Local Jungle - Current

Gavin Taylor: It. I don't know why my camera's doing that. There we go. How you doing?

Chris LaFay: You know, yesterday and today are going to be. We're. Yesterday was a great day. Today is going to be a good day because you know why? I had two in person meetings that were a decently long drive and both of them canceled last minute. So that means I don't have time to backfill those with other meetings. So yesterday I had a day that I could just get stuff done. And you know what? Today will also be a day that I get stuff done.

Gavin Taylor: So very love it.

Chris LaFay: Very sad that I'm not gonna get to see my people. Like, don't get me wrong, I really like those guys. But the introvert in me is very happy.

Gavin Taylor: Oh darn it.

Chris LaFay: I have a day that I kept like six uninterrupted hours to myself. Oh no. What's a man to do? Work.

Gavin Taylor: That's funny. Speaking of a book, I dropped the ball last week. I know we were supposed to do that list of the customizations. However I, we finally. We're calling it our March Madness. Right. But we're diving deep into all these processes and I mean we're stripping back everything.

Chris LaFay: Yeah.

Gavin Taylor: And just going hard on this. So I have created about 30 different sops in the past week and it

Chris LaFay: edited 30 sops in the last week.

Gavin Taylor: No, I created like it's. Yeah, it's fun and I'm barely scratching the surface and I have two more weeks to do this. So I talked with Craig. He wants to like completely put a pause on the automation.

Chris LaFay: Okay.

Gavin Taylor: And I talked to him about everything we've talked about. I shared notes, I've done all that. He's like in an ideal world. Yes. I'd love to get there. But he's like, we have so many other problems to focus on right now. And while this solves a lot of those problems, that's not how his brain's like looking at it. He's like, this is another project that we have to come over and it's not just getting the template in order. It's not getting the automations in order. It's everything shouting it. So he's looking at a list of SOPs that we have to create before we get into all that. Does that make sense in general?

Chris LaFay: Yeah. Without. I don't. And I don't need to know the full context of all the other things. That's all fine. I understand it. That makes sense.

Gavin Taylor: Yeah.

Chris LaFay: On the, the reasoning behind it. But. But yeah, that's fine.

Gavin Taylor: That Makes sense how his brain works. I'm always curious about. He's just one of those people, he's so smart. But how he gets to certain things, I mean, in the end it works out. He obviously successful.

Chris LaFay: Let me move you over here.

Gavin Taylor: This is what I'm working on right now. This is just part of it. It's basically the process broken down into SOPs. What I'm looking to do. This is my table contents, if you will. I'll link out each SOP through here. And I don't even want to look at this. The like some of these, like for example, Google Tag Manager. While this should be like the most simple thing ever, Craig's page speed stuff comes back into play. Like, hey, we're not doing call rail Google Tag Manager because of xyz. And like, we don't want to overload Google Tag Manager to bring down the page speed. But in other senses, like Google SiteKit plugin works really well to place the tag Manager. So my assistant can do it. And that's pretty much as far as we're going with it. And then placing.

Chris LaFay: You have a plugin that allows you to place the Google Tag Manager code.

Gavin Taylor: So Google Site Kit. Have you ever played with Google Site Kit?

Chris LaFay: It's like Google's plugin for work. Yeah, right.

Gavin Taylor: Yeah. There's a couple different things with it. And I know that we can go in and mess with the code, but every time we touch the code of the site, something can break. This is something I want my assistant to do. And Google SiteKit gives us a couple different things. So yes, it's gonna place the Tag Manager, Google Analytics, it's gonna connect to PageSpeed Insights. It's gonna have a bunch of stuff just right on WordPress plus where we can monitor different things. And it's the easiest way to connect Tag Manager, Search Console, everything to the site, which that.

Chris LaFay: That actually makes sense like that. That's all. Because that plugin actually does multiple things for you. It doesn't.

Gavin Taylor: Yeah, I.

Chris LaFay: What my brain heard you say was we install a full plugin to copy and paste a single script line. And I'm like, no, dear mercy, no, no, no. Anyway, sorry, no.

Gavin Taylor: And this allows us to do a couple different things and it doesn't slow down the site hardly at all. I think we're talking about like this maybe a faction a second. Yeah, we're good. So like for example, the clients that we work with, they have. Well right now we just did an audit of it last week. They use three different scheduling tools. They are very shop specific scheduling tools. So I had to figure out how to connect that with Google Tag Manager so that we can pass the conversions back to Google Ads, which is some of the things I'm doing now. I need to just standardize Send Grid Trust Index, like do all of these SOPs and including web development SOPs. So that way anything in my wheelhouse of development fulfillment, whatever is sorted is worked out. So that way anybody can do this. And I feel like this is a better starting point because standardizing the how we're doing these different things is going to help us with the process of it. Right? Yeah, totally.

Chris LaFay: The whole, the whole point is basically to come up with a Here's a list of all the, all the scripts that are needed to have and then here's a list of all of the what I'm just going to simply call custom field data that can then get injected and if you have all of that information, you can pass all that off to a single human and have them develop it out at that point.

Gavin Taylor: So that's, I guess we're doing this without the custom fields for right now. And then we're going to go back and redo the custom do the custom field concept again because we are still. He's pushed back the development team on optimizing the site even more. So I'm kind of a standstill with him on it. I just want to move forward. I don't want to use the expertise to finish this up. So some of the things I wanted to talk to you about is okay, we're handing this packet off to Wemdev, right? Everything that they need. Right. My head's immediately going to okay, here's the temp cut you need. Here's the SendGrid API, here's the Google no Google Tag Manager. I don't know how we're gonna either way. Here's the trust index snippets, here's everything that you need. So I'm going to need and this is pretty much going back to what we were doing last week is just going through the site of what all changes, what everything does. But I also need some insight on the development stack standpoint of okay, what am I missing? How, how can I make sure that this packet is complete? And that's why I want to lean on you is what do you need as someone who does this to actually build out the site and launch the site?

Chris LaFay: So I would, okay, so I, I, I in general I understand your question. So give me, give me a second to give me a Second to think. So I'm gonna bucket all of the things that I don't know under all of the scripts because I just don't know what all those things are going to be. And so there, there's that whole segment I would break up branding into a few different things. And this kind of goes back to the variables, nature of stuff of. In branding you need primary, secondary, tertiary colors. Now this is granted all your templates might not utilize all of those.

Gavin Taylor: Those.

Chris LaFay: But I'm trying to think of like how do you gener. How do you make this as generic as possible? So like primary secondary tertiary colors, heading font, body copy font, logo.

Gavin Taylor: And this is something that like we can talk to now. But I also don't want to put you on the spot because another one of the things that I'm working on is going to be the, the fulfillment launch packet, right? Like what I'm actually handing to my developers. And if you have an example of something that you use, what I could use to head to my developers, say hey, here's the website brief, here's the assets, here's everything you absolutely need to know. That document is a new gold mine, folks.

Chris LaFay: So we don't, we don't have one. Mainly because a lot of our sites that we do are the primary effort is in the designing of building blocks, building out the building blocks. And, and we typically work with five or ten page sites that we toss Google Analytics on it and we're good to go. So our, our process is more in the actual like custom development side of things. It's more about, it's more about designer to developer handoff than it is about sales to development handoff, if that makes sense.

Gavin Taylor: Is this something that you would be able to help me create?

Chris LaFay: Yes. And what I. So what I would like. So basically what I would like to do, this is my brain is in conflict at the moment because one of the things that Craig said is he doesn't want to think about like dynamic variables and automation, all that jazz. But at the end of the day this type of a document is basically defining all of that. So which is fine if that, if that's what. If that's what's going to help move the. If that's what's going to help move the needle.

Gavin Taylor: Yes. And let's keep that in the back of our actually as the goal, the end goal is, hey, we want this to be spun up with either AI or just in general with the ACF or whatever it is. That's the end goal. Let's do it this way first. And then we can hand it to Greg by, hey, this is everything that we came up with, and this is the next step with us. Okay?

Chris LaFay: So,

Gavin Taylor: because I'm in that unique position where I'm like, I. I can see both sides of it, he's just, like, absolutely underwater with all the processes that we have, and then we're adding more every day, and then he doesn't want to think about, like, adding more to it right now. But. But then on the other side of the fence, this makes sense. Like, the advanced custom fields makes sense. So I'm just in that unique side. I'm fighting for the both of you, what you're both saying. But. And I. I see both of you.

Chris LaFay: Let me. Let. Let me do this. I think this.

Gavin Taylor: Do you want me to show this with you?

Chris LaFay: Yeah, you can. By the way, it's. It's funny because I know that I have a lot of pieces of what. How you describe Craig to me. I know that I bounce around like a pinball a lot of times within the walls of my own business. And so it's a very humbling thing to hear you talk about him. Him. And you are, like, calling me out on my own crap while we're talking here every day. So I just want to, like, when I talk to you, it's like. It's also a little bit like being lectured as well, too. It's. It's really. It's really funny. Okay, so this is what I'm. This is what I'm thinking. I have. I think I sit in a good seat to where I have enough context to be extraordinarily dangerous, which either means I'm gonna hit the nail right on the head or I'm gonna find stuff that you're not thinking of. This is what I would like to do. After hearing all of this stuff, I'm not gonna worry about listing out various different scripts and tags and all that jazz, because there's just no way that I would know any of that stuff.

Gavin Taylor: I have everything that you need in here.

Chris LaFay: Perfect.

Gavin Taylor: So, really, the. The biggest ones is Sig Good Trust Index, Call rail, and.

Chris LaFay: Okay, great. That's fantastic. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to spend time this week, and I'm going to dive into the code of the theme, and I'm also going to dive into a sample website that you guys have built. So send me over one that has all the pages kind of built out on it so that I can. I can look at something so That I see what a full site looks like and the types of content that it has on it. I'm going to take the bare bones SOP that you have here, the theme that's developed and a website that is finished and use all of those pieces and put them together and say, what is the laundry list of items that we need for every single website for to be able to then pass it off to a developer, go straight from sales into the developer's hand and give you a first draft of what that document is. Now, I know for a fact it won't be 100 because I don't know your business as well as you do, but it'll stop you from staring at a white screen. And my hope is it'll at least get you 70 to 75% of the way there, which will be a lot less, which will be a huge mental load off of your plate,

Gavin Taylor: I think. Yeah. And so on here pages.

Chris LaFay: Yeah, I'll put stuff in there like screaming frog and all that kind of fun stuff as well too.

Gavin Taylor: So this is. What I call my URL structure. So everyone's pages will be a little bit different. And that's the hard part about this. So in a perfect world, if I were to go in and create it from scratch and they didn't have an existing site, which will never happen because we only work with people with existing sites. Right. It will be a home page, it will be website forward slash, like whatever brand, right. And then forward slash, whatever service. And then we have PPT pages. So I don't know if this is going to be the best way to do it. So what we do is we are going to do a scrimming frog report, pull all the existing pages that we can find on screenback. What that will allow us to do is maintain whatever SEO value that they already have because we're going to match the URLs, we're going to pull the content in one way, shape or form. It might not be designed the same way, but the same content will be on the same pages. Then we might add service pages, we might add vehicle pages. We will very likely add PPC pages or landing pages. Right. So this is another thing I want to share with you because this is kind of the, the, the structure that I definitely want to utilize with it is when we hand it off, we hand this to our development team, say, hey, these are the pages we need. In addition to that, so we have brand name company info, pictures, website content coupons, Google tag manager, CallRail, sim grid, search index, is the biggest ones. And I'll tell you right now that this, I'm gonna just do this, this, this.

Chris LaFay: So that is. We're highlighting pictures robots that we are

Gavin Taylor: actually almost at a loss with. These are the things that we're struggling with in this process. Because I still don't know the best way to go about pictures is we're hand picking pictures and it's total mess right now in everybody's eyes. Let me show you an example

Chris LaFay: because you're basically just going on their current site and hand downloading your hand downloading photos.

Gavin Taylor: No, we're having them. We're having them do a photo dump and we're going one by one and like okay, this is a good picture. This isn't a good picture. This is whatever. Like for example for a landing page, this is a great picture. This is a well performing picture. It has the logo is this. My allergies are kicking my ass today.

Chris LaFay: Okay, mine are about to.

Gavin Taylor: So it has a team. They're smiling, they're happier. How's the shop in the cars as the lips. It has the Mercedes thing. This is a great photo. Now in the same site, what was a Maserati they tried with this one. However, as you can see his face is extremely distorted. And what we do when they work with certain high end cars, they're not gonna have these cars when they do a photo shoot every time and they typically come in do it all at once because they have to clean up the shop. They have to do all this stuff is a big thing. They will take stage photos without the vehicles in the shot. So that way we can come in and use AI or use a photo editor and place the correct vehicles in. So our photo process is very time extensive is what you could say. We are looking through hundreds of photos we're trying to pick out, hey, this is a good photo site. This isn't. This is why Whatever. So it's not just pulling the photos from the existing site like we are trying to take it to the next level. And the photo process is a huge issue.

Chris LaFay: Do you have a unorganized Google Drive folder of client photos of a client photo dump that you could send me so that I can copy and paste them somewhere else. I have a couple of thoughts, but I don't want to promise anything until I take some things for a test run.

Gavin Taylor: I am not 100% sure. Yeah, that's a good one. Okay, so as you see there's folders and folders and photos. Okay, so we have. Why is this shook hold on.

Chris LaFay: I think that means I'll be able to access it if it says, yeah, I should be able to download it.

Gavin Taylor: We've been trying to like stop doing this. The security stuff. That doesn't matter anyway. There's so much different now.

Chris LaFay: Are they normally organized like this? Are they normally organized into these folders?

Gavin Taylor: This one is kind of where we want to go, right? So we created like all these folders. This is part of our new process and that we're going to try to do. And what we're trying to do is during the approval process, we'll make a copy or do a short shortcut to these folders. But yes, this is the new photo process.

Chris LaFay: Are you going to have the client do that themselves?

Gavin Taylor: No, client will never do that.

Chris LaFay: Okay, that's what I was curious. Can you share that organized folder with me for even like two. Like, I just basically want to grab. I just want to grab them, download them and then you can then revoke access. Oh, anybody with link can view, actually. So if you just want to copy that.

Gavin Taylor: Yeah, we need to. We need to change that. That's another project is. I'm going to go through our entire drive and make sure that we don't have that anymore.

Chris LaFay: Let me refresh photos. Here we go. Here we go. Here we go. How big is this file downloading? Because you shouldn't be that.

Gavin Taylor: Well,

Chris LaFay: there's actually not that.

Gavin Taylor: Right, Any.

Chris LaFay: Oh, there's actually not. There's actually not that many photos in here. Okay. No, there's some in that one.

Gavin Taylor: Okay. I don't think we finished this one at all. So where all the photos is. Is in here. So.

Chris LaFay: Oh, the TLC folder has all of them?

Gavin Taylor: I think so.

Chris LaFay: Oh, so somebody is in the process of moving them from TLC over into.

Gavin Taylor: Yeah, we're making shortcuts because that's the best way that we found is we had a media consultant that came in and I think she just was like, yeah, use Google Drive. Like it's just a process you gotta deal with. I don't think that's right. But unlike the approval process and sorting these photos into usable things and renaming them, whatever, that we can come in here and say, yes, this is go to go for this page. I don't know. Media management is going to be the thing here.

Chris LaFay: There we go. Okay, let me. This is local jungle image assets.

Gavin Taylor: That.

Chris LaFay: There's that. Okay, so now share with me. Refresh. Upload all photos here. Ah, this is. Okay, this is the folder I should have downloaded the upload folders. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Gavin Taylor: Okay. Okay. You see what I mean now?

Chris LaFay: Yeah, just a wall of unorganized photos which. That's, that's perfect. Let me actually do that. I'm gonna get rid of what I just downloaded because this, I'd rather not have all of these folders and subfolders. Let's select all 230 images download. Okay, I'm going to. Wow, that zipped up. No, that didn't. Okay. I was gonna say a little spin wheel said zipping up 230 files and it went from like 0 to 100% in like 5 seconds. Like there's no way Google Drive zipped up 2 gigs plus of images in one second. That is not possible.

Gavin Taylor: So yeah, any. Anything on here that you can help me out with? I'd very much appreciate it. Like, I'll go and thrill. Like single source index. I already know these things. How to choose a template, the URL structure, website. I mean website content center, its own thing. Like robots, text plan. I have no. We honestly don't know. This is one thing I've always been kind of ignorant on and I'm gonna do my own research. But like how do we set up the file to make sure that the right bots are able to crawl and the wrong ones aren't and whatever the case may be. So any insight on this could be really, really useful. Basically what I'm doing this week, next week is I'm just creating all these sops. Every single one. I can think of adding it to this. And then here in about two weeks, I'm going to sit down with Craig and I want each one of these to be about 95% there. And then we can put his twist on it. Add whatever I'm missing, whatever the case may be. So I guess that's kind of where I'm at with this.

Chris LaFay: Okay, that makes sense. I just got all of the. I'm going to unzip these files really quick and make sure that I actually have everything. And then you can. Once I get these confirmed, you can then remove me.

Gavin Taylor: I'm not worried about you being there

Chris LaFay: and then a lot. Yeah, I needed. I want a. I want a good live website to take a look at.

Gavin Taylor: I don't know if we have like a really good one right now.

Chris LaFay: Just love that feeling. It's like, what do you do for a living? Build websites. Like, which is like, show me a couple of good ones. You're like, there's something wrong with all

Gavin Taylor: of them that I don't like, and

Chris LaFay: I'm like, God, I hate it. Clients, man, they get in the way, don't they?

Gavin Taylor: They do. Okay, so this is a really good example for this type of site. So this is a general auto repair shop. Now. We went a little bit extreme on pages. Like, very extreme on pages. There's so much content. My God. So. But they also do trucks too. And then we didn't want to do a mega menu on the services because of this.

Chris LaFay: Holy shirt balls. That's crazy.

Gavin Taylor: Yeah, I mean, the.

Chris LaFay: Are those all links?

Gavin Taylor: Yeah, every single one of those.

Chris LaFay: Okay, so why in. Correct me if I'm wrong on this. When you absorb a new client, I'm assuming most repair shop websites are not super robust on the content side of things. So you're basically extrapolating like, y' all probably created this one.

Gavin Taylor: No, this one was. We created. Yeah, there's some. Like, I just did. Who did. I do. I just made like 40 something pages of content for. Not this one. TLC. Oh, it was.

Chris LaFay: Because at the end of the day, you're deciding which vehicles to specifically showcase and which services to specifically showcase. That's the bulk of, like, that's the bulk of your stuff. I mean, obviously there's things like coupons and stuff like that too. Like, don't get me wrong. But content wise, the biggest question marks

Gavin Taylor: aren't vehicles, it's services. And it's PPC pages.

Chris LaFay: Yeah. Okay, cool. So we're. I'm. That. We're. We're. That's all the same page.

Gavin Taylor: Cool. I mean, the, the coupons are important and all, but. Okay, so this is one that. This is actually a custom site we built. Semi custom. So it's built on the same, like, back end structure. However we went and got Figma created and this is what that came out to be. I am happier than Craig is with this because this is something I've spent a ton of time on. I did create every single one of these services for them. So as far as content, I did do all this. Did we go a little bit above board? I mean, overboard on that? Yes. Vehicles. They had the majority of these already. And this is where it gets a little bit tricky with the URL structure because let's say they only have. But I'll show you the existing site. It's such a step up. So this is the existing site, right? Yeah, they had a couple of vehicles and I went in and I think I added more. Yeah, I did. So I added more. They had. I mean, this is a terrible picture because I do like that they had the lift behind them, the cars or whatnot. But we wanted to showcase different brands. And this shows better on mobile than it does desktop, I believe. No, it doesn't. Okay, we gotta fix that either way. And then when I say that, we go really in depth on like the photo case. Like each one of these are highly thought out across the entire site, you know.

Chris LaFay: Oh yeah. The images and whatnot. Yeah, yeah.

Gavin Taylor: But this is. This is a good example for a European site.

Chris LaFay: Actually, before we. Before. Actually before you go off on that. That is on Craig's 101 SG host dot com. Okay.

Gavin Taylor: Yeah, it's still been built. I sent that one to you. This is a. Okay. One for Journal Auto Repair. And then we have. I want to say prestige.

Chris LaFay: This one, General Auto repair was the TLC Auto Truck 1.

Gavin Taylor: Yes.

Chris LaFay: Let me make it. Let me copy this. And which one is this one good for the prestige one?

Gavin Taylor: This is also a European, but this shows like the old style that we used to do. And Prestige European also has ppc Mercedes.

Chris LaFay: Do you mind copying that. That page over that link to me?

Gavin Taylor: Yeah, yeah. Okay. So this is the page structure that Craig likes for PPC pages. He likes the pictures up front just like in your face, whatever. Prestige is one of our older clients. I think we're about to lose them. And the reason, because they just got bought out by like a big kilometer and they try to bring all the stuff in house. So we'll see how that works. But this is an example of a PPC page that he likes. Again, we do each one a little bit different from a prestigious office, is kind of our old school sites. I've tried and proven they're ugly, but they work.

Chris LaFay: Okay, got it, got it, got it, got it. This is.

Gavin Taylor: But if you can tell the difference, the Duncan's, which is the Craigs 101 and TLC are two that I oversaw the build out of. They both took a while to build out, but this is the style of sites that I build.

Chris LaFay: Gotcha.

Gavin Taylor: Okay, so

Chris LaFay: that all makes sense. Can you actually. Wait, hold on. Actually, I think I have where to go. Yeah, I have this.

Gavin Taylor: Okay, cool.

Chris LaFay: Copy and paste this URL. Okay, so I have the sample sites. I have the image structure. The image like folder structure.

Gavin Taylor: Should have my table of contents too.

Chris LaFay: Yes. Okay. Okay. I have sample sites. I have sample sites. I have your image folder structure. I have all of the images. I have your table of contents.

Gavin Taylor: Doc.

Chris LaFay: I have your code for the website. My goal is next, when we meet next week, to have baseline documentation wrote up for a lot of this stuff. Keeping in mind that it's obviously not going to be 100% just because I don't know your business fully, but I feel fairly. I feel fairly good about this. So let me. What? Do I have any questions? Let me think. I don't think I have any other questions. Can't see. There we go. I don't think I have any other questions right now.

Gavin Taylor: Sorry for throwing the wrench in the cogs here and kind of changing fast.

Chris LaFay: But no, this helps you get moving. Like I. I have a lot of. I have a lot of tools in my disposal that I. I know what you're trying to get at and I think I can get you there faster. So this gets us moving into basically taking all of this and then saying let's build out a website theme based on all of this data. Great. So yeah, let me. Okay, this all sounds good. Is there anything else that you wanted to chat about today? Because what I would like to do the next 15, 20 minutes or so of our time, I want to organize a lot of my thoughts while I. While they're fresh on my mind. So if there's something you want to talk about today, that's fine, but if your game, we can go ahead and cut it here and I can go ahead and start word vomiting into documentation. Does that sound good?

Gavin Taylor: Oh, that's. That's totally fine. I got a lot on my plate today anyway, so that, that works out.

Chris LaFay: Awesome. That sounds good, sir. Well, thank you for the download. If I have any questions, I will holler back it and let you know.

Gavin Taylor: Sounds good. Thank you.

Chris LaFay: Have a good night.