:40:45
then this becomes your choose a puppy. Got it. Okay. Get that centered the way that it’s supposed to be. We’re starting to simplify, right? What did we, we saw when we arrived? And then that, that button up there, essentially the same thing. There was links everywhere. There’s buttons everywhere. We’re trying to, we’re trying to simplify that down. Unwrap a surprise, put a smile on a loved one’s face. I’m not sold that that’s the best thing that we can talk about right here. Live active and healthy. Experience the outdoors. I guess
0:41:19
you’re alluding to the fact that I’m going to be more active and healthier because I’m going to walk my dog and take my dog places. I think that’s what you’re alluding to. It’s not clear enough. It needs to be, this needs to be rewritten. You know, companionship is a good one to hit on. I think if we’re gonna keep companionship, these other two things need to be rewritten. We need to find this.
0:41:42
And this is where you survey, survey dog owners, people that are in love with their dogs. Right. And you know, what are the top three things you surveyed? It’s like, what’s that? What’s that game show? Why?
0:41:54
Why is it slipping my mind? Okay. I’m just going to move on. But if you know the game show I’m talking about, it was like we surveyed a hundred people. Okay. What are the top three things on the board?
0:42:05
Top three things that people say over and over. Those are the top three things that go right here.
0:42:09
Okay.
0:42:10
Unwrapping a surprise is like, that’s a few minutes of exhilaration and all of that, but it’s not why you wanna make a 15 year commitment to a dog, right? Find the top three reasons people wanna make a 15 year commitment to a dog.
0:42:24
Those three things go right here. A poor match is a nightmare that can be avoided. Starting out with a little bit of negativity, okay. Oh, I like, no, I’d get rid of the emoji here. Okay, let’s see what the narrative is. A bad match is bad for the puppy and the family.
0:42:44
The good news is that it’s easily avoidable. In order to give each puppy a voice and matching them with the family, we use the BAB temperament test. There’s a lot to the BAB program. So you see how you’ve gone from like, there’s a little bit of a disconnect here. There’s a little bit of a disconnect. You’ve gone from get a loyal friend to brighten your day and we see what
0:43:02
we’re doing here. You can get a puppy from us and then right down to, oh my God, this is a horrible situation that you have to avoid and here’s how we do it. And we have this proprietary temperament test and all of that. I think we can discuss this a little bit easier and simpler and I know what you’re trying to do. I know I know you’re trying to like agitate and then you know wrap it back around but it’s a little too early. It’s a little too early for that. A poor match is a nightmare that can be avoided.
0:43:38
I don’t know that everybody that arrives here is like having that problem, right? I would rather see you talk about an actual core mission here. Like what is the core mission? Why do you even exist as a breeder, as a company, right? Let’s maybe start there. And then later on, maybe we can get into like some problems that happen with certain breeders or maybe you don’t go to a breeder or, okay, we can get into those things later. I think it might be a little too early for that right now.
0:44:07
Let’s maybe start with the mission. And when you, when you talk about your mission of like why you’re even here in the first place and why I should care, it helps me understand that I’m in the right place. Like, Ooh, I aligned with that mission. That sounds really good to me. Yeah, I am in the right place. Right. And then I’m going to keep reading. I think it’s a little early to just jump right to this like seemingly random problem
0:44:30
that you’re wanting to hit on here and your solution to it. Okay, and okay now see this, see what we’ve got going on. We’re kind of wasting copy opportunities. This is just rehashing what we already talked about. You already told me all this right here. You went bang, bang, bang. You gave me the little selling points and now you’re trying to make me read them again and then this time you threw in some photos which I think is actually more impactful than just these little you know chintzy icons here for sure but we don’t need to say
0:45:02
the same thing twice literally the same thing these are the same three points with just a little bit of extra paragraph below and some imagery we could have opened with this right here for sure. Okay, and then you have getting started, see, and we don’t need out, we don’t need all these options. The number one action you want people to take right off the bat is choosing a puppy. That is the number like here, go to the puppies, they’re all really cute and fucking choose one.
0:45:30
Then once they choose it, they’re in the process, they’re in the process. So all roads for these pages and sections probably need to lead to choosing your puppy. Okay, so let’s just do that. Choose your puppy, choose your puppy, choose your puppy, choose your puppy, they end up right here. When they end up right here, now we need to not lose them. We need to, we need to make these cards a little bit cleaner. I don’t like the fact that the labels are all up in the photo and all of that, like they’re too big, the labels are too big there’s probably too many of them
0:46:04
right here they can get all this information when they when they get to the actual page because a lot of it is very repetitive f1 f1 f1 f1 f1 f1 f1 it’s a Bernadudo Bernadudo Bernadudo Bernadudo okay like we’re just repeating the same thing over and over and over again in most of these cards that’s not a space. Clean this up. Let’s say I like Elm though. We’re going to go to Elm. Okay. Reserve puppy FaceTime me. Hmm. Rob is already looking forward to you. It’s best to text to confirm. Okay. Good time for a video call. I actually like this a lot. I like FaceTime me. I really
0:46:43
like this because you’re going to, you’re going to immediately get the person on the phone and like make a connection with them and be able to talk with them and answer whatever question. That’s actually really, really, really, I like that a lot. So reserve puppy and FaceTime me. I don’t know, you know, choose, I would say this, I would use dynamic data for this, right?
0:47:04
So instead of reserve puppy, that’s it’s so sterile. It’s so like unpersonal. This would be choose Elm, okay? Or bring Elm home or something like that, you know, like, and you can easily inject the name of the puppy. You’ve got it right here, right?
0:47:22
You can easily inject the name of the puppy with dynamic data into the call to action. I think that would be, that would be a much better way to approach that. And then when they click on this, stop doing all this nonsense, right? Take me right, essentially to right here and don’t say application. Here’s where I would actually, I would actually pass along the dynamic data, okay? So let’s adopt Elm, like this. So it knows I just came from Elm’s page, right? I clicked on the CTA on Elm, so it’s like
0:47:58
adopt Elm and then you know, okay there’s this, this, and I actually think again this hero section is useless. So I would I would I would actually get rid of that hero section right there and then I would make this say like this would be my h1 and then it would say adopt elm or whatever. Adopt elm right bang okay maybe that’s not the best but something like this we need to put a little extra thought into it okay and now I’m right into the process. And guess what I do? I pay my deposit at the end. And then of course over here you’ve got a ton of
0:48:35
shitload of wasted space. I mean look at all this wasted space over here. This sidebar is where you’re saying like, okay when you adopt a dog from us you get remember that laundry list of stuff you get? You get the training packet, you get to this, you get to that, it’s $240, okay, that all goes right here in the sidebar. It’s good to put a testimonial here too, but for sure you want all of those other benefits they get from adopting with you, with your company, all that gets listed right here next
0:49:02
to the adopt elm. You have an FAQs section probably, there’s a lot of stuff that needs to be added to this page. But you see how we’re simplifying. We’re simplifying in the sense that the main thing, the first thing we want people to do when they arrive,
0:49:17
assuming that they’ve read some things and they’re bought into the mission, they understand what we do, our process, all that, we want them to just look at puppies. And then once they’re looking at a puppy, we want to make it as easy as possible for them
0:49:30
to fill out the application, pay the deposit, and get to that, reserve that puppy essentially, right? So a lot of simplification can be done here. We talked about simplification with the cards, talked about simplification with the navigation up here, adding some additional things that need to be
0:49:47
in the navigation that aren’t currently there. Okay, let’s look at this footer situation then we’re gonna move on to the second website because there’s a lot going on in this footer. I think that this could be simplified for sure. Okay, you’ve got puppy training up here, right?
0:50:01
Well, kind of. All right. There’s this, this need, we need to go a little bit more in depth with this. Prices. Okay. Good, good, good.
0:50:11
Yeah, that doesn’t need to be, this is kind of just like, doesn’t need to exist. Put this information elsewhere. stud service areas we serve leave a review subscribe purchase agreement legal policies top faqs If you’re gonna do I’m not a fan of faqs having their own URL like this unless they’re just gonna be a lot of information Yeah, I Would just have an FAQs page sortable searchable filterable, whatever
0:50:40
There’s a lot of ways to do that But I this is just a lot of it’s it’s causing a lot of extra clicks a lot of wasted space This is thin content in terms of Google’s eyes like if you’re if you’re letting Google index this stuff It’s indexing a bunch of really really thin content pages not good for the domain overall Is this Okay, at least you got your h1 situation title, but yeah, that’s I would I would redo that a little bit. You already have a CPT for the FAQs.
0:51:16
You just don’t like remove the URLs for them and just render them on an actual FAQs page. Let me let me hop over to the chat and see what other people are saying here. Unfortunately, I don’t have my two screens. So I can’t monitor at the same time. I have to pause what we’re doing and then hop over to chat. Okay, let’s see. Finally, wow. Okay. Bernadette doodles a cross between a Bernice Mountain Dog and a poodle.
0:51:42
Got it.
0:51:43
Okay.
0:51:44
All right. Why is font on the end so small? Either the logo needs to be bigger, the header container needs to be smaller. I do agree with Pete here. That’s part of the problem with… I didn’t want to zoom in.
0:51:53
I wanted to go up. Part of the problem with like, this is like, bang, in your face links, because they’re oversized compared to what’s going on with the logo over here. Jamie says, I agree about the centered text. Maybe I’d like to see a tagline that quickly tells me exactly what the site is about.
0:52:10
Okay, good feedback there. I hit the like button for KG, of course, obviously. I think if it’s a WYSIWYG custom field, pulling into basic text element, but yeah, I just don’t know why they would be using dynamic data in the hero of the homepage necessarily.
0:52:24
That’s the part that didn’t make sense to me. Okay, so reserve a puppy means apply and get on a list for a puppy. It could be from a litter that is already born or if they are all spoken for then reserve from an upcoming litter of puppies. Got it. Okay. Got it. All right.
0:52:46
Hmm.
0:52:49
Okay, what I would need to ask is, is there a waiting list constantly? Is that a common thing that I need to like, I need to get on a list for like, but here’s the thing is like, there’s all these puppies I can look at that are, it says are, you know, ready to go home and that appear to be available. So I don’t know, why do I need to reserve one if all these are available? Essentially like, maybe there’s a situation where,
0:53:15
okay, I don’t like any of these, but I do know I want to adopt a puppy from you. I wanna be able to get on a list where I get notified every time there’s a new litter, there’s new puppies available, but that’s a different situation to me
0:53:28
than like reserve a puppy. And why do I need to pay a deposit necessarily to be on a list like that? I don’t know. There’s some logistics and strategy that I would want to talk about there. I just think it overall can be easier.
0:53:40
Okay, let’s see. Anyone know what template company uses? Okay. The dom say or let’s see. Puppy farms are okay. Yeah, pup first then apply.
0:53:54
Okay. All right. As a former preservation breeder, exhibitor, author, and judge of golden retrievers, this is antithetical to what a reputable breeder should do. No one gets to buy a puppy online. Hard for me to watch.
0:54:10
Okay. All right. Well, yeah, there’s a lot of, you know, now we got to get into puppy politics, right? F1 puppies can drive race cars. Sold. Let’s see.
0:54:22
Okay. The litters are not necessarily born yet. People can get on the reserve list to choose a puppy when they are born. Okay. Mmm. Usually waiting lists of like a year or more. Then the litter doesn’t become available eight weeks after. So there’s a fine window of when they’re still public. It takes a lot of planning, et cetera.
0:54:52
Got it. Okay. I still think, um, I still think it can be streamlined a little bit. Okay. Uh, yes. Family feud was the name of the, of the game show.
0:55:03
Thank you.
0:55:04
Okay.
0:55:05
All right.
0:55:06
There’s a lot to, we’re going to move on to the second website just so we don’t take up too much time here, but there, there is definitely a lot to improve on and streamline in general. I think we’ve given enough feedback at least for now. They can go make some changes, go make some updates, and, but yes, yes, there is a lot to do, both on the UI, on the UX, on the process, on the copy. It’s kind of like this is an across the board, just every area.
0:55:37
It’s not horrible, right? All the bones are there and now we have to start doing a lot of refinement. Refinement of almost every area to get this to where it needs to be. But it’s I will say it’s a good start. It’s a it’s a decent start. All right. Let’s go to home blushing flowers. Blushing flowers. Okay. No scroll test we’ve got a logo that I can’t read don’t know what that says Blossig this was translated by the way but I’m mainly I can’t read that because
0:56:10
of the script font I’m not sure that’s an M that’s an N blow blow man blow man Blossig blow man Blossig is that a name is that a person’s name oh it’s Blossig blowman well hold on damn it that’s in a different order. Okay, I’m a little lost. So we’ve got bouquets, we’ve got vases, gift vouchers, about Blossig, that must be a person. Blossig must be the person.
0:56:36
Contact and make an appointment. We’ve got a little shopping bag. We’ve got a giant hero. Okay, I’m going to start scrolling around. I mean, I, we get it. It’s flower bouquets, right? Okay, wait, hold on. Damn it. Mod. Who’s
0:56:52
Mod? I thought we were talking about Blossig. Is this the company? Is this the person? Hmm. All right. Let’s go to about let me just figure this situation out real quick. Ah, my name is Mod Gisbers. See, I never would have guessed Gisbers because that’s not anywhere on here. And I’m the face behind Blossig Blomen.
0:57:14
I don’t know what, what was this translated from? From Dutch.
0:57:18
Okay.
0:57:18
All right. Uh, we’ll come back to this about page, but now I know what’s going on here. So Maude is the person. I don’t know anything behind the name Blasig Blomen, but maybe we’ll get there at some point. Right now, let’s just talk about what’s going on in our no scroll test.
0:57:33
So as you can see a little bit of confusion right off the bat. We have a hero section that doesn’t have any content, which is very interesting. I’m not a fan of these. And I will also say, this looks like a random coffee cup. This is not, and there’s a little spilled coffee here.
0:57:57
Not the best photo for the hero section. Because I’m looking down here, what caught my eye, this is great photography, great photography, great photography, great photography, makes these bouquets look very nice. This does not look nice, right here. It’s almost you’re starting off with what I would imagine is the worst photo in your catalog.
0:58:23
Just not a great start. Down here I like these photos. Once again though I got to say I’m not a fan of the font choice. I’m just not a fan of the font choice here. This does not feel bouquet-y and elegant and such. And I’m not a fan of the… this seems like it’s almost like a fake italics. This whole section, this whole scenario right here can be improved dramatically just with a legit hero section. And then that legit hero section with content
0:58:59
will actually give us an opportunity to talk more about what’s going on here. And then it’s like, all right, we have, let’s go to like 1800flowers.com. This would be like your primary corporate competitor, right? And this is the juxtaposition
0:59:15
It’s like you can go you know something like a hundred one eight hundred flowers, or you can go with like a private You know flower boutique kind of situation right and We know why certain people would choose one eight hundred flowers over something like this all right And we’re gonna get into that because I think that’s going to be very important as we go through the site. Um…
0:59:40
But look, they’re, you know, they’re showing people and faces, which I, I, I don’t even like their fucking photo that they show. Who’s this Mr. Rogers looking motherfucker, like, in the, in the, in the right? I can’t even see his face, all cut off.
0:59:52
Let’s bring this in a little bit. Let’s bring, let’s, let’s go with, uh, I guess the easiest way to do it would be this. It doesn’t even improve the situation on different device sizes.
1:00:03
Oh, it’s a kid. Okay, so on mobile, you can kind of see everybody, right? And then as you get to that, this is just not a good, I mean, what is 1-800-Flowers? This is amateur hour from 1-800-Flowers right here. All right, a lot going on, obviously,
1:00:19
lot of photos, lot of boxes, lot of blocks, lot of links, lot of, I don’t, I just hate it. I just hate everything about this site right here. So I was going to see if they were doing something great that we could compare to and they’re just not. This is a terrible site. So we’ll go back to here. Okay, we’ve got the Jill, we’ve got the Biba, we’ve got the Amour. They’re all bouquets, right? So do we have to write the word bouquet
1:00:52
over and over and over and over and over again? Not sure that we do, not sure that we do.
1:00:57
Let’s scroll down.
1:00:58
What, wanna put together your bouquet yourself? In addition to our standard range, also possible to have a custom bouquet put together. We can then look together at what your wishes are and put together a beautiful bouquet. All right, we just need a little bit better.
1:01:12
And this is translated. So I always give them a break on the copy when it’s translated Because I don’t know if it’s actually translated really well or if it’s translated poorly So unfortunately, we’re not gonna be able to talk about the copy all that much But I do really like the photog like, you know, this is well done because it it makes it these are obviously nice They’re obviously nice book. I don’t know a lot about flowers. I’m not a big flower guy, okay, but these look really well done.
1:01:40
It doesn’t look like amateur bouquets, looks like somebody that knows what they’re doing, so that’s always good and the photography is good, the people in the photography are good. So in terms of the photography I would grade that really high, just not the hero photography, this needs to be swapped out here. Okay, let’s go to here.
1:02:00
All right.
1:02:01
Standard, you know, e-com template looking thing. I can change my quantities. Real bestseller, the combination of purple, orange, and pink
1:02:09
artificial flowers.
1:02:10
Okay.
1:02:11
Uh, the silk bouquet is best combined. This is, so this is silk.
1:02:15
These are fake.
1:02:15
Are any of these real?
1:02:16
Hold on.
1:02:17
What is this? Perfect bouquet. Okay. Okay. Flowers, artificial flowers. All right. Are they all are they all artificial? Now, now, now, now I’ve got questions. Now I’ve got questions.
1:02:38
Okay, I’ve got to put myself in the mindset of somebody who would buy a bouquet also. think they’re all artificial. So I guess you can ship around the world maybe do you? Let me let me go let me go here. Why can’t I check out here? Oh that’s out of stock. Okay mm-hmm let’s go back because I was, you know, if I go to 1-800-Flowers, I pretty much know right off the bat they’re going to be able to ship anywhere and they’re real flowers, right? So, we see
1:03:34
why this website would benefit dramatically from a legitimate hero section with actual content. If all you do is artificial bouquets, it needs to say that right off the bat and then give a really good selling point for, I don’t even know why people might choose artificial over, like there’s gotta be some good reasons, right?
1:03:53
Okay, so some of that needs to be talked about in the initial opening copy, but just setting people up for what they’re about to experience. There really isn’t any setup for what I’m about to experience and I have to figure it out along the way. I also don’t know if I’m going to be able to even order these. Like the minute I arrive
1:04:12
it’s in Dutch. I have to translate it but you’re not selling only to Dutch, right? And then I don’t know if you’re going to be able to ship to me or not so I don’t even know if I should even start poking around. I don’t really know the benefits of ordering from you versus somebody else. Let’s go read the about.
1:04:34
My name is Mod, I don’t know how to pronounce the name, Gisbers, and I’m the face behind Blasig Blomen. In June, 2021, I started arranging silk flowers. Fresh flowers are of course beautiful, but they only give your interior a boost for a short time. When I worked in a home furnishing store,
1:04:49
I came into contact with silk flowers. I was immediately sold. Okay. I’m starting to learn from the about like reasons people would choose these things. These things need to be hit on with really good copy on the homepage.
1:05:02
Right.
1:05:02
Uh, at that time I bought fresh flowers every week at the market and arranged them at home exactly to my liking, enjoyed arranging and be caring for flowers less. Okay. Again, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh. Based on my own creativity, I started arranging silk bouquets.
1:05:13
I soon noticed that arranging silk was the words differently. I’m arranging a fresh bouquet. You can bend each stem and arrange it entirely according to your wishes over the years and created my own way of arranging many, many customers have
1:05:21
been creating a nice side effect. Okay.
1:05:22
Durability client.
1:05:23
Okay.
1:05:24
Got it.
1:05:24
You got it. You got a man. Okay. So obviously, obviously. Um, and, and like, uh, realtors, I can see if you’re realtors and you’re staging homes and things like that.
1:05:32
I mean, you don’t want to be dealing with all this, like, you know, fresh flowers. Obviously you want something like this. There’s a market to sell to. We need to start calling some of this out. We need to start putting some of this as content. I think if we just kind of put ourselves in a visitor’s shoes. They arrive here and they see flowers and you already are talking about arranging a custom bouquet. They don’t even know anything about anything.
1:06:05
They just see flowers and that’s it.
1:06:08
Okay.
1:06:09
And they got to kind of figure everything out as they go. That’s what you want to avoid because most visitors don’t have patience for that. They need to know these things right off the bat. Okay. Now, now that we know backgrounds and information, we can start to look at the rest but you know this is a general e-commerce situation heavily dependent on photos number one heavily dependent
1:06:37
on logistics it’s just like can I order in my country how long is it going to take to get to me is the price right what’s the shipping going to be yada yada yada very standard e-commerce stuff so this is a very templety looking site obviously. What you’re really missing here is all of the background information on the homepage, the sales copy on the homepage, the differentiation of why people would want to order this kind of flowers versus you know real flowers and on and
1:07:08
on and on. That’s really what’s being missed here. Like I said photography is good. It’s all logistics and copywriting really. Logistics and copywriting. Let me go in and see what the chat has to say for feedback on this. Flower politics now. Deliveries only to the Netherlands and Belgium see single product page. Well that’s just free shipping. Where do you see that they only ship to there? Am I missing it somewhere?
1:07:43
Because when I added it to the cart and I went to check out,
1:07:46
oh, let me see, shipping to another address. The other thing that’s missing from here seems to be like, what if somebody has a different billing address versus their shipping address? I’m not seeing that here. But I could choose United States.
1:08:13
And then I can put in a street number and all this stuff. These aren’t provinces, but close enough, I guess. Yeah, I mean, it seems like it’s going to let me order this to my house in the United States. So what am I missing there? I mean if it is in fact only shipping to the Netherlands and such Or wherever you need to not have all these selections. I mean damn I can get it in Zimbabwe if I want to
1:08:43
All right, let me go back to chat You could even do copy advantages like you thought they were real flowers, right? Yeah, that’s a good that’s a good point right here. Okay, let’s see. It should be more clear. It’s same if we thought the website is created with bricks,
1:09:01
but when we see him from the back end, it’s Elementor. Let’s go. Let’s go ahead and and see. Now, well, this one’s this one’s this one’s bricks for sure. What element or site were we looking at? I don’t think I looked at an element or site.
1:09:18
All right, let’s go back to chat. Pain point, fresh flowers, short life, silks last forever.
1:09:22
There’s a place for these interior designers, et cetera.
1:09:25
Yeah, perfect. We just need to make that very clear right off the bat. What’s going on here? Mm hmm. Currently and from past several years. Uh, okay.
1:09:34
Okay, we’re gonna go into Q and a in just a second to Sarah says I have a bouquet
1:09:38
from my wedding that are fake.
1:09:39
It was well done and lasted longer than my marriage said. Okay, well, my condolences. Um, but yeah, I know. I totally see why people would buy silk flowers for sure. It just, I was just confused because I thought they were real when I arrived and there was no information to tell me that they are not real.
1:10:08
That’s the confusion we need to clear up. And we need to have those selling points. There’s a bunch of selling points for silk flowers, right? We need to have all those selling points littered throughout this website. There’s really no copy. There’s really no copy.
1:10:20
It’s just like, you know, pictures of flowers and stuff you can choose. And that we don’t even know collectively there’s a hundred over a hundred of us here we still don’t even know if we can ship it to certain places. Anytime you create confusion or just hide information it’s
1:10:37
like you’re not going to get the sales you’re not going to get the conversions that you’re wanting.
1:10:41
mm-hmm
1:10:44
mm-hmm ok do you have reviews of websites that have crushed it or examples of best practices across the board. There’s a couple, there’s a couple here. Honestly, like, you know, the amount of really good websites is very low. It’s very low percentage. Okay. All right, good. Uh-huh. All right, let’s move into, there’s not a lot we can do here. There’s not a
1:11:13
lot we can do here. Let’s move into Q&A. There’s this, you got to add a bunch of copy. You got to add a bunch of copy, a bunch of selling points. We can go, we got, we got to get clear on the where, where do you ship, who can buy, that sort of thing. These photos of vases are not good by the way. I didn’t, I just now saw this vases page. I’m sorry to inform you this redone all this all this photography has to be redone. We need a you don’t want
1:11:43
the vase to be like laying down like that it needs to be standing up and then you need them these are this is where you would have a gallery so here’s here’s just the vase here’s the vase with a bouquet in it here’s the vase being held by somebody okay like you know go to that level of detail probably. So you’ve got some of those kinds of photos, right? I don’t I do not like these photos.
1:12:06
I do well, one I name name I hate the shadow behind them. Really, really, really not great. Does not give a good presentation. So all those photos have to be redone. We don’t need to worry about the gift voucher. These are the best photo I mean, I really
1:12:28
like how this is all done really, really, really well. All these photos. Okay, contact make an appointment. Mm hmm. Okay, yeah. Hopefully you got enough to improve on there. I think I think we gave you enough. All right, let’s go. I don’t know why that was zoomed in Q&A here we go Q&A. Let’s go ahead and close that out. Let me open This so in case anybody has some questions of something that we have to demo
1:13:00
Let’s just open one of these demo sites here You guys can ask questions literally about anything. Okay about anything even if you want me to demonstrate something, as long as it’s like, you know, demonstratable, don’t ask me to do something that takes like an hour. Okay, he obviously can’t do that. But let me see what plugins we got here. What is the stack 3.0 beta 2.2? Okay, that’ll do. That’ll do. All right, let’s go look for let’s go look for questions. So hashtag Q. Here we go. On the list for 2024 bricks features,
1:13:35
you mentioned variable and class manager now bricks has it. What do you think about it? It’s good. It’s good. It could be better, but it’s good. All right. Why did we see Brian’s on mobile? I don’t know. What do you think will happen with WP if Gutenberg does fail? Hmm, really good question. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.
1:14:03
I don’t think it’s like, you know, people, again, people use WordPress because of its open source nature. That’s its best selling point. The CMS is really good in general, generally speaking. Okay. There’s a lot of great advantages that have nothing to do with whether the block editor
1:14:21
succeeds or fails. Right now, it would be a bad look. It’d be a really bad look, right? But it’s not like gonna kill WordPress or anything like that. What do you think of Divi 5.0? Have you seen it? I have not. A complete waste of time. Complete waste of time. They rebuilt it from the ground up to do essentially nothing better. Like from what I’ve seen
1:14:47
like the the code output is not going to be better. The accessibility doesn’t seem like it’s going to be better. They didn’t add a class first workflow of any kind. They it’s just why? Why? Why was this done?
1:15:01
Why was this done? That’s what I’m asking is why? Yeah, it’s going to be faster for people that use the Divi workflow, I guess. They didn’t gain any other advantages. Who’s a great independent news source on Gutenberg? Who do you read, follow, and listen to?
1:15:17
Just Twitter. I just follow a bunch of Gutenberg people on Twitter. Who are the big developers to abandon Gutenberg in the event it heads towards failure? SureCart, SureMembers, what are the signs it’s losing steam? I don’t know. We’ll have to see how things start to play out.
1:15:34
They have enough money and enough politics behind it that they’ll continue shoving it down our throat until I think a lot of people are ultimately going to submit obviously I have a really hard time believing that anybody that uses the block editor it just is absolutely in love with it like it actually knows what they’re doing I just feel like every it’s it’s like people are making a concession it’s like okay it’s native, so I’ll use it and I’ll learn to like it. But it’s not, you know, nobody opens it for the first time and is like this
1:16:08
thing. It’s just this is amazing. And it has so many limitations. And just I just, I feel like everybody that tells me they love it is lying to me and is gaslighting me. And that’s what I feel like. That’s what I feel like.
1:16:18
What are the failings of generates new class first system? I, from what I’ve seen, it just feels slow. Like it just feels slow to like add selectors and style selectors and add multiple selectors and things like that. There is also a challenge of, every selector doesn’t need to be in the database, right?
1:16:40
Every selector doesn’t need to be like utility classes. Those aren’t classes you edit with the builder. So I’ve actually had a discussion with Mateo about this. Like I really think that Automatic CSS, we don’t even need to preload all the classes into the database. If you’re an ACSS user, let’s just talk about this for a second. The reason we’ve done that historically is
1:17:08
because when we first built ACSS, that was the only way to get classes to auto-suggest for the user was to load them in the database of the builder, Oxygen, Quickly, Bricks, wherever, Breakdance. Okay, you gotta load them in, then the auto-suggest will work. But since then, we have contextual menus.
1:17:28
We have the right-click auto-suggest of our own. That’s our own contextual menu that can auto suggest right it can also live preview and then you add the fact in that you don’t need to edit those classes with the builder right because their utility class they essentially do one specific thing and that’s the only thing that it does and actually you wouldn’t want to add other instructions to it so they just don’t need to be in that area at all and when
1:17:57
you’re adding classes to an element if you are using a utility class workflow. So you’re going to add eight different utility classes to an element. The adding to that input, okay, let me just demonstrate it. Why am I like making everybody imagine? We have a builder right here that we can use.
1:18:18
This is actually very slow. Like this is a very slow workflow. If I was going to go put like flex, you know, column on here and then, and then choose it and then put another one, you know, text L or whatever. And I’m having to add them one at a time, add, enter, add,
1:18:37
enter. And then why? Cause again, they’re locked. I’m never going to edit them with any of these inputs.
1:18:41
What you really need.
1:18:43
And other, other people have had this is like what they call plane classes, right? Where it’s like an input where you just type type type type type type and you’re never like hitting enter submitting adding things to a database it’s almost like down here okay there’s smart spacing gap none okay let’s do that so let’s go down here and I go I don’t even know it says without the dot okay so smart spacing gap none see I’m quickly adding things down here and then
1:19:10
these are not being added to the database all the styles associated with these classes, you guys can see that right? I think so. All the all the styling associated with these classes exist in an external style sheet, right? So but it’s about speed. It’s about how fast can I type classes in here and add them to an element? The problem is that’s where that’s what you should have. The problem is it’s buried over here. When I when I first select an element if I’m on like this panel right here. So I select an element, then I gotta hit style,
1:19:41
and then CSS wouldn’t be open, it’d be on some other panel. So I gotta scroll down, I gotta hit CSS, I gotta scroll down again, and now finally, I’m where I can start adding plain classes. That has to be improved. So builders have to come up with a way
1:19:54
to differentiate between database-driven classes and plain classes. And I don’t like the name all that much, when you find a better name for it, but there are two different types of classes in a good workflow, right?
1:20:09
Okay, so that’s one thing. In Generate, I wish I had a copy of it. I don’t have a copy of it, because I’m on my laptop and I’m not on my normal computer, but I could show you. I could show you, it just feels bulky.
1:20:24
It feels kind of slow to just, you know, in a workflow, not like that there’s lag or anything like that. It’s just tedious. It’s tedious to like add a selector, style the selector, add another one. It’s just Brics makes it very fast for the most part, but still doesn’t do what it needs to do in terms of plane classes.
1:20:43
Okay. Answered that question. Will components help in building verticals like on Ghost? No, they won’t help. They’ll actually just make it more complicated. I mean, they’ll add additional functionality that’s necessary, but it’s not going to make
1:20:58
things easier. It’s for the most part, components is another layer of complexity, another thing you have to put consideration into with regard to naming, with regard to what styling belongs to classes on the component, that kind of thing. Naming, all this naming that we have to do for BIM is going to be equally as important for components.
1:21:26
And that’s why I love people who use like a utility first workflow because they’re like you don’t have to name things. I’m like, but if you use components, you still have to name everything. So that doesn’t really save you anything. But it’s just another layer of complexity that people are going to… And then there’s probably going to be what are called component variations.
1:21:42
And so that’s going to… There’s going to be need to essentially be like families of components. You’re going to have to think about them that way to be able to swap between variants. It’s just going to add more thinking and more technical execution. So no, it’s not going to make things easier. Is it going to make things better?
1:22:00
Yes. Is it going to make things easier? No. It depends on what you say is easy though. Globally editing HTML within a component? Much easier, right? Much easier. But it does add complexity. So overall not easier, but parts of your job will become easier thanks to components. Are there more videos coming ACSS 101. Yes, I’m just I’m traveling. And so it’s between
1:22:29
live streams and this video for the channel over here. And, you know, going to Disney and going to the beach and going over here and here and then there’s we have friends in town and there’s a lot going on. So yes, I’m trying to fit it in as I can. But yeah, ACSS 101 is going to be like 20 videos long. So we’re at what video four, I think. Yes, there’s many, many more to come. Okay, what are the
1:22:57
top one to three things you’d advise that needed action immediately on the puppy site? Top three things on the puppy site. Better copy, streamlined workflow of what you want people to do when they arrive, how you want them to work through the site and eventually get on a list to reserve a puppy or choose a puppy or whatever. What would I say is the third thing?
1:23:23
Improving that form workflow too. So that would be like because that’s like the final step and getting the deposit and all of that. Those would probably be my top three things. Okay about us in footer is this a bad idea? About us in footer is this a bad idea? No, it just depends on what you write. Right? So is it bad to put we have a footer for example let me go edit footer here. We probably have one in frames that kind of would would serve as an example. Let’s search footers. So here’s one right here footer Lima that we can look at.
1:24:04
Here’s one right here, footer Echo. Let’s insert footer Echo. And so you could put a little about blurb right here. So it’s got your logo and it’s got a little place for an about blurb. So is this a bad thing to do? No, but it depends on what is written here.
1:24:18
It’s very easy to write nonsense here that doesn’t help anything whatsoever. But it’s also very good to write impactful copy here that would have a good impact. So yeah, it’s depends on what you write, but there’s no problem with putting that kind of thing there. Okay. What local SEO, GMB, et cetera, improvements would you recommend for it? For the puppy site? I don’t have it pulled up we didn’t even check the GMB or anything like that. I would have to review it again specifically in terms of local SEO. When is ACSS expected to get out of beta? After beta 3. So beta 3 will add Gutenberg, Oxygen, Breakdance, like other builders support and then once all that is stable, then it’ll come out of beta.
1:25:16
Which sites do you keep going back to for inspiration, design, done right? Is there a list in IC? One day what we need to do probably, maybe next week, I like to go to sites like this, like lappa.ninja. And there’s all these sites that we could take a look at.
1:25:33
And I think a lot of them are really well done. But then there’s a lot that, you know, we can talk about some issues that we see with them and such. This one I don’t like, cause it hijacks scroll a bit.
1:25:45
But there’s actually a lot to talk about.
1:25:47
We would have a field day going through some of these. Check out this one. We can talk about copy too. I really like this. This is like, I really like this very narrow content column-y kind of landing page layout. Good focus on content. Good kind of like you know it’s not boring but it’s not overly done either. We can have a field day just kind of going through. Lapidot Ninja is one of my favorite like kind of inspiration-y example website kind of galleries.
1:26:40
So if y’all want to poke around there you could probably have some fun doing that. Let’s go to next question. Did you design your website or did you hire someone else to do the job? I designed giri.co. I mean what do you consider to be design? Like I used frames and then I just styled the frames. I’ve built you know the majority of the frames. ACSS was designed by a designer. I threw the frame site together the like the bare minimum. That needs that’s been redesigned we just haven’t rebuilt it yet it’s been redesigned by a designer
1:27:17
But it needs to be rebuilt But it’s a mix and match. It’s a mix and match Why did you stop using oxygen? I understand that bricks is better, but in what aspects I apologize if you’ve mentioned this before bricks is light years better I We don’t have time to go for every reason, but there’s literally like 50 of them and they’re like not like you know small reasons either my team was doing websites in Elementor for so long what would be the best practice to shift
1:27:46
them over to Bricks put them through page building 101. Oh we answered that one how did you build the interactive forms on automatic css why isn’t that one coming up okay how did you build the interactive forms on automatic CSS comm specifically the ones for spacing and colors? I went over that in a live stream right after we launched the website But it’s all manually built. It’s it’s It’s just HTML and JavaScript Who do you have in the Tyson verse Paul fight?
1:28:15
I think Tyson teaches this kid, but I worry about his older reflexes. I don’t think I think you’re gonna be extremely disappointed I think you’re going to be extremely disappointed. I think that I am, I’m not convinced that it’s not a fixed fight, not, not fixed in the sense that, um, they know the outcome necessarily. I don’t know who they’re going to let win. I could see them letting Tyson win by decision.
1:28:43
I could see them letting Paul win by either decision or knockout, if that’s like, but I don’t know that, here’s the thing, I don’t know, I just feel like they’ve told Tyson, like, you can punch me in the face, but you can’t fucking Tyson me, okay? Like, I feel like that’s in the contract somewhere.
1:29:08
And Tyson has experienced enough to you know pepper Paul’s face all he wants without actually knocking him out. I Just feel like if they actually given that even I don’t even care that he’s 60 I feel like if if tight I’ve seen him hit a bag Okay, if you put Tyson in there and let him be Tyson, I think Paul should easily lose the fight But I don’t I don’t I just feel like they’ve fixed it up enough, enough to where it’s not like the
1:29:41
whole thing is scripted or anything like that, but I think they fixed it up enough to where it’s going to end in some sort of decision or some sort of just disappointing, like, ah, really? That kind of thing. And at the end of the day, I think everybody’s going to feel like, fuck, they got my money and I didn’t see what I wanted, what I was hoping to see.
1:29:59
Does that make sense? Does anybody else get the same feeling about that?
1:30:03
Okay.
1:30:03
I’ll look at the chat in just a minute. Um, are you all in on InstaWP for staging now? Uh, just for all, all the stuff that I do for teaching and testing and all of that, I’m on InstaWP. Yeah. Will I be able to upgrade my ACSS beta to the final 3.0 release?
1:30:17
Yes.
1:30:18
How do you design service area pages for service-based businesses for SEO? How do you ensure unique content? Well to ensure unique content you have to write unique content There are some frames templates you can use for service area pages Or you can design your own. There’s a lot of examples of it. It doesn’t have to be super fancy or spectacular It’s like a it’s like a little directory Do you think that WordPress will add custom post types in the near future?
1:30:49
Will we keep relying on ACF? I don’t think they’ll add custom. Well, they, they, you know, they claim to already have it, right. But there’s not the level of functionality that ACF has. And I don’t think there ever will be. I think they allow third parties to just handle that kind of thing.
1:31:05
Can you talk about challenges with multiple developers working on the same site with Bricks, ACSS, Bedrock Roots, um, versus Bedrock Roots. So Brickster’s app is in the process of adding multi-user support until they actually add that and it’s testable and we can actually play around with it. It’s really hard to make an assessment on that.
1:31:27
Right now though, it’s not great. Right now it’s not great. I’ll be 100% honest about that. If two people are working on the site, you can add some classes to things, hit save, everything looks great, come back,
1:31:38
and all that shit is gone. Uh, that is a hundred percent, a guarantee that that will happen at some point working with multiple users. But again, they’re fixing that in the next release, there is support for multi-user editing. So we’ll see how it works.
1:31:50
We’ll see how good it’s executed on. Okay. Uh, let’s see. I feel that WooCommerce is not much efficient for the e-commerce website.
1:31:58
Yeah.
1:31:58
I hate WooCommerce. I feel like e-commerce in WordPress in general is trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. What is the best way to create a 100 V8 section that is best for all devices? Well, let’s go to a page. Let’s go to edit and let’s delete whatever’s here. So we add a section right. Here’s the section. We go to style layout. So you can do a height of 100 VH. I would not do this. I would strongly advise against this. I’m
1:32:44
That’s why. And you don’t know, it might look good on mobile or on desktop, but then we don’t know what’s going to happen on mobile. So like this amount of content fits on desktop and it doesn’t actually fit on mobile. It’s just because my screen is gigantic. See that?
1:33:07
Content gone. Gone.
1:33:09
It’s overflowing the container. Big mistake that I see a lot of people make is using just fixed height. So what you would want to do instead is you would want to go back to your section and go to layout. Let’s go back to the desktop breakpoint and we move that 100 VH to the get the same initial effect but it actually grows, see that? It grows to fit additional content. So almost always you’re going to want to do min height instead of actual height. Okay? So that’s one thing. The next thing you need to
1:33:54
figure out is does your VH care about the device that’s being used and is there any scrolling issues that could be present? Because if there is you want to go with something like DVH which is like dynamic viewport height which responds to how the browser interacts on scroll. You can go read about DVH get all the details on that and then the same is true kind of for VWs, right? So there’s a DVW, there’s a VW, there’s also VMINs and VMAXs.
1:34:34
We’ve gone over all of this in PB 101, page building 101. But by far the thing you want to avoid, oh, by the way, Elementor encourages users to do this. So see, I use padding, and if I want the section to be bigger, I would go add more padding. So like section padding I would say
1:34:53
XXL or XL or something like this. So let’s choose XXL and so now I have a bigger section right. Elementor encourages you to use min height. So if you want a bigger section you would say like 500. Now I have a bigger section. This is not the way to do this. I hate that method. I despise the fact that Elementor encourages that. Padding is the way to go.
1:35:24
Block padding to make sections bigger is absolutely the way to go. Okay, so there’s some do’s and don’ts about sections. Hopefully I answered your question.
1:35:32
What are we doing on time?
1:35:33
Okay, we’re almost out of time. We got about 10 minutes. Is softball season done? Did you win? So the beginning of the season I told my wife I went to practice number one I went to practice number two and I came home to my wife and I said because we actually do legit rec ball. Rec, legit rec ball is you draft kids they there’s an evaluation day so
1:36:01
all the kids well not all of them because not everybody shows up to evaluation day. So you evaluate the players that are there, they all get ranked by multiple people and then we have a draft. And so there’s two coaches because there’s only enough for two teams and so I’m a coach and we have another head coach who coaches the other team. We do a draft where we go down and we each pick a player in a round, right? And so the teams get distributed evenly and there’s some new kids, right? There’s some big kids, there’s some fast kids, there’s some slow
1:36:33
kids, there’s some every it’s a it’s a mix. And to me, this is like, this is what wreckball is supposed to be. And the wreckball is about player development. And it’s about every player playing. And it’s about everybody having a lot of fun, but at the same time, you do want a competitiveness to it. You do want kids to be pushed, right, to get better, to not pick flowers in the outfield,
1:36:59
to actually be able to hit the ball really well and catch the ball really well and make plays really well and know what they’re doing on the field and learn the sport so that, and by the way, I’m at the peewee level, okay, so that’s eight, eight, you,
1:37:13
it’s like kids that are seven, eight, and nine, which by the way, in summer 10, like if you turn 10 after the season starts, you can play peewee. So I’ve got some kids that are, well, we’ll talk about ages more in just a second, but just the legit age group of seven, eight, nine, 10, there is a dramatic difference between 10 year olds and seven year olds.
1:37:34
Fucking dramatic, dramatic difference. Okay. They’re all on the same field. They’re all on the same field. That’s one, I would change that. I would change that up a little bit. Anyway, let’s get back. So we do the draft.
1:37:47
I don’t know who half the kids are in the draft. I know like one or two here and there. We don’t know most of them. So, and there’s some politics behind what happened last year of why this is happening and yada, yada, yada.
1:37:59
But we draft, I go to practice one, practice two, practice three. And I get home, I tell my wife, okay? I think it’s a feel-good story. It’s a feel-good story. So we’ll just take a break from web design. We’ll talk about some softball here.
1:38:15
I tell my wife, we may not win a game. That’s the first thing I said. We may not win a game this season. I mean, the kid, they didn’t know what foot to have in front when you throw. Some of them look like they had never seen a ball before. Like any any ball of any kind.
1:38:32
Catching no catching not happening not happening. I just got home and I was like we may not win a game this season. And I was okay with that because it’s like you know but back to being
1:38:40
competitive.
1:38:41
I still think like you should show up and the team should want to win the games the girls should care about winning The games it’s not like a win by any means necessary But we’re all on the same page that like I am devoting hours and hours of time I told them the most important things I care about one is you show up with energy Two is you show up with attitude and three is you show up with focus. Everything else will work itself out.
1:39:16
If you make mistakes, you can make mistakes all day long. If you make them with energy and attitude and focus, because your ability is your ability, and by the way, you’re eight and you’re nine, right? You’re not a superstar, okay? So you’re going to make mistakes. You’re going to drop balls.
1:39:30
You’re going to throw over people’s heads. You’re going to throw it into the dirt sometimes. You’re going to miss the ball when you’re batting. You’re going to make a bunch of mistakes. I am totally fine with all of the mistakes you’re going to make. I just told them point blank, what I am not fine with is if you show up with no energy
1:39:45
and no attitude and no focus. That’s what I’m not fine with because this is not going to work if that’s what we’re working with. And I know that if you show up with energy and attitude and focus, you’re going to get dramatically better and we’re actually going to be able to put a team together here. So it was just up to their attitude and energy and focus and all of that.
1:40:05
But I told my wife, skill-wise, ability-wise, I was like, we may not win a game. Prepare yourself mentally and emotionally. We may not win a game. But we kept practicing, practicing, practicing. I put everything in. I put all my energy and effort. The same thing I told them. You show up with that level because I’m going to show up with that level. So we start making progress.
1:40:26
We get like three weeks of practice, four weeks of practice before there’s even a first game. Plus we get like two scrimmages with the other team. We kind of sort things out, see what’s going on, see where we’re at. Okay.
1:40:38
By the first scrimmage, we can catch, we can throw, okay? But we’re still a little lost on the field. Like, you know, what’s going on? Where’s the play? That kind of thing. But we’re already dramatically better.
1:40:53
And I also don’t know, this is my second year coaching, so I don’t know what to expect from most of the rec teams, like in the area when we actually go play them. How good are they going to be? I have a glimpse of it from coaching like the first season. I have a standard in my mind of what we should be able to do, right? And so we show up to the first real game
1:41:14
We win that game 18 to 2 okay, and we weren’t even like you know it wasn’t it was it just felt like The other team just didn’t have it together. They just didn’t know what they were doing But we got off to a good start and again. We’re you know we’re practicing serious And we’re you know we’re practicing hard, and I like I’m trying to hold them to a high standard. Of course, we’re still having as much fun as we can have, but we do take it seriously.
1:41:43
Anyway, long story short, we ended the season 11 and five. So we had 11 wins, five losses. The end of the season tournament is what pissed me off though. The end of the season tournament is what really got me. Because like I said, the reason I set up with like,
1:41:58
what does rec ball look like? And let me go to the chat because I’m sure that people are putting putting their thoughts in the chat as we go. It’s a good break. It’s a good break from our normally scheduled topic and this was just sucked out a ton of my life so it’s good to decompress from it and by the way I you know I’ve got to do videos and I’ve got to do ACSS and I’ve got to do my job and I’m gonna do all this meanwhile like hours of time is dedicated to like coaching the softball team,
1:42:29
multi, multiple games per week. Like we played in eight weeks, we played 16 games, okay? That’s a lot. That’s a lot. On top of two practices a week, okay? It’s a lot of time investment. So we get to the tournament. There are five teams from a park nearby. Five teams from the same park. We haven’t played this park once during the regular season and suddenly they have five teams. Come to find out they actually have eight teams and they’ve condensed it down to five for this tournament. Let’s go back to what REC is, right? REC to me is random
1:43:10
kids, you did a fair draft, it’s a mix of everybody, it’s a mix of ages. And I have my daughter, I have two daughters on the team. One is the age group. The other daughter should be in T-ball. Should be in T-ball. But I told her, because she wanted to play with her older sister.
1:43:30
So I was like, hey, if you can not pick flowers and play in the dirt, that’s number one. Can you do that? She’s like, okay, I won’t do that. And I was like, you got to be able to hit. That’s it. You got to be able to hit. And she said, okay. She can fucking hit. Okay. I’ve got, she almost never strikes out. And this is not T, right? This is coach pitch.
1:43:48
And she could, she can hit it to the outfield. So she’s done her job, right? She did her promise. She can hit and she doesn’t play in the dirt. So that’s, that’s all. Now, can she make plays in the infield? Not a fucking chance, but she can do the two things I asked her to do, which is good enough, right? Okay, but my point is, she’s six, okay? Playing with 10 year olds and nine year olds, all right?
1:44:10
There’s a range of kids. There’s kids that this is their first season, kids that it’s their third season. We don’t have anybody with experience more than three seasons. Random, random, okay.
1:44:22
So we get to this tournament, there’s five teams from this local park. I show up to the batting cages. We do the batting cages to warm up before every single game because I got to get the kids in the mode. You know the first few pitches they’re not awake yet right and if their first few pitches are in an actual game they’re going to strike out. You got to get them warmed up in the cages. So I dedicate an extra hour of my time before every game to show up to the cage. I show up to the cages with my team. I’m just going to use my fingers
1:44:53
of girls like this. Okay. And the other team that shows up, this is the first game of the tournament from this, this other park, right? My team, their team. Okay. Just a little size difference. There’s a little, I took a photo. I was like, I need birth certificates for these kids. I don’t know. They could be fucking 14 for all I know. I don’t know what, and it was all of them It wasn’t like like my I got a couple tall kids, but I got a lot of you know normal sized eight-year-olds
1:45:19
Whatever these all look like 12 year olds, and I’m like okay, all right, so a little discrepancy in size little discrepancy But maybe they’re not that great. You know maybe they’re just big Then then I then I see them in the cages. I mean absolutely crushing balls like left and right and I’m like, okay, there’s a little sketch, a little sketch. Is this like a, is this actually a randomly drafted team with different age levels and different experience levels and all of that? So anyway, we’ve, keep in mind our record, 11 and 5.
1:45:50
We’re not a bad team. We’ve beat some of the actual like other rec teams that are known to be very good. We have wins over them. Okay. We’ve fought games to, you know, 14, 13, that kind of thing with like legit defense you know catching balls in the air getting double plays do it like doing some really cool
1:46:09
stuff later in the season that we had no hope of doing in the beginning of the season so really really good player development out of this season right very proud of my team this team beats the fucking breaks off of us like 18 to 4 okay and getting those four was like everything that we could do to get those four very clear immediately clear this is like they’re fucking all-star travel team or whatever right and then I look I look at the brackets and it turns out
1:46:39
this park is the only park winning games and they’re winning every game like 18 to 0 16 to 0 16 to 3 everyone every game against every park is like this. And then we get to the, and then, okay, well that was, so it’s a double elimination tournament. So they smoke us, but we’re not out. We’re not out. Because you have to lose twice to be out.
1:47:01
Okay, cool.
1:47:02
So I gather my team back and I’m like, hey, we’re coming back. We got one more shot to stay in this thing. We beat the next team. We beat the next team after that. Now, sadly for us, if you’re in the, if you’re in the one loss bracket, you have to play all the remaining games the same day.
1:47:20
Okay, so I wake up at 6 a.m. for our first game, that’s at 8 a.m., because I’ve got to be at the cage at 7 a.m. So we start the first game at 8 a.m., we win, fantastic. Next game, 11.30, got to be back for that. These are eight year olds, okay, come back.
1:47:35
Win the second game, which was a tough game, by the way, against a really tough team we we win that one Okay, got to get up again for a third game come back at 3 p.m. In the hot Sun by the way, okay So we’re out here just I got eight-year-olds a fallen out left and right I’m trying to pump in Gatorade and all this other stuff to him. It’s it’s a war of attrition at this point We even playing softball. I don’t know. It’s just we’re trying to survive out here. So you’re not going to get your best softball
1:48:03
guess what they match us up with the team that beat us the first time from this park and guess what we also learn that this team hasn’t played a single game today they’re just going to stroll in and they’re going to play us again we’re on our third game it was a disaster 18 to 0 we didn’t score a fucking point and so I was just irked because what I found is that they the teams do this they stack the teams they don’t draft fairly They stack all the talent and why do they do this because at the end of the day I was asking myself
1:48:34
What did that team learn? What did my team learn playing them? Nothing? My team didn’t learn anything playing them They just got you just get demolished. What did that team learn playing us? Nothing? Nothing, they didn’t learn how to work through adversity. They didn’t learn learn how to come back from behind. They didn’t learn how to do anything. They just came in and walked all over us, and we got walked all over, and that’s it. And of course, if you randomly draft a peewee team, and then you put them up against a hand-picked
1:49:03
team of all like 10-year-olds, max-age kids, who all have max experience, of course you can win. The coaches are doing it. It’s about the adults at that point you’ve been congratulations you made it about you you haven’t made it about the actual kids that were supposed to be coaching and by the way says nothing about your experience or ability
1:49:24
as a coach because anybody can take a hand-picked team and do this against randomly picked teams so to me it was just like I was pissed because it’s like we have this tournament that we’ve invested a ton of time into the season and we’re excited about the tournament and we have to go up against a park that’s hand-picked their teams and that has just come in to win because it’s all about the adults. That was the unfortunate ending to
1:49:49
the season but overall I was very proud about the season and the player development and all that we were able to accomplish. It was a dramatically different team at the end of the year than what we had at the beginning of the year. And that’s what’s important. That’s, that’s the whole point, right? And they’re all excited about playing again next season.
1:50:07
So we’re going to keep the, we’re going to keep the good stuff going. All right.
1:50:10
That was a nice little break.
1:50:11
Um, let’s do one last question. So we can end on something on topic. Let’s go back into queues here. Let’s go to the bottom. Okay. Uh, have you, or can you explain best practices for integrating custom post types into a hierarchical nav
1:50:29
tree? The BricsBreadcrumbs element doesn’t seem to respect URLs for parent pages. That’s probably going to be not a one line answer. We’ll come back to that. We’ll have to do that probably in a dedicated tutorial of some sort. Okay, let’s see.
1:50:46
What’s a good last question here? I see a lot of CSS examples with bricks and ACS. Can you show an example of the best way to add use custom JS with bricks? Not, I mean, I can’t show it right off the bat. It’s tough to demonstrate.
1:50:59
Is it okay to use, okay, we’ve answered that question before. What do you think of the DROIP page builder? Okay, what requirements? You know, you can ask about random page builders. If they have like a user base of like 10,
1:51:12
it’s, you know, I haven’t used it. I haven’t looked at it extensively enough.
1:51:17
We do any videos with other tools
1:51:18
you’re using your agency. Okay, who was the best resource to learn CSS from as a beginner? Okay, let’s end on this one. Who, what is currently the best resource to learn CSS from as a beginner?
1:51:29
I feel like,
1:51:31
I, you know, there’s enough CSS taught in page building 101 that, let me, let’s see
1:51:33
how to answer this. Where would you start? If I was going to do a CSS course, just like pure CSS, where would we start? I think there’s a lot of people in the, on these streams and in these comments that wish they were way better at CSS than they currently are. There are, believe it or not, there are some experts in like JavaScript and PHP and all
1:52:17
these various languages who actually say that they do not understand CSS. Like they hate CSS, it doesn’t make any sense to their brain, it’s hard for them to learn and do. What are we doing here? Don’t we have, let’s see, let’s go in here. Let’s end on this.
1:52:32
Cause I think this is super, how to make, how to make CSS like approachable. There’s a lot you can do with a div, you know, I assuming, you know, the basics of like, what is a class? What is an HTML element? What is an ID?
1:52:46
Okay.
1:52:46
There’s like that kind of stuff. And you guys know that once the foundation is covered, I like to break away immediately from foundational stuff. Like go immediately into experimenting, playing, real-world scenarios, that kind of stuff. And so principles of CSS, right?
1:53:09
If we’re going to style this div, I would almost do it as like, I would almost like to bring somebody on the stream that’s like a pure beginner in CSS and go through this a little bit. To me, CSS is very easy. It’s very straightforward. It’s very literal of like, what do you want to do? Type that thing out. Like for example, if we wanted this, the hardest part of CSS is wondering why something isn’t happening because you
1:53:41
don’t realize it’s related to something else.
1:53:44
I think this alone would like confuse a lot of people right here.
1:53:47
Why do I not see a red box? Like there’s a div on the page and I made the background color of that div red. Let me go to the chat. We’ll just do a pop quiz. This is the stuff where I feel like, but once you understand what’s going on, it makes logical, perfect sense, right? Let’s go, why are we not seeing a red box, guys?
1:54:13
This is the first pop quiz. A lot of people in the chat are saying Kevin Powell. Yeah, I think Kevin Powell is a fantastic resource. He’s probably one of my favorite CSS creators. I have not taken his course on CSS or any of his courses on CSS so I can’t speak to those but Kevin Powell in general is a very good resource. Yeah so the box has no dimensions a lot of
1:54:41
people get that right off the bat right. So we add a dimension. Well what do you want to add? You want to add width and height okay so we can add, you just literally say, well, that’s what I would like to add. Now you can pick any value you want. One of the hard parts of CSS is all the units. Like, do I do pixels?
1:55:00
Do I do rims? Do I do M’s? Do I VW’s? Do I, but I did a whole course. I did a whole lesson on units, right? So you should have that background information.
1:55:09
Now I wanna round the corners of my box. Okay, so I just have to know that, you know, there’s something called border radius. That’s just not really a highly technical thing to learn. It’s just learning the names of things, right? So if I did five pixels on border radius,
1:55:26
I get a box with rounded corners. Why is the box touching the edge of the screen? Well, there’s no space. There’s nothing else telling it to be spaced out away from the edge of the screen. Now there’s a lot of different things I could do. I could do margin and I could
1:55:40
do margin of like 100 pixels and that’s going to make it go 100 pixels away from the edge of the screen. Now the other thing that I could do is I could wrap this div in a section and I could go take this margin off. I could go to my section and I could add padding of 100 pixels, 100 pixels. I just got the exact same outcome, but two very different ways, right? So one was with padding on a section. One was with margin on a div.
1:56:11
And I think a lot of people don’t, they can’t visualize what just happened there. Like why, how they’re different because they are dramatically different, right? Um, the margin existing on the outside versus padding existing on the inside. That’s another fundamental thing. But you have to now start thinking in terms of how elements interact with other elements in order to figure out exactly how you want to approach doing something.
1:56:37
So I can see how that might get a little bit confusing for people in the beginning. But again, once those things are starting, you’re starting to explain those things and they start to get very easy, very fast, right? There are like the fundamentals of the box model like padding on the inside, margin on the outside, where does border go, how does that behave, how does margin push other things around, how does gap work.
1:57:08
That’s a lot. That’s a lot. Because so much of CSS is just literal, that’s the stuff that’s not necessarily, you know, literal and immediately obvious that you actually have to learn, but so much of CSS to me is literal and obvious. Like the border radius, that’s literal and obvious. Height, width, literal and obvious.
1:57:27
Background color, literal and obvious. Then there’s things like inheritance, inheriting styles, we put text inside of this div, you know, things like this. What questions do you have about, we could do a little extra time on see it what what confuses the shit out of you with CSS let’s just give people a little helping hand to close this out with what confuses you about CSS see I can come
1:57:52
here and I can do I can target my paragraph and I can say color white right and we all know that that color is going to go white what if I took that and I just put it on the div, what would happen? Whoops, I don’t wanna leave. The same thing will happen, the same thing will happen. That could be a little confusing to people.
1:58:08
What if we put that color white on the section? What would happen?
1:58:13
The same fucking thing.
1:58:15
And that might be confusing to a little bit of people here, you know? But that’s the kind of stuff that’s easily explained. And then once it’s explained, it’s like, okay, I understand that now, all right, we can move on to the next thing.
1:58:25
And it’s actually using these, you know, using something like inheritance to your advantage throughout a website built versus when is inheritance not a good idea. Let’s see what people have to say about CSS. Because I’ve been doing CSS for so long.
1:58:42
I am totally like, I don’t know what it’s like to be a beginner at CSS. I haven’t been a beginner at CSS for so long. I really don’t know what trips people up. And if I was gonna create a CSS course, the first thing I would do is interview a bunch of beginners
1:58:56
and probably get on a stream, not a stream, but like Zoom or something. And I would just be like, I just wanna watch you. I wanna watch you do some CSS stuff. And let’s see where you get stuck, what you don’t understand, that kind of stuff.
1:59:08
And that’s how I would start to put the course together because I’m so far removed from like being a beginner so I’m very interested right now actually to see what people are confused about when it comes to this okay divs is not okay we got through block to the div. See how that did absolutely nothing? So that’s interesting. What does that do? Right? What just happened there? That would be an interesting thing to talk
1:59:49
about. Let me go back to chat for a second. Confusion grid. Okay, well, there’s things like grid that are, you know, far more technical, right? That you just have to learn, you just have to learn. But that’s not CSS in general. We’re really kind of talking like CSS in general. Because if you know the generals of CSS, you can start to learn grid just by
2:00:13
reading the grid documentation and playing around with it. All the different values in CSS is what gets to me.
2:00:18
Okay.
2:00:18
So PB 101, I have a, it’s, it’s called like static versus relative units go watch that video 100% that will immediately you will have a clear understanding of units and then once you have a clear understanding of units then you’re gonna want to get into tokens you go learn about tokens right once you know units and tokens that side of things should be fairly straightforward. Specificity trips me up that does trip up a lot of people. Selectors and variables are a little
2:00:53
messy to me. Confusion CSS selectors. I would say the heart what probably the hardest part of CSS is selectors. Is getting the selectors right. And when I watch people put in support tickets for things they’ve tried to do with CSS and I can clearly see they there’s a lack of understanding of how selectors work. These are easy selectors, right? Section, div, or if you have a class on something, okay? And if you don’t even know what a selector is, you can probably start there, right?
2:01:21
Okay, so this is a class selector. Class selector, right? So now that that has a label called class selector, which I just named very, very literally, right? We can come in and say border five pixels solid black. This would be the other thing like shorthand versus writing each property out. That’s another thing you should probably do a video on. Should I do a CSS course? That would be the thing I’m getting interested in. So many people have
2:01:57
done it right? So many people have done it but the problem is have they done it in a way have they done it my way have they done it the way I would approach it you know probably not probably not but now that I have the CSS class selector right I can actually just paste it this is like a label you can just slap onto things and now the section has it but the section doesn’t have any dimensions either right so let’s do like padding of we already have padding of 100 pixels, let’s just do, so there’s the top
2:02:28
and bottom and then we can do the left and the right, okay, a little bit differently, but let’s do this is like 400 pixels. Let’s, what, let’s, let’s close this up here, okay. Another thing would be like, why are there two values in here? That trips a ton of people up, that trips a ton of people up. Some, some of CSS is very literal and obvious and some is like, what the hell is going on there? Okay, I’m reading through the chat still.
2:02:58
CSS 101, yes on the CSS course, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. When is CSS 101 coming out? I can’t do it until ACSS 101 is done, obviously. So we’re going to get through ACSS 101, and then we will revisit this but I think there are so many different ways to teach CSS that is way better probably than what than what most will be doing. So this is very interesting right here isn’t it? Let’s do our 100 VH thing that we were doing
2:03:29
earlier. The reason none of this is working because you can’t you can’t have a sexual you can’t have it see I had a sexual that doesn’t work as well, nearly as well as a section does. Okay, so see I have a black, this five pixels solid black is on my section, is on this little div right here. What if I took that same little label and I just put it on here?
2:03:55
See how classes can be used as like little labels for things. Look what it did to my little text element in there. So styling labels, that’s what you think of a class as a little styling label. And you can have multiple styling labels slapped onto the same slapped onto the same element. There’s so much to explore here so much to
2:04:14
explore. Let’s go Come on now. Let’s call code old school with table layout and transparent single pixel gifts. Okay, a lot of people a lot of people are voting for the CSS course, a lot of people voting for the CSS thing. That’s gonna be something we seriously have to consider. I think it’s a huge missing piece
2:04:30
from my particular content library. Like PB101 is really, really, really, really fantastic. ACSS101 is gonna be fantastic as well. But there isn’t anything that dives, and CSS, in all fairness, right? I said the page builder can do PHP for you.
2:04:47
The page builder can do JavaScript for you, you have got to learn and understand CSS. You have got to learn and understand HTML. Like at least the basics of semantic HTML. Because these are decisions and things that the builder cannot always do for you. And obviously the builder can’t just always choose the proper semantic HTML.
2:05:09
You have to know how to do that. And then there’s a lot of things the builder cannot do with styling that I show over and over and over again. And if you don’t have the CSS skills to do that stuff, you are going to be stuck or you are going to default to doing it a really bad way. And we don’t want to get into that situation, right? So CSS in all fairness is something you legit have to learn.
2:05:32
And if somebody makes it easy for you, puts it together in a really logical fashion and practical fashion. It is a skill set that will level you up tremendously and it’s really not all that difficult. It is not, it shouldn’t scare you the way PHP might or the way JavaScript might for sure. Okay, so we’re going to have to seriously consider that. We are going to have to seriously consider that. All right, I think we’re done for today. We will be back next Tuesday. I’ll be back in Atlanta next Tuesday.
2:06:04
So it’ll be even better for me anyway. What was I going to say? There’s one more announcement. One more announcement. Yeah, be on the lookout. I have a very special announcement coming. Very special announcement. I can’t give you any details on it. I don’t know if it’s coming after WordCamp Europe or before WordCamp Europe. But there is a very special announcement coming
2:06:26
Something you will be very very excited about it is not content related. So that’s good That’s all I could say about it now But you need to be on the lookout you need to be on the radar if you’re not subscribed to the channel you need to Be subscribed to the channel if you’re not subscribed to the Geary dot co Email list you go to Geary dot co get on the email list. That’s probably the and yeah, so this channel and the email list if you’re on those two places you will not miss the announcement, okay?
2:06:56
Make sure you’re on those places, but that’s it for me today. Thank you guys for joining me. I hope you got a lot out of the the critiques that we did. Thank you guys for joining me. I hope you got a lot out of the the critiques that we did. We’ll be back next Tuesday for another episode of WDP.
