Local Jungle - F2F

Alexa video call. Hello? Hello? Oh, I can't hear you. Hi. There we go. Oh, I can't hear you again. Technology sucks. Here we go. Try 15. Yes. Yeah. Is that Mike? Say again. Is that a yeti mic? It is, yes. I normally just have it. I haven't really. I haven't had a meeting yet today. Oh, yeah, there you go. I got one too. It finally died after like four years. Dude, this thing. When did I. It's been. Dude, it's been more than four years. Like, it is a hoss. What I will say though is even when I have it set to like single direction mode so that it doesn't is not as sensitive, I. I have been. I have forgotten to mute my mic, like, in general. I went downstairs and around the corner. My office is upstairs in the corner. And I chatted with my wife about dinner plans for that night. And I came back up and my project manager, dawn, who's been with me for a decade, was like, that spaghetti sounds real good tonight. And I was like, what? No, no,. They pick up a lot. Until they don't. Oh my God. Now my computer doesn't even recognize it. And I'm pretty sure it's just the cord or the actual adapter part of it. Oh, yeah. But my kid was messing with it, so. Yeah, my. My. It looks like that now. Oh. Oh. Oh no. It's bad. Oh no. When I do get a new mic, I'm probably going to spend a little bit more money because this. I have a full size keyboard now. I used to have like a, like a half size of 66, but there's no good plate. Like, I want this. I want this like right here because it picks up better. But I can't do that with this one. And also my keyboard makes a lot of noise. Yep, it picks up. So I'm going to invest in probably a, a highly specific like single direction mic, like one of those like long shotgun ones so that I can put it all the way back there and point it up towards my, like, towards my face so that the clicky clacks don't get as noticed. Because when I do meetings and I type notes, I'm very particular about not driving people crazy. Even though I love the sound of clicking keyboards. So I have an IBuyPower keyboard. It looks like this, but it looks like a full size keyboard, but I don't think it is. And it has the feel of the clicks, but it doesn't have the sound. I like the feel a lot more than the sound. I mean, I Like the sound too. But when I'm like, sitting here gaming, I can't. It distracts me. So I have that same feel, but it's not loud. That's actually an impressive feat of technology. I have no idea how you would get these. The feel of the click without the actual sound like that. That's impressive. That's really impressive. So I can look in there. It has, like, rubber rings down around the button. So it's still the. I forgot the actual mechanical buttons. Yeah. But as it goes down, it softens that sound. And like, the space bar actually has springs on it. That's really interesting. If you. If you're ever looking for one, I'm always. I. So my friend builds keyboards and you'll actually see behind me I have. I have two that he's built, and I like both of them. I like. And the green one is Zelda inspired. So there's a lot of, like, ocarina stuff and all that jazz. This one I picked up from Micro center about a month or so ago because I wanted a cheap hop, hot, swappable keyboard that I could mess with and not feel bad about. And so, like, I want to change out some of the switches underneath here to like, different sounds and different styles and find kind of like use this as my, like, testing ground before I go messing with the things that are really nice. And the thing is, I now know the feeling of an expensive keycap set versus a cheap keycap set because one of those keyboards, the keycaps cost like 300. The other ones cost like 20. And I can feel a difference. And I hate that because I didn't want to know that I was a bougie keyboard person. And that's annoying as junk to me. The. The mouse and keyboard I'm so particular about, and I use MMO mouse for work too, is I have the buttons hot switch, so hot keyed if I. I tried that on Mac. But I. I am so used to like, the very precise, like, zoom in and out that you get with a trackpad. And so I tried using a mouse that had like, the infinite scroll wheel that didn't have the clickies on it with also hot buttons as well, too. In the zooming, like pinching in and out, it did it in such large increments for zooming in and out that I was like, I can't, like, when I'm designing, it's too big of jumps. I couldn't. I couldn't edit it at all. And that drove me bonkers. And I miss. I miss My hotkeys on the mouse so bad. Why don't you do like an MMO mouse and then also a trackpad. You could have two hooked up, couldn't you? Because if I could get up, okay, so if I could get a mic that I actually sit back here and kind of actually point like this. I have my keyboard here, I have my regular mouse on the right side. But then if I needed to zoom, I could have my trackpad on the left and then do the zoomies on the left hand side and then with. The MMO mouse so you have your hotkeys on the side of the mouse. I'm telling you, I've already thought about all this. My like dream computer setup. I think I like price it out a couple months back, it's like 10 grand. But there's all sorts of different things. Like I also want the sketch pad too. I, I would, I would like that. I, I doodle a lot. But it's mostly when I'm in meetings that I'm not a required person in. It's not because I'm not paying attention, it's just, it's my fidget, if you will. And so like I've thought about getting like a sketch pad so that I could draw some things. Is there some things like in web design that I wish that I could do like some more like hand drawn icons that are simple and then convert them to vectors, the whole nine yards. But it's a slippery slope. You buy the trackpad or not the trackpad, but the sketch pad. But then in order to do a really good job of converting your hand drawn lines to something that actually makes sense in vector format, you then have to have Adobe Illustrator, which then with Adobe Illustrator you have to have the Adobe suite of products because it doesn't make sense to buy just one. And so now my 200, $300, $500 sketch pad now is costing me $500 a month, $500 a year in subscription fees to convert vector outlines that I draw to smooth outlines. This is. But it could also make you thousands of dollars a year. It could, but I don't do it often enough. And that's the problem that where I don't sketch often enough for money, that's it. Because you don't have the opportunity to do so. You're an unhealthy person for me to talk to. You're beating in. No, I'm terrible at those decisions. Okay. By the way, I actually have a little bit more flexibility. I had a meeting at one and I'M not feeling great today. And so I moved that meeting to Friday. That's more of me putting on a dog and pony show, whereas this is just more a conversation. And I can do that. So I have a little bit of flexibility today. So I'll be honest, I don't feel great today either. So we'll keep this kind of short. Sweet. To the point I got a steroid shot. And if you've never done that, that's an experience. So it's kicking in very quickly, I will say so. That's nice. I've had them for migraines before. Like, with really, really bad migraine, they'll do a shot in your back. And I think it something to do with steroids. I don't know. And I swear to God, it's the best thing ever for my goods. But you have to go to the ER for it. I never, I never gotten, like, when I got like, go to urgent care, like, you know, they obviously, they prescribe drugs, all that jazz. They prescribe steroids and then it was like, I can give you a steroid shot right now that'll like, really, like, kick in. And then you can just take the lower dosage of steroids the next few days. I was like, I've never been offered an injection of medication while at, like a regular, like, I don't feel well. Doctor's visit. Like, does insurance cover it? And they were like, yes. I was like, shoot me then, please. Yeah, I need to start going to the doctor for things because I usually only go, like, I feel like I'm dying. It's like, I don't remember the last time I did it. Like, visit. Outside of that, I give myself about three to four days. Like, if I know that I have a cold, normally two days suck. And then I'm okay for like, I get to like, 85 better. But that stays for like three weeks. And that's annoying as junk. This time it's been like four or five days and I've been at like 40 to 50% and I'm like, that's not my normal, you know, use case. Yeah. And so I was like, I'm going to go, it's been four days. That's kind of my wall of, like, if I'm not feeling improved, like, that's my. Because I don't like the idea of, like, going to the doctor and getting drugged for like every little tiny thing that happens. Like, not a fan of that. But I'm also not a fan of letting things linger around and become something Larger either. And so that's kind of where I get my four day window of like, all right, cool. If I don't feel significantly better by four days, drug me, baby. Yep. So. Awesome. Awesome. Coupons. Coupons. Yeah. So I looked over. It looks pretty straightforward. One thing I want to do with that is I do want to add like a basic CSS to it. Very basic. Basically, most all of our sites are going to be light backgrounds, so that. Means you would have if there's stylistic. So when I say styles, I'm talking about non structural. So not. Not paddings, not gap spacings, all that kind of fun stuff. Let me send this quick text message. I think you had the CSS on the first visit. But the thing is though, if so when you're creating things like this, the idea is that a plugin that creates functionality only does structure. And so my recommendation would be to the template in the theme. Exactly so. Because then you can override it easier by editing it. Because if there is, let's say that there's a background color, black and a dashed white border around it at the plugin level. Now every single one of your sites has that. And in the theme code you now have to write even more specific CSS to override that. When that's not applicable, I would rather see at the theme level the black background with the white dashed lines. And then if you need to edit it, you actually just edit it. You don't have to overwrite it, you just switch it. Okay. Does that make sense? Yeah. And you mentioned that you feel like it's not. I'm gonna be honest, I felt like crap. I did not watch that whole video. I saw like the first part of it where you showed it and you're like, we're 90 there. I'm like, cool. Yeah. So what's the other 10 where? Not really. Quick. I just got an Amazon fresh order with cold food outside. Go ahead. This has been a cluster of a call. I apologize. We will make progress, I promise. Go ahead. Thank you for letting me be a real human. No ways. And it wasn't even my food. It was toothpaste. Style in the theme file. And the theme folder is where we left. Yep. Oh, and then I was gonna take it to. You mentioned that we're like 90% there. What's the other 10% to round this off? Honestly, just giving you the plugin and testing it on a sample site in SiteGround. Just because like the emails. I have all the emails being sent using a. I have an email server that I set up for myself that sends out from all the little web apps that I've created over the last few months. So I basically installed a plugin to send emails through that server because I don't have send grid. And so basically take this plugin, toss it on a staging site that has all of your setup and just test it. Okay, I think we can do that inside of the template. Yeah, that should be fine. Send me the files. I'm gonna have my developer just go in and add it to the template and it'll play with it this week. I want to spend a whole bunch of time on this because each day that goes by, Craig is more and more sold on Astro. He's so fed up with Red Cross right now. And the cool thing about it is I am almost positive we're going to be going with ahead this word cross so we can use the plugins with an Asho site. Does he know what he's doing with that? I. I mean, I'm sorry, this is gonna sound really. Does he know what he's doing with that? Yes or no? So he's on a big change. Yes, yes, I, I know that. And I'm. I came on board never using WordPress for the last like 5 years and I had to like relearn all of it. I'm still relearning all of it, but now that I've kind of learned into it, a lot of our issues has to do with like the sites were built. Like to be honest, I think our old developer, he's so smart when it comes to code, but organizing the sites and setting up them up like correctly was just not done. He was trying to take shortcuts, use bandaid fixes, and it just turned everything into a mess. Now switching over Astro, the cool part and what he is looking at with what I think is rose colored lenses is you can take a site, push it through Claude, and Claude will write the code for Astro and that takes about 30 minutes to do. Now that gets you about 80% of. The way there and write it for Astro. That means you have. Are you writing a custom headless WordPress theme every single time? The address WordPress would not 100 show on. But I know with Astro he can go in say, hey, here's the whole site that I want to do. Write it for Astro. And that process alone put aside the head, that's WordPress. That process alone takes about 30 minutes. Now the problem I see is, is that will take you about 80% there, right? It's going to be a static site, you have to go and manually edit code every time, which I don't want to do. But that other 20% as far as functionality elements of the website, that's going to be the biggest piece I don't think he's looking at right now. And most of it has to do with page speed. Because Astro is. Everything I've seen with Astro is. Is going to knock WordPress out of the water 10 out of 10 times. But it's a static site. Every time that we need to make changes, we got to go and make changes to the actual site files and code and all that good stuff. And it's going to be a little bit more work. I don't exactly know my thought process and I've talked to our old developer because he's making the switch too. He. He's using WordPress as basically the CMS and then the Astro side of it. He's coded the entire website and then using WordPress for very specific plugins, and that's pushing it to the code to the Astro site, I think, is how he explained it. That is all very much feasible. I very. I highly doubt you're going to be able to vibe code a solution for all of this that I. That's my thought process too. So that's why me and you are still pushing the WordPress side with what I call a. A yellow light where he's like, yep, let's keep going. And we're gonna take it one step at a time in the most polite way possible. He's given me an inch, I'm gonna take it a mile. And hopefully it just never comes down to making that switch because that should be a project in itself. Yeah. So, okay, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take that plugin that you're gonna send me, I'm gonna get it added to our template with Advanced. Do you have an advanced custom fields license key? I'm sure we do. If not, I'll get one. Okay. How much is that? Probably like 100 bucks a year, if I had to guess. We've had the eight. We've had the agency license for like a decade now. So I haven't actually had to think. I didn't think about it. It is agency. Unlimited websites is 250 bucks a year. 10 Websites is 150 a year. Okay. So. So yeah, I probably play with it. If you. If you want to test it, I have an agency key that I can give you for just right now. What I don't want I. I don't. ACF never is. Doesn't have a limitation on any of this. But if you decide that you're going to actually go through with using this, I would prefer you use a different license key that you guys own just because you have a ton out there and I don't want you accidentally to. To that. I don't think we're gonna get rid of it, but you never know. So yeah, if you send me the license key I'll just, I'll keep it safe. I'll just use it for this one and chances are I'm not gonna save it and I would like keep or anything. So I'm gonna lose it before the next site. It's in your. It's in your inbox with a subject. With a. A non existent subject line. Okay. No ways. Now second thing that I want to talk about is AI photo editing. Let me pull this up really quick. And I'll show photo editing or the, the management of photos. The editing. This is. Oh no. So I actually have my assistant testing your process right now. We're going through and doing all of our clients right now. I try to have her to start it manually and it was taken her forever to do so. She's testing your process right now to see if it's easy enough for her to follow. So there's another thing that I'm working on right now before I go and buy Photoshop and this, that and the other and mess with this too much. I want to see if you've had any experience doing this. Let me pull up this task. Okay. That I'm. While you do that, I'm going to blow my nose. But you can keep talking me, I can hear you. So long story short, we get photos like these and having a Photoshop photo, getting photos done for auto shot. I don't know why I had such a hard time saying that. Getting photos done for an auto shop can be very, very difficult to do is they have to clean the shop, they have to make sure that they have some car cars there and this, that and the other. And chances are they don't have all the brands that we need. So one of the things that we like to do is take a photo like this and then swap out these cards. Now the current process is I have our designer going and doing that. Well, Craig is all about AI right now. He thinks that hey, with a really small edit like this we should be able to use AI and swap this out. Now I think I use Claude for this. I use something for that you would have to connect. So Claude doesn't have a native AI generator yet to hook up something. I have it hooked up to. I have mine hooked up to Nano Banana. That's what we use. So we use Nano Banana. Now, when we use Nano Banana, obviously there's a couple. Couple things AI sucks at. One is signage, two is faces, and three is like appendages. So whenever I go and edit this, this sign comes absolutely distorted. Like, and I found that Fireflies something. What is it called? Adobe Firefly is what Claude mentioned was the best one to use because they have access to a couple different things. I purchased it and it ran into the same thing. Now, the reason why Claude mentioned that it was the right one is because you can actually select the vehicle and in a way you can, you can brush it and then say, hey, I want this change. And it did a decent job. But again, it doesn't just change the vehicle, it changes the entire thing. So do you have a solution before I go and download Photoshop to do it? That's not going to change signage or. I don't know. I don't. That's. Actually, I've been. I've not gone down the rabbit trail as much as you have so far, but I have tested some things. Like we're. We're gonna get new shutters on our house at some point soon. And so I took a pic, the front picture of my house and was like, here are some shutter samples. Applied them onto my house without editing anything other than the shutters. And I've done a couple of different things and all of them edit something else. I have not found a way prompting. Okay, this has actually been the core problem that I've ran into. No matter what editor I use, going more than one edit in never works for me. So it's like, here's the initial edit and it's like, oh, no, you made the shutters red instead of brown. Can you make the shutters brown? And then it like colors the door brown? I'm like, no, I wanted the shutters brown. And then I get like a wall of brown. I'm like, no. Like, it's weird because most of the time with like using cloud code, the more you chat within with inside a session, the smarter it gets. It has more context. But for whatever reason, my luck has been if I can't one shot an image edit, I start a whole new conversation. Yeah, I just haven't had. It. Replace the vehicle is great. Like, this looks fantastic, but the actual faces are now distorted. And as you can see the sign. So. Yeah. And the next step is me trying to go play with Photoshop and see if I can get it working. Yeah, I, I honestly, I don't know what to tell you on that one. Okay. I wish I had more for you there. It's all good. Yeah, I just thought maybe you would if you do run into a solution, an easy solution. That way I don't have to continue using Photoshop. That'd be fantastic. One of those, those car pictures, the unedited car pictures. Yeah. My agency coach messes around with AI a ton and he has gotten,. He's. Gotten it to sing very new songs and so I can at least I can ask him and see if he's running across anything. I know he's done like video editing and stuff with it before. Like he has a couple of podcasts that he runs and he's done video manipulation and editing. This is different. This should be easier than video. You would think so. You would think so. But some of the stuff I see coming out that's in video or at least he's doing more like clips and stuff. So he's like take a long form podcast. Yeah. And then clip it. Let me. Where's my chat with him? Chris? You know, it's funny, I just read they're not releasing the new Claude update because the fact that it went past its boundaries and became a security issue. I read about that actually. Yeah. Huh. And yet for things like this, it's so stupid. Like I get it, it's very specialized. But if it can find security breaches, a 29 year old company, the 39 year old company that was the most secure, seemingly most secure company, should be able to change the damage. What all have you tried? Nano Banana? I. Adobe Firefly with Flux. With Flux. Yeah, it's just built into it. I mean GPT image 1.5, but that didn't do much. Yeah, those are really the two big ones that I used which should. Okay, let me show you how this looks. Hold on. This is actually really, really cool. Download this image. Okay. He has been messaged by the way. Don't hold your breath too much on it. But that's fun. No, I want to replace this. Okay. So just using the RAW image I sent to you, this is what I get for the prompt that we're using and I might change this prompt a bit more. Now. It's going to take a while do. But what's cool about this is I can also come in here and. Are you wanting to share your screen because you're not. Oh, sorry about that. No worries. I thought I was. I thought you're about to, like, send me a file, and then you kept going, and I'm like, yeah, I think there's something here. Okay. So I'm waiting for this to populate, but this is the prompt I'm using basically. Critical, do not generate, modifier, alter anything else on the image. Blah, blah, blah. Yeah. Well, what's cool is if we come in here, they have this tool here. I think it's generative fill. You can go specifically on this and then change this part, but the problem is it still changes the whole image. Yeah. And that's something I like. Yeah, I have. That's what I've gotten as well too. Was that the new one? Wow. That changed it. Okay. The whole. It parked two cars right on top of each other. You got Mustang on top of an suv. I mean, you know what, though? Even though they completely altered this, the top half, that side is decent. Surprisingly, surprisingly decent. Interesting. This is a completely different. I don't know what that is. Yeah, yeah. This is what I've been playing with this week, and it's driving me nuts. I, I, I don't know what I would do here. Like, this is one of those things that you wish you could just do, like, en masse, and every image is just different at the end of the day. Do you guys have internal designers, or do you outsource? I mean, I outs. I. From a legal perspective, I outsource everything I have. I do have web designers on my team. They're contractors, but everybody on my team is a contractor at this point. So we, we do, we do web design in house. We don't really do graphic manipulation. Like, this is not the, the primary. Gotcha, gotcha, gotcha. I was gonna see if maybe you guys would do a batch. Do a batch for us. Roadblocks as you and therefore, you just waste money. Yeah, I'm paying out designer, like, 30 bucks an hour right now. This is the thing. It's actually really interesting. I was actually talking to somebody about this the other day, actually, yesterday. It's actually. You're actually paying people now to have a brain and to think less about their skill set. It's very. It's a very odd place to be of. Like, I need somebody with a brain that can think, and whether or not they know WordPress code backwards and forwards is actually kind of okay as long as they generally know development and can call crap on things. But if you have a brain and you can Think strategically and think multiple steps ahead. That's the win. And that's also why I don't think marketing agencies are going to go out of business. I think 90% of them will because 90 of this industry is hobby businesses and it drives me nuts. But eating true like marketing strategists, I think it's going to be the winner here. You have to have a heck of a lot more deliverables as like a company that executes like you will be able, you should be able to deliver more like the brains that you create with AI that has all of your special and secret sauce in it should be able to execute more. And I think seniors are going to go their the career path is going to go less from junior dev to mid dev to senior dev to manager to senior dev that actually does stuff. But they don't have to work as hard and do all the monotonous stuff that they hated because like the idea of going from senior dev to. And you can replace dev with a lot of other. Yeah to, to manager. You get out of the weeds of doing the crap you don't like. But honestly a lot of the crap you don't like is the stuff that AI is doing for you. I think the hard part now in this industry and it's going to show in 10 years from now and mark my words on this is it's not going to be, there's going to be a lack of marketers of developers of those kind of things is right now who's in it. We have the knowledge to be able to continue and move forward with our career but it's going to be really difficult to get into an entry level position. Oh, I, I have a developer on my team who's been kind of an entry level person for the last like four or five years and I just interviewed a guy that cost about the same amount of money, a lot more senior and that he doesn't have WordPress specific experience, has more HubSpot development experience. But the way HubSpot structures its code is from what I can tell, very similar to how WordPress does it. But the thing is the dude has a brain. Yep. And I can use that guy way more than the guy that I have to like give a full blown like blow by blow, here's how to do everything. I just want to be like here's a design. You understand the code concepts of WordPress make it good. Yeah. It shouldn't take 200 hours, it should take a week. So with that said, the last thing I want to Talk about is actually down this path is the next hire that I do is likely going to be A or B, A being a technical project manager and we continue using E2M, for example. Now the struggle, those pros and cons that E2M I feel is a mass of junior developers. They say those senior developers on there, but I'm having a really hard time like seeing that. So I would say genuine medium level developers and then have a technical project manager who has experience, like knowledge of WordPress, knowledge of these systems, but can direct for me so I don't have to deal with it. Or B, hire developer in house and continue using those things. And they also act kind of as a project manager in that sense, but can QA more in depth. Yeah. What is your insight on that? Where knowing what you know about us, where would you say we're best off at? I know what you, I know you're saying. Is we don't have a lack of like manpower with E2M, but we have a lack of dev experience. But then I feel that's why I'm split is I feel like a technical project manager who has a brain for that stuff. He doesn't have to know like specific code and how to write it from scratch, but if he can look at it and understand what's going on, I feel like that's beneficial. Or if I'm trying to do another band aid fix where we might need to have a developer in house that does all that. How many, how many websites are you closing the sales process on every month? We closed ourselves down right now. We're not accepting new clients right now. Once we open that gate, it's going to be a lot. Define a lot. We did five and 30 days and that was just like on the fence of oh, should we bring these clients in or not? We're not like aggressively pushing and at the end of this quarter we're going to do an aggressive push. So by the end of the year I want to quadruple the websites we have. So we're going to be doing a dozen websites a month. Okay. So. Thinking I would say you need to have, you need to have some junior people in general. I actually think that the junior people that you need. Hold on. How to. I'm gonna kind of go back to the very beginning of our like time together and. Hold on. One more thing I want to add in here before you finish that thought. This all came from hiring a junior person in house that I found I could not properly manage without senior level developer skills. Yeah. So. My thinking is that I think you need three people. They don't all necessarily need to be full time is I think you need a content person who can literally just go in and understands WordPress enough and content structures enough to know how to like move content from an old site into a new site and dissect a block library, the whole nine yards. And that's one person. They do not need to be technical at all. I think you need a intermediate developer that I don't think needs to be full time. I think your content person will probably be full time pretty quickly. I'm pretty sure it's going to be my marketing assistant. She has a lot of experience with SEO and stuff so she knows content. So. And I think you need a intermediate developer probably overseas. If I had to guess who will be your fix it guy, edit the code out of the things like do the couple of like, you know, theme updates on a per site basis, stuff like that. But it's not editing what I'm just going to call the core plugin that powers everything. A couple of assumptions that that core plugin is going to start powering more and more stuff. Whether it's that or whether you have a core legitimate structure, whatever that looks like you're going to have that core baseline, whatever the theming of it is. I feel like that would be E2 intermediate. That's E2M. They do the fix it, hey, let's get this done, built spun up, that type of thing. That's E2 right now. Yes. And it might actually be more beneficial to just have one intermediate developer that can do a lot of that stuff rather than a team of juniors. We have a they right now. We do 130 hours a month with them. Oh shoot, dude. Okay, okay. Sometimes, sometimes it's more, sometimes it's less, but right now average is 130 hours a month. I would personally prefer like my, this is my thought process is, is that you take that 130 hours and see what's content, what's dev and you might be able to downsize your E2M workload that you have and maybe actually get one or two developers that are more on the intermediate side. That may cost you a little bit more per hour, but they might be better and then get yourself a technical like somebody akin to me to sit alongside you to run that ship. That's what I'm thinking. That's where the technical project manager comes in place. That would be an in house hire and they direct that ship and the thing is with the E2M, the 30 bucks an hour for me right now. And 30 bucks an hour, that's not bad. It's not. And that's the thing. It's, it's price to the point of even if they take three times as long, it's better than hiring someone here stateside. Let me, let me. So hold on, I'm gonna back that up for a second. So what my hope is the, the, the dev that I just interviewed last week, he's from Ghana and dude is 35 an hour and from what I hear you talk about relative to E2N, don't have experience there and what I hear this guy talk about and again haven't actually worked with him yet, but I know somebody that has and sung his like praises to the end of the world is there is a vast difference of the developers you're getting from E2M versus the developer that I will hopefully get from Ghana and work directly with. So my pushback on your. Whether it takes three times as long, I don't care. There is an element of if that developer at E2M takes three times as long, that means you're having to spend more time going back and doing QA and edits and fixes. So from a money standpoint it all looks fine. But you might be, because of that delay or that extension, you might be spending way too much of your own time now. I, I don't know any of these. I'm making 100. 100. My hope is. So let me give you an example of what I'm hoping to alleviate. We are in the process of about, actually about a month and a half or so ago I created a new like website starter script. I had all my, like, my core theme and all that jazz and I was like, I'm gonna test it out. I'm not gonna do all the dev for the site because it's a very funky looking site. Like I'm not gonna dive into the weeds of all the funky stuff. But I'm gonna do the setup and that setup going from Figma to like baseline code, typically about a 30 hour process and typically something you hand to a junior developer because it's easy. It's button colors, it's fonts, it's the, all of those like nickel things. They're not quarters that are nickels. It's easy. And I was like, I'm going to do that and see if I can take a 30 hour task and drop it down to like six or seven. And I did. And I was like, victory is mine. Hallelujah. And so I took it a little bit farther than that and did some of the more complex stuff that I didn't trust him with. But me, I hate mobile responsive development. I, I don't like it at all. I don't know why. I have a mental block. And I was like, okay, I got, I went to the dude and I was like, I got this to 80%. There's a lot of dynamic variables, kind of stuff we talked about, like with local jungle. Like, there's a lot of dynamic stuff in here. Here's the Figma file. I need you to basically go test all of this for mobile responsiveness. And like, maybe some things I missed. Check back a week later. Broski swaps out all my CSS variables that were dynamic and scaling and replace them with hard coded pixel values because he saw in the Figma file that the font size was 20 pixels. So now the font size, 20 pixels everywhere. And now it doesn't scale between desktop and mobile. Like, he, he just messed it all up. And I had to go back in there because in reality it was about probably four or five hours of work that I had to undo. It was probably going to take me two or three hours to explain it to him, and then I have to pay him more money to then go back and do it. And so with this guy, the guy that I'm hiring from Ghana as a contractor, the way he walked me through his HubSpot implementation was my process. Without prompting him for it ahead of time, he was like, in HubSpot, we create things called components. They're shared across multiple things. This is how we structure them. Some of them are custom, some of them are very words. Yeah. And he's like, so this is how we structure CSS variables. This is where we do hard coded stuff. This is how we lay things out when we're thinking about multiple pages. When I look at a design block that's like this, I think about it in these ways. And then I showed him mine and he was like, oh, that's all basically the same, it's just a different folder structure. And I was like, so my hope is that I can hand the dude a Figma file and my clog code script and be like, my cloud code script does all the basics for you. I need you to do the hard stuff. And then when I get it back, it's done. Yeah, that's the difference. Now I realize I'm speaking from a potential experience and not an actual experience. So I fully. I realize that Very large caveat over top of that whole discussion and a. Lot of this in theory. I have a couple of roadblocks and I know we're coming up here. I have a couple of roadblocks here where number one, we. Actually, if we say that I need to. I need to run the restroom really quick. Let me be right back one second. Sorry. All right. What you thinking? Okay, so back to what I was saying. The that's kind of my thought process is. Okay, Technical project manager or juxtap. Right. Because I don't want to be dealing with this. I want to be looking at big picture and websites is such a small. It very important but small piece of what I do. And right now it's consuming way too much time. I need that technical project manager to deal with that number two, E2M. Now E2M can be switched out whoever. But the benefits of E2M is the. With I want to say an 80, 85 accuracy, they have a very fast turnaround time. Okay, that's good. Because really all I feel like I've heard from you is like, negative stuff. So that's good. Yeah. Because I have some frustrations. I go back and forth with them all the time. So the benefit is like yesterday I signed five different tasks for them to do. They all got it done. I don't have to worry about it. Push them through now. Where I see like, the downside is like the big, bigger picture things, which I'm hoping our process fixes. If not, we need to find someone else. But if we clean up our process, which we are working really hard to do, if we simplify the template, if we simplify the plugins, just in general, everything spinning up a new site should not take 60 hours. I don't think it should take 60 hours. And the last three sites have gone over 60 hours. I mean, it should be. I mean, I mean, we've. We've talked about what this could be if you actually had a theme that everything was in its own form field for the most. We're not everything, but a lot of things. So. And I'm hoping with this coupon thing, I can keep Craig's eyes open to this because now he's on board with acf. So that's the thing. He's on board to try it with the expectation we still might move to Astro. So he doesn't want to invest too much into it, which is why I said, he's giving me an inch. I'm gonna take it a mile, but I'm gonna take it A step at a time. So that way it's not a huge change to him and he's not if that makes sense. No, it does. The. Hold on, say what is the next thing? What is the next thing that would show value to him within this ecosphere? Right now he's working on page speed. He's working with a senior developer that we've worked with a lot in the past. He's built a couple of our things and he wants that foremost, but he has to have it his way. So I've kind of let him. I don't know where he's at with that. He just had an hour long meeting today with the developer to figure out where that's at. And he's spent so much time figuring out certain settings for plugins, what needs to be lazy, loaded, what needs to be this, that and the other. And it just, it's become searching anything else right now. So I'm kind of like a hard block, if you will, where that's why I'm trying to focus on these little things like the coupons, the nets higher, the other things because our process change will happen. The big step of it is going to happen when he decides are we going to Astro or are we staying with WordPress? And until that happens, he's not going to fully commit to either one because he knows transferring the sites to Astro is going to be a huge project and he also knows that stand on WordPress to fix all the issues that we have is going to be a huge project. So we have two paths moving forward, both a huge project. So I need to figure out, okay, what part of our web system can I optimize to prepare for either eventuality and set it up for success? What if. So thinking of the, the things we've talked about in general, What if. The. Next thing that I can think that might be helpful is in the HERO section. Sorry, not the hero section, the navigation bar section. We have those sections where like phone number and address are. But then also that's primary cta that's on the right hand side. Depending on the quantity of locations is dependent on what, what shows there. So if we could automate phone number, hours of operation and then the cta, the location piece is already built out and as a custom post type, some of those fields are already there. So if we basically build a couple of very lightweight custom blocks for those areas, those could start getting automated as well too. Would that be talking about part of the plugin? Yeah, sorry, I didn't mean to. I, I really My face said like, obviously. Of course. No, that's not what I meant to say. No, I. I figured it was. That was more. That was a dumb question. Sorry. Now my question to you is this is. When we download that plugin, how does it identify. Let me pull this up really quick. So here's the template. So am I gonna have to go in and change this out to be a certain thing for that plugin to identify this as the address? Or is it kind of like call railway swaps address fields? It will. So it's going to be on the back end of WordPress. So like let me. Let me actually steal the screen. I think right now. I don't know what that is. It might be like an address field, but I think that's honestly just paragraph text. We do 10:00am have our S.O. Alone. Okay, let me. I can hang on for a minute longer. Let me move the meeting that I had at 1. I need to physically move it in the calendar. 10 To 11. Okay, can I do 10 to 11 tomorrow? I can. Let's just do that. 10 To 11. Give me one second. I'm sorry. Yep. Michael and Lynn. How do you spell Anna Lynn? Holy chunk. Michael? Leo? Annalyn. Nope. Anna Ellen? Nope. Nope. Okay. Okay. Saving that. I was spelling it right. Why didn't my Google say no thank you to me and land it? Okay. Save. Don't send. Son of a gun. Dawn marker is optional. Save, save, save. There we go. And mark this as delete. Okay. Sorry about that. Thankful. Let me do that. Local jungle WP admin. Okay, so. Are you on your builder? Is this our template? I don't remember. So this is on my computer. So you gave me a copy a zip file of your template and then I took that and you also gave me a copy of your database as well too for a sample site. Basically just loaded all that up. So the thing I'm missing are images for the most part, which is I. Forgot which one I shared with you. Do you have the. That's just a GMG one. I would not be able to tell you, but. Oh, this is our new one. This is our new one. Okay, cool. Gotcha. Okay, dope. So the way that these would work over here at the top is so we would. They would all. It would all actually pull from location. So if there is only one inside the location, there will be address, phone number, hours of operation, and then that would. Then if there's only one of them, it would just funnel right into here, here, and here. Okay. Yeah, I get that. So now the Thing is what am I going to have to replace place in that header for it to funnel in? Is it like the actual like field type like a location. I understand what you're saying. Okay, so let's go over here. This will be, this is a one and done thing. So like once you are. When you save this into your actual theme. Yep. You will never have to touch it again. Okay. So. So right now patterns header. Yeah. So in your header file. Oh actually, so actually what I did for ease right now, let's actually, let's do this. Let me hide this. This will actually make more sense. Hide that, unhide that. So this is your current. This is your current header section. Yeah, just like blocks that you would just go in here and edit the text of, right? Yep. So you would delete this block here and there would be a add after. Local. LJ phone number. I know, I realize phone number doesn't go in this section, but custom block that is called OJ hours. Hours of operations. And what it will do is it'll do something dynamically to where it goes into the location section of the site. If there's one, it'll just showcase the one. And if there's two, we would then have to discuss what do we want that to look like. The same thing would be true. For this there'll be a custom block called Local Jungle address. And then for this right here there will be one called Local Jungle like menu cta. And in the future I like right now I think it'll just do like location list with phone number. I think it's on one of the sites. But like what we could easily do later is I know that there was a button like when you were at like locations and it popped open the modal boxes with like the iframes and stuff, we could trash all of that to where basically these two links, like if you were to click schedule, the modal box that pops up will then pull from the location section. And if there's only one location it would just have the same thing. Like you know what would be really cool? And this is just like top of mind right now. And I don't think it's actually possible without accepting cookies and everything. But it goes based on the actual device location. Right. So when, hear me out. So when let's say they have five locations, right? You open up the web quick. So I know, I know where you're going with this. There are a couple of layers to that. You would need to have a subscription to some sort of like mapping API. So that you could then your locations would then need to be loaded into that mapping manager that. That third party tool. Then when your brow. When you load up the site and your browser prompts you saying would you like us to use your location? And they click allow which that is a requirement mind you. There's no way around that. Then it would go to your mapping manager setup, use their zip code and find the most recent, the most, the closest one, send that back to the site and then display stuff. So it's a. It is a three or four step development process to do that and it would require another subscription of which I don't know offhand but it is. You would actually end up managing a lot of your location stuff off site. That would be so cool though if you didn't have to do all that and it would just pop up with the nearest location. Yes, yes. Because I know Lowe's does that. Lowe's and Home Depot do that really well. Like yeah, once they get you. Once they lock you in and so like they cook you and all that kind of fun stuff. So like when you come back a bazillion days later, it's still there but they have a full blown location. I have a buddy of mine that does multi unit restaurants and he's custom deved all of the like location management and how it works and browser and all that jazz. I'm pulling a lot of knowledge from my conversations with him about it. So yeah in the meantime also might be worth. And this might affect the daps a little bit but similar to the schedule online have a condition in that if has more than one location it opens up a prompt to select the location like a call now button and then select location. Now she might be doable question for you. So the. So this is what I would like to figure out right now. Yeah yeah, sorry these. So single location. All of this makes sense. We've grabbed the address, we grabbed the open times, the iframe code, we grabbed the like. That's all simple, right? Multi location is the. Is the. Is the issue here. Now let's start with single location because I rather make edits to the exception rather than build it for the exception. But it is an important piece though and I want to actually take it into consideration at the beginning because I want to write the code initially to have that. That those conditionals built in. This is my thinking and this is me looking at it from an outsider's perspective. Actually let me actually ask when you have multiple locations is most of the time it's Just two locations or is it like four or five? Most of the time it's two. We have a couple that have like four or five. But you also gotta realize these shops, they do hundreds of thousands of dollars each, if not millions. Yeah. So most of the time the owner is so overwhelmed with one shot, very rarely do they ever expand. That makes sense. This is what I'm thinking for the schedule online. I'm actually thinking about this from a a better user experience perspective. So with multi location right now if you click schedule it pops open modal one where you select a location and then it opens up another iframe after that. What if we made schedule online with a little arrow down here where you clicked it and it pulled up in a little drop down and you select which location you would like to schedule online at same number of clicks. Better user experience. I mean sure, the papa was just an idea. So that could work. That would likely have less breaking points as well. Exactly. Now it really. Can you open Empire AutoCAD. This is one that just broke. I had them fix it. So this Go to appointments. Yeah. Auto Ops is our second most popular one, which is this one. Now the problem with this is it's not. Is not just a link obviously in the iframe. Those. That we had to put a code in and then we had to actually iframe it, which was really weird. I don't remember exactly why we had to do that. But for the scheduler to work we had to actually important on the body of the site and then the iframe was secondary. So it also causes issues with exactly what you're doing right now. If you are to open up appointments and stuck on Fort Lauderdale for example,. It basically caches that iframe. So when you go to the next one, actually the same iframe pulls up, but they look exactly the same. Exactly. So my thinking is that the way that this would work if we had this as like a drop down menu, you would select it when you close out of it. The iframe would just get delete. The. The contents of the modal would get deleted. So then when you click on the neck the one the next time the new iframe contents pop in rather than what more than likely is. All that's happening here is the iframe is just being hidden. Now how does this. Because that is. It's the same as what this is now you're loading in an iframe like that's. It's just a link essentially. And the way that I would envision this being built is these iframes are not loaded until you actually click the button. Okay. What is this? Why is this behind. That's a part of the widget. Oh, okay. Can you send me sample code for this? The iframe stuff? I'll find it. Yeah. Okay. If you can send that, that'd be great. I would love to. But they both look the same, so it's going to be hard to QA which ones are different because of that, because they physically look identical. If you open up the actual iframe code, you can tell with the API key and the iframe. I do know that. Oh, so that will. Yep, right there. Okay, so the API key is different is what you're saying? Yep. The whole IP is the same. Okay. The API key is the only thing that changes. Okay, cool. So you're saying this is a part of Auto Ops as well? Yeah, so it has two conversions set for Google Tag Manager, which is really cool that it sends these events. And it's also an issue that's sending these in an iframe because I'm having trouble catching those events. But either way, what it will do is it catches the appointment booked event code and then it also catches. I think for Auto Ops is phone verified, basically, Meaning that is that it has three. Phone verified is when we just get like the lead info. Right. And then they also have one where that last pop up is like canceled or whatever. Basically they canceled booking, but they filled that form out for them to reach. Out to, and that's all automated. Basically, once you put the script for Auto Ops on, it's good to go. Yeah, I think all that should be fine. Let's do the header. And one thing I want to do is keep. For the location. Specifically, location naming is going to be very, very important because part of this has to do with. Conversion rate, because like Fort Lauderdale. No, Palm Bay, where the shop's located in Palm Bay. If you open this up, it actually has like three other little towns near them. So we had to say, hey, this is northeast Palm Bay, so that way we can catch the other towns right next to them. Okay. So for the locations, location, name, phone. Appointments. And then. We also might want to do. So you already have those operations, Google Maps, URL. None of these are actually being utilized yet. But yeah,. I think that's all that should be fun sorting out. Okay, this, this gives me enough information now that I know I was actually trying to figure out. We've looked at this site plenty of times before, but I had no Idea which one it was, I was like auto repair shops with multiple locations and just prayed that something popped up. And obviously nothing did. And ideally, ideally when we create these location pages, they're gonna just be duplication of the home page with just a different image is what it is. So the great thing about these, they're all going to live. So right now the location section is just this like custom field stuff. This can be drag and droppable Gutenberg. And that's what it will be. And from an SEO perspective, you'll actually keep all the same SEO stuff because if you look at. Oh I, I can Gutenberg. Which is why they're not. There's no view link here. I. But the, the slug of each of these will be domain.com/legations/location name. So you'll be able to actually manage the content of the page here. And also because of that will also. Be under the pages though. Or is it just. Yeah, you can drop, you can drop these under the menu as well too. That's not a problem. No, that's what I'm asking is will it show up in both places? So if I created like for the template itself, we create a new location. The plugin, does it also show up under the pages in WordPress? Yeah, so you could. So like, if you're like. And I'm at like the navigation bar, I don't have navigation enabled on this very. It's very thin side that I'm working on. You could have a locations menu item here. And then when you're done with the page, you could drag in the page so that it shows up under there. And then by adding in a new location under here, all of this stuff will be magic and just work. Can we set the menu bar so it also has a condition. If there's multiple locations, it creates that locations link. So this menu bar is. This menu bar is pure WordPress navigation that automation can't. Because you're actually dragging and dropping blocks onto it. I'll show you. So the answer is no. But it should be easy enough just to add location. Yeah. So we go over here to patterns and then header, Show this and hide my little custom thing. So like here's the. This group, this navigation block, it's literally just pages hand dropped in. So hypothetically, could you. Could I also create a custom block that automatically builds out a navigation bar? Yes, but then you would lose control and that's not a good thing. So. So this part would not be able. This would not be able to be customized. But this this your scheduling and phone number and then also like your. Your footer information down at the bottom. That would all be automated. So if you add a new location, the only thing you'd have to do manually is just add it to the menu. Going back to Empire really quick. And I think this is on this template as well. Go to like a service page. It doesn't matter which one. This right here, the nap on the right hand side that I would want change to. Oh, okay. Yeah. So basically just give you a block that showcases address, phone and hours across all locations. I think right now. I think. Let me pull up a service page. Yeah, that's in here on the template I gave you. Yeah. So we already have that block. This is easy. So we just have to plug in the same thing. And my thought process is that should be all kids actually scroll up again for me. That blue box as well. We would want to do the same thing for. So the business name in there, Empire autocad on the. Let me show my screen. This is a little bit harder to explain. So what, so what this can be what the way I'm envisioning this working, the whole modal box triggering stuff is that this Schedule online button is going to be its own custom button. Yeah. So take a look at logic inside of it. Take a look at my screen again really quick. So this box right here is. So this is the main block. That should be easy for everything. This block which is I'm just going to call the call to action block. We have this in here which makes it a little bit more difficult. So View all services should be good Schedule online. This is going to be a custom button. And then I guess this should be under Patterns if I'm not mistaking. So when we put the business name in, it should go to all pages. So we shouldn't have to worry about that. Never mind. Don't worry about that. Yeah. That's the only button that we would need to change. Yes. And so yeah, and that's the. In that. That block. Well, that button will be a custom block so that if you actually drop that button onto a page with a single location, it'll just pop up what you're looking for. So okay. Yeah, let's go ahead and push this. This should take you too long to this one. This is going to take a little bit longer than the other what I've already done because I had a lot of that other stuff already done. I didn't log any extra hours for this last week. I kind of think take your time on this one. I don't want to. To make sure that we. I don't want to raise any red flags with the billing and Craig being like, oh, hey, we're spending a lot more money on this than we should right now. Just work within the hours allocated hours. And if this takes two weeks to do, three weeks to do, no worries. We're focused on a million other things anyway, but this is something we can work towards. Okay, cool. That all sounds good. I will. The first version of this is. There's a lot of conditionals inside of all of this. So the first version that we look at is not going to be the 90 that I sent over for this last one. Just because there's just. There's. There's a lot more going on with this one. So just keep that kind of in the back of your mind that this is not meant to be. The first time you see something will just be butterflies and roses, so. Okay, that's fine. That's fine. Cool. Cool. I think we got a good plan. I'm going to have my developers go in and plug the plugin that you created into this template site, and I will connect it with Sendgrid, so that way we can test it out and then. Yeah, I think that should be good. Sounds like a plan. So thanks for taking the extra time today. Yeah, no problem. Thanks for letting me be a real person and have stuff happen as well. That was also. That was also nice. Awesome. Sorry I'm getting distracted. I was very good about not being distracted. Have a good rest of the day, sir, and I will catch you a little bit later. You as well. Feel better. Thank you. Bye.