Local Jungle - Current

Chris LaFay: I would say that the cadence probably should be on all three. Maybe what we should do, given that you're going to be helping me with more of these is honestly it probably just makes sense to do it inside of morning and I just need to get better about doing morning. I think I should also make a note of what all needs to be inside of morning because really all client stuff should live inside of morning. So really we should have the exact same process for every client that you're helping me with so that you touch them every single day in the morning. In terms of escalation, I would say four business days sounds good. Terms of Harvest Project ID that does not exist for Gmail. That is his correct email. And then the two things to flag. I need to give him some sort of documentation to work from when I send him this contract is ready to go. Email. What document could you prepare for me that I could send to him that would help him organize the content of his core pages as well as the product pages as well?

Gavin Taylor: It.

Chris LaFay: Hello.

Gavin Taylor: Hello. Hello.

Chris LaFay: How's your week?

Gavin Taylor: Life got real busy real quick.

Chris LaFay: Hopefully in a. Hopefully it got better because if your text message last week was all about fires. So hopefully, hopefully the fire is.

Gavin Taylor: Yeah, it wasn't terrible. It was just a lot I needed to be done. This week's kind of the same way, but I want to make sure we have time post that for each other. Just a heads up, I do have a very hard stop at 1pm Eastern. I have a client strategy call we decided to bring on a client and we have strategy call with them today. Awesome.

Chris LaFay: Sounds good. I was gonna say I have a hard stop at 1:30 Eastern because I have a client call right after that that got scheduled so. Perfect. So we only have 30 minutes today. Yes, I got all of the Penguin site set up and so that is relatively good to go.

Gavin Taylor: Say again, the penguin 2 site.

Chris LaFay: Yeah, yeah, okay. Sorry. Yeah, yeah. I put a sample location in there just so stuff populated.

Gavin Taylor: Okay.

Chris LaFay: The only thing I didn't fill out was the iframe code for the like the scheduling thing because I figured that could be something that you could copy and paste in and we could then test together or you could test a little bit later on your own. Doesn't matter. But sidebar is populated, footer is populated. Navigation bar is entirely populated with all those new blocks coupons have a couple of sample coupons and then on the homepage the coupons are displayed appropriately. And I did get I put my email address in for all of the like the three different emails for like gm, admin, etc, and I received all of the emails when I tested.

Gavin Taylor: So wait, did I hook this up to send good?

Chris LaFay: That I have no idea. But the email sending went through. So I wonder, because email can send from a web server, it's just not.

Gavin Taylor: Yeah, yeah, it's hot. Okay, cool. So walk me through this. It's gonna be this local jungle thing.

Chris LaFay: You don't have to worry about any of these things in here. That. That these are all placeholder stuff. Don't worry about that for right now. Okay, so go to locations and you can edit Snowville. And technically you can actually build the location page here if you wanted to. And the URL would be domain.com location/snowville. You don't have to, but you could.

Gavin Taylor: So for the location page, what. What template is this? Pull in. Is this just a blank template with the header in it?

Chris LaFay: Move my. Move my window. Move the Google down. So template is single post. It's right there, right above your mouse.

Gavin Taylor: Okay, that's what I need to. I'm sure we need to actually build a template. Okay, let me take a note really quick because I want to make sure where the. Are my sick notes. Do you watch ufc, by the way?

Chris LaFay: Do I want his wife?

Gavin Taylor: Do you watch the ufc?

Chris LaFay: I don't know. I never really got. I'm just. I'm not it. Fighting sports in general don't interest me like you. I could say the same thing about boxing. I could say the same thing about wrestling, even though I know wrestling is fake. Like none of. None of them. Like, I have never, when I've watched one, been like sucked in. And I've tried a few question on that bullet point. Do you know how to create the location template?

Gavin Taylor: Nope. I'm sending out to my developers.

Chris LaFay: I have a one bullet point with that. Really quick to make sure that it's done the way that I think it should be done.

Gavin Taylor: Yeah.

Chris LaFay: Go over to the edit tab. So the second from the right. Third from the right, technically, go. Yeah, go from here. Go back under appearance on the left hand side down middle, about middle. Go to Editor, which is underneath. There you go. Go to Templates.

Gavin Taylor: And.

Chris LaFay: Okay, sorry. Yep, go there. What you're going to want to do is you're going to. So are. Do any of these templates match up with what you're looking to do?

Gavin Taylor: No.

Chris LaFay: Awesome. So in that case.

Gavin Taylor: So essentially the location page, honestly, is what it boils down to is the home page. So like this is Empire, for example. This is just the home page. Of Empire.

Chris LaFay: Now, when you're saying everything, it's just all it is is a content layout. You're not looking for, like, a sidebar on the right with dedicated information.

Gavin Taylor: No, no, I just thought.

Chris LaFay: Okay, never mind. You can actually completely ignore everything I just said. Sorry, I didn't have the right def. I thought you were talking about, like, I want, like, a right sidebar with a dedicated hero section that dynamically pulls stuff in and then there's left. So you can actually. Yeah, you can just do. What you were thinking is let them build out a locations page template and copy and paste it. Yep, we're good. Sorry, excuse me. Pardon me.

Gavin Taylor: So what was I. Hold on. Okay, so location. So this is going to be the actual locations page. I'm going to make sure that there's updates to. So this is current. Is a single post type. Okay. For the actual, like, location info. Where would I put that in?

Chris LaFay: So, like, address and all that Jazz. Yeah. So go ahead and edit. Go ahead and edit. Snowville Edit.

Gavin Taylor: A quick edit.

Chris LaFay: Edit. Okay, so this all was hiding behind the Google Meet window earlier. So on the right hand side, you see location details.

Gavin Taylor: M.

Chris LaFay: To the right.

Gavin Taylor: Right, right. Good catch. Oh, so the reason I was asking you about the whole UFC thing, side, my head's a million different places. I was gonna ask you if you watch that fight this weekend, Like a big fight. I don't do a whole lot of sports betting, but I'm on, like, a major win streak right now and I ain't some good money. I'm so happy about it.

Chris LaFay: I was at the banana ball game in Atlanta, so that.

Gavin Taylor: Oh, really? I had a couple things this weekend.

Chris LaFay: Dude is Banana ball is the best thing ever. I will go to my grave with that is absolutely the most fun you will have at a sporting event. You will not stop smiling.

Gavin Taylor: Now. I. I follow that immensely.

Chris LaFay: The owner on this. While you're on this. So you'll notice at the very bottom of that, you'll see scheduling iframe.

Gavin Taylor: Yep.

Chris LaFay: That I haven't filled in yet. I'll let you put whatever you want to in there. And when you do that, letting you know this is. I also realize that some of these scheduling iframes might also require, like, JavaScript in the header and stuff like that, or they might be a little bit weird. So when you test this out for the first time, please let me know what you do. And if it doesn't work, let me know what. What you're doing and what you're expecting it to be. And maybe Some of the. The bumps that you. You know, probably what's happening. So I haven't worked.

Gavin Taylor: Yeah, this is iframe. I can show it to you right now. I want to say. That's it.

Chris LaFay: Let's see what happens. Make sure you refresh it.

Gavin Taylor: Yeah, no, it's because it has to have the JavaScript. Unless I pulled the wrong one.

Chris LaFay: Now you might have to look.

Gavin Taylor: This is it. Because it's the API key, right? Oh, it's because it didn't pull the actual API key. It hit it.

Chris LaFay: On the. When you copied and pasted the ur. The iframe code.

Gavin Taylor: No, it's hidden in the inspect panel. That's weird. So this API key right here. Yeah, right here. Those dots is because the entire thing's hidden. This is the full.

Chris LaFay: But if you. If you right clicked on the whole iframe tag and you said copy it should. It should include that. Scroll up some for me. Yeah, there it is.

Gavin Taylor: Now it is for sure. So.

Chris LaFay: Oh, you pasted. Okay, I got you. I got. Got you. My bad.

Gavin Taylor: Refresh. No, it's because it needs a JavaScript in the header. That's so I don't know what the JavaScript is right now. I'll test this out later.

Chris LaFay: Well, do you want to keep that iframe in there?

Gavin Taylor: No, because I'm going to test it with a different one. Okay, cool.

Chris LaFay: This is the part that I haven't been able to fully test. So fine. When you get the script added in and you get the right iframe added in, let me know what happens or what doesn't happen.

Gavin Taylor: And then if there's multiple location, this pulls up a drop down menu. Cool.

Chris LaFay: And then the phone number changes to a. A multi. The two row thing. Snowville phone number, Loganville phone number.

Gavin Taylor: And we have an updated coupon site.

Chris LaFay: These are whatever ones were preloaded at the very beginning when I built the coupons at the very beginning of time. Now you can go in and edit those to your heart's content. And if you want me to change the defaults, just send me.

Gavin Taylor: Let me go back here. So if I go back to like the coupon section, I'm saying is that these the coupons are showing or is this. What was the before. Okay.

Chris LaFay: Oh, I'm sorry, I dropped the dynamic coupons block onto the page. Okay, so you are seeing what's in the system and then these are just the five default ones that I generated. Okay, so if you would rather. My core question for you is if you have a list of coupons that you would change.

Gavin Taylor: It will change with every single one, so.

Chris LaFay: Which is why I didn't put too much thought behind it. It.

Gavin Taylor: Great. And how do I edit which ones display here?

Chris LaFay: So go ahead and edit the page. So click on the edit page button at the top. And by the way, I have the video recording of all of this.

Gavin Taylor: Yeah, I know.

Chris LaFay: So click on that block. And so here's your different display mode. So the display mode at the top is most recent. Then you have manual selection, which.

Gavin Taylor: Oh, I like that. I like that a lot. And then I can change the order. Okay, cool. Yep.

Chris LaFay: And then you can also do by category. So when you actually build these out, if you have a category of like Mercedes coupons, you could then display the most recent. The three most recent Mercedes coupons.

Gavin Taylor: Oh my God, this is so much easier. Cool, cool, cool.

Chris LaFay: Oh, you can't see I'm sitting here making faces at you, like excited. But then I realize you can't see my face, which is fine. Just know that I made excited faces.

Gavin Taylor: Okay, cool. No, I'm so happy with this.

Chris LaFay: Okay, and then the full resolve dynamic. Go back to the. Go back to your view really quick. So not the editor, but the. You have a tab open. That's fine. Scroll the way, scroll the way to the bottom. So where it says Snowville, that is the grids, the. The footer grid block. So if you have more than two, more than one, it'll do it in like a, like a tic tac toe grid. And then that schedule online button at the bottom right is also the CTA button that will automatically pop up. And if there's multiple locations, it'll then switch to a drop down menu to allow you to choose which ones. It is the same core button that is inside the hero section. It's just.

Gavin Taylor: What about these. Social icons? Is that in the same block?

Chris LaFay: No. So I didn't touch social icons at all.

Gavin Taylor: Okay, that's fine.

Chris LaFay: I don't think I did.

Gavin Taylor: What are we doing in the ACF fields then?

Chris LaFay: Acf. So Advanced custom fields. All of the blocks that I built are all advanced custom fields blocks.

Gavin Taylor: Okay, cool.

Chris LaFay: But all of the field sets are loaded in through code so that nobody can accidentally fuss with anything.

Gavin Taylor: Okay.

Chris LaFay: Because even if you could mess with something in one of those fields, the code would not know what you did. So if you edited it or added something new, nothing would happen. So.

Gavin Taylor: And that reduces bloat on that too, right? Because it's going directly to code and not plugin.

Chris LaFay: And you can. I know there was One other location that you mentioned to me in a previous meeting that you're using Gravity Forms for, but the email coupons do not require Gravity Forms anymore.

Gavin Taylor: So how do I. How do we. The only other form that we use on here is the Contact Us form. And very, what I say, very rarely, seldomly, do we use a on page, like, application form.

Chris LaFay: Like a job application form.

Gavin Taylor: Yeah.

Chris LaFay: Okay.

Gavin Taylor: So would I still want to use Gravity Forms for that or can we somehow integrate that?

Chris LaFay: I mean, hypothetically, could we build. So this is.

Gavin Taylor: I don't want to over complicate it.

Chris LaFay: This is my suggestion. Have your developers write a few lines of code to see if they can figure out how to conditionally load in Gravity fields. Gravity forms, JavaScript only on pages that it's loaded on. I don't know the answer to that question. I'll have to do some research on it, but I believe that that is possible. That would be better because it would still give you the flexibility of Gravity Forms in the future. Because if you completely get rid of it and you need a random form build, you don't want to rely on a developer to build you a custom form. That sounds dangerous to me.

Gavin Taylor: So that's actually what they're gonna be, is that's gonna reduce blow on the main page and the PPC pages because we don't have either on those locations info. Go to the. Coupon edit, go to the coupon block and you can manually change. Okay. These are like the big things I needed to know. Perfect. And these are the same things I'm actually learning WordPress now. And it's making a lot more sense to me is the. We're slowly taking out all the bullshit my old developer had in here that was completely throwing me off. I really understand WordPress on a much deeper level now. Okay, cool.

Chris LaFay: And this, this is why, like, this can. So, like, it's so Easy to bloat WordPress it is so easy. But like I.

Gavin Taylor: And he bloated it by trying to unbloat it, which is what's wild to me.

Chris LaFay: I just launched a website with three plugins and one of them is Marker IO. Now don't get me wrong, it's like an eight page website. Like, it's not that. It's not that hefty.

Gavin Taylor: But I also use the plugin often for marker. Or do you manually pull the.

Chris LaFay: I use the plugin because it's literally, I click one button and it's just done.

Gavin Taylor: See, I haven't even installed it on any of the websites. I just Go and manually do it because I like, like the squares and the pointy and whatever. It makes it easier. And also I go in and delete websites so I don't have to pay for the.

Chris LaFay: Oh yeah. Also like with the, with the website that I just launched for myself that's very video game oriented and very graphics heavy. I got it to a 75 on Google PSI, which if you were to go look at my website, there's a lot of images and a lot of video and last I checked my homepage loaded at 75 psi, which that's not bad for like I'm not going for 90s, I'm just not. I don't need it in the 90s.

Gavin Taylor: Yeah. And that you are running a ton of traffic, like paid traffic 100.

Chris LaFay: It doesn't matter. And so, but the fact that I can get a image heavy, video heavy homepage to a 75 with a dated site, like I actually haven't actually rebuilt my classic City site from scratch. It's always been an evolution. So there is bloat.

Gavin Taylor: Yeah.

Chris LaFay: So anyway, I digress.

Gavin Taylor: We actually have gone very, very, very, very, very heavy into speed optimization. So we are about 100 hours down on that with this senior developer we've been working with and they're finally rounding that off this week and they've done so much research. So we're actually with everything that we've done, staying with SiteGround and we are going back to. For now we might be going to Astro, but for now with all of our options that we've done and the control and everything between Craig and this developer, they found that Astro plus Cloudflare is giving us the best control over the site speed stuff. And then. Oh, they were going to do one more thing. I think it's a cloud for apo. Oh no, this is what goes over. No, APO is a cdn. Cdn. It's giving them the best results. We completely took out Flywheel, we completely took out Rocket Dart Net. None of those give us the control we need. So he still hates WordPress, but we have made so much progress.

Chris LaFay: So intrigued, so and so, so very intrigued. Now is that basically going to be where you're still building everything within WordPress but Astro is just serving up a flat HTML file that has no database calls. Is that because like, if you're gonna say hosted on SiteGround, I'm assuming there's Astro Flat.

Gavin Taylor: While we work with WordPress, we're gonna stay with SiteGround and Cloudflare. But if we do make the switch over to Astro. And now there is a big if, because if everything goes well with the site speed stuff, it solved all of our problems with WordPress. And we will stick with WordPress. That plus everything that we've done in here, I think it's a good chance we stick with WordPress. So crystal things, Astro is the way to go. Okay, so we only have a couple more minutes. Yeah. Next question. I have. Do you have experience with the LLM? Hold on. LLMs text files for websites.

Chris LaFay: Oh, yeah, we. We talked a little. No, we talked about the robots. Txt file.

Gavin Taylor: Yeah, I know. Me and you talked about robots. I've actually already updated all of our sites based on what we talked about. But someone, one of like the influences or whatever, sent out a big email to all of our clients that use them, which a lot of them do, talking about how the agencies should be using this and if it they're not, they're doing something wrong. I. I hate those emails altogether, but.

Chris LaFay: Logically.

Gavin Taylor: I know we're not. And it for what I see, it's making a difference with AI stuff.

Chris LaFay: So I don't know, but I know somebody that would know. So let me.

Gavin Taylor: I do too. Claude, but. Hey, Claude, tell me what this is. No, we were just on a meeting and I just wanted to see if you had any experience with it. It says nothing more than adding a 5 file to the site.

Chris LaFay: I'm an TXC to your clients sites. I heard some noise.

Gavin Taylor: With white. It's just technical documentation.

Chris LaFay: Yeah. Okay. I just sent an email to the person, the same person I sent the robots. Txt to. I just asked her to see what her best practice was for that. I think it's done on. It might be done on a page by page basis. I'm not 100 sure, but it looks like from the literal 30 seconds of research that I've done, it's a markdown file that explains kind of what your site is.

Gavin Taylor: Throw up a file likely and upload that file. Okay. No way.

Chris LaFay: I don't think Yoast like the SEO plugin has done anything with it yet, but I could very much be wrong about that. But I'm sure it's on y road map to implement if it's a big deal.

Gavin Taylor: So I'm walking away. I'm still. I can still get my headset. I just want to let you know really quick. Perfect. And I think that is it though, because we're making some really good moves. I know we're waiting on one client to get started. We're waiting on a Bunch of images when he gets started. I think we're actually going to implement this new template and then I'll be able to test out everything that we built. We're waiting on images now. And then another website that we're working on is actually. This is actually a pretty decent website, so I don't want to do too much on it. What do you mean by that? So we just brought on this client. I actually love this website layout.

Chris LaFay: Oh, shoot.

Gavin Taylor: Okay. So we're probably just gonna use this existing website and optimize it. So there's not much to do here. So now, now we're in a place, I don't know. And I'm gonna talk with our team. I don't know what else. We need to work on a regular basis together. I definitely want to have you in my corner like as needed. But I think we're in a really good spot after working together for the last several months.

Chris LaFay: Yeah, at the end of the day you let me know.

Gavin Taylor: Your contract says 30 day out. Right. So yeah, you obviously need that 30 days. So what I'm gonna ask you to do, I'll let you know on that. What I'm gonna ask you to do is just like come up with something for the next 30 days. Like, hey, here's what you're thinking that we can implement where we're at right now being in a big question mark above our heads with say on WordPress or not the plugins in a really good spot. I think our process is in a really good spot. We just need to define it now. So yeah, I think we're. We're in a good spot right now.

Chris LaFay: Fantastic. I'll think through some other things that we could possibly automate some more because I think the more that you can have stored in the back end of the website, the less that has to change in code on a site by site basis. The more you can change via a form, the more you could actually introduce AI into the mix. A lot easier as well too. I'll go through and I'll look through some things and see what other stuff can be better automated and come to the table with some ideas for that next week. Next week is not a weird week. It next week for me is not a weird week. It's the. I have a 15 minute phone call that starts at one and it's with a client that's about to. It's her last day is next week.

Gavin Taylor: Okay?

Chris LaFay: I normally will move it. I was planning on actually moving it permanently, but I found out today that it is her last two weeks at the company. So next Monday at 1pm Eastern. I'm gonna find out more this afternoon. So either I will have that meeting with her on Monday and it'll be my last one with her.

Gavin Taylor: We can likely have a short call. Don't worry about moving it. We'll just have a short call. And then the first week of June, I will be out. I'm closing on my house on the 21st a little over a week. And I took off the first week in June to go redo all the floors because my wife can't live with carpet even a day. So there you go.

Chris LaFay: Throughout that whole week. Okay, cool.

Gavin Taylor: Yeah, yeah.

Chris LaFay: Okay, I'm gonna go ahead and move that. Remove that from my calendar for right now.

Gavin Taylor: And I gotta hop. I have a client call connect via email.

Chris LaFay: Catch. Later. Bye.

Gavin Taylor: Yeah, bye.