I'd like to welcome everyone to the paraprofessional section 2016 screen meeting. Our theme is the future. If you don't know me, I'm Sarah Nelson, the paraprofessional section chair. To every single one of you attending this meeting, thank you. We are so glad you're here. If you're not a member of APERAS, we'd love it if you'd consider becoming a member. But if you can't, we're so grateful that you've decided to join us today. We have 50 attendees who are scattered all over the state of Nebraska, from places such as Seward, Norfolk, Sydney, Hastings, and Lincoln. And we have a few attending at their desk. We're all here because of our passion for library work. I'd also like to thank Christine Woods. She's leading them back in for all of her hard work setting up this spring meeting. Thank you, Christine. If you're watching with multiple people on the same computer, would you please type everyone's names into the chat box so that we can make sure that everyone gets their CE credits? We've got three great sessions today, so I hope you all enjoy it, and that you learn something you can use on the job. There will be five to ten minute break between speakers. And now starting off our program is Michael Sowers, Director of Technology at Ducey. The session is called Ducey, a one of a kind concept. All right. Thank you very much for that wonderful introduction, and thank you for all the attendees. And it's so nice to be able to catch up with some folks I haven't seen in a while. So as some of you know, I used to be with the Nebraska Library Commission. And as of just about a year ago, I left the opposition and left training as something I've been doing for the last 20 years to kind of take everything I learned and more or less pull my money where my mouth is, and instead of spending my life telling people how they should be running their libraries and their computers, I decided that I wanted to participate in this thing called Ducepace. So from a visual perspective, basically what I want to do is I'm just going to kind of run a slideshow here of stuff that has gone on in Ducepace and things that are happening there. And then I'm just going to kind of talk about Ducepace, maybe mention specifics if a particular slide is up, but talk about what this project is, what we do there, what is the mission behind this, and then open it up for questions. Because as we learned very quickly over the last couple of months that we've been open, and even before that, everybody has lots of questions about what this thing called Ducepace is. So first kind of the why of Ducepace and a little bit of the history. The concept itself started with Gary Bosden, the former director of OPL. And when he came into Omaha, he started asking himself and other people what might possibly be the future of the library. He didn't necessarily have an answer, he was just trying to figure out what that might be.  Heritage Services is a philanthropic, nonprofit organization that raises money for community beneficial projects in Omaha. They raise money for the Durham Museum, they raise money for the New Hockey Arena on campus. They've been around for decades. And they're an organization I've never heard of before, and I found in Omaha, you've either heard of them or you haven't, they're just there and available. And so Sue and Gary started traveling around the country looking at what other libraries were doing that were different. They looked at what we might call digital libraries, they looked at maker spaces, they looked at co-working spaces, and they said, well, we need to do something like this in Omaha. And so Heritage Services did the fundraising. They bought the former borders building at 72nd and Dodge in Omaha. It is the single busiest intersection in the state. There is something like nine lanes of traffic in each of the two major directions. It's a transit hub, and if not geographically, it's at least considered kind of the center of Omaha. If you break Omaha, obviously, kind of north, south, east and west. They guided it. If you haven't been there, if you remember it as a border, the only thing that was standing once construction got in there was the stairs in the elevator. Everything else was taken down to the studs, and some of the studs were removed. And construction went on for about a year. I was hired in May of last year. So we have Rebecca Stamick, our executive director, and then there's me as director of technology and director of community learning and an operations manager. The team was kind of built last summer, and we spent the summer in temporary offices by Whole Foods on Dodge Street. And my desk for the summer was in a hallway next to the printers. This was when I say temporary office space, I'm not kidding. And we kind of planned what this was going to be. The technology was kind of already packed, but we had to decide how to implement it. We just had to decide how to circulate it. We had to decide how people could use it. We had to decide how many staff we were going to have. We had to pledge it. Things I had never done before. To say my life has changed in the last year would be an understatement. And so ultimately, one of the things I kept saying all summer, which has turned out to be very true, is that we spent all summer planning this space. Then I said we're going to open the doors and actually let the public in. Then we're really going to find out how this plays around. Because we can make a lot of assumptions about what people want to do with this technology. It is very much modeled on the library, how libraries work, how public libraries work, library ethos, privacy, security, all of that stuff. But then we're just going to let everybody in. Because what we're trying to answer, other than maybe what is the future of libraries, what we're trying to answer is what happens to a community when you offer this level of access and technology for free. So as we are a privately funded nonprofit that runs us called Community Information Trust, Do Space is the only one in existence. There are some things other places do that are things we do that are sort of similar to other places, but nobody quite does it like we do. So access and education are kind of our two larger goals. You can kind of think of me as the head of technology, as the access part of it, and then our directive community learning is the access end of it. So I'm a little better at talking about the technology, but I'll definitely talk about the education too. We are open 9 a.m. and 9 p.m. 7 days a week. We are only closed for six holidays a year. Membership is completely free. In fact, there's a stack of membership cards up here on the desk. You are welcome to grab one of those, so you can sign up for membership right online. You need to register your card online if you do that or come on in. Because we are privately funded, we're not restricted to a taxpayer base for a community member.  We have, so now kind of doing the non-visual tour of the space, we have 56 public access computers, ranging from about 60-40 split between Macs and PCs, PCs being the 40. On the PC side of things, we have touchscreen PCs, we have accessible PCs with additional hardware and software on them for people with disabilities. We have kind of low-end, medium-end and high-end PCs. Some of those high-end PCs are dual-screen setups. I'll get back to the software in a moment. On the Macs, we have both iMacs and Mac minis. If you are a Mac person and want to get your hands on a 5K 27-inch iMac, we've got a couple of those floating around that you can play with on that. On those Macs and PCs, we have software ranging from Office to the fully W Creative Suite to AutoCAD and other 3D design software. We are constantly having people request of us other software that we might install. That's part of my job is deciding what are we going to install. Is it free? Do we have pay for it? One of the licensing restrictions, things like that. All those machines are set up for an hour of use at a time. We have software control logging in with the motion part. At this point, the reservation system will give you an hour. If there's enough time, you can get an additional hour. It's kind of standard. Most libraries have something like this. On top of that, we have MacBook Airs that you can check out in the space. We have Dell laptops. Windows laptops you can check out in the space. We have Chromebooks you can check out in the space. We have iPad Airs you can check out. And then we also have 80 Kindle Fire HDs that you can also check out in the space. That's just kind of the simple you need a computer. We have a full gigabit Ethernet fiber connection into the building and open Wi-Fi. This, by the way, is all just on the first floor. We'll talk about it in a second for a minute. That's Metro Community College upstairs. We have what we call Tech Kits. Some of these things you're seeing, the makey makey that's on the screen right now. We have Tech Kits that we put together, which are kits of different pieces of technology. And these plastic bins you can see on the picture right now, that kids and adults can check out in the space. So we have makey makeys and we have different robots. I think that kid's making a Play-Doh piano at the moment with that. So we're constantly adding new technologies that people can check out in the space and play with. That's the Eggbot that this woman is playing with. That will take illustrations from a program and then use a Sharpie marker and draw your illustration on a rounded object. That's the Eggbot. We have a teen hangout. That screen there is four 55-inch HD displays with four Xbox ones and four PS4s hooked up to them. So you can play four different games at a time or one game on a 110-inch HD display. And yes kids do also, they're all working there and whatnot. We have what we call Little's Lab, which is our little kids' room. That has one of those AWE workstations in it. It also has another 55-inch touchscreen PC hooked up, mounted on the wall at toddler height. Emily's son has come in and gets to play some iPad games, but on a screen that's almost 60 inches wide on that. And we do kind of an interactive digital storytime in there and do programs for parents about how to work with technology with their kids and the factors of ethnicity are doing a storytime. We do have some books similar to those that we have. We have HTML for babies. It's a board book. It's never too early to use it. We have a web page. And then just over here is in our 3D lab. We usually, when we do a physical tour, we stop at that 3D lab. We end there because we started there. Nobody knew where we were. In the 3D lab we have three printers. We have a TAS5 that is a desktop model. And that is bookable. You can book up to two hours at a time on that and use yourself completely free to use. Let me just stress here. This is all completely free to use as long as you remember. We just start with paper and plastic. That's it. Then we have two other 3D printers.  Those are industrial level 3D printers. You are not going to find another one that's public access in the state of either of those. In those cases, what we do is there's something that was printed on one of them. You submit your files to us. We put them in a queue. We will get those printed for you and just charge you for the insurance. We're not looking to make a profit off of that. If you want to do it yourself, then you can book time on the TAS. Also in the 3D lab we have a laser cutter etcher. You want to see some wooden and glass things going by in this slideshow. This will cut in or etch everything from wood to acrylic to rubber, if you want to make rubber stamps, to glass, marble, metals. You can get creative. I saw the chess set go by a little bit earlier. That was done with a laser cutter up on the table. In front of me here we have a puzzle of what our volunteers made. Then we also added recently a vinyl cutter. If you want to make vinyl stickers, you can just bring in vinyl and get those cut in that. That's something we made. We have a Dunkin' Donuts in our bag. Did I mention that? If you need the caffeine and the sugar, you're all good. We got you completely covered. There's some kids working with straws and building. I think it was a bridge project they were trying to get support going on. One other thing that went by I saw was we have work on double telepresence robots. You can check those out or you can book them for a meeting. You can get on your computer. Your face will show up on the iPad in the robot. You get to drive the robot around the building at the tech meeting. There's a camera on the iPad in the robot so you can see what's going on in the room. I should have maybe brought one. What if they would do a presentation on a double robot? I think that might be kind of interesting. Here's a thermist that a medical student etched different types of heartbeats onto his thermists. They were using our laser cutter so you could study heart rhythms while he's drinking his coffee. We did a light painting workshop. I saw some of you were kind of moving and I saw some of these pictures going on. Like I said, we have a full educational program. I have some flyers up front of the table here of just a sample of our what's available. We do different kinds of programming. We have a youth category. We have what we call lifestyle category. Crash courses. Here's an introduction to Word, PowerPoint. In fact, we have someone in the audience who's actually taught one of those PowerPoint classes for us. We do resume workshops. We will do an introduction to PHP classes. Yesterday, I think it was Junior Hackers Group used the new Lego We Do construction kits and built robots that you would program using a language called Scratch. You bring up a laptop with the software. It communicates via Bluetooth to the Lego and then you get your robot to solve a problem. Our educational program, we really want to stress not just sitting down attending a presentation and hope you learn something. We really try to make them as hands-on as possible so that kids really do learn something. The slide up here, we also have meeting spaces available. We have two conference rooms and then a meeting room, a large meeting room that divides in half. These rooms are available for booking by the general public, nonprofits, community organizations for free. We also have a meeting room where you can have a presentation process that we approve. If you're just a study group and you want a room, we can do that for you. If you are a private organization and want a private meeting where the public is not allowed to come, there is a normal charge for that. We charge very competitively with other places you can rent in the area. Our meeting rooms have either 70 or 80 inch touch screen so that if you want to connect anything from your iPod touch to an HDMI device, we can connect you via a wire or wireless in one frame or another. Basically, bring it in and we'll figure out how to connect it for you. Coming up here, one of the programs I do want to highlight is our Senior Cyber Society. We have 18 paid staff from the executive director down to our staff under me and the education coordinator and our membership folks up front, kind of running the front desk and greeting people. Then we have a cadre of just over 200 volunteers available to us right now and we're always looking for more. There's volunteer information on the website and I'll fly her on the table in front of me. Those volunteers range from what we call advocates, which are people who are just standing inside the front door and answering the question, what is do space and can I show you around to our people who teach actual workshops to people who help on our tech help desk which is what my staff mostly runs to we have a mentor program. So one of those kind of long-term problems you have when you're doing public service and trying to answer questions for people is how long do you spend with a particular individual trying to answer their question? We've got high-end software in this place. I couldn't begin to tell you how AutoCAD works I know what it does but I'm not going to be able to help you nor do we have any other AutoCAD experts on staff and poor AutoCAD, we pick on it so much because it's kind of the most complicated software we offer access to but we have a cadre of people called mentors. So we will kind of help you out we will get you started, we want to encourage you to learn on your own but if you really need somebody to sit down with you for an hour or two you should fill out a form on our website we will then match you up with one of our mentors and then between you and the mentor you make an appointment and you sit down and they will come in and they will sit down with you and help you out whether it's on our equipment or on your equipment and we have a pretty good success rate with that we've got a long list of stuff that people are willing to just come in and help other people with IndieSpace and we are always looking for more and we will stress that we could not run this place without our volunteer I mean I can't stress that more than that these are some pictures from grand opening I think we are going to start cycling through in a few minutes IndieSpace in and of itself is a giant experiment as I mentioned we are trying to answer these questions of what happens when people have this level of technology I forgot to finish the story about Cyberseniors Cyberseniors means every Wednesday morning from 9am to noon it is run by senior volunteers and one staff person who is going to charge the whole program and it's basically your senior you need to come in and you just need help with your stuff you've got an iPad for Christmas that the kids gave you and then they went back home and explained how to use it so I'm familiar you know you need to sign up for email something like that and it's just kind of this open lab where folks come in and you ask them to register first so we can do some crowd control and they can help and that's it and we were averaging about 30 or 35 people a week and then two weeks ago it was in the and last week we had over 75 people show up just tell you who reads the newspaper that was the best marketing we probably could have ever had this week we had well over 50 we had a little more crowd control but people showed up to like what you know and they needed it so they used it and that is probably I would say one of our biggest successes at least from a program and events standpoint the stories that we're collecting out of Dewspace are just amazing the things people are doing at Dewspace I can't predict from one day to the next how people are going to use their technology we've had a gentleman come in a couple of times with a full size digital keyboard hook it up one of the Macs load up GarageBand put out his headset and make music and record it right onto our computers we do have a 3D scanner it's called an iSense it's an okay scanner it'll do your head quite well if you're a really fine detail this is not the tool yet we're working on that some kids discovered they can do that so they're scanning each other's heads and they're printing out little busts of themselves but we had one gentleman come in one day somewhere around 75 or 80 and he's like I heard me delight like scan my head and print a bust of me yeah I mean why do you want to do this but he's like well I fly RC planes and he wants to put himself as the pilot I don't know just like that spectacular I never could have guessed we have folks who are trying to start girls well businesses who will come in and prototype music art equipment we have a gentleman who he and a buddy want to start a custom engraving company and need to they will buy their own laser cutter we do ask that you're not using our space to actually make your business but they need to kind of learn how the equipment works and figure out if they want to invest in it and create some samples and so they're doing that using our equipment and in that case they can book up to two hours a day first come first serve, they're bringing all the materials there's no charge we do have some folks who are typically in 8 to 12 hours a day because this is now their co-working space instead of paying a company to go get a desk somewhere over an office building they come in and use our equipment now at the moment we've got enough computer capacity to people using that they can spend 6, 8, 12 hours on our computers come summer we're starting to warn them it's going to be a little tight we are really trying to figure out what's going to happen in the summer it's going to be interesting what else do I want to say here's Felicity doing another group of Girl Scouts with a little robot called Dash and Dot that will teach you how to program and then you can drive them around with your iPad and instruct them on a few things we love the common cards that we get from people like I said we're just collecting those stories as much as we can briefly so there's there's those 56 computers off to the right there briefly upstairs is MCC, Metropolitan Community College some of the things some of the photos that have gone by have been upstairs they will be doing a lot of continuing education type of classes up there they kind of have a very open classroom situation the upstairs when they're open is completely open to the public right now when people ask where's a quiet place to go they tell them to go upstairs because there's no students up there yet but as the spring comes up they will be doing more and more classes and workshops they did last month a science on the sphere which was a two-week exhibit it's this giant sphere with projectors and you can control with an iPad and get like weather data and satellite data and see the history of the earth and things like that oh during our grand opening we did do a high altitude balloon launch this is pictures that came back and we were able to track the balloon life in this space as that was going up that was in conjunction with UL on that and so with partnering with Metro or excuse me MCC Metro is the plus people with MCC they're going to be paying attention to what we're doing downstairs and offering longer initial classes like Microsoft certification that sort of stuff upstairs we'll be paying attention to what they're doing upstairs so we have kind of the resources to support their students downstairs and people who want to do that so they'll start looking at what software they're teaching and maybe make that available downstairs so it's going to be just a very interesting long-term partnership with them and kind of working back and forth and I do know too once they really get up and going our door counts going to go just instantly go up so that's one thing I track every day as our door count so I'm very aware of those numbers there's one kid scanning her brother with a 3D scanner we are I'll just kind of wrap up and open up for questions one thing we're trying to do is we're trying to be very responsive to the community so that once we let people in and find out how it really works that's where it kind of comes back on me and on us in that people are asking for things and they're saying well there's this whole group in this community who works with this kind of software maybe you need to have that available this was our outdoor site countdown so I think we're going through these hardware so we did not open with a flatbed scanner for people to scan photographs we just didn't think of it well we have one now and we have a couple of people we have one now and they bring a stack of photos and they get it for two hours and she's scanning her photos so we're adjusting the technology as much as we can we like to say I mentioned that we don't have we're not using our full capacity in the public computers right now maybe if in six months we figure out we never have well maybe we'll pull out some computers and put in something else when we open we only have the two 3D printers we want one we can play with directly not just look at so we got the task so we're constantly trying to adjust one other thing I mentioned did a picture of a brain go by so that was a medical instructor on a campus somewhere it was a life-size brain somewhat atrophied however so it was not as solid as a normal brain I guess that was an 86 hour long 3D print we did over Christmas he brought in a real brain he found the model of file we printed it I will say 3D printing it's kind of like watching paint dry it's interesting for about five minutes and then it's just like oh look it's a nozzle going back and forth and then layers so yeah but that's that was our single biggest print we've done so far luckily it worked all the way through we didn't have to restart it we left it over Christmas as we were closed and we're coming back we're like please we're gonna do when you get industrial level printers they're a lot more reliable I could not have dreamed of doing what I'm doing right now a year ago even when I took the job as those of you who know me know that I used to talk to people a lot and this is the third presentation I've done in a year I just you know my life has completely changed that's Elvin Elvin is amazing he was actually at our outside side the other day he's an artist around town some people see him downtown so anyways yeah I think we're kind of cycling back to our photos here so actually my timing worked pretty well so yeah I'm really committed to this project I think it's I don't know where I'm going to end up in a couple of years none of us do really but if I wasn't as committed to this project as I was I wouldn't be commuting from Lincoln also so you know my gas bill is going off just a little bit yeah this bear I will end with this bear this was a bear that got left so we gave him a little tour and we gave him a part in everything it was a race playing with our BBA and the 3D printers actually this was the single most successful social media we've done so far we did actually find the people through Facebook who left the bear behind but yeah Ted E. Bear that has the capital D space there there's Dash and Dash so yeah okay so that's about more than half of my time and as we have learned over the last year everybody has lots of questions so I would at this point just like to open it up and what do you want to know about D space and somehow I think we're going to answer remote questions too I don't know if Chris is controlling that or what what do you want to know answer what are some of these things at the moment or goal if there's some specific thing you D space is trying to reach this year goals um we're actually actively putting those together as we speak okay good we have a lot more to go around so the question was what are our goals for this year um there's very I'm going to be a little nebulous in this answer at the moment because we're actively trying to put those together um but serving a diverse community we're trying to reach everybody um so we are looking very much at our demographics and our statistics a lot I'm learning more statistics right now than I care to think about uh some days um so that for example on the registration form we do ask for years ago so we can kind of make some generalizations from that we do ask some demographic questions those are completely optional to make sure that this project is reaching the people who really do need it uh if nothing else and then the people who do have a certain level of access to technology giving them that next level of access I think is a big one so just kind of reaching the diverse population is one of our big goals at the moment we are getting about a thousand new members a month a week so uh yeah we're doing a lot of card signups uh so so we are starting to reach them um beyond that I think just being that responsiveness to the community um and one of my goals right now is to survive the summer because we notice when when when OPS is like off on a Friday our numbers go through the room it's like hey let's all go to these things uh spring break was this week for some schools uh we've noticed a definite uptick in the gate count too so yeah um yeah I can't wait for summer um but yeah ultimately it's like I said it's kind of we're in this experiment so we're trying to um we are setting up those goals but we haven't really solidified but yeah I can get up to this Jake yes Jake I don't actually don't think this is okay I'll repeat it okay um um Caitlin um Mbardo actually works for you guys and works at here at middle of university as a part-time right uh circulation assistance so that's fantastic Caitlin is wonderful yes and then trying to steal next yeah sorry this is uh uh she had mentioned that you guys actually circulate uh raspberry pies yes yes yes yes um now does that actually does that or any other technology actually leave the doors yeah okay everything is in this space um so um for example little bits kids that's right on the screen here uh everything is produced in the building okay um we uh really the only thing you can do with a membership outside of the building is we do have an overdrive collection of tack and stem related material fiction but just kind of related to what we do right um but yeah everything else is really to encourage people to use the space and collaborate in the space and work with each other in the space so yeah nothing nothing goes out the door at this point it's just curious any technology that's being lend out I know that there's a lot of uh like very large metropolitan libraries doing the whole wireless lending and stuff like that I was just curious to which I will probably just add not at this time we haven't ruled out we just aren't you know part of the goal is to get people to just use do space as a place um and then we're constantly re-evaluating things like that so maybe we will eventually but just not at this time oh I don't want it goes make me nervous I'll repeat your question I always end up talking too loud I kept seeing pictures of the violin oh the violin was that something that was made with the 3D printer and it actually works so that is called Hovalin a couple whose first names escaped me but their last name is Hova they are from Omaha they now live in San Francisco she is a spectacular violinist he works for a company but a company that writes 3D design software and so their project is called the Hovalin it is a 3D printable violin you do have to buy the strings and the knobs and whatnot but between plastic and parts it costs about $100 and the idea is from their perspective more of a instruments are expensive and kids want to try an instrument and a 3D working 3D printed violin for $100 maybe a little easier than a cheap $400 violin that the kid gives up in six months so yes, we printed one they have since come out with a version 2 that we haven't printed yet they came and did an event for us and it is playable it sounds great nobody on staff actually can play it and in fact, on Kate Hova this sort of heard former violin teacher actually printed one and came into new space and tuned it and re-strung it for us and played it and he knows what he is doing so yes, if you stop buying just ask to see the violin and we have to hang kind of in a work room we will pull it out and let you fiddle with it and we intend to print the new version but we have to sneak that in between people who want us to print things for them but yeah, thanks and actually if you look up Hova in H-O-V-A-L-I-M just google it and you can see videos in the process yeah, that's a great project Michael, we do have some questions from our remote viewers go for it okay where are we at here so I want to know if people use the space a cyber cafe, is that the kind of idea like sure, yeah they can oh yeah, the donut shop yeah, that's why we had the donut shop although we don't move next to the computers unless it's a lid on a coffee where the lid is fine yeah, no, seriously people can just come in and we have some 15 ministrations where they just want to check for e-mail people maybe not to watch what people are doing on the computers because it's really none of my business but then we also want to know what people are doing on the computers e-mail, resumes so yeah, you can that's part of what we do is that cyber cafe okay do you have policies online or where can people find them as far as printing and what are actually they can and can't do there there's a website that has it all listed so if you go to dospace.org and I believe that's under the about yeah, most of our policies are listed online how much things cost we have a behavior policy of code of conduct that sort of thing that we do enforce the food policy has changed over the last month or so as we just some food usage was getting a little out of hand so a little more control over that we learn but I will say probably as the audience here works in libraries most of these policies will seem very familiar to you I mean the three people who wrote them are all librarians so we kind of had a no place to start anyways so yeah, but all of those that most people should be looking for are on our website okay great another one, since it's such a new idea how are you marketing and advertising I know you talked about the newspaper articles but are you guys doing anything specific so we actually have a marketing firm that we're working with so this is where I have to be a little careful because I know what some things I can't talk about yet which if you know me that's all all summer I had to like not tell people what was going on so yeah the marketing firm works with local media works with the bus system and actually if you watch carefully there is a bus completely wrapped here in Omaha that is the new space bus the only picture I have of it is in the parking lot though I want to like on the street but I passed it once but I was driving so it's a little hard there's bus benches, there are billboards out around Dodge Street in 72nd so yeah there is a whole plan war will be happening there's kind of a schedule of things that will be going on so that's where the benefit of the kind of the private funding we've got pretty good budgets for all of this I was joking last summer that I'm dealing with more zeros than I used to so so that's about as detailed as I can get at this point but yeah there is a complete total marketing plan going on do you know the name of the firm or no? I think I can say that it's Swanson Russell okay yeah that's been out in the papers promotion for them yeah so a couple of questions about the sewing stuff I guess their picture is sewing into the clothes what are you doing with that and what with the yarn I know those are two different things but some of the more kind of crafty things can you talk more about those two the yarn I'm going to plead actual ignorance on that one I don't know what that event was we've done a couple of events that are kind of what we call tech fashion so sewing in LEDs and length strings into clothing and into hats and then hooking up a battery and a little pack behind it and lighting up your clothing after dark that's been fun I will tell you though I was amused by the tech fashion one last week because there was like it's teenagers there was like one guy all the rest were teen girls he was having a good time but yeah so far it's all still hand sewing we don't have sewing machines or anything like that yet we've talked about it but I think probably if you look through our events calendar you can get a few more details about what's going on with those particular workshops can you give us an idea about the cost someone wants to know how much it costs to do that brain oh how much did the brain cost so the what we charge is a number that's not really going to help which is $3 per cubic inch of filament I think the brain was in the neighborhood about $150 if I recall correctly so not bad the chess piece that just went by would be maybe $4 $5 that brain is solid so the brain I don't think was solid I think it was a high density fill so for 3D printing you can do kind of low you don't have to print it solid if you print it solid you're going to use more filament it's going to cost more it's going to weigh more we have done some solid objects they do a way a lot when you do add that extra cost the industrial printers prints in PLA which is basically Lego plastic so the one you can book yourself prints in a couple of dozen different kinds of filament it's just what you want to bring in sorry was that the remote questions one more just popped up someone said they saw a picture of a Segway maybe or was there I think that was the double telepresence robot it kind of Segway but it's an iPad on a stick with some wheels at the bottom there's a modern family episode big bag yes so Cynthia you had a question and then behind you Janet Grace who's on our board compiled some good questions and they were already asked but you had some good questions about the Google glasses and a few other things I was just curious if you had the Oculus gaming or a Google so the closest we're going to get which we will make available for check out the next couple of weeks are some Google Cardboard so you plug your phone in and you can do that I've looked at the Oculus I've looked at the Samsung VR I was at CES and I actually got to wear one of those in a chair they moved to wow it was pretty good I am desperately trying to get my hands on a HoloLens from Microsoft I really want one of those ever since I got this job I'm like I want one of those so you support me some other people support me too I work in the channels I can't promise anything but that is a goal of mine is I am going to get my hands on one of those and actually did you have a quick question I was just wondering on your team events and your youth events do you have age limitations do you have a cutoff that says you can't participate because you're the one so it kind of depends on the event so we have learned that there are some of them that are like 12 to 16 and my understanding from talking to staff is some of those they've had some 11 year olds and just the manual dexterity was just not there yet to be able to do whatever the activity was and so they kind of had to be a little more tighter controlled on the age limits but we really don't want to tell a kid no either but if it's for 12 to 16 an 8 year old just isn't going to fit in anyway sort of thing so we had what we called Little's Lab and we had team hackers what we kind of lost in there was like 6 to 11 in the middle so we've created Big Little's Lab and then there's junior makers and we're trying to fill that gap in the middle and in some cases the program concepts might be the same as like what the teams are doing but modified a little bit for the younger group so that's kind of my non-answer of sometimes we have to but we don't really want to just because of experience and the type of event that it is it just may not work for a younger individual. I saw a picture of a young man with special Olympics Yes. Do you let them participate at any age level? So he was actually working in our 3D lab and he did that with the laser cutter the plaque that he was holding up so we have had groups of folks with disabilities coming in I don't see why we wouldn't I'm not sure honestly he has actually specifically come up yet so that's something we would just decide on a case by case basis but we want to be as inclusive as possible so you know it would partially be up to the instructor too as to what the activity is Would they live an old lady like me do team tech ventures? My suggestion would be be a volunteer for it because we're always looking for volunteers and I don't get you in the dark so My question is about how far in advance because I'm sitting here thinking there's so many things that you do that I would love to have the kids from my community introduced to that I am never going to be able to do at that level at my library in Tecada So if I were to plan like with a couple of my parent volunteers to get a couple of bands together how far in advance would we need to schedule to have say maybe like an hour long tour of the facility and then let the kids hang out for another hour and kind of go their own way there's a form on the website there's a tour request okay and under that there is kind of so there's just I want a tour and then there's kind of I want a tour with an activity and it's all in the same form okay I would say at least a couple of weeks at this point but kind of all of those details under it's under one of the tabs across the top I don't know which one but yeah we do do things like that so yeah I would just fill out the read all the details fill out the form and then staff will get back to you in a day or two to try to get that schedule to work with you to the best of our ability and is it better to kind of keep your group like should I aim it towards like my team book club and advisory kind of keep it like a team or can we kind of mix up a group or is it better to keep it like an age group yeah I'm not the exact person to ask on that particular question but my gut reaction is yeah if you can kind of group with my age we can then better get an activity to that age group without completely boring the older ones or using the older ones okay and yeah I think one for a couple more last question who are your private funders I have absolutely no idea I can honestly say that there are some very generous folks with available funds in the Omaha area you know and I could not thank them enough I know I have met some of our board members who I believe probably were also donors but that is not I don't have a list even if I did I'm not sure I could share that with you good question thank you Michael we're going to take a short break


Bill France, president of NASCAR, please make your welcome, if you would please Mr. Bill France. Thank you very much. Thank you very much Tammy. And this is a great day. At this time I'm very fortunate on behalf of motorsports to have one of the great days that anybody in motorsports could ever have and as a citizen of Daytona Beach to have the honor that I have today and that's to introduce our Grand Marshal, the president of the United States, Mr. Ronald Reagan who will be escorted by the winner of the race today, Mr. Richard Petty. Here they are, two champions. Welcome to NASCAR in Daytona Beach. Congratulations Richard. Thank you all very much. This has been a fantastic fourth of July and I've enjoyed certainly everything that I've seen since I've been here and with the skill and the daring that we witnessed out there and the pursuit of excellence that those drivers, and I mean all of them that are here, made stock car racing a major American sport and I know that each of them probably is proud and has every right to be and we're proud of them. I want to take a special word to say a special word about Bill France, senior. Now Bill France, junior, yes and I know what he's done but I think that I guess it was Bill senior that got things really started and then I've heard since I been here that he's the grand old man of stock car racing. Now he's on, where did they get this old man stuff? He's only 74. I tell you the way I read old is old is 15 years from where you are now. Seriously to Bill senior and Bill junior they've accomplished so much and they've added so much pepper to the American scene. I think I can understand why stock car racing is so popular. Americans have always cherished mobility and we greatly admire innovation and by combining man and machine stock car racing brings out the both the best of both of these American impulses. I appreciate all the work that goes into those precision machines also because it makes you realize that the race is one in the garage as well as on the track. So congratulations to all of those fine those workers out there that were keeping those competing cars out on the track. Now Richard Petty congratulations to all the others for a demonstration of skill and courage. This race puts the driver to the test. You got to keep cool under great pressure. I was told that when I was up there watching it keeping cool sitting so close to a hot engine isn't easy as I found out when Richard Petty came up and I met him. I thought he'd fallen in some place on the way. You need intense concentration and stamina and it's amazing to see them out there bumper to bumper at 200 miles an hour. We've all done a little bumper to bumper driving. I know you have to if you live in Los Angeles with the freeways but you're not going quite that fast. So Richard Petty your victory is something for which you and those who work with you can rightfully be proud. I know how you all feel too because I'm in a little race myself this year but to be a little serious today we're celebrating our country's independence and freedom. Our founding fathers gave us a wonderful gift two hundred and eight years ago a free country a country where no one need live in fear and where everyone can speak and pray and live as he or she sees fit. As we commemorate our country's birth and its freedom I hope we can take a little while today to breathe a little prayer of thanks for the great blessings that we enjoy in America. I'm certain that if Jefferson and Adams and Washington were here with us today they'd be sharing in the festivities and if Patrick Henry were here from what I've read about him he'd have been out on the track with one of the cars. Our founding fathers were kind of gutsy and we'd better not forget that. These patriots and all the others rich and poor of every race and religion who worked and struggled and sometimes fought and died for our freedom are with us in spirit today and I again I just want to thank you all for letting me spend these few minutes with you and God bless you and God bless America. Thank you very much. Now ladies and gentlemen Richard Petty. Okay I'm gonna promise no spaces for me okay. I want our last year's champion Bobby Allison he and I have something present to the president. Bobby. Mr. President we'd like to present you this flag that's that's indication of our competition here today signed by all the competitors and it means a lot to us and we hope it'll mean a lot to you. Thanks for being here with us. Mr. President we're gonna show you a race car what one of really looks like close right here on the left and this it's a great day thank you very much. Something warm to come to when nights are cold and warm. How do you follow that?


Thanks Travis. All right, so make sure you can hear me here. All right, so Welcome. Thank you for showing interest in this topic I know relaunch is natural reoccurrence in life as they happen hopefully not for a long time periods of time, but they happen if you're a consultant or on the agency side or a developer you're probably doing them all the time and Often as an SEO It hurts me when I find out that it got skipped or ignored or At the last second like five minutes before launch somebody says hey, we're getting ready to launch this Hey, do you need to do something? All right, so so we're gonna help you with planning today as Travis said this will be This can serve as a checklist. It's in slide format. I've got a search engine journal article that goes through this in more of a linear written format as well and We'll just we'll run with it So I'll try to go through it pretty quickly quickly enough to leave time for Q&A as a group If there's anything I lost you on or that was really interesting or you have something very specific to what you're going through Catch me afterwards. I'll hang out on the side to to talk to you individually or we can Talking the community lounge as well. All right, so real quick. That's my family. That's why I get no sleep I'll try to keep my energy level up here. At least I'm not right after lunch a little bit about me Been here in Kansas City for my entire career proud of that and Voltage we're digital agency in the river market founded in 05 We have our focus on three key areas there. All right, so humor me for a moment before I get into Aspects of SEO Because I work with developers in my office designers every day I know HTML from the early days before WordPress and And doing everything by hand Which was a more painful era to do SEO in especially Some ways it might have been a little bit easier too because that was before content marketing emerged so much and so I could Do SEO and a silo and didn't need other people But humor me here. I'd never do this. I think it's you know Cheesy sometimes I'm not gonna make everybody stand up or anything But what I do want to know is a little bit about everyone here and backgrounds So I could tailor this as we go and make this more productive for both of us So how many people are familiar? Where would you put yourself if you put yourself as? Beginner or not very well-versed in SEO. Let me know that I'm not gonna shame you and people don't look around Everybody can close their eyes All right, so I've got a handful in that camp Who would say that they're really proficient in SEO and so they're gonna know every acronym I'm gonna bring up maybe or most of them use the tools.  That's a bullet point in here That's talking about a concept or a tool or an acronym So that will be helpful watch my Twitter over the next week for it Because I'll post that as well as a follow-up with with my slide slides. Excuse me So that way I'll it'll just be links to resources on Google and a lot of different article sites where you can go dig in deep on what a canonical tag is or Learn some of the best practices on a robots.txt file because what I'm more focused on is giving you this Phased approach with a checklist that you can work through so that way if you're not responsible for SEO You can check in with your SEO person or if you are the person that's gonna be responsible for SEO Even though it's not your role You can talk to your developers or if you are the developer you can figure out that dynamic So within your team or within yourself if you wear all those hats you can Pause and make sure everything's in order here So I will give you one. I have one background slide on SEO just so you see my philosophy and how I organize things It's pretty common Tyler here would probably maybe categorize things differently. He's welcome to challenge me And tell some jokes maybe too. He's he's a great speaker. You should hear him tomorrow But indexing technical these are what like my three tried and true pillars of SEO Indexing and technical are kind of separate topics, but I put them together Indexing is making sure Google and Bing and any other crawler from a search engine can see your content see your site See all of it so you can get credit for it later The technical part there are some aspects of that. They're just the best practices You do them you troubleshoot them if you have to to make sure that You're promoting your content your site so the search engines can see it so in most cases. It's really easy WordPress makes it easy Sometimes you may have to do some troubleshooting there. Then you have your on-page phase So this is the stuff that builds content relevance or relevance for your content To make sure that the search engines understand that you're an expert on this subject matter on these topics So these are all the factors like Your URL your body copy your image alt text and a lot of your semantic coding within the site So this is me talking about me Essentially, it's my content. I'm talking about myself to the search engines Then you have the external influences or off-page factors that some people call them. Those are things like who links to who Some signals from social media potentially debatable Google debates them, but there's correlation data that states Higher levels and engagement social equal equal better rate rankings. So we run with it There are also some other things like unlinked brand mentions that now because some some of the external factors get spanned But basically this is your authority category So you've got relevance and on-page of saying what I'm about and presenting that picture Just like you do to your users to the search engines and then the authority side of it is I could come up with the best Kansas City plumbing company website overnight Maybe not overnight, but I could write awesome content put it all out there Google's not going to know unless it looks at the external factors to see who links to me I'm not going to have a link from the International Association of plumbers or from review sites and other credible sources To validate that I really am who I say I am so those are the external factors that weigh in your favor So all of these can be impacted Positively negatively neutral neutral is that best what you want to do in a relaunch You don't want to harm yourself at the very least even if you're not doing the relaunch or the or the new site To help SEO even if it's based on UX or business conditions or reasons Those are things you want to think about all right The end of my background side the only background slide all right three phases. There's before migration. There's at launch and then there's post launch My wife is a scientist and obsessed with space and NASA So this one's dedicated to her with some space themed references, so hopefully you're ready to buckle up and Your seatbelt works because that's where we're going here So first off take a step back goals and project plan. There's probably a good reason why you're relaunching You're not putting yourself through this just for fun Unless you're a designer and you like to read redesign things every week And then relaunch them But business use cases, so there's a probably a business reason behind this so like everything you should start with goals You're probably making some UX improvements along the way You're probably also trying to accomplish the marketing initiatives whether those are Around content around structure around your offerings what you're doing And hopefully there's SEO improvements worked into that as well. Maybe you're on an older platform Hopefully all these things work together From there now it gets hairy because now we're looking at content and information architecture this is your opportunity if you're changing your information architecture are essentially your site map and The structure of your content on the site The more that you're doing in this the more risk you're introducing I'm not telling you not to do this because I love this is the time to do it if you're investing the time but don't ignore The fact that when you move pages around or have different pages and make pages you become obsolete That you just know that you're introducing another variable that you have to account for in SEO when you launch But good, you know practices in SEO are you know just like UX. I'm now aligning my content Hopefully around how people search and what they're looking for so again This is an opportunity where you can use silos of content kind of an outdated term I still use it because I I can't get away from it But if you're building your content into services into products into categories or whatever that response needs to be for a conversion That's where you want to map those keywords to content. So SEO best practices would be You know my homepage needs a rank for the most generic aspect of what I do and then my category or service page Needs a rank for that service and if I have sub pages under that that's where we get more granular So when your site map go from general to specific in terms of content naturally is the way you're probably going to design it anyway and architect it But think about that. So know where your keyword focuses are If you're not really focused on SEO to begin with this is a good time to think about that So if you got things you have things out of whack where you want to try to rank for cars And your car dealership on a page. That's five levels deep. Maybe you should think about flipping your your side upside down Canonicals, this is one of those words where I'm not going to go too deep into it But these are if you have multiple pages on your site to have 80% you know 20 or more than 20% matching text with another page You may have the red Mustang convertible page and the blue Mustang convertible page The only thing that's different is the name of the color or the or the color in there For a legit reason, you know, you have duplicate content or you have a product Page that appears in five different categories That's another legit reason to have duplicate content the search engine struggle with duplicate content They don't like it because they don't want to show five of your pages that are almost nearly identical in the search results They want to show one or two and show some others Same thing with if you sell a product That you're using the manufacturer's description and 15 other people saw that same product You're going to have against other domains and other sites duplicate content as well This is something you need to think about so if you're in e-commerce or if you know you have duplicate content This is a strategy you'll want to think about before launch as well, especially if you're introducing new content Compared to what your old site architecture had Even if your site map doesn't change at all Think about if you're moving to a different technology You may be changing URLs which even if it's a one-to-one match on your site map your URLs may be changing it may be going from dot PHP to just the directory extension and be defaulted or Even if in WordPress if you're you know, what's nice is if you're in WordPress and you're just introducing a new theme Your URLs probably aren't changing if you're not doing anything related to site map at the same time So that's a nice advantage of WordPress compared to some not so nice Even open-source systems All right, that's a big one and we'll talk about some of the impacts in a minute on Page so this is the more traditional stuff. This is what you're probably thinking about or somebody's thinking about Probably top of mind the first thing somebody's gonna say meta tags But all of these things work together. There's no one Magical element that's gonna guarantee rankings all these working together is That beautiful picture of okay, we use these we build context. We use the same phrasing and and Terminology throughout Every one of these from the URL to the titles the title tag to meta description tag headings body copy image alt text All of these are painting the picture what you're about and can strengthen what you're doing So don't ignore these before launch, especially if you don't have a plug-in or don't have something coded That will semantically complete these for you and even if it auto populates these based on whatever the file name you Uploaded is your file names might not be great because you may have it may just be image one two three dot jpeg Straight off of your camera or your computer or whatever it might be So take advantage of the opportunities you have to go page by page or even file by file or if you can do something Dynamically and not have to go touch every file every tag Think about that because that's better than again having it be blank Some of the worst things you can do are leave it up to Google to guess or populate those for you by leaving a meta description blank Well, it's not going to help you by itself in rankings it can hurt you because you're leaving out a key piece of information that Google cares about and For example, I mean your title tag well-written title tag and a well-written meta description Will be used as the blue link and the two or three lines of text under that in the search results page So that's how much emphasis Google has on it because it goes beyond just search That's a UX thing too. So if it's poorly written or doesn't exist and Google decides to pull something from your site I've seen it pull footer links and information and it strips out the links. And so you're like copyright 2014 As like the meta description, it's going to hurt your click-through rate too for people coming from Google through to your site Because they're not seeing a helpful cue of what they what what to click through to All right redirects Two slides on that still why redirects are critical if you hear no other word today here redirects Because this is if if no other factors play into this This is the one in the indexing and technical This is where you stop being found and you disappear and you watch your work You know, I'll have somebody come to me. I'll see their analytics show that their organic traffic dropped to almost nothing Only maybe brand queries or brand name or company name because they didn't do any redirects So that's a hostile thing for it from an SEO perspective. It also is from a UX perspective So if I didn't do any redirects and all my URLs changed now Anybody who sees a link on another site and clicks on is going to get a 404 How many 404s are people going to get before they give up on me even if they know I exist and I'm a legit brand so redirects transcend everything and Are the one thing that if somebody came to me five minutes before we're launching and I could do nothing else I would find a way to pause long enough to plan out the redirects now if you have 10,000 pages on your site It's going to take more than five minutes if you have 10 pages on your site I could do it in five minutes So this is where you want to get people to pause if you're not responsible for launching it If you're not the developer just slow the process down for a moment because it's better to delay Than to launch without redirects So in addition to UX the 404 is an indexing link value to so getting deeper into that external Touches on the external factor as well So people who link to link to you are Passing link value or link juice through to you votes their votes or they're giving you authority status Based on them linking to you. So now if that's a 404 Google forgets about that too So you lose that so this is a like a cascading thing if you don't do redirects. I saw a question over here Yeah, we're good. Yeah, we're gonna I'm gonna show you how I plan it But definitely even if it was like a you know dot net all these URLs are dot net you still can drop those in your HTXS So that's the safest most permanent place to put it But WordPress has its own redirection plugins as well. There's a plethora of them I know my team keeps changing them because some of them are not very lightweight and impact performance of the site overall even though they're not public-facing but that's an excellent question of Doing it so even if it's a you know dot net or some other foreign crazy Parameterized URL that wasn't even a that hasn't even been a page in 10 years But Google won't forget about it or it was a really you know It was linked from the New York Times So you want to maintain that link value and redirect it into your new site and you can do that within WordPress or At the server level in Apache So how so first this could be time-consuming as I mentioned You want to call the existing site the easiest way to do this is not do it after launch It takes 10 times as much time if you wait till after launch You have to go find an old copy of the site restore a backup somewhere on hosting You probably don't even have if you change technologies and went from dot net to to to lamp stack or if Or or just you have to go through external tools like cert Google search console or other places to hunt down What old URLs Google knew about and you're not going to give them all so I recommend I love screaming frog. It's like a 99 pounds per year Which is 150 140 bucks For your license there are other tools like deep crawl and there are some new ones like I can't remember the new one I just just tested a few weeks ago. So Crawling tools they'll let you do I mean they're awesome because they'll go grab everything From the site and the end screaming frog will go pretty deep. You can customize the settings and tell it how many levels deep It will pull down everything all the meta information as well. It'll pull down canonicals and all kinds of Server statuses and if they're redirects in place already, it'll give you all that information You can bring it into a spreadsheet you go old school and take it to Excel You can put in a Google sheet. It could create pivot tables do whatever you want with it but essentially You need to get that information and even it's going to find a lot of URLs They like we haven't used that in years or there are a whole bunch of vanity like root level, you know pages that were for like a one-day promotion And so you can decide what value there is and redirecting them versus letting them 404 But I recommend if you have the time figure out how to redirect everything you can so you're going to take in that spreadsheet What I do as a non developer is take my column of Old-site URLs and have a column right next to it of what I'm mapping it to and hand that off and that way it can be you know a query can be run to get it into ht access or It can be copied and paste or uploaded through a text file maybe to depending on the plug in you're using as well for redirection You can with some nuances to this if pages or sections are going away entirely You can redirect to the next level up So if you have a product category, we're not even selling that product anymore redirect to the most relevant page Google and Bing will tell you something different. They'll be like no 404 that 404 is a good thing because it means we should take it out of our index I'm sitting in the room with Google and being saying that to a bunch of SEOs It's comical because everybody looks at each other and they're like no, we're not going to do that We've worked hard to get the credibility that we have and authority status with our site So and it's not spelled out I'm not telling you about any like black hat areas here. I mean this is a common practice. So figure out where to redirect Even if it's a home page Google will sort it out over time and if you shouldn't get credit for that content or those links anymore They'll drop that off Off on their end, you don't have to worry about it. So you can have Many to one as well So you can have ten pages redirecting to the same page on the new site if you're reducing content or it's obsolete as well All right, so here's an example of that spreadsheet might be a little bit hard to see you can grab it in the slides I'll be happy to actually probably send you a file like this if you want or I think this is this one was in Excel versus a Google sheet, but essentially here's my old URLs Here's my new site URL and I've even used one master spreadsheet to even plan out what my new title and meta description is So I have one just giant sheet as I'm doing everything in it So my team can collaborate off of it and copy paste or make sure that we're not missing any important pages for SEO All right, that's the pre-launch checklist Now we're gonna launch And this is SpaceX it didn't blow up This was successful So at launch there's just one slide here and With the profit the most critical part of this, especially if you're responsible for SEO and you're not the developer Is know when they're gonna launch the site and what their checklist is and if you are the developer make sure they SEO Aspects of the are incorporated in your launch checklist You probably have your tried and true QA launch checklist you should and you know what you're going through to launch the site So ensure that everybody is on the same page if it's not just you as the one person responsible for everything and Well clients may love to have you launch it at like two in the morning on like, you know a Sunday All right, make sure your whole team's awake and they know what's going on So we don't get to like 10 a.m. On Monday and embrace freaking out because we make a thousand dollars You know every ten minutes on our e-commerce site and the e-commerce sites down or nobody can get to it Because we're not in Google anymore or everything that was in Google is now going to a 404 so Just make sure you've got your timing lined out and you have your post Launch action plan ready to go because you're gonna want to jump into it. So speaking of post launch This is often what we feel like when we launch like cool. We should celebrate. I Don't know what to do. We just launched it. I don't is there something is there a next step here It's that awkward moment where it's like oh Oh, there's it there's the candy in this case the cameras on I should grab this 1970 era microphone and talk to somebody But but but this totally translates We work so hard to get this thing launched and we get it launched And hopefully it's not late on a Friday afternoon where everybody's checking out Or hopefully it it's not this reaction where everybody's now asleep because we've stayed up and pulled all-nighters to hit a deadline And this is awesome. How awkward it is to sleep in space But but hopefully you know those one of those two things is like we're excited we're getting we're ready to move on with Our day move on to the next thing No, we're not we need to go through our post launch Checklist and so okay, we're coming right back to redirects the site went live Now we need to come back and validate proper implementation. So I'm not saying you need to go check every redirect But you have your spreadsheet Spot check start clicking on some of the links or copy and paste them in your browser from your From your your spreadsheet that you had before of the old site links and make sure they're really going to the pages You mapped out and it's not that I don't have any trust in developers Love developers, but at the same time things go weird and things don't go from dev to live Like you thought they might have or from the staging site up. So just make sure they're implemented properly also Redirect check calm isn't even really a tool It's just a page that you go and plug in your URL and for non developers like me To quickly tell me the server code and what's happening there You want to make sure it's a 301 redirect and not a 302 even though Google says they treat 302 is like 301's now I still don't trust it enough. There's no reason to not have it just be a 301 Which is page permanently moved which is their acceptable way of Transferring all the credibility from the old page to the new page at least in a short term It's up to you to make sure that content is as strong and lines up with with what What you had in terms of credibility previously So just go check some of these make sure they're they're redirecting and that you're in good shape there So the dev to live audit I mentioned sometimes things don't get pushed up a database gets missed the table gets missed a Plug-in gets missed Especially if you're operating a totally separate staging site, you know Did everything get pushed over or if you're just doing a theme update? Maybe you added some new functionality or you're going to turn it on at launch and maybe You CSS uploaded but nothing, you know some of your SEO features didn't so just run through this Especially if they're dynamic features if you got thousands of pages and you're not writing custom Meta descriptions or titles for every single one you have formulas everywhere where it's product name plus Model number plus name of my website Make sure those are working because those could look really silly if they still have the slugs in there and you'll have a million duplicate Slug-based or template based Tags so I also make sure you're on page optimization if you went to all that work to write the tags and put them in Especially if you did it by hand in WordPress through Yoast or something like that make sure those went live as well Most of the time I don't ever catch anything here But there are occasions where you want to know this now and not a month from now Because if everything else was done properly, but a couple things didn't go live Even though your site might get indexed and your redirects were great some of your SEO benefits And on-page things might not have carried through All right, so this is the newer more fun category That's sarcasm. This is the new thing that SEOs have to worry about You know, we're in mobile getting to essentially right now The first one was a few years ago. Everybody had to be mobile friendly Everybody jumped thankfully Thankfully we're mostly on the responsive bandwagon and not adaptive and five other types of technologies and Google wouldn't say anything about it Again like Jim before me spoke about, you know, most of the time good or bad if Google says it That's what we end up doing so Whatever but page speed Page speed so this has been important for a few years. It was a tiebreaker factor It wasn't like an algorithm variable that was going to give you a huge boost But Google is now in addition to wanting things to be mobile friendly is is now Shifting to a mobile first index so they're only going to index the entire index of Google and ranking system is going to be Based on the mobile version of your website So if you haven't thought about that think about this weekend You have you have a week or three I actually have crossed maybe 200 websites That I have access to through Search Console at the first notification yesterday that one of ours went live on mobile friendly Which is nice that they're notifying us because they don't always have to do that and they choose not to a lot of the time So they've got a lot of different tools or a couple different places you can get to the mobile There's a mobile friendly test which has been around for a few years now They have the mobile speed test as well and it's really fascinating like if you're an e-commerce site or know the value of a conversion It'll show you where you are and you can take the slider and move it down by tenths of a second And I'll tell you how much if you plug in a couple Inputs of how much money you make in certain time stamps or what the average order is It will use some factors that they know on click-through rate and bounce rate and all that to tell you how much money in a year Additional revenue you'll make by speeding up your site. I Mean it just started so we'll have to trust it and see if their data is correct in a year, but That that's going to be whatever it renders to their Google bot that is looking at mobile So it's going to be responsive typically or adaptive will still work as well So it's whatever viewpoint it can see so if the user experience is not good on a device iPad gets into the gray area there because things could render more like desktop versus more like a phone But they're going to evaluate you based on Closer to a phone because because they're looking at they're looking at spacing between buttons and size of elements Exclusively to make sure everything is optimized there quote-unquote That's an excellent question. Go run that mobile friendly test before you even start worrying about speed the speed test All right, so now indexing and we're back to indexing redirects could have destroyed you on indexing But you've already taken care of those and validated those but now that you're everything's clean. You're ready to Tell Google hey, we've moved. We've updated. Hopefully you're doing this all within kind of a day of Launch and you're not spreading all these steps out over a week But as quickly as you can validate everything you'll want to upload or submit Validate your XML sitemaps so XML sitemaps Hopefully you don't have a static one that you have to generate through a generator if you're in WordPress Yoast and many other tools Will dynamically generate it so every time you create a new page on your site It will the site will automatically add it to the XML sitemap This is a file that humans don't look at unless you're an SEO and care about it But it's like the index page for the search engine anytime they come to visit your site They look at your XML sitemap. Are there any new URLs that I need to crawl? This is the modern version of submitting your URLs to Google, you know 10 15 years ago This is what they look for you want to make sure that in that file you don't have any 404s You don't want to have any 301 redirects in it You want to have the destination URLs in it again if you're using the plugins and technology They'll take care of a lot of this for you still test it before you submit it to Google And you want to make sure it's the canonical URL the final URL or the one you prefer if you have five versions of the Practically the same page that live on five different URLs So when you feel like it's in good shape You want to submit it to Google through your Google search console to Bing through Bing webmaster tools what you want to be Careful about though and again the reason why you want to spend five minutes and go click on some of the URLs in it And make sure they're all legit is that The last number I heard from Google was 10% but Bing said a few years ago If you're what your site map has more than 1% of error whether it's 404s redirects issues in the site map They stopped trusting it so now you lose access to a really good signal when I have a new page and it goes in there If they're not looking at my site map It's harder for that me to get them to come back sooner to see my new content Especially if it's time-sensitive or I don't want to wait 45 days for it to get into the index And then monitoring so now we're launched we've taken care of all these steps But we want to watch this thing probably daily at a minimum Probably not our or by the minute, but at least daily stay on this make sure your indexing is still happening You use Google search console and Bing webmaster tools for this They'll give you information about how many pages they've indexed you can compare that to how many pages You know you have on the site if you've had Google search console set up Long enough prior to launching you can see how that compares to your old site and what it was It'll tell you it'll tell you as another Tool about 404s that finds HTML issues duplicate tags all that stuff so monitor that daily Go add more redirects if you miss stuff or if Google knows about some URL that nobody else knows about which is weird You know I know how would whatever just go take care of that Obviously you'll watch traffic, but you don't want to wait till you see the traffic dip You want to see these things first? Yeah, so if you so how long should you monitor after you launch so I would launch day I would watch it daily for a week if I have no issues If I'm not seeing any errors and having to go fix them every day when Google finds more as it continues to index I would say then you maybe you could go to weekly your For 90 days need to be paying attention at least weekly taking a look Because that's the longest length of a spider cycle for Google to come back and revisit content Might be up to 120 sometimes, but it's gotten so much faster. I would I would say you're gonna see the bulk of it in the first 10 days now Thankfully Google doesn't talk about it since they talked about caffeine. They're faster indexing engine a few years ago But I keep seeing it get into a shorter window Thankfully Yeah, so you can mark items one at a time as fixed in search console and it's painful Most of the time that's what you have to do if you Didn't put in a redirects and now you're seeing the 404s after the fact and you couldn't get that old site map and Google Only show you like a thousand of them a day and you had to fix those wait for the next thousand the next day At a client where for 23 days we had to watch for the next thousand and address them and spend three hours a day For 23 days Weekends included because we want to keep that window as short as we could and they were a large e-commerce site that Does $150,000 a day Would have been very important. It would have been very I mean they're on magento. So we can talk about that as a different issue They're on a wordpress or WooCommerce or anything else. So But yeah, excellent question. It really depends on how many issues you're seeing if everything's pretty clean small Site no issues. You go to a week. You could go to a month But just don't ignore it because there are hidden issues and things that you won't necessarily notice until you'll get trailing indicators like traffic Which are painful to see because traffic equals revenue and now you're a week or two or three out and you're like You could have in that window taken it fixed it proactively All right, so I'm wrapping up here. You're ongoing SEO and man. I don't know why I could stare at this for like hours So like gratifying for whatever reason But now we're in ongoing SEO. So you might have started just thinking about SEO or thought about what you had to do as a bare minimum Or maybe thought about strategically in your launch process It's not set it and forget it. So I'd be remiss if I Acted like it was one time I mean and I'm not just saying that because I'm an agency and we love the retainer model and getting you on the hook for a Long time. That's not it. It's truly built around the fact that So many of these things take rinse and repeat optimization practices and you're rolling out new content So in your bigger stack or mix of digital marketing You're probably generating content for your blog or for, you know, every new evergreen content or whatever it might be To push on social. Well, you can optimize that as well It should be optimized and should play into the fact of more is typically better for SEO as well in terms of content If it's good content and so and you're not gonna hit the home run the first time So you're gonna find that yeah, I optimize this page for this specific keyword and now I'm ranked, you know in the 30s Now, maybe I should think about adding five more pages because that's what everybody else has or its long form is being ranked Better than short form So it's an iterative process that I like to take in a more agile Fashion than to try to get it all right and work for six months to have this perfect strategy and roll it out And then some things were great. Some things weren't great It's kind of neutral overall because it needs to needs to evolve So keys to success here. We all want this experience at the end of the day Not because of the trauma that they went through in Apollo 13 to get there. I want to clarify that point I'm not making light of this, but The keys to success so be flexible working with content UX dev IT other stakeholders. I mean don't think about hosting till the very end And then realize you came and get to the HT access file now. You've got to do things the hard way Or you can't do do something like that Think about all this in advance have conversations if you're more again if it's more than just you controlling the whole process redirects are critical of nothing else do that and When you're in that awkward celebratory moment after you you launched Don't forget to get into the post launch checklist as well and Validation and so then ultimately again, it's not a one-time thing So have a plan after that to transition when you're done monitoring and validating. What's my next step with SEO? Let's incorporate that this into our ongoing marketing activities, so I've got a few articles one one especially in that mapping optimizing Optimizing a you know site for multiple keywords not trying to put all your focus on the home page I've got an article on that as well as to to on the topic of relaunch So that's why this is obviously an important topic for me if you hit up my author page There are there a few resources there, so With that being said we've got I've got some time for questions got 10 minutes so redirects will be a little bit more complicated because you're going from something else to WordPress and Migration and relaunch and all those are in the same boat to me. They'll kind of follow the same process So even if you're not changing you're just going even if you're not changing the look and feel at all Nothing's changing for a user Check those URLs especially if content nothing else is changing, but you're just changing platforms You're coming into WordPress or any or going out of WordPress Nobody in this room is but if that that were the case check your URLs because they may not match up exactly I'm sorry I Excellent questions and things you're considering Alyssa So she's got a client who is who has a separate sub domain with content on it Trying to figure out if they should migrate that in with the brand new site that's launching as well So I'm big on controlling variables So first off I would not do those at the same time because if it's a cluster You're not going to know what did it or or traffic wise you can have some stability and keep it and make sure you get through All the issues and then you can cleanly Know where it's going to go in the architecture and you can cleanly migrate in later Unless there's a business reason where this needs to happen now or branding issue or something like that where it's going to Look obsolete or or it's going to cost you twice as much to keep hosting things separately And you need to do that now on the other on the flip side of it of the decision of whether we should migrate in or not actually just wrote a proposal for For a global company the other day that's just going to audit that fact alone because because the site that the That's like this much of their business in terms of revenue. They want to migrate into the parent company site but the parent but the parent company site SEO Sucks and they have no so it's like do we want to take something that's ranking really well and doing really well and move It in to get the business hierarchy right and the brand hierarchy, right? So we're evaluating that and looking at all options and looking at a lot of extra You know factors like their you know domain rank and page rank in some of the Moz scoring We're looking at link value all those factors to see what the risks are of moving in so that's a very individual decision Yeah Yeah, so voice search and schema markup So schema markup was a wait and see type of thing when it first rolled out and oh nine or twenty ten for me Are we getting wide adoption? Wait and see because it's a lot of work to put something in your site that we don't that's not a ranking factor May or may not help you a lot of industries didn't like it because now you're putting extra code in your pages So Google can take your information and keep people on Google and serve it up there So that was kind of the backlash they got early on but some of the correlation data much like social is the more Structured data markup you have in your site the better your rankings are even though the search engines will scream all day long that we Don't use as a ranking signal So it's a best practice if the investments worth it, especially if you're way down on your checklist of optimization and you can invest that If you have code that can dynamically plug it in great. There's some plugins that are okay some that aren't It is it's context and so that's a really critical piece of it The other part of that voice search This is something that's talked about constantly and Tyler you probably talk about voice search as well You've presented on it and so what's interesting for me. I I work with a handful of National or international brands. I would say that 80% of my clients are in Kansas City and their SMB's so we're not in an Enterprise space where I've got coca-cola or somebody and we can go throw a whole bunch of money into you create a chatbot or AI or whatever it might be and capitalized on voice search It's not usable for me yet and this is so frustrating I have friends who are you know on the Simpo board with me globally who are Bing ads evangelists You know high up at Google everywhere else and they're giving all these talks around the country about voice search And what what's coming and they have been for three years But my response is until you give me search query data of how people are searching Like I can get for tech for for searches people type. I can't change my behavior I'm I shouldn't ignore it. I'm not ignoring it, but at the same time I'm guessing in some areas about my personas and how what their behavior is or I have to look at external cues I can't look at and react and optimize on my site based on what's really happening so until they start showing me the 30-word question that somebody asked Alexa or Cortana or Siri I can't really read and react and optimize through that process So I'm not ignoring it, but you know definitely taking care of the best practices like schema and things like that that will help some But until I have a really good use case for it. It's not part of my day to day yet So I might sound like a dinosaur to some people from bigger agencies and companies in this room who have their own chatbot, but I don't yet Some reason I heard this is another one of these signals Google whoops Yeah, I was just gonna say that seems to me like Yes, so I had a client who came to me was losing 30% organic traffic consistently every month for the past six months and the first thing I found Probably the most there are a few things that are causing it, but the most Frustrating one is that they went to HTTPS Back six months ago and did not configure redirects from every version of the HTTP HTTP www so you've got those four by default now versions Make sure they all redirect into your primary one whether it's with WWW or without it on the HTTPS and make sure they're all doing 301 redirects Because what I found was one of two of them were mirroring the ones that didn't have the s we're mirroring the site One of them was doing a 302. So I was like none of these are doing the right thing And it's not gonna kill you Google can figure out how to work around that But it's not helping you either. And so you're just creating more confusion And not helping yourself and negating some of what you might get by the tiebreaker of having HTTPS I've got two more minutes. So I'm maybe one more question if anybody's got one Yeah, so that's that's Overlooked redirects probably get missed and that more so than they do the website launch process because you're Thinking about a lot of factors for launch if you're like, it's just an IT thing Which is a hosting thing. Let's just go or flywheel gives you an you know SSL for free like many of them do and they're gonna Make sure you understand what WordPress is gonna do for you Or what your host is doing or what you're doing to make sure that all of those are gonna 301 to that one primary version Because that's a case where you're not changing URLs Like on a page-by-page basis, but you're globally changing everything and so it it should take five minutes To do it right But if it's done wrong in those same five minutes and you don't validate it You don't go check it in like redirect check calm check a few of your your homepage and a couple of interior pages to see Make sure they're truly doing a 301 Then yeah, that's a that's like an iceberg type of danger Yeah, redirect check calm you go there and it's got one box It says do a trace or whatever you put your URL in there and then you hit trace And it'll spit out the server heading or the server codes tell you exactly what happens, which is nice because you may have Five redirects and you don't realize them realize it just by putting in your browser. So I'm out of time I appreciate the awesome questions though. This is fun And if you have any more I didn't get answers something pops up catch me Here to the side or afterwards. Thanks