CMILC - Lumberock Weekly Sync

Chris LaFay: Good morning. Oh, wait. First off, you're muted. Secondly,.

Dawn Audano: Hey, how is development coming? I have like some overdue tasks in there and I just don't know where to move things out.

Chris LaFay: Yeah, hold on one second. Where did my thoughts go?

Erin Dyer: There.

Chris LaFay: And then let me move my microphone over. There we go. All right, the. The blogs are not imported yet, but they will be as a part of. So looking at the bulleted list from a week or so ago. The blog, blog articles and videos will get all brought over at the same time that all their content's important so that all be done in the same fell swoop. The custom post type for products, that's actually. I think that's actually done. There's nothing really there for them to confirm yet. Validate this. Because their products are basically.

Dawn Audano: Okay, so here's what I'm looking at. So call today. Fine. Do we still need their domain and DNS and hosting location?

Chris LaFay: We, we need to make sure that they know we're. We're. I would assume that since they're part of a larger parent company, we are not going to do the like DNS swap. Somebody else is going to do it. So we need to make sure that.

Dawn Audano: We know, but we need that sign out.

Chris LaFay: Yeah.

Dawn Audano: Okay. Custom post types, products, dealer, all of these pieces.

Chris LaFay: So custom post type for products, all of that is done. There's nothing there for them to QA yet because it's not wired up to a building block. But it's all their PDFs and their names and their collection categorization, that's all done.

Dawn Audano: Okay. Dealer, distribution, distributor, product locator, migration.

Chris LaFay: I know. I'm assuming that's just a widget that they have on their current website that we can copy over. That's not done.

Dawn Audano: Migrate and rebuild the existing zip code finder, dealer locator tool.

Chris LaFay: I don't know what that is.

Dawn Audano: You created the task.

Chris LaFay: Of course I did. Of course. Where to buy.

Dawn Audano: What about activecampaign form embeds?

Chris LaFay: We just need to get that. They need to get that to us.

Dawn Audano: Hey, Google Analytics, installation and verification, they.

Chris LaFay: Need to get that to us.

Dawn Audano: What about the sample request form? Is that confirmed done?

Chris LaFay: It's not confirmed done, but it's. It's probably at 90. I did a couple. That's another thing I did a little bit of work on last week after our.

Dawn Audano: Okay, so then you said the handcrafted pages, that's. These are all these. Batch one, batch two, batch three. This is all the stuff from Studio Hawk.

Chris LaFay: So the arrangement of how those tasks are Laid out, not important anymore. Where Aaron is basically writing all of her content for all of her pages, but she's writing it in a format that we can literally just auto import.

Dawn Audano: Okay.

Chris LaFay: So basically we're. We're ditching the whole idea of like pages that we're going to spend time on versus ones that we're going to auto migrate in. We're basically just auto migrating everything in. But it's coming from her. So I spent time. That was that tool thing that I built for her like two weeks ago. It was like, put this into your chat GPT and it'll give me data that works.

Dawn Audano: So do we need these tasks then?

Chris LaFay: Let me look at the. I can't see one second. Put you on a different screen.

Dawn Audano: Okay.

Chris LaFay: No, we. Those four tasks that are all connected there. No, it really just boils down to a dry run of pages, which is what I'm working on now. St. So Studio Hog, they're waiting for us.

Dawn Audano: So I just want to run through this really quick. Yeah, they're like in the waiting room. Blog articles you said are done.

Chris LaFay: No, those will be done at the same time as the other page.

Dawn Audano: Okay. As the other one. Okay. And then the blog video posts are the same.

Chris LaFay: Yeah.

Dawn Audano: And then the gallery content verification is the same.

Chris LaFay: That'll be once we actually get all the photos from her.

Dawn Audano: Okay, cool. And then are these due dates applicable? Like are these are not applicable. Correct. This one's obviously not. Like by next Friday or. What's our timeline?

Chris LaFay: We're looking at, I would say two weeks.

Dawn Audano: Okay, cool. So we're looking at everything complete. Maybe by next Friday. And then in two weeks we can do QA for go live.

Chris LaFay: I would say that within. By the end of next week, we should have all the content moved over for them to then do qa and then one or two or three rounds of revisions and then done.

Dawn Audano: Cool. All right. All right, I'm letting them in. Thank you. I'm going to stop presenting and then.

Erin Dyer: I will admit them.

Dawn Audano: Good morning.

Chris LaFay: Good morning.

Dawn Audano: Thanks for waiting. We were just going through some timeline things and lost track of time, ironically.

Chris LaFay: Yes, that's fine.

Erin Dyer: How was everybody's holiday?

Chris LaFay: It was good. We did very little. We watched a lot of soccer this weekend and that was. That was the definition of the weekend. So. Yeah, was a good way to spend time. What about you guys?

Matt Nelson: Same.

Erin Dyer: Yeah. Low key. Like that kind of seems to be the theme of the 250th celebration. It's pretty low key. We had a bunch of dads put off A ton of fireworks in our cul de sac. So I did walk my kids over for that, but pretty chill. Pretty chill.

Chris LaFay: We. We definitely drugged our dog a lot this weekend. We started on Thursday and finished on Sunday. And so she slept great, which also means I slept great overnight.

Erin Dyer: What's crazy? My dog isn't bothered by fireworks at all. I went and I walked him through like, it was like gunfire. I mean, there were fireworks everywhere. And I went to go pick my daughter up because I left her in the cul de sac. And he was fine. He didn't even notice. Like, I don't know. Don't. Don't come at my door with, you know, a business card, but you can do your fireworks.

Dawn Audano: Have you had his hearing checked?

Erin Dyer: He's a German shepherd.

Dawn Audano: Oh, okay.

Erin Dyer: Yeah. His ears are literally the size of my head. Yeah, he just doesn't. I don't know. He did. That does not seem to concern him for some reason.

Dawn Audano: He's probably like, I can take it. I'm a German shepherd.

Chris LaFay: Yeah, it's fine.

Erin Dyer: He whispers something he likes even 10ft away. He's like,.

Chris LaFay: Oh, man.

Dawn Audano: Okay, well, let's go through Chris and I like a little bit of a development update. And I know Chris wants to talk through some more content pieces as well. Chris, do you want to give an update on kind of where development is and then the next steps with content? And also, I'm sorry, I was out last week. I just could not figure out how to get my calls working amongst travel, so it was a little challenging. Yeah.

Chris LaFay: So one of the things I spent a little bit of time on last week is I. I kind of tuned up the. The sample picker, so I'm going to share that really quick. I didn't make. There's not a ton of visual changes here, but I feel like it's a little bit tighter than it was before, so added a little bit of a card background color, added a little bit of drop shadow as well to it, and then added a smidge of animation. When you actually select these different things, and then once you've selected the three, it automatically scrolls you down to the actual form in and of itself for a much better user experience, rather than having to be like, okay, cool, I've selected my three, and now I can't do anything else, what do I do? It drops you down here. Restyled the form a little bit as well to kind of make it match in line with the rest of the site. And so now all of that is there. So now if you scroll Back up. You go back and delete those, you can change them around, doesn't matter. All simple, straightforward. So made a couple of those changes. Again, nothing humongous, but just kind of quality of life for the main form that's going to be on your website that you want people to do. So quality of life on something like that is key.

Erin Dyer: Big fan. I like it a lot.

Chris LaFay: Fantastic. The other piece with content, as I was doing some importing stuff I heard, I got, I was chatting with the Studio Hawk folks late last week and they're like, we have some SEO stuff that we want to do. So I actually have a meeting with Charlie later today. I imported a handful of pages because he wanted to kind of see a kind of smattering of different page types because he wants to go through the content that you wrote up and then just SEO it is it. But he wanted to see it inside of the site as well. So I imported a handful of pages for him. I got a meeting on the books from like at 2 or 3 o' clock this afternoon. We're going to go over those handful of pages and if he has any questions, I'll be able to go through those with him. If he doesn't, great. I can then shortly, basically by probably by Tuesday or Wednesday, send you over those sample pages that we had talked about last week, get those over to you, allow you to confirm them, make sure that they line up completely with all the documentation that you sent over. And as long as you're good and Charlie is good on the SEO side, we can then take the rest of the content that you submitted over and do the rest of the importing this week.

Erin Dyer: So are we gonna get a little sneak peek of what that looks like today? I'm very anxious to see like how that importing process went. Is it going well?

Chris LaFay: Yeah. So we only did another three or four of them. Just because I didn't want to over. I didn't want to overdo it in case something was messed up. Let me grab a URL. Give me one second. The joys of working on multiple things, multiple screens at one time.

Dawn Audano: Here.

Chris LaFay: That was not it. That one. Okay, hold on one second.

Dawn Audano: Refresh.

Chris LaFay: There we go. Okay, so this is one of them. Now. There's no images in here yet, so. So they're all just placeholder images. So sorry, I have not, I have not done a onetoone verification of this particular page. So just a heads up, I have not. Like, if you see weird content, I haven't done it. I haven't done A comparison yet.

Erin Dyer: That's fine.

Chris LaFay: This is actually not the right one. Please hold.

Matt Nelson: Wait.

Chris LaFay: I don't know why that's there, but we have your different sections here for the different parts of Artisan, where all the different placeholder images are going to go. This is not. Hold on. This is not right. I need to go back. This is why you shouldn't showcase something that's not 100.

Erin Dyer: It's fine. You don't have to. I was just curious how it was going. I didn't mean to put the pressure on you.

Chris LaFay: No, no, you're. You're all good. That one I thought was this. Yeah. Let me. Let me check on these. The ones that were. That were worked on. I did some of it today, this morning. Some of them seem a little bit messed up, but I will show you this. This actually looks like it's more in line, so you can kind of see the thoroughness of a page that got built out.

Erin Dyer: What's more, because I'm. I'm still trying to build out all the photo library.

Chris LaFay: Yeah. So here's a page that's the custom and specialty one. So we have a lot of content here. Good placeholder Hero. We have those different image hovers over here to go to different. Linking to different pages if we decide to do that. Got some padding things that have to get worked on kind of over there to be consistent. Icon grid. So the icons didn't pull in immediately because that wasn't part of the thing that was in your system. So I'll go back and change all those. Why it matters most. Custom builds. We kind of got problem one, problem two, and problem three. And they're different sections. A little bit of a stat row, a little bit of a padding issue there. But nothing. Nothing major. The different quote cards or whether these end up being blog posts or links to different sections or just basic content, that's fine. And then we got the placeholder for the various. The. The. The gallery down here as well, too. And then now we have your links, all the different collections to then allow them to jump around with a final cta. So it's hard to tell with just placeholder content in there. I realize that. And without images, it doesn't pop as much. But the content that you wrote was able to output a framework that said, you know, 85%, give or take, within a page, only needing a handful of tweaks. And that's kind of the point. And so the goal is to do about four or five of these, figure out where the consistent Problems are make sure that those get documented appropriately and then push it out. So there's generic stuff that Studio Hawk wants to do from like a headings, like make sure like, you know, we're using the right headings or the right button types or whatever the that happens to be. We can catch those now so that when the rest of that import process takes place, it should then key in on those things. That's the thing.

Erin Dyer: I think that's such a great idea. And you know, they had kind of fed me a little bit in the beginning, like two or three pages, but that's all that they had. And I kind of took what I had, took what they had, merged it together. And I think great timing for them to do that for sure.

Matt Nelson: Yes.

Chris LaFay: So I'll talk with them today. I'll go over these pages with them, see if they have any issues. If they like everything, we'll send over stuff probably by tomorrow or Wednesday, saying, here are the sample pages with the content that you supplied. Take a look at it, do an extra set of eye validation on it, any tweaks or changes, and if not, we import it all in mass and we'll also go ahead and like import your blog posts and stuff like that at time. The same. Same time too. So perfect. And we're also, while this is being imported, we're creating a map of old URLs to new URLs so that those redirections can happen if necessary. So that's also happening behind the scenes too. So awesome. Excuse me. So that is, that is the plan. We have pretty much all the different custom blocks built out at this point. So like the, the ones with like the different, like, you know, daytime, mid and night, that's all built, but we need sample images to populate to really test that. So really a lot of it, a lot of the dev that's been done. Once we get content to put into it, then we'll be able to really fully test it all out.

Matt Nelson: Cool.

Chris LaFay: So, yeah, it's a pretty thin update for today, but once we get confirmation from Studio Hawk, we'll be able to really start pumping. Pumping the content.

Erin Dyer: Just so you guys know, I'm heading out of town on Wednesday and I will. Well, I'm heading out of town Wednesday evening and then I will be back next Thursday into the office. So I will not be here for our Monday meeting. I don't know if you want to keep it or if you want to wait. If you guys want to have some time for development, whatever it is you Need I will be checking my emails so I can definitely respond if you.

Chris LaFay: Have any questions what we'll do then. I have a feeling Studio Hawk will not have any issues with the pages that we've done so far. So chances are we can get those sent over to you by Tuesday so that you can get them confirmed by the time that you leave. And then really a lot of it's just going to be importing of content and so we'll need your eyes on all the stuff that's imported and you'll be gone. So honestly, we'll just use the next week and a half to just import all the blogs, all the content that you've written, whatever imagery. There is an images folder in the Dropbox file that you sent, correct?

Erin Dyer: Yes. But you guys haven't taken anything out of there yet, right?

Chris LaFay: We haven't taken what? Sagan?

Erin Dyer: Sorry, I haven't used any of the photos in there yet.

Chris LaFay: Not yet, no. So.

Erin Dyer: Okay. Because I have a bunch to dump in there. That's why I'm asking.

Chris LaFay: Please.

Erin Dyer: Yeah.

Chris LaFay: So if you want to. If you want to. Did you follow up to that? The images that are in that folder did. Are they. Are all those images staying the same, AKA did you update any of them to make them better? Or is the dump that you're putting in all new images?

Erin Dyer: New images. So all of the ones that I'm giving you are already post. Making better? They're already post. Running. Doing some work on them. Yeah.

Chris LaFay: Okay. So if you want to. If you want to create a secondary folder with all the new ones, do that. You can put it inside the main, like inside your primary folder that we already have access to, but just create another subfolder.

Erin Dyer: Okay.

Chris LaFay: So that I can then download all of those and get them queued up as well too. So.

Erin Dyer: Yeah, because right now they're all sorted by like Coastal Genesis, you know, all that. So my goal before I leave will be to make sure you have all of those. There were some things that I was still generating, but what I tried to do is take a bunch of our old Lumber Rock footage and revamp it through chat GPT, which worked really, really well. But I think that'll do really well for us also because it's going to be a lot more organic looking, it's going to be a lot more real looking and it's going to actually be projects we've worked on. And I know that was a big gap for us in the past. So I will make sure all that's in by the end of the day.

Matt Nelson: Today.

Erin Dyer: And also look over anything that might be missing. But I think you have everything. And then if we need to. Yeah, you'll have time tomorrow to do some revamping and then Wednesday I can look at stuff for you.

Chris LaFay: Yep, that all sounds good. Awesome. Fantastic. Lovely. Is there anything else that we need to go over at the moment?

Erin Dyer: Now, just so you know, I'm gonna be driving to Wisconsin, so we'll have a lot of car time. Yeah, I know, right? If. How many children will there? Yeah, it does. It's just me, my mom and my sister and like 10 kids. So. But anyways, I'll have time in the car so I can look over stuff on Thursday as well if you'd like.

Chris LaFay: Gotcha. Okay. More than likely we'll be full blown into the, into the swing of building stuff out. If we have any questions, stuff like that. We'll reach out. But chances are the next thing that you'll see when you get back and from today in about two weeks will be a barely flushed out website.

Erin Dyer: All right, all right, that's exciting.

Chris LaFay: That is the plan. So. Okay, I'm excited. This is a. There's always the day, there's always. There's always the both exciting and terrifying part because you go from like what feels like 20 to what feels like 80 overnight. And that's such a. It's either like this like humongous home run moment or there's like a lot of little things that, that, that pile up just because it's the nature of going from zero pages and zero things to here's all the stuff. And so it's. There will probably be a lot of little things, but we'll walk you through how to like use a tool on the website to submit feedback. So like, if you notice that periods are missing or words or you know, when things got imported, sentences got swapped, which doesn't happen often, but computers are computers. They do what they want to do. It's very easy to leave feedback on. And honestly, you have, you don't have a ton of pages. There's like 30. So like getting together and doing that QA together in person. Whether it's in person or whether it's virtual, but doing it at the same time is key. It feels like it's going to take a lot longer, but it really only takes like if you block off two hours to go through the site together and be like, let's fix this, let's fix this, let's fix this. You'll knock it all out. It'll be painless. And then we can knock everything else out too. So it'll be good. I'm looking forward to it.

Erin Dyer: Such a wild process. I've never done a website like this before where, like, there's all this, like automation, you know, in some part where it's all kind of built out that way, which, I mean, it's awesome. It's super smooth, super exciting.

Chris LaFay: So in reality, if we had done this project the way that, like, if we had this project two years ago. Yeah, it would have cost probably double the amount of money because especially with the pivot like the pit, the, the gold, the scope was what, five or six kind of well thought out pages? And then bringing over the rest of the content as is now, all the content's changing. So a year and a half ago, we would have had to have a person go through your Word documents and put everything in page by page. And that just takes hours. It just does. And manually upload images. So, like, the parts of the process that nobody really wants to do now is simpler. So, yeah, this would have been a double. Like this easily would have. We would have had to have a come to Jesus meeting a month or so ago when you're like, we want to kind of rewrite kind of the whole thing. And we'd have been like, that's gonna cost double the amount. But now we cut out all those man hours,.

Matt Nelson: You know, hey, I don't.

Chris LaFay: Want the cat out of the bag.

Matt Nelson: Too soon, but, you know, depending on how this process goes and how fast we can deliver a great product, next up will be the CMI site. So, you know, so, you know, this isn't going to be a one and done thing. So I want, you know, you know, if we can execute a good product, I mean, we'll, we'll get right after the next one.

Erin Dyer: Yeah, they're already jumping out of the bed about that.

Chris LaFay: Yeah. Which is. That all sounds great. And like, we've worked through the. The first project's always the hardest because you get to understand communication styles and structures and this, that and the other. Now it's just like, okay, great, show me some design inspiration of what you guys want to do. And then we can. A lot of these building blocks are very similar. Like, there's nothing like, there's nothing super unique about kind of other than like your textures and whatnot. So there's even a lot of stuff we can pull from the Lumber Rock site into the other one as well. So it's the nice thing about kind of compounding websites. You build something over here, you can probably use it over here as well, too. And so you kind of kill two birds with one stone, which is also absolutely so.

Erin Dyer: And we. And we know the process now, so that's even better.

Chris LaFay: Exactly. Lovely, guys. Well, we'll go ahead and get moving on this stuff. I'll talk with Studio Hawk a little bit later today, get them to confirm or denyer edit things the way they want to. And as long as that meeting goes the way that I expect it to, I'll then send over a handful of pages over to you tomorrow to look through before you head out. And then if you have any notes on those, let me know if you don't. And it all worked as well as the first couple that I sent over to you via text a week or so ago. Then we'll be rocking and rolling while you're gone.

Erin Dyer: All right, sounds good. Sounds like a plan.

Matt Nelson: Perfect.

Chris LaFay: Thank you guys very much. I appreciate it. Take care.

Erin Dyer: Thanks, guys.

Dawn Audano: Bye.

Matt Nelson: Thanks, Chris. Thanks on.

Erin Dyer: Bye.