Welcome everyone to Copywriting for the Web, today's best practices. Thank you all for joining us today. My name is Becky Wiegand, and I'm the Webinar Program Manager here at TechSoup, and I'm happy to be your host for today's event. You are using ReadyTalk, so before we get started I'd like to make sure everyone is comfortable chatting into us on the lower left side of your screen if you need help at any time. You can do so to ask questions or to get help with any technical issues you may experience. Most of you are here in the audio play through your computer speakers, so if at any time you are hearing an echo, you may be logged in more than once and might need to close additional instances. Or if the slides and audio don't stay in sync, we recommend dialing into the toll-free phone number at any time to get clear audio from the phone and phone line. There is an audio access code that has been shared out as well by my colleague Allie, so look in that chat window. 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So feel free to open that up and use those and look at those as we go along. If you get disconnected, rejoin the meeting with this green Join Meeting button. Again, my name is Becky Wiegand and I'm the Webinar Program Manager here at TechSoup. Today is my 9-year anniversary at TechSoup, so I'm happy to be with you as your host. We are joined today by Dalia Masachi who is a writer and the founder of Writing for Community Success. She is the award-winning author of the 2011 book Writing to Make a Difference, 25 Powerful Techniques to Boost Your Community Impact. And she has more than 20 years of experience on everything from writing to the web, project management, editing, and coaching. And she's actually helped coach here and trained some of our internal writers here at TechSoup, so we're really happy to have her on. You can learn more about her work at WritingToMakeaDifference.com. And we will share out more of her info as we go along and you'll have an opportunity to sign up for her newsletter and access some of her resources throughout this webinar. I'm headquartered here in our TechSoup office as well as my colleague Ali Bazdikian who you'll see on the back end helping answer your questions. We are way over here. Tell us on the map where you are joining us from in the world today. And then we'll go ahead and get started with our topic with our expert Dalia Masachi on Copywriting for the Web. So thank you all for wishing me happy anniversary. I appreciate that. We've got folks chiming in from Baltimore, Missouri, San Francisco as well, Michigan, Illinois, Boston, Wisconsin, D.C., Atlanta, Des Moines, Florida, all over the place, Toronto. So thank you everyone for joining us. We're really glad to have you on. So with that I'd like to go ahead and have Dalia come on the line. We have some questions to kind of ask you to get an idea from our audience of participants what your level of experience is first because that also gives us an idea of kind of where to target with some of the content that Dalia will be covering today. So I'm going to open this up. And Dalia, feel free to chime in here. But how long have you been writing for the web? Go ahead and check the radio button on screen that most reflects your level of experience. And if there's something other you'd like to write, feel free to chat that into us. Give just a moment for people to respond to this one. We have about 150 people on the line with us at the moment. We'll give a few more seconds. Yes, you're coming through loud and clear. Thanks for joining us, Dalia. You're welcome. And I'm excited to be here with everyone. It sounds like we have a great group from all over. So let's work together. Yeah, and I'm going to go ahead and show the results on this one. And if you want to share any other experience or background with our audience, you're welcome to do that. But it looks like it's pretty even split really. We've got a three-way split between some brand new folks within the past few months who have been starting to write copy for the web, some who are a few years, and another 30% that are more than five. So it's a pretty clear split between our audience. Okay, yes, that's great. We'll hopefully be able to help each other and address questions from all different levels of experience. Absolutely. So here's another question we have for you. Are you involved in the decision-making about your web copy? Are you involved in actually implementing the copy changes on your website? So maybe you're the one that goes in and actually makes those edits. Are you doing both? Or maybe you don't have either of those roles, and maybe you do something else. And you're just here because you're interested in the topic. It looks like so far the great majority from what I can see on the back end are doing both. And some that are decision-makers. Kathy asked a good question right now, and I know you can't all see the chat, so we'll do our best to manage questions in the back and share out any tips that are shared from the audience with the rest of you. But she asked, will you define web copy? So Dahlia, what would you say as web copy's definition? Sure, I'm happy to do that. The word copy is really all about text. So whatever text appears on your website would be considered web copy. We also use the word content for it, web content. And usually content involves the text and the graphics or the photos. So I'm actually going to be talking about both today, but my emphasis is on the text or the writing, the copy part. That's great. And yeah, I would agree that it can be more than just text when you're talking about overall content and content planning. But yeah, the copy is what we're primarily focused on today. But let's go ahead and do this last slide. It looks like the prior poll question, it was nearly 90% of you are both decision maker and implementer of web copy changes. So that crowd is pretty unanimous or close to unanimous. And then this one is just how frequently, when was the last time you made these updates or updates to your web copy? Was it this week? Was it in the last couple of months? Or maybe it's been a few months since your site has been updated. And again, we'll give just a few more seconds for people to respond, and then we'll dive into Dalia's content. It looks like over half of you have made updates this week, which is great. And 35% or so in the last one to two months and 12% more than three or more months ago. So a little chunk that's got some content that's staying up for quite a while. So with that, I'd like to go ahead and turn it over to you, Dalia, to take it away and talk people through your background and your expertise here that you're going to share with us. Thanks so much. Okay, thank you Becky. And I'm excited that we've got people, most of you all are working on your site kind of regularly. So that's excellent. Glad to hear that. We've got some people who haven't been working on their site for a while, and that's okay. We're going to kind of hope to prod you along to get you to do a little bit more of that. And let's see, going on here to this. I think this is where we start. Yeah. Okay, so this is just a little bit about my background in addition to what Becky shared. I've been actually working in the sector for about over 20 years. And I have authored lots of different types of documents. Today we're focusing on a website. My book Writing to Make a Difference covers pretty much everything, but we're going to focus and customize it today to specifically on website copy and or content. And I've trained tons of people, thousands of people actually. So I'm happy to answer any questions. And I just wanted to kind of put that out there. There is a chat window, so feel free to ask your questions. We will hold them until the end when we're going to be doing a Q&A session. So we will hopefully get your question. And if we don't at that time, I'm happy to follow up with you and provide you some answers. Okay, there's just a little bit more about me. I don't need to bore you with that. Okay, so let's move on to the outline of what we're going to be talking about today. So first question, why is WebCon be writing so important in the first place? Why do we care about it so much? Then we're going to be looking at three keys to planning your website copy. We're going to be talking about what today's web users are about and what they're thinking about, where they're coming from. Then we're going to be looking at some specific strategies and tactics concerning usability and accessibility to improve your website. Then we'll do a little bit of an introduction to SEO, Search Engine Optimization that is people finding you via search engines on the web. Hopefully we will have some time to look at some websites including one from a client of mine that is kind of a work in progress. And then hopefully we'll be able to get to three more that were submitted by folks like you for today's webinar. And finally we'll have that Q&A session that I mentioned. Okay, so first of all, what's the big deal about web copy or web content? Why is it so important? Well, three big things here.  They want to know first off, what is this about? What is this organization about? Can I figure it out in just a couple, two to three seconds? Because that's really all I'm going to give you of my time unless I know who you are. I also want to know who this website is for. Is it for people like me? Is it for someone else? I want to know if it's really relevant to my life. And finally, once I kind of know who the organization is and who the website is for, I need to know why should I care about what you're doing? Why should I get involved? Why should I care?  So those are the big three questions and I'll kind of come back to some of those or at least those ideas throughout this presentation today. Well, actually before I go on to Plano Keys, I wanted to say a couple more things here in terms of the contents importance. Your website is not just your brochure. And sometimes people think of a website as, oh, it's an online brochure. Well, no, it's actually much more than that. It's an opportunity to engage your user or your reader in your work on many different levels, not just reading through like a brochure but to actually interact with you and be part of your work. So I encourage you to think of your website as much more than just a static kind of thing which is why I also encourage you to work on it regularly to update it, make it a living document. Folks, okay, so that's all I need to say on that. Then let's move on to planning. Okay, so I promised you three planning keys to start thinking about how am I going to put this website together or how am I going to upgrade my current website. So the first planning key is to focus on your brand. And sometimes people may or may not know what I mean by brand, so I'm just going to kind of get it all on the same page here. When I talk about brand, I'm talking about these kinds of things on this slide. What your organization stands for, what you want to be known for, and if your organization were a person, what would be your personality? What would be your identity? So if someone were to think about your organization what would spring to mind? That's all of that is part of your brand, and this is something that you need to reflect throughout your website. Let me explain.  That is, what makes your organization different from anything else out there? Right, so you know that web surfers are just kind of sick old sometimes, and they're just looking at a website and surfing away very quickly if they don't get what they need. And part of that is they want to know why is this website or how is this website different from any other ones? So for you, I have some suggestions that you might want to think about in terms of how you can set your organization apart, or specifically talk about it in your website. So these are just some suggestions. Perhaps you work with clients who are not being served very well, maybe in a location that is not served very well. Perhaps you have an innovative way to address a stubborn problem that is on your reader's mind, and you have kind of a new or fresh way of dealing with it, so that could set you aside as a unique organization. Maybe you're filling a gap in your community that is not filled by anyone else. Perhaps you have outstanding credentials or experience as an organization that really steps you above and beyond. So I encourage you to think about this type of thing in terms of your brand. And you may have already done that. Perhaps your organization has done a strategic planning process or a branding process. So you may already have some of these answers, which is great. If you haven't, I encourage you to think about that because that will be important as you start to plan your website and the types of content that you need to include in the site. So here's just a little opportunity for you to think for a couple of minutes here to type in, when someone hears about your organization, what's one unique fact or feeling that you want them to associate with you? I'll just give you a minute or so to type something in. We've got folks chiming in responses, compassion, enabling the future of healing, providing a safe, stable home, supporting youth, dignity, all kinds of adjectives. Alrighty. Yeah, I'm looking at the chat window here. Let's see. Great. Yeah, alright. Well, I'm seeing a lot of very, very positive phrases. And I wondered if people can make them a little bit more specific as they think about their specific issue and their specific way of dealing with it. For example, if your work focuses on forests or children or education or something like that, that's important to your work, but what sets you apart in that field of endeavor? That's the type of thing that I would encourage you to think about in terms of your uniqueness. And I see that some people are typing in things along those lines. That's excellent. Let's just take a couple more seconds on this. Okay. In addition to that, as you think about your uniqueness, I think it's important for you to think about why is your issue so crucial and compelling that it has to be addressed right now, because we know that web readers are all about right now instantly, right? They want to get their answers right now, and they want to know the most up-to-date information. So I encourage you to think about what makes your website so important that they must read it right now. Let's move on to planning key number two. So the first one is all about your brand. Think of through that how can I really focus and permit my brand. The second planning key is to really think about your specific users. Who's going to be coming to your website, and what do they need when they get there? These are just some examples of the types of people who may be visiting your website. Movies, that is, people who have no idea what you're about. They've never heard of your organization. They may or may not really understand your issue either. On the other side of the spectrum, we have very experienced folks who know a lot about it, and they're really thinking, they're looking for more in-depth information. Then we have donors. We have clients or members, volunteers. There may be some media coming to your website, colleagues and college organizations, and finally, researchers. There may be some other groups that you can identify, but this is just a list here to get you thinking about who are these people. All right, so these are just some basic things we know about web readers in general that I wanted to share with you. So the first one is we know they have short attention spans. And I mentioned briefly a few minutes ago that people give you about two or three seconds to really kind of impress them. When they come to your website, they're all about, okay, impress me, otherwise I'm going to go to another website. So I really encourage you to think about if people have shorter attention spans, how am I going to grab them and engage them quickly. Another kind of point related to that is people read slower on screen than they do on paper. So again, if we've got inpatient short attention span people, they're not going to want to read a lot on your website, at least not right away. As I mentioned before, they need to know the content is relevant to them before they read it, before they give more commitment to your website. We know people scan websites. They usually look at the first two paragraphs, the headlines, the subheads, and they're looking for bold or unusual characters, usually bold or color characters. We'll jump out off the page at them. And finally, if you're lucky, they get to the ending and kind of look for that. But usually, they're looking more towards the first one or two screens to make their assessment of whether they want to spend more time with you or not. Finally, the good thing about it is that your website is shareable. So we know that web readers will share your content if they like it, and like brochures. I encourage you to put your viewer or your reader in the spotlight. So when they are reading your website, they're coming from their point of view. So what you need to do is show them that you understand what they're going through or what they're looking for, and you're going to show them how you can help them be part of whatever solution they're seeking. So if they're seeking a solution for themselves or if they're seeking a solution for their larger community, they want to know that they can be part of that solution and that your organization can help them do that. You also want to encourage their trust in you. We all know that the Internet is full of not so great information or not so trustworthy information. So we want to make sure that the information that we impart on our website is trustworthy. Your website is also a great way to make sure that you keep them connected to you. That's kind of I mentioned that earlier. And your website also should steer them to relevant information that they're looking for. So again, I'm saying them, them, them because I want to encourage you to put them in the spotlight and finally inspire them with success. So you're sharing the success that you've had in an attempt to inspire them that they can be part of it in the future. So how do we instill that trust in organizations especially when we're kind of online and there's a lot of fake information out there. There are several ways that we can do that. One way is to talk about who's already on board with your organization.  Do you have mentions in the press that can show, hey, we have a third party endorser here as well as excellence ratings, charity navigators, Better Business Bureau, great non-profits.org, all of these types of websites are great to help endorse you. And finally, your website should show that you are transparent about everything, that you're not holding things back or covering things up. So I encourage you to really think, get serious about this whole trust issue. So what is some information you need to gather about your potential readers? These are just a few suggestions to get you going in that direction. Think about their values. Think about what problems they're trying to solve and what goals might they have that you can help them with. And finally, especially if you're dealing with an issue that is not very well understood or is kind of under the radar, I encourage you to think about what they already know or what they don't know or what they believe about your work or what they might not believe. And that kind of goes into the category of misconception. So sometimes we have to kind of deal with those issues. And a website is a great opportunity to offer all kinds of information and ways to encourage people to see things from different perspectives. So that's another idea that I encourage you to do when you're thinking about your readers and you're gathering the information you need for focusing on their needs. Okay, so let's move on to planning number three, planning key number three. So we looked at number one, which was focus on the brand. Then number two, which was really focus on the needs of your specific readers. And then the planning key number three, the final one is to think about the benefits that you're offering as opposed to just the features. Now what do I mean by that? Let me explain it in as concisely as I can. When we talk about features, we're talking about programs, components, or characteristics of what you offer. Usually it's the services that you've got going in your organization. Okay, so if someone were to ask you what you do, you probably are going to answer with some features, but I encourage you to dig a little level deeper than that into the benefits. That is, how do those program services features improve the lives of your clients and community? How do they satisfy their needs and desires? Let's look at a few examples of what I mean by that. So benefits answer these basic questions. What does your work mean for your clients or community? What's in it for me and us? Notice in business it's all what's in it for me, but in the nonprofit sector we say what's in it for me and us, the community. And I like this middle one here. For each feature you offer, ask so what who cares? That's a really tough, sometimes that can be really tough to answer, but it's really important throughout all of your work, all of your communications work specifically on your website. So so what who cares? Let's look at some examples of what that's like. Okay, so here's an example with a homeless shelter. They have standard features that you would expect out of a homeless shelter. And then you think about the benefits, the so what who cares for the impact. And I just have listed a few of them here, higher level of nutrition and stability, higher level of employment, fewer families living in cars or on the street, the sense of being a community that cares for everyone. Those are starting to answer the questions, so what who cares? And those are key questions that people coming to your website are going to want to know the answers to. Here's another great example. I like this one from an organization called Slow Food USA. You may have heard of it. This actually comes from their mission statement. And they say in the first part what they do, their features. And then they ask the question, so what? They actually say so, and the word so can help you answer that benefit question, so that together we can ensure equity, sustainability, and pleasure in the food we eat. So this is a great example of going into that so what question. I'm just going to give you a couple minutes to think about what might be the answer to your so what question. What is the ultimate outcome result or benefit that your community gets from your program? Take a minute to think about that and type it in. Lots of interesting responses, and we know you can't read them all in the back end, but we've got examples like we provide literacy classes and tutoring so that adults in our community can gain independence, have a better quality of life, and improve their education. Every student has the opportunity to imagine, create, and realize their full potential through their lives. We create the curriculum and assessment tools so that you don't have to just read the scripts and start teaching right away. Those are just some examples that I've read from the comments coming in. There's also so often children receive an education, enough food and clothing, and a safe place to live. Lots of different types of works that are chiming in in the back end here, arts organizations, libraries, K-12, lots of community-based nonprofits, small businesses, so lots of input. Excellent. And just as I'm seeing the scroll here in the chat window, I see a lot of people are using the word so to answer the question, which is excellent. I don't want to just know what you do, but I want to know why it makes a difference, and you can use that so word to answer the so what question. So, bravo everyone. You're really moving in that direction, and I'm glad to hear that because it will be so very important to use that kind of thinking when you start working on your website. Okay, and this is just one more reminder. Whenever you talk about your programs, also list the so what who cares benefits. So that was my little very brief spiel about the three planning keys for your website. And now we're going to move into the next section, which is some specifics about how to increase your usability and accessibility for your website. So I'm just going to kind of go through rapid fire here. And again, as Becky said, you will be receiving these slides. So the first tip I have for you is go from the we to the you. And remember I said a little while ago that we want to make the user be the person in the spotlight, not the organization. So we're going to move from the we, the organization to the you, the reader. And here's an example of that. So in the original we have we want to bring native plans back to our community, but we need your help. Who's the focus of those two sentences? Obviously the organization, the we. Let's flip it around and have the focus be the reader. You can help improve our city's environment. Plant and save native plants. They bring many benefits to our community and help avoid eco trouble down the line. Okay, so the focus of those few sentences is you or the reader. And the secret here is the word you can really help you. If you start thinking in terms of you kind of having a conversation with your reader you can start thinking about how can I frame things from their point of view. Here's another great little trick when it comes to that. You can think about using the word imagine or just the concept of imagining what it would be like to be in your organization from the point of view of one of your users. Let me just give you a minute to read through this. And if you have a reaction please type it in. Well we do have some comments coming in saying it's a little long or maybe we would want to break these paragraphs into shorter chunks for easier scanning. But then also some people saying it's powerful imagery. Another person saying sounds a little bit like an advertisement. So kind of some different perspectives coming in on this. Yes, it's very interesting when I use this example with groups around the country I get a whole wide range of responses. And that kind of tells, that kind of goes to something I said earlier which is the importance of knowing who your readers are and what is of interest to them, what they want to get out of your website. So this appeals to some readers and doesn't appeal to others. And that's okay. So this is something that you might want to test or this kind of thing might be something that you would want to test on your website or test in a focus group or something like that to see how it lands with your target audience. In terms of its length it is a little bit long. You might want to chop it up into one or two sentence segments. This actually came from a website I saw called GuyDongs.com. And they apparently had found that it works well because they decided to use it on their website for quite some time. I was just encouraging you to think about this exercise of imagine thinking about how can I encourage my reader to imagine him or herself in the story of my organization. I wanted to point out this little heat map. This is from usit.com. And they've done a lot of research on this. The red and yellow areas are where users spend the most time on a website. So we're noticing obviously it's on the left hand side kind of the beginning of things, the upper left. So it's where you want to put your most critical information. So it's the first two words of a sentence or a paragraph. It's the top of the page as opposed to requiring them to scroll down to get that critical information. I just wanted to kind of impress this on you, this red and yellow area. That's where you want to get your juiciest information to your readers. Okay. Kind of along those lines, the first 56 or so words are the most important. And for those who are familiar with the inverted pyramid style of writing that is often a good idea on the web. That's when you put the conclusion first and then the supporting facts and the details later on. And that's because again, your website readers have short attention spans. They're looking at the beginning of things. They don't want to scroll down to get the juicy information. So you want to summarize your main point here with focusing on benefits. Remember not just features.  And you want to tell what the page is about and why they should read it in your first few lines. That goes back to the very beginning of my presentation that people are very interested in those three questions. What are you about? Who is this for? And why should I care? Very important on the web is chunking your information. So you want to use easy-to-understand categories. You want to make sure you're using subheads as much as you can because people, again I mentioned this earlier, people are interested in reading your subheads. They may not read the text, but they want to read the subheads. Actually your subheads should provide enough information if people were just to read the subheads for them to know what you're trying to convey on that webpage. If you have a list of three or more items, I encourage you to number it or bullet it again to make it easy to scan. And if you've got a juicy quote coming out of your story to see if you can highlight that or feature it in some way on the site again because people are drawn to those kinds of things as opposed to just a block of text. Focus on your headlines. Headlines are important in newspapers, but they're super important on the web as well. It goes in terms of headlines and subheads. These are just some thoughts about headlines. And you know, I want to make sure that we get to the web review so I'm not going to read through all of these slides. I'm going to just point out some highlights. So now we're moving into the SEO or the search engine optimization section here. One big part of SEO is keywords, that is words that people will type in when they're looking for something related to your organization or your issue. I encourage you to use those keywords as much as you can throughout your site, preferably two to three times on a short page and more times than that if it's a longer page. Call them out with bold italics or links. A good resource for keyword research is Google or wordtracker.com. What is the ideal sound online? How do I want my tone to be? I want it to be conversational. And this goes back to what I said earlier that it's really about you.  So I'm going to start to write or think in terms of you and your. It's okay to use sentence fragments or be a little bit more casual online in tone. I encourage you to think, to sound like a savvy best friend. So you're smart, but you're not intimidating. And you're easy to understand. So if you have to choose between being clear and being clever, definitely think about being clear. Okay. If you've got blogs on your website and I highly encourage you to have a blog on your website, then the writer's voice is going to come through because your blog is probably going to be written by more than one person. And the blog gives your writers an opportunity to express themselves and use their personal point of view. So if you do have blogs I encourage you to let the writer's voice blossom. Okay. Of course websites use links a lot. And sometimes people don't use links very clearly or these are some best practices when it comes to using links. You want to send the reader to important background information instead of kind of having it all there in one massive block, right? You want to send people elsewhere to find that background information or to explain unusual terms. Links help emphasize important information. They're kind of like bold in terms of calling out things for people to follow up on or to really focus on. These are some ideas in terms of using links strategically. Include a brief description of just a few words when you're thinking about using a link. If you have a vague link like more info or click here it doesn't really give your reader a sense of what they're going to get when they click there. So I encourage you to have more informative links. For example, learn more about the latest report on climate change and then you make that phrase into the link. Another example, list of foods high in calcium. So you would have it in your sentence and then you would just make it a link as opposed to making it a more info or click your link. Calls to action or CTAs are super important when it comes to web copies. These are essentially a call to action is pretty much what it says. It's an effort to get your reader to actually engage with you in some way to take action as opposed to just reading your website. So whatever that action is that you're encouraging them to do make sure you're including all the details they need to do it. Easy ways to do it. If there's a deadline or a special offer make sure that's very clear. Remind them of the benefits, that word again, remind them of the benefits that they're going to enjoy if they do act now and encourage them to make comments. That's another great way that they can engage with you on the web. Encourage them to use the comment section below whatever website or blogs you've got. Again, it builds community and offers people a way to express themselves. I'm not going to go into these other SEO tips because we're running long time, but again you will be getting this presentation. I did want to mention just have a little plug here for editing because I think editing is super important. On the web if you don't edit your website people are going to come to it and they may find it not credible. Or problematic because it's your representative on the web.  I like this quote from Robert Cormier. It's a beautiful part of writing is that you don't have to get it right the first time unlike say a brain surgeon. Keep that in mind. Make sure that your website is promoting your organization in the most professional way possible. One great way to make sure that you're doing that is being as concise as you can. Less is more. And I gave a few ideas here about that. I made up this Vizac and I added an S here to kiss. Keep it short, simple, and scannable. Tell them how to ask right away and why. These are things that we've been talking about. Your sentences should be no more than 10 to 14 words. The 14 is kind of a long sentence especially online. You want to keep it to more like 10 words. Or fewer if you can. It's all about sound bites right? See if you can write in a way that's almost tweet-worthy. Almost like a tweet. It doesn't have to be that concise all the time. But you want to move in that direction. The first one to three screens are the most important. So you want to make sure that you're getting all of your juicy information right up there. And search engines like to have at least 250 words in on a page. So you don't want to have super short pages but you don't want to make them too long either. Just a reminder about proofreading. I'm not going to go into that right now. Graphics, super important part to compliment your text. And I like to say it's not just a cherry on top, it's actually integrated with your text. Make sure that you're using photos and other graphic elements that will enhance your text and draw your reader's eye. Draw in your reader's eye. One of the downloads that you have that's part of this presentation is what I call a swipe file. Actually not just me, but lots of people call it a swipe file. It's basically an idea generator. It's a list or a compilation of other websites that you found really interesting or that you want to stay away from, things that you don't want to do kind of reminders for yourself. So it's an internal idea factory. And I offer you a starter for a website as one of the downloads. Okay, so let's just take a look at a few websites here. And then I'll take a gander at some submissions. Change.org, I like this is just a website that you might want to look at. Notice the quick text that they have here, kind of call to action, and nice photos. Then we've got nature.org, very simple graphic here, almost no text. But the text that they use is very impactful. diva.org is another great one. Again with a short text, little snippets, and a call to action right there, LendNow or Browse All Loans. Do something. I like this one. My thing about this one is I don't know if you can read the text there under About Us, but they know their audience and they use the language that their audience would use. So that's just a heads up on that. Okay, so let's look at some submissions here. And what I'm going to be doing is I'm going to talk about what I thought was really great and what could be improved. And I encourage you to do the same as I look at them. So feel free to type in your thoughts about these websites as well. I think I want to just start with this one. Yeah, this is from a client of mine. It's a work in progress called the Washoe Meadows Community. And just a few things that I like that we are working on on this site. In their People tab right here, before they had almost no bios and they decided, oh, we want to put some bios of our folks. And I encourage them to do that. I also encourage them to have little thumbnails here with a link to their bios further down the page. I'm a huge fan of what is called internal links, these links that will jump you down. So you know what's on the page before you even read through it. Let's see on their Campaign page. I like, here's another example of it. They use these subheads and you can click down to them. Let's see on their Take Action page. They have a flyer which is a really nice kind of summation of their work. And I encourage them to use it right there at the beginning of their Take Action page to encourage people to print out the flyer and use it. Notice their navigation bar here, these links here at the top. Notice how there aren't very many of them. They kept them to a minimum and they put them in the order that they think people will probably use them. So that was another tip that they used. I like that they have a lot of pictures on their site, really nice. If you go in their photos they have a gallery and they have really nice photos here. I encourage them, they haven't done this yet, but I'd like to see some captions on those photos so we know what we're looking at. Okay, let's see. There was one other thing I wanted to just point out here. Sometimes if we don't perforate we get things like this. Here on the bottom where it says write wash-o-meadows in and then misaligned, the memo line. That's the kind of thing that you don't want to have on your site. It makes you look pretty unprofessional. So you want to make sure that you don't have that kind of problem. Okay, let's look at the People Supper. And it was submitted by Patrick. I hope Patrick is on the line here today. If you are Patrick feel free to type in whatever chat you'd like as I go through your site. I really liked this site. I liked the clean, simple design that it has. I like the brief text snippets that it uses, an example there. They have some nice calls to action. Let's see, they have a form right there asking you if you want to be part of their email updates. Then they have their social media platforms right here. They encourage people to join their dinners. This is their suppers. It's all about suppers. So they have a lot of call to actions around that. They have an about, under their about they have what, why. I really like that section. It really goes into kind of not only the features like say this is for suppers, but it goes into the benefits. And why would someone want to do this? That was really nice. In their FAQs, they are using a conversational tone. Very nice. And it's very easy to use. The one thing that I had suggestion for this site, if we click on we agree, first of all, I didn't know what we agree meant when I saw the link. So I didn't know what to expect. When I did click on it, it had three simple things that, three simple commitments. And I really liked that. I wanted to see that elsewhere on the site. And I also wanted to see, I thought the second one here, I will show up and be present. That may need a little clarification. It wasn't quite clear what you meant by that. Let's look at this other site. We also got a comment really quickly just to throw in there from a participant who said that the contrast on the menu could provide some challenges for people, particularly if you've got a community of, if your audience consists of people, which kind of frankly everyone's audience consists of people who may have vision challenges or find it hard to read color in the, or not very high contrast. So the pale blue from the menu options and then that pale gray on the white background can be a challenge to read. So keep that in mind. And that came from somebody who says former accessibility consultants. And I think the more we can make our sites accessible to everybody, the more they will be accessible to everybody, right? Excellent, excellent idea. Thank you for mentioning that. Yeah, and that kind of goes along with the whole making sure, making sure that the graphical elements of your site really pop and go along with the text. Okay. This site for Reach Out, Sherry is the one who submitted it. I like the design. I thought there were some nice testimonials on this page if you have to scroll down to get to them. But actually I think it might not be on the home page. It might be elsewhere. But I like the testimonials. I like the contact page especially.  I noticed that. But when we, yeah, here we are at the contact page. So we have all kinds of contact information for all the different programs. I like that. My main challenge with this site when I came to it for the first time, I really struggled to get the answers to my three big questions. What is this site about? Who is it for? And why should I care? I really struggled with that. So I would suggest to really think about making that as clear as possible on the home page. Okay, I'm just going to come off hold because I think that we may have lost Dahlia. I think I have lost her audio too. So we'll try and get her back on if folks aren't able to hear. I know she's still showing the site but I think her line has actually cut off. So I apologize for that. She was giving some great feedback I think and input on this page. And we are actually almost at time. So I am going to wrap us up here since I think we don't have her back on the line yet. And I know she's showing another site, the Wisconsin Agricultural Education. You will get all of the slides and resources that she shared including her swipe file. So for those of you who want to look through all of the recommendations around SEO and the tips that she shared, you can feel free to do that. I'm going to stop sharing but many of you are welcome to go to the WisconsinAge.org website if you want to see what she's showing right now as well. But I'm just conscientious of the fact that she's not on the line to share those tips with us. So I'm going to stop sharing and take us back out to her presentation really quickly. So she did want to offer a special discount for people who are interested in having your website reviewed. If you are, she does this professionally for lots of organizations and helps them and regularly charges $87 for a regular review of your website. If you'd like to do that, she's offering a special discount for the first five folks to message us to say that you'd like to do that for $47. You can get your site reviewed. So feel free to shoot an email to me or chat in this chat window now if that's something you're interested in. And then I can have those passed along to you. You can also, like I said, email me at Becky at TechSoup.org and I can pass those along. So feel free to send that our way and we'll make sure that you can get an opportunity to have your site reviewed. And we wanted to just point out this is where you can find her newsletter. Feel free to sign up. We also have in our post-event survey that we'd invite you to take an opportunity to sign up for her newsletter through that as well. We would love it if you would take a moment and tell us one thing that you learned today that you find most useful. We're skipping around in the slides a bit. I think she still doesn't realize we are off the audio from her line cutting off. So I'm going to wrap us up but if you can let us know one thing that you learned during today's webinar that you're going to take back and try and implement, we would really appreciate it.  Maybe it's taking a moment to try and rewrite your homepage content to be between 10 and 14 words long and no longer. Let us know what things that you're going to help try to do to improve your web copy today. And we would also invite you to join us for TechSoup's other trainings that are coming up including our course catalog which you can find at techsoup.course.tc. So feel free to check out the other courses available. And then starting next week we have a bunch of other webinars coming up and other events that you can find combating nonprofit burnout, managing tech and email overload, libraries as innovation hubs, community driven design, and then we'll be talking about IT staffing, who can you call when you need IT help, and how to access tech donations and resources. So with that I would like to thank you all so much for participating today and I'm sorry we lost Dahlia here at the end. I'm not sure what happened to her line but we appreciate you all being on. Feel free to look in your email. You'll get a follow up email from me later today with the full slides and recording that you can refer to at your convenience. Thank you all so much everyone and have a great day. Bye-bye.


Did you cause a narcissistic injury? A narcissistic injury occurs when the narcissist's elevated self-image is threatened, when they feel like their true self has been revealed. This happens when they feel like they have lost favor or a position of power or honor, when they feel like they have lost acceptance, when their hidden motivations or behaviors have been revealed. A narcissistic injury can also occur when you challenge their egotistical behavior, when you question their practice of thinking and talking about themselves excessively. In many ways, the narcissist has set themselves up to have their ego bruised. They have this undue sense of self-importance and self-centeredness, so anything you do that makes them feel irrelevant or less important will cause a narcissistic injury because they're self-absorbed. They care too much about themselves rather than the feelings or needs of other people, which is why they always have to be the center of attention. They always demand for you to focus on them. And whenever you have other priorities, they will feel like they are unimportant, which will cause a narcissistic injury. Anytime that the narcissist feels like they are not important or relevant, it will cause a narcissistic injury, even if you're just taking time to practice self-care. That is enough to do that. They're like big babies. They need the spotlight to be on them at all times, and if it's not, they will throw a temper tantrum. They will cause drama and chaos. They will try to hurt you. They will do whatever it takes to get you to focus on them again. When they experience a narcissistic injury, it will be followed by narcissistic rage, but it will not always be displayed as open aggression. Sometimes they can be passive aggressive or give you the silent treatment, so it can be difficult to tell whether or not you have caused a narcissistic injury, but I have found free things that will almost always bruise the narcissist's fragile ego and free behaviors that narcissists engage in following this threat to their elevated self-image. So even if you don't see any open aggression, these signs will reveal to you whether or not you have caused a narcissistic injury. One, when you expose the narcissist, when you reveal the narcissist's true characteristic nature, it will cause a narcissistic injury. They may experience fear at first, but this will soon be followed by narcissistic rage. They will fear that you are going to expose them to other people, and this will compel them to talk to other people about you.  They will assassinate your character. They will do whatever it takes to destroy your reputation, so that you are no longer seen as a credible source of information. There is nothing more important to a narcissist than their image of reputation, so they will go all out to protect it.  The narcissist always has to be right. They believe that they are the bearers of truth, and they always need to feel wanted and accepted. If this does not happen, it will threaten their false image and cause a narcissistic injury. When this happens, they will criticise your ideas or opinions. They will try to discredit you. They will target your vulnerabilities and weaknesses, and point out your false mistakes, flaws and imperfections. They will try to divert the focus onto you, so that you are looking at yourself in a negative light. Whenever you reject their ideas, or them as a person, they will always find a way to twist it around, so that you feel like they are rejecting you. Free. When the narcissist feels irrelevant, when they feel like they are no longer relevant, this will cause a narcissistic injury. They have to feel like they are significant and important. They have to feel like they are closely connected or appropriate to the situation, as though they have a useful function or purpose. Otherwise, it will harm their false image. It will make them feel worthless and insignificant, which will cause a narcissistic injury, instead of making the necessary adjustments, so that they could actually be something. They will instead try to make you feel irrelevant. They will treat you with contempt, as though you are worthless and beneath their consideration. These are three of the main things that cause a narcissistic injury. I hope that they have been helpful to you. I am now going to share with you three signs that you have caused a narcissistic injury. One, when they try to make you envious or jealous.  They know that you have the ability to self-reflect. They know that you're going to take it upon yourself before you question or confront them. So they will use this to their advantage. But whenever a narcissist tries to make you envious or jealous of someone or something, that is a sign that you have caused a narcissistic injury. They are doing that because they are trying to project their emotions onto you. They feel envious and jealous of you. And because they are already tuned into that experience, that is what they then try to transfer onto you. You should know that there is nothing to be envious or jealous of. Narcissists are fake, manipulative people. You wouldn't want anything that they have. They're just good at simulating something of value because they've spent their entire lives living vicariously for other people who do have what they want. So they are experts at portraying this to you because they've spent so many years of their life studying it. But whenever the narcissist tries to make you feel envy or jealousy or any other negative emotion, this is a sign that you have caused a narcissistic injury. Two, when they try to expose you, when the narcissist tries to expose you, this is another sign that you have caused a narcissistic injury. If you have made a fault or mistake, they will greatly exaggerate it. In some situations, they will just make it up. They're doing this to take the focus off of them. Maybe they believe that you know something about them. They feel exposed. So now they're trying to expose you. When you threaten to expose a narcissist, it will cause a narcissistic injury. And they will do whatever it takes to protect it. Free.  They feel like you do not honor or value their presence. They feel like they're not good enough for you. Or maybe you did openly reject them or their proposals or ideas. And this then caused a narcissistic injury, which then results in them trying to project their feelings unwanted onto you. Narcissists cannot regulate their own emotions. They need you to do that for them. So whenever a negative emotion comes to the surface, they project it onto you, because it's too painful for them to deal with. But whenever a narcissist makes you feel unwanted or unworthy of something, that is a sign that you have caused a narcissistic injury. Did you cause a narcissistic injury? You will know when you have caused a narcissistic injury because they will start acting differently towards you.  They will make you feel like you're not good enough because that's exactly how they feel. However you feel when you are around a narcissist is likely to be how they feel. And it is likely to be how they want you to feel.  So they expect you to identify with it. They expect you to take on those emotions as your own. This video is here to serve you. By giving you the awareness that these emotions do not belong to you, you cannot make a person feel an emotion that you do not already feel yourself. Emotions are very contagious. So whenever you feel down around a narcissist realize that this has nothing to do with you. It's not something that you have to respond to and spend more time with yourself. Tune into your own emotions. And you will notice that you begin to feel a lot better. Thank you for watching. I hope this video resonated with you. Please like, comment, share and subscribe. If you would like to donate, my PayPal link is in the video description. Coaching inquiries. You can email me at coaching at nartsurvivor.co.uk Thank you for watching and I'll talk to you soon.


Welcome back everyone. My name is Brian. And in this video, we're going to cover lists. A list is a complex data type compared to what we've been talking about. It's very complex. So far we've covered bulls, numbers and strings, but the list is well, vastly more complex as we're about to see. So first off, what is a list? Well, it's an ordered list or collection of data. And what do I mean by that? Imagine we add an item, that item is going to be at position zero, meaning the first item you add is always zero. And as we add items, you guessed it, that index will increment. Go ahead and add an item here. So zero, one, two. And these items, they can be the same. They can be different. They can be something totally crazy. Whatever we want to do. This is the beauty of Python. So the list doesn't have to be what's called typed, meaning you don't have to have the same data type. That's how a lot of lists work in a lot of different programming languages. You can intermix strings with numbers and custom data types. The main takeaway before we dive in here is that this is an ordered zero based index, meaning it will be added in the order you add them. And the first item is always zero. From zero, it goes to one and two and so on and so on. Okay, let's go ahead and create a list. First thing you'll notice in our notes here is I have these square brackets right here. What that denotes is that it is a list. It's important that you remember that because we're going to talk about other data types that are very similar to a list, but they are different. And they use a different style. So first things first, let's create our list. Remember the square brackets. I'm going to say X equals square brackets. And anything we put inside the square brackets becomes part of the list. For example, I'm going to say Brian. And we're going to add another item by I've seen comma and then whatever we want to put in here. So we have two strings in there.  If you're coming from another language, I'm going to add a number. That's right. This is not a typed list. You might be used to something like C++ where, well, you have to have a specific type. It can only have strings or only have numbers. Python is not like that at all. It makes it very flexible, very easy. So let's go ahead and put a note in here. We can mix data types. And let's go ahead and print this out. And I want to say list going to print our list out. Good old copy and paste. Let's put this down here. And let's get the length. So you can see right off the bat, our list is this right here. And it's inside those square brackets. Always remember square brackets or lists, and we can have two strings and a number we could add whatever we want. And there are three items in there.  It makes it super convenient, super easy to create your own data structures on the fly. Let's make a special note here about indexing and positioning. So this really confuses a lot of people. We think like, well, humans, the first item is always one. Well, computers don't think that way. The first item is always zero because you're starting with nothing. So when we talk about lists, this is zero based. Let's go ahead and let's grab our friend print here. And let's say we want zero. So to grab the first item in that list, simply say square brackets and the index. Now note, we are not creating a list. We're saying inside of that list, get that index. In this case, it's the zero or the first item. I'm going to put that in all caps for you newbies out there. The first item is zero. Remember, humans think the first item is one. Computers think the first item is zero because you're starting with nothing. Now, if you watch the previous video on strings, and I hope you did, you understand what slicing is. But just in case you skipped it, a slice is a lot like making a slice of bread.  You just want a slice of it or a slice of pie is probably a better example. So we're going to print this out and we're going to slice this. So I'm going to say I want X and then we're going to you guessed it. Now notice those are square brackets as well. We didn't cover this in the last video, but yes, when you see that square bracket, that means we want a piece of this list or in this case, a slice of it. I'm just going to put some quotes here or some quotes, some comments, slice the list. So what this is going to do is it's going to say X and we have a starting position and an ending position. We're going to go from the first to the second. Now remember, the first is not the first item. It's position one. Remember that gets super confusing as far as zero based indexes. To illustrate that one to two position is actually Karen's. So what we're doing is we're taking this list here, and we're saying zero one to two. So it's going to stop. If we omit the second position, we're going to get the remainder of this. We're going to say we want that whole slice right there. So let's demonstrate that works as expected. Slicing is a very convenient way of getting a sub item. You may be thinking lists are great, but now that I've created the list, how do I add items to it? That's a common question. So that's what we're going to cover in this little section here is how to add the items and you can either append or insert. And both of them do well exactly what they sound like they do. For example, X append, we are going to say append pizza. Let's go ahead and X dot append. I'm doing this twice for a reason and you'll see why here in just a second. Add beer because everybody likes pizza and beer right now we want to insert. So append will put things at the end in the order you put them. Notice we did two of pads, pizza and beer. So it's going to add pizza, then it's going to add beer and it's going to do both of those at the end. Now insert allows you to say I want to put this at a specific position. So because we're talking about a specific, I need to give it a number and in this case one, you notice it wants an index, an integer of where you're going to put this in the list. So I'm simply going to say one and let's add cats. So following along what we're doing here is we're adding pizza to the end of this list, then we're adding beer. Then we're going to go to the one position, not the beginning. The beginning would be zero. Remember, we're going to go to the one position and add cats. Let's go ahead and add a few notes here. That way anybody who downloads this code off GitHub will just have the notes and be able to easily follow along. Now let's go ahead and do a print. And I want to see this list in its entirety. And let's see what this looks like. Okay, down here you can see we have our list and we have Brian and then cats got inserted in the first position. And then my name Karen's 46. And then it did pizza and beer. Very important to understand that append will do it in the order you append it. So it put pizza at the end of the list. Then it put beer at the end of the list. Very simple. Once you wrap your head around that just trips up a lot of newbies. Just bear that in mind when you're adding things. If you want a specific index you need to do insert. If you want to slap it at the end, you do append. Okay, now that we've added items let's talk about how we get rid of items. We're talking about removing. Let's remove pop and delete. And these do things very differently even though at first glance they may seem very, very similar. So I'm going to say x.remove. And I want to remove cats. I'm not a big fan of removing cats because I happen to love cats but you know what I mean. Sometimes you just got to get the cats out. So what remove is going to do is go through and remove the first item here. Let's grab our print statement, slap that down here and let's run this. Alright, so you can see Brian cats. Karen's now it's Brian Karen's we've removed cats. So just remove that first item there. Now let's talk about pop. Now don't get excited pop is not like Coke or Pepsi or anything like that. But what we want to do is we want to remove an item but at the same time return it meaning we want to be able to work with it here. So I'm going to say I equals and we're going to do x.index because we want to find something here. We want to find pizza. Now this will raise an error if it's not found in there. So if you just look for something crazy it's not going to return negative one. And there really isn't a find remember we talked about find in the last video where it returned a negative one. This is just going to say hey there's an error and it's going to crash your program. That sounds really bad until we get into more advanced discussions where we talk about how to get around that and why it even exists in the first place. So just big leap of faith at the moment. We know that pizza is in there because we appended it. We're going to get that index because nobody wants to hear and count and figure out what position this is actually at. We're going to say food and we're going to pop. Now when you think pop think of it like popping the top off of a nice cold soda or beer whatever your favorite beverages. You now have that cap in your hand after you've popped it off. That's at least how I learned pop. So when you pop off the cap you still have that cap in this case it is the item at index of whatever pizza's at. Sounds super confusing. It really really does. But it's really simple once you see it in action. So what we're going to do here is I'm going to clear this list just to avoid any confusion. And we're going to run this. Boom. So what's going on here we have our list and see there's pizza in there. And we're going to pop meaning we're going to pop the cap off that thing that's in our hand and we now have that bottle cap. And that bottle cap is pizza so we can now use that. But once we've popped it it's no longer in the list see how it removed it. Very convenient if you want to remove the item but at the same time use the item. Seems a little confusing but bear with me. That is actually used quite a bit when you get in a little bit more advanced programming. All right next up we're going to talk about deleting. So I want to say I equals say X index.  No one wants to do that we just want the computer to figure out where it's actually at for us. So once we get that index and I should put a special note here. This will raise an error if not found. But once we get that we want to actually just delete it. So I'm going to say D L X and then whatever that position was. Now this will delete the item without returning it and I'm going to copy and paste some notes in here. So delete a specific item without returning it where pop will remove and return the item. Fundamental difference there. Which one would you use and why well pop is if you want to actually use it delete is if you want it gone. Now when you delete this it's gone you cannot use it it doesn't even exist in memory anymore. And that's why it's called delete because you're literally deleting that out of memory. If you're coming from like C or C++ or any other language that does memory management. Yes you are actually deleting that out of memory. Now under the hood what's really happening is that you're actually deleting that out of memory. Now under the hood what's really happening is pythons flagging that for garbage collection and all this other fancy stuff that newbies don't really understand. But if you're more of an advanced person that's what's going on is Python saying get rid of it out of the Python internal list. We're just going to let garbage collection wipe it out later on. Save run this is what's going on here so we found the index of beer and we deleted it. Pretty cool pretty easy to understand so major takeaway from removing items if remove will remove the first one pop will remove it but let you play with it. You can do whatever you want and delete will well actually delete it and get rid of it. Let's talk about extending or adding elements from another list and this will be a little bit confusing but bear with me here so. There's a reason why you would extend rather than just add a list and it's because Python you can actually add less in the list which we're going to cover at the very end of this video but it gets super confusing. So let's look at this so we're going to say we're going to make another list and let's call this cats. Mama dogs. Mama birds and in case somebody out there is like well how would you actually add a comma you wouldn't add a comma directly you'd add it as string like that. But we're just going to add in cats dogs and birds into our list called why now the list we've been working with is called X. So we want to take the contents of why and put it inside of X. So we're going to say X dot extend. Sometimes IntelliSense helps us out sometimes it doesn't. And we're going to extend with the Y list. Let's go ahead and print this out. Notice we're printing X. What do you think pop quiz what do you think this is going to look like when we run this. Well if you said it's going to have the contents of both lists you're absolutely correct. Now notice how what it's done is it's taken our X and added the elements of Y to it. So these are now true items inside of X. Very cool how that works. So let's talk about sorting. And when I say sorting we mean sorting and reverse sorting meaning doing the exact opposite of like an alphabetical. So let's go ahead and say sort and reverse. Now think of this as like sort ascending sort descending. Now our list is a mixture right now and what do I mean by a mixture. So if we just take this print this out run it. You can see how we got string string int string string string. We're going to have problems with this integer and we're going to have to take that out and I'll demonstrate this really really quickly. So I'm going to say X dot sort. And this is where a lot of newbies get tripped up and it goes not supported between instances of int and string. And it's exactly that. So it's saying it knows how to sort strings. And it knows how to sort numbers but it doesn't know how to sort a string to a number. So think about that.  Well how do you want them sorted do you want the potatoes in the apple sorted or do you want them sorted by color but they're all different colors and this is what I mean. Python gets really confused and it just says you know what I'm not even going to try and figure this out. I'm just going to drop an error. Let you just figure it out on your own. The easiest way to get rid of this at this point is to simply remove it. So I'm going to say X dot remove. We're going to just remove that int and then we're going to sort. So now it's alphabetical because we've removed that it knows exactly how to sort these strings. Birds, Brian, Karen's cats, dogs. Very, very simple. The polar opposite of course is reverse and we're just going to grab this for the sake of time. Pretty self-explanatory what's going on there. This would be like sort ascending sort descending. I almost wish they didn't call it reverse but called it like sort descend or something like that or you know had a parameter inside of sort. We'll talk about parameters later on but it can be a little bit confusing but just think of sort as you're going to sort alphabetical and reverse is the polar opposite of that. You notice how when we sorted we had to remove that int simply because sort will throw some sort of error if there's a mixed type. Now what if you wanted to do that but you didn't want to really modify the original list. Well what we're going to do now is call it copy and some people call this cloning which is a very shallow clone but basically we're just making a copy here. So we're going to say y equals x dot copy does exactly what you think it does. It actually makes a new list and copies the elements into it. So we're going to say copies the elements into a new list. Now we can simply say y dot reverse and we could add items, remove items, do whatever we wanted to do. So I could say y dot append. Let's go ahead and append apples. We could do any other thing we really wanted to do here. So let's grab this print statement here. So x is the original new is our y. Let's see what these look like here. So our original remains unchanged where our new now has apples and it's been reversed. Pretty cool the way that works and then if you were done with wine you didn't want anymore just simply delete it which is what we're going to talk about next. Okay so deleting. Delete the whole thing is really what I'm going to put here. Why would you want to delete something? Well in the previous little segment here we said we're going to make y and y is a copy of x. Now that we're done with y we don't need it anymore. We can do one of two things. We can either let Python garbage collect it meaning it's going to figure out when it's not needed anymore. Or we can specifically say delete the whole list. And yes that deletes the whole thing. So if I try to say something like print y it's going to have a bad time here and it's going to say name y is not defined. And you remember from a previous video whenever you see is not defined it means it simply does not exist. Meaning we have now destroyed y and everything in it has been destroyed as well. So all that memory for your computer nerds out there is now freed up and gone. We can use it for other things. This really becomes important when you start talking about embedded systems and things of that nature where memory might be a little bit more constrained than say your desktop or your laptop. You got to understand that when you delete something it is gone. And I mean gone gone is not defined means you would have to rebuild this entire data structure from scratch. There's simply no way to recover it. Deleting can be a little bit drastic as we saw name y is not defined is well kind of a problem. I mean what if you didn't want to delete the entire variable you just want to delete part of it or clear the whole thing off. That's what we're going to talk about in this little segment here. So we're talking about clearing think of your list like a big table and you got plates and dishes and all sorts of stuff on there. You don't want to throw the whole table out you just want to clear it off and that's exactly what clear does. So it's going to clear all of those elements out of the list but the list itself will still exist. It will just be blank to demonstrate that those type cleared. So most of the time in programming land you don't actually want to delete you just want to clear it out. So our list exists you can see by these brackets there's just no elements in there and we can actually test that. Let's go ahead and get the length of X. So it exists but there's no items in there. Most of the time if you're confused just think of it this way. Delete is throwing the entire thing out you're throwing the whole kitchen table out where clear is you're just clearing the dishes off the table. Usually you want clear not delete but delete exists in case you need to free up that memory. You want to do something a little crazy a list can contain other lists and if you look at this it looks kind of weird. But just think you have a start bracket and an end bracket followed by start and end start and end and start and end. So that's right a list can contain other lists if you're coming from another language think of this like an array of arrays. It's kind of advanced and it's not something a newbie really understands but in case you're curious this is how you would do it. So we're going to say X equals and we're going to turn X into a blank list with nothing in it. Y equals we're going to create another list we're going to say one two three and let's go ahead and make another list called Z. And in here I'm going to say my name you go ahead and put your name or cats dogs birds whatever you want to put in there. So now we have three different lists. What we want to do is we want to take the contents of Z and Y and put them in X. So I'm going to say X dot append. Let's go ahead and append Y. Now what I've done is I've taken all of these numbers and put them inside of X. Let's go ahead and print this out. Now I'm saying merged but that's not really what we're doing here. We're actually merging all these into one giant data structure. You notice how we've got these double brackets here. So what we're saying is this item this individual element is its own unique list. So I'm going to say list in the list. All right now what we want to do is we want to take the contents of Z and put them in X. But we want to put them before all the other stuff that we put in there say X insert. And let's go ahead and put this at the zero index and we're going to put all of Z in there. Let's go ahead and run this.  Newbies may look at this and go well there's five items in here. There's really not. Let's go ahead and test this out here. We're going to say grab this and let's call this our list. And let's go Lynn and we're going to get the number of items in here. There's only two items in there. Very simple very easy to understand. Now let's say we want to grab the first item. We want to say zero and we want to go zero. Let's go ahead and grab that second item. So our first item is this list here which is its own little list and second item is this list here. And in case you're wondering yes you can get kind of nuts here. What we're doing now is we're diving into those lists. So in our first list right here we're going to grab the first item which is Brian. In our second list we're going to grab the second item notice that's at the one position which is two. Seems super confusing but just think of it this way think of it like a stair step. Every time you see these brackets you're going deeper down a step into the basement. So for example we could switch this around here and we can grab the very first item which was one. We could switch this around again and say we want the second item which is three. Seems super confusing if you're a newbie but trust me once you get into more advanced stuff this is a huge huge time saver. We're putting lists and lists and when you start working with things like web services you're going to find that quite a bit where the data they're going to hand you is basically a list of lists and you just simply have to navigate through it. Okay a little bit of bonus material here I know I'm going to get the question so I thought I would just add it. How do you change an item remember it's positional. So for example let's say x equals and let's just make some numbers here one two three four five. We want to actually change this. We don't want to change the whole list just one specific item. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to say x and then whatever the item number is. So let's say I want to change the item at position two. And we want to change this to the word test. Remember this is zero base and this trips up a lot of newbies so we have zero one two so this guy right here we're going to change that. Let's go ahead and print this out and let's see it in action. There we go zero one two are two position is now test four five so that is very simple how you change something. A lot of people especially me take this for granted because it is so simple and easy to work with. And if you've worked with other languages you may be looking for like a change element add or swap element or something like that. It's actually very simple. You take the list you take the position and then you assign it a value. I hope you enjoyed this video. You can find the source code out on github.com. If you need additional help myself and thousands of other developers are hanging out in the void realms Facebook group. This is a large group with lots of developers and we talk about everything technology related not just the technology that you just watched. And if you want official training I do develop courses out on you to me dot com. This is official classroom style training. If you go out there and the course you're looking for is just simply not there. Drop me a note. I'm either working on it or I will actually develop it. I will put a link down below for all three of those and as always help me help you smash that like and subscribe button. The more popular these videos become the more I'll create and publish out on YouTube. Thank you for watching.


Hi and welcome to Learn WordPress. In today's session, we are going to create a custom footer using a pattern. A footer is of course the collection of elements found at the bottom of a webpage. It is essential as it gives site visitors one more chance to take action and should aim to improve user experience. To customize your footer, make sure you have installed a block theme such as 2022 and then make your way to the site editor where you are able to customize your templates and then scroll down to the footer of your home template. And when you select the footer, click on replace and here you will be able to access all the available patterns that come with your theme. And once you find the pattern that you are looking for, you can click on the pattern and it will insert into your template automatically. And now you can modify it as you please. Another option is to use a pattern from the patterns directory. So I'm going to click on the list view, select the footer, click on the three vertical dots and remove the footer from my template. Then I will make my way to the patterns directory at WordPress.org slash patterns and search for a footer pattern. And here are a variety of footer patterns that's ready for the picking. So once you find the pattern you're looking for, you can merely click on copy, make your way back to your website. Click on the three vertical dots, insert after and then paste it into your template. And now you can change this pattern as you please. But I would actually like to modify a different pattern. So I'm going to click on undo, make my way back to the patterns directory. I am after the pattern called three column footer. So once you're ready, click on copy, make your way back to your template and paste it below. Before we continue, I quickly wanted to show you what the footer pattern will look like once we've modified it. Let's start in the left column. So firstly, I will add my site logo block and select an image from my media library. And then open my sidebar settings and change the style to be rounded. Below that, I will add our company slogan, which is we design for you and make it bold. Before I move on to the social links, I will select the footer, open up my sidebar settings again and change the background to black. And once I've done that, I will open up my list view, open the group, go to the first column and ensure that I select the parent block of the social icons. And once I've done that, I will change the icon background to salmon and the icon color to black. Next, I'm going to change the headings of my other columns to 30 pixels each and then move on to my second column. Firstly, I'm going to use my list view to select all the paragraphs in the column and then click on the three vertical dots and select remove blocks. And then below the heading, I will add a navigation block and select one of the navigation menus I've already created. And once I've inserted the navigation menu, I will use my sidebar settings and change the orientation to vertical. Then I'm going to change the heading of the column to quick links. When I move on to the third column, I will change the heading to resources and then use my list view again to select the paragraphs in the column. Click on the three vertical dots and select remove blocks. Then I will add another navigation block, but this time I will select start empty. And then firstly, add a privacy policy page, then a product support page, and then a testimonials page. And once I've done that, I will make sure I select the navigation menu in my list view and also change the orientation to vertical. I realize that these navigation items were already below each other due to having longer titles. But if I forgot to select the vertical orientation and I added another shorter navigation item, it would have appeared next to testimonials. So now any future items will also be displayed vertically. I will leave column 4 as is, but lastly I would like to change the color and typography of some of the links and text. So let's start in the second column. Select the navigation block and then click on color and change the text color to salmon. Then we can scroll down and click on the three vertical dots next to typography and select appearance and then change the appearance to light. And now we will do exactly the same in the third column. Select the navigation block, change the color to salmon and change the appearance to light. Lastly, I will also change the color and typography of the phone number and email address. Once we save and close the sidebar settings and list view, we can see the modified version of the pattern that we selected. When we look at it from the front end, we will also notice that the header and the footer complement each other. Visit Learn WordPress for more tutorials and training material.


Well, I've got some news for you. You might want to sit down for this.    And he's going to explain this in the following clip.  I think of anything. If anything, it makes me less gay.   Well, because think about it this way.  And when I said on Elijah Shaffer's show and they said, Have you ever been in a romantic relationship?  No.   So like I said last week, not only is not only is that thinking flawed, but actually it's the reverse that actually makes me really more heterosexual than anybody. If we're being, if we're really being honest, never having a girlfriend, never having sex with a woman really makes you more heterosexual because honestly dating women is gay.   And then, you know, it's really, it's all. And if you want to know the truth, the only really heterosexual position is to be in a sexual incel. So that's all there is. Being mig-tau, a sexual incel, is really the straightest position that you can have. Having sex in itself is gay, I think. I think that it's really a gay act to begin with. Think about it. That's gay or like, I need cuddles. This is all I need. I need the... It's all very, it's all very sauce. I need to spend time with a little sauce. A little bit sauce.  Yeah, don't think so. Now, I honestly don't know if he's being serious here. I think that maybe he's being half serious, partially facetious, but he laughs and that leads me to believe that he at least acknowledges that what he's saying will be perceived as insane to most reasonable people, if not everyone, even unreasonable people. But I mean, there's part of me that thinks that because he's a committed incel and if you're part of his America First movement, you also have to be a committed incel. So in a way, he's trying to, I don't know, make himself feel better by ascribing meaning to his inability to get laid, trying to create some sort of a pseudo ideology around him being an incel. I'm not necessarily sure, but at least he kind of believes this at a minimum, right? If he believes this, then we're seeing cognitive dissonance. But either way, I mean, this is just... It's bizarre.     Take a look. Yeah, I want to get married. But more out of necessity of like having... producing a male heir is really the whole point.  So how are you going to pull that off?  Now perhaps he'll be married and then opt for adoption, opt for, you know, in vitro fertilization. I don't even know.  But the more that I think about this, the more I'm convinced that he's absolutely serious. Because again, being a committed incel is crucial to the America First movement, and this raw story headline illustrates the importance of being an incel. Quote, white nationalist America First group plunges into chaos after high-ranking official gets a girlfriend. Yeah. Now the article goes on to explain the America First movement has plunged into turmoil after its treasurer started a romantic relationship and moved out of the group leader's basement. White nationalist Nick Fuentes, the right-wing group's leader and associate of representatives Paul Gosar and Marjorie Taylor Greene, urges his followers to abstain from sex, and he describes himself as an incel or involuntarily celibate. This led to the nonprofit group's treasurer, Jaden McNeil, to resign and call America First a cult, reported the Daily Beast's Fever Dreams podcast. Members act so racist and ridiculous in public that it ruins people's lives, said co-host Kelly Whale on the podcast. You can't go and get a normal job after that. So they turn further and further into this movement, which really does function almost like a cult. And that really does make sense. I hadn't previously thought of it as a cult, but that absolutely makes sense.  So, of course, your only option is to get further entrenched with this cult and double down and triple down. And so it's just... it's weird. It's very weird. The more that I learn about this movement or whatever you want to call it. But if you're wondering why Nick Fuentes is an incel, he claims that he is celibate on purpose. So I guess that would make him a vol-cel, right? But either way, if you're wondering why he's an incel, well, it's because he believes that women should be second-class citizens and they should have as much rights as the Taliban permits women to have in Afghanistan. This is literally something that he said in public in a podcast appearance with the blaze. So let's watch. If I'm understanding your question correctly, if you don't want them to vote or drive or have an existence akin to what they would have in, say, Saudi Arabia, you would say that in large part then they don't really have rights. Well, I would say probably the ideal is something more like Afghanistan, if I'm being totally honest. Like, recent Afghanistan. So what's the difference between Afghanistan then and Saudi Arabia? Like the brutality, I guess. It's like a little slightly more brutal, of course, Taliban rule, not American rule. I'm talking about, you know, recent Afghanistan. So you want women to have the same treatment as women have under Taliban rule in Afghanistan. Something approximating that, yeah. Gee, I wonder why it's so hard for him to get laid. It's because of things like this. You're broadcasting to women that you think that they should be subjugated to second-class citizenship status. Why would they want to be with you if you think that they are literally inferior to you? Who would want to be with someone like that, who inherently disrespects them? Nobody would. So you being an incel is of your own making and because he's unable to get laid, he forces everyone else in his cult to also be celibate. It's just, it's so ridiculous. Now he referenced the appearance on the blaze that we just watched where everyone made fun of him and they were making fun of him because he didn't have a girlfriend. But that's not what they actually were making fun of him for. He claims that it was because he doesn't have a girlfriend. But it was because the interview was so awkward because he goes on to describe how, you know, women shouldn't have rights. And then the host asks him, and this is a conservative woman, by the way. She asks him, you know, if you've never been with a woman, then why, who are you to say this? You know, if you don't have experience with a woman, who are you to say that they should live a certain way? And his response here is incredibly cringe-worthy and it went viral because of how awkward it was. You also promote like the way of interacting with women and I go, have you been in a relationship with a woman? No.  Or in fact, in any capacity where you, you know, uphold them in a way that treats them with respect. I mean, if you're out here arguing that women are basically half the value of a man, I'm not going to put words in your mouth, in fact, because that's not right. But, you know, if you are looking to some other regimes around the world that do think that women are half the value of a man, I have to question what kind of a person who's had no experience with women is in a position to, you know, basically promote these ideas. Well, I'm having an experience with a woman right now and I've had lots of experiences with women in my life, not romantically per se, but, you know, I've talked to enough women, I've been, you know, I've known enough women to know sort of what's going on.  Like a perfect example is like the pickup artists.  What they say is that really with women, it's the same bag of tricks to seduce a woman or whatever. And I think that kind of tells you something about the nature of women, that, you know, you go from woman to woman and it's the same kind of like little tricks, little things you could say or whatever to kind of hack them and whatever. And I think that kind of says it all about their nature. Painful, absolutely painful.   You think that you're better than them when you're not. You're just insecure about your own sexuality and manhood. So, I mean, it's just, this is so bizarre.  That's just so absurd on its face that I can no longer participate in this cult because I don't want to be associated with that.  I mean, what incentives are there for people to be in this cult, just for a sense of community? Perhaps that's all that it is.  We'll put it that way.


Good morning everybody just want to share a little bit of viewer feedback that I received this morning when I woke up quote You are the worst youtuber ever Pretty pretty Heart man, let's take a look at what happened so nine hours ago when this was a screenshot was taken this would have been about 10 p.m My time and says somebody reported they had a problem with their code and said please help and Notice in that same hour. I wrote back. What is the error message and That person wrote back. There's no error. It just appears and the screen disappears Then follows up with a little bit. Well, you know, actually I completed it But then I added something and then share the code perfect Thank you so much that makes my life easy. I can download it test it boom find the problem Then the person added the error message makes my life even easier. Thank you for that So we're actually right as soon as I saw this line. I knew exactly what the problem was I knew exactly what the fix was now keep in mind. I'm asleep right now This is the error you there. Can you help? Please? Can you help? Please can notice this all happened in less than an hour This could have been I could have been 15 minutes could have been 30 minutes I don't know but it was in less than an hour and finally You are the worst youtuber ever this would have been about 11 p.m. Ish my time So I get I was asleep. I'm I go to bed early then I woke up the next morning at 645 or 545 whatever time it is I do had breakfast to my wife and Responded and at this point I would have given this person the answer to their problem But I said, you know, I live in Japan and I was asleep when you were posting and just got up I was about to respond but then saw this comment. So just some advice This is not the way to get help those of you have been on my channel. Those of you have come and seen my videos You know that I basically respond to everybody if I'm able there's I looked in the history about a year ago I got sick. I remember and I did miss a lot of Didn't miss a lot of comments, but I do try to keep up with it. I am on top of it every day It's part of my morning routine. I come in and I respond to You know messages from the night before the day before sometimes I skip a day just I'm a busy person And you know what you get what you pay for you guys ain't paying for this So I would just appreciate a little bit of courtesy. I know this is this person is an outlier And I'm very grateful to everybody else who is polite and and does you know work with me rather than against me So everybody have a great day be nice to youtubers. We don't get a lot out of this Except appreciation a little coin on the side if you're lucky. Ciao