Local Jungle - Current
Gavin Taylor: It.
Chris LaFay: Good morning.
Gavin Taylor: Good morning. Good morning. How are you doing?
Chris LaFay: It was a. Actually last couple days were good days. We, you're actually, you're working on your like, starter theme template. I'm doing the same thing over here. We're definitely tackling the problem in two very different ways.
Gavin Taylor: Yeah.
Chris LaFay: But I ran it through the gauntlet. Mine. I ran mine through the gauntlet yesterday and it worked exactly as I had hoped.
Gavin Taylor: You know, with technology that's like such a bad thing. I'd take the win.
Chris LaFay: Right.
Gavin Taylor: Take the win.
Chris LaFay: Right. So that just delighted my heart, needless to say. And it was on test. It was on test number two as well. Like in test number one actually went really well a couple of weeks ago and so I did some updates and all that jazz. I was like, all right, let's push the button on test number two. And it was, it was beautiful. Absolutely beautiful. So I don't know where that accent came from. Just feeling, feeling good this morning, so.
Gavin Taylor: Fantastic. So just kind of bring you up to speed here a little bit. I spoke with Tessa again a little bit yesterday. I think we're all aligned on where we want to go. And as far as. I just want to like throw this out here really quick before we get started today as far as moving towards the goal of the idea of onboard do what I'm calling a fulfillment launch packet. Basically the one source truth for fulfillment. Right. And then from there I want some sort of automation. If we said with WordPress it's going to be ACF, if we go to Astro, it might be called something else. But the idea is going to be the same. The, the ACF idea is going to happen. The templates that will optimize is going to happen. It just was like minor little tweaks in between that might change just a tiny bit.
Chris LaFay: That all sounds good.
Gavin Taylor: Yep.
Chris LaFay: So where, where is Craig and the CMS decision making process?
Gavin Taylor: He's not even thinking about it right now. And the reason being is he's so backlogged that at the beginning of the month. What was it last week? Beginning of last week, I started on our processes almost full time. He's wrapping up host development right now because he's still. He hired me on for my paid ad expertise and my management expertise, but he is still hands on with ppc. So he's now fulfilling that part of it. He's probably next week is when we're going to be circling background to even having this conversation. From the think about.
Chris LaFay: Okay.
Gavin Taylor: I would say he's very much on the fence if page speed was an issue, if stability wasn't an issue, would say on road press just because the ease of it. But if page speed continues to fluctuate, if stability continues to fluctuate. My money says we're going to Astra.
Chris LaFay: So I want to. I want to use. I want to use our time wisely. I'm trying to think of. So there's a couple different routes I feel like we can go here.
Gavin Taylor: Yep.
Chris LaFay: Because I don't want to. I don't want to. I don't want to chase our tail.
Gavin Taylor: So I have a very good idea where I want to go with this. And then let's. Let me show you. Hold on.
Chris LaFay: Have you had a chance to do the. The doc, the documentation? Fantastic.
Gavin Taylor: Yes. And I want to go over that with you today. So I actually. A little marker thing. I. I know this was not the best way to do this, but I wanted to. I was audio and Mark, I'm like, hey, let's use this.
Chris LaFay: Slide you over here now so I can see you. I think it's time for me to just shut down my computer and start all over again because I have way too many screens open right now. Okay, here we go. I'm seeing your Google Doc.
Gavin Taylor: Okay. Yep. Okay, so let's go here. This is what I'm working on this month. This is primary focus across the board. Basically, it's all the SOPs, playbooks, checklists, everything that I could do in fulfillment. Now at the very top of this is technical onboarding with fulfillment. Yeah, technical onboarding, which I did. This is going to be during the actual onboarding itself. We all talk about that process. This is basically getting access to everything we need access to. Now with that being said, what I would like to do from here is talk about the fulfillment launch packet. And the reason being is we can continue where we left off with the ACF ideas. I need to know. Okay. And this is something that we could probably use our extra hour with you for this week too, is okay. On the dev side, what is everything you need to know? Right. And that's where I'm lacking my knowledge. I know how to onboard a client, I know how to run ads for a client, I know how to run a team and all that. On the dev side, I don't know exactly what is the right amount of information, what's not enough, what's too much or whatnot. Right. With the idea of having this website. So in this itself, we have to start from the top bottom. So obviously business details, anything that would be on the Venus custom field thing, color schemes, logos like have just a full on development. Here's a launch packet. Go.
Chris LaFay: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so you have. You went ahead and started writing this stuff down in marker, right? Okay.
Gavin Taylor: Yeah. This was just like the. How do I open it up again?
Chris LaFay: You basically just kind of went through the homepage. You went like at least.
Gavin Taylor: Yeah.
Chris LaFay: You went through the home page and basically said which of this stuff could be autom. Like automated effect.
Gavin Taylor: Yeah. So business info, the. The pages, the title, like the page structure. Each one's on the home page at least the schedule link. Yeah. So let me open this up. Yeah. So I went through here coupons, coupon layouts. I think we talked about that last time. I have a couple different patterns that we can choose from. So this is a coupon 1, 2 and 3.
Chris LaFay: Yeah.
Gavin Taylor: Select a pattern. Here's the title, here's the price, here's the description, terms and conditions. And a lot of times these will have bullet points on them too. So just have basically a mock. So I could drop down. What I'm thinking about is like a drop down for coupon 1, 2 and 3 and it selects ABSC or whatever. And then once that does it populates basically a form where in itself of what it needs filled out.
Chris LaFay: Go back, go back over to marker really quick for me.
Gavin Taylor: Yep.
Chris LaFay: Okay, so this. We need to break this down more so like. So like business info for example. What are the fields underneath that? So obviously we have company name, address, phone number, hours of operation, which I realize are kind of odd. We had to figure out how to standardize that some.
Gavin Taylor: That's really easy. I've already standardized it. We go. This is not it. It's going to be the short code unless it is half hour. So it's nine out of ten times what it is is Monday through Friday eight to six.
Chris LaFay: Got it. Okay. So but then down at the bottom in the footer, it's more of an expansive view.
Gavin Taylor: No, the bottom of the photo should have the same thing.
Chris LaFay: Okay. It just expands the text out some. Okay. Like because it says Monday through Friday actually there's a line break in there too.
Gavin Taylor: So from a. Yeah, that's actually not. Yeah, that we don't have to do. So while I was doing this I was actually getting over my devs like all the other items. I want change on this. No, I want the hours to be the same across the site format.
Chris LaFay: You want the look and feel of the hours. If it's M o n Fri, 7:30am to 5 to 5:30pm you want it to look okay? Got it. Perfect.
Gavin Taylor: Yeah. I want exactly the same way.
Chris LaFay: Let's go back over to marker. So still underneath. Still underneath business info. We need all the different like social media links as well. Name, address, phone hours, social media.
Gavin Taylor: What I call two from addresses. This is more so for coupons. This is basically admin notifications, form submissions and then the from emails. The SMT TP got.
Chris LaFay: Okay, excuse me. That makes sense. Let's go down. Let's. Here we have call. Let's actually create another section underneath this. So delete the dash. We also need to talk about theming. I think there's no E but theming anyway. It doesn't matter.
Gavin Taylor: Oh, underneath that.
Chris LaFay: Yeah. No, no, no, you're good. We need primary, secondary, tertiary colors. I find that having three color options, even if.
Gavin Taylor: Oh, I spelled it right, you.
Chris LaFay: That is assuredly not correct. But that's okay. Tertiary is T, E, R, P E, R, T I, A R A Y.
Gavin Taylor: Sorry, why A R, Y there?
Chris LaFay: Yeah. Header fonts. Header font.
Gavin Taylor: So actually we will not change a font. And that's specifically asked. It just does one if you're.
Chris LaFay: You do need to be able to change it though.
Gavin Taylor: Okay.
Chris LaFay: Right.
Gavin Taylor: Yeah, yeah.
Chris LaFay: So I would still. I would still have header font and body font as options here.
Gavin Taylor: Yep.
Chris LaFay: Because you want to have that ability. You don't want to. You don't want to brick yourself with that. Like you don't want to like have yourself stopped.
Gavin Taylor: This doesn't make sense to do anymore. That was just me.
Chris LaFay: This honestly probably goes into the fulfillment launch packet. Like we have to have this information.
Gavin Taylor: Yeah, I. I'm just very OCD with my like in look of those. So I want to write all my notes here and then it will go in the fulfillment launch packet.
Chris LaFay: Gotcha. Okay. So we have the theme. We have primary, secondary, treasury. I would also put things like default border, border radius. And I realize these things you probably don't change. But again you probably want to have them as options just to be on the safe side. Also default drop shadow so that anything that has a drop shadow, you can change it within one line in the back end so that everything stays the same.
Gavin Taylor: Yep.
Chris LaFay: Trying to think through all the stuff that I have in mind. So let's, let's actually, let's. I'm gonna pass it through a slightly different filter here. So. Okay, you're looking at this and let's just pretend that your theme that you have right now had a back end control panel to where you could change all seven of those styles of what? I just. Oh, actually, you probably also want to.
Gavin Taylor: Yeah. Would this be part of the colors right here?
Chris LaFay: Yeah. So that would either be your primary, secondary, or tertiary. It would just be at a. That block would just use it at, you know, 70% opacity.
Gavin Taylor: Yeah. Okay, cool.
Chris LaFay: Let's go back and add one more. Let's do. Because you said that you make every button red, the same red color.
Gavin Taylor: Not necessarily. That's the call to action button.
Chris LaFay: So the call to action button, is it.
Gavin Taylor: Oh, no, no. The call. Click to call. Sorry, late night. So this button will always be red. These may not.
Chris LaFay: Okay, so go ahead. Let's add in to our list the call to action color, which by default will be that red. You're probably never going to change it, but again, while we're creating a control panel, you might as well have access to change stuff. Okay, so if you had the ability, let's pretend that your theme from a structural standpoint was exactly the same as this one right here. You have what you have. The only difference is that you could go in and on a single screen, update all eight of those colors, fonts, sizes, etc, and then everything just magically changed across the board. Would that cover everything from a style perspective?
Gavin Taylor: No. So there's one more, the hero. We actually have like three different blocks that built up the hero. Let me see if I can find it.
Chris LaFay: Oh, we also need to add under business info logo upload. So the same one can be used across all the blocks and only has to be uploaded once. Sorry, I just thought about that. I didn't mean to distract you.
Gavin Taylor: Would it be better to have this and do logo, square logo, horizontal? Because if we have the option for horizontal and it looks better, we could use that. I want to remember what blocks are built for this. Okay, so we have two blocks for the hero. And I know we're gonna have one more because Craig actually sent me. This last night, which I'm not even gonna think about too much. But this is the paper, the PPC landing pages template that we're working on. Those aid absolute ton. How do I. There we go. Okay, so since we're building this out as a ppc, landing pages will likely have this hero block built out as well. So would it be possible, and I know you told me last time to just assume. Would it be possible to just have it? So for the theming, it would be Hero 1, 2, or 3.
Chris LaFay: So now we're getting into actual page building. So all in my perfect world of this core Template has the ability, like has a building block called Hero 1, 2, and 3. And then when the homepage is being built, you just toss that on there. So that's not really a global.
Gavin Taylor: No problem. That could go into the fulfillment launch packet for the devs. Say, hey, I want this here. Okay.
Chris LaFay: Yeah. Saying like, for the homepage, you want blocks A, F, G, Q and Z on the home page. That. Yeah, which is why I want like
Gavin Taylor: 3 or 4 templates. Stuff out is my ideal thing is like, hey, what's the possible combinations that we could use? Because. Because if we use this hero, we're not going to use the coupon section. Yeah, but we'll have the coupon page.
Chris LaFay: Yes. Which is why it's good to know what blocks you have at your disposal. And if those blocks can be automated, all the better. So, like, no matter which one you choose, like, if this, this homepage has two coupons on the bottom right hand quadrant, those coupons pull from the same location that the coupons block on the. On the original. I'm gonna call the original one that, that you have. So it doesn't matter which one you choose, they all just work.
Gavin Taylor: So it's gonna be like coupon one. Well, hold on.
Chris LaFay: No, hold on. Wait, hold on. Time out.
Gavin Taylor: One.
Chris LaFay: One second. Before you dive into that, I'm gonna answer your question for you. I know. I know what you're about to ask. I think a visual is going to help. You can. I'm sorry. You can ask your. Sorry, you can ask your question. I didn't mean to sound come across like a toolbar.
Gavin Taylor: No, no, that's ADHD. Is that. I do the same thing 1,000%. I'm like, I know what you're saying. Don't even bother. Yeah, basically, we're going to number the coupons and because it might make sense to have the coupons, the different orders,
Chris LaFay: I'm actually going to switch your thinking around so I'm actually sharing my screen. So go back over to your Google Meet tab so you can see this. So, yeah, I can leave this. All right, so this site's in dev right now. So this, what I'm showing you is a video production company's website. So they obviously have things like case studies and testimonials. Right. So within testimonials, because I think this is actually going to be the closest, like one to one example here. Within a testimonial, you have what, a first name, last name, company name, job title, and then their actual quote. Right. So think about this in terms Of a coupon. You have a coupon name, a discount percentage and then like a list of like bullet pointed details which would be right here. Right. Obviously they would have a photo that they could upload if they wanted to for this. That's not going to be necessary for the coupon. So you load in a coupon and then you would click on all coupon, you would see all the different coupons that you have at your disposal. So with that being said, let me go over. I don't have this pulled up. Pulled up. I do have it pulled up. Great. Okay, cool. Block library. Because this was literally the call that I just got off of before you and I chatted this morning. I was like, hey, I have everything right here still testimonials. So this is an advanced custom fields block. So if you look over here on the right hand side, these are all the block settings. So here are the three testimonials. But if you notice over here I chose the testimonials that I wanted to pull. So I chose Marcus, James and Elena. If I get rid of James, James goes away. Oops. And then if I change the columns to two, now it's there. So if I update Marcus's testimonial with something new, this is automatically going to update itself. So I think the, the mental image that you had of like you select coupon like 1, 2 and 3. I just wanted to make sure that the mental image was correct and so you could pull these little cards wherever you want.
Gavin Taylor: Yeah, so very close. This is honestly the 1, 2 and 3. Essentially it's just names. Right. So market, whatever. But now on that main settings menu, could we have a field that will auto populate that.
Chris LaFay: Auto populate your coupons.
Gavin Taylor: The testimonial. So let's say now the settings video and it's going to essentially go through all the different questions. I'm almost thinking of this as like an onboarding form within WordPress. Right. Where my assistants just busted everything out in one screen like we talked about. And then it said homepage coupons. And then it has by default three different options. Let's say drop three different small drop downs and then just pick a number. Right now we would have like the coupon itself. So just like you have testimonials and that the coupon settings. So that's how we upload all the coupons and then they'll just always be numbered and then we'll be able to have a drop down in the main settings menu that selects that automatically. So when it pulls the Block to the website. It auto populates those three names.
Chris LaFay: I understand what you're saying. That all makes sense. Where.
Gavin Taylor: I mean, it's one more step. We could go and fill it out. It's just. It would be really cool to have it done.
Chris LaFay: So I. So this is my. I'm actually literally kind of in the process of doing something very similar to this within my own setup. So the way that. That would work out best. So I have AI attached to this now. The way that you and I do, the way that our approaches are. Are very much different. And I'm ex. I'm going to explain, even though I know that our processes are very different here, I'm going to explain this to you to maybe for it to either spark an idea.
Gavin Taylor: Okay.
Chris LaFay: Or just get you thinking in a slightly different way. So the way that I do it is you. The way that you're. Five sentences. We're gonna try all of those again and push them into one. The way you do it is that you take your. You duplicate a site on siteground, you have the theme initialized already and then you basically just hop straight into the back end of WordPress and start doing. Doing stuff. That's an oversimplification, but that's in general what it is.
Gavin Taylor: It's exactly what we do.
Chris LaFay: Perfect. So where ours is different is we start in. Develop like in code. So we have a. We don't start on a server somewhere. We start with a starter theme, the theme code, and we take whatever the current state of that is and we copy and paste it into the. The website that we're working on right now is called Consume Media. So I'm going to use them as well. So we copy our starter theme into the Consume website. I then point my AI robots that I've trained to basically look at that starter theme and do what you just said, actually, which is basically what. What are the core. It prompts the developer.
Gavin Taylor: Yeah.
Chris LaFay: What are the primary. Secondary tertiary colors? What is the. The font size? The array of font sizes from small to large. What is the spacing from extra small to extra large? And it has defaults built into this, mind you, so that you can skip them and use the defaults when the theme is. So inside of this theme we also have patterns and custom blocks, just like you do. So you have some patterns that are all Gutenberg, that are fully editable, and then you have some advanced custom field blocks where they just do the one thing that they're meant to do and they're custom coded. That's the Exact same for me. What I then have it do is once it. Once the developer fills out all the information in the prompt, it updates all the code with all the new colors and all this jazz, and it does it in the correct WordPress way. When I activate the. It doesn't have the. But it doesn't have the ability to run PHP code, so it doesn't have the ability to go in and edit the database. It doesn't have the ability to go and like create new pages at that level. So what it. What I did was I had it write code at the starter theme level to where when you click the button in the back end of WordPress and say activate this theme, there is a script that's run and that script is thousands of lines of code. And it pre builds pages and structures on the website using the patterns in the ACF blocks pushed together. And it builds out those pages for me. And it takes about two to five minutes when you push that activate button for the site to come back up again. Because it takes. It's running through a lot of scripts at the time, but it creates out the block library, it can create out a homepage. It's a lot of that stuff. So I say all of that to say, can you have a section in your Settings panel to do some of this stuff? Yes, but it's a little bit far ahead because where I want to. It depends on how you want your process to go, because adding them in a Settings panel will just create them in their own different object. Like kind of in that left sidebar where we saw testimonials earlier. It's not going to go and like manually create a block that has these predefined settings inside. Yeah, I'm going to do that. That's a little bit. That efficiency doesn't make a bunch of.
Gavin Taylor: That part is where I. Assuming the template's gone, it's going to be built out by our devs, right. So once we have all this built out, the blocks themselves will be custom coded to support all this. No, no, that. That makes sense though.
Chris LaFay: I. Here's a different thought of one that you could do. Coupons is the easiest thing to pick on. There might be some other stuff that we could do this with as well. As a part of your technical documentation, let's say that you have an Excel sheet of default coupons. You could then, when you're sending over the packet to the developers, you could then send them that Excel file to where they could then just do an import into the. Into the coupon section of the website. And so if you have any updates to the coupons ahead of time, you can just update them there and then they could then just update that Excel file and use whatever you have.
Gavin Taylor: So that my goal was to find that line in the sand because that time you told me to be ambitious about what I want to automate and this time I'm like, okay, let's push that. So what I'm hearing is yes, that's possible with a complete process switch, which
Chris LaFay: it would make more sense if it was a complete. Like it would, it would make more sense to. This is. This is a very odd thing to say. How you describe the automation from a code standpoint and an E standpoint isn't actually going to save you a lot of time because you're going to still input it in the back end of WordPress. You might as well just input it in the back end of WordPress in the right location. Whereas if you went down my path of it's more, more development centric rather than kind of like copy and paste and duplicate and back end website centric, if you went down that route like I've gone, you can actually create more of these automations but you have to change the way you think about everything. And I don't know if that's going to be valuable. I would love to see it, honestly, I would love to see a full blown setting panel described exactly how we have a more development. When I say development centric, I don't, don't, don't read into that as saying that like E2M needs to do more weird technical stuff. I know you want to keep them at surface level, which is fine, but a more code oriented approach so that you can inject AI into various different pieces of this process to make life easier.
Gavin Taylor: Yep.
Chris LaFay: But that's a whole, that's a, that is a categorically large shift. And so the, the.
Gavin Taylor: Yeah, I don't want to do all that. I think, I think what you built with that website you just showed me, I think that's plenty. It's just I have to make sure that I add it to like sop. Like hey, here's how you do this. Right. Which it is what it is. I'm not worried about it.
Chris LaFay: We need to come up with what are, what is that theme settings panel with all those things and then audit each of the blocks.
Gavin Taylor: Yep.
Chris LaFay: And say where do these things plug in and do they need to be. Do they still need to be Gutenberg only blocks or can they be custom coded? Blocks so that you don't have to have all this back and forth and duplicate of entry.
Gavin Taylor: I think all of these blocks right now for the most part are going to be custom coded. Even though, Even though some are going to have elements of the stand up Gutenberg block, like for example the gallery, I think to minify all the code and everything on the website. I think with the developer debuts. This was the E2M, this was our other developer. I think they custom built their submitted fire whatever possible code that we could. Okay, so that's fine. So for the coupon, where would you think it's best to put that? Assuming we took the approach that you just showed me, Having the coupon section and putting in all coupons like that. And then in the block itself we were able just to change that. It'd be right here. Number of coupons, layout, contact, pricing order. Okay, so let's do.
Chris LaFay: Okay, what are the data points inside of each coupon that are important?
Gavin Taylor: Coupon name, coupon. Title.
Chris LaFay: What's the difference between name and title?
Gavin Taylor: That's a great freaking question. Okay, let me show you an example. That's probably a bad wording on that. This. Okay, so. This one's a better one. So technically the name of this would be the oil change coupon, right. And these would be the titles. Now we combine them and this is really. There's only two that we really do and we see this actually more common than you would think. But we usually combine oil change coupons and we do this thing now. I guess name and title doesn't have to be separate. You're right.
Chris LaFay: So what I would probably. The way that I would think about this is you have a, a coupon name and then everything under the name is just a WYSIWYG editor. Kind of like Microsoft Word, not like Gutenberg to where you drag and drop blocks, but like Word to where you have like an open box where you can bold text and do bulleted lists and all that jazz.
Gavin Taylor: So I think that's what we have now. No, we don't. It's all PHP code. That's what it is. Okay, so what did you call that?
Chris LaFay: So you have a coupon name and then you have a coupon description which is where you put all of the, the details. And that's just going to be a WYSIWYG like editor so that you can adjust font size and color and boldness and add bulleted lists. And do you know what WYSIWYG is?
Gavin Taylor: No. Have you never heard WYSIWYG no, but I, I, I understand what you said. Yeah, I've never heard of that. That's weird.
Chris LaFay: So that's how you smell. So I just, I sent you in the chat. What is it?
Gavin Taylor: Yes, I've, I've absolutely seen that. I've just never heard of.
Chris LaFay: What does it stand for? What does it stand for?
Gavin Taylor: I have no idea. What you see is what you get.
Chris LaFay: Boom. Look at that. Huh?
Gavin Taylor: That was Google, by the way.
Chris LaFay: Oh, you suck. No, no, no. Oh my gosh. Okay, so anyway, that's what the description would be basically. Like a little minor, like a little tiny Microsoft Word editor, basically.
Gavin Taylor: Yeah, yeah.
Chris LaFay: So the coupon name, coupon description
Gavin Taylor: is going to be the E.
Chris LaFay: Yeah, thank you. I think that's it. Right, Because I mean the button is dynamic and then the, Oh, I would say the, the quantity of days. I know there would be a default in there, but it's like the days from, like you don't put a hardcoded D and.
Gavin Taylor: Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
Chris LaFay: But I want you to give you the ability. You might as well have the ability to.
Gavin Taylor: Yeah. So by default it's always two weeks. And then we, if you want to
Chris LaFay: adjust it, you can. There's no reason to not give you the ability to change it.
Gavin Taylor: And even with this, the one thing that I'm trying to keep reminding myself is we still have access to the dev team. So even though, like, yes, let's go as far as we can go. I, at the end of this, I am still sending it over the dev team to finalize this. I'm sure there'll be more stuff. Okay. That actually page structure. This is where. Let's skip this for now. Okay. Schedule link. Now most of our clients will have. God, I hated that. Okay, so we had to do something.
Chris LaFay: Is this the side that y' all did?
Gavin Taylor: Yes. Okay, so this one has two locations. So we had to do this. And for some reason they had a pop up and if they wanted to change locations, whatever the dev said, oh, you have to refresh the page. I don't understand that. But what it does is it pops up an iframe. There's two, two different ones that we primarily use. It's Auto Ops and Octo. Both of them have pretty much the same code in here.
Chris LaFay: Yeah, it's just an iframe. At the end of the day, you're just iframing something different.
Gavin Taylor: So what I want to do, and this is where it's going to get a little bit difficult, is would it be smart to Standardize this in the ACF and just put the iframe stuff in it. Basically the code for the iframe or the link within the iframe for it or because it's going to be a hit or miss, it's a coin flip whether or not our clients have multiple locations or not or we're even taking on multiple locations. And in that case we're going to have to build out this separately. With every multi location this is built out a little bit different.
Chris LaFay: So when you click on appointments, go ahead and click on it for me really quick. So is this, this modal box right here, Is this an iframe or. No, this is your. Okay, so you basically this is a
Gavin Taylor: pop up that has multiple selections that
Chris LaFay: goes to a different pop up that goes to different. Like basically when you click on. Whether you click on Lauderdale, Fort Lauderdale or Palm Bay, it's taking you to different iframes, right?
Gavin Taylor: Yeah.
Chris LaFay: Okay, so how, how often does, how often does this happen? Multiple locations and how often do you think it will happen?
Gavin Taylor: Well, 50. 50 right now since I've been on.
Chris LaFay: Okay, so that's a large percentage. So I think the way that we do this is also.
Gavin Taylor: Hold on, one more thing. There is another wrench to throw. Nope, not prestige. Oh, I can't think of the name. There is one of the schedulers that we could potentially use if the client's already on it.
Chris LaFay: But you can't guarantee.
Gavin Taylor: No, no because it's like a whole back end like scheduling and shop management. They're not going to switch. Just plus.
Chris LaFay: No. So this is my. Okay, so this is my thought. This would take custom coding but it would make life super duper duper, duper duper easy. You already go actually hover over locations for me and then click on one of them. I don't care which one you do. Are these built in? These are built inside of a custom post type called locations. Right. They're just. There's flat pages.
Gavin Taylor: Yeah.
Chris LaFay: Okay.
Gavin Taylor: I think you know what a custom
Chris LaFay: post type is, right?
Gavin Taylor: Yeah, we gone last last time.
Chris LaFay: Can you log into the back end of this one for me? You have to. Yeah. Okay. Sorry. There's. The good thing is I will know immediately comp model services. All right. So there. Okay. All right. So this would be my suggestion. This actually doesn't change much from a content importing perspective by the way. So custom post types are the things that you have on the left hand side models and services. And then an assumption that I was, I showed you was case studies and testimonials they're basically just dedicated sections on the side of work on the side of the admin bar. My recommendation would be to pull locations into its own custom post type, because you can put custom fields attached to a specific custom post type. So you could have a custom field for iframe code attach that location. Now you can build that location out with building blocks. There's no difference in terms of content importing here. You. There are still pages that you can build out just like you always have, but because they're inside of a custom post type, they are separated from the rest of the pages, the page structure. So you can do unique things with them. So imagine this. Let's say that you have a block that is inside of the template of the pages. It's basically attached to the footer, if you will. So it's on all pages. And that block is called appointment modal. And this is all completely custom coded, mind you. Yeah, that modality block that sits at the top of the footer that you don't see, it's an invisible block because it's a middle block. What it does is it goes into the locations custom post type. It says, how many of these do I have? 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Doesn't matter if it's one, all it does is it pulls the iframe code from that custom field of that one and it shoves it into the middle box. So when you click on Schedule Appointment, the iframe is right there. If it's more than one, it creates a little modal box piece of code, just like on that, the sample one that you just said. That gives you the list of here, all the locations. Because it has the name of them. Because the title of that page is Fort Lauderdale or Palm Bay.
Gavin Taylor: Yeah.
Chris LaFay: And then when you click on one of those, it then goes and grabs the iframe code from the one that you clicked on and plops it into the modal box. So now it's all 100 automated, no matter what.
Gavin Taylor: I don't know if I like that on the SEO side. Now I understand what you're saying. So are you saying the page itself would be iframe or are you sending the appointment?
Chris LaFay: No, just the appointment piece.
Gavin Taylor: So here's the thing. Our ads, they are going to location pages and they're going to our location PPC pages. On those themselves, it's going to be built out a little bit differently and then we have three different headers. So on our location PPC pages, what will happen is like anything under the Fort Lauderdale one, we have a Fort Lauderdale header. So actually it's this one right here. So now under the Fort Lauderdale header, if I click Appointments, it pulls this one up.
Chris LaFay: Oh, oh. So basically what you're saying, okay, so that all makes sense.
Gavin Taylor: So, so yeah, we have a home header.
Chris LaFay: We have a. Yeah, it could handle all of that. So meaning, like, for example, like. So, so first off, from like from a content perspective, these act just like regular pages. They're exactly. The URL structure would actually be exactly the same. It would be slash, location, slash, whatever this location slug is, and you build the pages exactly the same. So given that that block is completely custom coded, if you were to click on the, like the, the button that triggers that modal box. That modal box, the, the initial, and I love this phrase, initial conditional. The initial conditional that the modal box looks at is, am I on a single location page? If no, then all the things I just described happened. If yes, it only pulls the, it only pulls the one. And so the button that you, the button that you trigger, all it does is just trigger whatever modal box has been preloaded onto the page. Does that make sense? We're getting, I'm, I, I full, I'm getting very technical with this explanation.
Gavin Taylor: No, I, and that's where I have a question because again, how we started out, this call is Cook's on the fence of WordPress versus Astro right now. Every decision I make moving forward has to be like, okay, is this something that, no matter where we can go, can we do something similar? And while Astro has all the very similar layouts, it's very custom coded. My question would be, is this something, is it like a custom script, if you will, the modal box that you're talking about?
Chris LaFay: So all modal boxes are just showing and hiding a div tag.
Gavin Taylor: Okay, so it could be custom coded and it, it's actually anything.
Chris LaFay: No, like, it doesn't. Now the, the, the thing is, so with CMSs in general, the, the, a lot of CMSs have the ability. In WordPress, they're called custom post types. In the rest of the world in development, they're basically called like custom data objects. Because think about like this, like, let's go back to my testimonials. Example, one testimonial. What does it have? It has a, has a title, a first name, a last name, a quote, content, job title, company. It's a data, It's a, it's an object of data at the end of the day. Now some of these, like what, let's go back over here to yours. Like with location locations is a data object right now really all that it has is title, featured image and then a butt ton of HTML code for the pages content. Right. Like that's all it is. So all most C most quality CMSs have the ability to create a custom data object with custom fields attached to it. That is common. Okay now how do you then how. How does it all work together and how do you tie them together and what can do like how to implement it is different.
Gavin Taylor: Exactly.
Chris LaFay: Should be similar. And so one of the a red flag for you to just kind of like keep in the back of your mind is if whatever CMS you're going with doesn't have the ability to create a what I'm going to call a custom data object with different fields and stuff like that's what a coupon is as well description. Like if you don't have the ability to create those you are going to seriously shoot yourself in the foot if you're trying to automate this stuff.
Gavin Taylor: I absolutely agree. So let's do this then. Obviously we have nine minutes left so I need to break these down a little bit more and into all of this I want to not focus as much on the automation. Just I know we're all working towards that like so let me reword that. I don't want to get into like the technical or the automation yet. While I like the sound of that, what I heard is like a lot of back and forth with developers.
Chris LaFay: Initially that would be the case but
Gavin Taylor: long term it's going to help long term. I'm 100 on board now and to throw a bunch of things the. The reason why there's another issue here and this is probably why it's gonna help. We also have select location on the coupon here.
Chris LaFay: So was the coupon stuff a. Was this. Is this a custom built modal? Is it using a plugin?
Gavin Taylor: It's using. Can you, can you.
Chris LaFay: Can you write View inspector on this? Because the HTML code might showcase is a gra. Is it a gravity form?
Gavin Taylor: Yeah, that's what it was. I was trying to say gravity form is the input and then on the back end in the coupon code basically. Have you had a chance to look at our custom plugin? The coupon code?
Chris LaFay: I noticed I, I saw it there but I hadn't actually like opened it
Gavin Taylor: up yet but oh, I get so lost because it is PHP and I found that it's very temperamental so it can screw a lot of things up. So I don't even want to open it. I let developers do that.
Chris LaFay: Make it. Oh, you're actually using a. Hold on. You're actually using a plugin for the pop up. See, this is where. Okay, this is where some of the slowness comes in. Now I can't. So I mean from what I can tell. So go move your mouse. Keep moving your mouse up. I'm sorry, no, over on the code. Go up about four more div tags. One more. Right there, right there. Nope, down one. So write that class. Oops. Nope, one up there it is there. So make it easy. So I, I believe that is a plugin for modal boxes. That does not mean that it is a bad plugin. So I realize I'm calling attention to
Gavin Taylor: something that I don't know, it's. You call attention. A problem that I've already talked to them about is relying on plugins and that's something I do not want to do. And I think that's causing a lot of us being issues because I found out that even for the dynamic exploration date they did a plugin.
Chris LaFay: Yeah, that's dumb. Sorry, sorry.
Gavin Taylor: No, no, I, I fully agree with you. It's like by default, what's the plugin that we can do to do this? And it slows down on page speeds. So it's actually. I have a call with them in five minutes. No. Oh, we reschedule it this week. It's tomorrow. So yeah, I have a call with them tomorrow and I'm gonna be talking to them about it because they have gone and added a whole bunch of plugins. So we have documentation. His food plugins question for you.
Chris LaFay: From a form submission standpoint on the website, do not count anything that lives inside of iframes. I don't care about those at all because those are all third party things. You have coupons and because their email, their. The client is getting an email. So what coupons and contact us.
Gavin Taylor: Those are the two different ones.
Chris LaFay: So there is a case to be made. I'm not saying I like it, but there's a case to be made to where if those are the only forms that you have to have on your site to just custom code those and then the like. Right now you said one of the. One of the. Words. One of the items in the checklist of things you have to get is like the to and from email sends. Yeah, that's way too much.
Gavin Taylor: Yeah, so like this is not one. This isn't one. We would have like this.
Chris LaFay: Also something to note here. Scroll back Up a smidge. There's a plugin that you have called code snippets. I despise these. And the reason why is because you're allowing the back end of WordPress to directly inject code. They're very. Now, are there ways to do it safely? 100% yes. And at the end of the day, are you going to be injecting some type of code into your theme by adding in like, you know, this is your Google Analytics, like the, the ID number. This is your call rail ID number. You are. Yes. It's a lot easier when you're only accepting number values than whole entire script tags. Like yeah. Then you also have header footer code manager, which again is an easy way to not edit code to add in scripts. Yeah. Future date. Like there's. That should just be.
Gavin Taylor: This is one that. I don't know where that came from.
Chris LaFay: That's where you would. I would toss that.
Gavin Taylor: Oh no. That's how old developer did this. I don't know why, but yeah, there's that. So these are all things that old developer built out first. This right here, I don't even know how to access this to be honest. But this right here is what sends out emails and then reconnect WP mail SMTP with sungood to send out the actual emails. But all the email like templates and stuff are in that.
Chris LaFay: Got it. Okay.
Gavin Taylor: Which I hate because I can't edit. Like I don't know how to edit it. One, there's no edit button and two, it's code. It's all code.
Chris LaFay: My thinking is that. The pop up stuff should be custom coded inside the theme. And then you have a settings panel mainly for the pop up that has the coupon code to where you then apply a specific gravity form into it.
Gavin Taylor: All of our gravity forms are actually turned off, which is also really, really funny. Turned off? It's deactivated. Yeah, they're turned off. But somehow with how he wrote this code, they're still being used. I don't know. I'm not a developer. It doesn't make sense to me either. But I don't know. That goes over my head. So here's what I'm gonna do this week. I'm gonna go ahead and build this out for you. What I would like you to do is take an hour and just make me a list of everything that should be in a fulfillment launch packet. Right. Like with the assumption that ACF like all these blogs. I'll share this with you too. All these are going to Be in here.
Chris LaFay: So.
Gavin Taylor: And then go ahead.
Chris LaFay: I'm fine with doing that. The thing that if you have a list of every custom field that is needed across these various different blocks and two, you have a list in the previous packet that has a list of all the scripts that are necessary, like call real Google Analytics. All that. That. That's. That's it.
Gavin Taylor: That's okay.
Chris LaFay: Like that. That's pretty much. That's pretty much everything. And so I don't know if that's the best use of my time because this right here, you know your site much better than I do and I can poke holes in it all day long. I don't know if I have enough. I could go. What I would. Would it be. So if you could. If you could get this to me, middle of this while we're already on Tuesday, would it be helpful if I created tomorrow? Would it be helpful if I created a very miniature dummy website that utilized a lot of this stuff in it so that you could see how it could function?
Gavin Taylor: I think just seeing the menu itself. Yes. Okay. Because take more than like an hour at a time because I don't. It's more of a visualization and I want to be more focused on. I know this all works towards the process, but I want to be a little bit more focused on more the beginning of the process than the actual automation side. And I know that's where we're going. So it's hard for me to actually put in words what I'm saying.
Chris LaFay: Can I make an adjustment here?
Gavin Taylor: Yep. So
Chris LaFay: creating this in terms of part of the process, this is going to be very similar. Once we have all this data, making it as a part of the process, that's going to be easy. This is what I worry about is if your E2M guys are very much the like surface level developers.
Gavin Taylor: Yep.
Chris LaFay: I worry that if you handed this to them.
Gavin Taylor: Oh,
Chris LaFay: I thought my. Can you hear me, by the way?
Gavin Taylor: Yeah, I got you.
Chris LaFay: My power just went out for like 3 seconds, yet my computer didn't turn off. I don't have a search protector.
Gavin Taylor: Really.
Chris LaFay: I have no idea what just happened. So I was like, I'm gonna join on my phone because Internet. Anyway, I digress. So my concern is that if you were to hand this to them and say, build me a better temple that has these variables. They're not going to build what you need. So I. My thinking is I don't care. I'm not gonna. This is what I'm not gonna do. I'm not gonna blow. I'M not gonna blow time and spend a lot of time and charge a lot. That's not my point. I think I can accomplish a lot within an hour or two, and I don't care if it takes me a little bit longer. If I have this list, I think I can give you a starting point. It's not going to be sexy. It's not going to look like your sites. Yeah, but it could have all the data points and at least some of these core structures to where you can be like, here's the foundation.
Gavin Taylor: Okay.
Chris LaFay: And then be able to run with it from there.
Gavin Taylor: Okay. Let me get you these things this week then. I do have to hop on with my assistant right now, but let me get you this this week at least, and then we'll go from there.
Chris LaFay: Yeah.
Gavin Taylor: Okay.
Chris LaFay: That sounds good. Just FYI, my I know we're meeting next Tuesday. My. The Monday before that for me is fairly slammed. So if you can get this to me by the end of the day tomorrow.
Gavin Taylor: Yep.
Chris LaFay: By Thursday. And Friday is fairly open, so no pressure, but that's just. That's kind of where my. My box.
Gavin Taylor: Okay.
Chris LaFay: Send me an email when you're done with it because I won't get updates when you update this. So.
Gavin Taylor: Yep. Cool.
Chris LaFay: Thanks, man. Appreciate it.