368 – Driving WordPress education via Full Site Editing with Chris Badgett

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Hello there, and welcome once again to the WP Builds podcast, you have reached episode number 368 entitled driving WordPress education via full site editing with Chris Badgett. It was published on Thursday, the 11th of April 20, 24.

My name's Nathan Wrigley, and I'll be joined by Chris in a few minutes to have our conversation. But before then a few bits of housekeeping. If you would like to keep up to date with what WP Builds are doing head over to WP Builds.com forward slash subscribe. Fill out the form and we will keep in touch with you as and when we produce new content. That's typically a podcast episode, like you're listening to now on a Thursday, but also the this week in WordPress show, which we do live every Monday and then repackage as a podcast on a Tuesday.

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Okay. What have we got for you today? Well, today I'm chatting with Chris Badgett. If you've been in the WordPress space for any length of time, you've probably heard or seen Chris around. He's a frequent attendee at WordPress events and he has a LMS or learning management system plugin called LifterLMS. And we talk a little bit about that today, but we also get into a whole load of other subjects.

We talk about how full site editing is empowering, in Chris's opinion, the ability for non-developers to create really high quality online courses with great ease.

We also talk about how it's possible to control every element of your site. That's headers and footers without having to touch a single line of code. So this is the whole full site editing experience.

We also talk about how blocks can add advanced functionality, things like embedding videos and so on into an LMS or learning management system.

And we also talk about a thing which was new at the time we recorded it, which was a little while ago now, but it's called sky pilot, which is a theme created by LifterLMS to make it super simple to get your website up and running with a limited amount of experience.

It's a really nice episode, Chris, as you'll discover is a really nice person. And I hope that you enjoy it.

I am joined on the podcast by Chris Badgett. Hello, Chris.

[00:04:05] Chris Badgett: Hey, Nathan. It's great to be here.

[00:04:07] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, really nice to have you on the show. We're recording this in chilly times. It's October 2023 and we've just been having a conversation about how cold it is where we both live. Where are you based, Chris?

[00:04:19] Chris Badgett: I'm on the coast of Maine in a small town called Belfast.

[00:04:23] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, okay. It was, I'm going to totally go off piste here. Any any connection to the Belfast in Northern Ireland is, I know that a lot of

[00:04:32] Chris Badgett: sure there is. I don't know the history, but I'm sure there's a connection of some

[00:04:37] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, nice. Anyway, Chris is from Lifter LMS. He's been in the WordPress space for. Certainly a lot longer than I have, because when I arrived into 2015, something like that, Chris was already part of the furniture, you might say, but given that not everybody will know you, Chris, it's a boring and fairly bland question, but let's start this way.

Just give us your bio, your WordPress bio, what you've been doing all the time that you've been using CMSs and tell us a little bit about Lifter just to kick us off.

[00:05:08] Chris Badgett: Absolutely. So Lifter LMS is a learning management system for WordPress. It just turned nine years old, which is awesome. I started in WordPress in 2008, just building a blog for myself to write about leadership. And then I started a freelance business. Then I became an agency. I focused on the LMS membership, coaching niche for my agency, and then built the product that we wished existed for.

to do full stack learning management system, including the e commerce, the gamification, memberships, it's all rolled into one. So that's that's where Lifter LMS came from nine years ago. But I feel like I've been on all sides of WordPress, as a freelancer, agency person, a product person, a community person, a WordCamp organizer a WordCamp sponsor.

I just love the people at WordPress. They're some of the best people. And I love connecting with the WordPress community and contributing. So like our core Lifter LMS plugin is free. So that's like kind of our big present with a big bow on it. That we give to the community, but also try to help out in other ways.

And I love helping other WordPress entrepreneurs and agency folks. In business and stuff like that as well. I have a podcast for our niche called LMS cast. So that's another thing to check out if you haven't heard of it.

[00:06:37] Nathan Wrigley: Wow. There's a lot to unpack just there. Did you have to, sorry, I know that we're going to talk about a particular thing that you've got going on, which is a theme we'll get onto that in a minute. When you when you were coming up with the whole idea of Lifter LMS, did you have to, did you have to invent a lot of the things which are now.

What an LMS is, I guess if you go and look for an LMS, you've got this fairly you've got this fairly deep understanding of what's going to come with it. You've got an understanding. Okay. It's going to be organized into lessons and courses, and there'll be some badges and there'll be ways of getting through one thing to the next thing to the next and so on.

Was that all part of the landscape or did you have to, you guys have to invent it as you went along No,

[00:07:22] Chris Badgett: I think LearnDash had been going for a couple of years. And there was WP courseware. We were like the OGs of WordPress LMS in a way. But we really built it up from a first principles approach in terms of, I had these clients where we're building these custom LMS sites from scratch.

Super high end, expensive projects. Some of them like even over six figures after a couple of years working with these clients and. Everything that they needed, we, we came out of the marketing automation and fusion soft area. So we also knew a lot about marketing and sales and automation. But our first customers were our agency clients.

And then over the last nine years, people just keep asking for features and some louder than others. Oh, a lot of people want to be able to offer training to groups. Okay. We'll build a groups functionality. Some people, they want to do marketing automation, but. Do more from the WordPress site. So we built triggers for sending emails and gamification with badges and things.

And it goes on to this day. Like we recently launched a course cohort to add on for doing more time based courses with a particular group of people. People wanted to stop cheating on their tests. So they wanted question banks. So that students got like different versions of the test and randomization and stuff.

So people keep asking for it. We keep building it. And it's really an art and a science to not building everything that the market wants, but you can tell what, cause you're going to end up with a cluttered, hard to use interface, but finding that general use stuff that fulfills our customers desires is where it happens.

And then also. The really crazy thing about LMS is that there's a lot of different use cases. So we started with kind of the expert speaker, author, coach type person. We have, we found all these businesses using it for internal training and they had different needs. And then we had schools of various size up to major universities, to some certification program that somebody invented and everything in between.

And the pandemic accelerated all that. So we these use cases evolve. So sometimes in product, you want to focus on this like ideal customer profile, but it's always been interesting because no matter what we do, whether we focus our marketing or focus the product, all these other use cases are knocking on the door, which presents a good challenge, but also opportunity to grow through.

Making it flexible in that way, which is in many ways, the story of WordPress, people use WordPress a lot of different ways. There's beginners, there's experts, there's power users, there's developers, there's novices. So I think of it like. You take care of the ends, like the power user developer needs custom API, all these integrations, but then we also help a beginner who there's, it's their first introduction to WordPress and they need to be able to put a course online and put a price tag on it.

So we take care of the ends and the middle takes care of itself.

[00:10:43] Nathan Wrigley: really surprised, actually, that the, that it hasn't got to the point where you're running out of things to, to come up with, but that's great. So it's a, that there is no horizon set on what an LMS is. It's constantly evolving and what you had three years ago probably will be. Really different to what you've got three years from now.

There's new features and new things coming along all the time. That's, yeah, that's amazing. It's good for you as well. Cause it keeps you fresh and on your toes and be able to offer new things to your current client base, as well as new ones that come along. That's good to know.

[00:11:16] Chris Badgett: Yeah. And learning is like a evergreen human need and desire and T as well as teaching. So it's, and it's ever evolving, you've got AI here, you've got. Inflation and like cost stuff, which makes WordPress more attractive. And yeah, it's just an ever evolving industry and you can always fine tune making learning more approachable and democratized and more accessible to people around the world.

So there's plenty of work to do.

[00:11:46] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I hadn't really thought about it in those terms, but learning is one of the few things that more or less everybody, like whether they expressly enjoy it or not. Everybody gets something out of learning something, if there's an awful lot of things from my past that I'd rather not do anymore, but learning is not one of them.

Yeah. That's really interesting and great for your business as well. Let's talk about the future a little bit, because in the show notes that we shared, Chris was keen to get on and talk about full site editing or site editing, as it's now called and what that brings, but also we're going The weeds of it's not really a product.

I guess it's a theme, which is a product in itself which bolts onto LMS and allows you, sorry, lift LMS and allows you to take that to the next level. But the nice little phrase that you wrote that I think should kick us off is I said, what do you want to talk about? And you said falling in love with full site editing, which is I'm sure not everybody's experience.

I'm sure quite a few people listening to this will have the exact opposite set of emotions towards it. But why do you, what is it about the whole full site editing that you like? Are you just able to ignore the bits that most people dislike? What's going on?

[00:13:03] Chris Badgett: Well, I remember when I first got into WordPress and you have to understand, I'm not a developer. I'm not an engineer. I can barely write like HTML for a link if I need to do that. So when I discovered WordPress. I was like, holy cow, I can put a website online without writing code. And it was a little hard.

It was a little clunky, especially in the beginning. But as WordPress evolves, the block editor is an example. I was trying to figure it out. It was a little hard to use at first, but over time it gets better and better. And then full site editing is really that same story, just further down the path.

And as a non developer myself, if I want to create custom templates for, let's say, a course or a landing page, or I want to do this distraction free learning of a lesson and remove the header or hide the menu and do all this stuff as a non developer, I can easily do that. And I know as a product person our users use the tool in so many different ways that they want that flexibility when we survey our customers.

Customizability is like the number one, customizability, control, affordability, scalability. These are like the main desires of the market. And I think that full site editing puts customizability into the hands of the average user in a way that wasn't possible before. And I'm a big fan of page builders.

I use beaver builder for a very long time. Probably 30 percent of our users use Elementor and it's a great community. It's got you can do a lot of those same things, but having full site editing natively, just using core WordPress. I come from a background in mountaineering and climbing.

And in the beginning, when you learn how to climb a mountain or go backpacking or camping, you carry all this gear and stuff. But over time, you want to be fast and light. You become a minimalist. You don't want your back and your knees hurting because you're carrying all this stuff. So that's my ethos when I approach technology is how do I do more with less and there's performance when things are more native and stuff like that.

And as a, we've always sold a theme in our product bundles because we want to lift our LMS as a platform. So everything you need to do to create launch and scale high value online courses, every website needs a theme. So we've always had one. The first one we built was modeled after. A theme that I really liked back in the day for WooCommerce called Canvas, I think it was called,

[00:16:01] Nathan Wrigley: That

[00:16:02] Chris Badgett: and it was very and this was like, we launched it right when the customizer came out.

And so I learned the valuable lesson that like, Oh, now it's all different now. And our theme kind of went out of date. Lots of people used it cause they wanted the full suite and they just wanted support from one company as much as they could. But I took that lesson I learned about six years ago, and when full site editing came out, we launched Skypilot, which is our full site editing theme for the e learning industry and really focused on what course creators want in terms of how the lesson syllabus looks and how to leverage the new bits and bobs of full site editing.

So that's the journey.

[00:16:50] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Can I just rewind a little bit to what you said a minute ago about you, you mentioned a whole bunch of different things that your customers are focused on, they're really interested in, but customizability was the first one that came out of your mouth. And that's really interesting. So obviously I have no insight into what the typical LMS user might want.

By the sounds of it, there isn't really a typical one. There's just, you have customers and they all have individual needs. But I would have assumed, obviously incorrectly, that most of them want a layout. The layout. The LMS layout. The thing that you would see. But they don't, right? They want to, it turns out, they want to adapt it slightly.

Maybe they want to do a Full on change and make it completely different. I didn't think that would be a thing, but it is.

[00:17:34] Chris Badgett: 100%. And I think the other view is also true with which is people wanted to look good out of the box. So you have to fulfill that too. And maybe their idea of customizability is not in the LMS. They want something else in their marketing to be super customizable or how they do coaching or whatever.

Yeah, that's, if I had to put one at the top, it's customizability. That's what people like and it's what they love about WordPress, but they want it to look good too on first install. And, maybe the default is good enough for them.

[00:18:10] Nathan Wrigley: So how does Lifter handle that then? How does Lifter go about putting pixels on the page? Because obviously you've got the plugin and I'm guessing that if you said you've used Beaver Builder in the past, you don't necessarily need. A Lifter LMS theme, although we'll talk about the one that you obviously have built in a minute.

You can put it inside of any theme, but how does Lifter put the pixels on the page if you've just got the plugin and any old theme from anywhere else, and can you modify it with just the plugin without any full site editing or regular or a different theme?

[00:18:44] Chris Badgett: Yeah. At a high level, the way I think about it is plugins are for functionality themes are for design. Although that's not a hundred percent true. Like plugins do create interface and, they need to have default layouts. And fortunately for us, some of the most popular themes like Astra and Cadence added additional, their take on what a course should look like in terms of styling, the syllabus and the progress bar and all that kind of stuff.

So there's been great community support for e learning. But anything it'll just work. And really what an LMS is structured data. So back in the day, in the early days of WordPress and membership sites and information products, people would buy a membership plugin. Like Optimize Press was one of the original ones a long time ago, which was, it did the membership, but it was actually a theme and you get people over the paywall, and then you have to.

Like kind of build out your menu to make it look like a course or something like that. So in the early days of LMS, what we did is we like, we have all this data. LMS sites are heavy cause they have a lot of content. And if you want to do quizzing and people were trying to figure out how to do a quiz with a form plugin.

So really what we do is we just structure all that data in a way that makes sense. That doesn't overwhelm the user. You can build a course from one screen. And then the output of that, the default view is pretty good. You've got the hierarchy of courses, sections, lessons, leveraging sidebars and progress bars and the user dashboard and so on.

So it's really just about making the default look pretty darn good. And then letting the themes innovate on what they want to, their take on design on top of

[00:20:46] Nathan Wrigley: that.

If you've never used WordPress before and you just. Use the Lifter LMS plugin. You'll get out of the box. You'll get something which looks great. What you need, but if you want to go and get into theming, then there's other steps that you can take and you might need to either tweak the thing that you've already got or.

Have a look at the thing that we're going to be talking about now. What did full site editing bring to the table though, that the old they're calling classic themes now. So just dear listener, if you have never listened to this podcast before, and you don't know what the difference is full site editing or site editing themes allow you to theme all the bits.

With blocks. So in the classic themes, you'd go to the customizer or the customizers gone in a block based theme and everything is done through blocks, so headers, footers, menus, everything is done in a block. Why that? And why not stick with classic themes? Cause they don't really look like they're going away anytime soon, but at the same time, they don't really look like the future either.

Oh, okay. Yeah.

[00:21:51] Chris Badgett: It's the customizability. So when you get into learning and e commerce and like user experience there's a whole like discipline called instructional design, which is about like how to create learning that works and there's a bunch of principles and ideas within that. So we talked about distraction free learning as an example with a full site editing theme, no matter which one you're using, if you're not using RSkyPilot, anyone you can do this with is you can be like, Hey, if I'm inside of a course or a lesson or a quiz, remove everything like the header and the footer, and just focus on the content.

We talked a little bit about minimalism. One of the things a good designer will do with a learning site. Is keep the focus on the content without a lot of bells and whistles and distractions. So with full site editing, because Lifter LMS is built in a way that you can customize all these LMS related templates.

You can modify it to your liking. You could have if somebody is in a lesson, it can feel app like in the sense that you could remove everything except for the lesson content, and we have an advanced video thing where it can just progress like Netflix does, and you can. You can build like a Netflix of learning if you want to.

[00:23:21] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Binge

[00:23:21] Chris Badgett: And

[00:23:22] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:23:24] Chris Badgett: that makes me really excited because the idea of doing that level of minimalistic customization, I would need to hire a developer to help me figure all that out. And once you like WordPress has a learning curve, Lifter LMS has a learning curve, all technology has a learning curve.

But what I've found is that when people invest. A weekend or a week or even just a solid day or a couple hours to learn how to use blocks, to learn full site editing. If you bundle in that learning time for your technology with no expectations, you're not billing the client, maybe you are. But, you can really learn like how to drive this thing, but you have to invest that time. And even today, I still find features in the block editor or full site editing that I didn't realize existed.

[00:24:18] Nathan Wrigley: yeah.

[00:24:19] Chris Badgett: yeah, sometimes it's a little clunky, like in, in the menus and stuff, but it gets better over time. And

[00:24:26] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So your feedback from the customers then has been broadly positive about the move to blocks then has it. And they're expressing the opinion that, okay, I gave it a couple of hours, a weekend, whatever it may be. And that got them over the hump. So they moved from this one paradigm, the customizer and the options within Lifter to the full site editing experience.

And it really wasn't that difficult. That's good to know.

[00:24:53] Chris Badgett: it really isn't. And, I think as power WordPress users ourselves, we have all this Oh, I have to change. Or there's just like this change process, but I don't know if you were the listeners like me, I've been trying to get, not trying to get, but sometimes my wife will need a website.

But she's not she's not a WordPress power user or anything. She's now she has a running coaching business. She does. And she has several clients and she hadn't really touched WordPress in four years or something, but she needed a e commerce coaching. She was doing free courses for lead magnets.

And I was like, I got the perfect tool for you. It's called Lifter LMS.

[00:25:33] Nathan Wrigley: have heard of it.

[00:25:35] Chris Badgett: I closed that sale, but the I watched her without saying anything, get into WordPress. She had missed the whole block editor, site editor thing. I didn't say anything. And I just watched her start building this new site from scratch.

And it just wasn't that big of a deal. It was just the way it works. She never said anything about what's this new thing or how does this work? Sometimes she would ask me like, Hey, how do I, Hide the page title or something like that. And I just show her how to do that in full site editing for this template.

I'm like, do you want to do it on all these types of pages? Let's build a template for it. And so on, she was just on with it. I think for us that have been around tools for a long time, some people, we just have a hard time with change and it doesn't mean the old thing was bad and. There's a lot of wonderful features in, in the page builders and stuff too.

But yeah, it's just, it's sometimes I think we overthink it a little

[00:26:34] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's a good point. You raised the point of templates. So with the full site editing, you've got access to things which may have been difficult to do in the past. So for example, you, let's use the word courses, right? You could have a courses template and anything which. It was a course that template will be applied to it.

So you just style it once, get it just how you want it. And then every time that a course comes along, that'll be the way it looks. And the same with a lesson or whatever else it could be, it could be anything, and so in that way, you can finesse it, get it right just once. Whereas I think a lot of people's experience with the block editor is a page and a post.

And they're doing it one at a time and they haven't got into this whole full site editing yet. And so the templates and the patterns and all the different blocks that you can just throw in, spend half an hour getting it right for that one thing, and then save it and it's going to be used everywhere.

That's really cool to be built into core and just to be easy. That's great.

[00:27:34] Chris Badgett: Yeah. Yeah. I think the idea of templates, like once you, it clicks in your brain, it becomes really powerful and then you could have variations on that template. If you want to do I have some courses I want to look like this. And I have some that want to look like that. You can do that too.

You can create an alternative course template. All without writing code.

[00:27:54] Nathan Wrigley: Do you have do you have a whole, we will get to SkyPilot by the way, do you have a do you have a whole series of blocks which enable you to pull into a page, a post, a template, whatever it might be the functionality that you'd expect oh, I don't know the video. For it goes here and the previous and next buttons go here and the course materials and the ops, the workbooks and all of that kind of stuff go here, do you have blocks for all of those?

How is that all figured out?

[00:28:27] Chris Badgett: Yeah. We learned that a long time ago when we figured out that the number one, most popular non like sales feature pricing type page on our website was the shortcodes page of our documentation. It's one of the most highest traffic pages on our site. And we doubled down early on with creating shortcodes that people could use to display those bits like the mark complete button, or if you want to take the pricing plan for a particular course or membership and move it over onto a sales page somewhere else, those little components with lots of options, WordPress, really had the shortcode system for.

So really just the idea is short codes are now blocks. So we created a block for every short code, which is, allows you to basically do the same thing you can with a short code, but it's actually easier to use. So instead of especially a complex short code where there's all these like parameters and sorting and category, instead of writing, this something in quotes and all this stuff,

[00:29:38] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:29:39] Chris Badgett: yeah, you can just do it in some settings on the side of that block.

And which is also great for, having all those shortcodes is great for page builders. So if you're using a page builder, you can use, you can build custom templates with those shortcodes the way templating is done in page builders. But for block based themes, you can do the same thing where you can have a default configuration of those components.

[00:30:10] Nathan Wrigley: Nice. I feel like a little while ago, the whole layout engine of the full site editing was not quite there. It was very difficult to figure out how to get things to align and to fill, two columns and all of this kind of stuff. Whereas I feel now. So much work has been put into that.

It really is just on you now to dig in and have a little look, because you can do a more or less anything pixel perfect, just with core blocks, the blocks that come inside of every installer WordPress, and if you play with them for half an hour, and there's loads of people on YouTube explaining how you can pixel perfect get any.

Possible configuration of any page. And then you can drop the blocks into the containers that you've gotten, save that as a template. You're totally off to the races. Yeah. Oh, that's exciting. Okay. Let's finally get onto sky pilot. I figured. That this was new, that this was really new, but it's something that you said a little while ago made me feel it's not maybe new, or maybe you've relaunched it or something, but tell us a little bit about SkyPilot.

I should say if you want to explore this, lifterlms. com forward slash product forward slash sky. Dash pilot. So that's where you need to go to check that out. I'll put a link in the show notes, but tell us what your thoughts are. Why another theme?

[00:31:28] Chris Badgett: Yeah. We launched it, I think it was about six months

[00:31:32] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, so it is. Yeah. Okay. It is newer. That's great. Yeah. Great.

[00:31:35] Chris Badgett: And we recently redid all our sites with it as well and actually made the transition to everything is in blocks and and just went with that. And we did get a performance lift from that in terms of speed. And I do want to just plug WebDev Studios, they did some of the original design work for our website's redesign and also what SkyPilot would look like in the default view of courses and lessons and quizzes and so on.

And they did an excellent job.

[00:32:07] Nathan Wrigley: tip to them. Yeah. Nice.

[00:32:10] Chris Badgett: Yeah, so yeah it's basically the new way is cutting edge as we can be with modern WordPress to do e learning. It looks good out of the box. It's extremely customizable. And I think one of the greatest things about it is a lot of themes go for general use because in theory you're going to make more money if your theme works with, the people who are doing e commerce or personal blogs or whatever kind of site.

But with us, we took a LMS only focus, like what a course creators, coaches, businesses who want to do internal training. What do they want it to look like? What do they need it to do? What's the feedback from the community of what's the student dashboard look like? Makes it easy for students. See, one of the challenges is for an LMS, the person building it might not even be the business owner or whatever.

Or they are, but then the end user oftentimes is non technical. So it needs to be really intuitive and clean and simple to do things like find their courses navigate the user dashboard view reporting. Like I mentioned groups earlier, if you're doing training to companies and there's all these layers of management or viewing reporting of their students on the front end of the website.

How do you make that clean and crisp and not be like super overwhelming? And that's really the first principles approach we took to SkyPilot. Modern, clean, easy, customizable. And it works great outside of courses

[00:34:01] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, I was gonna ask that. Yeah, you've done your homepage, your landing page, which really, you know it's demonstrating what a course could do. It's not showing what a course would look like apart from in the images, obviously, but it works fine for all of that as well. Landing pages, the lot. Nice.

[00:34:18] Chris Badgett: yeah. And Lifter has its own e commerce system with Stripe and PayPal and others, but we also about 30 percent of our users use it with WooCommerce. So we built SkyPilot to be, have a great looking WooCommerce product pages and WooCommerce account page and checkout and all those things as well. So that's.

The focus is really just Lifter and e commerce.

[00:34:43] Nathan Wrigley: So you mentioned that there are other themes out there that, tightly integrate with. With Lifter. So I think you mentioned Astra and I can see a couple of other themes mentioned, but I'm guessing that you've got you've got more skin in the game with this. So it ships with more things.

It tightly integrates even more tightly than any of those do. What are some of the sort of UVPs of it? What did it enable you to do more quickly, more beautifully with Lifter than if you had to bring a different, even though it's an optimized theme, a different theme.

[00:35:19] Chris Badgett: I think one of the things is just ease of use and focus. Like I love like Astra and Cadence, and we have a lot of users who use Divi as well, big community there. But when the theme is like super focused on learning, there's not tons of other options. In the configuration and the setup, so that's great and also the like the course templates, the lesson templates, the way the quizzing and the reporting engine looks like we didn't just style the front end.

We styled the back end of WordPress in a way that's, so it's definitely still WordPress. You'll, it looks very familiar, but just the level of detail we went into, if the site owner is like running reports in the back end of WordPress, the, one of the things that makes it LMS different from like a membership plugin and a post type is the M in LMS, which is management.

So all that interface for reporting and managing students and grades. And all this stuff is also well styled. So other themes put a lot of focus on the front end and making the course look good. So it sells well, but the devil's in the details when it comes to deep down in the user experience to the way the achievement badges look or the certificates and all that back end stuff and WordPress as well. So we just covered everything basically.

[00:36:55] Nathan Wrigley: So out of the box, if you've simply had content for a course and the sky pilot theme, if you just install the sky pilot theme, it'll basically look. Great. It may be that your colors aren't right and you need to fiddle with things. But if you were, if you wanted something to look, oh, dare I say it like a SAS app and there's, a lot of those companies put a lot of effort into making their solution look great on the front end and the back end.

So that reports and everything looked great. That's what you get. You activate the theme and everything just looks like a SAS app for want of a better word, I shouldn't say that.

[00:37:32] Chris Badgett: exactly. And there's, I saw a YouTube video the other day where somebody built, they use Lifter and they made it look exactly like Pat Flynn's website. Who's an online entrepreneur who uses Teachable for his courses. And he did it like super fast. And he was like, Hey, here's how you make teachable. So I let some of our most popular videos on YouTube, and we need to update some of these now with SkyPilot and everything.

It's like, all right, you want your site to look like Udemy? Let's make it look like Udemy. If you want it to look like teachable or Kajabi, we can do that too. It's the presentation layer has never been easier with tools like full site editing and SkyPilot.

[00:38:13] Nathan Wrigley: Um, You mentioned the backend. And when I'm thinking about the backend, I'm thinking about the person that's running the site, that's managing the course, but I'm also imagining their customers, their the people that they're selling it to, who they're teaching, presumably they get a nice experience as well, because.

That, although I hate to admit it if I buy something and it doesn't look very nice, it does make you feel a little bit skeptical that the course itself could be of a good caliber. And I feel that you could easily let yourself down if I subscribe to an LMS course and everything like the buttons, different colors over here and different colors over here and what the heck's that, all sorts of janky things all over the place that makes me a bit suspicious and I'm guessing.

This takes care of that as well. Not just the management from the owner's point of view, but the management from the learner's point of view as well.

[00:39:07] Chris Badgett: Exactly. Yeah. It's a little bit meta when you're building an LMS site, you have to think about, the teacher, the entrepreneur, and this is a, even the more simple use case, there's more complex, like with more stakeholders. But the learner's experience is ultimately the most important for this whole project to be successful.

It's so important. We made it one of our company values. So learner results first. Is one of our company values. So when we think about what to build, how to do design we always filter it through that value of let's never forget about the end learner. Cause that's what matters most, not just great looking course and membership sales pages.

Let's focus all the way through.

[00:39:50] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it's interesting. I wonder, I'm not going to ask you for the numbers, but let's say you gave us the number of people who use Lifter LMS, and let's say it's X, the number of people who have used Lifter LMS is probably like 50 or a hundred or a thousand X and. They are your potential customers as well, aren't they?

How did you put this course together? I used Lyft or LMS and so getting to them and making their experience as pleasant as possible, not only generates you business, but it generates sales for the people who are pitching these courses to their potential learners.

[00:40:26] Chris Badgett: Yeah, we have we have like a, how some software, like you can submit your data to some of your anonymized data to make your improve the product. So we have that, that people can opt into and the setup wizard. And last time I checked, it was somewhere around number of enrollments was somewhere around 8 million.

And that's only that's only about 20 percent of the people that allow tracking. that means that's 40 million enrollments. So let's not forget about those

[00:41:03] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, he has a,

[00:41:04] Chris Badgett: designing

[00:41:04] Nathan Wrigley: a

[00:41:04] Chris Badgett: websites.

[00:41:06] Nathan Wrigley: Small handful of people. Yeah. But making their experience as pleasant as possible. But I also think that like people's expectations of what websites will look like is just constantly changing. What was allowable five years ago? I don't mean allowable. Like what was, what looked aesthetically pleasing two or three years ago is not the same as what it looks today and it won't be the same in three years time.

So having a. A theme, which you can just chuck on top of your WordPress website. You worry about the content will worry about the way it looks, you can tweak it and style it with the blocks and with the settings if you like. But basically you can get out of the gate more or less immediately by clicking a few buttons.

Yeah, that's great. It does look, it looks really nice. It looks really modern. It looks like exactly the sort of site of the moment. So bravo. Like you needed me to say that, it's good. It's 120. That's an annual fee. And I'm guessing that with that comes all the regular support that you would provide for everything else as well.

[00:42:12] Chris Badgett: Yeah, absolutely. And so if you have a theme, you have the free Lifter LMS core plugin and the payment gateway. You could do so much with just that combination for under 300 bucks.

[00:42:24] Nathan Wrigley: The the option though Lifter, it comes in all these different permutations and there's bundles and all sorts of the way you're going to find out about that is go to lifterlms. com forward slash pricing. It ranges from infinity where you just get the full Monty all the way to the free core version with various different iterations in between.

That's all the questions I had to ask.

So basically dear listener, if you've got any clients or you've got an interest in. Putting a course together yourself. I love the little motto in the footer of your website. It's a bit like we all want to write a book, don't we? There is a course inside every one of us. I love that. You were writing a book.

You were going to write a book. Did you finish it?

[00:43:07] Chris Badgett: I did finish the book. I'm in the editing phase right now. But yeah, it's I don't have a name for it, but it's basically taken my decade of experience seeing where all the friction points are from. Idea like, Oh, I think I want to make money online or teach online and all the way through how to think about it, how to pick your topic, how to structure a course.

How to put it out there in the world, how to get clients or students or customers and do it. And as condensed and actionable with no step skipped, basically taking, turning decades into days, like all my experience sit with this book and you'll come out the other end and save a bunch of time and have much higher odds of success.

So

[00:43:52] Nathan Wrigley: got to, you've got to call it turning decades into days. That's so good. That's great. When's that? Are you, do you have are you going to self publish that? Or are you planning to,

[00:44:04] Chris Badgett: Yeah, I'll self publish it. Yeah.

[00:44:06] Nathan Wrigley: I'll tell you what I'm going to keep this bit in because I'd love to promote that if you, if by the time this episode comes out and Chris has reached out to me, I will be sure to write it in the show notes, but let's assume that it isn't quite out, but people want to get in touch with you anyway, apart from the LifterLMS.

com website, where would people find you, Chris?

[00:44:29] Chris Badgett: I'm most active on Twitter or X. So it's just at Chris Badgett and that's easy. And I'll, jump on the podcast, LMS cast. I like to interview a lot of people around all the struggles and opportunities that course creators have, not just with technology. So check that out as well.

[00:44:48] Nathan Wrigley: Chris Badgett, thank you so much for chatting to me today about Lifter LMS and SkyPilot, the brand new ish theme for Lifter. Thanks so much.

[00:44:58] Chris Badgett: Thanks, Nathan.

[00:44:59] Nathan Wrigley: Well, I hope that you enjoyed that. Lovely chatting to Chris today, all about LifterLMS, full site editing and sky pilot, their new theme. Hopefully you've got something out of that. If you've got any comments that you'd like to make, please, please, please head over to WP builds. Search for episode number 368, and leave us a comment there. I keep saying it's very nice when we get comments on the actual website. I know it's a podcast and you're probably listening to this elsewhere. Probably not sitting at your desk, maybe you are, but head over WP builds.com. Search for episode number 368. And give us a comment.

Feel free to share it on social media. That always helps, as does giving us a rating in your podcast, player of choice.

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Okay, that's it. That's all I've got for you this week. Hopefully you'll be back with us next week for another podcast episode, and join us every Monday for the this week in WordPress show, it's at WP builds.com forward slash live at 2:00 PM UK time.

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