WonderSuite Series #1 – Simplifying the setup in WordPress for all users

[00:00:04] Nathan Wrigley: This episode of the WP Builds podcast is brought to you today by Omnisend, the top rated email and SMS marketing platform for WordPress. More than 100,000 merchants use Omnisend every day to grow their audience and sales. Ready to start building campaigns that really sell? Find out more at www.omnisend.com.

And by GoDaddy Pro, the home of managed WordPress hosting that includes free domain, SSL, and 24x7 support. Bundle that with The Hub by GoDaddy Pro to unlock more free benefits to manage multiple sites in one place. Invoice clients and get 30 percent off new purchases. You can find out more at go.me/wpbuilds.

Hello. Hi there, Chris. How are you?

[00:01:01] Chris Miles: Doing great. Thanks for having me on.

[00:01:03] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, you're very welcome. this is going to be the first of a four part webinar series between WP Builds and I'm going to say, WonderSuite, but obviously WonderSuite is a property of Bluehost. Chris is joining us today from Bluehost and he's going to be talking for the first of four episodes, on.

Subsequent episodes, we're going to be joined by a colleague, who is called Jocelyn Hendrickson, if memory serves, and she's going to be talking through a variety of different aspects of what the suite of, well, it's not really plugins, I normally say plugins, but what the suite of tools can do for you.

I think it's fair to say that, WonderSuite is an endeavor to add a little bit of Artificial intelligence and speed, and all of that into the, beginnings of your WordPress website. Would that be about right? Is

[00:01:50] Chris Miles: that roughly what it is, Chris? That's, mostly what we're going to be focusing on today.

there's, more to it than just that, but yeah, that's certainly, part of it is, we're able to use, AI to accelerate, site building and things like that for customers in a way that. that, that makes it a lot easier to, get started quickly. whether you're new at WordPress or whether you have a lot of experience and, you're finally getting around to trying out Gutenberg, it's, pretty valuable, yeah.

[00:02:28] Nathan Wrigley: Can I just dig into a little bit, what the sort of reasoning behind this was? Because I have my intuitions, but I could be completely wrong. But my guess is, go on. Yeah,

[00:02:38] Chris Miles: the, real reason here is that, A lot of people when they sign up for a hosting plan or a website plan or something like that from a hosting company like Bluehost have expectations about what they're going to get and have expectations about how easy it's going to be.

and if you've seen any of the advertising and the website or hosting space, it, it sometimes doesn't help or it's, Oh, easy. You 10 minutes, that sort of thing. And. we want to make sure that it is as easy as possible. And we do try to deliver on those promises, but a lot of people go into this thinking, Oh, this is going to be a breeze.

This is going to be as simple as creating a Facebook page. And then the traditional experience with WordPress is, Oh my goodness, there's. Quite a learning curve here. there's a lot I need to know about. There's a lot I didn't think about. Sometimes there's even more I need to buy that I didn't realize that I need if I'm trying to run a store.

And so what that has created is a problem of a lot of people canceling and a lot of churn for not just Bluehost, but for really anyone selling like WordPress sites and services and hosting and that sort of thing is that yeah, you get a lot of people saying, man, if I knew it was going to be this hard, I.

I never would have started, I would have, maybe, skipped the website thing altogether or, tried something that, that is easier than this or, just hired someone. so this problem of expectation versus the complexity, the kind of real complexity of it, is one of the main driving factors here that, financially speaking, we're trying to address.

We call the churn problem that people canceling, early and late in their, life cycle. But from a customer's perspective, we want their website to be successful so that they stick around. And so by providing them a way that they can very, quickly get up and running, we can meet those expectations in a way that people are going to stick around longer because they actually accomplished.

[00:04:47] Nathan Wrigley: And we're able to do new things in this era as well, aren't we? Because we've got the advent of, AI for want of a better word. There may be different ways of describing it and what have you, but we're able to introduce a foundation of intelligent questions and then intelligent responses. So I flow that we go through at the beginning of setting up our website. And the inputs that we provide for those will give us a bit of a bedrock. And I guess that's what WonderSuite, tackles. Do you just want to outline what WonderSuite is made up of? Because I know it's more than we're going to tackle today.

It's got various different tools within it. Yeah. So

[00:05:25] Chris Miles: we have WonderStart. Which is a kind of onboarding that guides you through the first setup process of a site, and we're going to dive into that in a lot of detail today. There's Wonder Blocks, which is a series of patterns, and a pattern library that can intelligently...

first it's a beautiful collection of a, bunch of patterns, but it's also relevant to the site itself. So your copy of Wonder Blocks is gonna be different than my copy of Wonder Blocks, or at least it's gonna feel that way when you're using it and we'll, get into how that works and what that means.

so Wonder Blocks is a lot of patterns and, blocks that. Make site editing really easy. there's also wonder help, which is, our artificial intelligence assistant Within WP admin that can explain how things work what things do answer questions And that's very much still in beta, but we've seen some good results from it so far and wonder cart I think we're covering in one of the later episodes in more detail, but just to summarize Wonder Cart is a, collection of, commerce features that normally you would have to get several plugins to do, but they all work very, nicely together.

And it's some of the more common things that don't come with WooCommerce, but that people typically need, like how to run a sale with a sales banner, how to do, products frequently bought with, how to, oh, buy one, get one free or like those sorts of like cross campaigns and promotions like that.

this makes really, easy. and that sort of stuff, often you would need several plugins for. and you would need to mix and match several plugins from different companies and hope that they all are playing nicely together. And this is something that just. Out of the box works really well with WooCommerce and, certainly with each other and, it, it takes care of the most common types of campaigns and sales and promotions that you're going to see on, e commerce sites.

[00:07:43] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Thank you for that. So we've explained the foundation

[00:07:47] Chris Miles: blocks and, and the commerce one.

[00:07:53] Nathan Wrigley: thank you for that. So quick question. the, obviously the enterprise here is to speed things up. I'm just wondering if there's a, if there's a sort of. Interface here a little bit between people who are freelancers and whether they can sell what you're about to show us over to their clients, or is this very much client shows up to your property blue host purchase it for themselves?

Or can I, as a freelancer, can I have this as a package, which I can then sell the product of on to clients?

[00:08:25] Chris Miles: So right now, it's very much geared toward the end user that's creating the website. But depending on how you've set things up, there's no reason you can't use it on behalf of someone else. If you have access to WP admin, that being said, it is very much geared toward the end user.

and so any arrangements as far as reselling or things like that aren't built in. But we do have a lot of people that buy hosting on behalf of their clients. We do have a very healthy, affiliate program and yeah, there are certainly people that do that and. One of the more common, ways I've seen people, use this is walking their customers through onboarding and very, quickly generating a starting point.

And in, as single consultation, they're able to get 50 or 90 percent of the way there on a site build. and so for some clients that are looking for something really, quick and simple, this can be a great, easily reproducible thing that won't feel like a template because. It's, customized to exactly them every, time you run through it, it's a little different.

[00:09:39] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, great. Thank you. it occurs to me that we were having a few technical, gremlins before we started and we had all the screen and everything, the share all set up, but that's gone away. So I'm just going to talk for a minute whilst Chris gets his screen shared again. share my screen here.

[00:09:56] Chris Miles: Yeah. Thank you. There it is.

[00:09:58] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, perfect. In which case I will pop it onto the screen and, the endeavor here really, Chris, is to let you have free reign. You go for it. if there's any questions that happen to come in live, I will pose those towards you. But also, if I get confused or puzzled, I'll, I'll interrupt.

But we've got roughly, I would say, about 35, 40 minutes. Something like that to, to get through. Perfect. Show us. Okay.

[00:10:22] Chris Miles: Ready when you are. All right. So interrupt is as often as, you'd want with any questions or anything like that. But yeah, I'm going to be going through this. And explaining what this is, but also, just for, the show here, I think it'd be interesting if we talked about why we made some of the decisions we made as we step through and what sort of problems we're attempting to solve.

so this is the page you would land on, when you first sign into WordPress for the first time. and it's just a big screen that says, Hey, make your website dreams reality and explains some of the things that come with. your hosting and why you would want to use WordPress. And I have two options.

I can either migrate a WordPress site, which a percentage of customers that are just signing up already have a site and they just want to migrate one. or start setup. And this is for people that are just starting a website for the first time. So I'm going to click start setup. And the first question we ask here is, what is your experience level with WordPress?

And I've got three options. Never used it, some, and I'm an expert. And the idea here is this is not a questionnaire, this is actually going to change the experience that you get. Oh, Yeah, so we're never asking the same question twice, and we're never asking a question that we're not immediately using.

There has to be an immediate payoff for everything that we ask. Or else it's just going to feel like a questionnaire. So I'm going to say I've never used it before so we get all the steps. but one of the things we're launching very soon is depending on, how much, how comfortable you are with WordPress.

we change the order of the steps and we, let people, go back to them later. Versus what we found is people that have never used this before and want a lot of help really... Like a straightforward start to finish kind of wizard that walks you through every single step, even if it's long. they like all of the help just because.

It's, overwhelming if you don't know where to start. So I'll say I've never used

[00:12:41] Nathan Wrigley: it. I'll just interrupt you one more time. so what you're saying is if you, if you pitch yourself wrong here and you say you're an expert and then have a, if you reconsider, you can begin this process again, there is a way of hijacking and getting back to this and beginning once more, what you end up with is not necessarily what you have to settle

[00:12:58] Chris Miles: for.

Yeah. One of the things that we. Our launching very soon is the ability to restart this process, and change your answers after the fact. right now, when you go through it, there aren't any links to get back in. of course, you can always do it if you keep track of the URL, but no one's going to do that.

yeah. but, yeah, the idea is, here I would just say, I've never used it before. We can pretend. and let's, continue on. Okay. So here I've got a series of types of websites that we can do. and I'm going to pick if we do, I'll say government and politics. Okay. I haven't done that one in a little while. I'll say continue setup. And then we have subcategories, for each of these. Activism, emergency relief, law enforcement, libraries, public services.

Policy and campaigns. I don't think I've ever seen that one. So we're going to see what that looks like today.

[00:14:15] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, that's fun.

[00:14:18] Chris Miles: continue setup. So here, and I've already been through this on a different one, but here I would just type in a, name of a website. let's see, what did we say we were?

We said we were policy and campaigns. Policy and campaigns, yeah. Alright, so let's say that, or what if we change it to say that I'm, I'm running for office or something. Politicians. Politician. Okay. Yeah. . Yeah. And then we'll, say, Chris Miles for Governor . And, every vote counts. And we can always change this stuff later.

But, one of the things that's nice is, like we said, we never want to ask the same question more than once. So if I, fill in my Twitter here, which would be twitter. com slash chrisdavidmiles. Then that and then get saved, but we're going to save it in more than one place because one of the things that's a persistent problem with WordPress and the web is this.

Selective amnesia that sometimes happens where you're asked, okay, we'll put your Twitter link in a footer here and then connect your social media over here and then tell Yoast what your Twitter handle is and tell, and you have to tell 15 different plugins what your Twitter handle is. And it's okay, you shouldn't have to answer that question so many times.

And so when we're saving information like this, we're actually keeping track of how some of the more popular plugins. we'll save that information and we're saving it to your database in anticipation of you needing it later so that you don't have to fill this out many times in 15 different places in WP Admin.

It's just now all of the things that need to know what your Twitter is, know what your Twitter is. As you fill it out, so I'm just going to put this in so we can keep going, I could fill in all of these and at some point we are going to finally update Twitter to X. Everyone has to, but, yeah, and then top priority.

So here, I'm getting a branching path where I can say, what's your priority here? the account that. I'm demoing right now comes with, a lot of e commerce functionality, so I could say selling, I could say designing, I could say publishing, and this will change the order in which I do things such that let's start with what you're most interested in.

Because we actually do keep track of the drop off in who completes the steps and like how often and that sort of like just looking at analytics in aggregate. And if you start with something that you think is important, you're more likely to get through the whole thing. So we just ask you, what do you think is important?

Because we want people to get through the whole thing. So we'll say designing because that one's always fun. Okay. Here, it's warning me that I have an existing website, which normally you would never see, but this is a test website where I've installed things many times. Chris Miles for governor. So here it's, going to try and make me a site for Chris Miles for governor.

[00:17:45] Nathan Wrigley: So what are we seeing here? Is there something going on in the background there? So that wasn't a typical, that wasn't a typical kind of like loading the images that it was actually, Oh yeah. Look

[00:17:56] Chris Miles: at that. So, here we have, because of the category that I picked, it's able to see. It knows, okay, this is somebody probably running for office or making policy or something like that.

If we would have picked, that, I have a bakery, it would be a bakery website. If we had, depending on what you pick, the, all of the content, and images are actually relevant to that. and it, and so here, I don't have to use my imagination nearly as much because that was another problem we were trying to solve with WonderSuite is no vivid imagination required.

cause it's, an ongoing problem when you're trying to pick out a theme somewhere is that you can go to if I go over to wordpress. org slash themes, they're great and there's a, ton of great stuff here, but I have to have a really good imagination to be like, Okay, if I'm running for office...

Okay, how am I going to imagine a version of these sort of templates and whatever else that's relevant to me? And I have, and yeah, you can change the fonts. Yeah, you can change the colors. Yeah, you can change the copy and the images. But at a certain point, it's okay, If I need to ignore the font and copy and images and colors and it's then what am I looking at?

And it's, you have to hold so much in your head at once. It gets to be really tricky. And so here, no vivid imagination required. I can just look at this. And select one and it'll, zoom in and, and render it. And I can actually look at this and say, okay, so here's what it's going to create for me.

And these are images that it sourced from Unsplash that, we have a license agreement. So these can be used without attribution.

[00:19:53] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, neat! You can actually use the images.

[00:19:55] Chris Miles: Okay, that's cool. Yes, 100 percent you can use any of the images we add, and we just pay for them. here, it's not necessarily final copy, but it's copy that's close enough that you're able to, picture what things might look like.

And you're able to do things like, now I can actually make a decision about colors and fonts, because I'm not distracted by the fact that it's a recipe blog. it's close enough to what I need that okay, I can actually now make a decision one thing at a time about, color this or that.

So let me. Let me do, this. that's a decent one. And we'll go next. I can also change the code.

[00:20:41] Nathan Wrigley: That was the next question. Okay, here we go. yeah,

[00:20:44] Chris Miles: yeah. So I can, and we've got different ones. And of course I can do custom ones. But if I get too far outside of what is recommended, we do the same thing Core does, which is we'll say, hey, this is, going to have problems with, visibility on some screens and in some patterns.

And we can warn you about that. here, let's pick a nice professional looking font that's going to get me elected governor. The font is all. There we go. that looks like a government site. Yeah, that's it. We'll do, that one. alright. And then I can decide on a header. Which here, since the primary call to action is probably going to be something like donate to my campaign or something. We probably want, a pretty big header title, so I might pick something like this. I'm going to go back and change that font actually.

Okay,

[00:21:59] Nathan Wrigley: that's interesting. I did notice the back button, but it's nice to see you using it. the, pathway is not closed. You could, oh yeah.

[00:22:09] Chris Miles: This in any, you can just go back. you can skip around and do any order you want.

[00:22:13] Nathan Wrigley: whilst, whilst you get your fonts straight, can I ask you another question?

If I was to go through and I was sat next to you on a different computer and I went through and I entered exactly the same things that you did, would I end up with a website that looks like that or is there some kind of. weird AI going on, which, it just so happened that yours was three images with that text and a get started button.

So is it driven by, AI, really having a free reign on what it does, or is it AI's picking a template? In this case, you've got the, you've got the hero with text in it, and then you've got three images left to that kind of thing.

[00:22:54] Chris Miles: So the layouts, we have a number of layouts that we use.

Those are pretty consistent, and we'll get to a step where you can pick which layouts you like. The copy, we pre generate so that it doesn't take too long. And there's... Yeah, and I don't remember the math for how many of them are factorial, but, there's something like eight, like 180, 000 combinations.

So it's we generate, we pre generate them all and we're updating them a lot. Okay. And if you were to do it at the very same time, there's a chance you could get the same thing. but based on all the different combinations and all the different choices and everything you click on changes the path a little bit.

it's, it would be really interesting if we both picked the same lottery number, per se, Yeah, got it. but it is theoretically possible, at least for now. One of the things we're working on in the future, is the design layouts will be a little bit more, Generated on the fly where you'll be able to create more and more variations right then and there.

and once we're able to get that into a state where it's fast enough that you can sit there and wait for it. and it doesn't feel like. Let me click on this. Come back. then, yeah, we'll be able to launch that. And some of those will actually be generated just in time. but yeah, the idea here is that when you're finished, it's not necessarily supposed to be 100 percent finished website, but we want to get you well past 50, hopefully past 80 or 90 percent there so that Without too much imagination, you can step through, put real images, real copy, whatever else you want in here, and you're not having to use your imagination too much.

Now, there are a few places where there are some gaps in some of the copy that we have, where some of the patterns haven't been adapted for every single subcategory, and so every now and then you will scroll through and see one where it's either... It's default or something like that. But for the most part, we've got them all dialed in and we're continuing to, to cycle through more and more.

Okay. Thank

[00:25:28] Nathan Wrigley: you for that. That was really helpful.

[00:25:30] Chris Miles: yeah. then I can, oh yeah, just right there. The next step it's, I can pick homepage. So the.

[00:25:42] Nathan Wrigley: That kind of answers my question. There wasn't just one variant. Yeah,

[00:25:46] Chris Miles: exactly. So here I've got the three images. Here I've got, text over top of, a full width one.

And then I've got one that really just focuses on the text. So for mine, I'll probably do something like this. I'm

[00:26:02] Nathan Wrigley: glad you said that. I wasn't going to vote for you if you'd have been either of the other two.

[00:26:08] Chris Miles: That's great. Yeah, and then we have some, some page templates here where, depending on what you picked, you've got different options here for, either testimonials, a contact page, an about us page.

using, our, block patterns.

[00:26:25] Nathan Wrigley: And again, I think I probably want to stress that point. If we'd have taken a very different journey through this and we hadn't have picked political and we'd have picked a completely different category, what we're looking at now would be pretty different, right?

We'd be looking at, if you'd gone for bakery, for example, or whatever, the flavor would have changed. We've just gone down one route of thousands of possible permutations. Especially on the

[00:26:48] Chris Miles: homepage, which is where we put most of our. Our effort, is very different, all the way down, from the copy to, and so by the end of this, unless you're somebody like me that's doing demos, it's unlikely we'll get the same one twice.

Okay, yeah, thank you. and then I can decide which additional pages to add.

And then here we've got, oh yeah, which features you want. So I'm going to say Yoast SEO, partially because SEO is going to be important to me and partially cause a lot of my friends work at Yoast cause it's the same company as Bluehost. I'm a little biased that way, but, we've also got a coming soon page.

A lot of people are nervous about. Making their site live right away. what we have found, normally this would be opt in. I've already gone through it and remembered my settings. Normally, coming soon would be opt in. But if you're still saying, hey, there's a lot of things that are really, I don't, I've got a very easy to guess domain name, and I'm worried about traffic to my site, you can put up a coming soon page so you can continue to work on it.

and you'll just get a blank, normal looking, coming soon page that the world sees. But when you're logged in as, you, you can actually see the real website.

[00:28:30] Nathan Wrigley: Can I just ask a quick question about the plug in suite that we're looking at? Obviously, these are things that you've got relationships with these plug ins or you are.

the, your, in the case of Yoast, the same company. But do we, for example, if we were to go for the WP forms, let's pick that was an example, are we taking the free version there or other options too? Yeah. okay. So the, email, newsletter by creative email, that would be the sort of free tier as well.

You're just taking repo plugins and putting them in just as a starting point. You're not bundling in like the pro plans or anything. Okay.

[00:29:08] Chris Miles: we do have premium plugins bundled in. none of these are those though. It comes a little later and I'll show you what it looks like. Thank you. for now, just to keep things simple, I'm going to say just jetpack and Yoast and a coming soon page, please.

and then it's going to take that big site object that we made and it's gonna. Bake me a website. so yeah, the we've gone through all the steps. This is just a little bit of additional information for people to read while we turn through it. And then I click complete setup. And here we are. So this is the blue host dashboard inside WP admin.

I believe in one of the later episodes, we'll, dive into AI help a little bit more.

[00:29:58] Nathan Wrigley: I am so interested in that. I just want to see what you've got there. That's fascinating.

[00:30:02] Chris Miles: Yeah, that'll be a lot of fun. Yeah. but yeah, so for now, as you can see, because I had selected, give me that coming soon page.

I get to see. This, which is, here's where I went to law school and here's where I was a community organizer, et cetera, et cetera. Here's, please vote for me for governor. but the world only sees the coming soon page and it's the same generic one that everyone gets. So it doesn't really give any information away, for now.

And yeah, we've got a series of steps here that like, hey, we, here's some things that either came with your plan. Or that we think would be useful, that you can do. And when I'm ready to go, I can always just launch the site, and that'll turn the coming soon page off. But to answer your question before about stuff that comes with it, so when I'm Yeah, so here if it looks like on this version of the plan We don't yeah, so this was not an e commerce plan.

It looks like because here We, yeah, here we don't have the upsell, cross sell, and promotions. But one of the things, I'll just show you the differences in the plans here just so that people are familiar. We have WordPress hosting that is just WordPress hosting. Comes with everything I showed you. Then we also have online store plans.

And what that comes with is, and we'll get into this more in some of the later episodes, but just to, briefly cover it. That comes with some additional functionality. Like those, wishlists, Ajax search, the, wonder cart suite that lets you do cross sells and upsells and other promotions and things like that, would all come included.

So instead of being asked to. to pay for it, to unlock it, it would actually just be a part of the hosting plan is a little bit more expensive, but it comes with those things. So

[00:32:20] Nathan Wrigley: if you just on that, one, Chris, if, is there a, is there often a benefit in doing things up front? In other words, you just.

You just showed us the bluehost. com website where you can pick particular plans. Does it generally tend to be cheaper to do it at the start of your journey to get that plan figured out? Or is it the same price if you bundle things in, the UI? there was an option there to buy now for the, e commerce.

Do you, have any knowledge about that?

[00:32:50] Chris Miles: Two answers there. For one, just generally speaking, Right now, really all month, but right now is the best time to buy basically anything that you can buy.

[00:33:02] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, anything, anywhere.

[00:33:05] Chris Miles: Anything, anywhere. So if you're looking for hosting, everyone is really competing for your dollars right now, and Bluehost is no exception.

So all month long, we're doing Black Friday. So right now is actually a really, good time, over 75 percent off on a lot of our products. So yeah, now's a great time to buy some of these things. But yeah, with the WordPress hosting, you can buy the e commerce package separately, or you can buy it with the hosting plan.

And the price isn't going to be that different. it's substantially equivalent, either way where you start to but given that we massively discount the first term, you will save a lot of money on that first go around, right? Because a lot of times what we find is people that are just getting started don't have as much to invest in their site.

But once you've got an e commerce store up and running and you're starting to get some customers and that sort of thing, then you can afford really what the hosting actually costs. And so for as a, as an introductory price, yeah, it's totally possible. that you're going to be saving a lot of money here, by signing as part of the bundle for on that first term, when you renew, it'll be the same as if you had just bought it separately.

So that's one thing to keep in mind is if you already know you're going to have a store, and you're looking at this in the month of November of 2023, it's not too late. we're doing sales all month. and as a quick aside, our Black Friday sales. at least this year, are all month long.

Oh,

[00:34:59] Nathan Wrigley: that's pretty neat,

[00:35:00] Chris Miles: nice. Yeah, and a lot of people like that, and also it helps us a little bit, just as a little bit of inside baseball. The, a lot of people won't... Sign up for things. There's a big dip. just coming into before black friday for and that's not just blue house It's everybody where it's yeah, i'm not gonna buy a tv Let me wait two weeks because i bet Everything's gonna go on sale.

And so every retailer in the world is wow We're about to have our best week ever. But first we're gonna have our worst week ever. I'll be doing

[00:35:36] Nathan Wrigley: that for six months

[00:35:37] Chris Miles: chris yeah, exactly so Because of that, we just do it all month long and we're like, okay, we don't want to have a really rough November and then make it all back in the last week.

We're going to, we're going to do all month long black Friday, loud and proud. and that'll be a lot of fun. So yeah, the, so yeah, back to the, experience that one of the things I can do since this is a demo is I can do a little bit of demo magic. And so what I can do is. I can make it so that we've purchased this.

So if I click buy now, let's see if we can, There we go.

[00:36:34] Nathan Wrigley: He's fiddling with fields on other screens, probably. Yeah, I'm just buying it really quick. yeah, just checking the box. There we go.

[00:36:42] Chris Miles: Checking the box. And, so now we should, as soon as that order goes through, we should have access to this. So that'll take a minute and a half, but, but yeah, so while we're doing this, I can, walk you through.

So here's a, here's a walkthrough of what we've got. here is, you've got a preview of your site that is always going to be live. And it warns you whether or not there's a coming soon page up in store. You can check on the current status of your site, how your sales are doing. In another episode, we're going to dive into this in a lot more detail.

[00:37:23] Nathan Wrigley: I think in fact the next episode of Wondercart is going to be episode two with Jocelyn. So that'll be next week, I think. Yeah.

[00:37:29] Chris Miles: Yeah, perfect. And then, and in fact, it's probably best if we save this until that next episode. Just, to

[00:37:38] Nathan Wrigley: be clear, we're, building on top of tried and tested WordPress solutions here.

So this isn't some Bluehost, WonderSuite, bespoke, cart solution. You're building a top of WooCommerce, Woo, right? Yeah.

[00:37:53] Chris Miles: And in fact, Yes.

[00:37:58] Nathan Wrigley: Yes. That's part of yours as well. Yes.

[00:38:00] Chris Miles: Yeah. Yes. So Yoast, Bluehost, and Githemes are the same company. And so some of the most popular, just after Automatic, the creators of WooCommerce, some of the most popular, WooCommerce extensions, on the market are created by this company, which is now part of Bluehost, which means...

We can give it away for free. and so it's, really nice that if you get one of those, plans, you can install this and it comes with a lot of really cool stuff that you can just turn on. going back to, cause we've got about 10 ish minutes left. One of the things I wanted to demo was let's make a page here.

I'm going to make a new page.

And one of the things that's nice about this is the fun is not over. I see a green button

[00:39:04] Nathan Wrigley: that's unfamiliar. There we go. Yeah,

[00:39:07] Chris Miles: so this is, new. remember how we told, WordPress What kind of site this was so that it would, it would build us a site that was specific to me running for governor.

Yeah. the fun thing about this is because I answered those questions that way. now when I go into my pattern library, my entire pattern library is based on what I said. So every single one of these, is relevant to in one way or another. to this, so you know,

[00:39:49] Nathan Wrigley: you don't get anything about that is when I was building client websites, even writing text that was slightly to do with the industry that they were in, rather than it being lorem made such a difference to their perception of it.

If I showed them the exact same page, but it had something akin to what they were actually in business selling or doing. It was always much, much more easy for them to get a hold of. That's so interesting. Okay.

[00:40:16] Chris Miles: Yeah. So you've got... Oh, no, It's great. And that's exactly the... There you are, look, in your stretch limo.

Yeah, so there I am in my stretch limo. But, and, yeah, this is where, because we didn't just pre generate a bunch of homepages. We pre generated your entire wonder blocks. now when we go into, these different areas. Which is funny because some of them only make sense to certain things, but it's still, it does its best.

So this is a, maybe a little social commentary here that we have a pricing table for a politician. but, but yeah, the... Maybe it would make sense if you're donating.

[00:41:06] Nathan Wrigley: Did you see that one? For 49 you can buy the influence pack.

[00:41:10] Chris Miles: That's brilliant. Yeah, which is pretty funny. But yeah, like the copy is all written for that specific vertical.

That is so neat. So it's really fun, that you don't have to use your imagination nearly as much. And, Yeah, the, meet the politicians who will fight for you, that sort of thing. so yeah, I can go in here. Let me go to templates. Okay, this is something else as well. I'll do a whole, yeah, so patterns are just like sections of a page, basically.

But if I go into templates, I can do a whole page. So I wanted to add a page. I'm just going to add this entire page. So now we've got an entire page here. where most or all of the copy and images are specific to what I said it was, and now I'm just using Gutenberg. Can I ask

[00:42:12] Nathan Wrigley: an important question around this?

What is creating the layout there? Are you using core blocks? Or is it... All core blocks. So everything's core blocks. Everything's core. So what you don't... It's not proprietary, you can, fiddle with it and move things around. You just need to learn the, way that core blocks work, group blocks.

Yeah.

[00:42:32] Chris Miles: There's no extra plugins to license. there's nothing that's going to, suddenly, change and turn and, we're keeping up with core in terms of block grammar and things like that. So like the, there's a few places where core didn't get us all the way there. So one of the things that we had to add, for example, is animation, which is not in core yet.

eventually it will be, and then we can take this out. But until it is, we have to help core just a little bit. but for the most part, the, not even for the most part, 100 percent of the blocks themselves are made out of just core blocks. It doesn't even require the Gutenberg plugin. and they're just patterns, synced patterns.

In a template with a bunch of pictures and text specific to the type of website that you have. and we're always adding more to these. So this is what it is now and, we're gonna have way more in six months and that sort of thing. So whether it's something simple like a link in bio or if you want, this is one of our recent things that we just launched this last month is customizable coming soon pages.

that require extra blocks, for the form, but yeah.

[00:43:59] Nathan Wrigley: What's the little heart icon? is that like my favorite? This is just me saying, I like that one. And that stores it away somewhere for future use. Cause you've got a lot in there, haven't you? Especially when you were looking at the patterns, there's like hundreds and being able to just say, I like that.

I like that. I like that. And then you like that.

[00:44:15] Chris Miles: Yeah, exactly. So I'll just favorite a few of these. Down below. Got it. and then they're going to show up in my favorites then from then on. And they. And here's a little inside baseball, we pay attention to the ones people favorite and that determines what we make more of and what we experiment with in the future.

We're like, Oh, interesting. Yeah. Nobody favorited this one. We're not doing that again. Or maybe we need to look at it again and we'll interview people and we'll figure it out. But like we, we are looking at. Which websites are actually successful? Which websites aren't? What are the formulas that, play nicely together?

What are people actually doing? And we're able to, it's one of the benefits of having, I don't know if I'm allowed to say this, about 10 million sites, on your server farm that you can look at to say, what is the actual recipe for success? What does a real successful website look like? and how can we help someone who's just getting started, replicate some of that recipe?

and, so this has been, really successful so far, but there's still a ton we need to do, and there's still way more to go. but yeah, right now, it's really fun. because, one of the things we'll, be able to do is when we're on, customer experience interviews with customers, we'll, we can promise them, hey, we'll build you a whole website if you call us.

And we get feedback, and all we have to do is walk them through onboarding, and there we go. They have their, custom website that probably nobody else has. And they're really happy about it and it looks great. And we get to see the reaction to it and feedback like that, but it's extremely effective.

So like I can step through this with a client and go on a website with them.

[00:46:12] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. I think that's one of the more amazing pieces is that you can really knock out something very, quickly that your clients can get ahold of. And, yeah, just quickly going back to the blocks again, you were, showing us, so when you went to wonder blocks, it showed us patterns.

Do you ship any. Actual blocks. So if we were to go to the inserter, everything that you showed us is a combination of core blocks, right? Obviously you've dragged in some images from

[00:46:40] Chris Miles: various places. Core blocks, stuff that's in WooCommerce. I think the coming soon page requires. I believe jetpack form, which we can do, and I, if you just say install form, it will then install it, which is not a thing we had to invent.

that's, core can do that. but yeah, so it's, really nice to just be able to walk through this and in the space of. most of it's just been me yapping away, but in the space of about 20 minutes. Yeah, that's been really interesting. I'll tell you, I'll tell you what's just amazing.

We've made a whole website. Yeah. The,

[00:47:20] Nathan Wrigley: the thing about this is if you were to rewind the clock like six years, everything that you've just done was totally voodoo. You like none of that was even imaginable. And now slowly, but surely Gutenberg begins. We've got this non proprietary, way of creating pages and templates and patterns and all of that kind of stuff.

And now it's future proof stuff. Yeah, but it's interesting, but that has also added a layer of complexity for end users. And so something like WonderSuite, and in this case, we're looking at WonderStart, abstracts that away a little bit and says, yeah, we know that's hard. Here's a wizard. And honestly, I'm really interested to know, I think you could probably have done that site if I wasn't yapping down your neck and you weren't doing it on a presentation.

What, honestly, 120 seconds, something like that from start to finish.

[00:48:15] Chris Miles: Yeah, something crazy. It depends on the last step where we install plugins if you selected all of them Maybe an extra 30 seconds.

[00:48:26] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Oh, that's just unforgivable

[00:48:30] Chris Miles: Just because it takes us a little bit longer to do

[00:48:32] Nathan Wrigley: that Amazing.

So even if you just use this as a recipe for generating ideas, if you just looked at it and thought, I want to do a politician, but maybe I'll tweak it and, just go back, start again, have another look, see what these templates and patterns do. Yeah. That's absolutely fascinating.

So just to point you in the right direction, this is a Bluehost product. It's called WonderSuite. It's spelt exactly as, you'd imagine. W O N D E R S U I T E. There we go. Bluehost. com. You can find more about it there. Obviously the pricing is as aggressive as it's going to get in the year 2023.

Kind of hop on board now is probably the best time to do it. We're going to be back next week and we're going to. Take another aspect of WonderSuite and demonstrate that. It's not going to be with Chris this time. It's going to be with somebody else called Jocelyn Hendrickson, and she's going to, give us a bit of a unpacking of something called Wondercart.

So take what you've just seen. And I imagine that with, e commerce making e commerce as simple as possible. That's what we're going to be covering today. I don't see any questions that have come in. So I think I've probably asked enough. So I think probably all I'll do, Chris is say. Thank you so much.

That's really fascinating. Is there anything you wanted to add before we closed it out?

[00:49:52] Chris Miles: the sale ends when the month ends, so get it while you can. Get it while you

[00:49:57] Nathan Wrigley: can, yeah. My inbox is insanely full of all the WordPress things, but yeah, get it while you can. Yeah. Thank you, Chris. I will stop the screen from sharing and I will say, I'll be seeing you in a few weeks time because we're back to do something in a few weeks time, but Chris, thank you so much.

I will see you next time. Yeah. Take it easy. Take care.