Chris & Gavin: One-off Meeting Slot

Gavin Taylor: It.

Chris LaFay: Good morning.

Gavin Taylor: You've seen me without coffee. You don't want me without coffee.

Chris LaFay: I guess last, I think last week might have been actually a coffeeless day, if I remember correctly.

Gavin Taylor: Yeah, it's not productive.

Chris LaFay: Did you survive yesterday?

Gavin Taylor: I did, I did. It's been hectic all week. I don't even know why. Yeah, I do. I don't know why I'm saying that. So Tuesday, the reason I was out of office is because we're buying a house. We had a home inspector inspection. Can't talk yet. Anyway, that two hour window threw off my entire week. It's been insane.

Chris LaFay: Yeah, that's what happens. It sucks. I actually had on Tuesday, given that we didn't meet, I actually, you let me know early enough to where I actually didn't have any meetings that day. And I blocked off the whole day and it was,.

Gavin Taylor: You gotta get, you got caught up.

Chris LaFay: I did. I legitimately, I did because my wife and I are gonna go out of town this afternoon actually and we're just gonna go to the mountains and hang out and whatnot. And so I had like three major projects that needed to get to a milestone and I just sat down on Tuesday and just. And it was good. It was really, really good. And so I feel fantastic leaving at 2pm today. So I have a couple of fun projects that I'm gonna work on for myself while we're at the cabin because I don't have time to work on my fun things and my fun things are relaxing. They, they feel like work, but they're not. They're fun. I actually want to show you something at some point today. I don't want to spend more than like three and a half minutes on it, but I'm so excited about it. I have to, I think you'll like it and I, I, I just want to show it. So that will happen at some point Today I do have a hard stop at the top of the hour because I do have a meeting at 11am Eastern time.

Gavin Taylor: So I have my meeting, my weekly meeting with the web developers and I'm at a point where I want to fire them like so, so, so, so bad. So.

Chris LaFay: You said that two months ago too, though.

Gavin Taylor: I know, but it's gotten worse. Actually, let me say this. You're the one that post Marco, right?

Chris LaFay: I think I'm the one that introduced Marker. Yes.

Gavin Taylor: Okay.

Chris LaFay: Yeah.

Gavin Taylor: So let me share my screen with you. This website I just looked, they have clocked 100 hours until, which is inexcusable because it was a template Almost already done anyway. So I don't even understand how it was 100 hours. But here is the description. Please picture Bob with pictures Sammy, shop dog. And then, yeah, so just, hey, replace this picture with the shop dog. And I thought I had. I gave them the description somewhere. All right. Yeah, I don't know. I gave them a description, and that's just on the home page, right? So I come down here and look, and I'm like, okay, Bob's stuff is still here. That's whatever. On a whole different page on, like, the whole team page, with as long as how this guy's such a skilled technician. They replaced the picture on this page, too. I'm like, okay, we're not in elementary school. I don't care if you're overseas or not. This is just logic. What the hell are we doing here? And I understand it could be a communication or whatever, but it's not like we just started working with them. They know what I mean. And it's just like, stupid mistakes like this that drive me up a wall. So I started this point. I looked at this because this site is supposed to go live tomorrow, and, yeah, it's absolute garbage. And then the page speed. I'm not gonna go too far into this, but they know our page speed requirements are so important to us. This is gonna take a second, but the page feed, I'll look again here in a minute. Is not great. It's like in the 70s.

Chris LaFay: But why would that be? If they're using a template, why would it be.

Gavin Taylor: Because they try to take the easy way out. And Craig has been, I want to say, at least 100 hours trying to figure out what is happening with our page speed. He's working with another senior developer right now that he's worked with for a long time. They're going through all the plugins. They're trying to make a perfect tech stack with the perfect settings, with the perfect everything to make sure that it's actually hard to screw up. But right now, they will do, like, the stupid stuff where they'll try to get fake page speeds. What I mean by that is like Callvail, they will try to hide it for a certain period of time. So our page speed insights, it won't show it loading, and it will load the page. And then when you start interacting with the page or whatever, that's what it shows. Okay. Oh, look, it went up. It's 80. I mean, this is passable. This is passable, but not great. That's. I don't know. It's just some of the things.

Chris LaFay: Because all they're doing is uploading content. Like all the dev team is doing is uploading content, is putting images in at the end of the day.

Gavin Taylor: Yep. So there might be like a couple. I have them build like I had them rebuild their section. This was like the original coupon section that I had them pull off the home page for this client because he didn't really like the coupons being right there. So now the coupons are on the actual SEO pages.

Chris LaFay: Gotcha.

Gavin Taylor: But like, it's not like he. I don't understand. And that's why Craig's getting so pissed off. And he's really irritated with the whole page speed thing in general. And the developer he's working with, he's very much into WordPress. He understands page speed really, really well. They're trying to figure it out, but every day it's just like, we need to get to Astro. We need to get Astro. So there's no chance to be like fixing anything until page speed issues fixed. So that's a little f. I won't communicate with you.

Chris LaFay: Go to the psi thing. I'm just scared. Go to the Google Psi. Scroll down to the like. Okay, those aren't. Those aren't bad.

Gavin Taylor: This is the big issue. So this site, they actually fixed this a little bit. Like the first control paint is great. Total blocking time. Whatever. But then the LCP is always so big and I don't know why. Force refill.

Chris LaFay: Go down to the next like whole section. No, I actually could go. Go back up a little.

Gavin Taylor: Okay.

Chris LaFay: Identifier css. So those are all yellow. Okay. Go to the next.

Gavin Taylor: These I feel like are really easy fix is like you can go upload the CSS and do like a minify thing.

Chris LaFay: Yeah. But you don't want. You don't want to do that manually. You want that to be automated. Because if you do that, if you're basically saying as a part of the dev process, go and grab your style css, shove it into a minifier, then copy and paste it back in. Like nobody is going to do that.

Gavin Taylor: Isn't that plugin that does that?

Chris LaFay: The log into the back end of. Can you log into the back end of the site that we're. That we're fussing about?

Gavin Taylor: I know a better way. I know logging into WP admin is probably easier, but this is just everything solid one place.

Chris LaFay: You do you.

Gavin Taylor: I don't think the website should take 100 hours. That insane. That's that custom website time.

Chris LaFay: More than that, yeah. But it very, very much. It depends.

Gavin Taylor: Well, this is. Okay, the 100 hours. To be very, very, very specific about that. 100 Hours. That's actually working on tasks. That's not design, that's not anything like that. That's. Hey, here's all your stuff. Go do it. That's the hours I'm talking about. So it's all. All together. We probably 150 hours on this.

Chris LaFay: I mean, I think that's probably too much based on everything I know about you guys. But I also know how many. There's a lot of moving pieces with content and images and all that kind of fun stuff. Go to plugins. I just want to see the list of plugins. Okay. Can you zoom in a couple of clicks for me? There we go. Let me actually zoom in this. Okay, here we go. So we have Art Direction responsible.

Gavin Taylor: I have no idea what this is.

Chris LaFay: That's. That's a common. The anti. It's a. It's anything that's deactivated. It's fine.

Gavin Taylor: Oh, wait. Okay. So yeah, yeah, Art Direction.

Chris LaFay: I have no idea what that is.

Gavin Taylor: That's not a poop plugin.

Chris LaFay: Better search and replace. That's fine. Gravity Forms is fine. Imagify is. I've also heard of imageify. That's fine.

Gavin Taylor: That automatically optimizes the images on that. It doesn't work great, I don't think.

Chris LaFay: Oh, it doesn't. Okay, I have it. But all the custom local jungle plugins, those are all fine. In general, based on what I know about those. Those aren't really adding any actual bloat. Like it's. It's all backend stuff. Make it easy. Pop up probably adds front end code because it's a pop up manager.

Gavin Taylor: If I had to guess again, we're running into the same issue where they're just adding a whole bunch of. To the plugin. I need to look at this more often because we have a list of approved plugins and none of these are on there.

Chris LaFay: So I don't know what widgets for Google. I mean, I know what, I understand what widgets for Google Reviews does, but I know that, I mean if you're dynamically pulling in Google Reviews, that's definitely going to be a front end. That's gonna be a front end thing.

Gavin Taylor: Yeah, we have Trust Index. That shouldn't even be on here.

Chris LaFay: Oh yeah. Yes. Also wait a second. Yeah, you definitely need Workman. So you have something called Security Optimizer. Oh, that's the site.

Gavin Taylor: Oh, this is Bitches Index. This is just the new. They shouldn't even be doing this though, because they're supposed to be adding the. Whatever. I don't care, honestly. It's just index.

Chris LaFay: WP Rocket's fine. Honestly, a lot of these plugins are okay. The Yoast duplicate post. I, I'm not a fan of duplicate post plugins just because I feel like they're dumb and you can just copy and paste stuff, but I also know that you're dealing with content at scale, so I'm assuming that's all back end, so it probably doesn't matter.

Gavin Taylor: Why does he have that? Does that because the. Oh, that's why they're lazy and they don't want to copy the blogs.

Chris LaFay: But also like the, the duplicate plot. Like the duplicate posting. Like, that's not. That shouldn't add anything to the front end that should not impact page speed. So it also looks like you. Those like if you go back to plugins, I think that SiteGround plugin Security Optimizer, I think it does. Oh, yes. Scroll up to. There you go. So, yeah, Security Optimizer. Then you also have Speed Optimizer. Yep, Speed Optimizer. I don't, I mean, I, I.

Gavin Taylor: Which I don't understand why we have that. Because we have WP Rocket.

Chris LaFay: It probably is automatically installed because it's a. It's probably automatically installed because of the siteground thing.

Gavin Taylor: No,.

Chris LaFay: I mean it's not under the Must use plugins, but you could, I mean, it's d. It. You're able to deactivate it. But I also don't know, I don't know enough about SiteGround to know how important it actually is. So.

Gavin Taylor: And that's another thing that we're trying to get off of. We're trying to go over to rocket.net yes. We just gotta figure out page speed first. So yeah,.

Chris LaFay: Go to. Go to the Tools tab really quick for me. I think it's up to Tools. Yeah, go to Tool. Oh, nope, it's actually not. Go to Hover over Settings. WP Rocket at the bottom. Go to File on the left hand sidebar that. Go to File Optimization. So, okay, just do like a slow scroll. I'm looking at the check boxes. So Minify CSS Checked. Optimize CSS delivery. Check should not be removed.

Gavin Taylor: Okay.

Chris LaFay: Yeah, minified. Okay, that's fine.

Gavin Taylor: Oh, this.

Chris LaFay: Oh, remove. Removes unused CSS per page. Safe list of Sci Fi should not be removed. Yeah. So basically it wants it. Yeah. That's all. That's all fine. JavaScript file minify them. Load JavaScript. That's all fine.

Gavin Taylor: Isn't this what I'm talking about with the.

Chris LaFay: Not specifically, no. Like what? I think what is probably happening, there might be some custom code written that literally says wait five seconds before logging it. Deferred loading is a little bit different. It's not. It's not the same base. This is the simple version of deferred loading. Don't take this to the bank, but basically what deferred loading means is once the entire, like, document is loaded, then immediately load the JavaScript. Whereas what you said is it was on a delay.

Gavin Taylor: Yeah.

Chris LaFay: Like a timer. Now you. And my assumption is you'd have to write custom code to put it on a timer.

Gavin Taylor: Yeah. That's what our old developer, he got fed up with Craig and his page speed stuff. This is like a really important thing to Craig. And I thought it was. Honestly, at first I was just like playing along, like, okay, yeah, I work for you, I'll do whatever you want. And he showed me the actual difference that 8090 makes on our ads. And it's insane. It's literally almost a 5, 10% difference on our ad conversions just by that in 10 points and page speed.

Chris LaFay: That's nuts.

Gavin Taylor: And I've never seen that in any other industry before, ever. So the fact that you showed me that data, I'm like, all on board about it now, so. And specifically how we. It translates to dollars we earn due to how we bill. So our old developer, he would just get fed up because he's very much developer, he has his blinders on, he doesn't care about anything else except building. That's right. And then with Craig's page speed stuff, he would go in custom code, all that, and he would just try to make page speed insights look good.

Chris LaFay: So, yeah, interesting. I. Nothing in here says, nothing in this list here screams bad to me. Now, in the plugins, there's a couple in there that actually go hover over speed. Opt on the left hand, black sidebar, hover over speed optimizer.

Gavin Taylor: I don't think we actually use this. I think this is the one that's going to be removed. It's.

Chris LaFay: So, yeah, this is the second one.

Gavin Taylor: Yeah. Part of our issue is this overlaps with WP Rocket, which overlaps with one more tool. And that's what Craig was like working on, is like the settings between each so they don't conflict. I am likely going to remove this.

Chris LaFay: I don't know if that's going to help at all. But when you have two plugins Doing the same thing. It's not necessarily a great idea.

Gavin Taylor: So it conflicts. We already know that. But Craig's the one that goes on that page speed things so I'll let him do that.

Chris LaFay: Have you all tried just taking one of these basically full blown like this is a full blown website at this point?

Gavin Taylor: Yes.

Chris LaFay: And migrating this full blown website to just a different server and running a page speed test on a staging server on another host.

Gavin Taylor: On another host, yes. So that's where Rocket. Net came into play. We never finished that out to be honest. But we were going to do. I forgot what site it was. Oh, I know.

Chris LaFay: Because I'm kind of curious if you took this site as is this one.

Gavin Taylor: So we took this site. We had to finish some things. I never finished this out. But while we were building this out, what I did is I took this over to Rocket.net and there was an immediate defense. However Rocket.net is really, really weird. So we didn't make the decision on moving over quite yet because what happened is we move this over on siteground. We were sitting at about a. I want to say a 70. I. This is. It was about 70. I moved it over to Rocket.net on cached. So it was 70 and then 64. So 70 was cached. 64 Was non cash for Rocket.net cast was 90, like 4 or 95. That was how mobile and, and desktop. However, noncash was 52.

Chris LaFay: I mean now the likelihood of showing a non cash page is very, very, very slim.

Gavin Taylor: And that's. You're using a lot of UTMs and things like that. So we have to take that.

Chris LaFay: I didn't think about that actually because every UTM is going to be slightly different based on.

Gavin Taylor: Ah, so then we. That took us back to the page speed thing and we are excluding.

Chris LaFay: Or.

Gavin Taylor: We're including caching basically they're doing something. I don't know. This is where it gets over my head. They're doing something where the UTMs, even if it is customized, is going to be cached. Hitting a cache version somehow some way it like 90 of the time but that other 10 needs to. We gotta do something with the page speed.

Chris LaFay: Interesting.

Gavin Taylor: Okay. And that's where Astro comes into play. Astro only delivers the cached version regardless. That's. I don't know the technical workings but that's why Craig's so focused on switching over to astro. Because it will 100 delivered cash.

Chris LaFay: Huh.

Gavin Taylor: Okay. So yeah, that, that's just to catch you up with what we've done recently.

Chris LaFay: Interesting.

Gavin Taylor: So where we're at now is I don't like you two M. We're going to keep them on. In the meantime because I don't want to switch a bunch of things. We're attaching our process. So as of yesterday we began onboarding two new clients. We're kind of sprinkling them in before we open up the firehose. We have one that is an existing client, but we'll be doing the whole website. So we'll be onboarding them to test our process. And then we accepted one new client to test our process as well. So all the changes that we made, we're now tested.

Chris LaFay: Can I go ahead and send you over the course the core plugin so that you can use it on this new one?

Gavin Taylor: Yes. I still gotta play with it and then I still have to get approval with Craig to do that.

Chris LaFay: So it's basic. It's. It's as done as it's going to be for now. There's other things we can add into it later. But the only thing I don't have in here is just the your actual like honest to God iframes for the like location modal boxes. So on that note, let's look at this, shall we?

Gavin Taylor: Yep.

Chris LaFay: So I'm sharing my screen. I think I just kicked you off of sharing.

Gavin Taylor: Oh I, I okay, cool.

Chris LaFay: Awesome. So we've gone over all the coupons so none of that's changed.

Gavin Taylor: So.

Chris LaFay: Nd let me move your your face over here. Under a single location, you can now drag and drop blocks as well. So your location pages can actually be built out with content. We have our address, phone numbers, Google maps, scheduling, iframe etc. We got the email routings for the the coupons here as well too. That's all. Most of that is all the same as it was before at the block level. I'm going to quickly go over the things we've already went over just for kicks and giggles. We have the custom block called NAV Locations which is dynamic. So if it's not on a single location page, it'll show all the location names. It's only on one location, It'll only show that address nav times. It'll show one of the locations times in this install I have separate times for both locations. Okay, just because I just wanted to see if everything toggled correctly. In the actual navigation bar we have a we have a call to action section. So it's the Nav CTA and that combines all of this stuff here together. So if you're on a multi location spot, not a specific location. It's going to show Schedule Online and you can then select which of these you want. But then we'll also show the city name and the phone number that is clickable over here. That is all. This is all one magic block. And then if you're on a single location, it only shows schedule appointment with the phone number as the cta. So all that's handled dynamically in that one single block. Then we have a custom block called the Schedule Online block. All this outputs is the Schedule Online button. If you are on a single location page, it'll just say Schedule Online and it'll pop open the modal box. If you're on a non location page it will show a dropdown very similar to the Schedule Online thing over here to where you'll then pick your location first and then the pop up will show up. And I have just YouTube videos on here for right now as the embed codes. Then over here we have the all location info block which will always show all location information broken up by address, phone and hours. And then in this, this actually does have a custom field where you can toggle it between showing it in a column layout versus rows here it's not going to show that in the editor very well, but you can then switch that. If you wanted to use this block on an actual content page and drop it in the middle of the content, you could do a column layout there. Then lastly went ahead and added the where's the footer? We didn't talk about this, but this felt smart. So I did a smart thing.

Gavin Taylor: So that's what I want my developers to do. Smart things. There's idiots.

Chris LaFay: I made a locations grid block that has no custom fields to it. But this is meant for the footer. You could hypothetically use it wherever the heck you want. And what it will do is it outputs a two column grid of location information in small text. And so if it's only one location, it just shows the location name. With all of this spanning out.

Gavin Taylor: Question. Let's say just hypothetically we go on and take a client with like 20 different shots, right?

Chris LaFay: We need to reconsider some of these things.

Gavin Taylor: Okay. We build it for the normal case and then when those things come up we'll do.

Chris LaFay: Because all we would do is we would just edit the existing blocks. We basically go into all the blocks and say when we would probably set what we would probably do at the plugin settings level. We would probably have a field here that says max locations Yep. And. And if the number is above that, that filter, then all of these custom blocks do something different. Now, some of them won't do anything different. Like for example, like the. Like the schedule online button. This would just show a list of them. That's not problematic, but obviously this is highly problematic. This and like the. Actually these two. So this one right there, the. The location section. And then this would be problematic if there's more than like three or four. Yeah, but that's not normal. And so let's. We can then edit the block and then we just then would deploy.

Gavin Taylor: The.

Chris LaFay: Block, the custom blocks and the different. Like, because all of this is housed in a single plugin, so if you wanted to update it, you just have to upload the plugin file and then all the sites get the updates.

Gavin Taylor: Okay.

Chris LaFay: All of this is at your disposal. It's not yet. Technically it's not at your disposal yet, but it is about to be at your disposal.

Gavin Taylor: Two things I will need from you. Well, three. Well, obviously one is the plugin. Two, can I add you to the website so that way you can go ahead and implement it to the template correctly.

Chris LaFay: Can you add me to the website? Yes, you can add me to a website.

Gavin Taylor: Okay, I'm going to add you to the template and. Because I know I had them add it. But what I want to be able to do is have both for right now. That way if Craig's like, oh, hey, I don't want to do that. I want to go back to what we were doing before. We can switch it. And then I also want it to be done right. And I think my developers are idiots, so I don't think they're gonna do it right. And then number three, I'm sure that's gonna take you like no time at all to get it like added correctly or whatnot and make sure that it's functioning. Number three, can you create like documentation for this? Like already you already have. Perfect.

Chris LaFay: Yeah, I need to. I need to check, but I. Let me. Local. Actually, no code. Momento.

Gavin Taylor: Open folder.

Chris LaFay: Wrong one.

Gavin Taylor: That folder. Yeah.

Chris LaFay: Local jungle. Yes. So here, let me. I'm just going to share. Present something else. Yes. Window. So I have a markdown file here that I can convert to like HTML. But we have. Here's the blocks. Let me collapse that LJ coupons, what it does, how to use it, any page you want them to go. And then what are the different settings that you have within that block? And then what does it showcase? And then the nav locations inside the top Bar the header, the strip with the address and hours shows the address links to Google Maps, shows a little bit of everything.

Gavin Taylor: Basically what I'm going to do just for my ability to read this without being dumb, I'm going to put it in cloud. Like, hey, make this into our SOP on how to change this.

Chris LaFay: Yeah. And Claude wrote all this up.

Gavin Taylor: I was like, I will understand it perfectly. Cool. Yeah. So here's the vision in the next, in the upcoming months. So these two clients are going to be super important. Number one, we need to improve our processes. Number two, it's also going to prove that the team can function without Craig. In the day to day, all he's going to be doing is the strategy and then the final qa. So these clients are kind of putting all of our systems to the test. Number two, he is finishing up the site speed stuff which should help out current clients. But once he's done with that, we are probably going to start testing with Astro and seeing what we can actually take over to Astro. So what I actually foresee happening is everything we build in WordPress, we are going to somehow translate one to one to Astro where it's possible. So. We're going to pull the file, the website files 100% and have Claude rewrite them for Astro and upload it to Astro. So everything that we've done on WordPress should not be any sort of waste because for the research that we've done, it should translate to Astro in some way, shape or form.

Chris LaFay: What does that mean, translate to Astro?

Gavin Taylor: So Astro, I guess to my understanding they have a different, like it's almost a different coding language, I think if I remember right, so it would be a little bit different. And what everybody's doing is actually using cloud code specifically for this. Astro wants it to be written one way. So we'll take all the file code uploaded to Claude, say Claude, I want this translated to Astro, I want this rewritten for Astro basically. And now Astro wants it ran and then we'll upload it to Astro and then boom, there's our website. That's how it should work now because we know things don't work out perfectly. Like that. Is the next higher. It was gonna be a technical like project manager. I forgot how we worded that. Basically we're gonna hire equivalent of what Tesla used to do as far as like project manage all the website stuff. That was going to be our next one, but our next one is going to be like a intermediate developer so that way they can handle all the internal stuff. If they can't handle something, we still have access to a couple senior level developers and then that's kind of how we're going to run the ship. And then I'm also hiring that technical project manager. So that way they, they know enough about it. They know more than me about websites and they can direct that team a little bit better than I can.

Chris LaFay: Yeah, I am the, the Claude. The Claude. The.

Gavin Taylor: The.

Chris LaFay: Shoot frick. What's called that Astro migration seems very odd to me. There's something, there's something about it that just doesn't, doesn't click in my developer brain.

Gavin Taylor: It might be how I'm explaining it.

Chris LaFay: That's. Yeah, I'm, that's what I'm mostly concerned about.

Gavin Taylor: Yeah, let me do this.

Chris LaFay: Because I think what the, the problem that I have. The. And I know you're going to be hiring somebody at some point soon, which is good, but nobody on the active team actually understands the Astro code base. They understand the benefits that Astro will bring. But you have all of these websites built on a code base that nobody understands how it's done.

Gavin Taylor: Here's. Here's the better way of explaining it. I got better way. WordPress uses PHP, right?

Chris LaFay: Yes.

Gavin Taylor: Astro use JavaScript. Astro is not a JavaScript based web playbook.

Chris LaFay: Exactly. Yes. 100%.

Gavin Taylor: That's the, that's the difference.

Chris LaFay: Correct. All of you are 100% correct.

Gavin Taylor: You already look that up.

Chris LaFay: And it is what it is. Like, that's fine. Every. Every. I know that everybody has their preferences. What I don't like seeing is people getting over their skis using a new technology that nobody fully understands and are relying a lot on AI to just do it. Right. That's the, that's the.

Gavin Taylor: So and that's the thing right now internally we don't have a developer and that's a problem. And it's a problem I thought that was going to get solved with E2M but at the end of the day it was not Box. And it's something that we're kind of coming to figure out. And our, the senior developer that we've been working with, he is, he hates etf. He have built so much crap into this is he built the original template. So he's like, I don't know how they made it so bad. I don't know. I wasn't part of those conversations. But anyway, yeah, right now we're on WordPress and we're going to stay on WordPress unless we can prove that migration to Astro works in Craig's head. It's through rose colored lenses where the idea of using Astro, where it delivers cached websites every time he loves because of the page speed. However, he understands that we do need to test it quite heavily. So we're still talking six months from now?

Chris LaFay: Yeah.

Gavin Taylor: He's like, oh, maybe it's only gonna take two months. When it's two months for him, it's gonna take a lot longer than that. So yeah. Okay, I'm gonna.

Chris LaFay: Do you have a GitHub account? No. Do you have a GitHub account? No. No. Okay.

Gavin Taylor: It's one of the things I need to get. Okay.

Chris LaFay: I was going to share access to the entire repository with you so that you could pull. You would just have access to it.

Gavin Taylor: Can I do that on the free. Yeah,.

Chris LaFay: No, it's GitHub's free.

Gavin Taylor: Okay, I'm getting it now.

Chris LaFay: You know how to use GitHub?

Gavin Taylor: No, I'll figure it out.

Chris LaFay: It's. Do you want me to give you a 30 second tutorial? Okay, let me pull up, hold on, let me. Get desktop.

Gavin Taylor: And I know you also want to show something else with me too, so.

Chris LaFay: I do want to show you something else because I am partially a child and when I have new toys, I like showing them off. Okay. Entire screen. Do you understand what a repository is?

Gavin Taylor: Yes. It's where you put all your stuff,.

Chris LaFay: All your stuff and it keeps track of changes and blah, blah, blah. So here's my Local Jungle template and here's all the various commits that I've made over the last couple of months. So what you will do, you'll download the GitHub client, the, the GitHub app for your, for your laptop. You'll sign in to GitHub and I'm going to share the repository with you so that you have access to it. So what you'll do is you'll. There will be none listed here. I have a million and a half. You'll click add and you're going to clone copy down a repository from the server and then you're going to go over here and filter it and you will only have one, but you'll type in Local Jungle template and it's freaking out on me because it's like, oh, you already have it downloaded. What are you doing? You'll basically, you'll then go over here and once you've selected your repository, you'll then go and choose Is this a.

Gavin Taylor: Plugin or is this.

Chris LaFay: This is the whole. This is. This is it. The repository actually has a lot more stuff in it because that's how I set up repositories.

Gavin Taylor: So this is like what you should use for like Claude and stuff. We're like, hey, this is all about info. Okay. I knew all this was.

Chris LaFay: Okay, so get has become a lot more popular with non technical people in the last like 12 months. Like get is going zoom right now. So you'll then go over here and create a folder somewhere on your system and call it like, you know, local Jungle, plugin, whatever you want to call it. And then you'll click on Clone. I'm not going to do this because I already have it on my computer. And then what you'll see in that folder is. So you'll go and navigate and you'll see Local Jungle template or folder you have. And you will see not actually all these folders, not all these folders, but you will see the contents of WP content. This is what I have inside the repository. You'll go over here to plugins and you'll see the Local Jungle core plugin. And this is the folder of all the stuff that you'll upload. And then inside of it you'll see the Blocks guide. I actually went ahead and had it converted to HTML so that it's just a little bit more legible for what it is. So that way if I make an update to it, all you need to do is go over to you open up GitHub. If I send you me like, hey, update the plugin, you'll go to GitHub and you'll click this fetch origin button and it'll go to the server, find the updates and pull it down to your computer for you.

Gavin Taylor: Great. Okay, so that makes sense. Yeah, yeah. The first time you make an update, you're gonna have to show me that again.

Chris LaFay: No, that's fine. But I at least wanted to give you the basics of it because I feel like if you see the basics, that's gonna trigger thoughts.

Gavin Taylor: Okay, yeah, you know, what did I do here? I'm downloading.

Chris LaFay: I have actually haven't added you yet. Hold on one second. What is your. What's your email address?

Gavin Taylor: Gavin T. Local jungle.com local. I showed you the marketing email. It's fine.

Chris LaFay: Invite ad. All right, so you shouldn't you go over to your inbox, View Invite, accept invitation. Boom.

Gavin Taylor: Okay, you got your thing. This is not. Is this my account?

Chris LaFay: Yeah, it is.

Gavin Taylor: Okay. Yeah.

Chris LaFay: So now go back over to the GitHub app.

Gavin Taylor: Yep.

Chris LaFay: Click on the little refresh icon next to the filter your repositories. Click on that and say clone. So the URL at the top, that's going to say the same. Where do you want this to. Actually, this is going to live in your documents folder inside GitHub, inside local jungle template. That's a fine location in general.

Gavin Taylor: No, because I need to separate this out because I'm going to use this for my other agency too. Hold on. Oh, I should only have. Damn it. This is the problem of running multiple businesses off of one computer.

Chris LaFay: Yes. I had to, like. Actually you can see like on the GitHub screen, down the bottom right hand corner, you'll see Chris Lea and then Classic City. I was running two separate GitHub accounts and I had to log in and log out of my GitHub app every time I wanted to make changes to different repositories. Like if I was doing a personal repository, I had to go and log in, log out of my Classic City one, log in my personal one. Then I just combined them all. Recently I said, screw it, I'm tired of this.

Gavin Taylor: This is going to be. New folder. This is going to be. Local Jungle. And then.

Chris LaFay: Excuse me, sorry.

Gavin Taylor: This is the folder, right? Yeah, the new folder.

Chris LaFay: I would keep the folder name that the repository lives in still Local Jungle template, so that the folder name matches up with the repository name. That's a nomenclature thing that I would definitely keep.

Gavin Taylor: Yeah, so I just added a folder inside of that.

Chris LaFay: Awesome. There you go. So go ahead and click Clone. And now it's going to download all the stuff. Now if I tell you, hey, I updated the code.

Gavin Taylor: Oh, it's in a subfold.

Chris LaFay: So that's what you have to be careful. Basically what it's going to try to do. It doesn't have to, but it wants that final folder to be the repository name. That's just what it does. But anyway, if you open. Go ahead and just open up that folder.

Gavin Taylor: Hold on. Sorry, I get. So.

Chris LaFay: So now go back. So now it's in a different location. Now go back to get. Go back to the GitHub app because now that that path is wrong.

Gavin Taylor: Oh, shoot.

Chris LaFay: Say no, it's fine. Click on Locate, click the blue Locate button and then just navigate over to. And then Local Jungle Template. Double click that. Now click Select Folder. There you go. Now we're good. Now you're good.

Gavin Taylor: Okay, cool. I. Yeah. Okay, so if you go into the.

Chris LaFay: Plugins and then Local Jungle Core. Oh, go. Go up a folder that's. That's a zip file. That zip file is probably outdated, mind you, but there's a folder called Local jungle core. That is the plugin. And then the blocks guide is the HTML file, the MD file. And then the HTML file should hypothetically be exactly the same. Just the HTML file is easier for to view.

Gavin Taylor: Yeah.

Chris LaFay: And then the claw MD has all the instructions on how to, how this all, how this all works, which you don't need the Claude md. You don't have to read that. That's for, that's for cl.

Gavin Taylor: That's for Claude. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay, cool. Okay. What do you want to show me?

Chris LaFay: I want to show you something. Okay, here we go, Here we go, here we go. You ready for this? I'm actually going to, it's on a different computer right now, so I'm actually going to hop, I'm going to switch. Okay, so here we go. Refresh that. Yes, sir. I'm editing my classic city homepage and I'm having fun with it. And I'm basically just leaning into fun. So this is what we got. That's what we got. Bada bing, bada boom. So going full side scroller style here, we got heads up display. We got coins that are collectible that I've already collected them. They're already up here at the top. So I, I, I meant to re enable those, but you can actually go and collect the coins across the site. I got little boxes that you can punch and these guys make noise too. And then wait, so you'll see it says 10 right there. You click the last one gives you two coins to punch a box, which is great. And then the menu bar is an inventory panel. And so we got all the different pages listed here. Obviously you book a call because you know, why not, right?

Gavin Taylor: Yeah.

Chris LaFay: And also what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna hide little SVG graphics all around the site and they're going to be. I don't know what I'm going to do with them yet, but they're collectible. So this guy has like a little bit of a drop shadow behind it. It's a, it's a one of one if you will. So if you click on this, Let me move this out. If you click on splashes, it changes the screen and then it adds the don't get stung bumblebee to your inventory, which if you go over here to your items, you have now, I called it the Bee, but I chose the wrong graphic there. I don't know what I'm going to do with these yet. I'm going to do something with them.

Gavin Taylor: You should. The conversion side of me is like you should tag all of these in Google Tag Manager and assign it points for who interacted with it more and push that to like a CRM with engagement points.

Chris LaFay: So I'm kind of doing that. So the backend right now does keep track of which items are clicked on, when they're clicked on and which visitor does it. So by default you don't. There's no account in the browser that I'm logged in. I do. If you're on the site and you haven't registered yet, there will be a little box here that says enter your email to save your progress and it'll send you a magic link. And when you come back, that's all you have to do. Now when you do that, this profile tab is created where you just type in your first name, last name and a username. All of the stuff that you've done so far get saved to that account. So I can tell here like the per item breakdown, the test elixir of Inside this was the. The first one that AI helped me create. So it's the. The math is. The math is wrong. But it also did a lot of stuff behind the scenes that it was testing with.

Gavin Taylor: This is some of these the hell out of SEO though. Fy.

Chris LaFay: Wait, say that again.

Gavin Taylor: This is gonna confuse the hell out of any SEO because all of this.

Chris LaFay: But gonna be able to links all over the place, right? Yeah.

Gavin Taylor: Yeah. So no, that's cool. I like that.

Chris LaFay: My, my whole thing, my, my whole thinking around it is that nobody cares to go to a website designer's website. No, like, which is, which is fine. They're gonna go there, they're gonna see stuff and be done. But if in my marketing efforts, especially things like on LinkedIn and through like email marketing that I do to people that I know, it's like, hey, there's a new thing to collect or a new thing to go see. That's interesting. Then you might just go click on it for kicks and giggles. And now I become top of mind more. And I'm the only person in marketing that has a video game embedded in their website.

Gavin Taylor: Do you run ads at all? I know you have a three minute hard stop, but I don't. Okay.

Chris LaFay: I'm not opposed to it.

Gavin Taylor: If you ever do, all you will want to do is that is definitely a great thing for like warm traffic or some like referral traffic. I should say it's great for referral traffic but for like cold traffic and like what the hell is. So I would just make. If you ever do want Ads, I'll just make landing pages like the theme itself. Like go along with the theme but like keep it very much focused in on whatever you're trying to market.

Chris LaFay: But the plan, if I do ads and more like highly targeted landing pages, what I'm going to do is if a visitor comes for the first time, there's just going to be a row of coins and if you click on one and you collect it, there's going to be a little box that pops up and it's like, hey, you can collect things on the site if you want to. Just FYI, try clicking things and if you want to find things, you can.

Gavin Taylor: But basically I'm sure that should improve the engagement. For sure.

Chris LaFay: That's what I'm saying. Especially like on a blog post if I say something like at the very top, like in the TLDR section of all blog posts. Whereas like on this page is an elixir somewhere you might go out and find it. Because we all like games in some way, shape, form or fashion. Especially if it saves your account too. Like again, I don't envision people are going to just come back here for like kicks and giggles and funsy time.

Gavin Taylor: You're gonna start seeing your view count go up just for me. You don't play with your site.

Chris LaFay: Yeah, that's also fine. One of the things I'm going to do this weekend while I'm in the mountains, I found a way that I can create a side scrolling game in Claude code with all the assets that I have. I'm actually thinking about if that is expandable and recreatable multiple times over with ease. I actually might create little mini games that live in like an HTML canvas or something that would be a way for you to collect stuff.

Gavin Taylor: So when you get back, we should talk about teaming up with my other business to help your clients out. Fads. If you're interested in doing any of that.

Chris LaFay: I would be at some point, at some point in the next two or three months my business will be basically the first four months of the year were me stabilizing my business from all the crap that I've that's happened over the last few years. That stabilization is about to. We're about to hit a good rhythm and I closed a ton of projects in the last 30 days and a lot of that cash is about to hit the bank. And so between dropping all my employees and actually having an influx of cash and some good recurring revenue coming in, the. The Valley is in the process of coming back up to where I actually have money now for the first time ever, to market, which I'm excited about, because if I can market to fun, which is what I like doing anyway, that's. That intrigues me greatly. And that's probably only going to hit me, like, small to midsize businesses, probably not enterprise clients, which I don't care about enterprise. Like, I want somebody to look at that site and be like, that dude's cool. Y. Yeah, I want to work with him.

Gavin Taylor: I. I did the opposite. I have a marketing team just kind of sitting on the hands right now, so I need to push some work for sure. So, yeah, we'll. We'll talk when you get back. We'll talk next week.

Chris LaFay: Sounds like a plan, sir. I'll catch you later.

Gavin Taylor: Talk to you later. By.