Nathan Ingram's Office Hours 2019.07.23

This is a lightly edited transcript of a webinar type presentation given by Nathan Ingram on 2019.07.23 that can be found at academy.solidwp.com.

Some content may be outdated due to changes in WordPress and best practices.

Q: Advertising Your Business

@00:01:31
I realize that you don't do a lot if any advertising. How do you get referrals from people that you've never worked with before? And do you fill your funnel through speaking engagements or how does that work?

Getting a client by referral is better than having to go out and seek clients because you start off on a better playing field.

They are coming to you asking you to work with them versus you having to go out and pitch your services and try to get them to work with you. So it's just a better way.

Plus referrals generally come from people who know you and like you and trust you. And so there's just, there's an element of inherited trust that comes in when someone is referred to you as a potential client. So it's just a better way all around.

I know a lot of folks do some social media advertising or they pay to sponsor advertisements here and there or whatever. Absolutely nothing wrong with that. But I've never done that. All of my work comes by referral and it always has.

And the question is, how do you fill that funnel? When you run a business, you have to wear lots of different hats. You've got to be the CEO setting the vision for the business. You've got to be the developer actually building the websites. You also have to be the salesperson. And that sales function has to be present in the business in one form or another.

Now it could be that you completely outsource your sales force and you actually have a consultant or somebody that sends you business and that's a great way to do it. It may be that you're actually out there contacting people and you're the actual salesperson as well. A lot of folks, and by the way, if that's not you, don't worry about it because most people in the web business, that's not their strength. We're good at the tech and very rarely are tech people good at sales. Those skill sets generally don't reside in the same person. For some people they do, but for most people they don't. And so if you are not great at sales and that part intimidates you, relax because you are in the, you're in the majority, right?

How do you fill your funnel?

So you have to spend time when you, if you're going to make a big pie chart out of how you're going to spend your time this month, you've got to do some learning. You've got to do some CEO type work of casting vision and setting up systems for your business. You got to have implementation time when you're actually doing the work. You got to have some sales time. And that can either be you out there directly doing the sales or spending time cultivating your referral network.

And that's what I do. I am not going to be the one who goes out there knocking on doors. Instead, what I do is build relationships with people who are already doing the face-to-face work with people who would be my potential clients. And so I want to meet one of those people a month, for example, a new reference of, you know, here's a person who, you know, they're already in front of small business owners or professionals or nonprofits or whatever whoever you want to work with. They're in front of them already selling them something else that doesn't compete with web design.

And so you just build a relationship with them and then reward the referral and incentivize that referral in some way.

So, you know, just like, for example, just about two weeks ago, I had lunch with a new referral partner. Hopefully we'll become a referral partner.

This guy happens to be the outside sales person for one of our local internet providers, a large telecommunications company, but their business sales side and it's just a way in a lot of cable internet or other internet provider type folks. Their sales side is very entrepreneurial. I mean, this guy builds his own book of business. He's in front of small business owners all the time talking about, you know, how this particular company services can help them on the telephony and internet side. He's in front of my kind of people, right?

So, and they don't do websites and he's more than happy to refer those sorts of people to me. And it's a very simple, extra question for him to ask when he's in front of that client:

• Hey, how's your website?
• Do you need help with your website?
• Oh, you should talk to brilliant web works in Nathan.
• Nathan can help you out if you have some trouble there.

So, it's building those types of referrals. I would rather have built one relationship with an influencer who's in front of 100 people a month that I would knock on 20 doors in a month and do cold calls. So you know, that's, that's the deal. For me, it's a multiplication effort.

Now some people are better at doing the cold calls and that's awesome. If you can do that and that's your superpower, but all means do it. But for me, I am much better when the client has referred to me and I can just talk about what I do. I am not a salesy person.

So rather than being the person out there knocking on doors, I spend that time instead building referral network and then maintaining the existing network. So just because I met this guy once, you know, I'm going to try to have lunch with him again in a couple months and just touch base again, you know. And you want to have your pitch honed of this is the kind of client I'm looking for:

• What's your elevator pitch?
• What do you do?
• Who do you do it for?

And you know, have that sharp pitch.

For me, it's we help small businesses, nonprofits, and professional firms look great on the web. We build great credibility websites for those types of companies and what linked, for me at least, what sets the kinds of businesses I work well with apart from those that I don't are the ones where I'm actually working with the decision maker and business owner. If there's a layer between me and the business owner, it's probably not a good fit.

And so I described that kind of client to the person who's a potential referral partner and then let him match me up. I mean, it's a great way to do it.

Q: Referral Fee

@00:09:18
Do you pay a referral fee?

Yeah, absolutely. That's really the way to do this.

If you want to get a sales person's attention, you know, the fact that you're a good person is great. And if you have a friendship, that's wonderful. But they're really going to remember you if every time they send you business and that client signs, you send them a $200 Amazon gift card. That's a typical referral fee for me.

And you know, am I going to give somebody a $200 Amazon gift card if they send me a $456000 on the website? All day long, I'll do that all day long. So yeah, the incentivizing the referral is critical to this.

Now, somebody earlier mentioned your clients and absolutely, you know, you want to be in front of your clients regularly. Hopefully you're doing that already, you know, maybe quarterly or every six months, you're having just a meeting with your clients:

• How's it going?
• How's the website working for you?
• Anything that it can do better that it's not doing now?

That sort of thing.

And it's part of that meeting to say, hey, is there anybody out there, you know, that might be looking for a website?

By the way, if you send me business, then I will send you - we'll give you three months of maintenance on your WordPress care plan for free, or I'll send you an Amazon gift card or whatever. It may be that you could get an Apple watch these days for a couple hundred bucks.

Tell them hey, I'm giving Apple watches to everybody that sends me a paid client.

There's all sorts of creative things you can do to incentivize the referral, but incentivizing is absolutely critical.

Q: Time Management

@00:11:47
Time management: how do you decide where to schedule the different blocks of time?

When I'm scheduling time, I do that in a number of different ways, but I always try to block time. It is incredibly inefficient if you have a day where you're zipping back and forth between, I'm going to spend an hour doing technical work here and an hour doing phone calls here.

And for me, when, when you wear a lot of hats like hosting webinars and doing growth coaching for WordPress business owners and still do an agent WordPress agency stuff, it's really, really hard to stay focused on how your time is managed.

I do this with time blocking. So, like this morning, the only thing I did was I worked on my talk for Denver this weekend for WordCamp Denver. And I just put on headphones, I didn't have any other technology on, and I focused on that.

Three hours in a block doing that kind of work is way more efficient than if I did it an hour a day each day of this week. Even though that would have been five hours, I was more efficient because I spent a three hour dedicated block on that issue.

So time blocking is absolutely critical.

Now the essence of the question is: how do you decide what activities go where?

So I talked about a few different blocks like, having a time for strategy weekly in your business, having a time for what I call whirlwind time, the stuff that comes in, just a little bitty little small tasks that clients email about. And also, project time to actually get projects done.

Follow-up: Categorizing Activities

@00:14:13
How do you decide which activities go in the category?

So let's look at a few different blocks of time. So there would be a, what I would call the whirlwind block.

Whirlwind is the energy and attention needed to run your business. This is returning client phone calls, returning client emails, client says go change this picture on this page. We need to add this plugin and do this thing. It's the little, repetitive, daily busy work tasks that don't require a big block of time. If something is going to take more than about an hour to do, it needs its own little project block. But the whirlwind, you can cram a bunch of that stuff in and you can task shift with it. You can just knock that stuff out.

And my recommendation to you is this: you want to stack a list of those things up.

Most of us are at the whim of our email, the ding, our attention goes, and another ding, and our attention goes. Turn off email so that you're not exposed to all those little demands for attention, because generally most of those are not critical.

And what happens is if you're trying to do focus work and you're trying to get this project built or whatever, we're distracted. Oh, it'll just take five minutes and so you bounce out of a project, big work, and you bounce out and do this little thing and you end up ... multitasking is a myth. It is a total myth. We are not designed to multitask. Our brains don't work that way.

If you get distracted by something, you get pulled out of a focused task. It's going to take you 15 to 20 minutes to get re-acclimated back into that task. And some studies say it costs you 10 IQ points when you do that.

And I don't know about you, but I don't have those IQ points to spare. So focus, and then make a list of all those whirlwind tasks, stack those things up and then dedicate, you know, a couple of mornings a week to knocking those things out.

Monday mornings are almost always whirlwind time for me because for whatever reason, the weekend breeds whirlwind activities and just a ton of stuff that has to come in, right? So you just find those times and stack all those tasks up and just knock those out.

But then as you're planning your week, maybe you've got some projects that you need to do. So you want to block out that three hours in the morning from eight to 11 or nine to noon or whatever or three hours in the afternoon, whenever you are most efficient to do that kind of work. So you wanna block those times out and turn off all notifications during that time.

And so project work, you know, these are things or projects, whatever that's, that's more than hour long or an hour plus. And you want to just schedule that time where it's focus time, everything else is turned off. So you're just focused on those.

Follow-up: Client vs Biz Strategy projects

@ 00:17:23
So project time could be allocated to client projects like website building and business strategy projects?

So I recommend taking, at least every week, taking a half a day, a two to four hour block for business strategy.

And by strategy, I mean working on your business, not in your business, working in your business is doing work for clients, stuff that brings in the money. Working on your business is building out systems and processes, working on your own website, your own branding, your own marketing, all those sorts of things. If you don't schedule that time every week, it's never going to get done because it's really oftentimes harder for us to do that kind of work for ourselves than it is to do client work.

We could do client work a lot easier than we can our own work. And so we kick that can down the road of doing our own work and the strategy time never happens.

So for me, typically Friday afternoon is strategy time, what I'm working on is my business.

If I'm traveling that week, it's usually on a Wednesday afternoon and I just block that time off and I'm working on my business, not in my business.

Business strategy looks like making checklists like I talk about, working on your own website, redesign your website. It could be watching webinars and increasing your learning a little bit, but it's bigger picture, growing your business, doing bigger things with the end to making your business better than it is today.

Project time is client projects, basically.

So what is the balance between whirlwind time and project time? It varies, right?

So here's what I would recommend: you're going to, when you start trying to get your time under control, you need to figure out on a typical week, what does whirlwind time look like? How much time do I typically need to spend?

In other words, if I could allocate Monday morning and Thursday morning or whatever, for whirlwind, does that deal with all the little piddly stuff that clients ask for?

So the stuff that comes in Tuesday and Wednesday, I can do Thursday morning, the stuff that comes in on Thursday afternoon through Sunday, I can do a Monday mornings.

Very rarely is a client going to have an urgent need that has to be done like that day. And sometimes that happens and you have to make accommodation for that, but usually it's these little piddly jobs that can take a two to three day turnaround, it's just not that big of a deal.

So figure out those blocks of time first, because those are going to have to happen. When you schedule the whirlwind, it becomes manageable.

Figure out when you can do those sorts of tasks, then after you have those times blocked, what are the projects I need to accomplish this week and where do those go? And from there, you can decide, all right, now so this time makes sense from my business strategy time.

Or start the week with saying, I'm going to do business time, business development time. No matter what, it's always going to be Wednesday afternoons, just always going to be, or Wednesday mornings or whenever. And then schedule everything else around that.

I don't know that you can actually say, you know, is there a golden ratio between whirlwind versus project versus strategy time? It's really going to depend. Some weeks the whirlwind may be light, some weeks I may not have big projects to work on. And when I have that vacuum, I'm either going to take a little time off, or I'm going to spend extra strategy time.

@00:21:24
I'm trying to do about five to six hours schedule today, so the last minute things could come in if needed.

Again, that's a good way to do it. Here's what I would recommend on that.

There are, depending on what kind of a person you are, if you're a morning person or a night person or whatever, depending on how you are wired, there are certain times of the day when you are better at the strategic, big picture work.

For heaven's sake, do not do whirlwind work during those times. Those times are golden, you know, you want to guard those times like it's gold because they are.

So the times of day when you can just knock stuff out, like for me, it's early afternoon. This is not the time when I'm going to do strategy work, because I'm usually coming off, you know, I'm just eating lunch, I require much coffee, and this is just not the best time for that. So this is the time of day where I'm returning emails and just doing those "just knock stuff out" type work.

First thing in the mornings, that is my gold time. That is when I am really more strategic and I'm thinking that's why, for example, this morning, I spent the whole morning working on the talk for this weekend because it was the best time to do that.

So, going in five to six hours scheduled a day and leaving some time for, you know, client requests, that works. Just make sure you put that client request time at a time when you do not have to be the most strategic and creative.

If you are an early bird, first thing in the morning is going to be best for your strategic time.

If you're a night owl, usually late afternoons is going to be your good time.

If you're kind of in the middle, then your good strategic time is usually right after lunch.

It just depends on you.

Q: Meditation Apps

@00:23:25
You mentioned meditation apps in your home office webinar. Which ones do you like?

So, there's a number of different ones. One of the most common is called Calm.

When I'm doing focus work, I use brain.fm. It was an AppSumo deal a million years ago and I bought the lifetime and I've just always used it. It's got really great focus and meditation, different channels and whatever.

But most frequently, you know, when I suggested spending some meditation time, it was all about just kind of getting centered for the day. For me personally, faith is a big part of my life and I don't use like an app. I just spend some time, you know, praying and reading the scripture and doing some other things to kind of get my mind, get everything in perspective for the day. That's me.

Whatever works for you, there are apps like I mentioned that will do that.

Focus@Will is another one that's good for focus time.

But there are apps like Calm, for example, that will step you through a whole cycle of meditation. It just kind of helps getting you centered in on the day and when you do that, the best part of that is the big, scary, yelling monsters that are screaming at you in the morning tend to quiet down a little bit and you get a better perspective on, you know, that's really not as big of a deal, I'm making it bigger in my head, right? So that's where that getting centered time really helps.

YouTube has tracks for meditation as well, Spotify does, Pandora does. So the big picture of this is get centered on and get the right perspective of the work that you're going to do that day because if you just come into your desk and you don't have a right, your head is not on straight about what the day is going to bring. You get swept in and you never recover.

Q: Social Feeds on Websites

@00:25:50
Could you discuss the use of social feeds on websites, pros, and cons? Specifically interested to have a plug-in recommendation for adding an Instagram feed onto a Beaver Builder Astra site?

Use of social feeds, pros and cons: all right, so let me get on my soap box about this because there are a couple of different ways you can look at this.

Number one, social proof is huge. So if your social feed is reviews, awesome, because that brings in the proof that oftentimes will push a potential client or buyer over the edge to purchase your service or product.

If the social feed you're talking about is: oh, I'm going to put this gigantic Facebook thing on my, you know, it's got the whole feed from my page. I don't know about that, maybe. It depends on what the content of your page is.

Maybe you've got an Instagram feed and you're actively posting. That can be good depending on what you're posting.

The problem with any of those sources where you're pulling in third party content from other sites, it is absolutely going to slow the site down. It just will. There's no way around it. All that extra JavaScript that has to be loaded to pull in a live feed, it's going to slow the website down.

So if, for example, you've got a massive home page with all kinds of content and it's going out and grabbing stuff out of the WordPress database and now we got this big block of Instagram. That page is going to take five, six, eight seconds to load and that is just not acceptable. So you gotta balance all that out.

Social feeds are going to add time to page load, but they can be incredibly effective. So again, it's a tough one.

Now specifically, do I have a plug-in recommendation for Instagram? I do.

Custom Feeds for Instagram by Smash Balloon. This is kind of the go-to, 800,000 active installs. It is regularly maintained. This is solid code. It works very, very well, highly recommend this one.

I am not aware of a Beaver Builder module that pulls out an Instagram feed. There's probably one out there. I just don't know about it.

This one (Custom Feeds for Instagram) is going to work as a widget and or a short code and it just drop right in a Beaver Builder area.

Beaver Builder Vapor has an Instagram feed.

So there are 8 million different add-on packs for all these page builders, right?

You get the same effect with page builders like Elementor and Beaver Builder that you have with Gutenberg right now with Gutenberg blocks, and that's... I keep my Beaver Builder block stack pretty lean because if you install the block pack from this group and the block pack from this group and this group and whatever, then you get a lot of competing code that can slow the website down and potentially cause conflicts.

So, for me, unless there's a really good reason, I build on Astra and I use the Ultimate Addons for Beaver Builder and Beaver Themer, you know, because Ultimate Addons is built by the Astra people, it's quality code, and that's usually, unless there's a good reason for it, all that I install.

But yeah, there's other add-ons out there that have those things.

The problem that I've seen also is that people who are building add-ons for Elementor and Beaver Builder, the quality of code is frequently lacking.

You know, it used to be the genre of plug-in that had code that was lacking, were social plug-ins, remember those days? Where there were eight zillion social plug-ins for WordPress, and, you know, the quality, like, just to get a Facebook, whatever on there, the quality of code was terrible, and you'd get all kinds of JavaScript errors, because everybody was trying to build a social plug-in for whatever reason, and the quality of code just wasn't there.

The quality of code for a lot of these free, especially Beaver Builder add-ons, is suspect. So just take it with a grain of salt and, you know, make sure that you're going to test it out, and be sure that you're looking at the console in the Chrome Inspector, and just make sure you're not kicking up a bunch of JavaScript errors, because you can real quick get into some technical trouble by installing a lot of different block packs.

Okay, I'm off my soapbox on that.

Yeah, Jesse, PowerPack for Beaver Builder has an Instagram and Facebook feed, and, yes, you can turn off duplicate modules if you have another Beaver Builder package. Problem is there's core code in all those that you might still bump heads. So just be aware of that.

I have had less luck with the PowerPack modules, I own them all, than I have with the Ultimate Addons. I find PowerPack to be a little weird sometimes. But that's just me.

Q: Selling My Business

@00:31:46
How would I go up about selling my business? Thinking of retiring in a few years.

Ah, what a great question. So how many of you have thought about this?

Do you realize if you build your business correctly, particularly by creating recurring revenue by signing up clients for maintenance plans and systematizing your business so that it does not rely on what's in your head, there's actually a process to do things, then your business is not just your job, your business has value that is sellable, right?

So how do you go about selling your business? Your business is going to have those two kinds of value, typically, that I just mentioned. So is there value in the systems and processes in your business?

In other words, you have great checklists, you have a great system of acquiring clients, of building websites once they come through, of launching them, of managing them. Is there a system in place that you can step away from and someone else can step into? That has value.

Do you have existing WordPress care plan type clients that someone else could, you know, step in and manage? Those are two things that are sellable and how do you go about selling it?

Well, you'd have to figure out what that is worth, evaluation of your business today brings in X dollars per year.

Let's just say the easiest part to sell would be WordPress care plan clients.

So say, we'll say, my business brings in $4,000 a month on WordPress management. And we're managing WordPress sites. What is that worth to somebody?

Well, every year, that's worth about $50,000, so how do I sell that?

Most people who would be interested in buying it, another freelancer or whatever, I don't have $50,000 write to a check. So maybe what it looks like is, for the next two years, you get 50% of the take or, for the next three years, you get 50% of the take or 33% of the take or something like that.

You just work out some sort of a payoff over time so that you step away, but you still have some income coming in and you're doing no work.

Or maybe you do find somebody that has that kind of money to drop in to actually purchase it outright. You know, those are some options.

But first, your business has to be in a position for someone else to actually run it. Most of us run our business based on heroics and not process.

In other words, we are the superhero in our businesses and everything requires us to step in like a hero and save the day because of stuff we know in our minds and we don't have good, solid systems and processes for things.

So you have got to make sure your business is processed, out, systematized so that it can be picked up and used by someone else.

There are business brokers in your area that will take a fee for selling your business.

Sometimes they can make you money. I think probably in our case, you want another somebody else who's already doing WordPress management because, okay, look, if you're like me, I'm not going to just sell my business to the highest bidder.

I like my clients. I care about my clients. I've developed trust with my clients over the years and they've developed it with me.

So when I get ready to step away from my business, if I want to sell, I want to go to my client and say, look, things are changing for me. I want to put you in great hands. I've talked to Steve and Steve is somebody you can trust. He understands the model that we're using and our processes and he'll be able to step right in and provide you the same quality service that we've been able to.

So, when you sell your business, you definitely want to make sure that you are wrapping into that, hey, I'm going to talk to all my clients so that you inherit my credibility with them.

So that's part of the deal. That's part of the package.

And, I would suggest being very careful who you sell your business to, otherwise you get ... I'm not the kind of person that's just going to sell my business to the highest bidder. Hopefully you're not either. I think I'll just end it with that.

Great advice from Jan staying in communities with people who are like us, yep. Get known in your WordPress community, attend WordPress meetups. There's a widget in the dashboard for upcoming events that show you all the meetups in your area, pertaining to WordPress and all the word camps that are regional to you.

Q: Contract Content Management Limits

@00:36:57
I took a contracts course with you, and you had a website care plan with content management in the list of things you listed the following: on demand updates to informational website content, including updating images, adding new pages, blog posts, locations, et cetera.

Do you do unlimited new pages and blog posts each month?

Or do you set limits on how many new posts and pages you allow each month?

A client could take advantage of that.

Great question. So in that example, I gave you the contract for here's a basic WordPress care plan for me that starts around $100 a month. That's backups, WordPress updates, security updates, plug-ins themes, hosting updates, backups and security. It does not include content updates.

If the client wants to email us a support ticket and we do the content updates, then what we're going to do at that point is, and that's one of the questions I asked during that initial client consult is: who's going to be responsible for adding content to the website after it goes live? Is there going to be a lot of content added? Do you want us to train you how to do it or would you just rather us do it?

And so that's part of the conversation so that we can then give a price in the proposal for the level of support they're going to need ongoing.

So when creating the proposal, I would have a good idea of:

• They're going to want to do one blog post a week.
• They're going to want to do one blog post a day.
• They're going to want to add 10 pages a month.
• One page a month.
• One page a quarter.

We're going to understand a little bit about how active is this website going to be and then quote that service appropriately.

I don't have like an algorithm to run that through and say whatever, eight pages times 3.14 times blah blah, I don't know. Does this feel like about $200 worth of work or 300 or 500 or whatever? It's really going to depend. And the agreement that I have with the client is, we're going to evaluate this about once a quarter.

And you know, if it's working for you great, if it's working for us great, if we need to tweak it up or down depending on the volume that we're doing as far as updates, then we'll just agree to have an open in open line of conversation every quarter or so.

Now, I'm sure there's a place to have a formula to figure those things out. Especially if you're running high, super high volume. My agency is not super high volume. We've got a decent handful of clients that we manage, but, you know, I'm not doing a proposal every day either.

So if you are doing high volume, then you may want to have a more tiered structure. You know, you're in our middle tier that gets five to ten page and post updates a month, that sort of thing. For the volume that I do, that doesn't make sense. And probably for the volume that most of us do, it doesn't make sense to do that either.

Q: Tracking Website Users

@00:40:17
I have a client that is interested in tracking who is viewing which pages, how often, and for how long. I've explained privacy issues, users, etc. Do you have a good suggestion or best practice on how to achieve at least some of this in a balanced manner?

Is Google Analytics not sufficient to do this or do they want something simpler? They want more specific data like what, the actual person? They do?

So the answer to that question is ... Without significant, a significant third party product and consent of the user, there's no way for me to know that Shelly viewed my "about us" page today.

So the answer to that question is, we can't do that. The tech does not exist.

The only way you could do that is if you had all these people in a CRM of some sort and that CRM was dropping a cookie and you had that integrated to the site so you could then attach that person's cookie to their actual page, visiting, and all that, that's all you can do.

But they better be prepared to shell out thousands of dollars a month for that because that's what's going to cost them. But Google Analytics can let them know "this many people from these regions" are viewing your stuff.

Now something that you may also want to do is look at Inspectlet. Crazy Egg too. Crazy Egg is a heat mapping and Inspectlet, they'll actually record how people use your website. Inspectlet's better, I think, at this in some ways. It actually records them using the website. So they can actually see what people are doing, visitor by visitor. So this is a great way to track usability.

Hot jar is another one. So those are some options that give you better than just the on page analytics data. You can actually see, you know, heat mapping and then session recording.

Does it slow the site down a lot? Not really, it's a small JavaScript.

You can use Google Tag Manager to get information on where people are scrolling and what they click and so forth.

Editor's Note: You can also look into Bing Webmaster Tools for heatmaps and visitor screen recordings.

Q: SVG Logo Display Issue

@00:44:50
I've run into an issue using SVG from my logo. It's a schema problem because it isn't an HTML5 element and it doesn't show for schema and it comes up with an error. Do you avoid using SVG files for your site logo?

Are you actually embedding the code SVG or is it an SVG file that you're referencing in an image tag? You can do it both ways. If it's in your media library then it shouldn't be a problem.

The HTML5 item is not the SVG. It's the IMG tag and it's referencing the URL of the SVG file.

Now, if you're actually dropping the code in, where it's actually the SVG mathematical gobbledygook, that might be a little different. But if it's in your media library, then you should be fine.

So it is an HTML5 element. It's just the image tag. So I'd have to see the error, I guess.

Further on that question, I'm using Astra and much of your setup from the Beaver Builder Boot Camp last fall.

I'm used to Genesis where I can add code to the header and footer of individual pages. I have the hooks plug-in for Astra to add the code, but it applies to all pages.

Do I know of a plug-in that would allow me to add code on specific posts and pages? Yes, I do.

All right, so we are running on this site, Astra and about to be running Beaver Builder. So her question is: How do we add code to specific posts and pages?

And the way you do that is through Astra Custom Layouts. Now, if you don't have custom layouts right here (Appearance > Custom Layouts) you need to go into (Appearance > Astra Options) and turn on custom layouts, it's off by default. Once you turn it on, you can do a couple of things.

You can use it as a code editor and just add your code snippet here, okay. You don't need the Astra Hooks plug-in for this. This is built into Astra Pro, you just have to enable this custom layouts module.

So you can add a code snippet here and you want to say, I want to use a hook to display it and let's say it's code that needs to be in the header, in the head of the site. So we'll put it in the WP head and look here, I want to display it on the whole website, all singular pages, 404 pages, all posts, all blah, blah, blah. Maybe it's specific posts and pages even and you can start listing those things out here.

So this is one of the most powerful features of Astra, I love this muchly.

Now the other really cool thing about this is you can actually within an Astra custom layout, open up Beaver Builder and have a Beaver Builder layout applied to whatever. So let's just put a button in here, all right, and let's save this and we're going to apply this.

Let's say we're going to put this as a hook on all pages at the top of the content. Now every single page, every post is going to have this button up here before the content because that's where I told it to put it. You can do all sorts of cool stuff with this.

So yes, custom layouts is like creating a template, does Astra custom layouts replace pods? No, but it depends, it could replace certain features of pods.

But let's say for example, you wanted to put a banner across the top of the site advertising a sale. Let's call this site banner and you don't need to plug-in for that. This is going to be at the header before on the entire website.

Let's launch Beaver Builder and we can just make ourselves a nice little row here. It's going to be full width. We want it to be quite text with a red background. And we're just going to put in some text. And we're going to have some padding and stuff issues. I'm not going to deal with this right now, but look at that now all across the site.

Now we have a banner at the top that you can do anything you can do with a Beaver Builder layout. So it's pretty cool and very, very powerful feature and let you do some different things. Like for example, even put a countdown of how many hours are left. You can do all sorts of stuff with this.

Could custom layouts replace themer? No, because custom layouts are just little slices of content. Themer is what would let you say apply this Beaver Builder layout to every page on the site. And it's a whole layout, or only to post in this post custom post type, or that sort of thing.

Astra custom layouts and Beaver Themer share certain things in common that they both can do.

Back to the SVG question. Do you suggest fallback images on SVGs? For example, an international client with possible older tech issues. Yeah, probably so.

Themer can create page templates and that's why it's called Themer. It used to be, you know, your WordPress theme, you know, when you have a WordPress theme, it had custom pages for your 404 page and your search results page and your blog post looked a certain way and all this. Beaver Themer is a plug-in that lets you use Beaver Builder to build theme pages, right? It's just a confusing name.

What made me pick Beaver Builder over Elementor both work on Astra beautifully?

Man, Elementor is kind of buggy. Or at least it was when I was making the decision. I think it's gotten a little better now, but yeah, I'm Beaver Builder all the way.

All right, I'm looking for enhancing a footer area, don't need the power of Themer. Yeah, so that totally work. That would totally work.

Q: Client Maintenance Days

@00:53:47
For your maintenance clients, do you have a maintenance day where you do everyone every site or do I have a rolling day for maintenance, depending on when they signed up?

Okay, so for me, I ... okay, the way to answer that question is this: What is your process for doing WordPress maintenance?

And by that, I'm assuming we're meaning WordPress theme and plugin updates and those sorts of things. Is that what we're talking about?

It is, so I do all of those on the same day every week because I use a central management dashboard and we're just going to update everything once a week. In our process, we do, unless it's a time when it's an enhanced threat level to the WordPress ecosystem, a lot of security issues and so forth, we do once a week.

That's our process.

So all WordPress theme core, plugin up, that all that's done on the same day every day of the week. Like on a specific weekday or Wednesdays.

For us, it's Sunday nights because I'm getting ready for the week and I'm usually doing all those WordPress updates right then.

Plus, if you ought to be using a centralized dashboard like iThemes sync and group and just run them all, it'd be too much trouble to try to do some, some days and some the other.

Comment 1 Response:

Like Jan said, I hit this a second ago, but when it's a time of enhanced threats like, you may have seen it. Last month, we had multiple plugins, multiple plugins in the last three to four weeks have been compromised with cross site scripting and cross site forgery vulnerabilities. For a couple of weeks there, when all that stuff was going on, we were updating sites two or three times a week.

Comment 2 Response:

So, Paul is saying, when a client comes on board, that becomes the day they get maintenance. Man, I would block my time and I do maintenance on Mondays or whenever you want to do it. Just get into the mentality of, you want to group like kinds of work together. You're going to be more efficient if you do that.

Oh, Paul saying he has a full-time person that does the updates, awesome, but I would still block the time that, you know, today is update day and we're going to just do all our stuff on this day.

Q: Website Performance

@00:56:26
How do you speed up a slow site?

Oh, Ben, we're going to do a whole webinar on that next month. Actually, it's going to be in September. So a whole thing on speeding up WordPress, it is beyond the ability for me to answer other than in a very broad answer. The speed of your website is really all about three components:

• What is loading your site, the server.
• What has to be loaded from the database.
• What other assets have to come in.

And you need to optimize all three of those areas.

Now, WP Rocket, it's a good plug-in to use, but it is not the silver bullet. There's a whole combination of things.

The server needs to be optimized, what has to come out of the database to you needs to be optimized and the assets, the images, the videos, the scripts, all that stuff needs to be optimized as well. But we're going to do a whole multi-day training on that.

But yeah, that's way too long for us. We couldn't do that in the whole hour today.

Okay, we'll do one more and we'll call it a day.

Q: Time Management App

@00:57:57
Do you have an app or a tool that helps map out your time for the week? If I have multiple projects in play, they're all different phases, trying to avoid overbooking yourself, need to project out what time I have so in client spring you work, you can be realistic about when you'll be available to do that work.

Well, honestly, it can be as complicated or as simple as you want it to be and it really depends on how much volume that you're managing.

So, how many projects do you juggle at a time, typically? Three to five a week, so you got to figure out, how much time can you allocate? Can you actually do that many projects in a week?

So for me, the big picture, I have a Trello board that I use for projects that are proposals that have been sent out, projects that are on deck waiting to start, projects that are in process and active, projects that are in process and delayed, and then a column for God only knows, like the client has, you know, disappeared and who knows when they're going to come back, right?

So that gives, and there's a million tools for this, right? You could use a whiteboard if you wanted to, but it's helpful to have one place where all those projects are just in big picture. What I am actively working on and so forth. And just so you can quick glance, see where everything is.

Overbooking your, Sherry's saying "I use a whiteboard and sticky notes". Exactly. Trello is basically a digital whiteboard with sticky notes. It just all depends on what works best for you. You need a tool that you can get your business at a glance.

Now, you could use a Gantt chart, you absolutely can, but here's the problem: How much time do you want to spend managing your system? We who are geeks love to complicate solutions that could really be pretty simple.

You know, the old story is told, I'm not sure if it's true or not, but you know, when the space race was on and we were trying to put a man on the moon, NASA spent many hundreds (supposedly) hundreds of thousands of dollars developing a pen that would write in zero gravity.

You know what the Russians did? They used a pencil, right? So the issue is we tend to over complicate things.

I don't know if that's apocryphal or not, but it's a great illustrative point of sometimes just writing it all down on a legal pad is good enough. You need something that you're going to get of your business at a glance. It does wonders for your mental health being able to see, okay, this is kind of where things are.

And I've got three active projects right now. I can't take on another. So I need to tell the client it's going to be a month.

And you know, one of the things I do just as far as project flow, we all know that projects stall on content, right? We're always waiting on the client to provide assets for the project. And that could be a whole session in and of itself, but one of the things that I did years ago, recognizing I was never ever going to change the human nature of content being hard to get together. I normally stay six weeks booked out. That's just pretty standard. So if you sign a project with me today, it's going to be four to six weeks before we can actually start to work on the project.

So in my flow, I moved the content guide, which is the document I put together to extract from the client, the content for the project. I started doing that immediately after they signed the contract. So they don't feel like there's a big delay.

They pay me money, they put the deposit down. I spent a few hours putting that content guide together and it goes back to them. And then over that four to six weeks, they can take that time to put the content together.

And then generally speaking about the time they've got the content ready, is about the time we're going to be ready for their project. And so it sort of slides on in.

Freedcamp is a great project management tool.

By the way, there is an AppSumo deal right now that I just bought, called Project.co. If you're looking for a project management tool, this is when I just bought, have not spent a lot of time playing with it, but it hits all of the checkmarks that I need in my business. It's going to replace a couple of different tools, including Slack, to keep my folks together on projects.

It'll also give us a place for clients to upload assets. So give a look at that. It's a pretty cool tool for $49 lifetime, can't really beat that.

Outro:

@01:03:17

All right, it's after two o'clock, so office doors have got to close.

So let me hear from you guys in the chat. Was this useful?

Was this helpful for you guys? Did you guys like office hours?

Okay, I'm going to realize, you know, this is not a question. You're probably going to go, no, you suck in the chat, so I may not be getting good feedback.

So let me ask you this. Okay, do this for me, will you? My name, my email is Nathan@ithemes.com right there.

If you have suggestions for making this better email me, or if you have some, you know, positive criticism that you want to give email me, because I think this is something that we may do.

And here's another question for you guys. I can see this going forward absolutely on a monthly basis. Would every other, do you think guys think every other week would be too much, or would we have enough questions to support in every other week office hours, or maybe even a weekly office hours if we get to it?

Every two weeks I get a monthly is fine. Yeah, that's my question. I just wonder if we're going to have crickets.

Beth says there's always going to be questions, yeah.

Okay, so it's a mixed bag.

So my point in this is I would love your thoughts on Office Hours, okay, so email me or tweet at me, I am @NathanIngram on Twitter, and you can always find me at NathanIngram.com.

Yeah, Larry, exactly. We all have, we all have full-time jobs that we're trying to do too.

So now the other thing is this, if we're doing these on a regular basis, then that form will always be on the webinar, so you can ask a question. Even if you can't attend live, the replays will be available, right? So you can get your question answered.

The drawback would be, you know, I couldn't do follow-up questions, so I have to do the best I could with answering your question.

Okay, well, thanks for your feedback, folks.

I had a lot of fun with this, so I think this will be something that will be useful. We'll talk about it internally on the frequency of these things. And we may actually get some other folks involved in these office hours as well. For more, you know, I'm not a developer, I know enough PHP for self-defense. That's it. I always screw up the semi-colon.

So we might get some developers in on a monthly basis, doing some dev type talks. I know AJ might be able to do some of that. We'll see. This is an evolving idea, and our goal is, how can we be the most help to you folks? How can we be the most help to you folks as part of the iThemes community?

Sherry is saying, for those of you watching the recording, that'd be a great title for a talk, PHP Self-Defense.

And you know what? I really like that. I really like that. What are the basics that a person who's doing WordPress needs to know about PHP? That's really fun. That would be a fun talk to put together, so we'll put that in the hopper as well.

Okay, well, thanks for hanging out with me. Let me show you a couple of other things that are coming up, actually one more for this week. I want to encourage you all to sign up for, if you have not already, the webinar with Adam Walker on Thursday at 1 o'clock central, how to set up a communications plan with your client.

Adam is awesome. I love this guy. He is brilliant. He does a lot of different things, including run an agency in Atlanta called Sideways 8. He's involved in a lot of different projects. He is a big thinker. And this issue of good communication with your client is, I mean, this is in his wheelhouse.

So, I want to encourage you, if you don't catch any other webinars this month, this might be the one to make sure you catch. So if you haven't registered for that one, make sure you do so.

I'll see you back then. Hopefully you have a great rest of the week, and we'll see you next time on iThemes Training. Where we go further together.