So, when it comes to website development strategy, there are three main, I would say, sectors or parts that I like to think about when it comes to building a website. Because website development is just a smaller part of a bigger game plan, which is marketing to just be clear. A lot of times, we can get too much into the weeds to see the forest, and what I really want to show is more of a forest view, kind of forest dump it in a way, and just run for it and go for it to just give everybody a bigger picture of things. So if those of you all see some of this and you're like, hey, I have deeper questions about it, like I said, we can answer some of those later on. But for this presentation, I really want to stick to a lot of the upper level topics when it comes to website development and strategy. So the first one we're going to start off with is business. And within business, or within your business, no matter what kind of business that you do have, it could be a service-based business, it could be a plumbing business, it could be a bakery, it could be a nonprofit, it could be a hair salon, it could be a medical practice. There's always going to be something that we have in common when it comes to our businesses, when it comes to our aspirations. One of the biggest things that we want to start off with is our business. This always ties into your business, because if your website is not meeting your goal, whether it's WordPress or anything else, it really doesn't matter what that website is supposed to be doing, because your goal is supposed to be the achievement that you are creating for yourself and for others. What goals are they supposed to be reaching? Audience is the same thing. So who is your website supposed to be talking to? Who is your website for? Who is your website? What are the reasons why they would even come to your website? And then the third part, when it comes to your business, is going to be your competitors. So the reason why I have that on here is because a lot of times people forget you don't really need to reinvent the wheel. I think people undermine their competitors a lot in the industry, or in their industry. I hear often, especially because I come from a marketing background and having talking to clients, I hear a lot of times, we don't have competitors, or we have the newest things, and I have to slowly show them, we all have competitors. And it's not a bad thing to have competitors. It's great to have competitors because the last thing you want to do is go into a niche or an industry or something where you have to educate completely everybody there to teach them what it is you're even offering, what it is you're even doing, that could be exhausting. And there's a lot of time and money that comes into that. So looking at competitors eliminates the whole reinventing the wheel, as they say in my opinion. And it also kind of gives you a leg up on having to think of all the ideas that you would have to come up with in order to create your product service or website. So these are the main three core components, I would say, underneath business when it comes to strategy, looking at the bigger picture, that we all need to have, no matter who you are, your goals, you need to know who your audience is and who your competitors are. That way you're not worried about reinventing the wheel. Are there any questions on this part real quick? That makes sense. Same thing in the chat, if you have any questions, feel free to put them in. All right, let me go to the next part. So let's start off with goals. So when it comes to goals and tying that to your website strategy, from a very simplistic standpoint, I believe that goals should be transactional. So if you're going to think about goals, I'm a fan of threes. When it comes to a website and I'm building out a website strategy for someone, I ask them, what are your three top goals for the website? I say, hey, make it something transactional. Make it something that has to do with money, monetary. An example would be we want to make $300,000 by the end of quarter three in 2023. That's something transactional. It's going to take you X amount of sales to get to that point. So that's why, or we want to get a profit margin of 20% by the fourth quarter of 2025. That's another goal you can have. We want to make $300 per customer from our subscription business. That's again transactional, something that you can measure. Right now you might only be making 100. So what are those things you need to do to get to 300 per customer? Maybe offer more products with a bundle. So that's why I say transactional is important because you do want to tie it to something that has to do with money in some sort of way. Or if it's not money, it could just be something numeric, some type of number, non-transactional. I think this is where a lot of us really get tied to when it comes to creating our goals. We think of something more based on our mission. And, okay, for example, Marquise, what would be something that you would say that would be more mission-based for one of the goals that you have for your business, for your nonprofit? That's not so money-oriented. And father engagement. So Marquise here, he has a nonprofit where he's helping fathers. And one of his goals is father engagement that is a non-transactional goal, right, that he wants to be able to accomplish. And we've talked about it ourselves on ways that we can measure that. That's not dealing with money, but we can do surveys. We can do other things where we can measure a goal of his. And again, it's not money-based. It's not transactional-based. But it is something that's important because we can use the website at the end of the day to have forms and surveys and collect this information to see, ask fathers, how is their engagement with their child and XYZ, different markers. So that is something that would be a non-transactional goal. And it kind of goes to my next point here, which is measurable. Sorry, let me go back real quick. It goes to my next point here, which is measurable. So we can measure every single aspect of a goal through different analytical tools, through tools that we can use, like Google Analytics, for example. And I'm going to actually show you all and everybody here how to set up or what Google Analytics looks like at the end of the presentation. I think that's very important because it's really easy to do. And Google just had an update and it made it easier. So that's why I just want to go over goals and why that's important for a website strategy. And this is just simple.  We've heard those terms before, but without getting too nerdy about it, I just think a good goal, just have one that's transactional, one that's non-transactional, and maybe another one that's either one of the other either or or in between.  The website is pointless.  I hate to be very extreme. But a website is pointless if it doesn't help you meet your goals. It is what it is. It's an over-glorified brochure. It's a vanity tool at that point. I just want to have a website, to have a website, to have a website. Just have a website. What it's supposed to do? I don't know. It's the website. Goals are important. The next one is audience. Again, we're in the business sector. So we just talked about goals, what we want for ourselves. You know, there's, I forgot what the saying is, but it had something to do with, you know, kind of thinking about yourself. You know, people care about themselves more than care about you. They start caring about you, you know, when you show you care about. And when it comes to your audience, that's very true. You have to really understand and drill down who it is that's actually coming to your website. You can have all the goals in the world, but if you're not helping other people meet their goals, then you're really doing yourself a disservice. Because, you know, one of your goals should be about helping others, getting others to where they need to be. And these are different aspects or criteria, I would say, that you just want to think about when it comes to your audience, the actual people coming to your website. Because if you're the only person going to your website, it's a problem there. You know, if your team is the only people going to your website, there's a problem there.  So the question is, who are they? You know, where do they live? That's when we're talking about demographics. You know, what are they driving? What is their marital status? What is their education? You know, these are things that you want to know. What type of interests do you have? Or do they have? Does your audience have? And this is more tied to if your business is more of what they call B to C, business to customer. If you are a B to B, a business to business, you're looking at thermographics like the age of the company, how many employees they have, what is their revenue share or market share? So those are just a few things that you want to look at when it comes to your audience. And then as I mentioned before, their goals, their interests, their challenges, their motivations, you know, what do they actually want to do? What do they want to accomplish? What's keeping them from reaching their goal? Rhonda, for you, Rhonda, right? What is one of your biggest, and I'm talking to Rhonda here in person, but I want you all to please put in the chat, what is your biggest challenge in keeping you from reaching your goal? So Rhonda, what is your biggest challenge right now keeping you from reaching your goal? We have several physical groups and we have files, systems with Facebook are getting worse and we don't want to lose all of our files, so we want to start that and then expand it in some ways that can happen to it as well. Let me repeat that just in case. So Facebook is the key here. You have a lot of Facebook files that you're looking to reorganize or get reorganized? Yes, because Facebook keeps making it harder to access and put things in the files. So Rhonda has issues with Facebook, aka Metta, I mean, don't we all? That could be a whole conversation we are right there, to be honest. She's had some issues with Facebook with some file issues and she really needs that. She needs to make a database that's accessible, so that's one of her challenges right now. And what would you say one of your goals? If you met that challenge, if you overcame it, what would that goal be that you accomplished? Well, I have a stable place to put our files and then to expand on that would probably be some other things that we're not able to do through Facebook, like some paid classes, things like that. Paid classes, paid average, okay, okay. So as Rhonda was stating, again going back to Metta, aka Facebook, again, if she could overcome her challenges, she would be able to meet her goals and she's motivated to do so because she wants to meet her goal and get more organized in order to start utilizing Facebook in other ways where right now she's kind of stuck on. So that ties into the journey in the path. Right now, for instance, Rhonda's journey in the path could be she started off with Googling something, how to do this or how to do that through Google, then she could have ended up going to clicking on a link and going to either a course or a blog page or something like that. Where you're looking at, now you're on the website. The next thing could be where Rhonda then goes and gives her email in exchange for the top 10 ways to organize or to help yourself do XYZ on Facebook and Rhonda gives her email, how we doing? And Rhonda gives her email in exchange for this PDF or this guide. So the reason why I'm saying it this way from Rhonda's perspective and I'm just kind of doing this on the fly so forgive me if it doesn't sound the most polished y'all. But the reason why I'm saying this is because I wanted everybody to be able to see that this is a journey in the path that everyone is going to take when they go to a website. But I don't mean everyone takes that exact journey or path but everyone is going to take a journey or path when they're looking to overcome their challenges, reach their goals and they're motivated to do so because they're interested in what you have to offer. This is something that people once again tend to overlook when it comes to building out their website and then they get to the whole plugins and the whole tools and the technology but they forget that all those things don't even matter if you're not actually helping people reach their goals and understanding the path and the journey that they're going through. Does that make sense so far? So that's pretty much like meeting people where they at. And meeting people where they at. That bridge. You know sometimes sometimes you're building the bridge sometimes you're allowing them to give you the information it's almost like they're building the bridge for you.  But when we listen to them it's like they're building their own bridge. You know the FAQ like you know we ask them questions like what do you want help with? They gave you the answer like that's the most you know say like they gave you they're building the bridge and you're just kind of putting it for them. But that is the journey that is the path right there. And I kid you not every website once you and Marquise I talked to you about the other day once you put these new goggles on you know it's the eagle eye. I used to metaphor where I used to skateboard when I was growing up and I used to do a whole bunch of tricks you know I was a big fan of Tony Hawk and all those all those cats. And I remember that once I started learning how to skateboard and do tricks on we call the street on chairs and tables and things like that. I never saw the world the same. Every time I would go downstairs or look at rails I would look at things that I could grind on and I could do things. A person would just look at it as something in their way. I would look at it as something like I can do a trick on that. And that's I'm saying that to say that once you start seeing the journey in the path when it comes to some of these techniques and tactics here and you look at websites you would like oh man they got me in this funnel they got me in this journey I see the journey and then you'll start to just mimic that on your own websites on your own you know planning plans. So I'm hoping that that makes a little bit sense why the journey and path it's very important because you can build that on your website through your web pages. So let me move forward and get to that actually. So competitors again we're in the business section right here part one and the last part is competitors. We talked about goals you know what goals do you have what are your targets and your objectives. We discussed your audience what are you who is your audience and what are their goals right and what is their journey to be able to reach their goals. And now we're going to touch on your competitors because this is important when you think about if you have an audience and you have a target market most likely someone else has your target market and your audience as well too. So if you can understand who they are geographically as example where are they in the world or where are they in the United States. I know we have people here interact nationally so that's why I said the world first you know where are they in their country and then look at the keywords what keywords what are those very important words that people would Google that are leaving them to your competitors because again we don't have to reinvent the wheel we shouldn't be reinventing the wheel. So we know what our competitors keywords are leading to them we can use those keywords and add those to our website add those to our plan our strategy and then word of mouth word of mouth is very powerful we're all talking you know we're all telling each other what's the new latest cool thing how is our experience when we use this the new iPhone you know I loved it I hated it this we're always talking that's going to be one of the most powerful ways to find out what your competitors are doing is what people think about them verbally listen to that because they're going to be talking about you two at the same time and I think that when we add these things together when we think about where they're located what keywords people are typing in because that's the beauty of the internet don't have to actually go anywhere in order to experience something these days one of the things I learned about geografics is the culture is different everywhere you go culture is different words can be different yep like the words that you and cleavage may not be the same terminology that they use in the lungs right so I can see where geografics they made a role in your competition because if you go to columbia it's talking like you and cleavage right right then they're gonna be it's gonna be foreign it's gonna be foreign that yeah so what marquise is saying is he brought up a really good point when it comes to geography and understanding language in different in different parts of the world let alone excuse me different parts of your city or different parts of the state where if you're speaking if you're not speaking the same language sometimes it's the actual language or it's even the dialect how you say something within the language but if you're not understanding or speaking that language there could be a disconnect you know with that with that person with that company with the offering and that can cause conflict that can cause friction in the connection so it's very important once again to study you know to understand geographically how people are thinking how people are using words where I'm from the south so I grew up saying y'all when the north y'all say you you know I'm saying you you know say so it's a whole different I come from down style like that I you thought it's the same thing but I had to turn it off and start talking a little bit more northern because I got made fun of when I when I grew up when I was brought up from Texas so I had to even switch and learn so you made a big good point right there so thank you for that marquise I appreciate that so let's get into traffic again if you do have any questions just feel free to put them in the chat as well and if there's anything that you're not understanding just please let me know Michael feel free to interrupt anytime we do have a we have a question from they work for a non-profit and the goal is to bring in more people to their programs they have in person programs that they charge for and then they have a live stream component on YouTube and they're really concerned about how to how to bring in more people for the programs to then get more money and then also and maybe we'll talk about this later how to track some of that and and how they know what's being effective through analytics or other means on their site to know where they're getting a response from and getting getting participants from so how to get more people and how to track that activity for the for the for the registration yeah exactly how to how to get get more more money from the paid participants and how to understand what's effective on their website for bringing people from the website to these in person events or to the online views okay perfect hold hold how do you pronounce it was it the name I'm sorry I don't want to mess up the name I I can unmute you if you'd like to catch us now so I was going to say we are actually I'm actually going to touch on that so it is a good question do you hear me now yes okay Katajuna Katajuna Katajuna I'm going to touch on that question I'm going to on more of the later half of this meetup of this presentation and then give you some ideas in that way you can tell me if the ideas that I give you match some of the the problems that you're facing if these are some of the solutions that you may want to think about perfect thank you because I that's a good really good question but I want to give it to you from a technical standpoint because I love that scenario yes perfect the only the only not problem the only thing is that I might need to leave because you know I'm in New York City I'll be traveling home at some point I might just need to step away and leave but maybe you will be able to answer before I go I believe I'm gonna not I'm gonna be getting to it pretty soon here once I get past this part because that's more of the technical part okay sounds good thank you but I am recording this too so without I'm gonna answer the question regardless don't worry great great thanks you're welcome okay so and I see the question right here so that's good too it's in the chat so let's talk about traffic real quick and then I'm gonna actually I'm not too far from getting into her her question we touched on business and I want to touch on traffic because this is also important when it comes to thinking about how you develop and build a website when you're thinking about it strategically so the three main parts of traffic are going to be sitemap keywords and when I say email I'm talking about email marketing to be specific you're right when I'm not talking about the one-to-one email I'm talking about when you send the newsletter blasts to people when you collect emails which kind of oh man I hate not getting people's name right Cartigena did I say that right if I did I'm sorry it's also going to be somewhat a part of oh your question so sitemap keywords and email all right so the first part is sitemap when we're thinking about building our website and we're thinking about it strategically and some things are not going to some of the because of the the projector there are going to be some pictures that don't show I think it's just because of the color of it but sitemap from its most simplistic form is just you stating documenting it's better if you document what are the pages going to be on your website what are they because it doesn't matter it doesn't matter that how much traffic you get if they ain't going nowhere to come to so we want to think about what are the pages of our website actually going to be and this is just a simplistic way this a diagram of it in a way you can literally just take a regular piece of paper and a pencil or a pen you don't have to get all technical about it use a program and just literally write down I'm going to have my home page I'm going to have my about page I'm going to have a contact page those were the pages I'm going to have a contact page I'm going to have a contact page I'm going to have a contact page I'm going to have a contact page those were I would call the three bread and butter pages most of every website except for those one page websites have a home about in a contact right and then based on your industry based on your niche and I didn't catch your name I'm sorry I'm Audrey I was online it was right oh you were online okay Audrey Wiggins yes Audrey Audrey what business do you have I have a marketing business a marketing business a graphic and web design and it can help you know keep talking okay okay nice well we got to talk because I got one too so okay Audrey so then for your situation then you would it would make sense for you to have a pricing page would it maybe or a services page for your for your side map okay Marquise what would make sense for you to have that's not on here for yours that you can think about the same thing she just said a service page a service page okay give me something that she didn't think about special to yours change on there oh yeah anything anything that that's not already here or nothing that she said nice information page so Marquise just said he would have an information page for his on here Rhonda you know I'm coming to you now I would say resources they would find useful a a resources page Rhonda says she would put her resources page all right y'all come on I want to put it in the chat we have a we have an information page we have a resources page we have a services pricing page what what on what on here that you would have that would make sense for your industry that's not already on here in your site map and the reason why we're doing this exercise because again a products I see that okay products page testimonials page nice because I want you all to start seeing the patterns or listen to the patterns that there's things that we all going to have but there's things that are just going to be specific to to our niche and it's very important to think about that because once you think about that top layer pages then you have pages that connect with pages what pages are connecting with pages and I want to get too deep into that now but that's when you really start getting into more with the SEO type of activities that Google likes Google loves it when pages connect within your pages called interlinking interconnecting you know how pages naturally connect with each other but just starting off by itself it's always great to just understand how your site map works and this is a part of your strategy you know this is a part of being able to think from a higher tier big picture level of your website before you even start building out the pages any questions on that okay so next one is going to be keywords and keywords are very important and we we we touched on them very briefly before but keywords are I think at this point in time we've all heard the term keywords is that can I say that I know it's you know okay in the chat has anybody not heard the term keyword before okay I think everybody's heard on the call okay great so we understand the term keywords now I want to keep it simple here because I think it's very important to understand that when we're talking about keywords from a simplistic standpoint we want keywords first of all that are relatable they're relative to our industry so when I'm thinking about a website strategy or I'm doing a website strategy document for a client always ask them first and foremost you know what are the words that you use in your in your company that we can just start off with as keywords so it's based on their industry it may be start off with their products or their services it could then go into the tools that they use their equipment that they use it could go to the verbiage that they're that their people their clients their customers they use in just so forth and so on so what are the words that are relatable to you next one is going to be competitive so keywords that are competitive to your market to your industry typically these will be keywords that your competitors are also trying to rank for sometimes you want to go for keywords that aren't as competitive sometimes you want to go for keywords that are very highly competitive those are what we call the money keywords to an extent right if other people are trying to go after them that must mean something just the most smalls will say if people want them it must they must have some type of value I know that's not a hard edge rule but I promise you it works a lot of times but I over to think it if other people want it okay well why do they want it I ain't got it let me go over here and see what they want it Oh because it's that money keyword people are typing this in and it's helping them bring more money so these are things that I feel that are important and local keywords are also very important if you have a local business keywords like near me keywords that are associated with the area code people type in something plumbing in Cleveland plumbing in San Jose you know I need a contractor in San Antonio you know this is the keyword area code zip code four four some some some this thing those are local based keywords a lot of times people are typing those in when they need something quick fast in the hurry those are money based keywords so if you can get those keywords you are really winning because people want things fast quick in a hurry that means something is near them so this is just a simple way of getting into keywords for ways for you to think about keywords without having to go too deep into you know the tools and how to use them in other ways and formats like that any questions on the keywords part that anybody has okay so then the next part is going to be email marketing and as I mentioned before I'm talking about email segmentation email lists email tags sending emails to people in general after you've collected them on your website and this is something that I feel a lot of people really don't pay attention to or they don't give a lot of value to when they are blending out their website and the reason why it's in the traffic section is because what's the point of getting traffic if you can't hold them if you can't obtain them if you can't add them to your actual list you know if you can't send them messages later on you've done all this work with these keywords you don't know those words to get this traffic but at the end of the day you really don't have the opportunity to be able to talk to them later to send them messaging later is anybody here doing any emailing right now any collecting any emails or email marketing on your behalf okay what about yourself ronda and martyce I communicate via email okay to do different sites as far as fatherhood programs across the country uh-huh or I can say yeah okay okay so we have a few people doing anybody here emailing and the in the chat constant contact I see somebody using constant contact here anybody using anything else mail chimp so these are email tools that people use the email market this is something that it should never be thought about as an aftermath when it comes to building a website this should be baked into the strategy of the website because the forms that you use the the the offerings that you have the tools that you use you typically are always leading someone to some type of conversion whether it's an email capture or a sale and this is what you want to do in order to get so you want to think about the list so what kind of bucket can you separate people in is it a newsletter that they're getting is it a webinar that they've seen can you put them in a webinar list can you put them in a newsletter list when it comes to tags are you able to say that this is the webinar that they did watch that they watch this webinar versus that webinar that's how you want to tag them and then when it comes to dynamic list it's just a fancy way of saying as an example you wanted to send an email campaign or coupon to people who have not purchased in 90 days so X amount of people who haven't purchased in 90 days and bought less than $100 worth of product in your store I want to send them a coupon you would do that by creating some type of dynamic list or segment but this is what your email tools are supposed to allow you to do the whole concept is understanding that you want to attach email marketing to your website to your website strategy that it's very very important you know getting all that traffic people are coming to your website and then you have no way of recommunicating with them later you're just leaving opportunities on the table I mean I'd be money for you but it could just be opportunities so the last part and this is the part that I really want to touch on but I didn't want to skip ahead and get to the technology stack because this is something I know that a lot of people really wanted to talk about but before we got into it I just wanted to you know really touch on the business aspect of things and then the traffic aspect of things because when you think about the business and the traffic the rest of this your functions your technology your analytics it all really ties together and it makes you feel like you have a cohesive plan you have a long term website and not a short term website so we'll start off with functions and features so we think about functions and features and this is where I can use wordpress.org as a really good example but when you think about functions we talk about things that are typically activities on your website so people you want somebody to sign up for something or you want them to watch something read you want them to listen download search you may want to have somebody buy a product an estimate access something and then some type of custom content when we are speaking on functions we're really talking about the activities that you want somebody to do on the website so this is where that whole term user experience really comes into play when we speak on that and a good way to showcase that for example is if I go to the wordpress.org and let me know if you all can still see see my screen here is it showing the can you all see wordpress.org and just making sure that it's actually showing my the whole desktop okay cool so on wordpress.org we have a search bar here right so they obviously want us to search that's a function right there they built that in that wasn't by accident something else I knew it too so something else would be okay get wordpress right so download that's another function right there they want us to be able to download so let's see if there's anything else this would be considered there's a drop down menu right here to be able for navigation I know that's not on there but I could easily put on there navigate could be a function and they've given us a clear navigation way to be able to do so and if they have they do have areas where you can sign up or watch so wordpress.tv that would be an area to be able to watch but these are just examples though I think that they wordpress.org does a really good job another one would be Apple so just giving you examples when you think about the functions like where they want to buy so you know how we just said buy right there Apple wants you to be able to buy something so these are just ways that and the buttons aren't shown because of the projector I know people in line could probably see it but it's kind of hard to see here but these are just ways that or learn more so that's another one you know we want you to learn more and then this would be to read so this is again just ways that we think about the functions and then when we talk about the features on our website that's when we're talking about the tools so functions are the activities what we want people to do on the website and then features are the tools so this would come in play when it comes to the plugins specifically talk about wordpress so we have our form we have video players our blog our pdf again I said email marketing before too as well our audio player a search bar we just saw a search bar on wordpress.org payment processing system so we were to actually buy iphone from the apple store we would go through a payment processing system and a calculator would be an example so does anybody here have any examples for specifically for the website even those for you virtually that we don't see here on the features that you would need specifically for your website and everybody speaking wants search bar database anybody online as well too feel free to anything here on the slide that you feel is not there specifically for your website a feature or a tool and the reason why I wanted you to see why this is important because oftentimes you know when you hear people are heard 100 times hey you can build me a website okay well it's going to go on the website I don't know what people want to do on the website I don't know I'm telling you it's like a broken I've heard it so many times when people until they actually start seeing it this way they don't realize that you don't necessarily know what your customers or what people are going to be doing on your website unless you've actually thought about you know what you're going to actually have on your website these are the things you're going to have on your website and when you look at the functions this is what you want them to do so this is like the activities what they're going to be doing what you want them to do but then it's like how they're going to do that that's through these tools right here do these features does that make sense if it doesn't please don't say it does try to try to make me okay and again everybody virtually too if that doesn't make sense feel free to just speak up so I want to make sure that I do address because hopefully now we're getting more into your question ma'am about you know your specific situation but I wanted to talk about more of the technology aspect of it as well too before we got too deep into it so speaking of technology since we are talking about WordPress and we did talk about the functions and the features so some of the tools and the doings you know the activities what people are going to be doing on our website a big part of WordPress when it comes to I would say mitigating a lot of issues a lot of people we have in website issues with WordPress whether it's technical issues whether it's you know hacking issues threats to your website or speed issues I'm talking about issues galore a lot of these issues can be miss mitigated if you have good hosting do not go cheap on your hosting I'm not telling you what hosting you need to use or why you should use it but a lot of the issues can be mitigated through proper hosting because a lot of the hosting takes care of a lot of those issues just out of the box everything cannot be avoided 100% that's where plugins come into play or good practices come into play but hosting I would say is a big part of mitigating a lot of those potential issues so I won't go deep into all these different types of hosting I will say that shared hosting is the most popular type of hosting I think that most people probably here in this session are using but we have shared hosting we have virtual private servers we have cloud hosting and we have dedicated servers and I put next to cloud hosting Google and Amazon West because that they're the most popular cloud hosting types but like I said most people are using shared hosting something like a GoDaddy a SiteGround a DreamHost a HostGator Namecheap most people are using shared hosting for the most part but even doesn't matter what kind of hosting type you choose just make sure the company you choose is a well-known or a very good premium company and then from there you can build your website on are there any questions about hosting Bluehost is a good one too Bluehost okay in motion that's a good one too that's a good one too anybody here do you want to put your hosting in the chat I would love to see anybody you know what you are hosting with yourselves I particularly host with cloudways and SiteGround I want to host with Kinsta we have WP Engine that's they're a good one as well too spend WP digital ocean yep I got digital ocean on here that's a popular one too I tell people all the time I mean especially for speed and this we're not going to get too much in the speed in this one but when it comes to speed people don't understand how much hosting plays a huge part in that you can use all the plugins and do all the optimization you want to but if you have a slow host you can only get so far you know you can't get past the the 80 marker if that makes sense you know what I'm saying so if the host is a 80 host A is a 80 compared to host B which is a 95 and you're starting out of the 80 most likely once you start building on your website you're going to go down to like a 60 and you'll never get past that 80 because your host started out of the 80 that make no just performance wise I'm just saying 80 like 80% to the maximum you know does that does that make sense to everybody as far as the host matters because again if you're at a 80% starting off with 80% the moment you start building on your website your site's naturally going to get slower there's nothing you can do about that it's just going to get slower and you'll never get past that 80% because your host started at 80% instead of starting at 85 or a 90 or 95 so hosts matter you know a lot when it comes to speed and security those are the biggest two things I would say hosts will give you a speed and security when it comes to building out your website and then third one I would say would be support because you know I don't think anybody in here is an expert on building hosts and hosting so you always want to have some type of really good support when it comes to your website and motion we have another one too so theme theme is really really important when it comes to your website strategy with WordPress because your theme is going to give you the ability to do a lot of themes when it comes to your styling and eliminate you having to learn code or do a whole bunch of code if you have a really good theme it should have some type of feature or a button or an area where you can easily do what you want to do without having to do a whole bunch of code that's the most simplistic way I can say it and themes give you your styling they give you they help you with the styling these are the way that I would say you would want to choose a theme and I'm going to show you real quick and WordPress what that looks like but I first want to show you some of the criteria speed you want your theme to be fast flexible you want to have a whole bunch of features you want it to be integrated with as many other apps or tools as possible too usable meaning like how you can use it how easy is it to use is it compatible with other tools or or compatible with WordPress the latest update with WordPress believe it or not your website you'll have a you'll be using the theme on your website and out of nowhere your whole website just breaks because WordPress is an update and your theme wasn't compatible with it so and you just out you know you on vacation you are at home sleeping you're taking a trip somewhere you know you are you know picking up the kids or whatever and then you get that phone call out of nowhere from an employee from a customer from somebody hey your website is broken you have no idea it's because the theme you didn't have a theme that was compatible and your WordPress it happens to people it's happened to me it's happened to my clients it happens to us all so that's why I'm saying it's important for you to think about your theme as making sure that it is compatible it's a theme that is compatible and it goes to support updates typically if you have good support with your theme and it's updating frequently it's going to be compatible so these three kind of really play together in a lot of ways but these are just some of the things that I feel are important when you think about your theme so let me go show you real quick when it comes to picking themes so there's two ways that you can do do so and for those of y'all who are used to WordPress who know what WordPress this is nothing new to you but I just wanted to show you real quick let me go to theme real quick about to click this a little slow let's go to WordPress it's another area so we can go to themes right here so on WordPress.org itself you can just go here go to themes and you'll be able to see the themes here that they they've put kind of in a list of a popular order list or you can go to the latest I won't get into too deep on the different type of things like block themes versus full-site editor themes because this is not a session for that but I just wanted you to know that you can go here to pick your theme and if this would just be able to load so you can go here to pick your theme too let's see if I can get to up here not that's okay but it's not okay so when you when you pick your theme for instance you want to look at the way that I pick and look at themes is I look at ratings so I do like a little Amazon theme you know for good or for bad but we all know the Amazon theme we look at the ratings I look at the ratings I look at what people are talking about how many stars does it have the reason why people you know wouldn't use it and I also look at the description and this just lets me know and I look at when's the last time it was updated you know was this was this theme updated frequently I mean recently is it updated frequently how many installations does it have how many people are using it you know I'm not saying be bougie about how you choosing some but I'm just saying you know do a little bit of you know due diligence like because this it does give you a indication on what's good and what's okay and what's bad and what what what you may like so that's not good that's not good you want to do that to me typically only happens when you're trying to just want to make a point so that's why I'm saying the theme is also very very important and these are the biggest ways that like I said I choose a theme but you choose whatever theme that you feel comfortable for you you can start with the WordPress theme this is the makes us a specific theme every year this one is their 2022 edition but you can always start off with their theme and then you can move to another a new theme that you would like later on let's see if you like this enough here no one don't okay all right so let me move forward here and get to the plugins all right so plugins this is something that I think most people for good or for bad it's like a kid in a candy store when it comes with plugins and what I mean by it's like a kid in a candy store is most people will go into WordPress and just start adding a whole bunch of plugins to their website because they can just add free plugins to their website so we act like real big kids because oh I can add this new shiny thing and this thing and that thing and I'm just gonna add this thing and that thing you know just like we can just you just you feel like you know you're living out your childhood youth from mama said you couldn't you can't get that you can't get that you're like I'm finally here I can add whatever I want and those are the biggest things that cause the biggest issues when it comes to websites because it's just so easy to add anything you want do whatever you want but you're not doing it with discretion you're not doing it with a thought process in mind you're not doing it understanding that some plugins don't work well with others some will cause you know conflict with others some will actually break your site just because they're just not updated frequently and this is something that I wanted to show as well too because this is how I tend to organize how I think about plugins and technology so I felt like it was easier to just show y'all than to just kind of just tell y'all so what I like to do is I like to say okay this column right here is my plugins this is the company and I say whether or not I'm using the pro version or free version I talk about the details so I keep it very simple this is what this plugin does this is what it's for I want to know from a simplistic standpoint this is what this is for this is really not for me when I document things I do it for scale I do it for other people so I don't people have to bother me to know what's going on so I can go do what I need to do other ways so this is what this is for for other people this has probably been one of my biggest lead generating tools or I would say engagement pieces when I post on social media into like certain groups where I show people this and everybody always wants me to make a template of it and I tell them no you gotta take a snapshot or a picture because this is internal this is my stuff but it gives people the idea of oh this is how you organize your tech stack in a way where you can pass the tool a team member or an employee or you can look at it years from now I've had this for over a couple years and all I do is update it over time and my new staff members that come in they read off of this and they know exactly what we have and why we have it and I ask me no questions this is the this is the sheet this is our technology so this is why I have something like this and it it really does help be able to see so that's why I'm saying the purpose like when I say purpose it's really more of like the details like what is it there for and then standard the way that I document standard is it's standard of market position is it is it an alternative but is it a a plug-in or a technology that's alternative of the industry standard is it alternative of the gold standard when I say gold standard I'm talking about it's the top of the the creme de la creme of the creme of tools this is the gold standard of tools industry standard is this is one of the most popular alternative is they just came out and they're kind of you know trying to be the new standard but they ain't there yet but they weak I got it for the for the low low you know what I'm saying or I got they do what they need I'm just being real with y'all that's how I categorize you know my tools my technology stat but does this make sense anybody have any questions on kind of what this looks like and I know it may not you know look at it may look foreign to y'all to some degree but this is just how I organize it no questions on on the okay all right all right sorry about that okay so a quick question yeah yeah yeah on your plug all this on your list maybe I'll just like please just sit down here pay pay and I'll just ask you you buy all your plugins I oh yeah these these ones I do and I I kind I really wanted to so so I wanted I wanted to show y'all I had these two sites up because I had one site I pre-built that had my free plugins and another site I pre-built that had my pay plugins and I wanted to show y'all just a difference real quick so that's so that the answer your question perfectly actually ironically that's why I'm kind of sad that my these just kind of like timed out on me a little bit because I already had these pre-built for y'all and now the sudden that's not that's no bueno man but yeah I did have them I had two different sites for everyone for everyone to be able to see that way you can see you know the actual that's what this snapshot is from it's actually from one of the websites I have built to show you if you only wanted to use free plugins this was my recommendation to build like a really good lean WordPress website I'm recommending these free plugins if you wanted to build a more pro-based website with these it's the same plugins but the pro version and that's what I really want to show y'all like right now live so y'all can go okay well if I want to build a website from scratch he's telling me this is the exact tool to use and this is the criminal criminal tool and it's free so kind of going back to the kidney candy store it's okay to have the candy this time but it's good candy though it's premium candy let me be honest it's good candy but it's free candy though and access later yeah yeah yeah I actually I will I'll show everybody that later so I'm sorry I'm sorry to say I'm sorry to say the job can't can't see the thing but the next one is going to be integrations and automation so I feel like this is important to talk about because when we talk about plugins typically in my opinion it's better to use a plugin on WordPress for your integrations for your automations now I'm not saying you have to not saying anybody has to but I'm saying it's it's a lot better because they'll typically they will integrate with other WordPress plugins easier if you use a plugin that does your automation that's on WordPress versus using a third-party app basically a non-word press based tool to do your automation with Zapier so these are the integration automation apps that I recommend because these are the most popular and there's one on here that's the newest one that is going to be coming out soon here sorry about that it's going to be coming out soon here but I just wanted you all to see that if you're thinking about connecting your WordPress website with other tools outside of WordPress or say you wanted to do your email marketing and you wanted to collect email from your form how are you going to move that email over to your email tool a connector app like this an automation app will do that it would help you move that say somebody purchased a product off of your website and you wanted to send somebody a coupon or send somebody something special afterward you would use a connector app to send them a message after they purchase a product hey thank you for the here's a coupon for the next thing these apps give you the ability to send information say you wanted to post to Facebook you wrote a new blog post and you want that post to automatically go to Facebook a connector app like this would do that it would help automate that process so that's what these apps are for is to help you make connections with other apps other tools whether they're on WordPress or they're outside of WordPress Zapier is one of the most popular ones this one is not a plug-in itself and it's the most popular one it's they all have three three tiers to them but these are the ones that I would recommend Sure Triggers is not out yet it's in beta but it will be coming out soon and you'll be able to get this also from the WordPress repository so Uncandy and Automator these are also both found in the WordPress directory or the repository for free you can just add these to your to your website for free when you're you know just looking for a new plug-in look for Automator or Uncandy and that again they'll give you the ability to connect other apps with each other I just think that's important so that way you don't feel that your data is siloed it's just on WordPress you feel like you can take your information and your data you can do things outside of WordPress and WordPress is just a part of your whole marketing strategy your overall marketing strategy and then the last part when it comes to your tech stack and this was also a part of connecting the dots of your goals as we talked about the beginning so kind of like a Kevin Hart comedy a skit you know he always brings back the joke from the beginning of the thing to the end and he brings back that that that joke part to it we talked about goals in the beginning so I want to connect it you know again connect the beginning to the end when we talk about goals in the beginning if you know what goals you have at the beginning and you've done all the other web development activities that you need to do and you've launched your website then what this is the then what part the analytics you know this is measuring what's happening on your website that way you can make the changes that you would like to make the best way to talk about the other day this is exactly what I was talking about the other day so literally the best way to kind of show it's to show y'all this is Google analytics form and I feel like anybody who is creating a website needs to have this connected to their website I'm sorry for for those of you know for y'all that are here because it's kind of hard to see some of the report excuse me but Google Analytics 4 and it's most simplistic form it is not necessarily an update from the previous version of Google Analytics it's a whole new analytics tool that we built it from the ground up so for those of y'all who are watching this understand that Google Analytics 4 is not a new version I mean it's not a upgrade or an update from Google Analytics it's basically a whole new version and it was done to simplify for the average person to be able to hook it up to their website and kind of see very easily who is doing what where how and when if you are just to only see it as a snapshot so if you only want to if you want to see the users how much money you made I'm showing you my personal data right now it's not a lot but I I don't want to show you anybody else is be able to see where they're coming from no geog geography wise see where they're coming from channel wise you know if you just needed to see this real quick what I love about this is is just giving you quick snapshots you know how often are they doing these activities for what pages are they going to you know you don't need to drill into things what what conversions what are the conversions what are the events and when I say conversions and events what I love about Google Analytics 4 is it easily gives you away it tracks a whole bunch of conversions outside out the box and events out the box what I mean by that events are activities happening on your website conversions are the most important activities and before you'd have to do a whole bunch of setup through other tools in order to really create what is now very easy to be able to see so events again are things that are activities happening on your website and if you're like okay well this activity is very important to me such as a purchase or a checkout process or watching a video maybe an order confirmation all you do is click this little toggle on and it turns into a conversion and this is Google's way of of using the term conversion in exchange for goal it's the same thing goal conversions so if you know your goals at the beginning and you know your your different targets you know what you're looking for you can even call something sub goals so you have your major goal you have your sub goals right your objectives you know what to call conversions and then you can just measure these conversions and Google analytics very easily and then you can see on your reports you know are you meeting your goals are you meeting your conversions or not if you're not well what do you need to do in order to meet those conversions so that way you can make the changes and in my opinion this is what creates a really really optimized website where you have the ability to be able to build it from strategy and be able to update it later on based on actual information based on actual reports actual data and not what you think is happening and again I wish I could show y'all this was just so much oh it's working now okay all right it's working now all right all right so this is where I get to show y'all the plugins part okay so I'm I'm gonna bring it back or bring it back that one this one works okay so this is the free this is what I was suggesting and you can use alternatives remember I said you can use alternatives so you know don't shoot the sheriff now but I'll just give you some suggestions that if you want to use something that would be a advanced if you need something that has custom post types on the website so basically in WordPress these are all considered post types you want to make your own post types you need a plugin for that a very popular plugin for that is custom post types right here and then when you want to make certain fields like when you're creating different forms on your website and you would have very very specific type of fields for your forms a very popular tool called ACF advanced custom fields this is one to do so for forms a lot of people use contact forms seven it's a popular one I like to use fluent forms there are many different security plugins out there so many out there a one I recommend is I themes security for building out your webpage this is called cadence block so I'm gonna show you that here in a second this is to help you build an actual landing page or your web pages the presto player is for video right math is for SEO this is for if you want to see Google analytics on your website so if you don't want to and this is what I love WordPress as well too some people don't enjoy looking at their analytics here from analytics from Google analytics themselves so you can literally look at your analytics from WordPress right within here in your site kit just gives you a nice little simplified view of looking at your Google analytics right within WordPress shortcut this is for taking payments for creating products and taking payments it's an alternative to WooCommerce which is a very popular e-commerce plugin these are the two automation integration plugins that I mentioned before it's very important to have backup so if you have good hosting going back to your hosting your hosting will have backup it'll have what they call server side backups and that means your hosting is backing up your website on their servers but you never want to depend just on your hosting a backup needs a backup so you can use a plugin to back up your website as well too so if you backed up twice now let the hosting back up your website also back up your website through a plugin and then push that backup you can back up to your Google if you ever heard of Dropbox or Google Drive you can back your website to Google Drive or Dropbox your things that you can deal with other platforms like Wix or Squarespace so that it is an advantage of using WordPress is that no matter what happens to your website you can always take it with you if that makes sense you can with the plugin it will push your backup to Dropbox automatically yep or to Google Drive automatically yep so again double so and that's the best security you're gonna have is having that backup because something will always be able to go wrong there is never 100% guarantee but when you got two points of backups for the backup one a popular one is Updraft Plus that's a very popular one WPVivid is another popular one too I like that one as well anybody have any questions on the thing just making sure we're still good okay there aren't any questions but if I could ask you to repeat in-person questions for the video so that we can hear sometimes we can't hear the oh sorry about that it was it was more of a well it was kind of a question but she was asking me basically just another suggestion for for backup was the backup I was suggesting up there was that a good one Updraft Plus and I was just giving her another one which was WPVivid for another backup thank you thank you so these are the main ones I would say like this right here I would tell you right now this isn't my secret sauce as simple as this is I'm telling you right now this is a secret sauce right here everybody that's watching this watching this in the future there'll be secret sauce type stuff like as simple as that I may be simplifying it but this is secret sauce I'm telling you telling you but by the way I'm not saying like I tell you it's not I tell you it's not right now but it's that secret sauce because this really is the meat and potatoes that what most websites need most websites are going to need to take form so going I forgot I don't want to miss her name but but she was saying talking about being able to take those payments right shortcut short I'm telling you telling you telling you shortcut is about to be a WooCommerce killer like it's going to be one of those plugins that takes so much market share of one of the biggest ones WooCommerce because it's allowing people to take payments on their website very fast very easily without slowing down your website because once you put WooCommerce on your website you get into a whole new world territory of bloat of speed issues shortcut is getting into and this is not a presentation to really go too deep into it but shortcut is a plugin that's technically not even on your website it's called headless meaning that even though you see it on your website all the activities happening on your website actually happening on their servers so you're doing the payment processing on your website it looks like it on the front end but all that activities really happened on some on a whole new server that's new this is this is what what is that or they call disruptive this is a disruptive game plant like this is new so this again is going to allow you to take payments and not only take payments but you're able to it does tax does tax on the fly so when I would use WooCommerce I would have at least 10 different plugins with WooCommerce this plugin helped me replace five to 10 different plugins by itself it's a game changer do you know how many people are going to lose their jobs because they don't need to be optimizing people I don't need you to help me with WooCommerce no more I got short I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm being extreme but I'm telling you that's that's the game changer this type of thing does and it allows you to do physical products or it's getting to the physical allows you to do services and allows you to do digital product as well too but I'm not going to say too hard I'm not going to harp on it but I just wanted to share that this is one of those innovative type of one plugin like Lord of the Rings one plugin to rule them all like it's like the one plugin that gets rid of you know a whole bunch of plugins right right I'm I'm big on that I'm I'm real big on that another game changer is using a plugin that is based on code snippet so WP code is one I'm gonna go over to hopefully this is working now okay so I'm gonna go over to my premium version so I gave you all the free version all these are free sorry all these are free so when I say free free for free free free I'm talking about you can go here to the WordPress repository and search for all these plugins that I'm saying to tell you this is how you build a lean machine automation machine ATM machine sales marketing machine WordPress website these are the type of plugins you can use an alternative or whatever you want to but these are the types that you want you got marketing you got sales you got automation you got video you got page building and I'll go into page building here in a second let that load now here's the same version of that but almost the premium side so all I did was add the pro versions basically of the free versions of the other ones so it's sort of fluid form we have fluid forms pro when I say the pro version it just gives you more features it unlocks more features for the most part but that's another key thing too that I want to share most plugins that have a pro version they're more incentivized to keep updating the free version and why that's important because you want your free version plugins to continue to be updated over time whether they're free or not because when you have a plugin that's not updated it's more susceptible for hacking for people trying to use that as a way to get into your website and you know saying bug your website up so people plugins that have incentivized that they get money they can hire employees they can update them it's just one of those things that people don't talk about often but that's the way that I know if a plugin is going to be a long-term plugin if it's going to be good because they do have some way to make some money which incentivize them to keep updating even their free tools set up pump and dump situation but these are the pro versions so same thing I would say the only difference that I did was I used meta box instead of I went back with I used meta box instead of advanced custom fields presto player I'm going to show you something real quick too because I did say that this is a great way to understand that when you use premium plugins or really good plugins it makes your page building experience even better so what I mean by that is for example this is these are blocks right here so if I was going to build a website out for example I wanted to use in an image and this is the drag and drop experience for people who aren't used to WordPress who don't know about Gutenberg this is WordPress's native page building experience this is how you build out pages is with Gutenberg they're going to call it they're going to change the name and just call it the editor WordPress editor and what's important about this is most people didn't know that until this happened WordPress and people didn't think that you can do a drag and drop where I can just literally drag and drop content you know and start writing things out I can just drag and drop content with the text I can just drag and drop content just like that it wasn't that smooth before and this is where WordPress had to gain change when it came out with this ability to be able to do so so this is Gutenberg and if you have really good plugins you'll notice that you see short cart right here there's short cart this is that this is that plugin I said that was the boot commerce alternative right so you have what they call blocks so if a plugin does a really good job for creating like content blocks you'll be able to see them here on the left side and you can just drag and drop I wanted to add a little checkout form here I can select one I've already made or I can create a new form and this is going to be terrible but you can see here I can start off now you can't see this here on the screen but this if I want to start off for the form right here and right now I'm going to say create and I would associate a product to this and now I have a checkout form I'll put a product to the checkout form and this would be a form so short cart actually has blocks that you can make on the fly I love that the same thing with presto player so this is a video player let's see I can actually just this is the best way to show y'all search for presto so I just typed in presto and now I can add a let's say presto youtube here and say I wanted to add a youtube video I would add a youtube video right here and it would it would give me the ability to have a youtube video and I would have advanced features over here when it comes to my video and that all came from this plugin presto player right here so that's why I'm saying if you are certain plugins if they're really good at what they do they will they will create a block for you over here where you can easily instead of using code to add it to your page they just have a block over here you can just use this block in your page building experience same thing with fluid forms fluid forms right here you see this is the this is how I would create forms so if I wanted to find a block for fluid forms they should have one as well too so I say I just made a form and I wanted to put on a page there we go put the form here and it says choose your form okay bam now I got a subscription form so let's preview this it's still a little terrible but I just want to give you an example that's what the video would be and then here's like the subscription form right here if I put the name in here this is that form so I was able to just use a block over here to just make my page building experience just a little easier and then I can get rid of all this just to show y'all real quick those of y'all who are new to Greenberg I highlighted all these kind of like layers almost now I'm black to a blank slate and then because I'm using a block plugin called cadence blocks and other block plugins do this so the blocks give you the ability to have these content pieces here we'll say but certain blocks give you this library feature where you can click the library button here and then you can use different templates so you don't have to start from scratch let's say you're a cleaning service and you wanted to bother about page now you have a template that you can use and now you can go in there and change things out to your will it's very similar very similar absolutely Elementor is what they consider a page builder plugin right now we're using the page builder experience of WordPress natively but we're using a plugin that gives us kind of more advanced blocks while using WordPress's page building experience because WordPress has blocks themselves you don't even need a plugin you can build out pages with their own but some of their blocks are a little in my opinion limited so I'd rather use a block plugin to give me more advanced features that's the only difference but that was a good dozen so the question was asked was it similar to Elementor and Astra and so that's why I was saying Elementor is a page builder plugin Astra is a theme as well too but this is just a very way and in Elementor they call them elements and in WordPress either they call them blocks same thing you know same thing but yeah that's basically what I just wanted to show you all that you know all the way from the strategy to building out the page building experience this is where you start adding those forms so we knew remember we knew what the different elements we wanted on the website right because we had we decided that this was the features and the functions these are the things that can help create the features and the functions does that connect the dots to see people don't think about that they don't ask well what are my fees they just go into the I just want to start building pages out this is what I need to do but yeah that's that basically is what I wanted to show you all today anybody have any questions here or virtually as well too I'm going to repeat your question too well after you asked it the page and then this is the three plug-ins the three big ones in the site for somebody else are you buying plug-ins or are you compared to a pirate so what question was for paid and for free if I'm buying them from somebody else am I buying the plug-ins with my own credit card or am I basically offering the the cost to them I mean that is a good question it really does depend on the situation if if they are so this is why I'm a fan of here's another piece of my secret sauce right here so I typically if I can I like to buy my plug-ins if I'm if I'm in the know-how right if I'm being a real nerd and I'm in the groups and my ears are to the streets I can catch plug-ins at the deal stage where they're new and I can get a lifetime deal some plugins still have lifetime deals forever some only have it at the beginning of their life cycle like when they're first made when because they're looking to inject cash into their company so that they can boost creation so they'll offer you you pay one time you get forever to me that's the those are the no that can get addictive to a degree and I always tell people like don't count on that because that'll get you in trouble but I'm dead serious I went through years of buying lifetime deals that's why that's why I understood how to vet plug-ins I wasted a lot of money buying things that turn to be duds but if you can get something that turns out to be good so if I do that if I get a lifetime deal that I have unlimited license then I then that's typically where I'll put that license on the client okay so the follow-up with that is because a client of mine they were previous webmaster passed away so then when she's traveling trying to find out what you know they thought and so when we pass of course all these licenses passed with them so what happened to the client side that's where it went that's a good so that's where yeah that game but that's the thing about WordPress about plug-ins is that the licensing can always be it doesn't break the site that's one advantage I will say about WordPress so to that point if you put a license on somebody say you put a plug on somebody's site with a license on it and you no longer have contact with that person I mean that person yeah it's gonna hurt like I don't have the license okay but your site your site doesn't break you can replace that license easily the website doesn't change you just replace them the license out that should that's an advantage right there you know and that's all you do WordPress yeah other because the other other tools are typically using a licensing system for the active it yeah so that's why you said WordPress is the best or the one you prefer it has a lot of advantages but don't don't don't get me wrong though it has some tough spots too it has a learning curve to it but that's advantage of it because yeah like I don't use all these plugins on one site I use certain ones for certain sites right and there's times where if I put a plug in on a client site somebody's site and I say hey you can have this for a year you know after that year I might deactivate if they stop paying for it right now their website doesn't stop working they'll stop getting updates for that plugin until they replace that license so they can't get like their site don't break because of me you can replace the light does that make sense like it's up to you like so that's that's the now if it's an unlimited scenario where I have unlimited for me personally this is my moral this is my moral compass y'all I'm just giving y'all my thing I typically tend to either do deals or let people know like hey I don't I'm not incentivized to delete I have a limited license of that so say you I do a deal and I'm like hey a part of that deal was you get to use my plugin licenses I'm not going to take the plugin license off your website because I'm not incentivized to I have unlimited I can put as many as I want on now if I was limited I only had 25 or 100 I gotta be a little bit more mitigating of that right I mean that's just the natural game of the game so that's how I go about it personally does that make sense yeah any more questions so that was that was a good question and what most plugins continue to offer it yeah and to Michael's point most plugins do continue to operate they just don't provide the updates but that's the thing like you do want the updates like you you want your plugins because that's one of the easiest ways for your website to break one plugin can break your whole website that's the crappy part about WordPress to my lingo but that's the the sucky part is like you know one plugin can really break your whole website so do you so do you so do you got it so do you got it and you will be okay you will do it just automatically okay that's a good question you now that we have WordPress where we are now what I mean by now is this wasn't this way for years this only happened within the last year or two but we have automatic update capability so you can turn it off or on like I'm doing right now it's up to you so that was a good question see that's where I happen to a computer is a lot too it happens to computers a lot a lot of people lost their jobs because of this this update yeah you know how many people are getting paid just to update people websites and then WordPress is like we're gonna end that we're gonna give it to you we're gonna give you the ability and people are like aw man that you can't tell clients like hey you know you I mean you can but you know it was what it was so but yeah that was a game changer people needed an automatic because I mean we this is a little bit what I'm telling y'all right now this is minimal you see 18 active typical websites have up to 50 different plugins for it is lot to maintain and manage so just be careful with that you know don't be that kind of that's why you need somebody on your team to do nothing but look at the computer sometimes sometimes or that but anybody have any questions in the in the in the chat as well too I mean don't don't get me wrong y'all are asking some real good questions but I'm glad I mean whatever y'all ask them like I love that now that they're working I could just show y'all instead of trying to explain to y'all because now hopefully it makes sense as far as I think but I just want to show y'all you know all the dots I just want to connect I know it's it's tedious and you know it's not so cool or whatever to get through but at the end of the day I really do think it's important to understand that you know you got to think about your business so now I want to show y'all a big picture of the slides so you can see like we talked about the business part right our goals our audience our competitors then we got into the traffic right so it ain't no point of getting no traffic if we don't know about our business and when we got into our traffic we said okay well we need to know what our pages are because it don't matter what type of keywords we want or who we want who the audience is going back to the y'all if we ain't got no pages where are they coming to like where are they landing that how are they getting there are you getting there through keywords through Google or through social media what happens when they do get there we want to get their email we want to be able to keep having conversations with them because if if we did all this work to have people come to our website and we ain't be able to retain them retain keep them you know you can't so we talked about that then we talked about the technology the functions the features the tools the activities that we want to happen on our website right we and we just went through okay your hosting is very important because that helps me to get a lot of security issues a lot of speed issues so that way we don't have to have so many plugins later to compensate because we did a great job picking our hosting we don't have to have so many plugins because we did a great job picking our theme sometimes people be using plugins for features that certain themes have but they don't think about it that way and I think from a strategic standpoint so some themes will give you features that you don't even need a plugin from and then we talked about plugins okay if we're going to use plugins make sure it has a purpose purpose being what kind of process do we want this this technology to be able to do for us it's just doing a process for us what do we want it to do that goes back to our functions and our features but does that make sense now kind of seeing it from a big picture this is website strategy they should be they should be minimal they should be consolidated too we should know that if you thought about it if not you're going to be guessing when you get into the plugins part I think I need this I think I need that I might need this no you don't you just would have wrote it down so but yeah that's what I wanted to share with everybody Michael do we have any questions or anything else in the virtual side of things there weren't too many questions that came up David brought up the good point when you were talking about the WordPress blocks to touch on patterns and how the patterns are a connection of blocks but how powerful that is in quickly building up pages I do that real quick because that's easy and I'm glad he brought that up because that is also something that's very important so if I'm here and patterns are also another way of being able to remember how I showed you templates from this button right here patterns are the native WordPress based type templates so I showed you templates using from a plugin patterns WordPress calls their templates patterns these are the same thing I'm going to scroll down here to the bottom and then I'm going to click a pattern and we should see it and it's just a starting point it's just a starting point I don't want to start from scratch so I'm going to use a template now I can I can fill it in it's a fill in so to it was David yeah if that's a good so this is WordPress's native way of being able to give you the capability that I don't want to start from scratch I don't have time I'm too busy yeah it's very similar you know it's very similar it's just the WordPress version of that it's the WordPress it's but it's that canva template canva we so marquise was talking about we were talking about canva the other day and it having the ability to have templates and have this this is I love using parallels this is parallel to that just a different platform okay people even will use canva build their graphics on there and then put them on work you know what I'm saying on the thing so now you're using two birds with one stone does that make sense like but that that's it that's all this is so so that was a good David that was a good one to bring up the patterns and I love using patterns I love using templates it's just really good starting points you know you don't have to build from scratch if you want to you can but notice anywhere I click I have the ability to change this and here's the cool part I can preview it in mobile and see what it will look like in mobile I mean WordPress didn't used to be this easy now try to tell you it was good it was easy but it's gotten easier and a lot of people don't understand how easier it's gotten me because they've never seen just a demonstration this is just a short demonstration this ain't the power of it this is just a little this is a little taste of it you know a little little sprinkle of that sauce and that little salt and pepper yeah I appreciate everybody I don't want to make this longer than it has to be but I did want to show you all again the bigger picture that's why I said let me keep the slides short instead of trying to do 50 slides and stuff you know talk about it get through it then let y'all all connect the dots at the end of it see a little bit of demonstration of it and then anybody that had any questions you know feel free it's an open book but yeah this is the this is what's it the presentation hey maestro yes you know to go back to Katzner's question earlier and maybe this could tie in a lot of the the different points you spoke about across the slides they were looking for this nonprofit they have or they're trying to cultivate an audience and move that audience through some of the funnels you were talking about from an online information system to an in-person event and could you maybe tie that together for her a little bit of all these different tools you talked about I know it's a it's a big ask for for a short amount of time but maybe maybe give an example of how a site like that like how you might structure a site like that so you could inform people online and give them some mechanism to engage with an in-person event and then track that okay well let's do this then hopefully and then you can guide me through it while I kind of give this example real quick so let's pretend that so in person yeah yeah yeah so let's do this there is an event template if I'm not mistaken here and is it here okay I'm gonna I'm gonna use this conference right here all right so we have home I'm gonna bring this in real quick hopefully it goes fast and even if you don't you know have to necessarily build out the the actual site but maybe maybe talked about what the process would look like and the types of tools that you've you referenced earlier what those might what choices she might want to make to help her along that path so if we're talking about registration to an in-person event I would say you know you will one need a home page something like this right that would make that would make be a landing page so you would need that landing page then it would be up to her to decide you know what her mechanism of registration is going to be so going back to what I was mentioning before when it came to the different blocks one method of registration could be just doing a form like form forms here and I can drag this right I should be able to drag this right here in this little block area boom it says say she created the event form right I know this is a contact form so I'm just giving an example here but say she created the event form here on the landing page so bam you know they're signing up here through the through the through the email put their name in here here's the event and then for the in-person part because that's that is pretty specific so if I were her and it was going to be in person I personally would use event bright and I would put I would add an event bright widget they might actually have it in here but they might not let's see all right did you that they might this is a little blocks for event bright but they I thought they had an event bright block so you can either use an event bright block or you can use event event bright and just embed so if it were here it was going to be in this little area right here yeah but yeah you would use that you know build out the build out the ticket process you know build out your tickets in event bright and then add it here on the page and then that way registration can go through event bright and she can use in the checking process when people go to the in-person event she can check them in as they come through the event bright app that in my opinion would be one of the most efficient ways to do it if it's specifically for an in-person event so that way you had a check-in process so you know who actually came to the event everybody doesn't do that or you can do a registration process so say it's you want to do registration on your website once again you can let me remove this and you can create a let's say a check out those check out right here create a checkout form create a new form we'll say ticket reg registration and now I'm creating a checkout form here on the fly where a person can register for their ticket and I can say product here I know you can't see this because this is terrible as far as what you call it but I'm just going to create it anyway so say that this was the ticket process so now a person will pay for the ticket here on the page as I mentioned before so there's many ways to go about it this just depends on how she would want to do that registration process and that checking process at the actual physical event because now we have the ability to take we should have the ability to take tickets I know it's a good one it was right there we should have the ability to take tickets though but does that answer the question at least from us? I think it does I mean it's yeah her question has a very large scope but I think especially with that technology stack you demonstrated earlier there's a lot of tools in there to help her along that process and she's offline now she's going to be watching later but yeah I think that's a a good start a good foundation so thank you for that perfect but yeah that's anybody else have any questions if not we will wrap it up I think that's it from the online side all right all right I'm going to stop sharing my screen well thank you everybody for attending I appreciate you all for attending here in person this was this is awesome thank you hopefully I didn't do do too bad and I will be I don't have the slides here but I will have them available I'll make sure that I'm going to send them all out make sure everybody gets them as well too the slides once I get them available and then everybody here I'm virtually I'll make sure everybody gets the slides as well too I'm going to send the message through the meet up and through Slack as well and then our next meet up I'm going to be thinking of next month when is that going to be but most likely it's going to be here as well so hopefully we'll have even more of a turnout because then the first one is always the the rough one the experiment one but yeah I'm going to start getting more organizers to help out I'm going to get more feedback about topics shall we talk about so that way I can kind of cater towards that I just want to have a very introductory foundational yeah before we get to all the nitty and gritty you what you should look for yeah yeah yeah yeah that's what this was about well thank you all as well too


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