A Convo With Kyle Van Deusen - Client Care Plans, Bricks Page Builder & More

well good evening everybody i can see there's already a ton of comments and so on inside here so who do we have in tonight first of all can you let me know if everybody can see me you can hear me all the usual things is everything looking and sounding okay before we kick things off and then once they kind of find out then we're gonna have a couple of sort of welcomes this evening so it's good to see some faces in especially some oxygen faces in um so yeah can you just let me know if everybody can hear and see and everything okay just be great if you could do that for me so we have a couple of nice faces in storage good to see you good evening stardust good to see yourself hope you're doing well and yep all good thank you michael you are an absolute gentleman for letting me know nice haircut thank you okay so before we sort of say hello and everything that i just want to quickly say we've got a special guest in tonight i'm sure you all know kyle vanderson so i want to say a welcome to kyle tonight who's joining me for the first time so good evening kyle i hope you're doing well this evening uh i think i have to start it's off by saying howdy how's it going howdy to yourself too okay so if anybody that doesn't know kyle would you like to introduce yourself and let everybody know who you are what you do and why you're here this evening joining me awesome yes so uh my name is kyle van duzen i most people that know me in here probably know me from the admin bar which is a community i help run with my good buddy matt siebert we do all kinds of fun things around uh agency life and helping each other kind of get through the struggles that are involved with that so our facebook community is a huge part of that we have a podcast things like that and i also run a web agency called ogle web design here in texas that's how i got into this business and as far as why i'm here tonight i have no idea paul just for some reason thought it would be okay to let me on his channel so he's unleashed the beast today yeah i think i think it was the two hundred dollars you sent me in paypal money i think that's the reason why that's all it costs to get on everybody yeah please do everybody send me two hundred dollars it'll be a good evening okay so thank you very much tonight joining me kyle it's great to see and have you here so i'm gonna do a couple of hellos this evening i'm sure there's gonna be a few faces in that you are more than uh sort of away and accustomed to so we've got let's have a little look always good to have stardust in who we know is a big oxygen proponent and speaking of oxygen proponents we've got perma-slug in tonight we also have elijah in from oxygen as well so absolutely fantastic to see you guys here hope you're doing well hope you're safe wherever you are and we also have innocent maguire i have no idea if i said that right but good evening and uh welcome to uganda i hope you're doing well anya good to see you as well nice to have all the stalkers in tonight let's see good evening in germany and we've got much of design we've got michael wright who is the original stalker tonight so good to see you and michael as well and steve pro always good to have you in we've got ms stigma so again good to see you spendy always good to see you davey dennis mark sonin i hope i said that right and heather good wow we've got a few people in tonight already so it's good to see you all so john hussey good to see you in as well and michael m so how's it going to go this evening well first of all it's going to be a pretty laid back conversation with between myself between kyle and all you guys so if you've got comments on anything we talk about tonight please do drop those in the chat section and if you enjoyed the video tonight you enjoy the live stream don't forget to give that thumbs up because it just helps youtube know that you like what we're doing okay so we've got three different topics we're going to cover tonight and let's be honest about it if we didn't talk about this first topic we would all wonder what the heck is going on so the first thing we're going to talk about this evening is something that i know is very close to kyle's heart and that's care plans or maintenance plans however you want to sort of label them so this is kind of first of all why and how to promote website care plans to clients because we know that when it comes to selling services once you've done the website some clients can kind of see that in a negative light even though you're only really doing it for their benefit to make sure that their experiences are seamless flawless and they know they've got that support mechanism in place but how have you found convincing clients well you had to convince clients how to you know sort of take on these care plans what's your experience being of selling care plans kyle so i'm gonna pass that over to you young man yeah so i mean from i think it starts from the agency perspective right this is a great way to introduce recurring revenue into your agency and without that recurring revenue this job can be a little bit painful sometimes when one one month you're able to sell a bunch of projects and make a lot of money and then the next month you can't seem to find the clients that you were finding before so that back and forth trying to uh you know ride that roller coaster of income becomes very difficult where care plans come in they give you a nice source of recurring revenue and you can kind of steady the waters a little bit in your agency so one of the big goals i had for my agency when i was still working a full-time job and doing my agency on the side i had a few benchmarks i wanted to hit before i got to where i could leave my full-time job and and run my agency and one of those was a certain amount of recurring revenue so i knew no matter what at least i could you know pay the mortgage for the house at least we wouldn't be homeless like worst case scenario right uh so obviously growing that over time every year i set goals on kind of where i want to be by the end of the year as far as recurring revenue because it just makes my stress level go down a ton knowing that you know each month i'm going to be bringing in a minimum amount of money um but as far as selling care plans you know i i've gone about it several different ways and i've learned a lot over the years but for me the biggest part of it is just making sure you explain to clients early and up front that their website is going to require you know ongoing care and support in order for it to do the things they want it to do so you know if you spring this on them after you launch the website or right before you launch the website they're probably going to be offended because they you've sold them on something that they didn't realize would require all this extra work so the you know the number one thing i always tell people is just to make sure you bring it up like as early as your first conversation or at least in your proposal uh when you send that over to them because the earlier they know about this you know the sooner they can kind of digest that information and kind of you know take in that idea so for me it's about making sure i explain this up front i have a couple guides on my on my website on my agency's website where i'll send my prospects to when they first make an inquiry so some of those cover like five questions every business owner asks before buying a website and in there i talk about recurring or excuse me the ongoing maintenance side of things and i have some other resources a website buyer's guide which kind of tells them about the entire process of buying a website and one of the things in there is you know realizing that you're going to have some uh ongoing time investment and fine or and or financial investment in having your website and operating it yeah i think one of the key things that especially when people are new to you know agencies or freelancing whatever it is when they're dealing with clients face to face with clients a big part of what we do is educate the client to explain to them that you know having a website isn't like just buying something that never needs to be maintained never needs to be updated doesn't need to be cared for i mean when you buy a car when you buy a house when you buy anything like that they have ongoing running costs and part of what we should do is to educate and inform them so like you say there's no surprises towards the end of the project life cycle you know whether you do that right the beginning the initial conversation whether you do that as part of the proposal which i think any ongoing costs should always be included in the proposal so you know whoever's looking to make the decision the final decision maker in a company or whatever they've got all the facts they need all the ongoing the maintenance the care the domain registrations and renewals the hosting all those kinds of things and that's part of our job is to tell them and explain to them what they need and the ongoing sort of cost implications of doing that side things from their point of view it could be a time cost or from our point of view where it's a a time is money kind of cost and we're doing the service for them so totally agree with what you're saying there and i think part of it is kind of the positioning too of if you just let them know up front and i think this is especially important with uh people who have not had a website before and a lot of people in in the time we're in now there's still a ton of people that have never owned a website you know we kind of live in this bubble where all of us think about websites 24 7. uh but if you just went out in public most people don't own and operate a website so i think it's really important for those people that have never done this before when you explain that up front as just a matter of fact now you can get in deep and say well with wordpress you need this kind of maintenance but if we use something else maybe you don't i usually don't go that far with them wordpress is my main tool of choice so that's that's the point of reference i'm explaining to them but when you explain that up front without pushing your care plan services what you're really doing is just educating them and telling them okay these are the things it's going to require so then when you follow that up with but don't worry about any of that because i can take care of that for you it's kind of like you've relieved them of a problem they didn't even realize they had right and i've even had people come back to me you know especially with companies that are just starting out and not had a website before uh just like when i buy something that i've never bought before i'll go get quotes or check prices from multiple different places and a lot of people are doing that with us and i've had people come back before it and say they were following up with me or going with me or getting the proposal from me because i was the only one that talked to them about that so they kind of felt like maybe the other agencies weren't letting them know about that up front so i think just being upfront and honest and being that person that's there to help them is is you know it puts you put you in a good position and really set you up for success in that standpoint yeah and i think um to kind of go back to what you were saying as well the different articles and things that you've got on your website i think this is a good uh topic we discussed a couple of weeks ago about putting content onto your website that helps educate and inform people because that can be a good way of actually winning clients over because you were being open and honest about what the whole process entails because as you say most of us that have been doing this for any number of years live and breathe the different things that we're talking about we understand the difference between wordpress and web flow oxygen and elementor and divi and all those kinds of things on what is the right solution for a particular project but they don't know it's the same as most people if they take their current to be serviced they don't understand what the engine does and all the various different sort of like sensors and the different the engine management systems and all those kinds of things they just want their car to get them from a to b comfortably without rattling and banging and puffing smoke out you know oversimplification but it's the same kind of thing we just want a smooth ride and we know that part of that is going to be looking after things servicing it some things we can do ourselves but the majority of the more complex things we would feel more comfortable giving it to someone that knows what the heck they're doing because it'll probably be cheaper for us in the long run because they know what they're doing then they can do it more effectively than we could so yeah i think to go back to the sort of education and information side of things i think that is the key that a lot of people don't necessarily understand which kind of brings me on to my second point that you just kind of touched upon wordpress now we all know and love and use wordpress for all the positives and the negatives that it actually has but like you said your choice is wordpress and with wordpress comes maintenance and updates and incompatibilities and all the things that we know that when a new update comes out we brick it a little bit when we think i've got 20 client sites they're going to update and i don't want to do it no matter how many backups and things you've got in place when big updates come out you can't help but feel that sort of like that little little pit in your stomach empty a little bit and just go ah i don't want to do this i know my day is going to go bad so what are your thoughts on sort of sell like i don't say selling as in like you're forcing someone to purchase it because we're not but selling the benefits and the virtues of having a care plan in place when a big part of that is because of the platform that we choose in this example wordpress because of the follows that that has knowing that we've got to deal with updates and they are coming out pretty regularly with page builders and wordpress core and those kinds of things so how do you feel about that and if you get questioned by that by a client that might know a little bit how would you deal with that side of things to allay any sort of like doubts or anything that they might have in their mind yeah i'll tell you what the the clients that know a little bit are my least favorite ones like i rather than know nothing or know a whole lot because when they know a little bit that is really tricky but yeah so i think you know obviously wordpress has its problems all platforms have their problems right no platform is perfect but with with wordpress because uh comes the flexibility of really being able to do anything you want to do there's pretty much a solution for everything inside wordpress and for me because my agency is focused around building wordpress websites because that's what i do you know i really don't go into it necessarily saying selling wordpress as a platform i'm more selling my services and what i can do for people and the tool i use to do that is wordpress so if i have a contractor come over to my house and they're gonna put in a new shower um you know i might like one brand a hammer and he likes a different one but i don't tell him which brand of hammer to bring with him you know so really they're not coming to me for a platform most of the time they're coming to me for a solution and that's this is the best way i know to provide that solution for them so i really hadn't had to struggle with having to justify wordpress to people now there was a point in time when i would have felt really backed in a corner had i got any pushback but i've started exploring things like web flow and and understanding how that works and where that might be a better solution for people and spend a ton of time going through their their training and stuff on their website and their youtube channel which is fantastic and learning how that system works enough that i can be comfortable with that and when the right project comes along where it makes sense you know i don't have a problem recommending something instead of wordpress uh if i feel confident that's that's the better solution for the project so i think all this is a little bit personal are there some projects where it might just be better to hand code the whole thing maybe i i don't know i couldn't do that so i can't really sell that solution to people so i think of it more as selling the solutions i provide that's what i'm selling and then you know the tools i use to do that is more my decision than the client's decision good point good point um yeah it is it is difficult i think as you know you're an agency owner whereas i'm like a freelancer kind of thing and i've had a business in the past where you know web design was part of that you know we do need to keep abreast of the different technologies that are kind of pushing forward webflow is a great platform and like you say the training website is brilliant i love their videos they're absolutely awesome the guy they've got to do with it well actually the three or four of them that do it they they know how to make a good video and make it entertaining on education which is great stuff um but yeah i completely forgot to say actually no i do know so this will take kind of like take us on to that second point that i want to cover today i'm going to pull up my slide number two now because i've got buttons to do it you recently switched over to oxygen and without going into the politics of why from a technical point of view why did you choose oxygen over maybe something like webflow or one of the other platforms that are out there that give you similar sets of tools was there something specific with oxygen you liked or is it something more of just a it kind of resonated with you and just kind of clicked really quickly you know honestly it didn't resonate with me or click with me quickly to be perfectly honest i had a lot of friends that are in our group and uh moved to oxygen six months ago 12 months ago and i honestly never went to their website i never looked at it it never occurred to me that it was a product for me because it it was always kind of billed as like the developers tool somebody you know who would consider themselves a developer and i come from a design background before i ran this agency i was a graphic designer for 15 years in the print industry i i knew nothing about code i still know very very little about code so it just didn't seem to me like um you know oxygen was a tool that was right for me however you know i've been using elementor for several years now and i think like every elementor user has you know gets to the point where you're frustrated about how many steps you have to put in place to get the performance you want to out of uh the website not saying it's not possible i see people get awesome scores with elementor all the time but you have to put in a whole lot of extra work to make that happen um so for me i was really looking for a solution that especially with all the changes coming in may with all the uh webcore vitals and things like that like i really wanted to be able to build websites that i knew would perform well um so i started looking at options i started looking at webflow and when our good buddy uh dave foy uh left wordpress and joined on the webflow train uh and for me webflow was way over my head at that point um and you know i decided well let's let's give oxygen a try um and when i used it and started to kind of get the hang of it and i i i was forced to kind of learn more about uh how html actually works how css actually works not that you have to like hand code a bunch of things inside of oxygen you don't you can but you don't have to you do have to have a better understanding of how those things work in order to understand how oxygen works versus a page builder like elementor beaver builder or even gutenberg but i basically went all in on um watching every bit of training i could could do everybody training i could find for oxygen and let's see uh within two or three days of purchasing it i rebuilt one of my websites uh with oxygen and the experience was really great i made tons of mistakes with it when i go back into it now it's really annoying how bad i was at like naming classes uh so i'll probably end up redoing that website again one day um but the the performance benefits i was getting out of that website immediately i mean it was night and day immediately different and when i started seeing how much more flexible you could be with oxygen that's what really hooked me in is you know uh the only limitation i had was like uh my imagination and really understanding how the interface works it wasn't any limitations within the platform itself and it's just made me it like really reinvigorated me to start you know uh getting more creative and building more things and you know it was just just an exciting thing for me yeah i think that's a good good point is like when you you rely on a tool like elementor which for most people it's a visual builder you know you can get in and you can do more things inside there's no two ways about you can if you want to within reason and if you really want to delve into some of those more advanced features you you can do that but i think that's where a lot of the fear from a tool like uh oxygen kind of comes in you know you were under that that misconception to a certain extent that you needed to be either a coder or have a good solid understanding of code to even get started in it let alone start to get more advanced or get more features out of it but i think unfortunately that's one of those things that while i'm sure there's lots of people would like you to believe that that i don't think it is necessarily 100 true there are certain aspects of it and having used oxygen myself for various different things you know people could quite easily get away with minimal to no knowledge and still be able to create a fully functioning and probably quite fast loading website but if you do then go that extra little mile and get a bit of an understanding of html and css i mean take out all the the cool things you can do with css css itself is pretty simple you know i'm no coder you know i can dabble a little bit in in php html and stuff that i'm fine with but it's not particularly complex to get your head around once you understand the hierarchy of it and all those kinds of things so with a little bit of time and effort you could realistically start to get a lot more out of a tool like oxygen without having to get in there and really start feeling like you've got a hand code lots of things you know like you say the the way classes are integrated into the whole platform makes it really really easy you know and and it's the same with webflow i mean there's a very there's a synergistic link between the two of those when it comes to the classes and things like that that if you plan ahead and you sort of you label your classes and you use those at the right places you can very quickly make sweeping site-wide changes with just one line of css code change and all of your classes will update accordingly which is yes you can do the same kind of thing inside you know elementor but it's not necessarily geared to working in that way so i think you don't need to you know i think people need to sort of put the fear of that side of things be to the side and test out something like oxygen because you can have is it a seven-day trial of it where you can set up a development environment i'm sure elijah or um permaslag or stardust will will let me know i think it's either three days or seven days where you can set up like a and a test environment full install of oxygen on their servers and you can play around with it so you could quite easily have a dabble before you shelled out any kind of money to see if it's something you could really get on with or not but yeah i think that misconception needs to be pushed to one side a little bit and people need to be a little less fearful of trying it out and seeing that you don't necessarily need to have that much of an understanding of those those fundamentals but never hurts to have them as like you say as you were finding out the more you've dabbled with it yeah and what's been really exciting for me is it's it's helped me learn a lot more about specifically html and css i'm still not touching any php because i don't want to brick my website quite yet um but it's it's given me the opportunity to use those things to learn those things and use them in a really easy way so you know you're talking about being able to make sweeping changes the other day i had to make uh a change to some styles in a client's website um and the only way to really do is elementor website the only way to really do it the way the website was set up was to style one element right click it copy that style and then open every page on their website one at a time in elementor and paste the style in and you know it was fairly quick it took me 15 or 20 minutes but the whole time i'm just really angry thinking this would have just been like open that class make whatever changes i need with the builder and it would have been done in oxygen so things like that just make your life a whole lot easier for sure yeah i think i mean i come from a background where i used to use dreamweaver so when you're using sort of like your typical html and php and stuff like that includes what a massive thing once you kind of learned about includes it was like they are the best things in sliced bread and basically all it includes if you've never used it is it's a way of using one block of code repeatedly so for example your footer which you create as a template and then your template is referenced on all the pages you know with oxygen with whatever when you want to make a change it's one instance of that you make a change to and then that reflects throughout the entire site and that kind of is how uh that works with code side of things so when you kind of work that way when you want to make changes global changes and you can do it that quickly that's a god said and you can to a certain extent you know use classes and things in a tool like elementor but you've got to be so much more forward thinking about adding those in to start off with otherwise you know they're kind of like an afterthought as it were for elemental classes whereas with oxygen and with webflow and stuff like that they're kind of a core concept inside the software itself so when you kind of you you think like that you know moving forward when you want to make those sweeping changes it is literally a couple of seconds and that reflects throughout the entire site yeah but i mean with something like elementor sure you can click on an element and assign it a class but whatever whatever changes you make to that element using the elementor interface it's not affecting that class like on a global thing like you could give it a class and go in there and and write some css and then apply that class to things but what's great with oxygen webflow builders that are thinking in this way is it's actually the you know if you click a different color or left align text or something on that class you're affecting everything with that class right from the buttons you have inside the the interface instead of for elementor it seems to me like the way you can use classes inside elementor is really more to like override something or add something that's not available inside the interface you know yeah i think the way i sort of look at it is some of these features in in elemental we talk about amanda because at the end of the day you've been an elemental user for a long time i've been an elementor user for a long time and i'm sure many people that are in the in the comments in the chat tonight are also elemental users or have been it honestly feels at times like certain aspects have been bolted on because people have gone on about them for a long time like for example the the global colors the global styling and so the theme styles whatever you want to kind of kind of call it they feel like an afterthought you know they feel like we need to have something like this because other page builders are using it so we're going to bolt it on whereas like you look at something like like bricks which i tested out yesterday which will come onto a little later you can so easily create a new global setup inside there and then you can assign that to any page you want any template you want so for me what i create like front-end dashboards i want the front-end dashboard to look different to the rest of the site because it's a dashboard at the end of the day well to do that it's an absolute pain when it comes to elemental i would like to just have multiple different style sheets all different theme styles you know and then assign that to this particular page this particular template and then change one thing but it's much more complicated and it's not really integrated into it whereas tools like bricks and i believe with oxygen and things like that these things are much much easier so it's kind of like it's thinking what would the typical designer that might want to have a website that has multiple different parts to it and they don't necessarily all share that same design aesthetic what could we do to make their life easier that's what we can do that would make it easier let's have multiple different setups for that where you can just reference them on a template or page basis and let people do what they need to do different styles of fonts different colors those kinds of things whereas i don't feel like elementor's necessarily done that with that kind of thought process in mind because it feels like it's just been bolted on because it's needed because other page builders are kind of doing it does that make sense yeah and you know i think things like that happen so i don't have a really long frame of reference with wordpress i guess i started in 2017 so uh four years now but when i started i was using beaver builder and i started using beaver builder right before beaver themer came out so when beaver themer came out i had no idea what it did but since everybody was talking about how awesome this was going to be and like how revolutionary this was i bought it right and so i had no real concept of what it would do uh and then learning you know uh on the simple side of what beaver themer does just being able to create your headers and footers and things like that like at that point the page builders weren't doing that right and now if a brand new page builder hit the market uh with with a bunch of fanfare and you couldn't control your header and footer i don't think a lot of people would be very into that because that seems standard now like your page builder has to be able to build everything out i mean soon gutenberg's gonna be uh giving you the ability to do all that um and the color palette example you used you know uh i guess the first one i saw somebody talking about where this was really well thought out and implemented was like in the cadence theme where you set up these global colors and then they are affected all throughout the site that's just part of that system uh and now it seems like everybody's you know integrating that because it makes way more sense to be able to set global colors but with something like elementor where that where that wasn't part of their of the core of the software it's something they've had to add on which i i definitely think they had to add that into it um it definitely it doesn't feel as integrated into the system now i've personally had trouble with their global colors i was told it wasn't wasn't their fault so we won't place play but i've had trouble with those things and i think that's probably because it's it's things that have just had to get bolted on over time yeah um there are so many aspects of it that you do kind of feel they're playing catch up on because i mean divi was another example of this i think divi also suffered from seeing what other page builders are doing and thinking oh crap we need to have this in me so they would that's it it's it's oh crap that's exactly perfect yeah your crap moment so yeah i would say that this this forward thinking page bill doesn't look at it maybe they come from a different point of view maybe they come from a designer point of view and they're trying to create a product that they would want to work with because they do this day in day out so they're in touch with what a typical designer would want and need to do maybe it's a case that's that you know other companies that develop page builders and tools like this they maybe they've fallen out of touch with that market and therefore they don't necessarily see what needs to be included from the get-go to make it a product that has the features that we need and i think again to talk about bricks which we will come onto it a little bit they do seem to have looked at what are the well two things in my opinion they've looked at what are the good things inside all the key page builders that are out there right now what are the things that people really use on a daily basis and the second thing is you know i completely forgot what the second thing is it was really important too how professional am i uh well we'll stick to the first one but they're really creating something that is not about hyping it up it's about fulfilling the needs for people that actually need to create and do a job and make that you know pretty simple and straightforward and not more complex than it needs to be so i'm kind of excited to see where that goes you know as opposed to that oh crap moment where they're looking at we really need to put this in because this is what people now need and we should have thought of that six months ago 12 months ago when we built things but they didn't and like i say i think unfortunately that is kind of what's happened over a period of time with elementor is that i think maybe they're not keeping up to speed with what their core user base actually wants and needs and there's little little sparkly bits i agree with you there they also have such a huge user base now too they probably have a million different opinions of what people want and need uh so that i i'll give it it's probably hard to listen to everybody there but like uh now thinking about your slide you pulled up uh before we started talking about oxygen like me making the switch to oxygen i would say that's not entirely true um and maybe i feel like me saying this will be controversial because i feel like so many people don't feel this way though i know you and i do because we just talked about it like i still have 40-something sites running elementor i have zero plans of rebuilding all those now i just rebuilt the admin bars website because uh you know i wanted to eat my dog food so to say like i've been talking about oxygen a lot i've been excited about oxygen there were some things that i was having trouble with on the admin bar site that would have been easier to handle in oxygen so i rebuilt the admin bars website in oxygen and i'm happy that i did it but i'm not going back and rebuilding all of my websites in elementor and my my controversial point is this like you don't have to pick one tool and plant your flag in that tool and say this is all i use and it's the best one and everybody else sucks and if you don't use this you're wrong like for some reason in our communities people are very and you said this word tribal about like the tools they use but i just don't feel that way at all like i think it's okay for me to build some sites with elementor build some with oxygen i think it's okay to jump over and build a website with webflow that's completely outside of the wordpress system like that doesn't bother me at all i feel like that's totally okay for us to do totally agree i mean i've talked about quite a few times on the different live streams and i'm quite open about the fact that i think as designers you know whatever we kind of want to call ourselves we have an obligation to the client to give them the best product that we can to meet or fulfill their needs and that isn't always using something like elementor there are times where brizzy might be a better option there are times where a static site might be a better option there are lots of different options out there that we can look into and like you say like i reference people do become very tribal about their page builders of choice or their tools of choice themes is another one you know there's lots of people out there that get really for the one of a better word but hurt if you don't love the theme that they love you know and it's kind of crazy because at the end of the day this market is a big enough market for all of these tools out there and what is one person sort of like poison is another person's you know they just love it they can't get enough it's the best thing whether that's just the way that different people are programmed for the way that these particular tools are sort of put together i don't know but you see people are going like you know oh but if you use oxygen you can't use elementor because this is better than that's better than this it doesn't matter you know you could have all the widgets in the world but if you only ever use five of them does it really matter what tool you use as long as it has those five widgets you need to use and rely on not at all you know uh it's been a couple months now there was a appsumo deal for some landing page builder and you did some videos on it um i don't remember what it was called pages swipe pages okay so i didn't have and i don't really have a need for that and you can absolutely do everything swipe pages does uh with just wordpress whatever theme you use whatever page builder you use let's not get mad at each other they all do what swipe pages does however i had a client uh one of my biggest clients i ever had he was a ppc agency he had a really really small a really focused niche on a specific uh industry and like even a niche within that industry and he really cornered the market on that because he was the guy to go to if you you did this service and he came to me he was using i don't know one of those landing page builders out there um he was using that i'd never heard of it uh he was wanting to come to me for some design help because the pages he was building looked like they were built with one of those generic landing page builders um so i told them you know well i use wordpress here's why here's what i do and he decided this was fairly early in my career he decided to go ahead and go with me and we ended up rebuilding probably i don't know 50 landing pages with wordpress uh and eventually that relationship ended up not working out because of how expensive it got to be managing 50 wordpress websites on you know we had several different servers on different hosting accounts and updates and care plans for all i mean it was a nightmare if if your job is to build a single landing page for a ppc campaign like and you're going to have tons of them wordpress really isn't the best solution you don't really want to be doing that with wordpress i found that out the hard way uh but you know this just goes to show you like there is there is reason to use different things and try different things and learn about different things and it there's no there's no one builder no matter what your preference is that does everything better than anything else ever could no i mean swipe pages was one of those things that i kind of i mean look i i bought i think landing was another one i bought ages ago from appsumo and i don't really have a need or i haven't really had a need to build landing pages too much for for myself i bought it for myself more than anything but it's one of those things that when you realize you can do so many different things that that does inside you know wordpress with whatever page builder you want but when you want to run a b test in with multiple different landing pages of the same to do the same thing you know when you want to monitor those and you want to do all the different things and you don't want to deal with updates you don't deal with security you don't want to deal with all those things a tool like that is just easier i could literally create a layout for a landing page i could then create three variations of it set enough to a b test all of those i can have it so it'll monitor and track leads all those kinds of things and i could probably have that set up in two hours and i haven't got to worry about maintaining that or updating it or checking to see if there's a new update or get an email to say there's a new update for wordpress and there's a new update for the plug-in there's a new update for the ap testing plug-in blah blah blah blah you kind of get the picture so you kind of think that just makes life easier and quicker and it just takes the pain away from what we're doing there which leads me on to one completely different thing which is i need to thank tonight's sponsor so you're going to have to bear with me for at least 30 seconds kyle so just to sort of say that tonight's episode is sponsored by those lovely people over at croco block and if you've never been over the croco block go and take a look because they have some amazing tools and plugins that work with both elementor and thankfully gutenberg and the use case for gutenberg is getting larger there's more uh links between gutenberg and crocker block so if you haven't checked it out visit crocoblock.com and have a little look and like i said i want to say a big thank you to them for sponsoring tonight's episode of lockdown livestream okay so with the bills being paid let's have a little look at some of the comments and then we'll get on to the third and final topic before we open up the q a session but what do we have we have a lot of lots and lots of comments and things going on and lots of conversation so i need to find something that has some relation to what we've been talking about otherwise it's going to be just gibberish so paul is saying beaver builder for life so i mean i suppose if you are a beaver builder user then yep you probably are in it for life yeah well paul just also uh posted a video of using live canvas so i would watch out getting that bb for life tattoo he's gonna run out of space it'll be something else on the other arm cross it out start to get a big x through it stradas so zion is an example of this it's not implemented yet a full head of building experience i don't think i've tested zion build right have you taken a look at that at all not even heard of it no that's the thing i mean there are lots of builders coming out and i think it's going to be difficult to break into that market sector if i'm honest i'm i'm absolutely blown away by the interest that uh brics has had i mean like i said i literally put that video together last night because i had builders in for the last three days and i couldn't record anything she's like they left at about two o'clock so i'm gonna quickly just put this together because i didn't have time to do a more detailed tutorial check that out quickly and i think that's had well over 5 000 views in well less than a day which is pretty awesome for a builder that most people probably didn't even know about before that so i think this definitely i think there are people interested in looking for an alternative to some of the more mainstream things that are out there right now you know i think people may be feeling a little frustrated with maybe not necessarily being heard with the things that they need and they are looking for a viable alternative and i think again it's one of those things that you see it every single day and i'm sure you've seen it numerous times in the admin bar group and so on is how many people are jumping over and embracing oxygen which i say is no bad thing because the more users the more money that gets put into the company the more opportunities for taking on more developers and the more that tool can expand and grow more support those kinds of things so i mean i'm kind of excited to see where this goes i mean what are your thoughts do you think that people are maybe getting a little disillusioned with some of the main players that are out there yeah i mean i'm surprised how much interest there has been about bricks because i i kind of get the feeling that people are getting like we're teetering on the point of being burnt out with more tools like uh it's if somebody came to me and said hey kyle i have an idea for a page builder uh what do you think i would say i don't know that i would like spend my next year building a new page builder like it feels like the market's getting very very saturated and with the fact that gutenberg while still not quite my cup of tea uh as it sits today like it does seem eventually it's going to be in a place that fully competes with page builders uh and when that point happens i think the market for third party page builders is going to get smaller because it's just so easy to install wordpress and everything's already there and ready to go so i don't know i feel like we're there's room for innovation obviously and i think uh new page builders coming out or page builders coming out with new features that push another page builder all that's good competition is good um you know i think that really in the end helps everyone but i do feel like we're just i don't know i feel like a lot of people have anxiety about all the tools that we have uh and even when i just started talking about oxygen like we do some affiliate stuff inside the admin mark but i try not to do a ton of it it helps keep the lights on which is nice um but you know there was no infil affiliate incentive for me to talk about oxygen i was talking about oxygen because i really wanted to use it and share people with the the cool things i found with it uh but it did seem like you know every fourth or fifth comment was like oh god now i got to learn something new oh no now i have to you know pay for this and you know i i feel like people have anxiety about like all the new things coming out and so i think part of it is a you don't have to just pick with one thing and stick with it forever and b you don't have to try everything like if you're happy with yours like just it's okay that people are happy with something else like you can still you know you can still tattoo bb for life like paul on your arm and you're okay not just paul though that not me not this other paul speaking of things like that i mean michael as he said not committed to one builder's really resonated be the best at one thing versus expand your skill set mindset this kind of is a good point you know where we are get in so many different page builders so many different tools coming out and with the advent of gutenberg becoming a more powerful force inside this especially like you say with google rolling out that update in may which is going to focus a big part of that's going to be on speed you know it is something that page builders are generally notorious for adding additional bloat that's not necessarily needed so this kind of links me up to a product that i've been talking about so i've been looking at and working with the company which converts wordpress sites to static sites so basically you have a development environment on their server that you have a copy of wordpress and you do all your building like you would as normal create your posts your pages all those kinds of things and then you export that over to your actual physical live domain for the website and it just converts it to a static version of that site do you kind of think and i don't if you're going to experience this kind of thing do you think that's going to kind of become something like a halfway house where people get the benefit and flexibility of using their page builders of choice and then they can output it as a static html to get the benefits of not having all of that potential bloat that a tool like you know a page builder on top of wordpress on top of a theme inherently adds to the whole end result of a website i mean do you have any experience with those kinds of things and what are your thoughts yeah so i played with one i'm not going to name who they are because uh my characterization of it wouldn't be fair because it's very dated so i played with one uh it's been well over a year ago because it was pre-coveted so it's like uh b c yeah bc before covid um so uh i i played with one of those because i really like this idea like you know the security part of it the performance part of it like if we could take those are like the hardest things about wordpress the updates the security uh you know the the speed sometimes depending on how you're building it like if we could eliminate all those things by pushing something out as just a flat html and css website uh without that content management system attached to it uh that would be really awesome and the one i played with worked similar to what you're talking about where uh you know on the development side of it you had wordpress and then you you pressed a button and it updated everything on the live site and boom so all those systems worked fine the site was faster the site you know uh did what it was for the most part did what it was supposed to but it was still limited on some of the functionalities that are built into wordpress that required you know the calls to the database and the whole cms being in there so at that point when i tried it and it's been like i said well over a year it it wouldn't allow me to take some of the sites i have and use them like those sites were not compatible with being able to do that so i don't know where that's at right now but that's certainly an interesting concept that i know a lot of money is going into yeah i think it's one of those things i think if they can iron those kind of bugs that there's limitations out because i don't know how well it would work with e-commerce it's something i need to experiment with but i mean e-commerce is probably one of the the sort of the prime candidates for something where there's going to be a lot of database courses a lot of products and shopping carts and all those kinds of things so it'd be interesting to see how it goes and again i think it's one of those things that maybe for simpler sites this could be that happy medium where you get the benefit of wordpress but you get to spit out a html css based site that is reducing the amount of blow to the junk that kind of just naturally goes with that kind of set of tools to go with it so fingers crossed you know those kinds of things will open it up for people that do still want to use the the benefits of a page builder and still benefit from a fast loading website so and one that i actually quite like the way they've done it is brizzy i like what they've done with brizzy cloud i don't know if you've experimented or played around with that honestly do if you if you get sort of half a day that you can spend a little time because you can just set up and use the free option you already got to sign up to it and you can use the free version of it but it gives you all the benefits of using the brizzy page builder all breezy depending upon how you want to say it gives you all the benefits of that and then what you can do is you can literally push that out to a domain that's on their cloud hosting with an ssl and everything or you can push it over to your own live domain and then the live version of the site is just a static site but you've got that again synergistic link back to the cloud server where you can then quite easily make changes and push those over to the live site that way and i i believe they've also introduced the blog aspect to that so you can now do blogging and i think they either are or have introduced some form of e-commerce option into it so it'd be nice if they could do something like that because i think that would definitely help set them apart and and limit the impact that people are getting fed up and burnt out with page builders could actually have by using a tool like that so i mean that would be quite cool to see yeah i'm definitely interested in seeing where that goes for sure it's honestly it is worth taking a look at like i say it it really impressed me how good that was when i looked at it a couple of times and created some landing pages and things and again it's a good option if you want simple landing pages that don't need to do a ton of other things like a b testing and so on it could be a great option for that side of things okay so final thing we're going to talk about before we go on to some q a's and that is going to be we've kind of covered a little bit today the bricks builder so i just want to kind of have a little talk about what we kind of think of that get your feedback on it in the comment section as well to say you know have you looked at it is this something you're kind of interested in we've already talked about people getting potentially burnt out with page builders and the amount of page builders that kind of come out but i think every once in a while and i kind of noticed this when elementor came out probably four or five years ago the first time i sort of did any content on it and you had the big players at the time which was divi and visual composer with and probably beaver builder but beaver builder i think is more of a niche kind of product i think there's a pretty smaller very loyal fan base to beaver builder that isn't necessary builder is the cult classic like in movies classic of page builders it's like the b movie that everybody loves but no one understands why they love it so much maybe that's doing a bit of a disservice but you know what i mean um i i don't think i've seen any real hype since elementor came out with a free version like i said about four or five years ago that kind of really got hyped up very very quickly i'm seeing a similar kind of um trend happening should we say with bricks at the moment that's come out to from my front little fanfare i didn't know anything about it until about two days ago where it was posted up onto my facebook group and i bought happy files pro which is the company's other product probably two years ago for like ten dollars for the lifetime access to it and i mean that's gone now the lifetime access has gone which is another thing that people are sort of poking at you know um that they're doing this lifetime access for a reduced fee 40 off at the moment but what people are not necessarily seeing is that this is a limited offer it's a launch offer and this isn't going to be something that stays lifetime forever more this is to get early adopters to get users onto the platform and i think then it will actually go over to an annual uh payment plan kind of thing which i think in all honesty is the right way to go about these kinds of things because it gives you sustainable income you know much the same way as care plans like we talked about the beginning but i think it's one of the first ones i've seen in a long time where there is a sense of excitement especially the fact that this is version one and it's shipped with so many solid options yes there's quirks yes there's some things that are that are missing some things would be nice to be tweaked to get a better experience but on the whole where i tested it over the last day or so i'm really blown away by just how feature-rich it is for a v1 product i mean i know you haven't tried it yet or not not too much but i mean what are your thoughts on this do you think this there's room in the market for this particular builder i'll i'll be 100 honest so the the creator of it messaged me like you said maybe two or three days ago and told me about it it was the first i'd ever heard about it uh i went to the website um and nothing on the website uh marketing wise stood out to me of like you need to drop your page builder and try this because this is so much better like nothing on there stood out to me in that sense and there was no way to try it for free so there's no free version there was no sandbox on the website where i could demo it or anything so for me i wasn't initially uh you know that that excited about it however i bought happy files like you did for like nine or ten dollars for lifetime access and it's a fantastic plugin and it's gotten really great updates ever since uh and the creator is very nice and and has always been very cool uh he offered me a version of the of the brix builder to test it out and see what i think so i took that um and played with it myself for for an hour so had he not done that i probably would have not purchased it based on what i had seen at that point now somebody like paul c comes out with the video and explains all these cool things i probably would have bit after that point um but yeah like you i was really really impressed with how far this is to feel like it came out of nowhere like to be fair he's probably been working on this a very very long time it didn't happen overnight i'm sure but for it to come out of nowhere and to have as much as it does in it already is it's pretty impressive but for me like i don't think any of these new page builders bricks included uh none of them are going to have a chance to compete at this exact moment unless they're focused on performance because that seems to be what everybody's worried about right now with any page builder especially with gutenberg getting closer to being something everybody can use to build just about anything if it doesn't perform well then i don't think it's really going to stand out from the little bit of testing i did which was certainly not scientific and not thorough it seemed to to perform really well the code when you inspect the code looks nice and clean so those parts of it are really impressive to me obviously i think there are plenty of things they can do and you pointed out some of those in your video to make it better from where it stands right now just some little improvements and tweaks as well as they're going to need more features to compete i don't think it's it's not going to compete directly with elementor or even oxygen at this point but i think it i think it's a much better product than gutenberg uh is you know at this point at a v1 first update i think gutenberg just had its 100th update uh so you know for me that's that's pretty impressive yeah i think you're probably bang on there i mean it's we if we can kind of compare it i mean if you think when uh elemental version one came out or you know when oxygen came out the start office i think i tried oxygen probably version two two or maybe late version one earlier version two i can't quite remember but when you kind of compare the feature set that this is kind of shipped with in version one it's kind of mind-blowing compared to what came out previous i see i think there's obviously the benefit of being able to see what other builders are doing and what people want and being active or at least just sitting back and looking inside the various different facebook groups to see what people are unhappy with what people want what these page builders are not giving them and then creating a product that has solid foundation with those key tools inside it so i think if thomas who's one of the key developers behind it which i think might actually be watching tonight's livestream um i think they went about that in a very solid way is the this page builder dead which i kind of talked about two weeks ago i think in the same way where people said a theme is dead i think you've got to look at the difference between people like you and i that do this for a living or have done it for a living compared to the hobbyist that might be looking for a tool that allows them to do to build a site or build a couple of sites or make a couple of extra dollars on the site you know do it for some family friends and what have you they're not probably not necessarily going to be looking for the same kind of features that you or i might be looking for so i don't think page builders are going to die anytime soon because i think speed again is one of those things that when you do this for a living and it is your main income and then google comes out and says if your website speed sucks we're going to penalize you for it you've got to sit up and take notice you'd be daft not to but we're in a different um we're in the industry a little bit more ingrained than a lot i would have thought of the people that even use tools like elementor i mean elementor's like seven million strong i think at the moment i'd be curious to know a what percentage of that are professionals and b what percentage of that are using anything but the free version you know because to invest their money and their time and effort into it is not necessarily something they would want to do but they still want to be able to create pages in a visual easy to use fashion so i don't think page builders are going to go out anytime soon unless gutenberg and wordpress turn around and go right page builders don't work with us anymore we're cutting ties which i think would be crazy to do but you never know yeah exactly it could happen so i think there's room in the market for something that's caters for what people actually need so i'm excited to see where this will go like i say i know it's still the version one um and we always get that shiny toy kind of syndrome where you try something out it's got some cool features you think this is great but i think if it concentrates on dynamic content to make that side of things easier we were talking before we went live about how easy it is to very quickly start introducing dynamic content into a bricks page which is way easier than some other builders out there make it i think every builder i think it's easier than every builder makes it yeah it probably is you know it is literally like two clicks and you've got dynamic content inline content no messing about with divs and spans and all that kind of junk i think if they focus on those strengths and they look at a market because i think it's gonna be very difficult to topple someone like elementor off that perch right now and for quite some time i think if they focus on the right market sector they could make a really solid product for that market sector and make a really solid income from that what are people's thoughts i mean elijah very very good good point very simple comment comment the brix dynamic content tags are beautiful exactly it's crazy simple you know if you know how to write them you don't even need to click on any buttons you can literally just open up a curly bracket type in what you want close your curly bracket your dynamic contents in there boom it doesn't get much simpler than that does it it is interesting you said you know they they obviously were listening to all the things people were complaining about it's interesting just looking at the interface of of bricks builder because uh you can you can see the influence from several different page builders right in there like to me the bar across the top that has like the desktop uh tablet mobile mobile landscape and the preview button i mean it's straight it i would be confused if i was just to see a screenshot of that in a screenshot from webflow it's the same thing like it's it's that that similar to me of course i also think the way webflow does that is the best way there is uh that i've seen so kudos to uh to brix builder for recognizing something like that and building it right in there but you can definitely see the direct influence from a lot of these different tools inside of there yeah absolutely and i but i don't think that's any i don't think that's a bad thing because i think what no i don't know it gives you an immediate um comfort family yeah so so you know yes there are influences from like i said i think in my video yesterday if divi elemental and what else they say oxygen had a love child it would probably be bricks and it probably would be because i think they've taken key elements from there that people are accustomed to it's the same as e-commerce the chopping basket is in the top right hand corner of pretty much every ecommerce site because everybody knows where it's going to be so they don't think about it and i think the same can be said yes if you look at yes the widgets on the left-hand side look very much like elemental but then they've taken that which is already a solid way of working and then they've given you things like you can pin the widgets to the top how cool is that is such a cool i didn't know that when i used it until i watched your video and i'm like that's one of those things where i'm like why doesn't every page builder do this like there is like four or five widgets that i use 99 of the time if i could just pin those to the top how much time would i save that's a killer feature exactly but you can see that the thought has been put into the interface to make it something that becomes it works for you not against you which you know with certain different other platforms there is an element of that working against you it feels counterintuitive to what you want to do it's kind of why i kind of brought up about the whole hierarchy of the page being on the left-hand side underneath that once you click somewhere else that goes back and everything closes and closes right up which to me was a little bit counter-intuitive that needs to be something its own dedicated panel on the right-hand side you can enable and disable you know ala oxygen which does that really well um and have that there so when you want to use it what's that let's let's debate this so in oxygen that panel sticks to the right-hand side right the structure panel um and you can open it or close it right but it sticks there in elementor they introduce the navigator which is like a floating uh thing you can just move around you prefer in oxygen where it's stuck to the side i don't prefer i think it's one of those things that i think each one of them has a different way of working like i like the way the brizzy does things the thing i don't like about the way oxygen does it is that once you start to get down which is very quick and easy to get down multiple levels you end up with a sideways scroll bar which is fine on a big screen but on a small screen if you're doing something on a laptop for example that becomes a bit of a pain point uh so i don't think one's necessarily better per se than another but i think if they can take you know if with bricks they can take the best points of each of those so it is something you could open and close when you want to use it like most of them do that you do have a simplified view i love the fact you can rename them really really easily i love the fact that when you click on one of those depending upon whether it's a row or a column or section gives you immediate access to deleting it duplicating it those kinds of things no right clicking because you don't need to it's just click on the little three dots and you get extra options seems really intuitive to me just needs to be separate and i know where i spoke to thomas earlier on in a conversation that's something they'll be implementing because it does make sense so i i like what they're doing with the interface is it perfect none of these are perfect they've all got things that work you know you're a left brainer or a right brainer some things are going to be so natural you never think about it another thing is going to be i just do not understand why that's there but i think i think they take in some of the good or the best points from the different builders and they're using those like for me the color coding like you spoke about earlier on being like a bit rainbow-esque based upon whether it's a column a row a section those kinds of things i'm not a big fan of that not so much i get why that's there and from like i i understand why it's there and why it would be helpful but i just don't visually like the way it looks yeah i find it awkward and i think i said this in the video i use two 32-inch 4k monitors so you can imagine when you're going to go from the top left where you've got the one panel right the way over to the right hand side to click on to select a section that becomes a bit of a pain because it's just too much of this and with a trackpad as opposed to a mouse which i tend to use now with the mac like it is just a lot of unneeded interaction with the trackpad as it were you're almost going to get a workout which you hot well you want armies yeah but you know the little things like that i think they frustrated me a little bit yesterday but these are small niggles i think what is ultimately a really good launch product that superseded my expectations i mean i remember trying brizzy out and that was good but that had to go quite a long time before it got to the level of the amount of tools and the ease of use that you had with what bricks launched with you know i think that i think that's probably what i'm most excited about is that if this is version one where is it going to be in version two how much further forward is if people support it and and hop on board this platform you know that's that's the the biggest thing will people hop on board the platform only time will tell with that side of things so i don't know hopefully you know because i think what thomas is doing there and the other people involved in it it's pretty solid yeah i think for the launch price they have right now obviously this depends on where you're at uh and and how how life is going for you but at the price they have it in comparison to other tools out there it i think it's worth investing in if you can spare the money if you can say i can drop i don't forget what it was 150 bucks or whatever if you could drop that and it not hurt you not bother you to do that i think it's a tool worth investing in to see where it goes you know maybe it's not your everyday builder for every single thing maybe it you know it ends up being but i think it's it's definitely worth checking out yeah i think if you were looking for a platform that allows you to do you know really easy dynamic content to get associated with you know building sites and so on because at the end of the day we need i need to sort of answer a question that was sort of popped up in the comments does it come with a theme basically what bricks is is a theme with a builder integrated into it you don't use external themes it's all in one platform so the theme is basically a bare bones theme which has the builder that allows you to do all that including all the different template files like your archives your 404s your home page all those kinds of things and integration with gutenberg which i kind of found a little bit weird to start off with and we'll come on just answer some of the questions about this in a little bit but i forgot what i was going to talk about again i think i'm i'm obviously getting way too old oh i need to start drinking beer again i was going to say you're not drinking tonight and you can't remember anything i think that's the key alcohol is my friend yes it is my friend yeah so i think we've pretty um we've kind of covered the the excitement that kind of surrounds a tool like bricks like i say for me if they can make the whole dynamic thing or i know i was going to say if you're looking for a pretty solid platform to build dynamic sites and you want to limit your expenditure then you could take a look at bricks which like you say is the launch price of 149 for a thousand websites sounds familiar uh and use a tool like um metabox which is on lifetime offer over on appsumo which i think again that's 149 and you get unlimited sites on there i think when they bring out the ability to create custom loops to put conditional logic as some of those core things i think you need to work with dynamic content and then link it up to a tool like metabox which gives you separate databases if you want to have a lot of content and you want to filter that quickly and you want to be able to display that really quickly that might be a good option for 300 you could literally have a thousand website development platform and an unlimited platform when it comes to dynamic content that's pretty compelling i think where there is no additional expenditure moving forward you have those in your toolbox ready to go kind of thing so i think that's quite an exciting kind of idea especially now seen as a tool like elementor have upped the price to 999 per year 4 000 websites which is a big old chunk of change for lots and lots of people so you know there's options there's options there okay so we're gonna do now is before kyle has to shoot off in about 15 minutes or so we're going to do let's start again so if anybody's got any comments questions anything you'd like to raise either myself the topics we've covered tonight or for kyle drop those into the comment section don't forget to give us a thumbs up if you enjoy in the video because i was like say it does help youtube understand that it likes what we're doing around you so let's have a little look at some of the comments so susan you're asking the question metabox instead of acf reason i said metabox instead of acf is because if you want to have tools that you can use that you don't have an ongoing cost because acf no longer have that lifetime deal and you want to have the ability to have a database structure like tools like metabox with custom metal fields and custom post types and those kinds of things separate from wordpress in other words instead of having it into the wordpress database structure you have separate database tables specifically for that data and those meta fields a tool like metabox is a better option because for my understanding and this is fairly limited because i haven't actually tested it myself yet that will give you a speed increase it'll make your database lighter and it should also help with filtering searching and so on on bigger websites smaller websites you probably get away quite happy with the tool like acf ports toolset toolkit whichever one is i can never get it right they will give you that but if you want that ability to scale your database then maybe something like metabox is worth taking a look at and that's right why i said aca so that's why i said metabox as opposed to acf i mean you're an acf kind of guy aren't you kyle i am that's i've used pods a little bit um back in the day but once i invested luckily i bought acf while it was still a lifetime deal um that's pretty much all i've used it does everything i need it to do so i've just i guess this kind of goes back to our like shiny object thing like metabox comes up i don't even look at it like i don't have any issues with what i'm using so i've just not even paid attention to it now you'll go out and do a video on it and i'll be buying it so i'll just wait for that i hear that a lot need to turn this inside your notifications off for your videos i'll just message you directly add another 200 on um yeah but the thing is i mean for me i mean you you know that dynamic content is kind of what my channel is kind of focuses on so i've looked at meta metabox before people have sort of said why don't you do it on this plugin and so on but up until now cost prohibitive for what it does it didn't integrate with 99 of page builders and i don't think it really integrates that well just yet but brics has it native integration for it looking on the facebook group from the developers where they've been talking about the the future of it one of the things they're talking about is that they want to open up more integrations with more page builders so i'm kind of looking at potentially investing as a bit of a sleeper product like we've said where i might not use it or do much with it right now but in six or twelve months time where it becomes a more useful tool for many people many use cases then i might take a look at actually using creating some content on it and if brix grows the way that i hope it will then there's already an integration option between those two tools to start off with so it's kind of interesting to see where all those kinds of things go and if they do open up to more page builders like they say they're going to do so what else do we have um let's have a little look michael wright i tested one of the pre-built bricks templates it got 99 in gt metrics 97 google mobile and 100 on google desktop that's pretty good going i mean i was testing out because there's a lot of comments came up about this earlier on after my my video yesterday i wanted to sort of test it out with just the stuff that i just been throwing together to see how it worked and out of the box it was average it was average but then i hadn't optimized the images i i just literally just bung the pile of things on the page to see how the heck it all worked but very quickly by using some of the normal techniques you'd use even just uses like auto optimize which is a free plug-in you could already get that up to the high 80s when it comes to mobile and just under 100 with the desktop so i think out of the box it's got potential to be pretty quick you know but i'm sure carl you could attest to this as well the number of times you you run tests on gt metrics and google page speed and something like that you run them say let's just say you run five of those without changing anything and you see each time you do it the number changes because there are so many things at play it's not just how fast is your website from how you built it it's also the server that about the traffic going back and forth all those different things play a part and i think it's a little bit misguided when people go oh this is better than that because look they scored 10 points better there are way more things to take into consideration just the tools you use to create the page that you're benchmarking i mean would you agree yeah i agree and anytime i run those tests i i'm just in the habit now of i've run it three times and kind of i don't get out of calculator and find the exact average but i'll kind of see from those three tests you know what's kind of in the middle of those three because it's always it's always a little bit different but like i said i think if if if brix isn't there with the performance then i don't know that it it's doing enough right now to really make a huge dent from what i saw it is making it with the performance so uh i think out of the box it's already going to beat something like elementor in terms of performance probably not gutenberg and be very comparable with oxygen just straight out of the box and i think it's going to have to do that to to really compete so yeah and i think you know whether you like gutenberg or not and i mean i'm not the biggest fan of gutenberg i mean the gutenberg plug-in itself you do have to put several other plugins on top of that to make it a truly usable platform but you can get some really solid results i mean when i did the e-commerce site using gutenberg using stackable and using the bloxy theme that got great speed scores straight at the box and it was no real effort to do it so it is really quite straightforward unless you've got some really complex designs which let's be honest about these days that's not really what most websites are all about unless you are promoting something very specific that is graphic and animation heavy i think you can get away with using quite minimal tools to get great looking results if speed is your main concern then you have to realistically look at what are the things that you don't need to include on your website to make it as optimized as possible for your audience and the speed in which you are looking to attain you know when you want to have all animations and effects and transparent you know sort of pngs and things everything is going to have an impact upon the speed score that you have a simple fact there's no two ways about it have you ever looked at uh getting into gutenberg yourself or is this something that you're kind of thinking i just don't want to even touch that bloody thing right now no i think i mean i almost feel like i'm on this inevitable train to using gutenberg if i'm still using wordpress in the future right i kind of just feel like eventually that's where i'm going to go and so when gutenberg first came out i dove into it deep and realized this is a huge mess and i'm not touching this and then a few months later i tried it again and it got a little bit better and i was able to get a little bit further and then right at the end of last year i started playing with it again that's actually kind of how the me trying oxygen actually happened i i did a test of building this simple landing page in elementor and then rebuilding it in gutenberg and this time i was able to recreate the page completely in gutenberg simple page it was like four sections nothing fancy in it i was able to complete it and i was like holy cow the performance is so much better and i actually did that same test again um in oxygen but i just still feel like for me there's not everything you need in gutenberg there and there's still too many things that like oh well this doesn't work so you have to like do this work around so for me it's just like i got to make money when a client hires me to do a job i need to be able to get in there and do the job so for me it's still too much fooling around at this point but i almost feel like i'm like like i said on an inevitable train to using gutenberg one day i think the biggest hurdle for people that transition over to gutenberg is the fact that it's not a wysiwyg editor you know you're not seeing what it looks like in the context of the design and that i think really hurts people you know if you are if you go back if you ever use like visual composer back in the day which is what i kind of cut my teeth as the first page builder that was primarily just building blocks with nothing in the back end the only thing you really saw was the text you know and it blocks all over the place so you were constantly switching back and forth between the front end of the back end whenever you made changes and that's one of the things that is really annoying and i think that's very indicative of what gutenberg does it forces you to have a back and forth just to see the design you're working on and see what's different in the editor to what's different on the front end that's really frustrating and time consuming i almost think at this the last time i was really trying with gutenberg it was almost more frustrating than when you know with something like uh what's the thing you just mentioned um when you know the back end doesn't look anything like the front end and you know that for a fact so you have to go back and forth with gutenberg it kind of looks like the front end like it looks similar to the front end but not exactly so it's almost more frustrating that like i thought i just fixed all this and when you go look on the front end it's you actually did more harm than good or whatever it may be so it's it's just that there's like it's like when you're playing a video game with lag or something right it's like you keep having to go back and forth you're not sure exactly where you are at any point so yeah and i think gutenberg is kind of relying heavily on third-party plug-ins now to bring extra blocks extra functionality and you get to the point there where you plug in all the holes that gutenberg has with these third-party plug-ins at which point are you just going to get up to the amount of extra code and the extra sort of resources required just to use a page builder yeah i don't i don't think gutenberg's necessarily relying on third parties i just think when you when you task something like wordpress which is this huge open source undertaking to build something this huge uh it moves slow like government moves slow like uh we have an idea for uh a bill and we have to send it to you know congress and then it has to go back here and it has to do this and these people have to check it and this person's mad about this one thing and that's just how things move through wordpress so uh i don't know when thomas started a brix builder but uh i'm sure had he been in charge solely of making all the decisions for gutenberg it would have been done and working fine by now right and i just think private companies can move fast like that they don't have to worry about the bureaucracy of everything where anything inside wordpress is just going to take a long time and like you said now you have to bolt so many things on to it because it's it's still to me a beta product like it's live inside of our wordpress dashboard and it's ready to go and like i said there's been like 100 updates but to me it still feels like it's kind of in that beta stage i think um peter might be a little bit sort of um generous in a lot of cases if i'm honest but then you have some people that are building awesome things with gutenberg and like tell you you're you just don't know how to use it yet like you haven't spent enough time with it uh and they're building up wp rockets website is awesome totally awesome and built with uh gutenberg i don't know so maybe part of it is just me but yeah yeah and elijah comes up with a good thing he basically echoes what i was just about to say it's like development by committee or designed by committee if you've ever worked with that kind of thing you know as a designer when you've got 10 people involved making every decision you get no way it's one step forward 12 steps back super difficult really frustrating to kind of deal with now i'm conscious of the fact that kyle has got to go and be the good dad and sort of picking up the kids so we're gonna have one i could spare about 20 more minutes so we'll be good two more questions then okay so first things first let's have a little look richard good to see you in tonight my young man i'm saying as this is sponsored by croco block hopefully they'll realize the need for integration into other builders including bricks oxygen brizy divi etc i would love to see that i would love to see more of these tools that have really powerful tool sets being able to work and integrate with more tools out there you know i'm super excited the fact that we can now start to use you know jet engine jet smart filters and so on with tools like gutenberg love it or hate it at least if you combine that with things like cadence blocks or stackable those kinds of things which opens up more design sort of opportunities and global colors and things like that then you can start to harness the power i think this is where gutenberg has to go i think it has to be a platform for really good third-party tools to take in the direction that we are used to going in you know the dynamic content i mean we know that gutenberg is not particularly great when it comes to mobile side of things it's not great at responsive there's a lot of people complaining about how it's not great at that side of thing so i kind of hope that they do at least open up have a nice open api and we can have third-party companies that have solid backflip sorry solid platforms solid backgrounds in developing expanding the tools we use and they can do that with a tool like gutenberg so fingers crossed we can get more like that and they can integrate more but like you say i think this whole development designed by committee is is really hampering what gutenberg can do um and maybe it would have been better if they'd actually bought out another company there's a page builder company and took on their experience and knowledge to build a product that probably would be way way ahead of where it is right now had they done something like that but that's just my opinion on it imagine how mad everybody be if they bought the wrong page builder though it's very it's very very true it's very true okay well what i'm going to say is i'm going to give kyle the the sort of the microphone for the next sort of couple of minutes and he can just tell you all about how you can find out more about kyle more about his agency more about the admin bar some of the exciting things he's got going on there so i'm going to quickly hand this over because i didn't say i don't want to keep you from going picking the kids up because i don't think the wife or anybody else would be too happy if that was the case so i'm going to quickly hand it over and let you have the microphone well thank you sir i appreciate that i will say i saw a comment in here where uh we spent most of this talking about page builders i think the original idea was care plans and more and we we uh we got on talking about page builders one thing we didn't mention and i'll just plug since you said i could plug um when we're talking about care plans one of the things uh we came up with at the admin bar is a thing called the website owner's manual if we had gotten into that i was going to tell everybody there's a coupon code for that if anybody's heard of it i'm not going to do a long spiel telling you what it is you can go to the admin bar.com and you'll see a thing for the uh the womb or the website owner's manual if you use the coupon code thanks paul you'll get 40 off as way uh thanks paul for letting me plug this um so you can check that out if you're interested that makes it around 20 bucks or so um but yeah if anybody wants to come hang out with us at the admin bar we have a community there of about 4 000 folks uh we're very very active there's 30 or 40 posts per day there's lots of great conversations going on in there um we do a newsletter every week kind of a recap of the best things going on inside the group so there's definitely lots of support you can find in there and good conversations with other agency owners and we tend to keep things very very civil inside of there so i'd love to see you there you can go to the admin bar dot com forward slash group and that will redirect you to the facebook group just make sure you fill in all the questions so we can we can approve you in there but we definitely love to hang out with you awesome stuff well thank you very much for joining me tonight on the livestream it's been an absolute pleasure to have you here it's always fun to talk about all the tech and the the the things that kind of go on in our industry so i want to say thank you and sure everybody else has really appreciated you being here tonight and sharing your knowledge your experience and just having a solid chat so thank you very much kyle thank you to everybody that's been in tonight just remember it's two weeks now and we'll have another lockdown live stream so two weeks tonight and if you haven't already picked up the website owner's manual or joined up to the admin bar head over there after this video and go and take a look at those so thank you very much kyle for joining me tonight and thank you everybody else for being part of tonight's live stream or take care and i will see you in two weeks time take care thanks paul

Channel: WPTuts

Views: 2,638

Keywords: WPTuts, kyle van deusen, the admin bar, WordPress, WordPress page Builders, Elementor, Bricks Builder

Id: O1IkVaV9es0

Length: 87min 10sec (5230 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 25 2021