Hey everybody, I am not accidentally live, just suddenly live, we'll say, because I wasn't planning on going live for this, but I figured I'm working on the site, and I thought it would be fun to kind of walk through it quickly, give you a little sneak preview of what I'm hoping will launch next week. That's what I'm hoping. I recorded an interview yesterday, and that was the first time I referenced Streamline to Solopreneur, so I have a very set date
for when the show will be rebranded now. So I thought I would just kind of go through what I was working on. In the last live stream, I looked at Podpage, and I talked about all the reasons that Podpage wouldn't work for me. So it looks like a really good service. I think a lot of people would probably benefit from it, but as far as what I need, it just doesn't fulfill those needs. So let's do this. I have my project and things here, which
I clearly have not updated. Clone Currents site, new color scheme, wordmark. I probably won't do this. Update copy, cleanup plugins. So that's the stuff I need to do for the new website. Here's what it is. I guess I should maybe for comparisons sake go to how I built it so you can kind of see what they look like. They're very similar, right? I'm not in the business of redesigning the entire site. Actually, maybe I'll do this. Give a little bit more
room and then put them side by side. Nope, not over there. But actually, you can see what this will look like when I decide to make the site go live. This little pressable is my host and they have a nice little plug-in that does maintenance mode. There's no way to customize it, so I actually modified the code. I don't recommend that. To add my playlist here so that people can at least access the content while the site is in maintenance mode.
So now we'll put these side by side. I'll hide the sidebar so you can get kind of an idea of how they look side by side. I didn't want to change too much, but I did want to kind of tighten up the upper area and make it a little bit more streamlined. So I put the artwork next to this. This is going to be the new tagline. I think that's the one I'm messing with, at least a little value proposition. And then I put the buttons out
in the open. If you click this, right, you have these colorful buttons over here. I wanted something a little bit more muted. And actually, all of these icons are the same and they should not be. So I need to fix that. Maybe we'll dive into that and I can show you that really quickly. I also, you can see if we look at the latest episodes, I did tighten this up a little bit. And I finally centered the sponsors. Like this was driving me crazy. Featured episodes
again pretty much the same, hosted by pretty much the same. And then the opt-in is a lot cleaner and has a better value proposition. They are the same thing, but the value proposition,
especially for the show, is a little better. So I think something that I probably need to do here is create like a new welcome sequence, I think is what I should do for people who sign up via the show, like create a new forum and a new welcome sequence because I have gotten people to join my list and they'll say something like, hey, I really like your podcast. Do you only talk about podcasting on your mailing list? And so I don't want
to have a divided audience. I want everybody to know that's my main offering, but maybe just like an extra email to be like, by the way, I talk about like podcasting is my main thing, which again, they should know this by listening to the show if they're going to sign up now, being more not diligent, explicit about that. But I can also be like, hey, if you like only want the Monday emails, right? Click this. And then you'll just get no, like
you won't get any of my other content. But I might not want to do that. I don't think I want to do that. Because I want people to be on my list so that I can like my, you know, my mailing list is designed to sell stuff. I mean, like inform people, but also, you know, I want to get business from that. So by the way, I didn't do like the normal live stream startup. So if you are coming in and watching, say hello, let me know if you have
any questions about the redesign as it goes. I'm happy to answer those questions. Of course, I probably this isn't going to be as long as my normal live stream because this was just kind of like an accidental live stream. So I probably also won't be like diligently checking all of the places as often. But if you are watching on Twitch or YouTube, I will see the comments come through there. So anyway, that's, you know, little out of the way housekeeping
stuff. Okay, so that's the homepage. The homepage is basically done. I'm going to tighten this up. I'm going to create some more space. You can't see that now because I've switched screens. The homepage is basically done. I'm going to create some space here. I'm going to update my bio a little bit here, maybe change the photo. But this is I'm very happy with the way this oh, and of course, like fix these buttons. The listen page, you know, there's
some things I'm using WordPress with the cadence theme. So I think that's probably important to note. But the this basically looks exactly the same. These images, I'm like, I'm not going to rebrand every image. But like you can see here, I've the header is a little bit bigger because if we know not that one. Oh, actually. Oh, no, I set them both to 100
so that we could see them both nicely. But if we zoom in over here, sure, I did create this word mark I created this my graphic designer didn't because I didn't ask him to because I didn't think about it. But I created like this little word mark that's also serving as a fave icon with the yellow background. Actually, that's just the arrows. So, you know, I created some other like pieces of branding, I guess, so that I can use them
throughout the site this word mark and stuff like that. Everything else is probably like, you know, this is more or less going to look the same sponsor page like all I really I'm going to take. I'm going to be kidding in 2022. So I'm probably going to get rid of these two things. Most people want a custom package, right? They're like not interested in this other stuff. So I'm just going to update the copy on this because I haven't done that in
a while. Contact page, I'm going to update this. So I'll probably still include these two things. The reason I included this is because people were filling out this form thinking I was how I built this by Guy Ross just recently got another request like that, which is wild because it came in through this form. And I went like without explicitly saying I'm not the NPR podcast. This page is screaming. It's this is not the NPR podcast. So I don't
I don't know what to do. And I'm not going to have to worry about that anymore, right? Because it's going to be a different name. And then the joint pro page, like I want to update this. First of all, this is going to be called accelerated, right? Streamline solo for newer accelerated. And so, you know, just kind of update this page and these things,
these line items. And that's really it, right? There's a search. I probably I guess if I make one change to the homepage, it's going to I will kind of under featured episodes, maybe add a search or maybe maybe above the featured episodes. Add a, you know, find an episode you're looking for sort of thing, like make the search more front and center. I have over 400 episodes now. So that'll be good. If we go and then the only other real
page that's going to matter here is the so this is driving me crazy. I don't know if you could see this, but there's like a white gap here is the episode page. And so again, this is largely going to remain the same. I like the way it works. This will let me grab one with the transcript. I cloned this last week. So like before my VA got to adding the transcripts. But this is what it looks like. So, you know, maybe I'll style the transcript
box a little more. But everything else is going to be the same. The sponsors are here. Feedback, subscribe, and then the join pro, which it looks like this one goes dynamically generated and these these two are really hard coded. Yeah, so and then yeah, everything else is basically going to be the same here. I like this form. This form tells me like includes the URL. So it tells me what episode people converted on, which is really important
to me. If we go into the Oh, and then I guess, yeah, for comparison's sake. This is what it looks like. I got rid of the roundy thing because I decided I hate that. And I made this a more subtle color so that the yellow pops a little bit more. You can see that the player is the same color because I just changed the player and transistor. And so that changed it across the board. But again, everything else is going to look the same
here. The color scheme is better. Like it's more uniform. Like I don't know where this maroon is. This maroon probably came from Palatin telling me like, Oh, this is a complimentary color to the blue you're using. And I'm like, Oh, yeah, great. So that's that's basically it here. One giant pain in the neck thing for my WordPress people, anybody using WordPress with block patterns, block patterns are not globally set. So every block pattern is different
and is treated differently. Which means when I wanted to make this and this blue area right here is a block pattern. So when I wanted to make this change, I actually had to go into the WordPress editor, view the code and then do like a site wide find your place, which is wasn't my favorite thing that I had to do. So I'm going here. I have this set to a ridiculous color so that I know this is the staging site. In case I have both up.
This was just like a habit I've always I got into because I didn't want to when I was doing client work, I didn't want to update live sites that way. So I always like the first thing I did when I created a staging site was make it this color. And I think like the dev site is blue or something like that. Just so I could know immediately what environment I'm in. So if you're doing WordPress, I was wrong, I recommend you do that. And then,
okay, so what I had to do is like go into a post and then pick a post. And then this is where like, because I'm a coder, I know how to do this. Probably, but I went into code. I knew the background color was going to be like this. So I searched for this term in the block pattern. And then I found the color I wanted to replace it with. And then I used the fantastic plugin, better search replace to actually do those replacements.
So I don't know if there's a history here. There's probably not where you where I can see all the searches I ran. But this is really crucial. I thought about doing this across the board like replacing how I built it with streamlined solopreneur. However, I don't have that many non episode related pages. And even fewer that explicitly mentioned how I built it that's not part of the template. And I don't want to update the transcripts
and the transcripts are part our post content. So I'd have to write a pretty complicated query to be like replace all instances of how I built it where the content with streamlined solopreneur where it's in the post content, but it's only of type page or post and not type transcript. And I'm like, this is like the juices and worth the squeeze, right? This is going to be one of those things where outside of transcripts, if there's a reference to
it, I'll probably just like handle them as I go through it, right? And so if there's here maybe, oh, it's not, right? There's going to be older episodes where like it explicitly mentions join how I built it pro like in the show notes. That would be easy enough for me to change if I wanted to. But everything else is fine. So what's so what's on the agenda? I actually have I just remembered like I had like the regular project here in in things,
but I wanted to like jot down a few notes really quickly. And so I have them in bear notes. So let me bring that up really quick without like showing my showing all my other notes. Yeah. So this is it. I don't know if you could see this. Oh, cool. Yeah, so search bar on homepage, update the sponsor page update the join page update the thrive cart theme.
So that it fits test search page. So I haven't done that I'll do that with y'all. And then like, this is more of a question mark, like, do I want a mega like a super footer, one of the like one of the lots of stuff across the bottom here, I think I do, because I have a lot of different projects. And if people are finding me through here, like I want them to learn more about me. But maybe not. We'll like we'll see. I really need to to I'm not
just going to have it for the sake of having it, right? Because like I also don't want to distract from this. This is the thing I want people to do. So we'll see. Okay, so let's actually test search storytelling. Okay, so like I need this is going to get fixed all the way across. But yeah, this is going to look like every wolf. This is going to look like every other search bit. Now let's see this is I think this is the transcript.
Yeah, so something that I should probably fix is excluding the transcript pages from search. And when I was using search WP, there was a way to do that where I could basically give the search credibility to the post it was related to. I have a video about that from like six years ago. But when search WP got acquired, I stopped using search WP because I was worried it would go downhill. And I don't want to speak ill of the purchaser.
But I don't really like some other tactics. And I don't really feel like seeing that in my dashboard. So I might find a different search plugin might just I probably don't want to exclude the transcript from from site search because that's that's where the text is coming from like if we look at if we look at the search again, right, I need to fix that icon storytelling. And then we have my friend Becky here, like the transcript is showing up here,
but her episode isn't right. And so what I'd probably want to do is maybe like redirect this transcript to the episode it's related to somehow. That's going to require custom code, which is why I haven't gotten around to it. So I mean, we'll see this is something that not necessary for launch, but definitely something I want to consider. Because I'm like when and when I was using cast those I should say like, I was able to get the cast
those player and just embed it here, programmatically. And I can't do that anymore because I'm using transistor so I'd have to like do more hand wavy stuff to do that. So I'd probably what ultimately what I would want to do is if I find a different search plugin, give the search engine juice from the transcripts to the post it's related to. Otherwise just like kind of redirect it. And there's probably a way for me to do that. Because it is the code editor
can I see. That's the other thing like if I had built this page from scratch, there'd be so much technical like there's so much technical debt, right? Because this is like this was mostly a custom build. And so no, I don't see the post it's related to here, which means that that's a one way thing. If I go to, I guess now you're just getting like a behind the scenes look at how this site works. If you have and again if anybody
has any questions feel free to drop them in the chat. Oh gosh, I do see questions coming in. Hey Ruth, thanks for being here. I don't know how the X comments are getting added. But that's fun. I certainly tell you pop up on Twitter when you start a live stream. Thanks for that. Jason, do you use Riverside? I just started checking them out this year. I do use Riverside. I sojourned away from Riverside last year to try Squadcast. And I like Riverside
better. And so I started I went back to Riverside. So that's why I use my big fan. I can if you go to podcastworkflows.com slash tools, you'll find all the tools that I like and recommend and there there will be affiliate links there. But yeah, that's thanks Jason for being here for asking Ruth. Glad that you were able to stumble upon it. I'm glad you're enjoying this. So I can bigify this now. And if we look at so we're just looking at Becky's right
so I'll go down to Becky. And when we load. So this is small file that now it's now it looks all crowded. Also, there we go. So this is a block pattern. Right this was like the bane of my existence and changing this but this makes it really easy for my VA to go through and like add the player without having to add these buttons and the show notes, which I can automatically add in the show notes if I want to which I really should start doing
especially for this one. And then the sponsors. This is dynamically generated. I'll show you how in a minute. But then I'll like the rest of this. Also like the transcript is is pulled with a who that's custom that's custom code. So sorry, Becky, I'm like putting your email address here but trans so the transcript is from a drop down. You can search same thing with the sponsors. And so that's how the sponsors are dynamically generated. I do it this way.
This is all using a CF. I've tried a bunch but a CF has always been like the one to use. And so I do it this way because I can also then automatically pull the sponsors onto the homepage easily. Just by looking at the latest episodes sponsors. So that is, you know, that's been something really good too. So all of this here this is like these are the custom fields associated with ACF. And so there is a transcript ID is what this is.
And so I could probably like on the transcript template, grab the ID find the episode it's related to, which like if we look at, gosh, is this a good idea? I'm pretty sure this plug in is open source. I think it's up on GitHub. But this is like, I don't know, I'm really nervous about this. Yeah, like I mean, I would I really need to like update this, and you Oh, hey, I did update this. When I moved from when I moved from castos to transistor.
So I think all of this stuff is going to be in like functions and maybe output. I did a decent job of documenting this to be honest, but like I'm really rust I haven't my friends I haven't written appreciable code in a long time. Like since I left my agency job basically. So I'm definitely a little rusty in that regard. I'm not so rusty that I can't tell when chat gpt is lying to me, which is good. But I'm definitely probably more rusty than I'd like
to be. So if I let's see, I'm going to go over to Twitter, check things out. Yeah, so is there like a is there a comment section on this video? Like I'm so confused by how you all are like commenting on this live stream. Because I don't I mean maybe it's because I'm me. And so I don't need to but I'm like I'm not seeing the comments at all except for through the live stream, which is bananas. It's really like something that low key plagues
me. Like because it happened last time too and I'm like how is this happening. But anyway, so let's go back here. So there's probably some stuff in here and like this is I don't have a force balance tags. This is from like when I was copying and pasting I think from some other thing into this might have been like pre block editor this code. But any who I have you know custom widgets and functions and all that fun stuff and this is pretty
well engineered because I was really good at what I did for a while. But you know I think like if I'm going to modify the transcripts I'd probably do it this way. That's probably what's happening is I'm like looking to see if I get the episode like so this is get transcript. Yeah so I don't know. I guess all of this is to say I'm not quite sure how I want to handle this. I don't think it is crucial for launch. You guys are mowing the lawn. I don't
know if you can hear that if you can't hear it wonderful that's great. But I just I just wanted to give a quick update on this. Oh I guess so I can show you to I guess the last thing I'll show you here leaving the land of code and go back to my kids are really excited about the lawnmower going back to the home page here. So these are just block editor buttons. I was using the second line themes buttons like subscribe buttons but man I was
unhappy with oh I know what happened. I was like unhappy with the general layout. And like the fact that I couldn't make them like uniform or anything like that and it was just like I don't know I'm really lukewarm on the second line theme stuff. I think what he's doing is cool and definitely serving a niche that I think is important. But also I can't talk and do this at the same time. But also like I just I don't feel like it's I don't
feel like a lot of it is super well executed. And like I've given this feedback to him before his pocket casts in here because that's like an automatic joint. And so like I tried to do something and it was just like a very frustrating experience. And so I was like you know what I'll just use I tried to make them all the same color. And it just like it wasn't working the way I would have liked. And so that was frustrating. Sure. I guess the other thing
that I could do because I this isn't happening is on hover and a box shadow. Yeah. Do that great. Love that. Yes. I'll do that. So anyway suffice to say these are all just straight block editor buttons. I think it's that's a really nice part of. Oh well. I'm not paying attention here. It's my fault. I only want it on hover. Doot. Doot. I should also mention that this is mostly cadence blocks. It's the cadence theme with cadence blocks. Every time
I have tried to use full site editing with like a full site editing theme. It's made me want to rip my hair out. And I know it's not. They're all like themes by Anders Niren who's excellent like best in class as far as WordPress theme design goes. And I know it's just like the full site editor and me and like maybe it's just because like I'm old. I've been using WordPress since it was like six months old. And so maybe I'm like this is too different
and I don't like it but it's too different and I don't like it. So anyway I think that's this is about this is this feels like a good place to wrap. Jackie Delia. Hey thanks for being here. You're always good at whatever you did. I appreciate that. Those kind words I loved loved doing web development for a long time. I still low key do I just don't do it as often as I'd like. And Ruth can't hear the lawnmower over the sirens here. Yeah.
I'll take the lawnmower over sirens. Though I do live close enough to the train station here that the Amtrak goes by and I hear that so yeah but that's it. I'll give it like 30 more seconds if anybody has any questions about what I've done here but that's a quick update. Again I hope to have this out next week which I guess means the rebrand will happen in the next two weeks. Jackie saying I've been using WordPress way too long to deal with the site
editor. I agree with you 100% right. And this is the thing right. I want to thanks for letting me. Thanks for giving me this in Jackie. If it was good I'd be like great let's do it right but I feel like if I want to change like the header of the site I have to go into the site editor and then click on the header template and then click on like some other template like it's not just straightforward. Here's what your site looks like. Click on this to
edit it. It's like a weird rat's nest of templates and patterns. And maybe it's because I haven't given like I will assign myself some of the blame here but I've been out of WordPress long enough that I didn't even know 6.5 was coming out until like I saw some random tweet about it. I haven't been paying that much that close attention and I've been using cadence for a lot of my stuff. So I'm no longer and this was my design. I'm no longer a WordPress
power user. When I moved into podcasting I didn't want to be a WordPress power user anymore because I wanted to use WordPress the way that my clients would use WordPress. And like I still have the expertise and I know my way around but now I can't be like oh well you just do this like 400 things right. And so approaching it from like a new user point of view it's just not good. It takes me too long to figure out things. Too much technical
debt now right. Like Jackie you were there Ruth you might have been there too. So this is WordPress talk now everybody I'm really sorry for a minute. You were both there when like I think you were both there when like I got a call from before WordPress 5.0 came
out. I got a call from Matt Mullenweg like asking my opinion about the launch and this and I'm like you know from an enterprise standpoint this is really soon and sudden and like I don't think it's ready and he's like thanks for your feedback and then like two days later he's like 5.0 is out and I'm like we rushed this for no apparent reason. And maybe there
was reasons right. I'm like I will give I've been trying to give the benefit of the doubt more but just like I don't see how the site editor is better or more user friendly than the competition likes Squarespace or Wix or some of these other things that hosting companies have built themselves. It just feels it feels like a front end development like a front
end builder built by developers and that's not that's not user friendly. And so you know when when when I was looking at pod page last week it was it was an honest go at hey is this going to be better for WordPress better than me better for me then can we I'm going to clap my hands and start that over this is live I can't do that when I was looking at pod page it was an I was giving it an honest shake is this going to be better for me than
WordPress is will it make my life easier will it make my VA's life easier because like what she does now my VA what she does now is publishes the podcast on transistor copies the transistor code and publishes it on WordPress too. And it's because I have this design that I really want to use and I thought well if I can get close enough on pod page maybe it's fine.
I can't write and it's but you know it's I all of us here in active in the chat Ruth just posted you know hand coding designs before WordPress so the classic editor with the HTML view was great for me yeah. And like the the block editors fine for some things but then like awful for you know I like I have like a recurring it well it's not recurring it's very few and far between because I again I try not to tweet about WordPress and I try
not to complain about much much Jackie thanks for joining us. I'm glad you were able to pop in you definitely set me on a rant in the best way possible so thanks for joining
us have a good rest of your day. It's like good for some people on Twitter I'll say like hey I really wish the block editor could do advanced things like copy and paste text right or like I said I want a three by three grid or three by two grid with six images and it made like just the weirdest shape and it's because there's it's not I it's not the abilities of the developers whose abilities far exceed mine they're trying to do hard
things at a large scale project but if our goal was to make WordPress easier for the everyday user I think we failed we they I'm not there anymore that said because I can code I have that ability and I'm using a really good tool in cadence my site's gonna remain on WordPress and I'm really pleased with the way everything looks right now so there you go all right well that was fun thanks for letting me rant and reminisce and show you
what I'm working on I'm really excited I guess what I will say is I never know if I have a good idea I'm gonna go deeper into this I think for my members they get everything first more or less and I cover different and deeper topics so if you want to become a member and get access to a members only podcast feed you can do so over at how I built diet slash join or soon streamlined dot FM slash join the main thing I'll talk about for members
is the redirects because I'm concerned about that so I'll probably talk through that and how I solved it for the members that's like that feels like not really a live streaming thing so yeah there we go I figured it out on the fly I mean I've always planned this so yeah if you want to become a member you can do so over at how I built it dot it slash join thanks to everybody you tuned in thanks to Jackie and Ruth and Jason for chiming
in I always appreciate your feedback thanks so much for watching and until next time I'll see you out there.