Local Jungle - Current
Gavin Taylor: Hello. Hello.
Chris LaFay: Good morning. Sorry about that. I forgot that I turned off my video and microphones. I was talking to myself for the last, like, minute and a half.
Kimberly Tan: Hey.
Gavin Taylor: All good. Hey. I have Kimberly in the waiting room. She is the. My marketing assistant that we had on. I just wanted to, like, sit in here, take notes, and kind of have a good idea how we're changing things, doing things a little bit differently.
Chris LaFay: Fantastic. I do not see her in the waiting room, but I do see I added your fireflies.
Gavin Taylor: Oh. You know, I invited her yesterday, not today. Sometimes I just drop the ball here. Okay.
Chris LaFay: You know what? You would think that being the smart and intelligent website people that we are, that things like calendar invites would not elude us at this point.
Gavin Taylor: Yeah.
Chris LaFay: I. Yesterday, after I chatted with you, I had a. I had two meetings that were at the exact same time, which was intentional. I was gonna have one of my team members take one. I was gonna take the other. Well, I created both meetings, and I recently put in, like, the waiting room thing because I typically arrive to meetings early, and I like letting people in as they come in. Well, when you host a meeting in Google Meet, that means your friends that you invite can't start the meeting. So I'm over here doing a sales call.
Gavin Taylor: Yeah.
Chris LaFay: Whereas my team member is doing, like, a status update call and he is texting me, slacking me, and I have all my notifications turned off. And it's like, Chris, you. You created the meeting. I can't do this update thing. And so, again, things shouldn't be that hard.
Gavin Taylor: Yeah. Did you see the super bowl mishap with AI.com?
Chris LaFay: Wait, about AI.com or about. About the Claude AI commercials like, that were against Chat GPT.
Gavin Taylor: No, no, the one where the website completely crashed. No, they did a Super Bowl. It got four. Four middle super bowl because they didn't update auto scaling on the server. I was like, are you kidding me? That's. You spend $70 million or whatever it was on the domain, one of the most expensive domains ever. And then another $10 million on the super Bowl. And then don't turn on auto scaling. Someone's fired. Dude.
Chris LaFay: Dude, that is nuts. That hurts my. That hurts my soul.
Gavin Taylor: Yep.
Chris LaFay: Hi, Kim. How are you doing today?
Gavin Taylor: Okay. You're frozen again.
Chris LaFay: Yeah. You weren't frozen at the beginning. I saw you wave, but now, no.
Gavin Taylor: Okay, well, I know yesterday. Yeah. Let's get rolling here. One more thing to add on yesterday. I do not think E2M is going to work out in the long run. They're dropping the ball in places I.
Chris LaFay: You don't think what is going to work out in the long run.
Gavin Taylor: E2M our development. Yep.
Chris LaFay: Yeah.
Gavin Taylor: A dropping ball where I. I don't think they should be. So one of the discussions eventually we need to have is getting the right full time developer in for this position.
Chris LaFay: Okay.
Gavin Taylor: I'd rather pay a little bit more to have someone in house on Eastern Standard Time for this position, but I want to make sure our process is good before we actually introduce that into our agency.
Chris LaFay: Are you open to over like outsource outsourcing or do you want somebody like American full time?
Gavin Taylor: We're fine outsourcing as long as they know what they're doing. Like E2M right now is based in India. I like doing a lot of work in Philippines. Actually Kimberly's from the Philippines, but they need to. I just hired a junior dev off of online jobs. Ph. And they dropped the ball completely. So I definitely want a senior developer. Someone who working hour hours knows what they're doing with Gutenberg.
Chris LaFay: Gotcha. Hey, there we go. You are a silhouette now but you were moving so that's nice. It's like your background remover thing with Google Meet like did it the opposite. It's like let's remove the human and keep the background. I've never seen that before. That's wild.
Kimberly Tan: I don't know what happened. It. I don't know what happened. But I'm gonna try to refresh. Sorry. That I will.
Gavin Taylor: How about this completes meet out and turn off your. Turn off your camera and just listen in if you can hear us. Okay.
Kimberly Tan: Okay. Okay.
Gavin Taylor: Thank you.
Chris LaFay: Awesome. But okay. So that all sounds good. I actually have one of my team members, actually one of my agency partners has had some success finding really good developers. Not in the US I have not dabbled as much in it. So I can. I can have a conversation with him and maybe even actually loop him in to walk through kind of the process that he took for it because it's definitely. It's not easy. But the thing is once you find somebody, you're done. Like you are just. You are done. Like this has been working with these two, a designer and a developer overseas. Now he did go through online jobs. Ph. But he did it a different way. And I kid you not, that dude is raking the benefits right now. And they. They are all extraordinarily happy working with him. They like I don't know what his secret juju sauce was, but I can get him to come spill the beans on what process look like.
Gavin Taylor: So I'd very much appreciate that.
Chris LaFay: Awesome. So the. Okay, so we went through yesterday kind of your active process and whatnot. Let me walk you through what I would like to see the core part. No, me actually back up. One of the things you mentioned was you don't want to worry too much about operational stuff. I'm not too sure. That's actually if I ever implied that I don't care about that at all. Basically, once a project is in your hands, how are we constricting team member time and the number of team members touching the project to get it done as quickly as possible?
Gavin Taylor: Gotcha. Okay.
Chris LaFay: That's what I'm. I want to be focused in on that aspect of it. Now, one thing I know that you said kind of walking through your process is like you have your marketing person going and wire up all the marketing things and then like you pass it through the devs. I am still going to push for as minimal hands touching the project as possible. Now, does that mean it has to be down to one person like I'm preaching? No. But I'm going to start all of my thinking and processes and, and ideation around what would it look like to have as minimal pass offs as possible?
Gavin Taylor: Okay.
Chris LaFay: So just know that that's the baseline that I'm starting with. Not because I don't think it's not because. Because the more time it bounce, the ball bounces, the less momentum it gets. So I.
Gavin Taylor: Absolutely.
Chris LaFay: And some of this here that I'm going to share will. Will obviously be clarified once I see like the back end of a website or some of the code and things along those lines. So I want your. This is not an all encompassing list. I know that. It is the encompassing list that I made up about 10 minutes because making it more all encompassing would come once I see things.
Gavin Taylor: Okay.
Chris LaFay: I want your template, and I'm going to speak singular because I realize that the goal is to have different templates that can be chosen from. But I want your template to have inside of the back end of the site the ability to swap the color palette, the ability to swap the header, the body, the accent fonts, the basic font sizings of small, medium, large. I want like radiuses and drop shadows and like padding and spacing. All of that to be done within a control panel. So whoever is doing like, I know that you're doing the like, setup process of like copy pasting and all that jazz, but I would love for all of that to be handled in five minutes if you will. Because you're not a design shop. No, at all. That's the like it's color spot spacing, done, finished. And if that means the button in the top right hand corner of the navigation bar is always like a certain hex code of red, then that sucker is just hard coded in that color. In terms of like listening to kind of how you do the pass offs. One of the things that I was thinking about, and I don't want to, I don't want to dissect this right now, but this is on my L. This list was created before we chatted yesterday. I want to see on that initial pass off to whoever is doing the like coloration and all that. Like, I want to see this just going ahead and being handled like, okay, immediately. So, like when I'm gonna, I'm gonna use you as an example right now necessarily saying that that's the right answer for this. But the person that duplicates the site also could go in and swap these very basic variables probably within five minutes.
Gavin Taylor: Yep.
Chris LaFay: And then at the same time have that site map be delivered and say, guess what? All of your styles are done. All your site map is right here. Here's all the URLs that we know that we have to port over. Then on day two, like, let's say that that's day one. Day two, that person, whether it's a developer or a content person, I don't care, can just start moving content in.
Gavin Taylor: Okay.
Chris LaFay: The things, like I want to collect this. Again, this isn't finalized, but like the things you need from the client, like when there's a contact form, what is the email that needs to get sent off to? I realize that you probably have a CRM that it's connected to. It's not as simple as that. But in this list I want to have basically everything from a technical standpoint to where that one person can plug in 80 to 90% of the things and be done. And so I want there to basically be this structure put in place at the very beginning of like, here's everything that Gavin or who needs to basically give to the website person so that they can get it 90% of the way to the finish line.
Gavin Taylor: Okay.
Chris LaFay: Means you don't necessarily trust them to do the copy and paste and all that kind of fun stuff that I understand there's infrastructure there, but I want that initial package to that person to contain almost everything.
Gavin Taylor: Okay.
Chris LaFay: So kind of what needs to be created overall, this is kind of, this is my like starting point checklist. And you have a lot of this stuff in ClickUp. And I'm not this stuff. The stuff that I'm listing out here doesn't necessarily replace ClickUp or edit it. But this is just kind of my line of thinking is all of this stuff here in terms of that initial pass off information needs to be documented so that whoever is the one accepting a new website, you or somebody else has a checklist to then send to the developer or the content person to get it 90% of the way there. I do. I would love for one person to be empowered to do 90 of the build we talked about for QA. I kind of dipped in this yesterday. We need to.
Gavin Taylor: We already bought it. We. That's fine. We already bought it. We're in it.
Chris LaFay: Fantastic. Love it. Wonderful.
Gavin Taylor: The one thing that I couldn't do is connect it to ClickUp. So I need to diagnose why. I was just in the middle of Q8, bought it and I was like, oh, hey, let's play with it. I just gave access to my dev team email it so they can just log in, whatever. But I need to figure out why it's not connecting to ClickUp. It might just be access or whatever. It has the native integration.
Chris LaFay: Yeah, okay, cool. I just want to make sure because I actually, I know the guys over there. We've used Marker for like seven years now, if not longer than that. But if there's ever any issues, let me know. I, I know, I know folks over there.
Gavin Taylor: Okay, perfect.
Chris LaFay: So one of their guys, I actually went to Ireland to go visit him and he drove me around Ireland for like three days. It was great. I promise you this is not a sponsored thing. I just, I, I just, I do. We with Marker has legitimately made our QA process simpler.
Gavin Taylor: I've been, I, I know I've been in the industry long enough. Once you find that tool, it's like, hey, you live and die by it 100.
Chris LaFay: Yes, I would also be interested. And this is not, this is kind of more of like an out there idea. There's a lot, a lot of the website. I'm making an assumption, but I'm assuming a lot of your websites that you're absorbing probably have similar content structures. Like the HTML tags are kind of in the same place page to page because they're all kind of older and outdated sites. I'm curious if we have a solid site map in Excel format.
Gavin Taylor: Not necessarily. And here's why. Because everyone and their dog a few years back decided, oh, hey, let's go after auto repair shops. Because Med Spas are just overwhelming, right? A lot of these guys have crappy websites, really, really, really bad websites. So when we rebuild it, it's going to have the same structure, more or less homepage vehicles, models about reviews, things like that. The page content will vary drastically. What is going to be the same though is our PPC pages. And this is something that we've also talked about is. And this is something that is probably really good to bring up now. So we have the main core website and regardless if we take it over the existing website or building one from scratch, we want a secondary site. Basically a package of those landing pages, PPC landing pages that can inherit the main site CSS and we attach it to the same domain with a difference of it. I don't remember the technicals of that or how it works, but not even use a, maybe even use a subdomain. But have these PPC landing pages like Mercedes Benz repair, right? PPC4/Mercedes Benz repair and all that content duplicate content duplicate whatever has the logo has whatever. But we know that that PPC page is good. We are no indexing PPC pages already. So those will be. Yeah, those will be templates regardless. Like we don't even have to change those.
Chris LaFay: That is a really good reason to use WordPress multisite.
Gavin Taylor: Multisite, okay.
Chris LaFay: Have you heard of multisite before?
Gavin Taylor: I think my old developer talked a little bit about it.
Chris LaFay: I'm gonna. Showing rather than telling will be a lot simpler here.
Gavin Taylor: Okay.
Chris LaFay: So, and I'm actually, it's something in the back of my head as well for this, all of these things that you're doing, there's some, there's trade offs with and I'm not, I don't know enough about your initial setup and like your overall like client architecture to whether I want to make this recommendation. But for this, for these like PPC pages that literally are just color swaps and logo swaps. This is like the penultimate usage of WordPress multisite. So now what I'm going to show.
Gavin Taylor: You are maybe image, maybe image swaps too. That's it.
Chris LaFay: Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's all, that's all fine and dandy. So what I'm going to show you are two full blown websites.
Gavin Taylor: Okay.
Chris LaFay: These guys are in the aftermarket car parts industry Pro Comp and Smitty usa. Don't look at the, I mean you can look at them but don't look at the logos and the colors and the images. Look at the structure. So now look at smittybilt Same Thing. Yeah, it's the exact same thing. So all this is is what WordPress multi site allows you to do. Think about like if you were to spin up a blog on substack or medium or even work like WordPress.com is not a good example. Basically there is one theme and we have this one, it's called the Wheel Pros theme because that's the parent company and inside that theme we have theme settings, primary, secondary tertiary colors, logo header, font, body copy font, etc. All the pages on the site are all different but they all go back to the same theme. So for example, if I were to take this block here because this, I'm pretty sure this is a custom coded block. If I were to change the code of this custom coded block to make the text aligned to the top both smittybuild and pro comp this header text would go to the top.
Gavin Taylor: Question about this. So I know with WordPress you can upload figma files, right? So are you able to do the same thing on this?
Chris LaFay: Ask that. I don't think that's true. What do you mean by upload figma files?
Gavin Taylor: So our old developer had something where we he would take a figma found he would just upload it. Freaking web fest. I was like what the hell, I don't know what he was doing. He would tweak it in such a way. But I might be wrong with that. The reason I I could have our developers just build it out pixel by pixel but we actually have a designer working on PPC landing pages right now. So I think this is something that we can do sooner rather than later. So on the URL structure it would basically just be like a blog, right? You split up block, you would connect the same domain, it would just be the slug basically.
Chris LaFay: So you can set up multi site in two different ways. So it's basically one install and then every site has its own like in terms of backend structure every site has its own database prefix. So you know, like Normally in WordPress the database prefix for the tables are WP underscore, blah blah blah blah blah. So every website has its own database tables inside the database. When you add a new site, the the theme files and the plugins are all shared kind of at the network level. When you add a new site you can either make it and this has to be global, you can't choose it on a side by side basis. You can either go subdomains. So if you have I know you wouldn't use this but local, local jungle ads.com would be the main domain name. So then if you were running them for Classic City it would be classiccity.local jungle ads.com so you do subdomains or you do. Actually there's three. Sorry. You can do subdomains off the primary. So like what I just told you two, you could have completely different domains. So each website has its own domain name or like subdomains, you can do them off folders. So it would be local jungle ads.com classic city and then the whole site lives off of that.
Gavin Taylor: So it'd be/like PPC. And that's where it would live.
Chris LaFay: I. My recommendation would be to. From like just a. This is more of a customer visibility standpoint is I would just buy a custom domain name for each of your clients for 10 bucks. So that I don't want to go to like if I'm going to Smitty build and I'm looking at these car parts and stuff. If the domain name says smittybilt local jungle ads.com my like my like consumer trust in that is kind of. I don't know.
Gavin Taylor: Yeah. So that's why we want. We would need it to be like one of the ones that we're working on is Duncan's Auto. We would need it to be Duncan's Auto, ppc, whatever landing pages.
Chris LaFay: So that would be. So that's going to be. So what you're talking about right now, that would be. Is it possible to do what you're talking about? Yes. Is it technologically challenging? Yes. Because what you're saying is that duncan auto.com is its own WordPress site over here. But what you would like is duncan auto.com ads to be on this other like point to this other website entirely. It's possible, but it's glitchy as crap.
Gavin Taylor: So I know big like chain. So Sam's Club, for example, 100.
Chris LaFay: Yep.
Gavin Taylor: They. They do that a lot especially for the locations. Right. So they'll use different servers for. And that's kind of the inspiration behind that. I know that's multi billion, billion dollar organization. But at the core level I'm looking at it as okay, it's different server, it's different. What about how do we set that up?
Chris LaFay: So we did this for AutoZone. They did not have a blog and so we built them their WordPress blog and it hung off of autozone.com DIY and obviously there were obvious. Obviously I did not have control of their DNS settings. But at the end of the day they actually Had a fairly. Their DNS thing is actually fairly simple given that they had an enterprise level stuff. Were the combination of getting the DNS to point.com domain.com to one location domain.com URL, pointing that to a different location and then hosting, getting WordPress to accept a a folder location if you will, as its primary URL structure. It's not built for that.
Gavin Taylor: Okay.
Chris LaFay: And there are a lot of work around now what you might say is like well Chris, didn't you say that if you did multi site you could do domain.com something and that'd be the thing? Yes, because it's the same domain off of a like because it's working inside the ecosystem. Because you're pointing domain.com to the WordPress multisite instance where every multi site has the same domain but each subsite is off of a folder. That connection is more natural.
Gavin Taylor: So that's more of if I had like I used to do real estate, right. Marketing and we had my housequote.com or something like that, whatever it was.com so it's whatever domain slash and that's how we would be able to do that is what you're saying versus connect to each individual. Okay, my great question then. Subdomain. Not sub.
Chris LaFay: Yeah, subdomain off of the clients 100. I actually forgot to add that as an option. I I as you were saying, as you said the word subdomain, I'm like, duh, you could just do ads.duncanmechanic.com I don't know why I didn't think about that. It's, it's a custom domain.
Gavin Taylor: Will we lose any like SEO value with the traffic to the core domain doing that?
Chris LaFay: So I'm not, I'm not an SEO expert, but this is what I'll tell you is you're planning on no indexing all the pages on the ad site. The existence of a subdomain should not impact your SEO at all because just the fact that it exists doesn't matter.
Gavin Taylor: The traffic that we were sending to the primary domain versus subdomain.
Chris LaFay: So like yeah, if you, if you siphon off traffic then sure. But you're also no indexing all the stuff on ads.com yeah. As well. So it shouldn't. And like these, I mean it really depends like what, what is the end goal? Is the end goal to increase organic traffic? Well then you should just build out a ads template directly on each of these sites here. Let's actually zoom back. Hold on one second. I think we went too Down. Far too down for a rabbit trip.
Gavin Taylor: Well, this is a great, this is a great conversation by the way because this is like a core problem we're having right now is if we can get ads up quicker, then we have a little bit longer to work on the time frame of the actual site. We'll talk about two site builds right now. If we can get a PPC templates done and out of the way that solved right now. That would make life so easy. That's the end goal for Craig is like hey, I want to be able to put ads up in three days. He's like, that has to be ad.
Chris LaFay: If you want to put ads up in three days. This is exactly what you do. You create a multi site instance. So all of your sites are going to be hosted on the exact same server. You have one template that has all actually the entire same list of what I came up with before of like color palette, font selectors, all that jazz and the settings panel. And then you are, you basically just, you say create a new site, you apply the template, you fill out the form and then you go to one of your existing ads pages and copy all the code of the page. Like the Gutenberg code if you will go into the new site, paste it in, you're done. That's, that's 15. Like nah, I wouldn't say 15 minutes. That's an hour of time.
Gavin Taylor: Like so multi site using subdomains and we already have access to all of our clients DNS. We actually manage the DNS on our, we point the game servers and everything over to our stuff. So we do all that anyway. So we can do the subdomain easily. Perfect. That solves a big problem for us then. And that will make it really easy. How, how fast are those multi sites are we able to get the same speeds as Gutenberg.
Chris LaFay: So hey, so first off you can, you can build, you can build your core template in Gutenberg. Like those pro com sites are all good.
Gavin Taylor: Okay, so it's still, it's still the same Gutenberg stuff. It's just a different.
Chris LaFay: Here let me actually, I didn't realize I actually have back end access. So here, let me show you this. So this is that, this is Pro Comp and Smittybilt. So underneath. So if you, if you add multi site you'll see this kind of my site thing here and you'll see the be able to access the dashboards of the different sites. But here's like the network admin. So I'm going to go over here To Dashboard, go to themes. Please ignore the fact that there's 31 plugins out of date. We're not going to look at that for right now. But basically what you'll see here is we have the two. We have the two now. We ended up building them out as child themes. So that's just how it worked for us. Better because of a couple, they have some E Commerce stuff that they're doing. So we actually needed separate code bases for both of them. But that's unique for this particular setup. So you can enable themes on a site by site basis and. Oh yeah, okay, this is the, okay, that is the parent theme and then this is the child theme. So you could always just use just the, the parent theme and call it a day. And then you could then you basically go through and you enable network wide what you want. So network deactivate Network deactivate Network activate. And so you can go in and make sure that all the sites have all the exact same plugins so that when one is updated, all of them are updated. So then, and this is the part that we built this a long time ago. I shouldn't Showcase things I'm not 100 confident in because I, I think the settings for these were actually on. They might have been inside of the code. Yeah, the palette name. Yeah, this, this is all old. But basically what you would have here is underneath your settings you would have your like palette selection.
Gavin Taylor: Okay.
Chris LaFay: There would just be a form listed out here of like all of the different colors so that when you change them they change only on the Pro Comp site because their database inside of Pro Comp and you're done. And so the way that you add a new site. So if I go over here to Network Admin and I will have to hop off here in a second.
Gavin Taylor: Yep.
Chris LaFay: Go to all sites, you'll add a new site. And I'm not going to do this here because this is a live working site. But when you're going through the ad section you'll add a, you'll put a domain name and so this would just be ads.duncan mechanics.com and then you would have a whole third site over here that you could then configure like it's, it is not that hard. So all of this would live on the same server. So when you're talking about page speed and stuff, one of the trade offs is all of these sites are on the exact same server. They're all together. So if one of them fails, they all fail. But the likelihood of that happening given that you're just driving ads traffic to it is minimal. Both of these sites get tens of thousands of hits every month and they're doing just fine. And they're processing E. Com as well too. So it's not. I don't say those cons to be like, don't do it. It's a bad idea.
Gavin Taylor: It's hard to be aware though.
Chris LaFay: I just don't know your full blown. I know SiteGround. I know you're hosting on SiteGround. I'm not as familiar with how good SiteGround is. We host WP Engine.
Gavin Taylor: So yeah, actual hope. Yeah.
Chris LaFay: I will have to hop off.
Gavin Taylor: Yeah, I'll let you go. So I have my Fireflies obviously, but can you give me like a small recap I can approach Craig with? Because this sounds definitely like a solution, immediate solution that we can do.
Chris LaFay: So I'll verbalize this for fireflies for you. Yeah.
Gavin Taylor: Okay.
Chris LaFay: I would recommend setting up a WordPress multisite instance on your SiteGround account. Nothing for Local Jungle specifically will be hosted on it. And inside of Multisite will then be. Basically you'll have one singular template that has colors, font, sizing, like that type of stuff kind of programmed in like in a settings panel. And when you're adding a new, you can then add multiple sites within this and all live on one server. And as you're adding a new site, you'll basically just wire up your client, a subdomain of one of your clients into this, this. And when you add that new site, you'll go through and change all of those settings. And so then when you're ready to launch an ad, you could go to an existing site that's already there, copy and paste the Gutenberg code into a new page on your new site. And because that Gutenberg code doesn't have any of the color schemes and all that kind of stuff set in it, it hypothetically should just be able to apply all of those styles and then all you have to do is swap out images on that content page. And now you have ads.duncan mechanics.com/get an oil change as an ads page that you can start sending clients to. Honestly, probably if that. Creating all the settings and creating that template obviously will take time, but I would say within an hour, maybe two at most it would take to duplicate a site, copy and paste the stuff down. And I think it will take 30 minutes, but I try to not over exaggerate claims. So that's my thought for how you could get ads spun up within an hour. Or two of getting DNS access.
Gavin Taylor: Perfect. I appreciate that. I'll let you go and we went over. I'll talk to you next week.
Chris LaFay: I find it funny how now we don't send as many like follow up emails. We just verbalize to the AI, these are the notes and then go take it and run with it.
Kimberly Tan: It's great.
Chris LaFay: Wonderful. Awesome, man. Have a good rest of the day, sir. Thanks, bye.