WP Townhall 004: The Barrier to Entry in Web Design is Too Low

Every platform.

Yes, sir.

Let’s see what happens.

All right, I’m live.

We’re ready to rock and roll on my side.

I think I’m live as well.

Hopefully somebody pops in my chat to see if they can hear and see both of us.

Yeah.

I think regardless, we’re good on the space, so we can dive in.

Excellent.

Well, everybody, welcome back to another episode of WP Town Hall.

Today, we’re going to be talking about the barrier to entry in web design.

And you get to argue whether you feel the barrier to entry is too low or the barrier to entry is just fine.

We can talk about the ramifications of this topic, you know, in terms of clients, how clients are perceiving the industry.

I’m getting some chats and reactions on my stream, letting people are letting me know it’s working.

So that’s good.

We are doing a kind of simulcast today.

So this is the first time instead of just obviously we’re hosting on X Spaces, but we are I’m streaming to my channel.

Mark streaming to his channel so we can get some extra exposure here.

Of course, this is the show where you guys get to chime in and participate.

So if you’re watching on YouTube and you want to participate, you got to hop over to X.

Join the X space.

You can come in as a speaker.

You can participate.

Right now, there are 10 speaker slots open.

It’s been, Mark’s been quite a week.

It’s been quite a week in the U.S.

I’m interested to see what kind of how distracted are people.

Do we do we still get good participation or or not?

But do you have any opening thoughts for this topic about the barrier to entry in web design?

It’s definitely been quite the week.

Yeah, I suspect some people in the U.S. and even abroad probably are a little distracted.

So I’m not going to ding people for not joining today.

But I think we should have a really good chat.

I think this is a really pertinent one.

You know, we asked.

You asked me a couple of days ago here, like if I had any thoughts.

And, you know, we have a long laundry list of topics.

And this barrier to entry one is an interesting one that I know that you’ve talked about before.

I’ve thought about heavily as I’ve gone through this.

And it’s not obviously WP specific, but we see it a lot in WP.

So it’s definitely pertinent.

And I think over time, it has just it has gotten lower and lower.

I’m interested to hear other people’s perspectives on it, because I tend to kind of agree with this resolution that we have here today to a to a good degree.

But there’s obviously caveats.

You know, we don’t want to be gatekeepers.

But at the same time, we want to make sure our our quality stays high and things like that.

So I don’t know.

I’m just excited to hear what everybody’s got to say on this one particularly.

Yeah, same.

So I will give everybody a little bit of background on this topic.

I guess I’ve I’ve spent a lot of time in the photography industry as well.

And I use this as an example very often.

But the barrier to entry in photography, you would I mean, you would think the barrier to entry would be like photography skills, practicing photography, some experience doing photography, things like that.

The barrier to entry in photography is your budget to buy a camera on Amazon.

And there’s a lot of people that feel like, oh, I got a nice camera.

And, you know, they’re they’re actually just talking about like a middle of the road consumer camera.

And they feel like, well, I mean, it’s not a point and shoot.

So, you know, I can spin some dials on it.

It’s like I’m a pro now.

And then they go out and they start selling packages and God forbid doing people’s weddings because, you know, a Christmas session.

All right.

It’s it’s not the end of the world if that’s ruined.

But you ruin somebody’s wedding.

Not fantastic.

But but this is the barrier to entry in in photography.

People grab a camera.

They call themselves a photographer.

Next thing you know, they got a business.

Next thing you know, they’re out doing paid sessions for people.

Not great results a lot of times.

And that industry, I think this is what we need to think about collectively speaking, is like that industry starts to get maybe a reputation where it’s like, ah, I don’t I don’t really know who I’m actually who I’m getting, who I’m hiring.

And of course, people put portfolios online.

But do you know that’s really their portfolio?

I mean, is that really is that really their images?

You don’t really know till they till they show up or you can get a lot of recommendations maybe from friends or other people or whatnot.

The web design industry is very similar.

The barrier to entry in web design is essentially your ability to acquire a laptop, especially in WordPress, where, you know, the software is free.

You can get a lot of free plugins.

Very, very, very low barrier to entry.

And I think we know and we’re realizing that there are a lot of people out there running web design agencies doing freelance work.

And, you know, they’re not they’re not the greatest.

Right.

The results kind of speak for themselves.

And there’s also a lot of people out there with portfolios of work that aren’t really theirs.

And I think that one could argue that this industry might start getting a reputation of I don’t know who to trust.

I don’t know who knows what they’re doing.

I don’t know who’s going to actually complete my project the way it needs to be completed or it’s going to turn into a disaster or they’re going to disappear.

And anytime you have that kind of distrust or uncertainty in an industry, I don’t think it’s good for the industry.

Now, what do we do about that?

That’s what we’re that’s what we’re here to talk about today.

We do have some listeners on X spaces.

What we need is for some people to raise their hands and jump into the speakers slot, because again, we want to hear from as many people as possible on this.

We can give our take all day.

But WP Town Hall is really centered around hearing from other people who are active and working within WP.

100%.

Yeah, I mean, we could we could kick it off, too.

I mean, again, just to kind of parlay off of what you’re saying there as we kind of maybe to to jumpstart some ideas.

I mean, I I when we have these these conversations, right, especially, you know, these these types of ones where somebody reads the barrier to entry to web of web design is too low.

I mean, obviously, that’s a pretty shock jock for some people that somebody some people are going to listen to that, see that they’re going to be like, oh, it’s kind of shocking.

We want everybody to be involved.

We want everybody to be able to build and do that type of thing.

I think a good way to kind of go about it is almost sometimes to reverse engineer and be like, well, what is the first thing that’s going to be an objection to that?

And I think for me, a big one that I hear is like, you know, just gatekeeping, like we’re going to gatekeep the website industry.

I don’t really, really see it like that.

I think that there is there is a I don’t think I don’t think you’ve ever said this or I’ve ever said we don’t want less people in it.

We just want more.

We want people that jump in to be serious about it.

Right.

I think you have a line specifically about like aspiring professionals.

Yeah.

It’s like if you’re going like just understand.

I feel like it’s almost more of an education thing, a self-awareness thing, just like understand where you want to go and where you are now and what your capabilities are.

Right.

You were talking about like photography, like don’t shoot, don’t, don’t go shoot a wedding if you’ve never shot a wedding.

And this is like a serious, like, you know what I mean?

Like it’s, there’s, there’s a balance there.

And I think it’s, you know, if you’re building websites, like you got to start off smaller, you got to understand that your first projects are going to suck.

And in the barrier to entry of it is legitimately just, you know, like you said, a laptop.

I mean, it’s, it, I don’t think it’s necessarily a hundred percent, a bad thing, but it’s something that we always have to be like kind of cognizant of.

And hopefully as a community, we can all do a really good job of like understanding, like what that actually means.

And, um, you know, and, and people trying to get into it, it’s like, don’t discourage them, but make sure that they have their expectations set on like where they want to go, what they want to do.

Um, and I don’t know, just, we, we can’t, we can’t allow the expectations from outside people, especially buying websites to think that this is like so easy.

Anyone can do it.

It’s still, there’s still a lot of skill involved in this.

Um, and we’ll see what the future holds there.

Cause that’s a whole nother topic with, uh, where that’s headed.

Yeah.

Yeah.

All right.

We’re going to bring Kyle on in just a second here.

I do want to put this out here.

I’ve, I’ve heard the, uh, charges of gatekeeping in this industry.

And I, I, I’ll just be honest.

I don’t really understand it.

If somebody wants to come on and make an argument for why gatekeeping is, is not desirable in the industry and, and, and exactly what it is.

I mean, what I, you know, I haven’t really heard anybody clearly define what gatekeeping is, but I would love just to have a discussion around that, uh, kind of subtopic in general, but we’ve got Kyle, uh, on the line.

Are you there, Kyle?

Yeah.

Can you hear me?

Yes, sir.

Yeah.

I mean, I’d agree with the basic premise.

Um, but I think there’s a nuance there.

Cause I think if you are in the business of selling websites, then you’re competing against the people who can get in with very low barrier and you’re competing with them, you know, on price mostly.

So, you know, I’m telling my clients that, um, your website’s going to cost several tens of thousands of dollars.

And they say, oh, well I can do it for myself on Squarespace, or I can hire, you know, my buddy’s cousin to do it for a thousand dollars.

Um, and the hard thing is to sell them on the fact that there’s knowledge here.

Uh, and I think the nuance there is the fact that the barrier for entry is fine being low if somebody wants to do it themselves.

Um, but as soon as you’re trying to sell that to somebody else, I think that’s where it’s important to be professional.

I mean, same thing with your photography thing.

If you want to buy a camera and just shoot stuff for yourself, go for it.

I’m happy for you.

But if you’re trying to sell your services, then you want some expertise to go with that money.

Mark, are we, we’re, we’re, I think the show premise kind of is within the context of doing, doing this as a business, right?

I would, I would say we should lean that way.

I mean, I, I, I would echo Kyle’s point.

Yeah.

I don’t, I don’t have a problem with anybody just picking up a website and doing it.

You know, that doesn’t, that I feel like that’s kind of premise of WordPress in a sense of democratizing, publishing all that.

I do think though, that the lines start to get blurred when, you know, somebody, maybe it happens a little less now because instead of like knowing that your buddy down the street knows how to build websites, it’s that you got an ad to go make a Wix website for yourself and your business.

Maybe it’s a little different.

I feel like it might’ve been in the past.

It was like, Oh, my buddy knows how to build a website.

He can build it for me, but he’s only built one website for himself and he doesn’t do it like professionally at all.

I think that that’s kind of where it gets blurry.

Um, so yeah, I would say more in a professional sense is probably what we should kind of like, you know, be like kind of speaking about more so.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So Kyle, how do you, how do you, how would you like to see this approach?

Do you have any ideas for, um, you know, mainly I think about how clients can protect themselves at the end of the day, but also with regard to the industry reputation, like we talked, because a bad industry reputation is obviously going to negatively impact all of us.

Um, but then there’s the individual clients who we obviously want them to protect themselves as well.

Yeah.

I mean, I, I don’t have any specific things.

I think that it’s always the unfortunate thing is it comes down to money.

So it’s trying to speak their language and, and not being that, Oh, you know, your website is going to be quote unquote better in some way by being designed better.

But the fact that like a better designed site is going to give you a better return on your investment.

Uh, and I think a client will listen to that more than just the, the, the vibes of, uh, of better web design.

Yeah, I would agree with that.

I also think it’s very important for us to be, and I’ve talked about this on my channel ad nauseum and in inner circle that if, if all you are is a web designer in this day and age, it’s like, okay, I’m going to design you a website.

I’m going to build the website, uh, maybe even doing both of those simultaneously.

And then I’m going to deliver the website to you.

And then I’m going to move on to my other clients.

It’s not really what most serious businesses are, or, or clients are looking for, right?

Because it’s missing the big piece of distribution.

It’s missing the big piece of traffic and conversion and reaching the actual goals that that business has.

And so I’ve been a big proponent of, um, you know, there are going to be a lot of people who, uh, especially at the lower end who are just going to be selling design and development and that’s it.

That’s, and that’s all, uh, they’re not even good at that, but that’s the extent of what they’re offering because they really know they can’t do anything else.

So a professional has to be the person who is selling the entire package of, yeah, you are getting a new design.

You are getting good quality development, but we actually put the other pieces in place as well.

We understand the copywriting piece.

We understanding how to drive people to your site, whether that be with SEO or PPC or Facebook ads or Tik TOK or whatever our specialty happens to be.

But we know this is going to be a good fit for your business.

So it’s not a, um, situation where we’re going to build it and say, good luck.

It’s not a situation where we’re going to, uh, build it and not know what to do next.

We actually drive this ship for you.

Uh, and we can, we can, uh, essentially, you know, almost guarantee the results because of how much experience we have in this industry.

If that’s the case that you can make to a client, they’re going to be way more interested in you versus the person who’s like, I mean, I design it and build it.

And then it’s yours.

You know, they don’t want it to be theirs.

They don’t want the keys.

They don’t, they don’t know what to do with it either.

Um, so somebody has to be there to manage the site and drive the site and drive traffic to the site.

And then even beyond that, maybe manage the conversion optimization, manage the funnels, you know, whatever else needs to happen to really make that project successful.

That’s, I think what most clients are looking for.

And that’s probably the number one way that you can compete.

Yep.

For sure.

Do you have anything else, Kyle?

Or, uh, you think you’re not at the moment?

I’m good to pass it off.

Appreciate you, brother.

Looks like Brendan O’Connell in the, uh, speaker queue.

BOC.

Hey guys.

I have a quick thing to think about.

Maybe just as we discuss these things, the question I have is, are we talking about WordPress web design?

Are we talking about web design in general?

And what is the difference there?

Are we including the sort of no low code solutions like Wix and Squarespace?

And are we also including the opposite end of the spectrum with, you know, react and next JS projects?

Um, so that’s, that’s one thing I’m thinking about with this question.

And, and then I’m thinking, I, you know, just to be devil’s advocate here a little bit without a lower barrier to entry, many in this space wouldn’t be doing web design.

I don’t know if I would be, if I had to live in VS code doing next JS projects.

Uh, I don’t know if I’d be a web dev amp.

And then the question is, am I a web developer?

If I’m doing WordPress stuff?

Um, those are, those are questions that I’m thinking about.

Uh, and then the, the barrier to entry on this higher end, like next JS projects is shrinking too.

You’ve got, you know, for cells, VO, you’ve got copilot AI integrated directly in VS code.

Are those, are we considering those as lowering the barrier to entry?

I don’t know, just some, just some initial thoughts that I’m having and just sharing that out there.

Yeah.

I would, I would, I would love to get more context, uh, around that.

And I think we have to define more context as to barrier of entry.

Like for me, when I hear barrier of entry, uh, there’s a few staple barriers to entry, like money would be one.

Um, another one obviously would be skillset.

Okay.

So you have to learn a certain amount of things.

Um, in a lot of industries, I think if you compare maybe to another industry where, and I’m not advocating for any of this, I’m just giving examples of barriers to entry where there would be certification or licensing, right?

Those are, those are real physical barriers to entry because you have to demonstrate your skills to somebody before you are allowed to go and do work for other people.

Again, I’m not advocating for that.

Just pointing out what an example of a barrier to entry is.

Um, yeah, I mean, what, what do you think, Brendan, when you hear barrier of entry and web design and I am talking about web design in general, I guess I’m not just talking about WordPress.

I don’t know about Mark, but I, I guess I would say web design in general.

Yeah.

I mean, I think that the certification thing is an interesting point.

And of course, many other industries have that.

And perhaps that’s something to discuss.

I don’t have a good answer for that.

Um, uh, I, I see, I mean, I think there’s also the, there’s the question of also there’s a low barrier to entry for some things.

And there’s, there’s people that also like low code solutions, myself included.

And are we considering that cutting corners?

Is that bad overall for the trajectory and the future of the industry?

Maybe, I don’t know.

It’s too soon to tell.

Uh, but I think that there’s a lot of people building projects now that wouldn’t be five years ago.

Some of those are going to be good projects, but some are not.

So I don’t know.

It’s just lots of thoughts of things to think about.

Yeah.

I would say one of the pros of having a low barrier to entry is you get a lot of people who can come in and dabble.

And then from that dabbling, they can start to build a specific level of seriousness.

And then they can end up in a profession.

They didn’t necessarily, you know, fully commit to at the very beginning, they were just kind of doing an exploration, but because there’s no barrier to entry or a very low barrier to entry, and there’s no licensing requirements, and there’s not a lot of money involved.

They were able to do that dabbling very freely.

They were able to take a couple of initial clients and see if it was something that they wanted to pursue, uh, you know, more.

And then they decided, yeah, it actually is.

And then they did pursue it.

And now they have an agency and they have a, uh, they’ve made a life for themselves.

That would be one of the major pros.

And also probably pretty rare now that we are bringing all this stuff up because the counter to that way would be there’s for every one person that does that, there’s nine that fail and screw over their clients.

So, yeah, I think so.

That, that is the, that’s the rub, right?

We, that’s the part we have to figure out where, um, you know, well, I would say a lot of people, I think that path is a fairly popular path.

Um, and we can probably, if somebody disagrees, they can, we can have that debate too.

I think that’s probably a very common path.

The question is what is the destruction left in the wake of that person?

And, um, you know, what are the ramifications of that?

And so I, I’ve always advocated for just to kind of highlight my position on this.

Uh, I am okay with a low barrier to entry, but it still has to be managed, um, managed by the individuals themselves, uh, through a level of honesty with clients that they’re working with and then it has to be managed by what I would call like industry leaders, um, or even influencers or whatever.

And, and educators, people that are putting education out, people that are advocating for higher standards.

And I think the industry as a whole should be advocating for higher standards because that protects everybody.

It’s not forcing higher standards through things like licensing and all of that, but it’s strongly advocating for higher standards.

Uh, but if you have a person, if we go back to the dabbler kind of person, I am totally okay.

If that person comes in and wants to dabble and they’re like, you know what?

I actually want to get my feet wet with like a real project in the real world with real money involved.

You could do that.

Even if you don’t know what you’re doing, you can do that because you go to the client and you say, I don’t know what I’m doing.

I’ll just be honest with you.

I don’t know what I’m doing, but I know more than you.

Okay.

And I’m, I’m figuring it out and I’m learning and I’m going to charge you a very, very low amount.

And maybe the consequences of me not doing a great job or not that high because the business is just starting out too.

And you guys kind of just come to the same agreement that like, yeah, I mean, I want somebody to do this at a, at a really low rate.

Uh, that’s going to come with really low skills a lot of times.

And I’m okay with that because you know, maybe it’s a hobby.

Maybe it’s not a serious business.

I don’t know.

But you guys come to an agreement where you’re both on the same page.

You’re not presenting yourself as like, no, I can do anything you need.

Oh, I’m going to get you great results.

You’re not lying to anybody.

You’re being very upfront and honest.

And they’re in agreement that like, yeah, I’ll take the risks on you because I want the deal.

And I think, you know, it’s a perfect project for you to learn along the way.

Everybody should be happy in that scenario.

And the barrier to entry at that point is no problem whatsoever.

It’s when the person is trying to pass themselves off and say, oh, no, no, no.

I’m an agency.

I could do all this work for you.

I’m making all these promises.

And then they actually can’t deliver and they actually don’t have any experience.

That’s where we have a problem.

Yeah, I think a lot of that, I think a lot of it ends up coming back to just the professionals that are in the industry that have spent the time, you know, put in the years of effort to develop their skill and their craft.

You know, like a lot of people like, you know, in the space and the people that we know just like from even from WordPress, from other from other communities as well.

I think it’s just an idea of trying to protect the public, the average person’s perception of kind of like the web design industry.

I was trying to think as we were going through some of these things of like other outside examples in different industries where you’re like, you look at an industry and maybe you’re like, ah, you know, I could do that myself.

Like I’m trying to think of examples and I can’t think of too many.

Like, oh, I could do that myself or like most of those people, some, some sort of industry where they’ve created this situation where it’s like the public perception of it is not great.

Like, oh, this contract, I’m not going to get a contract.

They’re going to screw me over.

I don’t, I don’t know.

I can’t think of any good ones.

But I feel like with websites, it’s just, it’s always funny to me because this is one of those newer trades, so to speak, you know, relative to all these other things that we’ve had for so long because we’re in the digital age now where everybody thinks that they can do it because there’s not like a, there’s not a tangible aspect to it.

And I feel like a lot of times, unless we educate clients on what we’re actually providing and the skills that we actually have and all of that, that they, there’s just a huge disconnect there and they don’t really understand because they can’t physically see you building a wall or like framing a kitchen or something like that.

They, they can’t, they don’t see all the backend.

And it’s, it’s why like, we almost have to be even more of educators than I feel like people in other industries do because of all the stuff that we do is kind of like, um, just intangible, so to speak, like because it’s digital.

Yeah.

I think with, uh, like you just mentioned the contractor, it’s, it’s kind of weird because if you’re going to do something like that, a project like that, where somebody could be physically harmed, for example, this is where a lot of licensing arguments come from.

Uh, so people say, Hey, we, we can’t just let anybody do that.

I mean, somebody could easily be hurt from that.

And so you have to be a licensed certified professional and you have to have this level of insurance, uh, for liability purposes and things like that.

And so we see that a lot of times, but then on the web design side of things, you ask the question, can people be harmed by this?

And I think absolutely.

I mean, a business for sure.

I mean, imagine a business that has very, very strong SEO, maybe like an e-commerce business, very strong SEO.

Uh, they’re getting lots and lots of organic traffic.

That organic traffic is turning into mad sales on this e-commerce store.

And they end up wanting to do a little bit of a redesign and they, they end up hiring the wrong person.

That person doesn’t know when they do the migration, all the things that need to happen to preserve this SEO, uh, result that’s been happening.

And suddenly there’s a little bit of a disaster.

And we go from tens of thousands of dollars a month in revenue to, uh, hardly any, let’s say, I mean, there’s real lives that are impacted by that.

Not just the owner of the company that that owner could have employees.

Those employees have to be paid.

They have families.

There’s a lot of stuff that can happen very, very negatively.

Uh, if somebody doesn’t know what they’re doing in this industry, but, um, nobody’s made the case for licensing.

I’m not making the case for licensing, but I think that too many people look at this as just, I mean, just, we’re just building websites.

What does it matter?

Right?

I, anybody should just do it to hire anybody.

They can do it for whatever price they, I don’t think so.

I think that there are real consequences to the work that we do.

And it is our responsibility as an industry and as individuals in the industry to hold ourselves and everybody to the highest of standards and ensure that clients are taken care of.

Because if they’re not, the entire industry’s reputation is going to plummet and that is going to hurt all of us.

We can’t let the people, if we’re going to have a low barrier to entry, we can’t let the people at the bottom sabotage the reputation of everybody.

That’s what we have to look out for.

Yep.

I would agree.

Do we have somebody in the pool here?

Brennan, do you have anything else on that, Kyle, either?

Anybody else that has some thoughts?

Well, I was going to ask the question, but I think Kevin just spoke to it, which is that, do we have a, do we need to protect clients from themselves?

You know, if they, if they choose someone for whatever reason, you know, being cheap or familiarity or just being swindled?

You know, do we, do we, do we as an industry have the responsibility to protect clients from making bad choices?

What do you think, Mark?

It’s a good question.

I’m kind of torn on that because I don’t, I don’t think we should be like kind of the, I don’t fully think we should be the industries kind of like in every client’s like police force, so to speak, I actually do think there is an, there’s another angle to look at this resolution and it’s not specifically that the barrier to entry is too low.

It’s more like because of that fact, because that’s just like kind of happening.

Like I was saying earlier, we have to be better at not even selling, but just better at educating because I feel like a lot of us, if we, if we ran into this situation where somebody came and they had a bad experience with a web designer or something like that, and then they somehow come to us or we run into them or whatever, they’re going to say like, oh, I had a really bad experience.

And we’re going to have to be like, well, like this is where you have to like turn into like a, almost a therapist in a way.

Like you have to be like, well, why did that happen?

Like what were like, let’s just run me through that situation.

Like what were the signs there?

Did they ask you for this, this, and this?

And that’s almost like, to me, I’ve always had the most success when I’ve just been like, okay, I can easily point out to you what went wrong in, you know, those different situations and like how our process is different.

And, you know, in, in my mind, it’s like, while I don’t love necessarily, I’m just conflicted on like the fact that like anybody could just start doing it.

I hope, I hope there’s some ethics at play with people that, that just start.

Um, hopefully they can develop those over time or they have them from the get go.

But yeah, I don’t, I don’t know.

I’m torn on that.

I don’t, I don’t really have the energy necessarily to be the, the police force for every single client and kind of like make sure that that, that that happens.

So, um, yeah, I don’t know if that was an answer or not, but that’s kind of where I’m mentally grappling with that situation.

I had another thought too, based on, you know, you were, you were saying education and Kevin said that as well, but I think it’s great, but we’ve been talking about clients, but I think the other nice thing is that, you know, Kevin has taken the role of educating designers and, and increasing their, um, uh, skills, you know, and I, and that might be the way too, is instead of saying there’s a bunch of bad designers, we need to keep them out is, or educating clients that they exist is just help them be better, which I think Kevin’s doing a great job of doing.

Yeah.

I think, I think education is, is very important for sure.

Obviously not everybody’s going to get on board with, uh, being educated.

There’s a, there’s a lot of, you know, I’ve made the argument over and over pretty much ad nauseum for craftsmanship.

You know, like, I think if you’re going to be a professional in an industry, you should buy into the idea of being a craftsman.

Like you should practice, you should study, you should always be working on expanding your skillset, expanding your knowledge base.

Uh, and there’s a lot of people who just want to do the easiest possible thing to cash the next check.

That’s all, that’s all they’re worried about.

It’s everything is about efficiency to the, to getting dollars in the bank account.

And I’ve always kind of argued against that, that, you know, craftsmanship often takes a little bit more time and a little bit more skill and a little bit more knowledge, a little bit more experience.

Now, by the way, you can charge more if, uh, if you have higher craftsmanship and should charge more if you have higher craftsmanship, but you should be focused on the craftsmanship of the work that you are doing.

And again, I think that benefits everybody doesn’t just benefit your client.

It benefits you.

And then it benefits the industry in general.

Um, now I, I will say if we’re thinking about things we can put in place actions that can be taken.

I think that there are private ways to offer certifications.

So instead of, instead of a government or something coming in and saying, oh, I mean, there’s too many consequences in this industry.

We’ve got to put some licensing in place.

You got to get permission from us in order to do this kind of, that’s not what I want to see.

But I think a private organization can come in and put a, uh, uh, a certification system together, which may combine education with some sort of, um, badge or whatever it happens to be at the end of the day.

And people can voluntarily go through that.

And then they can advertise as being that.

And if it gets big enough and it gets serious enough, the industry knows to look for that and say, Hey, have they gone through this yet?

Right.

Um, and it’s just a third party way of, of communicating that, Hey, other people have put eyes on this person and their work and their knowledge and their skill and their experience.

And they have, they have, you know, publicly committed to this higher standard of work, um, and publicly committed maybe to having things like liability insurance and all this other stuff.

Um, so that is a, always a possibility.

I don’t think that currently exists, at least to my knowledge.

Uh, but that is an option.

There’s, I don’t know.

There’s, there’s lots of options.

I wonder, I wonder how much this has ever been talked about, like kind of in the industry.

I mean, again, and I think it’s, I think what Brendan was saying is there’s kind of an important distinction to be made between WordPress and then the other more like DIY low code tools, because, you know, we’re all familiar with WordPress and it can be a bear to really like dive into and actually understand how at least like the, the daughter work side of things works.com, I guess is a little more, has some training wheels on it, but, um, I don’t, I don’t know.

I think, you know what, one other, one other exercise I think would be kind of interesting would be if I know you outlined it a little bit, Kevin, but almost like a, a course, not a course, but like a, uh, you know, kind of like a, a process template for, all right, you want to get into web design, you know, nothing like, where should you start?

Obviously page building one-on-one is a good place to start as like the skills, but I’m saying like actually how you move through that process of how do you, how do you get from zero to actually being somebody that can like charge more for websites or at a certain level?

Like what’s, what are those steps look like?

Um, we’ve talked about it here and there, but I don’t know if something exists that’s like fully fleshed out where you’re like going from learn the basics, then build sites for yourself.

Probably first, it’s kind of how I started.

And then, and then finally get a client that’s willing to pay you a little bit of money and then continue to rank up from there.

And if there’s like milestones on that journey, I feel like that would be kind of something, um, even more so that like, you know, kind of transcends just the technical piece of it.

It’s more like actually business, almost more business training in a way.

Yeah.

Yeah.

On that note, if I could just jump in real quick, cause that, that brings up a really good point too, because I think there’s a lot of really talented developers and designers who don’t know how to build converting websites that help their clients.

We see this, all the time with people that can, they can, they can code well, they can create a nice design.

That’s compelling, but they have, they know nothing about conversions and how to write content and how to, you know, lay that kind of stuff out.

So having more of that business component, I think is huge.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah.

I’ve had, I’ve advocated for that for, for a while.

Um, yeah, yeah.

I don’t, I don’t know, Mark, where you want to go from here?

Um, do we have anybody else that wants to speak here?

Do we have a, we had D123, I think here in the, uh, he jumped in earlier.

I saw him jump in, but then he dropped off.

There he is.

Okay.

I see him now.

I see him.

DK, my man.

Doug, what’s up?

Oh, maybe it’s, maybe he’s having audio problems.

Testing one, two, three.

Oh, there he is.

You’re good.

Hey, I was just texting Mark to let, let him know I was having tech problems and trying to speak.

I don’t know what happened.

I, apparently there was some buffering going on and I was a few minutes behind the game here.

So, um, I didn’t get to hear the opening statement about the barrier to entry stuff, but, uh, I’ve got some feelings on the, on the subject for sure.

So again, thanks for doing this guy’s turning out to be a great platform.

Um, uh, lack of education is what, uh, is, is how I sum it up.

Of course I sum everything up that way.

Um, the barrier to entry is low and we see it in other industries now.

Uh, when you have automation, it’s going to lower the barrier of entry even further.

Uh, the music industry is suffering from it.

Um, you have auto tune.

Now everybody’s a singer.

Anybody can do it.

And, uh, the record companies or the recording companies auto tune everybody.

And when you auto tune everybody, that means that the people that can’t sing enter and they’re auto tuned.

They’re just like everybody else.

The only place we really see it is when they’re asked to sing a national anthem and they stupidly, uh, uh, accept the request and they go on national television and sing when there’s no auto tune set up.

And we all get to see the results.

Same thing with web design.

People enter the, we call it web design.

We should call it web services because design is just part of it.

But we, we are starting to see in the help desk.

Occasionally people come in, they have sold a client and they come to the help desk to figure out how to do things.

And it’s obvious they have no clue of the scope that they’re entering into or that they need to have to service the client.

If you have a website, you built basically a business card.

And if you keep the business card in your pocket, it does nothing for you.

So you’ve got all these other facets that need to be checked off.

You know, the SEO facets, the accessibility facets, um, all that stuff.

And when you have companies that say, it’s so easy, a caveman can do it.

Just give us 50 bucks a month to come on in and, and have at it.

You know, that’s, that’s not helping.

So I agree with Kevin.

Um, we need some kind of, uh, uh, uh, uh, I wouldn’t call it a regulatory type of commission, but, uh, some way to get stamped a stamp of approval that you are licensed, not licensed, but you are educated and vetted in the industry to provide X services.

And if we have that, and if we can market that, then maybe we can get it in the front of the eye, in front of the newbies eyes to show them.

It’s not just designing the page.

There’s aspects behind the scenes that you have to pay attention to.

I don’t know how to do it, but I like the idea of having a sanctioning body in place and that that being marketed, I think might help educate the newbies.

Yeah.

I think that’s a great point.

I think one of the, uh, frustrations I’ve had along, because you know, I, I haven’t thought about putting any sort of organization or certification together, but the pathway to something like that would start with, well, I mean, what are the certifiers going to look for?

Right.

And I think the answer would be, well, if you’re certifying somebody, you would look for what we would call best practices in an industry.

And so then the question is, who is going to decide what the best practices are.

And I’ve put out a lot of content in web design.

When I talk about CSS and I talk about, uh, building websites with page builders, focusing on scalability and maintainability and cleaner code and accessibility and things like this.

I’ve talked about best practices.

I’ve used the word best practices.

And I don’t know if it’s how certain people are interpreting that, but I get attacked constantly, um, by people saying like, you don’t get to decide, you don’t get to do that.

And I’m like, I never said I was deciding these are the best practices as I know them to be.

But what we need is leadership in an industry.

And that’s more than one person.

That’s a lot of people who are coming together and actually debating what are the best practices and why is this method better than that method?

Because we can’t, we can then come to different conclusions about, okay, this is what we would look for.

And when we, when we go audit a website, we can obviously see, well, these are the problems.

Why did these problems occur?

Well, because best practices weren’t followed.

Okay.

What are the best?

And we start outlining what the best practices are.

That would be the first step on any sort of path to certification.

And I think we should all be able to agree on that.

But for some reason, when I start putting out content using the term best practice, I actually get pushback from other creators, other quote unquote educators, other quote unquote industry leaders who are saying, oh, no, no, no, anybody can do whatever they want, however they want.

And it’s just, everybody’s just doing their own thing.

And that’s perfectly fine.

And that to me makes zero sense.

My response to that is I, I, I experienced the same thing.

My response to that is just ignore them and, and, and keep on plugging away at the, at the foundational aspects that we’re talking about, improve or improving the foundational aspects, like, like we’re talking about here.

And that will eventually communicate to those people, I would think, because there’s, I don’t know.

When I got into the tech world into programming, before I got into web stuff, I was, I got into the world of database programming.

And like a lot of people, there’s, there’s always some kind of a interesting story, people call them horror stories or tech horror stories.

They used to call them about how the main person in charge had an issue or disappeared or something happened.

And then they got put in the hot seat and they had to figure out what to do.

Bottom line is it always led to fundamental education.

If you got a code, you got to learn to code somewhere.

You’ve got to go to a school, figuratively speaking, some type of school.

Some of us did it in college.

I did.

C++ was the platform we used.

But you didn’t have to go to college to do it.

There’s all kinds of other educational platforms out there, but we all did it back in the day.

And those, there were fundamental conventions.

It’s just like the English language.

We have the alphabet.

That is a fundamental convention for the English language or many languages, right?

Same thing with web design.

So for somebody to say that the, you shouldn’t pay attention to conventions, you shouldn’t have to have to do it that way.

Well, there are still building blocks.

You get, you break it down to the fundamental building blocks that you must have, regardless of what direction you’ve chose to go.

And I think that’s, that’s what we got to focus on.

I don’t know.

And in my mind, and in what I try to do, is practice what I preach.

So in the help desk stuff, when people come in and they, they make it obvious that they’re in that position, a newbie that doesn’t know what they’re doing, we try to help educate them, at least I like to, and see the questions that they haven’t asked yet, and help them along, point them at certain, certain, in a certain path to a certain educational platform.

And I’m not blowing smoke here, but we often send people to page building one-on-one because it covers so many fundamentals.

So again, I get full circle.

I kind of lost my point, but full full circle, it comes back to lack of education and some kind of a regulatory licensing type of body would be fantastic.

Excellent.

Excellent.

All right.

Let’s, I want to get Sue in here.

Sue is in the speaker pool.

Are you with us, Sue?

I am.

This is a, this is a great conversation.

I’ve been building websites for a long time and I think a lot of designer developers don’t realize that this is a long game and it’s going to keep changing and they have to keep re-educating themselves all the time.

And you start out and you’re making things, but then you make something for a client.

And I mean, it’s, it’s like, like the movie, if we build it, they’re going to come.

Well, they don’t come because you do need the, the marketing piece.

And there’s just so many different areas that you need to at least understand somewhat.

And yeah, I, it’s, it’s, it’s not an easy job and, and they don’t, they don’t realize.

I think it’s great if, if you’re a person that likes to learn, you know, you’re going to constantly, if you’re, if you’re a person that gets bored, you know, with repetition, it’s a great career to have because you have to keep learning all the time.

And, but, but I don’t think some people get that, um, when they, they come in at first.

Um, I do tend to agree with you.

I think, how long have you been working in the industry, Sue?

I started learning web design in 97.

Okay.

So, you know, table layout and all of that.

And we were doing all these little, little things in code to trick the browsers.

So it would look one, the same way in all the different browsers.

And, and then you got really good at that.

And then that all went away and you had to learn something else, a whole different way of doing it.

And then you come to WordPress into WordPress and you’re limited, um, on what you can do at first, if you’re not, well, I was, I can code to a point, but then I didn’t get as good at the PHP side of things.

So, you know, I love doing the CSS and the HTML, but I wasn’t doing it by hand and then I had to switch and, um, which is great.

And it gives you a lot more flexibility to have all these other things you can pull in.

Um, yeah, but I think that the page building 101 class has been really helpful just to fill in little gaps that I missed along the way.

Um, but yeah, having some kind of group or some kind of standard, I know, like I’m, I’m a graphic designer to begin with and you used to join like AIGA or whatever and, and kind of, so you had a stamp on you that you were an official graphic designer, but we don’t have something like that with web design.

And I, I get that it’s, it’s pieces all over the place.

Um, Do you feel like that organization when you, I assume you were a part of it with, with, in the design world, do you feel like that helped?

Do you feel like that was beneficial when the industry needed it?

Actually, I, I joined here and there, but I live in a rural area.

And so there’s no, no chapter here that I could meet with the closest chapter, you know, is six hour drive away.

So, you know, I, it didn’t really do a whole lot for me.

It would be great if there was an online kind of a thing like that, you know, and, and something like that for us, you know, bridging that, you know, some design, having a knowledge of these different areas to a certain point, uh, would be, would be interesting, but, but I see that it would be, it would be difficult.

Yeah.

Like you’re saying who, who decides, but there, there are standards.

I mean, you, I, I, you, you call me out constantly here and there.

I, I get, I know I’m the chump that, oh, I’m still doing it that way.

I shouldn’t be doing it that way anymore.

I need to be smarter about how I do this so that it doesn’t take so long and things are more automated and yeah.

Yeah.

This is actually is bringing me back to, to, I wanted to hear really two sides of this.

Cause, and that’s why I asked you when you started.

So 1997, you’re probably like me, you probably don’t really remember.

And even if we did remember it, it’s irrelevant now because it’s 2024, but like, I, we don’t, we’ve been in it so long.

We don’t know what it’s like for somebody who who might be new, like coming into the industry and experiencing that.

Okay.

Here’s this low barrier to entry.

Here I am wandering around in the very, very early stages.

If there is anybody listening who that fits that you fit that description, I would love to hear from you.

Like, what do you, what are your thoughts as far as barrier to entry and how daunting is it when you look at the industry that we’re all doing work in, how daunting is it specifically?

But the other side, when it comes to best practices and certification that I’m now realizing this, I think this was Brendan’s point earlier.

And I think Brendan’s still here.

He can chime in, but where, where do you even begin when you start to account for all of the different languages, all of the different platforms that people could be using?

Is it even possible to map best practices across WordPress and then this platform over here and this CMS over here, and then a front end JavaScript framework being used rather than PHP on this side.

And then, you know, that, that starts to just get outlandishly chaotic.

It seems, I don’t even know if it’s feasible at that point to start to put together some semblance of a best practices standard or organization or anything like that.

If I can hop in.

Anybody can hop in.

Go ahead.

Open floor.

Hi guys.

And thank you very much for this conversation.

It’s very interesting.

I totally agree with Doug and Kevin about trying to sell more than technique.

I live in Morocco and the competition here is crazy.

Everybody makes websites.

I have a lot of trouble ranking in Google because of that.

I think that every industry has an aspect of technique and we’re all concerned.

And, um, and this aspect gets easier and easier.

Tools are easier to use.

Uh, the education is there.

Personally, I learned so much just by watching some of you guys and you make tools, uh, and you, you make tools to make this, uh, these things easier.

So it participates in making, uh, in lowering the barriers.

Actually, the problem with web dev is that what the client sees is the tip of the iceberg.

Uh, the real quality of a website is unseen image optimization, SEO optimization, content, et cetera.

So we have to sell and try to sell what is difficult to, to, to, to have, which is experience.

Like, uh, like, so I started like programming 25 years ago and now I’m not trying to market myself as a web designer, but as a web consultant and I’m trying to educate my prospect that a website is not a technical tool, but a marketing and a communication tool.

If you position yourself as an experienced consultant, the barrier, the barrier is automatically higher.

And, um, uh, I also try to, to sell the, the seriousness, the, the quality, the support, et cetera, et cetera.

Nowadays, everybody, uh, had a bad experience, uh, with a cheap surface and, uh, and had, had had a bad website.

So the education is coming and it’s, uh, organic, I think.

And we, we, we kind of, I don’t think we can do anything about it.

Uh, so that’s, that’s my argument.

That’s my argument.

Excellent.

Good points.

Um, Mark, I’ve been a while since I heard from you.

Yeah.

I think there’s, I think there’s, I was doing some research on this topic when we decided we’re going to do it and I saw some Reddit threads and like, there’s one from five years ago that says like thoughts on increasing barrier to entry for web dev.

And I think they’re talking about like how, kind of how Brendan was talking about earlier, like there’s more frameworks and there are more things which are like, I think good in some ways, but at the same time, like, I feel like what certain people are talking about, like one perspective is that now you need to kind of like know frameworks and, and get to understand those while they’re abstracting and encapsulating.

And maybe it’s kind of like, you know, an argument similar to us would be like, well, you know, ACSS as an example helps you a ton, but you have to learn it.

You know what I mean?

So I’m not saying that’s a good or bad thing or, or less or more barrier to entry, but this post was saying like increasing barriers to web dev.

And then there’s other ones that are saying like, they’re, you know, they should, we should, we should increase them because they’re too low.

But I was reading through some of these things and thinking about it.

And I was like, maybe one, I don’t know if this is possible, how we would work it, but maybe there’s just kind of like two pieces to it.

Like we want, we don’t want to discourage people from becoming like just blanket term web designers.

But at the same time, we would, we don’t want to dilute the, the industry as a whole.

So maybe there’s almost like a way where I think this is really where it gets gray and it gets muddy is how can you get somebody to get into the industry, but not become a per like, not like understand that to become a professional, there’s kind of again, like the certification piece.

You know what I mean?

Like, I don’t think anybody’s saying we don’t want people to be able to tinker with WordPress websites or any sort of thing.

But at the same time, maybe there’s like a second level of it where, you know, in order to actually start, you know, hosting client sites and things like that, like you have to almost kind of understand kind of the point that was just made where it’s like, it’s not just a technical thing.

Like you’re actually affecting businesses.

If you’re doing it right, you’re actually doing like real marketing work more than just, you know, putting pixels together.

You know?

I think, I think more people again with a lot of like Kevin’s teachings and stuff like that and other, and other YouTubers, like we’re starting to get that message out a little bit more because this is just really evolving.

And I think that there’s, there’s even more evolution to come here.

I mean, who knows what’s going to happen in the next five to 10 years in general?

So, but I don’t know, a lot of random thoughts there, but I think, uh, I think something to think about.

Yeah.

I think one of the problems is, um, when you have a low, so we talked about some of the pros with a low barrier to entry.

The, the problem with the low barrier to entry is that if you, even if you provide all of the education, uh, if you have some sort of certification process, if you manage to even put that in place, you’re able to just choose willingly, whether they’re going to consume the education and whether they’re going to engage with the certification process.

And you’re going, you’re always going to have a tremendous amount of clients who don’t even know to look for the certification.

They’re just, they’re not even to that level yet.

You know, we know that they’re not technical enough to choose properly between a provider.

Um, but they’re also not even going to know to look for the certification.

And then you’re just going to constantly, because of there’s no barrier to entry, constantly have waves and floods of new people into the industry.

And so it’s like, okay, you’re getting a certain percentage to engage with the education and, and follow best practices or whatever and do better work.

Uh, but then there’s just waves of people coming behind them who aren’t doing any of that.

And so at the end of the day, it’s, it’s almost like, does it really matter, uh, industry wide?

Whereas if there was a higher barrier to entry, you wouldn’t have that, those, those floods of people coming in that aren’t willing to engage, aren’t willing to learn, aren’t willing to take things seriously, aren’t willing to hold themselves to a high standard.

And again, I think it goes back to, um, and I’m not advocating for putting any of that in place.

I’m just, we’re talking about what pros and cons are, right?

Uh, but if one argument that people have made, and I’ll go back to this idea of like gatekeeping that they just, they, to me, I, I interpret their arguments as like gatekeeping equals bad, like black, white gatekeeping.

There’s that word.

They hate it.

It’s so bad.

And it’s like, I mean, is it really?

Cause if you wanted to be a doctor, for example, nobody’s gonna be like, I mean, yeah, just go practice medicine on people.

Just go, go for it.

You know?

I mean, you, you, I guess you could make that argument and then people are, Hey, everybody’s got to do their own homework, do their own due diligence.

Um, but we kind of get the idea that that’s probably not the best idea.

Uh, and so things are put in place to limit the amount of people who can just show up and be like, yeah, that’s me.

I just do, I’m doing medicine today.

That’s what I’m doing.

Right.

Um, and so we don’t have that in web design, obviously I’m not saying we should have that in web design, but I wouldn’t say that all gatekeeping is bad or that the, the term gatekeeping is automatically evil and something that we should turn away from.

And I think there are other ways to quote unquote gatekeep without, um, licensing or governments or, or anything else.

We can, we can self govern it to a degree.

Uh, we just have to figure out the best ways to approach that.

Sure.

I, I would think that it would be kind of cool to have some kind of a certification that was a voluntary thing where you put, I was in a business program because you know, you go to, you go to school, maybe I went to school for design and they don’t teach you anything about business.

And then you get thrown out there and that’s all the stuff that you’re having to try to figure out on your own.

But, um, I went through this program and you get a little sort of, you know, a little certification thing that you could put on your website saying that I’ve been through this, I’ve been trained in this, whatever.

And it is, I think that education piece that you got to educate your clients on what they’re actually getting that you have things on your, you know, they, they come in knowing that you go through this process.

Um, it’s not just, we make it look pretty and throw it up there.

There’s more to this than, than just that.

That might be interesting to have some kind of a, an, a voluntary thing, but then somebody would have to plan all that and figure it out.

So I don’t know.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That’s the big project side of it.

Yeah.

Who’s going to volunteer?

Yeah.

Uh, we got Jason in the speaker pool.

We got Dev, uh, Dev Kiyobi in the speaker pool and anybody, uh, in the speaker pool.

Yeah.

I don’t mind jumping in there.

Um, it already seems to be veering on somewhat of a philosophical chat.

Um, and Kevin, kind of like what you said that there’s these waves of, um, uneducated, uninformed.

Did we just lose somebody or was that just me?

Uh, yeah, sorry.

I think that was me that got lost.

I’m not sure where I dropped off, but that I was saying that as, uh, Kevin said, as that barrier to entry is falling down and that second wave of people come through uneducated doing whatever they want shooting in the wild west, um, is kind of like life at the moment.

There are certifications like the lady mentioned, Sue, I believe said she had studied web design.

Um, and there are, you can go to university, you get the certification and even in the medical industry, there’s holistic healers or whoever you can go to.

And then there are professionals with certifications.

And when it gets really big from an education perspective, um, you end up with this institutionalized, I’ve got a degree from an Ivy league school.

Um, but the skill and the talent still doesn’t mean anything.

So, um, yeah, I think we’ll, we’ll still face this problem or this challenge or this situation ongoing.

And as technology evolves, is it necessary for current best practices to create an entire framework when even ACSS, the way that it’s advancing?

Sure.

At one stage, maybe you needed to know how to code.

Um, now copy and paste works fine.

Click down, automatic BEM done, you know, it’s, uh, it’s, uh, and the pace that even that technology is advancing as one platform, how soon will we get Becky in California saying, Hey, Siri, uh, I’d like a website with waterfall and unicorns in the corner.

Uh, you know, you know, it’s, um, uh, I, I think the pace of evolution is, is really increasing where current, what is today is not tomorrow.

Yeah.

Anyways, rambling.

Thank you.

I appreciate it.

Appreciate it.

Yeah.

If I’m going to argue against, uh, I would argue against institutionalization of the, of the standards and licensing and all of that, right.

The, the downside would be, and I mentioned medicine, for example, I think it’s actually a really good topic to, uh, juxtapose against because you wouldn’t want to create a, and this is the situation that actually actually created today.

Like, you know, if there’s somebody who practices some super alternative form of medicine, uh, it may be illegal for them to do that in the United States.

Um, and then it’s, uh, it was against the law for you to go pursue that.

Uh, perhaps I don’t think that’s, that’s, that would be to me, that’s like a bad form of gatekeeping because, uh, yes, they can, they can absolutely do damage to people.

But when you have this, um, notion of a certification process and you’ve created a culture where, Hey, I mean, if you’re going to go get medicine in general, you should probably go to a medical practitioner that has a degree from XYZ and they’re certified and yada, yada, yada, yada.

And everybody kind of understands that.

But at the same time, if you recognize that, Hey, people are adult human beings, like if they, if they want to look into what this guy’s got going on over here, um, he should be able to do that.

It shouldn’t be like illegal for them to do that.

They’re in a voluntary little contract relationship here.

And everybody understand, Hey, this is a super alternative thing.

There may be risks with that, but stopping them from doing it.

I don’t, I don’t know that that is the best path, you know, let the adult human being make their own decisions in that regard.

Um, and that’s why I, when I talk about certifications or I talk about best practices, I said, it’s all voluntary.

It is a voluntary organization.

It is voluntary for you.

And there’s no gatekeeping in terms of like, oh no, you don’t have the thing.

So you can’t do the thing.

It’s none of that.

It’s all voluntary.

Um, but it’s creating a culture where clients can come in and actually feel safe because they, they, there is some sort of organizing, uh, certification process, best practices, standards, badges, whatever it happens to be, whatever it looks like.

They, they actually can be comforted by that.

As long as everything obviously is done well, uh, the organization itself could be mismanaged and, and, uh, could the, the certification could all be for money and could all be bullshit behind the scenes, right there that’s happened in other industries.

So there’s no perfect situation.

Uh, there’s always just pros and cons or always weighing the pros and cons and debating the pros and cons, and then just taking the path that we think is, is the best one.

But I think right now we do have an industry that is the wild, wild west with zero, uh, anything, uh, structure, best practices, anything.

And actually a situation, like I mentioned earlier, where anybody trying to try to establish some best practices often gets attacked for doing that.

I don’t think that’s a great situation.

We got Jason on the line too.

We haven’t heard from Jason yet.

Uh, and I think, yeah, I’ll jump in and Maddie as well.

So maybe Jason, then Maddie.

Yeah.

Can you guys hear me?

Yes.

Awesome.

I got, I guess, two avenues to talk about.

First, I see maybe like micro certifications.

Like you look at Google ads, you can get the badge for being Google ad certified or being a Google partner and using, you know, certifications from specific platforms.

So maybe you get a WordPress badge that you’re certified.

Now where that gets gray is who’s, who’s putting that together and how is that being done?

Cause if you look at, you know, how you talk about things versus how Matt talks about things, um, at WordPress, there’s very different views on that.

So, um, having micro certifications, I think could be, you know, kind of how you could get around doing that because there’s so many frameworks in so many different ways and things that people do to build a website and what that means to one person.

Um, and then on the other side is just educating clients too.

Like, I remember you talking a, uh, a long time ago, um, how you want a client when you gave them your proposal and they’re like, wow, this was like vastly different than everything, everyone else who submitted one, what theirs look like.

And that’s why we’re choosing you.

Like you go in way more detail.

You talk about all this stuff and why it matters and how, how can clients get educated to know the difference in what to look for and how to buy.

Like you look so often, you see people like what to look for when getting a contractor for my house and they go, you know, to a major website that gives them, you know, the top 10 things to look for.

Like how can we do that as an industry to educate the clients as well on that side of what to look for and things like that.

Great points, Jason.

Uh, I tend, uh, I tend to agree.

From a business perspective for me, it would be something that would look at the, the recourse or the consequences of being a certified XX web designer, um, and not delivering question mark.

Can you say that again?

I’m not sure I understood.

Um, it, you know, it’s a being a certified anything, uh, as a contractor, if I don’t deliver on a project, if I don’t meet my building to engineering standards, uh, there are certain industry recourses that I can take.

Um, whether it’s a trade insurance, because the supplier hasn’t delivered the product or because there are certain government regulations, which I think our industry is far from, um, to regulate the practice.

And as the word that you’ve been using the best practices, uh, I hope that makes sense.

Yeah, a hundred percent.

I think it’s important for people to think about that kind of situation from a client perspective.

Like if you’re, if you’re going into an industry that you know nothing about, you’re not technical enough to, you’re hearing three people sell you and pitch you on, okay, we’re going to use this stack and we’re going to do it this way.

We’re going to do it.

And you, it’s just, it might as well be Martian, right?

You have no idea what they’re saying.

Um, but there happens to be one of these companies as part of a certification organization.

And that certification organization essentially says, look, if they, these people mess up your project or whatever, you’re actually covered by our umbrella policy, right?

Like we, you’re going to get that money back.

We’re going to come in and we’re going to take a look at that.

We’re going to audit the situation.

You’re going to get that money back.

There’s no risk to you because we have said this person is vetted.

We have said that this person knows what they’re doing and you’re going to have a good experience.

And in fact, if they get X, Y, Z complaints, right, we pull their certification.

So they don’t have the thing anymore.

Um, the client in that situation is or should be protected and can feel very confident and comfortable about going with that provider because they know there’s this like oversight organization, uh, that’s going to step in if anything goes South.

And I can’t tell you how many people when I was running my agency would come to me and they would say, you know, we’re switching providers and I’d say, why?

And then they go, well, you know, we hired them to do X, Y, Z.

It’s been an absolute disaster.

I look at the project.

It’s, you know, an element or project or something.

It’s 75% done.

Uh, it’s in shambles.

And I’m kind of at the point where I’m just telling the person, I mean, I hate to tell you this, but like, we, we really just need to start over.

Uh, and then I asked them, you know, how much have you paid so far?

And it just boggles my mind.

I mean, 15,000, 20,000, whatever.

And all they’re facing a situation where all of that money is just down the drain.

They just lit it on fire because they chose this provider and it’s, it didn’t get done.

Um, that, that is a situation that thousands of businesses are facing every single year in this industry.

Uh, and, and I’d like to see it stop.

I’d never like to see that sort of thing happen.

And I also know that if it continues to happen, we are going to get a reputation that is much like, you know, the used car industry or whatever, where people know, like, I hate to go on a used car a lot.

I know they’re going to bullshit me.

I know I’m likely to get a car that has a bunch of problems and then it’s all on me.

Right.

And so we don’t want this industry to have that reputation.

I agree there.

Mark, I’m, I’m, uh, Maddie.

Well, yeah, let’s move to Maddie, but I’m also facing a little bit of a, are you looking at the speaker pool?

I don’t know.

Probably not.

I don’t know.

That’s, that’s, that’s probably a, that’s probably a deny, right?

Okay.

That’s a deny.

Okay.

All right.

Let’s go, Maddie.

Let’s go.

You’re up.

Okay.

I just, I just missed something.

Somebody was denied.

Fair enough.

Um, Hey gentlemen, nice to be here.

Um, I just wanted, before I, before I get to my subject, I just want to acknowledge that, um, it’s incredible how, how, um, Will Smith has shaped our discourse tonight, because I remember a time when it used to be wild west and then Will Smith happened.

And now it’s wild, wild west.

It’s true.

I think that’s very important.

Um, but yeah, I, I missed a bunch of the conversation.

I was listening in the kitchen earlier and then I went upstairs to join.

Uh, but one thing that D123 said, I believe was that, um, after Kevin, you, you said you, you, like you, even if you bring up best practices, you get people slamming you going like, no, no, that’s not true.

Like everybody can do what they want.

And it’s, you know, um, it’s, it’s all, it’s all so easy now.

And you, you can just, you can just design any way you want.

And D123 suggested you just ignore them.

Um, and I, I think unless you guys re re like came back to that point at a later point.

Um, I w I want to pick that up again, because I don’t know if ignoring them is the best idea.

Um, cause the, if we, if we do that, then they’re not going to go away.

Right.

And like, we know better, or at least we think we know, we think this is a point.

Well, this is the thing that that’s worth kind of standing up for, you know, and, and kind of fighting for.

So then shouldn’t we engage in those conversations?

Shouldn’t we try to convert them?

Or at least like try to argue, listen, no, this is, this is not the best, like what you’re doing, like any doing anything is, is not going to lead us to good results.

It’s going to undermine the industry.

It’s gonna, it’s going to cause problems.

Like, can we, can we try to convince these people or is it really just a moot point and should we just move on?

And I’m just going to pose that question and see what everybody’s thinking.

I have a response.

Yeah, go ahead.

Uh, so yeah, I, I, I, I needed to, I could have worded it better.

So you, you called me out on a good point.

Um, typically, you know, when, when you have an argument or somebody is floating an argument that doesn’t hold water.

In any topic, the, the more you engage directly with that, the more you’re elevating them into the spotlight for others to hear.

And that’s what I would like to avoid.

I do want to engage them and, and address their, uh, their lack of, of judgment, if you will.

And, and my, my thought, I think what I followed up with was creating a sanctioning body or some force of education and elevating that.

To the top of the mountain and shouting that from the top of the mountain, as opposed to engaging that person directly, I think was what I was, was suggesting.

Because then you’re, because then you’re addressing everybody that agrees with that person.

And there’s not a whole bunch, but, but, uh, we all know here that conventions are there for a reason.

And so, um, whether you, whether you went to school or not, whether you got into this field organically and just fell one stone over the other.

Or stepped one stone to the other and got to where you’re at, you still educated yourself.

We’re here talking about it.

Um, and so I, what I, I meant to present the idea of, instead of engaging them directly, which usually floats an argument and doesn’t get anywhere, but it, it, it elevates them higher.

So more people hear them and consider what they’re saying.

So that’s why I say, ignore them and let’s just build this, this thing that’s going to educate the masses.

Like the sanctioning body or whatever, whatever we come up with.

So that, that’s kind of what I meant.

So, but yeah, you, you raised the, I’m glad you, you raised that point, Matty.

And I’m glad you clarified.

Um, I, I had a follow-up thought, but now it is creeped me.

I haven’t slept much.

Um, yeah, yeah.

To me, I think, uh, I would actually like to hear from, uh, you know, I’ve, they’ve obviously attacked me and stuff.

Uh, I’ve never heard them say why they think it should be a free for all.

Uh, I mean, there, there’s, there’s basic things that we have a hard time, just like anything in life.

It seems that we have a hard time, like agreeing on that just seem obvious because they can be demonstrated.

That’s always been my argument is like, we’re not just sitting around philosophically talking about things.

Like when, when I say that it’s not best practice and I, this is should have been accepted since day one of web design.

It’s not best practice to attach all of your CSS to ID selectors.

Like this is just, it’s just not a great idea.

We have this thing called classes and classes make styles more scalable and more maintainable.

And, um, you know, we should take a class first approach to web design.

Well, we live in an area, uh, an era of page builders where many, many, many of them by default and by practice style, everything essentially the ID level and people picking them up who don’t really know what they’re doing are encouraged to do that.

And it doesn’t matter how many times that’s like one of those examples where, when I say, okay, a class first workflow is a best practice over styling on ID selectors.

And I can demonstrate very clearly and have demonstrated very clearly over hundreds of hours of video content, why that is true and why that is the case.

And there are still people who just respond with just, no, it doesn’t matter.

People can do whatever they want.

It doesn’t matter.

You shouldn’t be here doing, talking about this stuff.

And it’s just like, that’s, that to me where it’s like, all right now, okay.

We gave them a shot to recognize reality and look at a actual video demonstration of something and go, oh yeah, okay.

You’re right.

Uh, but, and they still can’t and they still don’t.

And therefore that is when you’re, you’re essentially come to the conclusion of, okay, you’re dismissed.

Like you’re not valuable to this conversation anymore.

You’re not valuable to the industry anymore.

Um, that, that’s where we have to let them go.

So I do think, you know, it’s important to entertain their initial, uh, objection, but there does come a point where once they’re just openly and blatantly denying what they’re looking at in front of their eyes.

Uh, that’s when we, we can’t elevate that voice anymore.

That sounds like a good compromise.

Cause yeah, I was like, I get the idea or I get the thought that elevating them into the spotlight just, just puts unnecessary exposure on them and just makes other people perhaps follow them.

So that’s, that’s one danger.

But like, like you said, Kevin, if, if we elevate them into the spotlight and just, just put, put the subject up for debate.

It doesn’t, it doesn’t, it also give people the opportunity to see the debate and to, to form their own decisions.

Right.

Right.

A hundred percent.

Yeah.

You know, if you have the stuff to prove it, um, it, be it a certification or be it just, just video evidence that you’ve recorded that you can point to, then.

You know, it, it gives them the opportunity.

It gives them the opportunity to grow first of all, and just realize, oh shit.

Yeah.

Um, that makes sense.

That’s a better practice.

And, uh, if, if, you know, if they refuse to do that, then yes, like you said, you know, they’re kind of deconstructing themselves at that point.

And you, you kind of have to trust whatever audience you have to, to see that.

Yeah.

I, I think it’s important for people to understand too.

I’ve, I’ve, and it’s hard for me to have tried to, I’ve tried to, I I’ve avoided saying this in the past.

Let’s just put it that way.

When, when these, when these kinds of situations occur, because people look at it as now I’m, now I’m attacking them.

Now I’m going after them.

Right.

And, and this would be considered maybe, or, or, or interpreted as a personal attack of some sort.

But if somebody comes to you and you’re showing why, and I think the ID verse class thing is just a very easy thing for people to understand.

So you, you make the point, you show it and you say, look, this is why it’s better to use classes.

You know, your content, whatever you’re, you’re using ID level.

It’s just, it’s not great.

Here’s why it’s better to use classes.

People will reject that not because the premise is false, but because you’re actually falsifying something about them.

So if it is another creator, for example, and this creator has published 50 videos showing people how to do web design in element or, or something.

Well, they showed everybody across 50 videos and however many viewers they have to style everything at the ID level.

So essentially for them to say, you’re right, they have to admit that you just falsified the 50 videos that they created doing it that way that they demonstrated.

And then if there’s somebody who created a tool like breakdance or element or, or beaver, the people involved in these tools are going to say, no, you shouldn’t be talking about that.

Or you’re wrong, not because of the thing that you’re saying is false, but because it falsifies their product that they’ve put however many hours into, right?

It’s very difficult for an element or a person at the top of the element or food chain to go, oh, you know, this guy’s right.

This guy, I mean, he’s right.

Obviously you should be using classes because then people go, well, where are they in element or?

And like, well, we don’t have them.

So should we stop using element?

Like that’s the situation they’re in.

So they have to, they have to argue against the best practice because the best practice, not because the best practice is false, but because it falsifies the things that they’ve been doing.

And they’re not, many people are not willing to do that.

I think that if you’re going to be a creator, if you’re going to be an educator, and I’ve, I’ve tried my best to do this is that people are able to come to the channel and say.

That actually, that thing that you show, like, I love all your content, but that actual thing right there though, is not the best practice.

It should be done X, Y, Z.

And the creator, the educator should say, you’re right.

Like we should be able to look at that as long as they can demonstrate it.

Now, I’ve been very critical of people who come and, oh no, no, you can’t do that.

And then I’m like, where’s your video?

And they can’t, they can’t ever find a camera or, or, or software to share their screen.

They can’t ever seem to find it.

Right.

Um, that I don’t, I don’t buy into, but if the person’s willing to show it and demonstrate and say, this is why, and walk through it, we should be able to say, you’re right.

And then switch and start teaching that as the best practice, because we’re all responsible for, for coming to these conclusions of what a best practice is and what a best practice is not.

I agree.

I agree.

I agree.

Do you have anything else, Matty?

Um, not at the moment.

No.

Okay.

I think we got Jessica.

I got a comment on, on what Kevin just said.

Real quick one.

Go ahead.

So you raise a great point.

So let’s, uh, on, on top of what you just said about, uh, styling the ID level versus the class level.

So if you have a certification.

It’s in place.

And it’s, uh, websites are getting the badge.

Or the web designer is proud and wants to, wants to fly the badge on that website or whatever.

There has to be a line that you draw because you can, you can create a website that’s styled with no classes all at the ID level.

Oh, it’d be a little one.

But the point is you could do that.

The website, the website could still function, still get good metrics, still load quick, et cetera, be marketed properly or halfway properly and be converting for the customer.

So you’d have to consider where you draw the line with that.

Obviously it’s best practices to style at the class level.

But for somebody who’s not going to do it, where, where does the certification adopt the best practice and where does it draw the line?

That you’ve raised a, uh, kind of a great point to think about.

I’ve actually, I’ve thought about that before and actually people have made these arguments many, many times where it’s like, well, it still converts.

It still does this.

It’s a, or, you know, like you just said, it’s just a brochure site.

Oh, it’s just one page.

It’s just the, the, the, the, the, it’s just, it’s just, it’s just, it’s just, it’s just.

And, uh, I think one principle that would be there that, that is really what all best practices are kind of based on is, uh, like I call it the, the, the crystal ball principle.

And a client may come to you and be like, I just need a simple brochure website and like, okay.

And then you say, well, it’s just a simple brochure website.

So, I mean, I’m going to cut some of these corners right here.

Uh, I’m going to style everything ID level.

I’m just, I’m just, it’s not going to be scalable.

It’s not gonna be made because it doesn’t matter because it’s just X, Y, Z.

And then the client shows up a year later and goes, Hey, my business has grown dramatically.

Like I need to expand on this website that you didn’t, now you’re going back like, uh, well, we can’t really do that.

You know, we chose this platform.

Cause you just said it was a little small website.

You didn’t need a lot.

Like you don’t have a crystal ball.

So you follow best practices as a standard of your craftsmanship because you never want to say, well, I mean, we are the ones that limited you.

We are the ones that didn’t do it right because you said X, Y, no, that like, like, right.

So that anything that violates the crystal ball principle of like, we don’t know what this website’s going to need to do tomorrow or the next day or the next.

That’s why, by the way, we use WordPress and not Wix.

Yeah.

It might’ve been, might’ve been easier to do that on Wix or Squarespace or whatever.

Um, you know, or whatever, you know, a little static kind of thing that you chose, but we don’t have a crystal ball.

Do we, uh, we choose WordPress as the standard because we know all of the doors are open.

All of the options are available to us.

We style with classes because that’s the standard of craftsmanship that we work to because we build scalable, maintainable websites.

We cross the T’s and dot the I’s of accessibility, not because it’s a 30 page site.

We do that on one page sites too.

We, we have a standard that we work by.

We have a process and for anybody listening, uh, I have a free masterclass called processes, everything.

It’s a hundred percent free.

It’s three hours long.

It’s probably the, the most impactful thing that you could potentially watch for your agency or freelance business this year.

Um, just go search YouTube for processes, everything Geary or whatever.

Uh, and it should come right up.

It all goes back to that, that, that masterclass talks about the importance of process from every single angle and how that applies to standards and craftsmanship and best practices.

And again, not everybody is going to live by that, but you get to choose if you are going to, or not.

And you are going to be far, far, far.

The case I make is you are going to be far more valuable to your clients when you work the standards like that.

And when you pay attention to these things and when you don’t cut corners and you don’t violate the crystal ball principle and, and all these other principles that we could outline and come up with.

Uh, but that’s, would be my objection to those kinds of cases.

Beautiful.

Love it.

Do we want to get Jessica in?

You with us?

What’s up, Jessica?

Hi, everyone.

I hope my environment is not too noisy.

Uh, maybe I put right now, but I always think you should be good.

You sound good.

I just want to throw in two cents here.

Um, let me get them together.

It’s almost just so good.

Um, one is like, uh, I think one problem that we have in terms of how does someone who has no idea, like a client, who has no idea of web development, web design, whatever, knows.

Um, but there’s no room to look for when we do not talk about it.

Like, I don’t think we share as experts.

We don’t share enough of, uh, our expertise and, um, why, why is it that some things are better than others?

Uh, like if we take, uh, Kevin’s ID versus classes example, uh, that’s a pretty simple one actually.

Um, but there are so many more nuances to it.

And that brings me to the second point is like, what is our best practice?

Um, because there are different kinds of best practices.

One is like, uh, I do it this way because it works for me and I have this specific file structure.

So, uh, we’re talking about like developing stuff and another developer or agency or whatever says, yeah, but we do it totally differently.

That’s our best practice.

And both of them can be right because like, there’s not, there’s not just like one right or wrong for many cases.

Like there are cases where it’s of course, one way is the right way.

But, um, I think also there’s like, it’s very nuanced to, uh, what is our best practice and what is not.

All right.

So I would say a hundred percent, like I, I fully agree.

Um, what we have to narrow down when, and when I talk about best practice, I try to account for this.

There are no, and anybody that does CSS, and this is true in JavaScript too.

There’s, there’s many pathways to get to the conclusion, right?

Uh, so you might have path A, path B, path C, and they all actually, all three pathways have different pros and cons.

Uh, and they might have the same pros and the same cons.

And then, uh, there’s the situation could be, well, this one is slightly more efficient than this way.

Uh, or this, I just prefer to do it this way.

And what we have to recognize is that there are a lot of decisions that people make in web design that are inconsequential.

So some things that they make like ID, I style everything in the ID level, uh, versus class of class first workflow.

That is a highly consequential decision, which we can demonstrate and we can repeatedly demonstrate it.

Right?

So if we’re taking like a scientific approach to this, it’s like, you know, we, nobody can come to the conclusion that it’s way better and way more efficient and way more everything to style everything.

Nobody’s going to come to the conclusion.

Right?

Right?

So that’s a, it’s two things.

One, it’s a highly consequential thing and it’s a repeatable situation that we can verify.

Okay.

That is the thing we build a true best practice around.

I think the file structure thing is a perfect, uh, is a perfect example of one that is perhaps inconsequential.

So somebody says, well, I do a file structure this way.

Oh, well I do my file structure this way.

The best practices would say, good, do it the way you want, because that’s an inconsequential situation.

Only if somebody can come along and say, oh, actually look at this major consequence to doing it like this.

And then they can demonstrate, then we can all analyze and look at it and say, oh, they’re right.

See, we didn’t think about that.

Or we never ran into that situation.

And it’s really not that big of a deal for us to accept that and just switch to using that file structure.

And I don’t think that happens in file structures, but let’s say it does.

So if it’s inconsequential, we don’t need to worry about it.

We don’t need to argue about it.

We don’t need to try to set a best practice around it.

We can let people do things the way they want to do things.

But if there is a demonstratable, verifiable thing that we can repeat over and over and over again where there is of high consequence, I think that is absolutely worth building a best practice around and fighting for a best practice and a standard for.

And this also, by the way, probably goes into the data liberation topic, that if you’re going to truly liberate your data, like a developer, let’s say I wanted to liberate my website from one agency to another.

Well, somebody that has built that against all best practices, the client can’t bring in another team to come start managing that because that team is going to be like, I can’t work in this situation.

This was built horrifically.

And it’s almost impossible to manage.

So now the client is, you know, we love to celebrate this data liberation concept.

Well, you didn’t follow best practices, so the client’s data is not actually liberate.

Nobody else can work on it without rebuilding it from the ground up.

That’s another bad situation that we want to try to avoid if we buy into concepts like data liberation and so on and so forth.

So that’s a long winded way of saying, yeah, we can we can definitely ignore the things that are of very little consequence or of no consequence and just focus on the things that are of obvious consequence.

Yes, I agree with that.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

There’s like things that are not debatable that these are wrong or not a good way to create a website.

And definitely there are things that you can freely choose how to do it.

Definitely.

But I think also I had enough thought, but I obviously forgot now with all the business around me.

But yeah, I think it’s just important that we also share what our best practices are or what we think is good.

Like if people maybe like look for it, what is a good web designer and come across that same thing, ID versus classes over and over again, they may start to understand, OK, this is maybe a thing I should like look out for.

OK, there’s a lot of more things to take into account.

Like creating a website.

This is just so many things you have to know about.

And I think this is also where it’s a struggle because you need to know a bit the technical side.

You need to know a bit of the marketing side.

You need to know about accessibility, which is becoming more and more important.

And there are just so many things that when a completely new person who says, OK, I want to do websites, I want to do web development or create websites for people.

Like they have to learn so much.

It’s like a enormous amount.

They have to learn.

Mm hmm.

And you can’t do it in like a week or two.

Because like it took me many, many years to get to the point where I am now.

And I think that’s also comes from any other.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

One one thought on that, because that’s a really good point, Jessica.

And I was thinking about it earlier when we were talking about like medicine and doctors and stuff like.

Obviously, there’s you can have a conversation about like how much like a website versus a surgery like has an impact on the person that that’s being done to.

That’s one way to think about it.

But the other way that you just thought about it is the stuff that we do is way more like is again, just just newer, younger.

Right.

So I feel like maybe at a certain point in the future and maybe we’re kind of getting there already where the barrier entry is lowering.

But the amount of stuff that you need to know to be a to be a very skilled developer or a skilled designer, you know, I feel like that could be like maybe there’s just more things to know.

Like we were talking about there, like now accessibility is huge.

Like there’s so much that I feel like over time, perhaps it will start to be more of a situation where it’s like the norm won’t be.

It’s like, oh, we can easily just spin up a website.

No problem without any prior knowledge.

Maybe at some point as our industry continues to mature, it’ll be like, oh, yeah, you actually have to be.

If you want to be a professional, you have to take it.

You have to absolutely have to take it seriously.

Maybe it continues to evolve in that, you know, that perception of it.

Just a thought that I had on that.

I have another thing to throw into is when you look at what avenue someone comes into the industry, there’s so many.

It’s so vastly different from how someone starts to become a web designer or developer.

You know, it might be like, hey, their friend told them about, oh, yeah, you know, there’s this website builder.

It’s Elementor.

It’s super easy to use.

You know, you’re going to be a professional.

You’re going to be a professional.

You’re going to be a professional.

You’re going to be a professional.

You’re going to be a professional.

You’re going to be a professional.

You’re going to be a professional.

You’re going to be a professional.

You’re going to be a professional.

You’re going to be a professional.

You’re going to be a professional.

You’re going to be a professional.

You’re going to be a professional.

You’re going to be a professional.

You’re going to be a professional.

You’re going to be a professional.

You’re going to be a professional.

You’re going to be a professional.

I feel like there’s there’s always more opportunity even to to like continue to double down on kind of like and that’s a whole science just trying to get that in front of people.

I mean, we kind of talked about this from the WordPress.

We’ve talked about this in the past, like WordPress onboarding as like a, you know, like a cousin of kind of cousin topic of what you’re what you’re talking about there.

Obviously, it’s WordPress specific, but yeah, I don’t know.

I mean, I don’t want to like I don’t think the answer is to completely like regulate a starting position for people and they have to go through something.

But I just think more people sharing their knowledge and educating as much as possible and then hopefully trying to, you know, the simplest way I could think about it is like just when when people search for things like we’re packaging our stuff in a way that it will be easier for people to find.

Like obviously there’s word of mouth and referral type stuff, but just that type of thing.

I don’t know if there’s we could talk about ways to formalize that, but I don’t even know where we start with some of those types of things because that’s a large that’s a larger that’s even a larger conversation this for sure.

Can I pour some fuel on the fire?

Do it.

This is a battle I have in my own head, like a dueling personality thing.

Well, so we’re sitting here talking about tech and entering into the tech world back in the 90s, 2000s.

And somehow we knew to educate ourselves.

But let’s let’s look at things this way.

If we say we’re a landscaper.

And we need help, we hire somebody that person learns the landscaping business after working with us for a while, and they may quit and then start their own business.

And now we just cultivated the competitor.

Okay.

So that’s going to happen.

Landscaping is not rocket science to a degree depends on how much you want to bite off.

But now let’s compare it to the plumbing industry or the medical industry.

There’s ramifications of doing a bad plumbing job.

There’s certifications.

You can’t just start plumbing legally.

You have to, you have to, well, unless you’re a homeowner, you can, you can plumb on your own house, at least in Oregon.

So the plumber doesn’t just hire on somebody to help them in their business.

They hire somebody who becomes a journeyman and there’s steps to go through certifications.

So here we are with our WordPress situation.

And every once in a while I hear comments like, how do we reach out to the newbies to educate them?

Why are we cultivating our competition?

If you’re in the business of educating, I get it.

Like Kevin, that’s, that’s one way.

How to become an agency.

But we’re in an environment where there’s now here’s, here’s where I’m going to get some kickback.

We’re in a tech environment where there’s shit tons of people being laid off.

Tens of thousands being laid off every other month.

What do those people do?

They look at AI come in and they say, I, I’ve always wanted to be a web designer.

I want to be a web designer.

And this happens.

We’ve seen it.

They come to our help desk.

I want to be a web designer.

And so they are diluting the web designer pool.

We have instantly more competition.

Why are we running out helping educate our competition?

So we have a harder time selling our product.

We have a better time selling our product.

We have a better time selling our product.

We have a better time selling our product.

So I was going to say in plumbing, you know, you have journeymen and the same thing with electricians and things like that.

And you have associations and the plumbing companies that I work with.

They love that because when they bring those people in, if they have any salt and they’re intelligent, they’re able to earn a little worth profit at a lower rate than the actual plumber.

They’re able to get more work done.

So there you, you probably have a good point.

Like if you were thinking about doing a, or in included somewhere in this, if there’s a mentorship style program that maybe if take someone under you, like a copy cub in copywriting or what have you, that they would work for you.

And you know, I’m thinking, I’m just thinking out loud, but so, and I don’t want to derail the, what you, or go ahead and just respond on that.

Cause I have another question for.

Yeah.

Thank you.

Excellent timing.

I’ll give you a perfect example.

Here I am.

How many years have I been doing this?

Not WordPress, but I co-host a WordPress help desk, the second Saturday of every month, 10 AM Pacific.

So a day after tomorrow will be the next one.

And we do just that.

We’re not hiring somebody, but it’s a help desk and people come there.

And this is just, there’s seven colleagues.

I have, we all host these, these help desks at different times during the month. total there’s between seven and 15 help desks, WordPress help desks that happen each month that are top notch.

Um, some of you here have been to some of them and can have expound your opinion on them, but it’s a day after tomorrow.

Again, after how many years of this we are, I’m going to say giving back unintended, um, to the newbies that come in with free education.

And we get into the weeds.

We’re not just one of these WP help desks that points them at something.

We get our fingers dirty, share screens, get into the nitty gritty, show them and inspire them.

And they go off and they, they get educated.

They come back and ask questions.

We’re doing this for free.

Why are we doing this?

We’re cultivating in some places, in some instances, competition.

Some of these people are just doing their, their one-off business website or their personal. log for their mom or whatever, but others are small businesses that don’t feel they have the money to hire a professional.

You know, in the end, they end up spending more time and money.

If they would just hire somebody, it’d be cheaper.

But I don’t know if that, that responds to your response, but.

We’re not hiring these people as employees and where they get educated and they go off, you know, where we’ve benefited from their presence for a while.

We’re just educating them.

It’s like we’re running out, cultivating the newbie, saying, hey, does anybody want to become a web designer?

Come on, we’ll train you for free.

And now we’ve just trained a hundred web designers that we have to compete with.

It’s kind of a weird conundrum, but I, that’s where I’m at.

I keep thinking about that.

I see.

It’s, it’s, it’s, and that’s interesting.

You have to have some ancillary benefit from doing what you do or you wouldn’t be doing it.

Right.

True.

Very true.

So, but yeah, you’re, you’re, you’re, you’re creating people who potentially can go out into the market and say, hey, I know how to do this.

And then they fall off ace because they really don’t because they’re new and the nuances in every niche will, will always shackle somebody.

Kevin, Kevin, I had a question with what the organization with the first intent or goal be to establish standards across the board.

And would that, that would be over and above kind of putting into some kind of credential or association or, or thing like that.

Right.

I mean, I actually don’t know.

I don’t, I’ve, you know, I’ve, it’s an idea.

It’s an option.

I’ve never explored it to any degree or detail because every time I go down the thought process of like, how would it work?

What would it look like?

Just, I, I see a lot of cons still.

I see a lot of loose ends.

I see a lot of things that are unanswerable potentially.

Uh, and at the end of the day, I just haven’t convinced myself that it’s worth pursuing.

Uh, and I’ve just gone other routes.

Like I, the, the one thing I have done very consistently is put out education and I have advocated for best practices.

I’ve advocated for other educators advocating for best practices.

I’ve put my arguments out there as to why that’s super important.

I’ve kind of, you know, I’ve looked one industry that I look at is cause I’ve, I’ve spent a lot of time there and I find it very interesting to analyze from this kind of position is, uh, the jujitsu or like MMA community and industry.

Uh, because there’s a lot of like karate, Taekwondo schools out there.

And they’re the general consensus is that those are all garbage.

Like they call them McDojos.

Like that’s the industry that they, or that’s the, uh, that’s the understanding or the branding that they have acquired for themselves because of how they behave.

So people are like, Oh, it’s like a McDojo.

You can go, you just pay for belts and whatever.

It’s not real.

It’s not whatever.

Uh, but jujitsu is like all is the complete opposite.

Where, uh, most people, they, they, they have achieved a brand, so to speak of being completely legit.

And, uh, you, you, it’s very difficult to get belts and promoted at, but the same thing is true.

Like anybody off the street who doesn’t really know what they’re looking at or looking for is going to walk into a random gym.

And how do they know that the, that the instructor that they’re about to sign up to learn from is actually legit and knows and knows what they’re doing.

They, they really don’t.

But they, what they do know is if I walk into a karate school or a Taekwondo school or something like that, I’m very likely to be in a, in a McDojo type environment.

But if I walk into a jujitsu gym, I’m very likely to be because the, the, they have established that culture of excellence.

Okay.

And that’s why I talk about that is so important.

And the only people that’s not a governing body that does that.

It’s not, there’s no organization that does that.

That is a network of schools and instructors and whatever one sharing education and, and that kind of leadership online, holding, um, conferences around the world that people can come to establishing their own personal reputation, going to competitions, having their schools go to competitions.

But also what you see in that community is, is people calling out bullshit.

So when they’re like, there’s pages after paid is dedicated to like, look at this bullshit right here.

Right.

And what that does is it informs people like, Oh, you do have to watch out.

Right.

Um, and, and so people are aware that the bullshit exists and people are also, uh, aware that, okay, this sector of this industry has this reputation and this sector has this this other reputation.

And we can very easily do that in the work that we are doing by following the same exact stuff, put the education out there, advocate for best practices, build a culture of excellence and craftsmanship and call out the bullshit.

That’s, and that to me is way easier than trying to form an organization and certifications and all this other stuff.

Yeah.

The, the organ, as far as, you know, newbies looking at it as a, as a badge or a stamp to say, Hey, I’m this, that only matters if the consumer or the business or the customer knows what this is.

So there’s a whole other level in, in, in building an organization.

You look, you look at like, Hey, I got my, got my engineering degree from MIT or I got my law degree from Harvard, or I got, you know, those institutions, they’re institutions.

They’ve been around for hundreds of years.

And the, the, the heart, I mean, the best, best time to plant the tree was 30 years ago.

The second best time is now.

So the, the thing is, if, if, if doing it with the intent of.

People have credibility because they’re part of something that nobody knows about that credibility.

And it’s a ton of weight.

It will help their confidence in their pitch.

But I, I love, I mean, I love your work, man.

I, I, I absolutely love your work.

I’ve been doing this for 30 years and I’m constantly learning.

And.

It’s a.

I like the idea.

I love the idea of setting up standards.

And giving people kind of go to.

That’s the book of.

Building things properly.

Like an architect would with a house or a building.

And.

I think that’s important.

So anyway.

Just kind of rambling.

Absolutely.

All right.

I appreciate it.

Mark.

We’re, we’re all, we’re approaching the two hour mark here.

This has been a good one, guys.

This has been a good one.

It’s been a real good one.

Appreciate all you guys.

Let’s go ahead and let’s go ahead and cut.

Cause I do think people will have a.

I think two hours probably are our max for, for a lot of these.

Plus I do have some work to do.

Um.

So let’s, let’s, let’s put this one in the books.

I do want to thank everybody for being here.

If you aren’t subscribed to WP town hall, it’s available on any podcast app or player, whatever your preference is.

Um, so you don’t have to attend these live necessarily.

It’s great when you do.

Uh, especially if you want to be a participant and come into the speakers pool.

And I think we’re getting a better handle on how to manage the speakers pool.

Uh, there’s 10 open slots and, um, I don’t know.

I’m just starting to kind of be like, Hey, if you, if you see a topic and you know, you’re probably going to want to speak on that, come in and jump into the speaker pool.

Like, and we’ll it’s first come first serve.

If it fills up, it fills up.

But those first 10 people get to, they’re going to, they’re going to be the bulk of that episode.

Right.

Uh, and then we can even bounce back and forth.

You know, we don’t have to have, okay, we’ll hear from one person for five minutes.

Okay.

We’ll hear from another person.

We can leave the pool open and then anybody can chime in at any time that’s in the pool and they make up the episode.

Right.

So, uh, I don’t know if you feel the same way, Mark, but I think that’s a decent way to manage it.

A hundred percent.

I think this was a fantastic one.

A lot of great ideas, a lot of good conversation.

Um, yeah, just appreciate every single one of you.

Um, we’re looking forward to the next one.

Absolutely.

Uh, WP town hall.

That show is where you can always see the upcoming episode, the upcoming topic, times, dates, all that good stuff.

Uh, but this one’s in the books.

Thanks for your participation.

Thanks for listening.

And, uh, we’ll be back again very, very soon.

Peace.

Peace.

Thank you.

Thank you.