PRX Engage (TrialPort) - Website rebuild sales call

Chris LaFay: Good morning.

Charlie Myrick: Hey, Chris, how you doing?

Chris LaFay: I hosted an event all day yesterday and I am not an extroverted person at all. So I was tired yesterday and I slept great last night and today bouncing between like 30 minute meetings. I have 30 minutes, 30 minutes off, 30 minutes on, 30 minutes off. I'm excited for tomorrow where I have nothing on the docket and so obviously I'm not complaining about having great calls with great people. That's not my thing. I'm just a real person and that's just who I am. So here we are how I am.

Charlie Myrick: I've been in the same boat, been there, so I understand.

Chris LaFay: What's exciting. What's exciting with you.

Charlie Myrick: We're doing an event next week in Boston, so that'll be cool. We're just having a couple speakers out to a little industry mixer type of thing. And then as far as you know, we just released a huge addition to our platform. So that's kind of what we're showcasing. So that's exciting.

Chris LaFay: Very nice, man. Very nice. I'm. I am curious. How did you stumble upon Classic City?

Charlie Myrick: Okay, so from David Guthrie, actually, who I don't know if you've worked with him, but he's the CEO of Repay and.

Chris LaFay: Okay, yeah, we actually, we white labeled that, that website. We, they had a marketing firm called Liger. Liger didn't have web on their side. And so we worked with Liger for probably about a year and a half or so, basically doing all of their web design and development and whatnot.

Charlie Myrick: So yeah, so I mean, it was actually, it was through just poking at their site that I found you guys from the, the WordPress theme.

Chris LaFay: Ah, okay.

Charlie Myrick: There's a comment in there.

Chris LaFay: There's a real. So we don't, we don't normally put a lot of stuff. Now we will say like, we put like the author, like of the theme. The author says classic Stuff City. But outside of that, we typically don't do much else. I've been in business for what, legitimately for 10 years, but 20 years if you include all like the college freelance stuff I did.

Charlie Myrick: Right.

Chris LaFay: Yeah, I think you're all my businesses, word of mouth. I think you are actually the first person that has said, I looked at the theme, I looked at the code or any of those number of things and was like, I found it. So thank you for putting a new little like, item on my registry of like, found by code effectively. So, yes, love it. Thank you for sharing that. That excites me deeply. Yeah. Did y' all do work with Repay or did you just happen to go to the repay site and just like.

Charlie Myrick: So David is on our board, he's one of our primary investors. So we were like, all right, let's, let's go look at some of their sites, see what they look like. And Repay was a good example. Dug in. Yeah.

Chris LaFay: Okay, cool. Okay, that's not important anymore. Sorry, that just. No, no, no, no, of course it, it was different. It was not what I was expecting today. So that's, that's, that's delightful. But yeah, I never worked with David. They worked mostly with their like CMO or marketing crew and whatnot. Awesome. Thank you for the email that you sent me yesterday. That all. That all makes sense. Sense. So let's game to just dive right in here. So talk to me a little bit about. So I, I did a little bit of research yesterday and what I'm seeing on the current trial port site and please correct me if I'm wrong because I don't have backend access here. Yeah, yeah, you have somewhere between like 10 and 15 actual pages of content and probably like 60, 70, 80, a little bit less than 100, like blog posts and things like that. That.

Charlie Myrick: Yeah, that's right.

Chris LaFay: Okay. In terms of. Let's talk a little bit about information architecture and what's needed versus what's desired. I'm going to kind of call this like phase one and phase two. Obviously you've had other phases prior to this as well, but this next version kind of for launch for the website on the front end to be successful. Let's not talk about the back end editing stuff for the moment. What, where are you leaning towards for that information architecture? Because right now you have a pretty simple site with pretty decently clear calls to action as well too. I think there's some, some buttoning up that could be done, but it's fairly straightforward. So talk to me a little bit about that.

Charlie Myrick: So look, the biggest thing is we have been having a couple issues with our current web dev team, you know, through no fault of their own, but it's more of a situation of the people that they have doing the edits on their side. Don't quite know WordPress as in depth as I would imagine that they should. We have just some weirdness in the install, if that makes sense. I don't inherently dislike the site, but it does feel a little bit basic for the space that we're in right now. I think content wise it's fine. I think call to action wise it's fine. But yeah, so I Guess background. I mean, I'm really, I'm not a web designer at all. I am a developer and have turned into a CTO through doing that. Yeah, exactly. So, you know, I can kind of sense when it's wrong, but I can't exactly say what feels wrong about it besides that it feels just not up to snuff for the industry. And then also I will say like the load times, if you, you know, pop a new incognito window open and just go to it. It takes forever if that's not saved in the cache. Yeah. You know, all the plugins and stuff are out of date. Just stuff that feels wrong is the best way I can describe it. I know I'm not quite answering your question here, but.

Chris LaFay: No, you're fine. Because in general I don't have a. I don't have any problems with like the core aesthetic of what you're trying to go through. Like, I know when you submitted the form you have less than a $20,000 budget, so we're not going to go through and do this like humongous, like, big design overhaul with it. Like, you have, you have parts and pieces that are, that are solid here. And I think my opinion is what, what I think that you're seeing is consistency from pages to pages and they kind of, they don't look different, but there's just some stuff that's. Like when you see font sizes that are slightly different from one another, from one page to another, some like line spacings, that's different. Sometimes you have drop shadows behind things, sometimes you don't. I think it's those. You also have a lot of dead, a lot of white space with very minimal content as well too. And sometimes that's good, but also sometimes that sucks. And I think that you need to have. My, my opinion is I think you have a lot of good stuff here. I don't think there needs to be a ginormous redesign. I think it's more about tightening up that style guide, which is something that you mentioned either in the, the form submission or the follow up email. I forget which. It just needs to get tighter, I think. So kind of a couple core thoughts from aesthetics are you have a really great gradient, which sounds kind of like an odd thing to say, but it stands out. It stands out on both light and dark backgrounds, which is very hard to do, mind you.

Charlie Myrick: There's like five options.

Chris LaFay: Yeah, exactly. And so if you stick with one singular gradient, but you only use that gradient on actual calls to action, that's going to make everything else appear not muted, but it's going to make that CTA stand out a lot more. And if you adjust your button sizes and button styles a little bit to kind of, you know, have a little bit more motion, like when on hover effects, when those buttons are highlight and you use that gradient for like big background sections of like, like main CTAs with content inside of it. And then you pick. You have a lot of colors in the color palette that you sent over. If we pick two of those colors to complement as just kind of like solid informational colors and not using all of them now you have less of a rainbow happening. And whenever you see the gradient, you're going to be like, that's a cta. So not using the gradient in the big hero sections anymore. That's. That's my $0.02 on aesthetics overall. How does that. How does that feel? I just kind of went on a little bit of a diatribe and that.

Charlie Myrick: Is what I've been feeling put into words. So awesome. I like that.

Chris LaFay: Great.

Charlie Myrick: And it's the type of thing that. So I guess just to give you a little bit background. Right. I will spend 30 minutes at the end of development, maybe up to an hour of like a feature on our platform. Just for context, I'm a React and Django guy, so it's more building web apps than websites.

Chris LaFay: Yeah. So I got you.

Charlie Myrick: Yeah. Which is. Yeah, it's very different skill set. I could not do what you guys do.

Chris LaFay: So odd because people like people that are in marketing, they typically look for web developers, but in general they need web designers that understand content.

Charlie Myrick: Yes.

Chris LaFay: That's who they want to manage their website, not a web developer. Now, if you have a large website where you're actually like adding in features and stuff like that, you assuredly want a developer. But it's that design and content pairing is what people are actually looking for, but they don't know the words to it. Anyway, sorry, I interrupted you. I apologize.

Charlie Myrick: No, no, no, you're good. I agree with you there. And so, you know, I care a lot about how things feel. I will get very detailed. For example, like, okay, this is a button. When I hover over it, the cursor should change to indicated button. That sort of stuff will drive me nuts. Different padding or different margins on boxes that are next to each other drives me nuts. I size the window down and things don't fold into a mobile view properly. That drives me insane. Things like that. So that's what I'm looking at. It's from that perspective. And then Keith, who's our CEO is looking at it from just a. This feels off perspective. You know, he looks at our competitor sites not up to the same standard. And I can, of course I can send you some examples of things that we like and don't like as well. I'm sure that would be helpful.

Chris LaFay: That's actually my next thing is like if you can send me a list of URLs and tell me what you like and don't like about those. The don't like is actually more important than the like. Yeah. And so if you can tell me what you're not looking for relative to those things, that would be super helpful because I do think a lot of the like side of things is actually going to come from the current site because you have good gradients, you have good content structures. It just needs to get tightened. So if we know what to avoid, then we're going to basically win straight out of the gate. So. Okay, reiterating what I heard you say in your form submission, but then also the email follow up, you're not opposed to WordPress if it's done the correct way, right?

Charlie Myrick: Yes.

Chris LaFay: Okay, awesome.

Charlie Myrick: And I saw that on your site you would prefer us to host with WP Engine and basically give you guys access. Totally fine doing that. I would ask that you, having been in the industry for 20 years, could kind of not guide me, but just give it a once over, make sure I didn't do anything stupid on setup, you know, that sort of thing.

Chris LaFay: On the current site?

Charlie Myrick: No, on when we get into our engagement, like if I set up a new site on WP Engine. You guys are editing that?

Chris LaFay: Oh yeah, yeah. So yeah, we'll. That'll be one of the last pieces that we do because what we'll do is we will build the site on RWP Engine and then when it's ready to launch, we'll then literally copy the entire environment and just copy paste.

Charlie Myrick: Okay, sweet. Yeah.

Chris LaFay: And then the only setup that you have to do is sign up for the account and give us owner level access so that we can actually take the site live. Because it's of course a billable site, so it'll actually charge you the 25 bucks a month. That's all you have to do. So as long as you're pretty confident setting up account on a software site, I think you probably will get it.

Charlie Myrick: I think I can manage that one.

Chris LaFay: You. No, you have no idea. You do know actually, yeah, WP engine's fantastic. I've had one issue with them on my like 15 years of working with them and it's happening right now. They when they created the install the bucket for the install, some of their keys didn't get keyed in correctly on that automated the automated scripts they've had. And my non technical client is like I hate this. I'm like, I promise you I've done this like 200 times. There was a glitch in the system and it's not about stability, it's about the setup. There was a glitch and it happened. Yep. Never has happened before. But of course you know, you can't say never has happened before because people don't believe that. And so anyway, I digress. Okay, that all makes sense. Content's going to say the same Bringing over all the blog posts. That's all simple and straightforward. Actually a question about your blogs. I couldn't tell from looking at the front end with your blogs. Typically one of two things happen a majority of the time with blogs and WordPress no matter the page builder. Basically blogs are just classic editor style. They're not not always classic editor, but they're just headers, paragraphs and bulleted lists.

Charlie Myrick: It's basically cms.

Chris LaFay: It's versus we have had a couple of edge cases where people have built their blog the actual blog posts with the page builder and from what I can tell yours looks mostly like flat. Not flat text, but just basic text with images and headers and not page buildery stuff. So I'm curious if you know if your blogs were built with page builder y stuff.

Charlie Myrick: I do not know for certain. I'm pretty sure that they weren't and if they were, we've got all that content saved in Google Docs as well. We're happy from our side to load that up as well. I'm not worried about, you know, making you guys copy and paste a bunch of stuff.

Chris LaFay: What we can probably do. I'm clicking through some other ones right now and it looks fairly. It looks like most of the content's very simple. What we typically do with this, we have a couple. We have an AI tool that we built that goes and actually scrapes the site and try not scrapes the site but scrapes the blog post section and it knows that div container that it the content lives in and it basically just simplifies it all down to like headers and paragraphs and lists and that gets it typically about 85% of the way there. If not 95% that's yeah, totally fine. And so as long as y' all are okay with going back and doing the little like tweaks around the edges, that just takes a lot of time. And typically paying an agency rates to go through and do tweaks like that isn't worth the money. I agree.

Charlie Myrick: Yeah, we're down to do that. I do think there are cases where we would want to have you guys maybe. Okay, we want to add a couple pages, we want to add XYZ functionality where we'd want to bring you guys back in after the initial design. I don't know. Is that something you guys would do?

Chris LaFay: Yes, 100%. All right, easy.

Charlie Myrick: The other thing that I was going to ask about is. So we use a ton of just like AI tooling in our build process and just throughout the company. It's nice actually, because we just started a year ago, so everybody integrated it from day one. And feel free to say no to this one, but I'm curious if there's anything we can do with WordPress where we could set up say an MCP server with it or instead of using computer use on the dashboard, if there's any way to give say coworker or cloud coworker Codex direct access to do some of these things.

Chris LaFay: So, yes, there is. It's not, as I'm going to call it, baked in, but I do this for my client sites all the time. I do it behind the scenes and it works out well. So, yeah, I'm going to dive in a little bit technical here. If there's anything that I don't, if you pause me because I like, I, I can, I can kind of go back in and edit. So basically what we do is we have a starting point of about 15 core building blocks because as you are well aware, websites are basically all built at the same blocks. You have a two column layout with an image and content on the side. Like that's just commonplace, right? Yeah. So we have a library, these like 12 to 15 building blocks, they're all core. They're either core WordPress or they're built custom using a tool called Advanced Custom Fields. So you fill out a form and all the HTML is spat out for you. Basically it helps basically with like responsive design. So all the weird code is taken care of behind the scenes, but then the stuff that you really want to custom customize, you can drag and drop that stuff all day long. So all of those building blocks live on a page called the block library. And the way that I. So I've never actually have told clients you're actually the first client that has actually asked about this. Okay. So. Which I'm kind of surprised, but also not really. We don't work with a lot of super technical people. The way that WordPress works right now. They just released WordPress 7.0 like a couple of weeks ago, where they have the ability to tie in. You can put your own, like, Claude API credentials in and stuff like that. It doesn't do anything other than give easy access to it.

Charlie Myrick: Okay.

Chris LaFay: Basically they want to make it so you didn't have to add a plugin for each of these, like, you know, AI tools. You can just type in your codes, your APIs, and you're done. Haven't tested it out yet, but what we have done is WordPress, when you create a user account, and they've had this for eons, is they have this WordPress application password that's tied to a user account. And so you can give. I'm going to say cloud code, because that's what I use all the time. You can give Claude into like an environment, variable, whatever, where it's your WordPress username with the application password.

Charlie Myrick: Perfect. So it's just an API key then.

Chris LaFay: It is basically it. There is weird expirations with it which bother the tar out of me and I have no idea why.

Charlie Myrick: You have to like refresh your session then that's weird application password.

Chris LaFay: And I couldn't, I can't tell yet what the trigger of the refresh is. And I've been, I've been doing this for about three months or so now. And there are times where it survives, like a computer refresh. There are sometimes where I feel like when I refresh, when I restart my computer. Sorry, restart my computer, not refresh my computer. When I. It. It feels like it needs to refresh the key. But other times, not sometimes when it's just been three weeks since I've edited a certain thing, it feels like it goes away, but also sometimes like, oh, I haven't touched this in a month and it works. So I haven't figured out exactly what the, the trigger is, but I also haven't done a lot of research in it. So how I recommend prompting Claude when you're connected in with an API. Basically an API password is have it on your own local machine, go through the block library, go through all the themes and have it document. I can give you a markdown file with all the core stuff that we build out that kind of gives it a starting point and say these are the blocks. Do not custom Code crap.

Charlie Myrick: Yeah.

Chris LaFay: When you're dropping a paragraph tag, don't choose a pixel font size. Choose one of the predefined ones. Like this. Okay. Too.

Charlie Myrick: So just like an agent MD for the WordPress site.

Chris LaFay: Exactly. And the. What I have found, no matter how much I have scripted out that MD file to basically say don't hard code crap. It still hard codes crap.

Charlie Myrick: Welcome to cloud.

Chris LaFay: And it is. It is what it is. But what I have found that if I apply, I. I've created recently within kind of. We have like a parent theme that we start with a learnings file. And I'm trying to get all these different child themes that we're building to apply into learnings so that. That continues to update on a regular basis.

Charlie Myrick: Yeah.

Chris LaFay: So that's the workflow that I would go with is take my markdown file where it's like, here's all the blocks and the basics of here, how they all work. Here's all of your rules of engagement and then here's how to do learnings and then apply that. Then you can build pages. Editing pages a breeze.

Charlie Myrick: Yes.

Chris LaFay: If you're like, I need to add an about us section. Use this block. Here's the images done. That stuff is fantastic.

Charlie Myrick: Cool. That would be the extent of what I'd imagine. And this would mostly be Keith that he would be doing. Yeah, it's more. So I just. I see him go in and make these edits and he's just using like a computer use tool with cloud code. And I was like, this is inefficient. Like. And it's gonna lead to just more and more mistakes. So let's.

Chris LaFay: Yeah. You can also wire up WP engine has. You can. You can connect it with them. It's not SSH keys. There's a. No, it is. Is it ssh? Yeah, I think it's a site. Anyway, you can wire up. Basically clawed into WP Engine so that if you're about to make major changes, you can say, yo, go make a backup real quick, wait 15 minutes and then go do it. And I think those keys are created at the user level. So if you do have multiple sites on WP Engine, you can then use those keys for other ones as well too. That's always helpful because I know everybody runs with scissors on production. Like nobody's gonna go do content changes on staging and then deploy it because it takes a 15 minute task and turns it into an hour. But also AI agents do what they do sometimes and they just run amok. It doesn't Happen often, but it can.

Charlie Myrick: So I. I would say so. I do like that you guys have a proper staging environment. Would that be something that we would get able. Or we'd be able to set up with WP Engine?

Chris LaFay: WP Engine will. You'll go live with a production and then there's a button at the top of that site on the back end of the hosting platform where it says at a staging environment.

Charlie Myrick: Beautiful. So we can do that. Then how does moving your changes over? I'm super unfamiliar with WordPress and WP engine. Just top level understanding.

Chris LaFay: So you know that I'm gonna ask a really dumb question, but you know that WP Engine and WordPress are very much different things, correct?

Charlie Myrick: Yeah. One is a hosting company.

Chris LaFay: Great. Love it. That's what I figured. But I'm actually just gonna log. Give me one second. I'm just gonna log into the back end of WP Engine and just show you for sure. I love WP Engine as a developer because they literally make 80% of the things you need to do clickable with a button and you don't have to.

Charlie Myrick: Yeah. I'm tired of the archaic tools in this industry. So anything like that sounds Great.

Chris LaFay: Yes. Freaking two factor authentication. I love 2fa but also hate it at the same time.

Charlie Myrick: Might be the first web guy I've ever worked with that actually has two FA setup. So I'm impressed.

Chris LaFay: One of our.

Charlie Myrick: I worked with a ton of like the. The fiber designer guys in the past and it's been kind of a nightmare.

Chris LaFay: I have no doubt about that. We had a former client that we didn't do like, we didn't do hosting for them or anything like that. We didn't do any maintenance work for them. They owned all they own. I. I'm a big proponent of people owning their stuff.

Charlie Myrick: Yeah.

Chris LaFay: And we get an email from them like six months after we launch and they were like. So our literal entire company just got hacked. They hacked into the. They did not have 2fa on their domain name. Somebody canceled it, re registered it, got into their Google workspace. And then in their Google workspace they had a Google sheet with all their passwords.

Charlie Myrick: Oh great.

Chris LaFay: And so to control the domain name, to control the website, put. Put porn on the website. And this is like a Christian organization. So even like 10x worse. Yeah. Huh. And we're threatening to do the same thing with their Instagram accounts, Facebook accounts, the whole nine yards. So like it was six months of just hellaciousness. Anyway. I'm gonna share my screen. Chrome has been Crashing on me sometimes when I share my screen. Because cloud code, it's a Google Meet.

Charlie Myrick: Bug that I've been running into as well.

Chris LaFay: Thank you.

Charlie Myrick: I'm so glad.

Chris LaFay: If I disappear, I promise I'll come back. I haven't yet. Today. Yep. Yes.

Charlie Myrick: Incredible.

Chris LaFay: Okay, so this is what a website looks like. On the back of a WP engine. They have a staging environment, but if you didn't, you would click add environment. You would click on staging and it would ask you which backup do you want to pull from Backups. They do rolling 30 day backups here. You can literally one click restore and it's done. You can also do a one click create backup, give it a name, you're done. And then you have your. Your SSH lives at your user account level. So like if you wanted to connect your VP engine with cloud code, you could toss in your SSH stuff here and then be able to do all of your like backups and stuff like that dynamically through chat.

Charlie Myrick: Beautiful.

Chris LaFay: They auto. They auto do SSL certificates. This is not showing up, but it is what it is. They're. They're there. So. And then if you do have multiple sites, you just have a dashboard of all of your sites with the various different staging. You can do a staging and dev environment if you wanted to.

Charlie Myrick: Sweet.

Chris LaFay: That's it.

Charlie Myrick: I mean, yeah, that's kind of the main things is that I was gonna ask. You have anything for me?

Chris LaFay: No. So in general I'm pretty transparent about pretty much all of my pricing. This pretty much falls under that. If you were on my website before you saw the pricing pots, probably this site, because all the content staying the same falls into that $15,000 bucket. Technically you have more pages than that, but they're all kind of like automatically migrated in and so this site would kind of fit into that. This would be about a 30 to 45 day website build. I'm going out of town for basically two weeks in June, so it might be. Normally it's 30 to 45 days, but this might stretch a little bit because I'm just not gonna be at the beach for a week and then a conference for three days.

Charlie Myrick: Totally get it. I. My June is packed as well. And then to make matters worse, I tour on the weekends and so that you have the weekends all that time. I tour on the weekends. I do live events, production and side. So it's a fun thing to do.

Chris LaFay: Audio, video, both video and lighting primarily. That's dope. Okay. I like that. I play music. I've never gone like live. I've played at churches my entire life, but I've also. Because I've been at smaller ones, I'm also a. I've also had the. You know, it's like, hey, that person's not there. Go figure this out.

Charlie Myrick: I've done a lot of Sundays at Buckhead Church here locally, which is a North Point Ministries campus. Oh.

Chris LaFay: Oh, that's. That's a production. Yeah. I see. I've never been a part of a group like that before. At that level, I'm perfectly fine. I don't actually care. It doesn't matter to me. I actually very much enjoy being a jack of all trades and actually pretty decent at a lot of them. I mean, guitar, play, bass, play, a little bit of drums. I haven't ran a soundboard in probably five years. But I love. I don't. I know what makes a good mix, but I don't know the technicalities behind it. Yeah, I can EQ things. Like if I go line by line, I can EQ stuff. Not at a performance professional level, but I love eqing stuff. And then I can balance stuff very well. But if you're like, we're getting a little hum on this one channel, we can't figure out where that is.

Charlie Myrick: Yeah, that's fair. I.

Chris LaFay: That's where. Yeah.

Charlie Myrick: My mind operates in kind of the opposite way where I can. I'll find the hum immediately. But God forbid I have to actually mix a band so.

Chris LaFay: I could mix all day. And I think part of the reason I love mixing is because I've always worked with sound guys that don't play music and they don't understand what a mix sounds like. And I'm like, I promise you, I'm playing acoustic today. I need to be up in the mains. Like, we have three people in the band today. Acoustics, the main instrument. So it should be heard.

Charlie Myrick: Y.

Chris LaFay: Just, just, just saying. There shouldn't just be. The harmonies should not be louder than the. The melodies. Anyway. I digress.

Charlie Myrick: You're good.

Chris LaFay: So, yeah, this. Overall, this is probably because of specific timing. This is probably a two month project.

Charlie Myrick: Sure.

Chris LaFay: 15K. We'll take your active site, we'll move all your content over. We'll basically create a style guide to start off with.

Charlie Myrick: One thing I want to mention too is we've got a kind of branding and marketing company that our CEO Keith found. I haven't talked to them yet.

Chris LaFay: I forgot about that. Okay.

Charlie Myrick: Yeah, they may have a style guide. They were also talking about putting together a whole like Figma Example site. And I was like, hey, let's hold off on that because I think that might be something you guys can just do and I don't want to like step on your toes.

Chris LaFay: Yeah, we'll basically go straight to code because we have a lot of our stuff here. Yeah, I'm gonna deliver the, the style guide slash guidelines.

Charlie Myrick: I have not talked to them yet, so I do not know. As soon as I have more info I can send that over to you. This was just something that Keith mentioned yesterday and I was like, hold on. Okay, let me also talk to these guys. This is very much tied together and yeah, so I'll get it. I'll get a read on them, make sure that they're going to do a good job on this and then. Yeah, I'm with you. I don't think there's any point in having a figma file for this. We'll just build it.

Chris LaFay: Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. That all sounds good. Next steps. I know we're a little bit past 11.

Charlie Myrick: I'm good for 30 minutes. Yeah.

Chris LaFay: Why are you talking to other folks right now? Does this all sound good to you? What, what, what are the best next steps for you right now?

Charlie Myrick: Best next steps would be to just get something over proposal wise from your side with pricing and just a little bit more kind of defined scope that I can share with people internally. I will get you example sites with things that we like, things we don't like. I'll send over any of the content that we currently have just saved in Google Drive as well as kind of an ideal. Not ideal, but I will see if I can get access to our existing WordPress and figure out the blog stuff for you if you're curious.

Chris LaFay: I am curious. Don't spend more than 10 minutes on it. Just look at the editor on the back end to be like, does this look like blocks or does this look like text?

Charlie Myrick: And that's all I'll share with you. Another example, we moved our domain recently from prxtrialport.com to just trialport.com and to do that they completely reset the entire WordPress environment, rebuilt it from scratch and nuked all of our user accounts. So.

Chris LaFay: That, yeah, doesn't make sense. You just add a new domain name.

Charlie Myrick: Correct. That is why I'm like, that is an example of the things I've been dealing with for about a year now. And why I'm like, all right, now that our contract's coming to an end, let's, let's reevaluate here.

Chris LaFay: Do you guys need do you guys need help with just like regular old, like content maintenance and stuff like that? Like regular plugin updates, 15 minute fixes, that type of stuff as well?

Charlie Myrick: Yeah, if you have a maintenance package, let's talk about it.

Chris LaFay: Okay.

Charlie Myrick: Yep.

Chris LaFay: I have a, I have a person on my, on my crew. We, we have an agency that we work with that does a lot of that stuff. We mostly do all like the building things. And so a lot of our retainers are based on. We're gonna build new stuff. And so we have an agency partner that I basically am in partnership with that does that, does all that. He's also here in Atlanta. His name's Mickey. And so he does all of that stuff and his. It's a few hundred bucks a month and it's all your plugin updates, all your external backups, and then you submit. He has a whole ticketing system where it's just like, hey, email this address. You want these changes and typically they get done within a day. A lot of times they get beautiful.

Charlie Myrick: Yeah, that's awesome.

Chris LaFay: It's all he does and that's, that's why he's good.

Charlie Myrick: That works out.

Chris LaFay: They hate building stuff. I like building stuff. I hate getting an email that says add a period and into the sentence. He loves it. And so we just work together on that.

Charlie Myrick: So I'm the same way. I don't like dealing with text changes and stuff like that on our platform. So I feel you.

Chris LaFay: Exactly. So, yeah. Well, I think it's like I need to get his. I actually was with him yesterday, but I want to say his pricing is like 250 bucks a month and that he wants you to own your hosting, which is a key thing, but he'll.

Charlie Myrick: Make sure that I'm more than fine.

Chris LaFay: With that and security things are done. And also then there's a. You Basically just get 15 minute fixes throughout the month and they just get done for you. So easy peasy. But yeah, I'll. I'll get the specific pricing from him. There's no upcharge for me. I'll have you just pay him directly for it. And then if you want to build new stuff, then yeah, definitely, like, let's, let's talk about it. So, so what I'll do is my proposal for you is basically for sites like this, it's basically the homepage of my website. Here's all the work we've done, here's the pricing. You fit into that $15,000 bucket. I can send you over some website examples and I can give you basic. I can go ahead and basically write up what, like the contracted scope of work is. Does that work for you?

Charlie Myrick: Yeah, that would be what I would need. Just something to kind of solidify it over email. It's really perfect.

Chris LaFay: I. I have tried to get out of the. Part of the. Part of the reason I have built the homepage the way I have is I basically took our proposal and was like, here's this is what covers about 75% of what people are asking for for most websites. So that saves me time. That saves you time at the end of the day. And so I'll send you over what the bullet point of scope of work will be via email. I'll send you over links to a couple of sample sites. We haven't really done a ton in kind of that, like, healthcare space, but I'll send you over some like B2B sites that we've done that kind of have that clean feel to them.

Charlie Myrick: Yeah, that would be sweet.

Chris LaFay: And at the end of the day, we're going to basically take your updated style guide, your current website and just kind of marry them both together, which will be pretty straightforward.

Charlie Myrick: Two more just quick things. One, I know I mentioned I wanted to get the top kind of pill menu selector matching across both sites. Right now it's a little bit bigger on the existing one that we have on trialport.com versus the app, but I'd also like to match up the footer as well. And I'm fully open to you guys designing one. And then I clone it on my side. I don't like our current one, but I want them to feel connected between the app and the primary site.

Chris LaFay: I'm sorry, go ahead. Sorry.

Charlie Myrick: And then the other thing that I was going to mention is we've got a widget that we've developed. It's literally just a single, well, a couple lines of JavaScript. You put something in head and then you place an element on the page where you want it to appear. That would be something that we'd want on our homepage. You can see that if you go to trial port and scroll down, there's a box where it says find clinical trials consent and continue. That shouldn't be too bad for you guys. I've got a whole packet that explains how to install it, even in WordPress itself.

Chris LaFay: Is it just an iframe?

Charlie Myrick: It's not an iframe, actually, because some of the people that we've worked with don't prohibit or don't allow iframes on their site. So Instead, what it is is it is a JavaScript file that lives at widget.PiraxEngage.com widget js. It's minified, it loads react and then it kind of builds a react site inside of wherever that div is.

Chris LaFay: Interesting.

Charlie Myrick: And then it can talk to our API and all that. It's. It's a little funky. It uses Shadow DOM as well, so that styles don't get mixed between the two pages. All sorts of just fun stuff.

Chris LaFay: Yeah, that makes. Okay, that makes sense. So my assumption, correct me if I'm wrong. So, like looking at the code that's output in the inspector.

Charlie Myrick: Yeah.

Chris LaFay: What I feel like is what would be the best use case for this is in the head tag. You have your generic script tag loaded that does the connections. But then you have a building block. I see there's a widget ID that's passed in, in some way, shape or form in a config.

Charlie Myrick: Yes.

Chris LaFay: If you had a block on the website where you just basically were able to copy and paste a widget ID and then that block wrapped that widget ID in that. In that script tag, in that div tag, whatever the thing is, then it would. Then the head, the code in the head that does all the connection would see the script tag with a weird funky ID or unique id, I should say.

Charlie Myrick: Yeah.

Chris LaFay: See the widget ID inside of it and then load everything in for you.

Charlie Myrick: Yep. Correct. That's how it works. If you can make that a reusable block, that would be incredible because I know Keith wants to put this on a couple of pages.

Chris LaFay: Yep. That's easy. As long as what I'm thinking is like, that's, that's simple. Literally, it's a custom block that you copy and paste a widget ID into. And then in WordPress you can then. You can then make block sync a bowl. And so once you save it as one, if you change it in one place, it changes it all over the place.

Charlie Myrick: That's okay. Incredible. Yeah. That's the type of thing that we're trying to move away from is with our current people is like, okay, we want to make a change now we've got to go to 15 pages individually and make that. That change. That sort of thing is just. Yeah. Like why.

Chris LaFay: It's really, it's really simple and I don't think they actually. I don't think this client has any of them. I'm going to show you something and it's not going to be the real thing, but you're good that's what I have open.

Charlie Myrick: I just.

Chris LaFay: They do actually. Wait, they do. Hold on a second. Wait, did I pick a bad page? This, and I picked the one page that it's not on. Hold on. Company. They have it on this one. This one shared, right?

Charlie Myrick: Yeah.

Chris LaFay: Okay. It's not both. That's okay. All right, so this is a construction company website. So back into WordPress to give you an idea of kind of the divide between drag and drop versus custom. So some of the HTML is done. So this is a image here of 5050. There's a little drop shadow on the image, all that kind of stuff. So like the core stuff is handled custom. So you upload your image, you upload your video, you can kind of swap left and right toggles. But then all the content side of things is all drag and drop. So like little eyebrow text, there's baked in styles or the paragraph to change it to the eyebrow. So it has a font. Awesome. Doesn't get loaded in the back end. So just those little blah blah lines there. But this call to action, if you notice it's purple, that's because it's shared across the board. So the basic cta. Do you have a project in mind? If you edit the original, Bada bing, bada boom. Now you got, now you got this right here. You can go through and edit. What do you want that block to actually say? And that's just a custom block for the ct. So that's how you. And you share them in a way like this. I should have actually pulled this up. Let's say that you wanted this whole group here to be shared. You would go say, create a pattern. You can name it, give it a category, and then you can either make it synced or unsynced. Oh, sweet. So unsynced are basically just copy and pasteable templates. So you can then just add it with that name synced, apply the purple and make it synced.

Charlie Myrick: Makes sense.

Chris LaFay: And that's it.

Charlie Myrick: Yeah, I like your actual organization on the page as well.

Chris LaFay: Like this, the nominate, little labeling and stuff. Yeah, that's. That's one thing I, I have been teaching my AI as has been building out pages en masse. Is when you build out pages, you gotta name the freaking groups. Yeah, it's actually, I'm pretty good about that. And so that just gives you an idea. Groups in WordPress are very important. Grouping things together is very important. They'll be. One of the most common blocks that you use is the group. It's the most flexible One one out.

Charlie Myrick: Of all of them. So makes sense.

Chris LaFay: Anyway, I digress.

Charlie Myrick: I like everything makes total sense. I will await your email and then I'll get you over some examples and then, you know, as far as revisions go, I assume you know, as long as it's not a full redesign, we'll be able to have them input on, hey, we like this, we want to kind of change this, that sort of stuff.

Chris LaFay: So what we'll do is the what the way the process will work. I'm going to keep focusing on text built because I was working on it before we hopped on this call. The site is live, but the only reason this little red box is showing up is because I'm logged in the back end. Are you familiar with Market IO?

Charlie Myrick: I'm not, no.

Chris LaFay: Awesome. Okay, great. Easy. So basically what you'll see is you'll click on a button, it takes a screenshot, you can then say, I want to change. You can then mark, oh sweet. Yeah. And then you can type in what you're wanting to do. And so my primary request with this is you can also add attachments here. So if you want to swap images, swap text, whatever it is, be specific. And so what I, what I see a lot of times what happens with non technical people is they take a screenshot and they will say pretend the red box wasn't there. They'll say swap, make label xyz. And I'm like, okay, are we talking about the left one?

Charlie Myrick: The one? Yep.

Chris LaFay: So I don't mind about rounds of QA if they are hyper specific.

Charlie Myrick: Yep.

Chris LaFay: And if you want a new image or a new whatever, add the attachment here into the thing. Bada bing, bada boom. So because in all honesty, this stuff, these types of things like with like if we're locked in on style, basically the way the process is going to work is we're going to lock in on homepage style, plus maybe another page or two with some dummy content kind of mixed of. This is where I think might be a good direction for some of the content. But 80% of it's pulled directly from the site. Let's lock in on the aesthetic on these blocks first. Then I'll basically have AI go and pull all the rest of your content, your site, and go ahead and dump it all into all the frameworks of the rest of your pages. I'll do some QA on an internally, do some testing and make sure that all looks nice and tight. I'll then send the second round over to you and say, hey, your website's 80% done. Take a look at it. And typically speaking it's mostly just content changes at that point because we've already, we've already approved this is what the 10 or 15 different blocks look like now. They're just stacked on top of each other at this point.

Charlie Myrick: Makes sense.

Chris LaFay: So if you're specific on the text changes and the image swaps that you want to do, honestly AI can do a lot of that for me. And the rounds don't really matter too terribly much. And so that's kind of. I try to limit it to about two or three rounds just so that we don't like take a two month project and turn it into a three and a half or four month project. But that's, that's typically how that process works is homepage plus a couple of pages. Make some edits to the blocks in and of themselves. Import en masse QA with content.

Charlie Myrick: Makes sense.

Chris LaFay: So.

Charlie Myrick: Yeah, I think that's everything on my side. If anything else comes up, I'll be sure to shoot you an email. I have one question though. Love your, your look here. Are you running like a mirrorless camera and feeding that into Google Meet or.

Chris LaFay: Yes. Yep, I have. So I, for a long time I did not have any of this at all. I basically, I had a tan wall and I blended into the background and I was like, okay. So the first thing I did, I literally painted my entire office dark gray.

Charlie Myrick: Yep.

Chris LaFay: Because I didn't know where I was going to put my desk at the end of the day. And then I left it just a plain dark gray background forever. Because I'm not a handy person. That thing requires nails or screws in the wall to mount that guitar and also that guitar over there. So if you notice the framing of this is very key. The headstock of that guitar is right above the frame. Because the first hole I drilled, I wanted it to be above the frame in case I screwed up because I'm not going to patch that crap.

Charlie Myrick: Makes sense.

Chris LaFay: And so I outlined myself on the wall of where I was at. I put little sticky notes on the wall. Then I sat down and was like, are the sticky notes outlining my head pretty well? And then I position. That's how I positioned these guys. And then eventually I got a mirror. I got a Sony ZV E10.

Charlie Myrick: Nice.

Chris LaFay: And with that got one of the Elgato teleprompters as well too. So I can actually look at your face and look into the camera. Because. Because before I was over here.

Charlie Myrick: Right.

Chris LaFay: And talking to you. At a webcam on top of my camera, on top of my monitor sucked, and now I look decent.

Charlie Myrick: That's great. I mean, the. The lighting looks nailed, too. I like how it's all set up.

Chris LaFay: I have one of the, like, bright as the sun lights that came with my soft boxes sitting in a. One of the, like, Walmart tall desk things that kind of gives, like, soft white light throughout the whole room. I have two soft boxes, one here and one there. I used to have one right above the camera, but then I was staring into the softbox all day. I'm like, why do I have headaches? Because you're staring into a light bulb. So I put two up, and I put Philips hue light bulbs in them, because this close, I don't need. That doesn't need to be bright. Yeah. So now I can icri. Exactly. And then I put a couple. I had some other Phillips things that I bought over time that I basically just shove kind of, like, in the back to do extra. A little bit of backlight splashes.

Charlie Myrick: Yeah. I was gonna say the halo backlight looks very nice. That was immediately good background separation.

Chris LaFay: And then I have. I have a ceiling fan up there, and I pointed one of the three lights this direction so that you get a little bit of lightness right there as well, too. Oh. And all of this that I'm describing took the better part of, like, a year and a half to two years, because I'm very. Actually, I will say 20 of it took a year and a half. The other 80, I just went balls to the wall and was like, all right, here we go.

Charlie Myrick: Yep.

Chris LaFay: That's how I. How I go about not shift in my office. Like, I'm gonna go ahead and do the rest of this now, so. And that thing was a pain in the butt. And my friend who helped me with it, because it's like. It's like rope lighting. Yeah. My friend who helped me with it after we were done, he was like, you know, you could have gone on Etsy and just got, like, an LED thing for, like, 20 bucks, and it would be, like, custom done to your SVG cutout, and you didn't have to then do a rope light in the perfect thing. I was like, why didn't you. You tell me this now I despise you.

Charlie Myrick: That's funny.

Chris LaFay: I have good friends. So anyway, you got me off on a couple of different topics, so thank you. I. I not. Not normal. And so I very much. I. You found my, like, three passions, and I'm like, yes, please.

Charlie Myrick: I Feel it. I'm the same way.

Chris LaFay: Mm. Mm. Do you play any instruments? I know. Just because you're doing, you know, tour stuff doesn't mean you play. What do you.

Charlie Myrick: I don't. I used to a long time ago, but not anymore.

Chris LaFay: What did.

Charlie Myrick: I left it up to the people that were better. I played guitar for a couple years. Okay, nice.

Chris LaFay: Yeah, I'm assuming just like some chord strumming sort of thing.

Charlie Myrick: Acoustic. And it was like. At one point I did a couple shows with some friends and like middle school, but that was it.

Chris LaFay: So nice. I was really lucky. I grew up in a neighborhood with somebody that I found in high school that was learning guitar at the same time I was in high school. And so because he was in the same neighborhood as me, we got to hang out a lot. We played a lot together and we just kind of learned like jam style playing. And that's kind of my. I'm not really an expert in playing guitar. I don't know it technically well, but if you give me a chord chart, I can jam all day.

Charlie Myrick: There you go.

Chris LaFay: And I'll take that over knowing the intricacies of music theory all day long.

Charlie Myrick: So I'm with you.

Chris LaFay: There we go, man. Well, hey, I have another call in 10 minutes that I need to do a little bit of prep for. This has been fantastic. I am in meetings all day today. I will either send you a follow up with all this stuff either later tonight or at some point tomorrow morning. Sounds good. Does that work for you?

Charlie Myrick: Yeah, I won't be able to get back to it today, so no rush.

Chris LaFay: Fantastic. Awesome, man. Pleasure chatting with you. Thank you for reaching out. Thanks for sharing some stories with me. Looking forward to it.

Charlie Myrick: Absolutely. Likewise. Have a good.

Chris LaFay: Bye. Bye.