WP Townhall 009: Code vs No Code – The Future of Web Design w/ Mike McAllister

What’s up, everybody? Welcome back to another episode of WP Town Hall. This is the show that

drops you deep into the heart of pivotal debates, shaping the WordPress ecosystem. It’s a unique

format. You don’t just listen like a regular podcast. You actually get to participate in the

conversation on X Spaces. If you’re not on X Spaces, if you’re listening to this after the

fact, obviously, you only listen. But the goal is to plan ahead, right? We have WPTownHall.show

where every upcoming show is available. The link to join is available at WPTownHall.show.

Once you’re in the X Spaces room, a lot of you are right now. All you have to do is,

what does it say at the bottom of the app? Is it raise your hand to speak? Is it request

to speak? There’s some sort of button like that. Mark, is that correct?

Yeah, I think it’s request to speak. A little microphone, and then we’ll get notified, and

then we’ll bring you in. Yeah. So we would like you, and you could jump into the speaker

pool at any point. That lets us know that you’re like, you know, when we get to the segment

where we bring on, you know, listeners, you’re ready to go. You’re ready to go. We can just,

you know, we don’t have to mess with any tech, okay? Because, you know, we’re being honest,

the X Spaces app, it’s not the best UX. It’s not the best UI. It’s not the best experience

in general. So the faster you get into the speaker pool, the better. We have Mike McAllister as

our main guest today. He is the developer of the Ali theme for WordPress. And we’re going

to be talking about the future of web design, maybe a little bit of a debate style going on.

We’ll see. We’ll see how this plays out. But Mike, I’m going to let you introduce yourself.

I know you have Ali. What got you into all of this? And then whatever you would like to

say to introduce yourself, Floor is yours.

Yeah. Thanks for having me. Long time listener of the various things you guys do. Yeah. So I’ve been

in WordPress a long time. I don’t even know how long, over probably about 15 years total.

And at one point I started making WordPress themes as products. I did the same thing a lot of people do.

They start building things for clients and then you move into products. And so over the years,

I’ve had various theme companies, plugin companies. Some of those have been acquired and moved on to

other things. And now I’m working on the Ali block theme, as you mentioned, and also Ali Pro,

which is kind of like combined with Ali is a kind of a design system and design library for full site

editing, Gutenberg and kind of native modern WordPress, whatever we’re calling it. It’s kind

of a designed library based on all of that. So yeah, that’s what I’m doing now. And yeah, it’s been going

great. Sweet. So do you have a, is it mainly a design background and then you got into dev or vice versa?

What’s what, what’s your history there?

Yeah. I, you know, I’ve always been a designer. It was kind of what I started out as in high school

and kind of into my twenties and everything. So I’ve always been a designer. And then at some point,

you know, after being asked so many times by clients, Hey, can you build this website too? I was like,

okay, well, I gotta figure this out. So yeah, I got into development.

And then from there it was just developing as a means to build, you know, I wanted to bring my

things to life at the time. I didn’t have a partner to help develop. So I just, I just started developing.

So yeah. And you know, it was low stakes stuff with, with themes, you know, easy PHP,

jQuery and things like that. And then over the years started doing more JavaScript, more react.

And now with WordPress where it is kind of in the crosshairs of everything.

Um, I quote a lot of different things, a lot more react these days than, than anything else, probably.

Cool. All right. So let me set the stage for, for our topic today. Um, I did a, uh, little X spaces,

like a casual X spaces a while back. Brian Gardner, uh, was the host of that. We were,

we were talking about some various concepts related to this WordPress need themes. And you ended up doing

a response video to that after the fact. And late in the response video, you mentioned that you

are migrating more towards the no code side of things. Uh, and you were bringing up the fact

that, okay, Kevin’s got, you know, his workflow and it’s more BIM classes and maybe a more traditional

approach. And you used to be that way. You’re trending more toward no code. Um, so two things,

I guess I’m going to let you, I’m going to invite you to maybe expand on that a little bit, or just

reiterate it if you want to, or just give your thoughts around that. Do you still feel that way?

Today. Um, and then we’ll just, we’ll go off of that. Yeah, that’s, um, this, this whole topic,

uh, is, is incredibly interesting to me. And I think in WordPress, we feel the there’s, there’s so

many different personas of people and where they’re at with development. There’s, there’s the classic

developers. There’s the, the DIY wires, there’s the tinkerers, there’s the, the no coders is the,

the person who doesn’t know anything about it. And just kind of like cobbles together a website.

And, you know, their level of development and that they’re exposed to is entirely dependent on how

they got into WordPress and what product they onboarded with and everything else. So,

you know, I’m, I’m constantly thinking about that because with Ollie, and we’re just having any

product in the theme space or in the WordPress space, you’re exposed to all these people. So you

see them all and I talked to them all in support. So, you know, um, it’s, it’s really interesting to see

where everyone’s at now, personally, for me, I think, I think after just building websites, every single

possible way that I have over the years from literally way back in the just HTML, uh, notepad days, all the way through

the, the WordPress PHP era and JavaScript and React. And, uh, I think when the block editor and then the site

editor came to WordPress, I think for me, I felt like it just made a lot of sense, you know, to me where I was

like, I am kind of tired of building websites with all of this complexity and just as dependencies. And,

um, I just was personally ready for something else. Now WordPress, you know, uh, they’re still working

out some kinks. It’s not the smoothest, most intuitive experience, but I think it’s arcing towards where the

wider web is going, where it’s, you know, to borrow a phrase like democratizing, not publishing, but like websites

for people. It’s bringing the stakes a lot lower for people. And for me, that aligns with where I’m at. And that’s why I

decided, you know, to, to kind of double down and build OLLI and full site editing space was, it’s kind of a, a gamble on

that. It feels like in this kind of, we’re edging towards no coast code, low code space. Um,

I feel like I can make an experience in that kind of sandbox that aligns with that and kind of helps

people get there. So for me, I do feel like that is where the web is going. And that’s kind of where

my personal, um, experience is going, whether everyone comes with us, that’s going to be a good question.

Okay. Uh, Mark, this could go in a bunch of different directions. I, I, I feel like, um,

I’ll let you guide this ship. Maybe, you know, okay. Well, I appreciate that. Cause I will take,

I will take it in very specific directions, but I, I’m in, I’m curious as to where you’re going to take

this. All right. Well, I’m going to deviate slightly for a second. Cause I have to ask Mike,

this question. Cause I’m, I watched that video. Are you actually an astronaut, Mike? Cause I,

I did hear you say that in there. Is that, is that, are you training? Is that something past life?

Um, yes, I have been to space and, uh, I’m actually just here temporarily. I’m just like

doing stuff between missions. So I figured I’d like dip down and do some WordPress stuff.

That is, that is dope. Well, we’re, we’re, again, we’re happy to have you and

honored to be in your presence here. Um, okay. Yeah. So on, on a more, slightly more serious note here,

we got, um, I think, I think the holistic thing, and again, I, I know Kevin has a bunch of different

directions that we can go here. I think kind of the main thing for me is I’ve explored this heavily.

I’ve watched, you know, Kevin’s content, your content, like so many other people’s like stuff

and everything that everybody’s doing from the, from the product space. And we see, I feel like we live

in this WordPress bubble sometimes. And a lot of times we look out at the other products that are

maybe touching more of like a less of a, they’re Leslie, Leslie designed for like the typical,

what we would consider maybe like an, a freelancer agency owner and WordPress, like that archetype.

They’re more for like, like even like a, a business owner to handle or like a, just like a, a hobbyist

type freelancer thing, like all the other platforms, like Squarespace is the Wix and all that.

My question is, I think there’s a line that you’ve stated. And I think if we could define that further,

I think it would be helpful is the idea of like developer controlling everything environment

that we’ve lived in and that, that exists. Like, what does that ultimately mean to you in

practicality? And like, are you, are you saying you’re building tools with that in mind? And like,

you kind of like see Ollie and maybe other, you know, other things that you build the future and stuff

like that in that realm. Do you think that’s where we’re headed? Do you think if I could summarize,

do you think that the average person, like it’s getting easier to build websites and the average person

doesn’t want to deal with all the ins and outs? Do you think that archetype of people is growing?

It’s a good question. And like full disclosure, I don’t know the agency space super well. So I can’t,

I can’t speak to like where they’re, what their arc is. But you know, I can speculate just being

adjacent and having a product that agencies, you know, are using and that I, a few things. One, I do think

the stakes are a lot lower for websites these days in that, you know, it used to be, you kind of lock

things up for a client so they couldn’t break it and give them just enough access to kind of get in

there. But I think with what we’re seeing with kind of the customization era of websites, everyone wants

to change everything. And I think even maybe clients want a little more of that. Maybe again, that would be,

that would be a guess. I don’t know. But with the tools where they’re at, you can give clients more

access because if they bust it, it’s so easy to roll it back these days. Everything’s backed up and

everything’s on revisions and not just in WordPress and other platforms as well. And I think it’s just

a lot, we don’t need as much handling. It’s not as of a critical process to, you know, update a website or

let them get in there and break a template if they want. It’s like, whatever, we’ll just,

we’ll just fix it more billable hours for us. Well, whatever. So there’s that. And I just think,

yeah, in terms of like, if that’s the archetype for inside there, I guess I couldn’t speak to that

entirely. I don’t know that space. But if I was a, you know, I was a agency and doing that,

I would be personally looking at ways of like, how can we simplify this whole thing? Let’s look

at how we’ve been doing things as an agency for so long and all these tools we’ve had and the plugins

and all these different things we’ve had to plug into WordPress to kind of make it do the agency thing

we want to do. I would be doing an audit of that and saying, can we simplify this down? Can we get rid

rid of a lot of this tech debt? And can we maybe go lighter? And every project that we do, can we

make it a little lighter and more replicatable? And can we, can we do that? So if I was in that space,

I would be trying to figure out if we can lean into that. If not, if it’s not ready, that’s fine.

But I would be wanting to go towards that. Gotcha. Okay. I’m gonna kick it back to Kevin in a second,

but I have a, I’m so glad to give us that context, Mike, because I think there’s a bigger,

there’s a slightly more of a meta thing. I’m sometimes a meta guy and there’s, there’s a

little bit more of a meta thing going on here that we don’t ask enough when we have these types of

conversations. And I wish we did more, but you provided it is that you, you gave your background,

obviously from designer to developer and essentially like kind of self-taught dev, right? Is that kind

of what I heard? Okay. And then, and, and the context of that, if I’m getting it right,

like freelance designer, like freelance developer and everything like that, building your own products now,

obviously like successful there, not specifically in the agency realm though, just kind of around it.

Right. Yeah. So, so that’s super important context because the way that Kevin’s going to listen to

this, or maybe potentially me, like we’re going to hear everything that we’re saying in a different

light. And I think we need to all like, remember that as we’re kind of processing it, which I think

is part of the beautiful part from these perspectives. So, so, okay. And the last question that I have to

kind of wrap up just like, again, the perspective piece is with all these specifically what you’re

building now, the, the, the theme for WordPress, are you in your marketing? I haven’t looked at every

single marketing piece. Are you mainly marketing to agencies to then use as like an, a solution for,

for those clients, uh, that, you know, kind of want that type of experience or, and, or I guess,

is Ollie a product that a, we’ll call it more of like an average WordPress consumer would purchase.

Like, I don’t know if you, you don’t have to necessarily give us the split on that, but like,

what’s that typically look like? Because those are pretty much the people that you’re probably

dealing directly with, you know, most of the time. Right. So what’s that look like?

Yeah. It’s, it’s definitely, you know, we, we point it towards the, the, the more casual, um, the,

the, maybe the freelance WordPress, the, the, the DIYer. Um, but there’s also some more like, um,

long-term WordPress devs that use it. That was the idea. Like when we launched, it was like, okay,

full site editing is kind of leaning more into that area. So Ollie inherently does too. It has to,

that’s kind of it. The thing that surprised us though, was when we launched Ollie, because, you know,

I worked at WP Engine for a long time, four, four or five years, they do a lot of agency stuff. And so

I talked to a ton of agencies in that time and, you know, we learned that they don’t love to switch tools.

It’s expensive. It’s time consuming. They like to like find their workflow, find their tools, and they

kind of stick with it. And that’s, um, makes a ton of sense. Um, so when we launched Ollie,

Patrick and I were both surprised that we had agencies reaching out and saying, your pricing plans

don’t work for us as agencies. And we were sitting there like, well, shit, we didn’t have you in mind.

Okay. So, uh, we’ll, we’ll make some adjustments and, um, we kind of reworked our pricing to be more

friendly towards the agency crowd. So that we have found that like, there are agencies who are,

I think a lot of people see the writing on the wall. Again, if you’re, if you’re in an agency right now,

and you’re kind of seeing all these other tools, uh, pop up around you outside of WordPress, and you see

WordPress kind of leaning more into full site editing, all that other stuff, you might think, okay, this is

to some degree, maybe inevitable. And so we should at least dig in a little bit, see where it’s going,

get some tools, see, you know, figure it out. And then we can decide whether we want to build around

that, or if we can maybe go a different direction. So we did have people, um, you know, several different

agencies are currently using it now and building a bunch of sites with it. I still wouldn’t say that

they’re ready for Ali as like a, um, you know, a focus product where that that’s what they build

around yet. Um, but it’s, I would say it’s encouraging and surprising, um, from our end that,

that we did get that initial buy-in. So yeah, definitely more of the individual, but, um,

yeah, we’ll see where it goes. Gotcha. Cool. Kevin, what do you got?

So the, there’s two kind of premises here that I guess I want to explore. Um, you mentioned that,

you know, if you were in the agency space, you’d be looking for ways to, to, to simplify things that,

uh, you got tired of building sites with a lot of complexity and so on and so forth.

I guess my first question would be, you know, isn’t that exactly what Elementor and Divi and

Gutenberg and Beaver and all of these builders, isn’t that exactly what they did? They came into

the space saying, man, web design is really complicated. Like we, we got to make this easier.

And so they came up with proprietary names for everything. They ditched the complexity of a

class system. They did all these steps, uh, to, they added drag and drop and yada, yada, yada.

And you know, the builder handles interactions for you and you don’t really have to, it’s that’s,

that was the March, the, the original March towards first low code and then eventually no code.

And you know, one is, do you agree that that that’s what was already done? And two, do you agree?

Because my argument has been that’s, that’s been an absolute disaster. Um, and so I think that a lot

of the major problems have come from that mission to, to kind of dumb everything down and go more

toward or then as close as possible to a no code solution. Yeah, I think that, I mean, they’ve definitely,

those tools were introduced to reduce complexity, quote unquote, and, um, you know, abstract away

that part of, of website billing and just get you to like the fun and pretty stuff and like put the

stuff in your face. Um, now their way of getting there, um, full of all kinds of shortcuts and

questionable code and design standards and everything. I, you know, to some degree that’s, I guess that’s

inevitable. Um, I, I’m curious to, uh, what your thoughts are on like, what is the, like the big problem

there? Is it, is it code quality? Is it, um, you know, what, what is the problem with kind of going

towards no code, um, maybe as a default way of building websites and then relying on code-based

websites for things that you like really need to, you know, serious high stakes things, enterprise,

et cetera. Yeah. Um, I mean, it’s a, it’s a, there’s a lot to unpack there actually. Um,

is it a code quality issue? No, it’s not, it’s not sitting around going, well, I mean, look how messy

that code is. Uh, and that is, if there’s like no implications of that, I mean, messy code has a,

is a big fundamental problem in a bunch of different ways, but from the developer’s perspective,

the biggest problem that it creates is inspection nightmares. I mean, if you, if you have to go to

the website to, to change things or to update styling and you can’t figure out where the styling is even

coming from or what Dom element it’s even applied to, it just, it’s a lot of absolute hunting, right?

It makes my, my life, uh, very, very difficult. So it’s not like a, well, I just like clean code,

like that kind of, that’s not the attitude. It’s just, it’s a mess. It’s an absolute mess when we actually

have to dig in and figure out what’s happening on the website. But that’s just, that I would say is

not even the biggest problem. The problems that I harp on all the time. Um, well, one,

there’s just a craftsmanship issue. Um, and I’m actually planning on doing a video on this, but

when I, when we bought a townhouse in Florida and I, and I, we did a walkthrough and, um, you know,

I found 25 different things that was just like, that’s just fucking lazy. Like just being lazy.

Right. And it’s just, and it’s obviously not like, it’s almost like, did this person even

know what they were doing when they did this? You know? And then I get in the, in the Facebook group

for the entire community and it turns out, man, a lot of people are complaining about the same kinds

of stuff. And the general narrative becomes like, what happened to craftsmanship? Like where did

craftsmanship? Nobody likes to use these products that are not built well, you know, and not designed well

and not put together by people that actually know what they’re doing. Nobody, nobody enjoys that. But for some

reason in web design, we have a bunch of people saying, ah, it’s not really a problem. I mean,

you don’t really have to know what you’re doing. You just do it any way you want. There’s no,

there’s no such thing as craftsmanship. And so we don’t accept a lack of craftsmanship in every other

aspect of our life. But suddenly in web design, a lack of craftsmanship is just totally okay.

Because we’re democratizing publishing and on and on and on. So like, that’s a whole rabbit hole that we

could go down for sure. But again, going back to a developer picking up where a project left off,

I can’t tell you how many times I will get a digital knock on my door from a client who’s saying, hey,

and of course I’m not in the agency space anymore, but this was just repeated. It was just constant.

Hey, I, you know, I, they’re not managing my site anymore. Like I need you to take it over.

And I go in, I’m like, Hey, let me have a look. I go in. I mean, it’s, it is an absolute

atrocity the way that this has been put together. And if they’re asking me to do, can you do X, Y,

Z? And it’s like, I’m, I’m sorry. No, this would be an absolute, just, it’s, it has to be rebuilt.

As a, just to maintain it. So I use two words constantly. It’s scalability and maintainability

of websites that if a client comes to you and says, well, we just need a simple brochure site right now.

You can’t just build them a simple brochure site. You have to build with scalability and maintainability

in mind. If you truly believe that one, this client has a future and that two, you are going to help them

realize this future because if I, if, if I’m going to build something and my goal is to make my client

more successful, I have to know that, okay, when that success starts to come, they are going to

reinvest in this platform. They are going to reinvest in me. Okay. Well, phase two has to happen.

Phase three has to happen. We’re going to get more aggressive. We’re going to do more things with this

website. So it has to be able to scale. We have to be able to build easily on what we’ve already built.

And then we have to be able to maintain it really, really easily and efficiently. And if we can’t do

those things, then we have failed as developers. And that’s really where, where I said a minute ago,

like element or Divi, Gutenberg, all of these, they are disasters when it comes to maintainability

and scalability. Everybody wants to talk about getting to point a, but not talk about, well,

what about point B, C, D, E, F, G, and, and on into the few, like everybody’s in a rate. How easy

can we get them to just put the thing together? But there’s never any talk about what about scaling it?

What about maintaining it? And that’s where the professionalism comes in. Okay. Uh, and so that’s

where I see it lacking in all of these different platforms. And I see a lot of people not caring

that it’s lacking in those areas. And that’s where I start to raise my eyebrows a little bit.

Yeah. It seems the, like all of the, uh, we’ll just call it like no code tools here,

but I’m talking about Elementor and Divi and all these things. The, you know, one of the biggest

problems with, with WordPress is like the plugability and how you can get in there and make it do whatever

you want. And so you can have the best intentions of mine, but two, three developers get on there and

they plug all this stuff in and change things. Like, you know, there’s the only like way to bulletproof a

site. And maybe that’s kind of your point is, is like hard coding it to some degree. Um, and, uh,

following coding standards that the next developer can pick up and go with. Um, the problem with that

is if we continue to move further away from that, it’s going to be harder to convince people to keep

building websites that way. And there’s going to have to be some kind of acceptance of, well, this is

just how we build websites now. And, um, hopefully the tools that are built in modern days now, these days,

um, take that into consideration and they’re building more robust, uh, websites by the end of

it. And I think, you know, unfortunately you kind of need more guardrails for less trouble. Um, the,

the more guardrails you take away, the more, the wild the website gets and then the more on,

on many, on maintainable and scalable it is. So, um, yeah, there’s, there’s, there’s going to have to

be some kind of baseline, like compromise about the tool and the output and like what we all accept.

I I’m glad you mentioned something about craftsmanship though, because that’s something

that’s really on my mind lately with everyone talking about AI and jumping into AI this and that.

It’s like, don’t get me wrong. I like AI use it, but like thinking that these people are saying like,

Oh, design is over. Oh, development’s over. The baseline experience right now on most websites

is terrible. And we’ve had humans working on it and we still can’t get that right to think that the AI is

going to somehow make that part better. It’s not. Yeah. We have to fix the baseline experience on all

these tools and all the websites before we like go jumping and asking the robots to do it. So, um,

yeah, there’s a huge part of craftsmanship there. And that’s, you know, one of the things that we

focus on with Ollie is that, and I think you kind of get the idea with, with frames and ACSS is that

there’s a certain degree of like, let me just help you design this. So I’m going to give you the best

possible chance of getting off the ground. Yeah. And you can focus on the content and other things and kind

of giving them the best chance of craftsmanship, um, out the gate. Yeah. And I, I’m sure, you know,

you have a design background, so there’s a bunch of different, let’s call them standards of

craftsmanship that you feel that should be in design. And I, I think you would agree that,

Hey, not everybody, like you can’t just grab some Rando. I, you know, I, Ronnie Rando is like my favorite

character to talk about. Like Ronnie, you can’t grab Ronnie Rando off the street and be like, Hey, design me this

thing, Ronnie, Ronnie’s going to fuck it up. Ronnie, Ronnie just is not a designer. Okay. So,

and it doesn’t matter how much you dumb down the tools. Ronnie ain’t going to design it. You can

give them Canva all day. Ronnie’s design is going to look terrible. Let’s, let’s just be honest. Right.

And so you, you have these like craftsmanship standards in the design world. And I’m not a designer.

I appreciate good design. I know good design from bad design, but I’m not a designer.

I have craftsmanship standards in the dev world. And I think what we have to be careful of not doing,

I think a lot of times devs try to throw out craftsmanship standards in design. And these are

like the, I do it all myself devs. We know the devs are like, I’m not a designer, but I’m still going to

do it anyway. Okay. And, and that’s never works out. It never, I always tell them like, stay in your lane,

know your lane, stay in your lane. Okay. And then we have to be careful for designers to not throw out

the dev craftsmanship because they’re always rushing to like, I know what it’s supposed to look like.

It doesn’t matter what the code looks like. Let me just do it. Right. And, and they, so they throw

out all the craftsmanship on the dev side. And I think both areas of expertise need to respect the

others area of craftsmanship, uh, and not be so willing to, to just toss those aside. Now,

going back to the platforms of like element or Divi Gutenberg, et cetera. And, and, um, you know,

we talked about how they are trying to simplify, they’re trying to make it easier for people.

I said that that’s really what has led to the disaster. I think it’s all been based on this

false premise that all of these tools were built around. And it is the premise that lay people can

build websites that Ronnie Rando should be able to build a website. And all we have to do is make the

tool as easy as possible. And Ronnie will be able to get the job done. And I think that that is an

absolute lie. I think it’s an, a very easily provable falsehood. And I think if you design tools so that

Ronnie can use them and then all the tools that are available, like the market is flooded with these

tools, these are the standard tool of today. Okay. Uh, and, and anybody that knows what they’re doing

and needs to get their work done essentially can’t really get their work done. Um, the, can you build a

site with, with Ali? Yeah. Can you build a site in Gutenberg? Yeah. You can get to point A, but where

there’s still question marks around point B and C, the scalability and the maintainability side

of things. Um, but I, I think what you’ve done, what, what these tools have done, not you personally,

but what these tools have done, the elementers, the Divi’s, et cetera, is they have completely ruined

the experience for anybody that knows what they’re doing. And, um, you know, we say that about Gutenberg

all the time. Like I, I just, I, I can’t use it. I, it doesn’t speak the language of web design.

It’s, it’s totally proprietary. It does everything different. It’s just anybody that knows what they’re

doing likely does not like the Gutenberg workflow, the block editor workflow, minus

all the limitations that they come with it. So do you agree or disagree with the premise

that lay people can build websites? Can I go literally just get somebody off the street,

some rando person and put them in front of the block editor or put them in front of, uh, Wix or

put them in front of squares. But these are all, I mean, Wix is Wix, their ads. I mean, you just watch

their ads. Anybody can do it. Okay. Can I, can I put somebody in front of Wix or the block editor?

Cause the block editor, I think is trying to compete with Wix and can they build a website or

is the reality that the most they can do without going through the learning curve that so many people

have to go through is the most they can do. Maybe rearrange some things, change some copy, click a

button or two to mess up the colors on the, cause they don’t know color theory. They’re going to

mess up the color. Okay. So they can click a button, a couple of buttons to, to, to switch up some colors.

They’re not building sites though. And we can’t call that building sites. They’re, they’re, they’re

glorified editors and that’s the max they can do. That’s my argument. What’s, what’s yours?

It’s in my experience, it is very difficult for an average person to build a website on any of these

platforms. And I’ve used all of them and I’ve sat next to people who are using them. I do a good amount

of free websites for nonprofits and, you know, kind of watch them deal with various things and Wix and

Squarespace and other platforms I’ve never even heard of. Never even heard of. And, um, so it’s very

difficult. And I think you have a good point about like, you can’t, you don’t want to compromise the tool

in pursuit of that instead you can accommodate that experience. Um, but not at the sake of the

developer experience or even the, like the average DIYer experience who can build a website. They’re

they maybe are more leaning into the tools instead of the code, but they can still put together a decent

website. These people, there’s a thriving industry around that. Um, but no, I, I would agree that the

average person has a very difficult time, even figuring out where to go to get a website or

even how to get a blog going, or do they need a blog? Like it’s very difficult for them.

Okay. So there’s a second aspect to this too. And I, I, you know, blogging maybe, uh, is kind of a

different, a different boat. Uh, but I talk all the time about building websites of consequence.

And what that means is the website has an end goal and is able to achieve that end goal.

And if you have a goal, let’s say of representing a business really well,

getting traffic that you otherwise were not getting, getting people to convert to an offer

that you wanted to put in front of them. These are the traditional business goals. I want to get more

leads. I want to get more sales. I want to get more eyeballs. I want to get more eardrums. I want to get

that I want to grow my business. I want to use this website to grow my business. Well, those

are real consequences. And you’re either going to realize those consequences, or you’re going to fail

to realize those consequences. And when we take this approach of, well, Ronnie Rando is now a business

owner and Ronnie Rando, the business owner, uh, should be able to build his own website. We should build a

platform that empowers Ronnie Rando to build his own website. To me, that’s like lawyers and the

justice system going, we should make it really easy for Ronnie Rando to represent himself in every legal

case that he encounters. And I think everybody would say, no, that’s a terrible idea. That’s a really,

really bad idea. I think there’s a famous line that like,

you have a fool for a lawyer if you represent yourself. Okay. And I would argue that if you have

a real business and you want real consequential outcomes and your business relies on you achieving

these things and you have employees and they rely on you continuing to be able to write paychecks and

on and on and on that you should hire experts who know what they’re doing, not just on design, not just on

dev, but on, on the entire picture, the entire picture of how does, how do we make a successful

website so that you have and your business has the highest chance of success. Don’t put that in your

own hands unless you absolutely know what you’re doing. You’re not a designer. You’re not a dev.

You’re not a copywriter. You don’t do internet marketing. You don’t know SEO. You don’t know.

I could go down the list of all the things, all the ways in which Ronnie Rando is unqualified

to build his own website. So why is the premise that we should empower him to do so? Shouldn’t

we just tell him the truth? Hey, this is complicated stuff. You should hire somebody and pay them good

money to do this stuff to ensure you get the outcome that you’re wanting. I feel like we’re just lying to

people and, and we’re not doing so that the number one rule of like an agency is to do what’s in the

best interest of the client. And step number one in that process is don’t do it yourself.

If I’m advising a client, that would be the number one thing is because I want what’s in their best

interest and them doing it themselves is not in their best interest. Yet we have all these tools

saying, no, no, no, no. We have to democratize this. We have to, we have to put this in everybody.

Every lay person should be able to do this for themselves. That to me is an astronomical,

just miscalculation.

Yeah, that’s, there’s a lot of great points there. I think, you know, it’s all smoke and mirrors and

marketing of all of all of these platforms to say, you can get in here and do it. And

then they do it and then they can’t, they can’t deliver. And I think that it’s not, there’s a

there’s a correlation between that and then every small business website you visit that is just like

absolute garbage because it’s, you know, they don’t have a lot of money to get in there and

you know, pay a few experts to do it. So they kind of go their own way. And then they end up with like

a Facebook page that has hours that are like, way out of date and everything else. It’s,

it’s, it’s, uh, yeah, it’s, it’s unfortunate if you want to build something that is like for the

lay people. I think, like I said, you, you need to build a tool that is less like a website builder.

That is not anything like website builder. You just get in there, you take a layout, you change,

you could only change the text and you hit a button and then you get like the thing that is like,

if you want a lay person to do that, you have to take all of the variables out of it and just make

it so it’s like bulletproof. Um, but that’s not WordPress and that’s not any of these platforms

that are, uh, infinitely complex in comparison. So yeah, I, you know, it’s, it’s tough. And I don’t

see, um, in Oli, like I said, I talked to every customer, uh, that writes a support question. I don’t

see average people in there. I don’t see somebody who’s like, Hey, uh, I’m trying to make this for my

small business. I can’t figure it out. Like the people I’m seeing are people who are making it for

other people. Um, so there’s, there’s something to that. I mean, and WordPress itself, just the way

it’s designed does a pretty good job of filtering out lay people just because it’s so hard to go from

zero to even a WordPress install. Yeah. Uh, for most people that it filters out so many people and that’s

why they end up going to these other platforms. Well, yeah, well, that’s a great point because that’s,

it’s another big disconnect that I’ve talked about before is like, we’re, we’re going to

completely design and tool Gutenberg to be used by anybody on a dot org system that needs,

they already need to have picked out a host. They already have needed to, you know, one click and so

they, they had to already go through a bunch of not layman steps to get to the layman friendly

builder. Like that’s just a magnificent disconnect. Um, you know, to which Matt would say, well,

they can just sign up at wordpress.com. Um, but like, yeah. Well, even if you do that,

even if you sign up at wordpress.com, say you do that, you’re thrown into WP admin.

Correct. And you’re like, oh, okay, what is this thing? And then it looks different than

the wordpress.org version. Yeah. Um, because they have that Calypso interface or whatever they have,

whatever it’s called. Uh, so it’s already, you’re already thrown into a world of, of hurt just because

WordPress admin is like, what is this thing? There’s like these old, old and new worlds colliding

together. And, um, it’s never been historically super intuitive to get started. Uh, the learning

curve is pretty big. So, uh, yeah, I mean, that’s where these other platforms will just continue to

eat our lunch is because, well, first of all, they don’t have to serve almost a billion websites so that

they can move a lot quicker. They can pivot, they can build a thing specifically for the audience. And if

enough people ask, they just get in there and they fix it and change it and ship it. Um,

we do have this massive debt of people and content and everything else to worry about. And that’s kind

of why WordPress I think is, is moving particularly slow to get to where we need to be. Um, and it’s,

uh, yeah, you, you can feel it stress testing for sure. Yeah. Okay. I think we should, Mark,

we should probably start to turn this over to like, let, let some people in the speaker pool come on in. I know,

Jackson is, is, is blowing, he’s lighting me up on, uh, in my YouTube, uh, in the chat about,

about coming on. So we’ll bring him, we’ll bring him on in just a second to, to recap my, my thoughts,

uh, my, my positions. Um, I do not believe that the future of web design is no code. Um, I believe

that lay people will use AI heavily to get them to, uh, these are the cheap lay people. Uh, and I

wouldn’t recommend that they do this, but they are going to do this. There’s, I don’t, there’s no

denying the reality that they will start to use AI platforms to get their website off the ground,

so to speak. And they will make concessions. It’s going to be people that are okay with not being in

full control of the entire thing. Like they’re just going to have to make concessions. Like I

can’t get it to do what I want or whatever it’s free or it’s nine 99 or whatever. Uh, it’s super

cheap. It’s super easy. And, and so what I have cautioned in the developer space is if your level

of work, and this goes back to craftsmanship, this goes back to actual knowledge and skill.

This goes back to being a consultant and not a pixel pusher. If you are doing bottom of the barrel

work with a bottom of the barrel offer at bottom of the barrel prices, you are going to be the first

one to be replaced. AI will absolutely and totally replace you. You have no business being here. You’re

not doing anything of value that AI can’t do. And so if a developer self identifies as like, oh,

shit, that’s me right now. That’s I, I think that’s me. Um, you need to get your shit together

and you need to, you need to start increasing your level of craftsmanship. You need to increase your

understanding of how marketing works on the internet and how all these pieces get put together. And you

have to start doing things that AI can’t currently do for, for clients, uh, and clients with real money,

by the way, who are looking for real experts. If you want to stick around, if you want to have longevity

in this space, you need to move away from low code tools. You need to move away from these,

like, uh, anybody can do it because that’s what the AI is going to do. And you need to move towards

professional tools, professional workflow, and professional craftsmanship, because that’s all

that’s going to be left when people can’t get AI. Oh man, it won’t, it just won’t do what I want it to

do. I need a, I need a professional. That’s when they’re going to turn to the professionals using

professional tools who can still write, read now the professional and use, and the professional tool,

and this is how we’re crafting etch should be AI empowered. It should, the, the developers have to

write every single line by hand, right? But they can get it to help where they want it to help. It’s not

doing it for them. Uh, it’s just being a intelligent assistant and it’s helping with efficiency. But I think

those are going to be the two camps. And I think that the race to simplification of the tools for lay

people has been insanely destructive. I think that they can’t accomplish the goal, no matter how much

they dumb it down. And we see this with Gutenberg is the quintessential dumbed down interface. It can’t

get any, any more dumbed down unless it’s pure AI. It can’t get any more dumbed down in my opinion,

than the block editor already is. And it’s failed. It’s still fit. You can’t put a lay person in front

of it. They can, they still can’t do anything. That was a failed premise, a failed mission.

All of the apps and tools that tried to go that route are, are complete disasters in my opinion. And

the other side of that is even if they could make it work, they shouldn’t because it puts the authoring

of these websites into the hands of the people who don’t know how to make them successful. So at best,

they can get a design and layout on a page and then watch their business fail because they don’t know

how to do anything else around that. All of the stuff that actually makes a website successful,

they still don’t know how to do any of that stuff. So we’ve empowered them to essentially walk off the

edge of a cliff and go bankrupt. So those are all of my, I guess, arguments rolled into one.

Mark, do you want to inject anything before we bring on some speakers here?

No, I mean, a lot of good thoughts there. A lot of different perspectives. I’m excited to hear from

Jackson and the rest of our guests here, because I do think there are some keen perspectives out there.

So yeah, I think Jackson, I know you had a point in the middle there. Do you want to head? We’ll go

Jackson, Doug, and then Chris, I think. Yeah.

I just check. Can you hear me?

We can. Yes. Yep. Looks good. Yeah.

Oh, Jesus. That’s, that’s pretty cool because I’m literally on a headset, just diving in whilst cooking.

Love these shows. Love these, these debates, but I wanted to just pick up on a few things that have been fairly

apparent during the whole discussion, specifically, most of which has been coming from you, dear Kevin.

which is about this sort of like, we all know, we all know that Gutenberg is, is lacking. You know, we, we, we kind of all know that, right?

But for about two or three years from the first quickly release, there’s been ways to make it better.

you built products that make it better. Obviously that’s through bricks, etc. But

my point being is that it isn’t, you know, I said this on a, on a call, actually you were there, Mark, a few months ago.

Isn’t WordPress just always been just the starting point and all the plugins and the frameworks and the, the way that you can just, just pluck things out of the magic plugin repository.

Isn’t, isn’t, isn’t this is how all, how, how it’s always worked and what, how, why is it different now than it was before?

Pre-post Gutenberg. It’s one thing.

Is that for me? Is that for anybody?

Anyone, everyone, everyone’s invited.

I guess I’ll start.

Um, yeah, you’re right.

That, that WordPress provides a base layer and you have a bunch of plugins, which add a lot of functionality.

My argument has been now, you know, if, if your goal is to attract, so this is, this is the conflict in mission.

The mission is stated as it’s for everyone and we want to democratize publishing and we want everybody to be able to use it.

If that’s your stated mission, you can’t also make people install 50 plugins because every plugin requires a rabbit hole of investigation.

Well, I mean, which one, which one, which one, which one, I get all of that.

I think we’ve, okay.

So there is a lot, there’s a lot lacking in, in, in, in a core install of WordPress.

Okay.

But you would, you might get with a, with a, you know, like a Squarespace or a Wixit as, as low performance and, and technology levels and music experience and, and, and, uh, functionality goes.

Yeah.

I just wanted to point that out because I don’t think everybody has put those dots together that, that might be listening.

You know, they, they haven’t seen that that’s a conflict of interest, uh, with, with the main mission, but I’ll, I’ll say in terms of.

So what is the main mission?

Kevin, what is the main mission?

They need to decide what the main mission is.

I’ve, I’ve said before.

What is it for you?

I see what I’m saying.

Oh, okay.

So WordPress.org is a technical platform.

It is, it requires technical knowledge, prerequisites in order to even get an instance established on the internet.

Okay.

So if we’re recognizing that this is kind of a technical platform, um, there are, there, there is a learning curve just to get going, just to, just to press go.

Right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Then you need to say.

My point, my opening point was, it hasn’t that always been the same.

Sure.

But they, but that’s the, but they, it’s, it’s, they embrace it.

They embrace it.

They embrace it.

2015 film.

I had 2015 film.

A 2015 theme.

You know, and you just said, oh, I’ve got a WordPress site.

I’m on some sort of $2 a month.

Here’s the thing.

Here’s the thing.

No, I get it.

Here’s the thing.

Let me finish.

Let me finish.

Let me finish.

Because I’m saying that it’s always been that way.

And it just, because now we’re in a position where the web has advanced suit, like, it’s

correct.

Essentially.

Correct.

But it’s still only, and only, only ever been, in my, in my humble opinion, has only ever

been a starting point.

And yes, I totally agree with you on so much of your views in respect to, like, it’s not

a pick up and play thing.

But then let’s talk about what your, you know, what your direction is, what your position is

within WordPress.

You’re not a pick up and play guy.

You’re a, I’ve got products and I want to, I want, I’m, I’m going for the knowledge and

skill workers within WordPress space.

And those aren’t the people that might want to pick up and play.

I’m not, I’m not, I’m not, by the way, I’m not saying in any way, shape or form that we

are in a position where you can pick up and play WordPress.

But all I’m saying is that we never have been.

Correct.

The mission has been wrong from the get-go with dot, with dot org.

Okay.

With dot org.

Dot org is a professional platform and should have been tailored.

For professional use.

And if Matt had a grand mission of democratizing publishing and make it available to everybody,

that is what dot com should have been used for.

Okay.

I guess, I guess the whole thing is been so confused by org and com.

Correct.

Forever.

Correct.

But now, now we know.

If you Google a plugin and you get like dot com and suddenly you’re on dot com.

I mean, we all know that, that scenario.

I mean, well, we all know it well.

Yes.

The failure of, the failure of dot org comes from the mission of everybody should be able

to use it.

It’s a technical platform that everybody should be able to use.

That right there is the contradiction.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But I’ve also said, hold on.

I’ve also said from the beginning, if you were going to say, Kevin, how do you make, how

do you ensure that your software product is going to fail?

How do you ensure that your product is going to fail?

The number one thing that everybody knows is to say, design it for everybody.

You or me.

I’m not saying this to you, by the way.

You, you, if you say, I’m going to design it for everyone, it is going to fail.

Oh, yeah.

So as a concept.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, I mean, it’s impossible.

It’s like, it’s like communism, essentially.

No disrespect to any socialist brothers out there.

But, you know, it’s never been proved to work that where, you know, there’s one rule fits

all.

It’s never worked.

Has it not?

I think I appreciate where Jackson is coming from and that I think for all of the faults

I think we have with Gutenberg and kind of the, for me, it’s a lack of kind of focus and

vision on modern day WordPress as a product instead of a platform.

It’s like, we’ve been, we talk about it as a platform a lot and that’s great.

There’s like a lot of philosophies that come with that and the philosophies of open source

that have to be thoughtfully stewarded.

But I’m at this point in my career and as a product maker, I want to look at WordPress

as a product.

And if you look at it as a product, you start to see, oh, this is, we’re not going in the

right direction as a product because what’s the vision?

Who is it for?

What about all these little details that we’re kind of leaving out there?

You know, there’s, it changes the way you look at it.

But I think in the same way that Jackson’s saying WordPress as a baseline kind of entity that

you can take and turn into whatever you want, I think is still incredibly powerful.

And I’m, I’m still bullish on that.

I’m just waiting for people to kind of wake up and look at the, look what is available to

them in modern day WordPress to build upon.

If you just take the baseline experience and you say, this is WordPress and this is all

there is, you might be underwhelmed.

But if you think about, okay, if this is a, a platform that I can build a, um, a vertical

into, or I can use this as a platform to springboard an app, uh, for a very specific use case, a niche

or whatever, there’s all kinds of opportunity.

But we have this seemingly, we have this, uh, just delay of people.

Maybe they’ve already lost interest and they’ve moved on from WordPress.

Um, and now that we have all this stuff, all this more powerful APIs, we have, uh, visual

builders that you can do more than just, you know, build websites with.

There’s a lot you can do, but we’re just not seeing a ton of creative use case for it.

And it takes investment in time and everything else.

And that’s another reason why, but, um, yeah, it’s, I think there’s a lot of potential.

We’re just not seeing it, um, on the ground level.

And we’re also not really seeing it encouraged, um, kind of on the platform level.

We’re not really talking about and encouraging people to build and show them how and do, you

know, we’re, we’re just not doing that right now.

So that’s, I think a lot of reasons why, but let’s bring one.

Yeah, go ahead.

Just one quick nuance point to that, because you’ve got a lot of, a lot of great points there

on that, on that, in that segment there, Mike.

Um, when I was spending the last year and a half, you know, talking to so many people in

this industry, really getting into the community aspect and like almost the history and understanding

of WordPress super deeply.

One of the things that I was constantly met with by people closer to core was that it’s

a project, not a product.

And while I understand that, and there’s a little bit of a, you know, like a line in the sand

between.com and.org.

And that’s kind of like the product side with hosting all that sort of stuff.

Totally get all that, how it kind of that apparatus is shaped there.

Uh, I do think that one thing that’s kind of like faltered and not, and I’m not, I’m not,

I’m more of an observation, not a criticism.

Cause I don’t have a complete solution to this.

Is that kind of what you’re saying there, Mike, to say it a different way is that I, and I want

to do more of this.

I think we should probably layer some of this into WB town hall.

Cause I made recent videos about this.

We’re all in this camp.

Like we see it from the inside, but I think we’re always like speculating what people on the

outside think.

And sometimes those are right.

Sometimes they might be a little incorrect.

One, one specific anecdotal example is I’m talking to a buddy of mine, you know, six months ago.

And I tell him that I make WordPress videos, like I’m in the WordPress community.

And they’re like, isn’t WordPress dead.

Now I’m not saying that’s indicative of everyone, but I’m saying is that if you’re a part of a

platform and we know that not to be the case, but the actual average person might think that

what happens if that person like starts a business and they already have that preconceived

notion.

It’s just, what I’m saying is when we don’t treat the thing sort of like a product, because

it’s been, it’s been treated like a project, then I think that those types of things, when

we don’t think about the perception of our platform, product, project, whatever the hell you want

to call it to the average person, then I think that that could be detrimental if we completely

forget that.

And I think that it’s not really any of our faults specifically.

I’m just saying that I think that that is something that has plagued us.

And that’s part of the reason why we’re here now, because the opportunity arose for all

these other platforms to continue to, to, you know, with potentially a superior product

in certain aspects, or at least a more finely tuned product, like Kevin was saying to a particular

audience, rather than everyone.

I think all of these things are just pieces of it.

And moving forward, what I would love to see is more of a, you know, and I think we might get it one way or another, is more concerted effort to actually express what WordPress is.

And really, I would honestly think the closest thing now, it’s a platform kind of like how you’re alluding to there, Mike.

It’s like, there’s so much you can build atop of it.

Yeah.

Maybe the, maybe you don’t like pieces of the core aspect of it, but there’s so many good pieces and so many good people that have built great products atop of it.

And that’s really where the value is.

And I think that has definitely gotten lost as all of these other things have sprouted up.

And I’m just hoping that we’re not, I don’t think we’re too late.

I don’t think it’s going over, but I hope we’re not too late in the sense of like, that we can’t pull some of that back and be like, go back to, I know, I don’t know what it was five, 10 years ago or whatever, when it was the thing.

But I think that everything we talk about all the time that we have, you know, WP town halls, stuff that Kevin talks about, stuff that other people talk about, it’s really from that lens.

It’s like, we know that we have a really good platform here.

How do we make it more understandable for a general person to know that and feel what we do when we get in here every day and we know what the capabilities are?

I think that’s kind of one way that I would summarize all that.

Yeah.

My position is that we don’t, we don’t need to, we don’t need to, like, I would abandon that mission completely.

I, well, I would shift the mission.

I mean, if you really believe in that, uh, if you’re like, I really want to democratize publishing and I want anybody to use it.

Okay.

Go do that with.com leave.org, um, alone in terms of like, like the Gutenberg project being put into.org.

You put a layman editor into a, a platform or a product that lay people don’t really use.

They can’t even really get started with it all that well.

The learning curve is magnificent.

That’s, that’s a huge disconnect.

And in doing that, by the way, what is the consequence of that?

Seven years of funding that could have gone into the CMS side of it, the UI side of it, the, the, the important side of it.

Let’s say that the important side of it did not go in to those parts.

And now we have a decaying platform.

Okay.

That, that everybody is like, this, this sucks.

Everybody’s like, man, this, this place is falling down around us.

So that had a consequence.

This pursue, this pursue, this pursuing of this crazy mission that is already a failed mission from the get-go has now caused a decay in all of the important areas of the platform.

That, that, that, and that’s why I’ve said that this has been, it’s all, it’s all a leadership issue.

It’s a, it’s a, it all goes back to, that’s just poor leadership, poor, uh, just insight into what should happen next, yada, yada, yada.

Go do that stuff with .com.

Protect the core aspects of WordPress so that the people doing real work, which are agencies and freelancers on WordPress.org, can continue doing their work to the highest degree and still love the platform and still appreciate the platform.

And still, by the way, do the very thing that they’ve done, which has caused all of the growth of WordPress.

If people aren’t aware, it’s the millions of freelancers and agencies onboarding millions of clients and creating websites, people that didn’t know what WordPress was.

And the agency and freelancer says, we build on WordPress.

That’s what we’re going to do.

That’s what we’re going to put you on.

And to that end, you will end up with users inside of WordPress, but these are not people who built their site.

These are people who can be guided by those same agencies and freelancers into how they should be using, uh, the admin side of WordPress, which by the way, would be fully modernized if they hadn’t spent seven years going down the wrong path.

So the experience would be better for everybody if we had kept the focus correct.

We went the wrong rabbit hole with the wrong focus.

And now we are seeing the terrible, terrible results of that.

Um, I want to bring in, uh, Doug next.

Doug, you there?

I am here.

Wherever you want to pick up, Doug, we can hear you.

Wherever you want to pick up on that.

Oh man.

So many points.

This is a barn burner session.

Thanks for this.

Um, okay.

Number one response to Jackson.

Yes.

WordPress is, uh, what it’s always been.

And that’s to me, the problem it’s, it’s not progressive.

Uh, there’s too much, uh, both feet are in the old camp.

And the competitors, if you will, are progressing and redefining the options that the, the layman chooses from.

And we all know it.

We all see it regardless of what area you’re in.

So, yeah, I agree.

It is what it’s always been.

So, um, no code versus code environments.

Um, uh, a little bit of my background is, uh, currently has to do with, uh, driving help desks, WP help desks in meetup groups.

Uh, I personally co-host one a month and my colleagues, my four of the colleagues also host them between all of us.

There’s probably seven WordPress help desks live getting our hands dirty, getting in the nitty gritty, not just referring people to help documents and such, but really getting involved in it.

And so we’re seeing people from all ends of WordPress.com versus.org.

And they don’t even know it.

Uh, not just any specific theme, all themes, all environments.

And so we’re seeing quite a diversity coming, uh, a diverse populace coming to us for help and the no code versus code conversation comes up all the time.

So I’ve been thinking about this for seems like forever now.

And I think I’ve written it down in a very short synopsis, which I’m going to read right now.

Um, and this also will give you insight of what I think the future is.

So the success of a no code environment is going to be, is going to become directly related to how well it can address accessibility for the site visitor.

Such as accurate alt text, which is not easy.

If any of any of you have used AI to generate alt text for your images, thinking you’re going to, going to save some time.

It’s, it’s, uh, can stuff.

It doesn’t relate to what you see in the image.

You know, two different people can see an image and they focus on different aspects of the image and that alt text needs to relate to what your mission is.

So until AI can do that, we’ve got a problem.

And, uh, so basically that means the no code environment needs to allow the dev to get in and address things.

Right.

Right.

If it’s alt text, if it’s, if it’s custom code or whatnot, I mean, how many of you have had people come to you asking you to modify a site?

I need some custom code or I need some custom customization on this site that they can’t do in their dev environment.

Whatever theme they’re using, whatever builder they’re using.

And you got to get in there and do it.

Um, so basically two things need to get better.

For the no code thing to the no code environment to be a smooth experience.

Number one, the dev environment must allow for hands-on, uh, the hands-on coder to address things.

Or number two.

And here’s the big point.

The search engines need to place less weight on responsibility or responsive, responsive, responsiveness, responsibly created websites.

Yeah.

Not responsiveness, but responsibly created websites.

I.E.

Uh, semantics.

You know, proper use of H1, H2, H3, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Because people in builders and in no code environments, unless they’re going to use an AI, which is smart enough to do it, they’re using H1, H2 versus H3 for visual changes.

They don’t understand the semantics behind it.

Therefore, you got a problem.

So we already know the search engines are changing the way they look at our sites.

And there’s a lot of sites that are getting ranked that shouldn’t be, you know, that are kind of a disaster.

And there’s, in my world, what I’m seeing, there’s a crap ton of people that are just losing it.

Everything’s coming to an all stop.

Their site’s not generating what it used to for whatever reason.

And so that’s, that’s kind of a study in itself.

But so those are the two things that I see.

If a no code environment as defined right now with our current AI tools, the current capability or lack of capability of AI, however you want to look at it, whether it’s an AI dev environment,

or whether it’s a hybrid environment, whatever it is, it needs to still allow the designer, developer, coder to address things.

And number two, if that’s not the case, search engine…

Did you guys lose Doug too or just me?

Yeah.

I lost Doug.

Doug, we lost you.

I don’t know if it’s…

Search engine’s got to him.

There he is.

Oh, no.

They heard it.

Google heard him talking.

Big, big search.

Cut him off.

You there, Doug?

Doug, Doug, Doug.

Task one, two, three.

Somebody get a welfare check on that guy.

Yeah.

Yeah.

All right.

Hold on.

I’m going to mute him in case he…

Because he may not know that we can’t.

He might just come back talking.

We’re going to get to Chris in just a second.

I guess I’ll throw…

Based on what Doug was saying, I’ll throw this out there as well.

Might as well.

I mean, I messaged this to Mark yesterday.

I think the term no code, we just stopped using that term.

As Doug just mentioned, it’s insanely important for somebody to have access to the code at all

times.

Otherwise, you are at the complete whims of the limitations of whatever AI system you’re using.

So to me, the only safe approach to using AI in a development workflow is with a hybrid

approach.

And by the way, there isn’t a page builder in WordPress right now that gives you access

to the code.

This is one of the fundamental premises of Etch, is that you always have access to the code.

So even when we AI empower the Etch interface, it is a hybrid environment.

You will always have access to the code.

And that should be the number one standard of any platform.

I would say that if a platform claims to be no code and prevents you from accessing the code,

it is not a platform you should even begin to use.

It’s not safe.

If you’re building a website of consequence.

Again, if you’re building a, you know, if it’s my mom and she’s building her Bunko Club website,

it doesn’t matter.

It’s not, there’s no real consequence there.

But if you’re building a website of consequence that needs to be scaled and maintained, the idea

that you would build it on a platform that doesn’t give you access to the code, I just don’t see any,

you know, smart business making that kind of decision.

Chris Latham, let’s bring you into the discussion.

Awesome.

Are you guys able to hear me?

Yep.

Awesome.

Feels like one of those Zoom things is my mic on.

Yeah, we can hear you.

All right.

I’m coming from this from a SEO side of things with in terms to the web design.

And I think it was something that Mike said earlier that I think has a great opportunity

for the mainly small businesses and the solopreneurs who don’t have $10,000 to pay for their first

website.

Like all their money literally has to go into marketing.

And like I’ve dealt with clients who have bad experience with WordPress.

They don’t want to touch WordPress, but then they go to like a Wix or Squarespace and they

essentially just traded one problem for another.

And on my side, coming in to do the SEO, whether it’s including schema or optimizing pages or

fixing some of the technical stuff, there’s headaches on both ends with like Wix and Squarespace

not being that flexible.

But then the solopreneur with no $10,000 budget goes to somebody on Fiverr to get the job done,

which is a hell in a handbasket of itself.

But I think when Mike mentioned a platform or something set up where they just get a pre-built

template, they change the color, they match the color styling, they just change the text,

the image because like the WordPress editor is overwhelming to many people who aren’t

familiar with it.

Wix editor is as overwhelming, but the colors are nicer.

So people kind of make deal with it better.

But looking at things for the small business in the solopreneur doesn’t have 10K yet.

Something that’s potentially no code, but that has that scalability to then upgrade them when

they’re ready to upgrade their business.

It’s not a matter of fully swapping platform, potentially building it off of something that’s

soundly built.

Yeah, you could build that’s the you know, that’s kind of where I was going with that idea is that

you could build a million dollar business on WordPress by picking the right thing and

gearing it like really dialing it in for that user.

Don’t you could throw out so much other stuff and just say, you know, I’m basically building

a link tree version of websites.

And it’s for this.

There’s a person out there for that.

You might have to do some research and dig in and find where they’re at and then kind of

really go at it.

But you could do that.

And you could build that on WordPress.

And you could remove what you wanted.

And you’d have all the awesome stuff that you want with WordPress where you have off and

user management and e-commerce.

You can have all that plugged in, remove all the other stuff and then really funnel it to

a vertical.

vertical.

That’s where I would love to see this new stack go.

And I think it’s one of the most.

Go ahead.

No, nobody said that.

You’re just echoing yourself there.

Yeah.

Oh, OK.

My bad.

My bad.

Yeah.

That’s where I would love to see us get a little more creative with is like, sir, we

can sit and criticize Gutenberg for what it is in its current state.

But what else can you do with it?

Do something cool and interesting with it.

Kevin’s building etch on top of it.

That’s going to be a whole crazy thing.

And like, that’s a great example of how you take the foundation that is pretty solid and

has many years of development into it and then build off it.

So let’s see some more of that.

Yeah.

I’ll just add to what you’re saying there, Mike, because like the situation I’m now with

is with a client who has to get a new site and I’m essentially going into WordPress with

a dashboard editor to remove all the buttons on the side to like just this page.

This is post.

This is news custom post type.

And I’m thinking of seeing whatever the case I disappear five years from now and they

want to keep building on at e-commerce.

It’s a matter of just turning things on versus a full platform switch.

So I think something that has that scalability in mind where any developer from somewhere

else can hop in and upgrade their site and add functions without a platform switch would

be huge.

That’s huge.

Yeah.

Do you feel like it’s hard to do?

It’s hard for you to do you have to do a lot of extra work to tailor WP admin to your clients?

Do you feel like WordPress could have made that a lot easier for you?

I’d say yes.

Because I am coming from SEO, but I have to kind of learn the building of sites because

so many of them are trash and broken.

I’m like, okay, let me just learn how to fix this thing.

So I’m going to be learning web to bed myself.

But most clients never touch tools.

They never touch settings.

They rarely touch users unless they know it.

Most people just give me their login passwords.

I’m like, no, never do that.

Can you create an account for me?

I have to create a video.

So it’s like there’s this great ability to dumbify the dashboard for people who aren’t

tech savvy.

And then they could just give like a dev access to the person they’re hiring and they get the

classic WP admin dashboard.

I feel like that alone will scare less people because anytime you talk to them, it’s like,

oh, no, that thing’s slow.

It’s broken.

It’s confusing.

They have all these negative connotations from like where WordPress was five years ago.

And then I’m having to like educate them on how things have changed.

It’s much more secure.

The reason it wasn’t secure is because you hired somebody on Fiverr who didn’t pay for the

plugins.

So there’s like a lot of educating that comes into place and you can just dumb it down.

That’d be huge.

I think that that’s a, it’s kind of like a damning argument again, because let’s go back

to WordPress essentially has this mission that anybody should be able to use it.

It should be, but your number one thing is like every client that I onboard, I have to

dumb it.

I have to remove all this stuff so that they know what’s going on and so that they can even

begin to use it.

So that’s like a clear example of they’ve been failing in their mission.

All of this focus was put on Gutenberg, not put on the CMS, not put on the UI.

To me, if it was real leadership in place, you would look at that.

Again, it’s just the basic question of who are our users?

Okay.

We’ve got agencies and freelancers.

So we’ve got to put a bunch of stuff in place.

One of the things that we would put in place for them is the ability to natively simplify

the WP admin for their clients who then need to go in and do whatever they’re in there for.

Now there’s another side debate and side quest that we could tackle of should people even be,

even though I build the entire site for them, should they be editing any part of it?

Should they be doing anything?

I mean, like Doug’s point was fantastic.

I love when people make points like he made about the alt text.

So many people tell me, Kevin, it’s just a blog post.

Like let the client in.

It’s just a blog post.

Let them do it.

I let them do anything.

I just tell them.

I inform them.

I educate them.

You should not be in here.

And it is in your best interest to leave all of this alone and let us do whatever you need happen.

And here’s why.

We get this.

It’s just a blog post, Kevin.

Okay.

Why let them write a blog post?

You know what I do?

I log in.

All the paragraphs are centered aligned.

The images are eight megabytes.

There’s no alt text.

There’s H1 headings all over the place.

Really?

It’s just a blog post.

This is my main argument of you can’t dumb it down enough.

As Doug said, the minute you give them a heading block, they fucked it up.

That’s it.

You can’t, if you can’t get past the heading block, you should just end the mission of everybody

should be able to do this.

And that’s not a, it’s easy or not easy thing.

That’s a literally, there is knowledge that has to be acquired to even take that step.

And so we’re already into the realm of some semblance of a learning curve.

And if we get that, if you’re like not even a thumbnail in to the mission and it’s failing

to that degree, you should just be like, guys, this is not, this can’t be the mission.

This can’t be the mission.

And we have to go in a different direction.

So that has been like, to me, the disconnect is so gigantic that I can’t believe we’re still

here trying to accomplish it.

Yeah.

And just to kind of not be, slightly counter that, it’s like the stuff I set up for clients

is like, especially now with the Brick strict content editor, it’s just going like, you’re

not going to pay me a hundred some dollars an hour to change just one title on a page.

Like it makes no sense because I’d rather spend money on making you money with your marketing

than you change the text.

But the setup of where they just click the page and they could only edit the words on

that one H1.

They’re not going in there moving things around for those few who are solo printers and scrappy

kind of gets them by without having to invoice them for something that’s useless.

And then we’d better spend on marketing to the point where they could then build a team or

get someone to fully manage and maintain.

Cause there are those who are scrappy that run a business that are able to kind of, because

of Canada, everyone knows how to change a text on an image.

They’re not the old part of, I’m going to say the 65 world is not tech savvy, but people

are generally more hip nowadays.

So I think there’s room for something like that.

And like, it would save me from having to completely edit Bricks and the whole backend.

All right.

So just change the title.

It’s a good point.

My counter to that.

Yes, it is easy to let them change a headline, but you’re the SEO guy.

Okay.

Tell me the implications of randomly changing H1 text on a page that’s ranking really, really,

really well.

There are, there are potential consequences to doing that.

If I ask the copywriter, what are the implications of me just randomly writing a new headline on

a page that’s converting really, really, really well, they’d be like, don’t do that.

And then we ask the analytics guy, what are the, what are the implications of somebody randomly

changing the headline on this page that’s ranking and converting and nobody knows they changed the

headline and the analytics guy is going to go, don’t do that.

I need to know when shit changes.

Cause I need to know why the analytics are tanking.

So we’ve got three different areas of discipline, SEO, conversion analytics, where just this simple act of let me, let’s just let the client change the headline.

All right.

So they don’t need to, they don’t need to, to pay me to do that.

They don’t need to, they don’t need to, let the client change the headline on an important business website.

And so that’s why my argument has been make it a point to know you don’t belong in here.

You don’t have any of the, you don’t have any knowledge in any of these areas of discipline.

You don’t really belong in here.

You don’t belong it.

Sir, I’m going to, I’m going to represent myself in this, in this murder case.

No, no, you shouldn’t do that.

You shouldn’t do any of that.

You shouldn’t, you shouldn’t take the stand.

You shouldn’t do, we have to do things that are in the best interest of the client.

And that is informing them of when it’s not their place.

Yeah, 100%, 100%.

It’s, especially like, again, the main people I’m talking to, bro, they’re generally starting getting things going.

It’s all their traffic can be coming from paid.

They’re not ranking anyways.

But there is a point where it’s like, look, you’re now at a stage.

You need not be touching these things.

And you now have budget to be paying for all these extra services to make sure we get you going ahead.

But it’s very much, I was just thinking about that person who’s starting up on themselves.

Because a lot of them I deal with, they’re starting a business their first time.

They got, they saved $10,000 to run on ads.

And it’s like, let’s make you some money.

Then let’s focus on making everything else free.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure.

And the thing is, is the scrappy people, I’m not worried about the scrappy people.

The scrappy people are scrappy.

They’re going to figure it out.

There’s a lot of, you know, they’re the people that are going to, it’s the lay people where it’s like, no, no, no.

We can make this super easy for, like when the experts start pushing them in that direction.

Like that’s where I, because not everybody’s scrappy.

Not everybody.

And I look at people who are like, man, I’m putting my life savings in this business.

My hopes and dreams are in this business.

My family’s relying on me.

And then we got experts just pushing them.

Oh, yeah, I mean, you could do it yourself.

I just use the word private.

Anybody could do it.

And like, what you were doing is you’re just gently pushing them off a cliff.

And it’s like, then they, you know, they crash and burn.

It’s a giant fireball.

They’re broke.

They’re bang.

And then it’s like, oh, well, I mean, you tried, you know.

It’s like, I just, I don’t want to see that happen.

And I don’t think, I don’t think we should be encouraging that.

10,000%.

Thank you.

Doug, are you, we want to give you a chance to come back if your tech is working now.

Is Doug here?

I see.

He came back.

I just don’t know if he’s, his audio is working.

I see him.

I got a mute sign under him right now, but I don’t know.

Yay.

I found the tab.

Oh, there he is.

There he is.

Yeah.

I don’t know what’s going on.

That’s the second time I had to restore the page.

I don’t know whether I’m getting, I’m not losing connection.

It’s just, it’s almost like a timeout.

If I don’t touch the X page, then it times out after so many minutes.

It seems like I’ll text Elon real quick and get him on this.

Yeah.

No, all good points.

I, every, every lately, every time I think I want to respond to something, somebody else

makes a good point about it.

But yeah, I don’t, I don’t recall where I broke out and what you, what the last thing you heard

was, but I think you got the gist of what I was saying.

Yeah, we, we, it was like right after the alt tag conversation and, and, and all of that,

I think in headings and.

Oh, okay.

Gotcha.

Yeah.

I’m good.

I’ve got some other points to make, but they’re, they’re slightly off topic.

So I’ll wait.

All right.

Well, we’ve got about, I think we’re, we’re about six minutes left on the show.

Mark, do you, do we want D one 23 to, to make his side quest points here?

Or do you, you have something else you want to add?

I’ll just check in.

We can head into that.

We can head into that.

Sure.

All right.

Okay.

Close us out, Doug.

I’m going to go.

I’m going to just make a pitch.

Um, just because I hear it so often.

And I explain this.

I’ve seen this so often.

This is so fundamental.

It’s not called Gutenberg guys.

It’s called WordPress.

Gutenberg is gone.

Gutenberg is now a plugin for beta testing with a latest test.

somebody, somebody correct me if they think I’m wrong, but, uh, Gutenberg is a beta testing

plugin.

It was first used for what we call Gutenberg, the, the block editor, if you will.

But so people get confused between WordPress and Gutenberg native WordPress and the block editor.

It’s, it’s a confusing mess.

They’re WordPress is like a exercise in the bastardation of technology anyway.

So anyway, that’s my rant.

It’s not called Gutenberg.

It’s called WordPress.

Um, another thing I think that would help the success of WordPress.

This is a separate topic is if there was some attention paid for people that want to transition

from.com to.org or vice versa, that is a nightmare situation.

It should be easy, but it’s not.

So that would allow people like Kevin was making the point earlier.

.com should be left for the no coding environment or whatever they want it to be.

The environment for everybody.

Where .org, they should leave that alone.

So it could be more of a dev environment.

At some point, people are going to want to have to, or want to transition from one to the other.

And if there could be some attention paid to that aspect, switching from .com to .org without having to rebuild your entire site, I think that would help a lot.

So those are my side points.

Cool.

Cool.

Mark or Chris or Mike, anybody.

I just wanted to just touch on that Gutenberg thing real quick.

I, I tried to, uh, you know, I made a whole video on that, uh, trying to low key correct people.

And I actually got some like pushback from, we’ll just say some leadership folks, uh, that, and you see like in, in everyday conversation, even Matt calls it Gutenberg.

So there is just a confusion about what it is.

I also was under the impression that this is just native WordPress now and Gutenberg is the development plugin.

Um, but now it’s become such a hot mess that everyone calls it Gutenberg, Gutenberg WordPress.

Yeah.

It’s just, it’s just, it’s confusing.

And I thought Gutenberg was the initiative, like the project itself.

Gutenberg is the code name for the block editor.

Uh, I see what Doug is saying in the sense that they created a plugin for the purposes of beta testing the next iterations of features.

And they put experimental stuff in there as well.

Uh, but I think the nail in the coffin for like, I, I say Gutenberg all the time.

I, I, I have Gutenberg as a separate entity.

It’s not like, I wouldn’t agree with it’s just called WordPress.

And I think the nail in the coffin here is if you go to wordpress.org slash Gutenberg, it brings up an instance of the block editor that says, say hello to Gutenberg, the WordPress editor.

Like that is the code name for the block editor in WordPress.

Um, and so I think if we just accept that the, and, and by the way, I think Matt would like Matt loves that name.

I’m sure.

Like, you know, there’s so much behind that word.

And, uh, I, I think he would argue that is the code name for the block editor project in general, not just the plugin.

Uh, but I, I would encourage everybody to go to wordpress.org slash Gutenberg because it it’s, that’s the best overview.

I think that you’re going to get of their vision of how this fits into WordPress.

I think we got, I just accepted Sinan into.

Oh yeah.

He was in earlier.

I was wondering.

Yeah.

I’m not sure.

Yeah.

I refuse to accept that, uh, Gutenberg is the block editor.

No, it’s not.

The problem is the WordPress says it is.

I have a good, good example for it.

Uh, Gutenberg is like Manhattan project, the project name, name, and the block editor is the product.

And the site editor, I, I don’t know what it is.

That’s my thinking.

I think it was, wasn’t it though?

If we just looked it up, isn’t it like Gutenberg is the project.

There was multiple different like phases of it.

Or we’re currently in the Google docs phase of collaboration.

WordPress.

Or something.

WordPress.org slash Gutenberg.

Literally the headline literally says that Gutenberg is the WordPress editor.

Yeah.

I mean, they named it like the project name like that.

Even I remember in the past, like Matthias talking about it, like as a project name, not, not the product name.

That’s how I remember.

Gotcha.

I think they changed their, their mind maybe because of Matt.

I don’t know.

Very likely.

Nobody, nobody knows.

Very likely.

Anyway.

All right.

Why are we putting this one in the books, Mark?

I think this has been fantastic.

Really appreciate all you guys.

Mike, thank you so much for being our guest today.

Yeah, for sure.

This is awesome.

All right, everybody.

Definitely have to do more.

Yeah.

We’ll, we’ll have Mike back for sure.

Um, this is going to be going out, uh, later today to the Spotify’s and the Apple podcast and everything else for anybody who wants to re-listen or hasn’t listened yet.

Um, you can get all subscription information at WP town hall.

That show.

You can see all upcoming shows.

You can get the links to the X space.

I know X spaces can be difficult to find.

So if you’re wanting to be a participant on a WP town hall episode, uh, as the fine people who came on today were, the best thing to probably do is go to WP town hall.

That show.

It says next show.

It says the heading.

It says the guest.

And you can just click on it.

That’s going to take you right to the X space so that you can join.

And then you just ask to be a speaker and you’re good to go.

Um, if you’re just browsing the X feed, you’re unlike, even though we’re live and stream, you’re unlikely to see it.

So just go to WP town hall.

That show.

That’s the best way to get to it.

Uh, thanks to Mike.

Thanks to Mark.

Thanks to all of our guests today.

We’ll be back in two weeks for another one.

Peace.