So we’re back with another ‘podcast hijack’, in which the WP Builds podcast is temporarily taken over by a new podcast that I’m doing with David Waumsley.
It’s called “The No Script Show”, and we’re getting back to the basics which we feel we’ve lost touch with, namely HTML and CSS. This week, it’s all about something called ‘component based web design’, but before that, a few words about what this show is about…
Over the years our reliance on tools like Page Builders mean that we’ve not kept up with the new technologies which are becoming available to us via the browser, HTML and CSS… and that made us sad!
Sad because there’s real power in what can now be achieved, and it’s an exciting time, where CSS can do much of the heavy lifting which used to be the domain of Javascript.
Does this mean that WordPress is not in view, not for me, but WordPress uses all-the-things we discuss, so they’re tied together in so many ways!
The hope is that you’ll enjoy the podcast enough to subscribe to it and enjoy the podcast as we get into this new subject.
There are the show notes that you’ll find on the noscript.show website for this episode.
Today we are talking about… designing an effective homepage.
It is the 11th episode of our “Thinking the Unthinkable” series, and today's thought provoking title is “No one cares what your website looks like!”. There’s a number of articles with this title and similar sentiment expressed by many UX designers and SEO’s. With limited ways to judge the abilities of a web agency, many clients are likely to approach websites as if they were a piece of work in an art gallery. This can see them getting ripped off. It is hard for us not to do the same. We know first impressions matter, and we are always searching for visual inspiration too. We get into how UX, SEO, branding, call to actions (and more) can influence the route that you might take when creating a website. Check out the episode...
Welcome to the penultimate episode in our Business Bootcamp series. Usually, this is where I write... "where we relearn everything we know about building WordPress sites and running a web design business from start to finish". But if you are joining us now, you probably need to go back a year to season one! We are on Season 5, which is the last in this Bootcamp series and is about what happens after the website build. This is episode 5. Today we are talking about Future Proofing (our tech based business and maybe our clients’ sites). We're supposed to be talking about Traditional (Waterfall) v Agile, but as you'll hear we get slightly derailed and go off piste for quite a bit of the podcast, which is fun! We cover: Reduce or embrace dependencies? Should we offer long term support? What kind of efforts do we put into making sure that we're keeping our knowledge and skills up to date? Check it out...
So you're in the business of selling WordPress websites? If you are in that business, then I can guarantee you that there's more money to be made than just getting the site done and then moving on. Today it's all about the upsells that we might offer. We go through a list of things that we've tried in the past, some of which were profitable and easy to do, others of which were hard and lost us money. It's a lottery to be honest! Things that one person excels at, others might be loathed to do. Website hosting, email hosting, design, custom development, social media, content creation, SEO, optimisation... I could go on. In fact, I (we) do in the episode today. Have a listen and then head over to the post and leave us a comment.
So you've tried Gutenberg, and you might like to or you might not! But one thing that you cannot really argue about is that it's got some room for improvement. During the last few release cycles there's been more and more talk about block patterns and how they're going to make WordPress website building more straightforward. Block patterns are a collection of blocks that have been built and saved away for future use. So think about a typical use case, you have a hero section of your website that you might use over and over again. You build it one time, adding in a variety of blocks, and once you're happy, you save it and then later you can add it into any other part of your website with the click of a button. But here's the problem. The block editor is still a little but, how shall we say it... fun to use. It's got some quirks and you might not find it as easy as you'd wish to get pixel perfect patterns. Step in Extendify. They have a suite of pre-made block patterns which you can use. It's really all about making life simple. They're all built on top of WordPress Core blocks so there's no lock in and you can use them to learn how to build your own block patterns.
Another episode of the WordPress Business Bootcamp where we try to go right back to the start and unpick the process of building sites for clients. Today we're on to the tricky subject of 'Design Aesthetics'! Aesthetics affect a brand's credibility and perception. The look and feel is probably the thing that first hit us first and is most important to our clients. But the problem is that aesthetics are subjective, there is no agreed way to deliver such things and we have to find some way to avoid design by committee (the client seeking outside parties) or the loudest voice winning without reference to the overall goals. So how we might do this is the subject of the podcast today. Remember that there's a dozen other episodes in this series prior to this, but we'd love to get your thoughts on this one... tell us where you get your inspiration and how you handle this with your clients.
Welcome to another in the Business Bootcamp series where we relearn everything we know about building WordPress sites and running a web design business from start to finish. We're on Season 2, Episode 1, and it's all about what the whole web design / build process might look like. As is so often the case we're wearing many, many hats in the work that we do, and that's really what this episodes emphasises. How to we set the expectations, get the designs, understand the mood, decide upon sources of traffic, think about SEO, agree on colours and fonts. See, I told you you'd need many hats! We cover what we've done in the past and what we think might work for us going forward in our WordPress website businesses. Have a listen to the podcast...
In this episode of the podcast we asked you submit what you thought were some Killer Tips for creating your WordPress websites, and you did not disappoint! So there's loads of useful little nuggets of information in here, many of them might be new to you. It never ceases to amaze me just how my processes differ from other people doing the exact same job, and how much I could learn from other WordPress professionals. Well in this episode of the podcast, we kinda make that possible! Go check it out!
This week was debate whether it's better to design your WordPress websites with browser based tools like a Page Builder, or use dedicated apps like Figma, Adobe XD or Sketch. Years ago this question was completely absurd. Not only did the tools not exist, but there was almost no conception that the browser might even be capable of image manipulation on the scale that would be needed. Fast forward to today and the tools exist and are excellent. So should you just stay in the browser, educating your clients about WordPress along the way or stay with solutions which have stood the test of time? Find out what we think on the podcast today...
Times have changed... It used to be that creating websites was really tedious. It took hours to get anything to go where you wanted it. Along came WordPress themes and life got a little easier, well sometimes, and then we got Page Builders with their rows and modules. Now you can get templates for just about anything and can have sites built in a matter of hours, but should we do it this way? Should we be using other people's templates or should we be doing all this from the group up? Perhaps there is a middle way? Tweaking what you find so that the internet does not all look the same! Join us to find out what we think...
Joe has been in the WordPress space for years and years. Working as a freelancer at the start, then as a member of a large agency. All of that is now behind him and he's got a whole heap of different things that he's doing. He's a podcaster, a creator of videos for himself and for third parties, but perhaps most importantly he's a creator of online courses in the WordPress space. If you want to find out why he's so successful then listen to this episode...
This week we have Mor Cohen on from Washington State in America and she's with us because she has a new course that she's launching called "The GeneratePress and Elementor Design Course". This course is designed for people like me, and when I say that it's unlikely that you need this course as much as I do because I have the design skills of a peanut! I can see what makes a design good, and I can appreciate a good design, but I cannot seem to be able to make a good design. That stuff is hard, or so I thought. Mor thinks otherwise!
Daren Morreale was having a problem trying to get some triangles in a layout to line up in Elementor. He decided that media queries were not the way to go and so he shows us what it is that he…
This is the first WP Builds “Contribute” recording with Paul Cress who shows you in about 10 minutes some of the features of Adobe XD. The idea of these videos is that you come on to the podcast and show…
Today, we get to meet Laura Elizabeth. She’s a designer turned plugin creator that has some good ideas for you! Like I say, she’s a designer and her latest product, Client Portal, is a great way to help you and your clients to stay on the same page. If you build WordPress websites for clients, then I think that you’ll know this problem… you get out of sync with your clients and all the communication seems to go all over the place. Some people want you to send them email, others would rather that you use Slack or Dropbox or Google Drive or some other system that you’ve never heard of! The long and the short of it is that you’ve got many clients all needing you to communicate with them in a variety of ways and Client Portal makes that process much easier!
I don’t know much about design. I’m one of those people who knows what they like when they see it. So I’m basically your worst client! Luckily there are people out there who do understand design. They think about it deeply and understand why some combinations of colours and shapes work well (good designers) and others don’t (me and turnips). Piccia Neri is one such person; she’s good at design and understanding design. Coming from a background in art history she moved over to the web and has been applying her knowledge to web design ever since.
This week we have Daniel David on the show talking about his plugin,
Smart Slider 3. If you have not used a slider on any of your WordPress website projects, then it might be time to have another look, because, these things are pretty amazing these days. Smart Slider 3 does not just slide things in from one side of the screen to the other in fun ways, oh my goodness no, it does a whole lot more than that! Smart Slider 3 is a drag and drop slider builder that you can use in many, many ways; some of them unexpectedly cool. Think Page Builder for only sliders!
Today we ask ourselves what skills do we need to offer a full web design service. That sounded like a great topic. It turns out it's a bit slippery this one.Is a webdesigner like a graphic designer for the web or someone who designs business solutions that are realised on the web?
