Spark Novus - Current

Spark Novus: What we want to be able to do is get all. All full body.

Chris LaFay: And so it's like you're kind of creating space just between like legs, armpits.

Spark Novus: You can even sort of like square up your feet.

Chris LaFay: And then along with that too, it's like a nice little bend in the knees.

Spark Novus: That way. Yeah, that way we can. Where your elbows, your joints, everything like that. You don't you.

Chris LaFay: It.

Spark Novus: There he is.

Chris LaFay: Good morning. Check if it was morning or afternoon. Here we are. The joy of not having too many meetings today. The time just kind of goes by.

Spark Novus: All right?

Chris LaFay: Yes, sir. So I know that you have a fairly limited amount of time today. We can jump right in. Did you have a chance to watch the loom video that I sent you yesterday?

Spark Novus: I did not. I was in calls back to back and I was trying to watch it this morning and I couldn't because again, I was in calls the whole time.

Chris LaFay: Got you. Okay, so what I want to do. What I want to do here today is I'm going to walk you through a little bit about what. What I accomplished over the last couple weeks, just because I think seeing something is helpful in general. On the flip side of that, there is still a good. Of course I moved out of this from my email inbox. The list that Austin sent over was fairly vague. That's not a complaint. It's just a. There's. There's a few things in here that are specific, like put the lead form in, do the URL matching, blog updates, things like that. That all makes sense, but stuff like content elements and mobile adjustments and then pending site sections and elements that need fixes. Those are. Those could be a number of different things. Yeah, this is my gut. I'm gonna just kind of like jump right into my gut reaction. Actually, let me out before I say that. My gut reaction is because I'm having trouble remembering the names of the people that you've mentioned before. Austin is on the SNI team and is not one of the two people that were butting heads with each other. Correct?

Spark Novus: Correct.

Chris LaFay: Okay. Do you think because Austin Melso mentioned the very bottom of his email, most of these items are already a work in progress? Is that because Austin is doing them?

Spark Novus: No. So I haven't. Austin is not. Austin is doing all content oriented things, but John the developer and Dylan the infrastructure guy, they're going back and forth and everything. And you know, we were supposed to have a meeting last time. The John was a no, no show. I was like so annoying. Anyway, so we're going to meet Tomorrow. But I am getting ready to tell them, hey, guys, we're going to pause for a little bit. I aligned with Andres as the CEO of the company yesterday and I just told him, you know, I said I was just giving him an update on what's happening. I told him, you know, you had a look and all that kind of stuff. But I think we decided that instead of letting them both kind of run riot, let's just put a pause for just a minute till the time we regroup and figure out who we're going to go work with. Because both of them are hourly and all these discussions meet trying to be mediators, just sort of the meters running. So. So what I wanted to do is put a pause at it. So Austin doesn't know yet. So I'm, I'm going to inform Austin today. He and me are talking later today and saying, hey, I'm going to pause them and I'm going to send an email to the both of them and saying, hey, spoke with Andres. We're going to pause it. But John is kind of working through whatever he can. He still has questions and he and Dylan were going to get together.

Chris LaFay: But yeah, okay, so given that I don't know the depth of. So we don't need to go for these particular pieces now. But the bigger questions that I have is Spanish language selector, poly link plugin review, and then the more vague, simple ones of like the pending site sections element needs fixes and then doing an entire like mobile audit across the board. Those are very big question marks that I have. And I just, I don't know without spending more time on the elementor side what that lift is going to be. So I'm going to put.

Spark Novus: I can address that if you want.

Chris LaFay: Okay, let me put a pin in that for a moment. What I'm going to do is I'm have the lovely thing where I'm using two computers at the moment. It's not a. Not a fun place to be. So I'm going to shift over here for the moment so you get a wonderful side profile of my face and I'm gonna share this tab. It just crashed out. Son of a gun. Have you experienced this a lot? I'm actually kind of curious with Claude code running and stuff like that, that Google Chrome crashes out randomly.

Spark Novus: Yes. Well, it'll crash out if you're using the clock code plugin.

Chris LaFay: The connect. Yeah, yeah. And I've been. I thought I had been getting rid of it, but apparently I have not. Need to go over here. Yes. Asked to join. Let me try getting this back in here again because I have my. The work that. It's on my laptop.

Spark Novus: So.

Chris LaFay: Sni.

Spark Novus: Oops.

Chris LaFay: Insight. There we go. Okay, Where did Google Meet go? There it is.

Spark Novus: Okay.

Chris LaFay: Why will it not let me share my screen? There we go. Okay, so this is what. This is what I'm seeing. And let me also log in over here. I thought this was already logged in. This was logged in, but then Chrome crashed. Sorry about this. I apologize.

Spark Novus: All good.

Chris LaFay: Okay. What I have here is not a one to one. That's not. The initial goal was not one to one. So what you're looking at right now is elementor. I'm going to focus it on two very small details, but they extrapolate over.

Spark Novus: And this is. This is running on your environment.

Chris LaFay: Yeah, exactly. This is on my physical computer. Yes. Okay, so I'm sorry, not. Not this. Not the. Not the elementor side. This is actually like the staging URL that I'm logged into the back end of. And then the next thing I'll show you is the edited modified version of the site. Kind of that lighter weight thing that we were talking about last week.

Spark Novus: Yes.

Chris LaFay: I give you a. A glimpse of the one to one, not the one to one comparison, but the comparison and my thought process behind it so that you have some head knowledge. This is the elementor site and I'm going to focus in on two particular pieces here of from a longevity perspective, what some of the problems might end up being. This also drives me nuts because it takes forever to load. But that's also just a personal preference with elementor. So one of the things that I see on repeat is small things like this, like. So this little like accent that goes above the header, that is an image file that has to be dragged and dropped every single time you want to actually add that in. So if you add the wrong image, it gets edited. It's not consistent.

Spark Novus: Can we just not add it to the H1 CSS?

Chris LaFay: Bingo. Exact. So that. That's what I'm about to get to. Exactly.

Spark Novus: Okay.

Chris LaFay: And then stuff like this over here where there's a couple of places that I found where duplicative entry is happening. So like on the home page you have leadership pods and this is all manually entered. This is not custom post typed with metadata stuff along those lines as opposed.

Spark Novus: To just having a leadership thing and having check boxes, homepage, homepage, homepage, and then it just shows up. Bingo.

Chris LaFay: Exactly. So again, I'm focusing on only these two things. I didn't. I Didn't have time to like audit every single thing. But this is the type of stuff that I look for when I think of stuff like this in terms of keeping things consistent on regular basis. Now this on the other hand is what spent a couple of hours building out with a system that I have. This is all within WordPress. Sorry, let me back up. Obviously it's all WordPress, it's all within Gutenberg and custom ACF blocks, which I believe you're familiar with both of these things. So I'm not going to, not going to beat anything around there. So obviously the layouts a smidgen different. I understand that as well. But if we go over here to editing the page, what we're going to see are something like for this marquee scroller with the logos custom block, you drop your logos, you set your speed and you're done. Over here, when we're looking at the team, you have the ability to add in headlines and whatnot, but then you just choose which of the people that you want to actually toss in there. Or you can then cat one of the things that hasn't been built yet, but the ability to categorize these people. Because I noticed you had speakers and then team members and there was some cross pollination there. So the ability to just have a checkbox of show all team members or show all speakers, that simple. And then now you just have everything looking nice and consistent. Now I did not do a massive data import here, I just did Ron's. But now all of this stuff is powered through a custom post type, advanced custom fields and everything is nice and automated. It's also freaking fast as well too.

Spark Novus: Right.

Chris LaFay: So those are the two pieces that I focus on primarily. You can see you kind of brought in some of the button styles. Brought in a majority of the style obviously the little like quadro, like the quadrant motion thing, that's all weird. This is all much more lightweight and it's going to be a lot simpler to edit in the future. Now the thing is I don't know what your, I don't know what the propensity for the doing this again is. My goal here is not to pitch you on something you don't need. I don't really care about that. I wanted to show you what the other option looked like. So based on what I know now, and really the biggest piece of that lack of knowledge is the, the Spanish language poly lane plugin piece.

Spark Novus: So let me talk about that. Yeah, so yeah, go for it. That's the phase two we're not going to do the Spanish language later. But one of the things I did want to know is which plugin to use and I wanted to maintain language parity in URLs where it's slash BS for Spanish. You okay? You're mute.

Chris LaFay: Sorry. I don't know how to drink water. The little flap in my throat doesn't work like everybody else does.

Spark Novus: So I know all about that. Yes.

Chris LaFay: Uhhuh. Dude. Covid. Obviously the COVID times sucked, don't get me wrong. But like when you actually did go out like kind of at the, the. The fringe ends of it.

Spark Novus: Yeah.

Chris LaFay: Every time I was at a restaurant I just hacked up along because I drank, you know, one sip of Coke and was like, I promise, I promise I'm not amongst the diseased. Just don't know. Anyway, yeah, so.

Spark Novus: So on the. On the language. Yeah, the Spanish is phase two. But I did want to know how it's going to show up, you know, in the nav. Where is the language selector going to be and that sort of thing. And then there were discussion about two plugins. One was the WPML plugin and then the other one was the one that Austin said. Polylang. I think so, yeah. It was more. We can put a pin in it. We don't need to do anything in it right now because that could be a phase two thing. So we're not going live with Spanish, we're going live with English essentially. And Spanish will come later. So that's number one. What else was on your list?

Chris LaFay: So let me just respond to that really quick. It's been a while since I have touched multilingual. Let me talk with one of my lead devs about what they recommend doing and I can give you an answer about that.

Spark Novus: Sounds good.

Chris LaFay: The other question. So there was that. So those were. Those were two separate bullet points combined into one.

Spark Novus: The.

Chris LaFay: You and I talked about the blog the other day about how it just didn't get imported. Well and so that's all. That's all fairly. That could all be figured out. I'm not too worried about that. The other ones were very generic. These are all kind of grouped in as one question. Content elements with mobile adjustment Pending site sections for media coverage elements need fixes. Bools Site section.

Spark Novus: Okay, so let's go one by one. So which was the second one?

Chris LaFay: Pending site sections Media coverage.

Spark Novus: Right. So there were. It's all content. So that would be Austin. That's where we've got. There are some pending items on the new. On the old Website that he's not put on the new website or those sections exist but he's not added the content for that. So that's the second one. What was the first one?

Chris LaFay: Content elements, mobile adjustments. I'm assuming that just means mobile responsiveness.

Spark Novus: Yes. So there was some response. He did QA and there was some responsive things that did not work. So it was just adjusting that it wasn't monumental, it wasn't major. So it was, you know, tweaks here and there just to make sure that it renders correctly. And then what was the third one?

Chris LaFay: Elements need fixes. Bools. B O O L S site section. I thought it was Boolean, like true and false, but that doesn't make sense either.

Spark Novus: Yeah, that third one doesn't make sense to me. So I'm gonna ping him on via chat, ask him what the hell is bull. Yeah.

Chris LaFay: And then lead form. I'm assuming there's like a HubSpot or a Salesforce, like. Yeah, put in.

Spark Novus: Yeah, we use Ninja form and basically it's one, literally one form and that one form integrates with Salesforce and we have a Salesforce guy. So the last time when we did this, John and me finalized the form when I inherited the website. There were like 18 forms that were all doing different things, different questions, different fields of like, what a cluster. So we went through, created one master form and then it creates a short code. Ninja form does. And then we just plugged in the short code and all the pages. So it was. So there's the whole thing runs off of one form and then that one form. John did his part and then I worked with our Salesforce guy, his name is jk. He's out of India to get the right credentials and whatever, configure test and all those things. So that was it. And then now all that stuff goes into Salesforce as we speak. Yeah.

Chris LaFay: So this if I'm taking mentally outside of the team members and blog posts, I'm kind of mentally taking out content importing since Austin can do that. If we were to take what you have now, build it in what I basically just showed you within WordPress using for like team members, like custom post types with ACF fields. Everything's nice and dynamic. And then these lighter weight blocks as well too. That's going to be about a 7, 500 lift. And then giving Austin the education he needs of like here's your 15 building blocks that you have at your disposal. Go forth and conquer. I don't know if that makes sense for you guys or not, but also doing the lift of doing all this in elementor kind of the rest of this still is a little bit of a black box, mainly around like mobile adjustments and stuff like that. Because then you're kind of writing CSS code infinitely. Not infinitely, but there's. I don't know, all these pages are built slightly differently. There might be different mobile fixes on different things. So that's the part that concerns me the most, is kind of the black box on elementor of everything has to be hand built and everything. All the mobile stuff is going to have to be done in their UI rather than we have a block. We can then make sure that that's mobile responsive and once it's responsive, once it's done.

Spark Novus: Got it.

Chris LaFay: So I'm giving like those are your options. I'm not a big fan of taking something that's seemingly at 80 to 85% and starting new. That's not what I like. But I also don't like finishing something that might not be the best fit going forward and at the end of the day.

Spark Novus: So let me ask you. Yeah. I mean I, I ask you hypothetically, if you were to start from scratch to the website, what you were seeing, what would that run us? If you were to do it from scratch, that.

Chris LaFay: So what I just showed you would be about 7, 500 bucks.

Spark Novus: Oh, okay. If you were to do it from scratch.

Chris LaFay: Yeah, so like what? Yeah, so with the, like I. They already have the foundation here. So like what we just looked at. And there's also in the loom video as well too, if you wanted to refresher on it later. All of this is like what you just see here is all built. So like technically speaking, the navigation, the footer is good, the multi column layouts is good, the FAQs are good, etc.

Spark Novus: Yeah, I meant it wasn't a rescue project. It was net new, clean.

Chris LaFay: Oh, I apologize. I understand what you're saying. Now this is probably again not counting page builds, so only counting and importing the blog and importing the team members. Because it's structured well on the staging site. I'm going to pretend that the staging site is the live site for right now.

Spark Novus: Yes.

Chris LaFay: Taking your team members and then basically having AI go and organize that data into data objects, importing it into a team member cpt, but not worrying about content on the rest of the pages and letting Austin handle that. That's about a $15,000 website.

Spark Novus: Okay.

Chris LaFay: Roughly from like soup to nuts. And this is actually what we did for another client. We actually Just built out the entire skeleton and did all the automated stuff and then said, here's your library of 15 things. Go forth and prosper.

Spark Novus: And that then this would be like 7,500 would get us live, then whatever maintenance, what have you.

Chris LaFay: And the difference between the 7515K is normally design. So even though I'm using your staging site as the example right now, I know that that's the updated design. So that cuts the price down a lot. If we were going like, if we didn't have the staging site or let's say that the staging site was the old design, that Delta 15K is the, the QA process and the design and going back and forth on design iterations. So.

Spark Novus: Okay, sounds good. I will. Have we discussed that when I was talking about the new website with the CEO, like, hey, what is your target budget? Like, what do you. What's your appetite and everything? And it's so funny. Like I. This is between you and me. Off the record, you and me, the note takers, of course. But the, you know, the. When, when we started this project, the company is, in my opinion, beyond the upwork resourcing at this point. But he is a big upwork fan. He'll just go find people in upwork and do stuff and everything. And. And I was like, I don't know if this is such a strategic project, whether it should be enough work thing, because I haven't. I mean, I don't use upwork a lot, but I've only heard horror stories about upwork.

Chris LaFay: Anyway, I've had one or two successes. You have to be. You have to dedicate a lot of time to do filtering in sample projects. And then when you find your gold mine, you basically just be like, hello, you're mine.

Spark Novus: Yeah, exactly. So I was like, we went through. There's an agency that they use that we like that. I know we have a good relationship with the CEO of that agency and we work through that. We built it, we scoped it, and da, da, da. It was along the same pricing that you provided. And he was like, yeah, I don't know if I want to spend that much. And he went with the upward thing. And I'm like, okay, well it's your thing. And. And then here we are. And that's. This is back in like November. So this is supposed to go live in January and now we're looking at, you know, May. And now we're calling the project. And this is, this would be onto. Alexis disappeared. And this is the new you Know the new dynamic duo who can't talk to each other, the odd couple. And now this would be. You would be the third kind of resource. So whoever we end up going with would be the third resource. So yeah, so he did not give me a budget amount. He did tell me that he, he's like, hey, who are you talking to? Us. I was, that I was telling him that I was talking to you and I was talking to one more agency. And he was like, oh, I know somebody else too. And I went, geez, okay, whatever. So hopefully it's not enough work person. But you know, and I told him that like, like I said, hey, the whole idea is we need to work with an agency. He did ask me, I sent him your website. He did say, hey, this seems very Chris centric where the team's down below. Yeah, I saw, I saw that. I told him that. But he was like, is it. Is it just Chris with a bunch of other freelancers and all that kind of stuff? Like in other words, if Chris is sick or goes on vacation, are we going to work with somebody else or is it only Chris? You know? So I was like, to the best of my knowledge, it's an agency and there's a team and they all work together. But I said, I will run it by Chris. So what is your response to that one?

Chris LaFay: Yeah, so let's actually. So for the project, this is going to be a very quick turn project.

Spark Novus: Yeah.

Chris LaFay: If they agree to it, basically I will end up doing the building part because I have 25 of it done already. That's not entirely. Sorry. My dog moved and scared the crap out of me. I have a good part of the foundation work done already in terms of maintenance. This is actually the other topic I wanted to talk to you about today is based on what you were telling me for longer term, it sounds like there are two primary buckets here. One is random quick fixes, plugin updates, making sure that, you know, the server goes down on WP engine, you have somebody to reach out to. All that jazz, blah, blah, blah. On the flip side, every so often, not on any sort of set schedule, maybe once a quarter, give or take, there will be an actual project of actual functionality work that needs to be done. Basically the maintenance work is going to far supersede the project work in terms of quantity of requests. I'm not set up for random maintenance stuff. But you know Mickey Melon, right? Green Melon? He and I partner up on stuff like this all the time. He. All he does is maintenance. So he'll have you own your own hosting, just like we talked about last week. You'll own your WP engine account, but he'll sit on top and do all of the support tickets. So if you need anything random done, bada bing, bada boom when it comes to functionality, that's when he brings me in. Because he does not have any builds anymore.

Spark Novus: Right. So I'm just wondering, like, why do we need him? In other words, if content is being handled by Austin and all development requests go to you, what is the value that Mickey is adding?

Chris LaFay: Are you wanting somebody? So when what I interpreted our chat last week as, and correct me if I'm wrong here, is that there are going to be small things that you might need to have done on a kind of, on a monthly basis that would kind of fall into that maintenance type of bucket.

Spark Novus: So, so there's. Well, I. Let me define it and then we can talk about it. So there are three things that need to be done. So there is like, you know, WordPress has plugin updates, maintenance, blah blah, blah. Like that's the server part of it, WB engine part of it. That's one. Number two is anything that needs new development work, templates, whatever, those sort of things. And the third is the day to day content updates. Hey, add this new blog and remove this person, he's left the team. Add this new person, whatever those sort of things. We have an event, we have media coverage, there's ongoing things that happen. So those are the three things. The last one, the content, day to day content updates and everything we don't need anybody for. Because that's Austin. Right. So that leaves the other two things. Any development work, new template, change, functionality, whatever, those sort of things. And then the WordPress engine, plugin update, security patches, whatever, you know, all those things. My assumption was you do both of those things. Is that not true?

Chris LaFay: So we, so what we do on a longer term basis is more of the functionality in the building pieces. So what Mickey does is the plugin updates, the maintenance. And then typically speaking, when most people say they need some new templates built out for pages, that also falls into that. Because those are typically things you can knock out in about 15 or 30 minutes, give or take. And that's what he does very well. What I'm not set up for is those emails that pop in that are like, hey, these plugins are up to date. I don't have the systems to do automatic plugin updates. Things along those lines, maintenance things, stuff along that all what I have, the what I have the ability to do is when we're building out new sets of functionality, that's what my company is built for. And so whether that's project work or development work, ongoing, that's what I have the setup for.

Spark Novus: So if, if Mickey has the ability to do dev work and this and that, why would I come to you?

Chris LaFay: So he doesn't, he doesn't do any of the development work. He'll build out page templates for you, he'll keep up your plugin updates, things like that. He's not going to build out new functional. So like for example, the Spanish language selector and all that kind of fun stuff, he's not going to touch that. That's not going to be him. But if your content person's like, hey, we need a couple new templates built out, that's something that he can do.

Spark Novus: Okay.

Chris LaFay: And so he does like the 1530 minute tasks, whereas I handle all the development oriented project based work.

Spark Novus: Yeah, but the more you're saying it, it makes me think that Austin can handle the 1530 minute tasks.

Chris LaFay: Oh, well then in that case then the only thing you would need is just basically if anything goes, if that's what if all you're needing, then in that case is development work, then that's all fine. Then develop that at all.

Spark Novus: Then development and server plugin patch up or whatever. Because I don't want to do what we're currently doing. I mean I can ask the, Dylan, who's our current guy, you know, I can ask Dylan, but he's again the, the whole point of us finding an agency was like one throw to choke. We need one person to do all of it. But if you are not doing the, the server maintenance and all that kind of stuff and that's Mickey and then you were doing just the development. We're back to two people, right?

Chris LaFay: If all, if you're not, if Austin is going to handle all the like template creation, all that kind of fun stuff and all the page updates and things like that that you originally divided out, I thought there was going to be enough work there to where there's gonna be enough of these 30 minute template creation tasks to where those are the types of things that fall off our company's plate very easily. And that's why I wanted to kind of partner up with Mickey on it. However, if Austin's going to be handling most of that and the primary thing that you're going to be coming with is, hey, this next Sprint we're going to unlock the, the Spanish Sprint stuff. Let's talk about that project. That's great. No need for it. So that would be something that we could definitely handle. And then we'll turn on automated updates on WP Engine and call it a day. And if anything happens on the site that would take it going down or anything like that, which doesn't really happen on WP Engine, then we would just do hourly for any of that stuff at that point. So. So in that case, you can basically just say the last five to ten minutes of this conversation, you just push it aside. We can handle the build and then when development stuff arises, let us know.

Spark Novus: Okay. It just doesn't make me very confident where the idea was like I want somebody accountable for. Everything outside of day to day maintenance. I wanted someone to be accountable for the rest. So I think the automated updates and you're right, most, for the most part the automated updates work and that sort of thing. But if that is something you are not doing, that's something you guys are not set up for. You know, plugins and patches and this and that. If that's not your routine thing. Right.

Chris LaFay: Sounds like it isn't. But in reality the website will probably have about five to seven plugins all on automatic updates through WP Engine. And WP Engine has rollback procedures as well too when stuff doesn't work. So if that's really the only thing that needs to happen, we can get all of that toggled on at the very beginning so that we don't have to worry about it. And WordPress engine has good processes with that. We just don't. We just basically don't do anything for like 200 bucks a month and make sure the lights stay on. Like that's not our. That's not our bread and butter.

Spark Novus: And so you guys typically do the development work and then hand it off to a Mickey Melon or whoever.

Chris LaFay: For most smaller businesses that don't need ongoing growth with their website, yes, that's what.

Spark Novus: Okay, all right, sounds good. I will check on the budget and have a. Have a discussion. And I realized that my note taker is not here. So if you can send me yours, then I will have a discussion internally and then I will get back to you. By the time you're back, you're out remainder of the week. Right.

Chris LaFay: Unless you're han. So I am out. Hey, your note taker didn't make it. That's weird.

Spark Novus: Odd.

Chris LaFay: Yeah, I was like, sometimes I miss the Ding Dongs that go in. So that was actually last week. I was out the remainder of the week. So this week I'm here all week. Yeah, I'm okay. Yeah. No, it's not until later June, so.

Spark Novus: Okay, Sounds good. So I should be able to speak to the other the one agency that I was going to talk to anyways. And then now I have a second one provided by the CEO. So I'm gonna by the end of the week, I should have spoken to everybody. And then I can circle back with you next week on where we landed and we can go from there.

Chris LaFay: That sounds good.

Spark Novus: Awesome, man. Thank you.

Chris LaFay: Well, have a wonderful rest of day. And if you all come up with any questions in the interim, holler me and let me know.

Spark Novus: Will do. Thanks. Bye.

Chris LaFay: Take care, man.

Spark Novus: Bye.