Is WordPress Right For You? | Ep. #20

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Nealey’s favorite! We’re talking all about WordPress, if it’s right for you, and a ton of value bombs. As always, we’re drinking a new beer. This week it’s Belhaven’s Scottish Ale.

Beer of the Episode

Belhaven’s Scottish Ale

vivendastore.com

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Transcription of the episode

Errors courtesy of automation 😉

00:08 Welcome to craft thinking I am BGC and I’m Nealey and today we are discussing if wordpress is right for you. I love wordpress. We’re going to have some interesting conversations on this. So I’m gonna I’m a pessimistic towards repressed, so I’m gonna need to calm down a little bit, maybe even our old, but. So I think I should open up here. What do you think a beer is always a must, especially if we’re going to be craft thinking. Part of it is being craft and we only drink craft beer, so I think that works out pretty well. We have an episode where you’d like awful light beer the whole time, the whole time. Um, this is what we’re doing is we’re not doing that yet. Uh, we’re actually going to be drinking from belhaven. Um, I’ve heard of it before. I can’t, I can’t say too much about it.

00:55 Um, I know I’ve had at least one of their beers overall. Pretty decent brewery. So it’s there. I’m Scottish Ale, I’m Scottish, so that’s why I kind of picked this up to your Scottish. I am, I’m sitting on my dad’s side chairs. Um, yeah, Scottish, mostly Scottish, the Mcneil Castle. I definitely want to check it out. It’s over there in Scotland. It’s kind of on my bucket list. Rundown castle it. Uh, it should be fun. Can you let go and claim it? Like that’s my class. So, um, yeah, I saw my dad’s side. I’m, I’m Scottish. And then on my, uh, my mom said Sicilian, so I don’t actually get hangovers and I think it’s, I think it’s the blood because I mean here’s the deal. So Scott’s, they’re all into Scotch, right? All into that red wine, both on the higher level of alcohol content both tend to give big hangovers. Well, I just have that lineage. That just means I don’t get hangovers. I think that was my fun fact for the day for Scottish. So I’ve already started drinking this. You haven’t even taken a sip. Yeah, yeah. You know, I wanted to hit a, it does have a rich, nutty and smooth flavor. It just like what the caption says. I actually really liked this one solid. The upfront flavor.

02:16 Do you like that nutty flavor? I’m going to take another sip. So yeah, I like it, it’s very smooth. I can eat it with just, I mean I can drink it with just about everything. Um, it’s, it’s just smooth for me. I give it like a, like a seven and a half or I’ll give it a seven and a half. I like it. I, my first impression, I like it. There’s a flavor on the back of my tongue. Oh, that’s hitting them. Just kind of, I’ll give it, I’ll give a like a, you know, I’m gonna give it like a six point two, five, six point two five. That’s very specific because I was like six point five. I’m like, ah, I don’t want to say six. I feel it’s now getting to really negative territory. So six point two, five. I’m going to stick there.

03:02 So these episodes are pre recorded of course, but I was coming up with an idea where we have on the site itself while you’re listening to this probably already there basically our beers that we drink and then uh, in order of which ones the best and which one’s the worst than kind of our takes on it.

03:21 I think that’d be cool. Yeah, and actually we, we might, we might start doing something. We might tell you guys the beers we’re going to be drinking, you know, a couple episodes and then go out and buy that beer. I’m going to tell you if it’s good or not, but try it out with us and will be. It will be all drinking a beer together. Talking about business, talking about beer, which I mean, come on. That’s freaking awesome right there.

03:41 Well, might be pretty cool. It’s like having like maybe like once a month have like a live podcast where we were live on the air or recording somewhere. I don’t know really where. Yeah, this is kind of just coming up right now, but we have like the beer we said ahead of time that have people drink it with us while we’re having that podcast are talking place.

04:00 The whining pig man. Come on. You know, that’s my bar I think live there. If we could.

04:06 It helps us be at night. We can’t just do it in the middle of the day because most of the people watching or listening wouldn’t be able to do it with us because it probably at work or

04:13 whatever else. That’s. Yeah. No, it gets pretty packed at night. Yeah. So we gotta go to a crappy bar. No one goes to it.

04:19 Not necessarily a bar. We can do it like someplace or a gang plank. It’s like a free community.

04:26 Yeah. We’ve done some business meetings there at work. So, um, yeah, I like it. I honestly, I buy it again. Um,

04:37 I want to kind of reference back to once I really figured out which episode it was, where you gave another beer, a 16 year old like it that much,

04:43 six point two, five, barely above the episode. It might be a six point five and that’s the thing. There is an APP, uh, to, to help out with this that we should be using. Um, I believe that APP is called untapped or something like that or touch or something like that. And what you do is you actually, every time you drink a beer, you find it in there and then you rate it, and then you can then go back and see a beer. Has this been all these episodes? Episode Twenty now to do this manually. You know how many times I’ve downloaded that APP, there’s just never used it. See it. I’m the. Oh, it’s on. Yeah, it’s untapped drinking socially. Yeah. So I’ve known about this whole time and I could have made our lives easier. So we’re going to have do an episode someday about using that 21 is just going to be nearly as. Oh Man. Yeah, we’ll uh, we’ll do an episode on using our tools. That’d be a good example. We didn’t use the right tools. Um, so let’s talk about. Let’s talk about wordpress here. So we’re, is, I want to start this out, that why we’re talking about wordpress. Number one, wordpress is relevant about 35 percent. The Internet is built on wordpress and you may say 35 is insignificant. No, that’s extremely significant. They’re the, they’re the number one of open source.

06:07 I built a content management systems, basically things to create a website in that’s 35 percent by one program. That’s amazing. No other program touches it.

06:16 It’s not even close. So awhile back there was a war between Joomla. Drupal doesn’t nuke and we’re, hey, Joomla with a passion. I hate dotnetnuke with a passion that’s asp. Kill Fire behind the barn and shoot it right when it comes down to it, it would. It would take over all the permissions on the hosting account and then the folder structure. It was a big man. It was a. It was a horrible. And trying to fix that stuff. You typically couldn’t. You just tell him good luck. Restart. Right. So so word press came out on top and if you hire a freelance web developer, it’s more than 35 percent chance that they’re going to be building in wordpress. It’s probably more like an eighty percent chance, honestly. They’re going to be using it because it’s what’s called open source and that means sweating. Why don’t you. Why don’t you explain a little bit towards me?

07:03 So word press. It’s phenomenal. It’s open source at good and a bad thing, but open source basically means anyone and everyone can contribute to it and it’s made it what it really is like word press was, was created initially to be a blogging platform. It’s what is still today, but open source. There’s a bunch of plugin and theme developers that have really made it what it is. They’ve added their own third party plugins, their own themes, and really built it up and made it this amazing, awesome content management system.

07:33 Yes. Before you went in for like you mentioned plugins and that’s what made word press really excel, so like say Justin wants to make wordpress do some who couldn’t normally do, which was normally a blogging software he could could a created, plug it, plug in and then upload it to the wordpress directory so to speak, and then everyone can use that plug in. For example, if you wanted to turn his instead of it being a blog in ecommerce site, that’s impossible on repress until install plugins. Think of it like your cell phone. The by default can take phone calls and texts and browse the Internet, right? But it’s not a flashlight, but if I were to download a flashlight app or plugin, so to speak, and now turns into a flashlight or if it’s not a payment processing system, but as long as they get the APP that allows me to do it, it’s now becoming that. So think it was plugins as apps for wordpress now.

08:19 So, uh, I think one of the biggest pros for word press is there’s a plugin for that. Remember the simpsons did it. Uh, there’s everything. Plugging a wordpress can do everything. Now, brands very pessimistic with

08:32 wordpress. Here’s, and here’s the reason why, because all these freelance web developers, which by the way love you guys. I’m not saying that you guys do anything wrong. They tend to choose wordpress for these websites that don’t need to be built. And wordpress, wordpress is powerful and it can do anything. I think that’s amazing. They build websites for these small business owners that don’t need pretty much any of these plugins. And these small business owners have no idea that they are in charge of update news plugins, themes, updating the core software, and then eventually. Because here’s, here’s also the thing about wordpress, it’s not if it will break, it’s when the website will break and these small businesses will know that. And then they tried to call their web developer up. They’re busy doing new builds. Most landlords don’t like doing updates. And that’s on the back of the priority list. And the business owner is the left in the dark. Basically they’re, they’re, they’re left going down the creek without a paddle.

09:28 Literally four days ago I had a past client reached out to me and say, Hey, my website’s broken. What happened? I go, I don’t know, what did you do? So it’s like I was updating some stuff and it broke. I was like, well, that happens with wordpress. Uh, you fixed it for you. It’s going to be x amount a cool. We’ll just get it up and running. So I went in and fixed it. Luckily he had a developer like me that will take the time out of it. I don’t charge an arm and a leg because it was literally like a 15 minute fix, but you know what you’re doing, but if you don’t, if he were to fix it himself, it would take forever

10:02 ever, ever in most of the dopers none most, but there’s a lot of web developers for 15 minutes, so we’ll charge a four or five hour block to make it worth their while because that’s their only job right now. So when it comes down to it, it has a learning curve. So a small business owner, you have a web developer, wordpress, and you just want to get the phone number on your site. Good luck. When you launch in there trying to figure out how to do it. You’re not typically going to know how to do any of that stuff and all you want to do is make a basic update. So a lot of these sites that didn’t require like plugins are crazy theme could have been built on a hosting providers do it yourself by the web developer. They could still make it look good and then the business owner can make the updates on their own without bothering the web developer who doesn’t want to do the updates. That’s one of my biggest beefs with wordpress. Now, let’s look on the other side though. Let’s look at some pros when it comes to beyond the power.

10:57 So wordpress by default is search engine friendly. It’s, it was created to rank very well in search and especially when you integrate the blogging side of it. But there’s again plugins, there’s a plugin for that, uh, that helps with Seo. Like if you guys have a word press site right now, you need to install a plugin called yoast. It’s a very simple plugin that lets you kind of add your Meta description, your title going to let you know, kind of like the top 10 to 15 things you need to make sure you have on that website, which is huge. And if you follow that to a t, your rankings on Google, that’s really the only one that matters, um, will, will increase it, will really get there. That’s the one of the biggest benefits of using word press is as how well it ranks on search engines.

11:48 My grandma used the three times she went on their computer time. I’ve ever heard anyone say, did you bring that? Well, I’ve heard it, but it had nothing to do with us. So let’s talk about the negative side. I’m going to be the negative guy today. I’m fine with this. Let’s talk about those plugins here. Let’s, let’s, let’s talk about those plugins for a second. Let me see. All right, so let’s talk about. There’s a certification that these guys had to go through to build these plugins to make sure they’re stable and they’re not going to be hacked. Right? Certifications. Exactly. There’s no certification. It could be billy the 12 year old making this plug in.

12:34 Right, but the problem is wordpress websites are notorious for being hacked. We did an episode on that, right, and they’re notorious because a lot of these plugins are built by people that don’t know how to build a plug in that won’t be hacked, but also most of these plugins are free and they built it on the. They just built a on their free time and then to keep it up to date. We require a lot of work when they’re getting paid to do it. So then, although it might be secure today, it is vulnerable tomorrow and that’s a massive problem.

13:08 So one way to combat that. Guys, don’t listen to BGC like don’t be, don’t be scared. Download the plugin was security, security, security, security. How is I was getting so caught up with that, but download the plugin security. It’s a free shout out BGC. It’s a free plugin. It’s now backed by go daddy, listen, what does it was its own company, but it’s going to help you make sure it’s going to harden your. You’re just going to lock down some files. That way nobody can touch it, which nobody. You shouldn’t have anyone touch it. It’s going to do monitoring on your sites. That way if there are any changes to your theme files, your plugin files, or your actual core files, it’ll let you know and it’ll help you out once it comes down to your site actually being hacked, so down that free plug in. Don’t worry about what brandon is saying. Yes, it’s legit that anyone can make a plug in and they can make it very vulnerable, but there are things to do to kind of combat that by by default, most of the most popular plugins are going to be fine.

14:10 I’m just, I’m just feeling like disagree with on everything today. I’m don’t download, don’t you? Don’t just download security. Security’s a great company to that. Just go to code data and by the Deluxe website security program is backed by security and has way more protection than that plugin. Just pay for their full thing because the firewall protection it gives is amazing and the cdn network will make your website go faster.

14:36 Back to little timmy. You don’t want someone coming to your site to see you. It about children’s book redirect back to a porn site. What is it about children and reading the book, make sure you guys are secure. So

14:48 the plugin is good. Insecurity is a great company. I absolutely loved them and what they do just by the deluxe plan with the, the, the firewall protection and you can probably do that and do the plug in if you want both. Just do both. Right? So then the other thing, um, so the vulnerability already covered. It’s not just the plugins, the themes, you. And the other thing is it’s just constant maintenance. If you’re hiring a web developer to do this, it’s convenience. If you’re building on your own and you just want to build a website and you just want to take a little bit of break from the web site for a month, well that might not be good enough. You might need to be in there updating the core software, updating the plugins and that takes away from the time for your business. And that’s one problem that I have with wordpress. It’s just, it’s too high maintenance, you know, it’s just, it’s kind of like, it’s kind of like that, that I’m not going to say girlfriend because guys are high means to. It’s that significant other that is just too high maintenance. We’ve all been there. I just, I struggled with that.

15:50 No, I completely get it. It’s a, it takes a lot. Like if I literally had to manage every single one of my clients plugins and update it and log in up, click that update button, wait for it to load and make sure none of the sites broke. I wouldn’t be able to run my business at all.

16:05 You’d have to, you’d have to quit your current job. You have to do this, you have to do this just to click a button on amongst multiple sites would be repetitive and it’d be annoying. It would be a struggle. So when it comes down to it, um, you, when, you know, for me, you know, if you’re hiring a web developer to do this in a building, wordpress, you need to just keep this in mind. This is not going to be a build that after they built it in two months, you can just sit there and do nothing in two months. There’s going to be a new core update this when you plug in these to there’s going to be something, so you need to either work out that web developer or find a way to Melbourne just for updates. I buy. If you try to do this on your own, it has such a high learning curve. You’re probably just going to break it and contact them anyways.

16:52 As the optimistic with word press, I’m manage wp.com. It’s a free site. It’ll basically easily manager updates. With wordpress, it’s a one click login and then you click update all the updates, all your plugins, it manages your backups, manages your does little security audit does a couple of other things, but it’s free and it’s a. it’s backed by a pretty reputable company, so go check that out. That’s what I use for all my clients. If you have a bunch of wordpress sites that you manage for yourself, like if you have one for personal, one for your business, one for a site, so whatever you’re doing, you can add them all to this one site and click one button and update everything. It does a pre backup before it does an update. So in the event that when it does break because it does happen and you make an update, trust me, trust me, it does break. You can easily revert back to what it was post pre update.

17:46 So another thing that I it as far as when things struggle with is when I talk to these small business owners is that they will just say, well, I’ll just figure out word press on my own. First of all, you’re not. Not It, okay you will, but the time it takes to do that is going be used to be so much time taking me from your business. You’re going to be sacrificing your business for this. In beyond that, you’re then stuck with all the maintenance as well. I kind of forgot where I was going with that, but the main thing is what? Oh No. Then you learn how to use it and your first website is going to look horrible. It’s going to look atrocious. We’re Fred’s going to build the most beautiful websites on the Internet and I love so many websites I go to is built in wordpress as much.

18:29 I think it’s overused and you can build some good stuff, but you’re not going to build that beautiful site. Your first site’s going to look horrible. Mine was second site is going to look almost as horrible. Your third one, almost as horrible as the last one. It takes so much time in revisions for you to draw on your own. If you’re gonna, if you’re gonna, do the whole wordpress route and you’ve never built some repressed before. Just hire the developer. Just I’m getting exhausted thinking about trying to build a wordpress site right now. I’ve worked in internet industry for seven and a half years. I have. I’ve tried to build probably five or six word press sites and they still look atrocious.

19:09 Let me tell you about my best friend Ella mentor elementary is a free plugin. It’s freemium. I’ve paid for it because I do see the value in and the actual plug itself, but it’s a visual builder so you go to your site itself and you build on what you see is drag and drop. It’s almost like a drag and drop builder that you get from another company, but on wordpress itself, which is super cool and it has pre made templates as well. Um, if you go over to macro fi media and search elementary may themes, you’ll see some of the ones that I’ve created that I’m somehow given away some I’m having people pay for some of the more premium ones, but they’re landing landing pages or starting points for you to go and edit from there, which is huge because I mean, like brandon was saying, the first couple of sites you built are awful, but if you have most of the page done and you edit your own texts and images yourself, the basic layout and the effectiveness is there. It definitely helps.

20:09 What about, what about the plugins, plugins response? We’re doing something, how will our elementary buildings with that plug in?

20:17 Yeah, so elementary it integrates with every almost every plugin that you’re using, so it adds onto the page whether it’s commerce or it’s some other random plug in. There’s a drag and dropped and it adds on a adds it on. I don’t want to go into technical backend of the taxonomies and the ideas and stuff, but it makes it super easy to. It has its own built in functions where like text headers, buttons, icons, things like that. That really makes it easy to create the site itself and then these premade themes or templates, whatever you want to call you, click a

20:48 button in and basically replaces the entire page you’re using with that into the the the theme in in its entirety, so images, texts and everything. It gives you a great starting point, which a lot of these other drag and drop builders you pay for elsewhere basically do for you. Here’s the deal. A lot of people are going to be reason. WordPress gives your web developers and be like, this is what I use. You can’t expect to word press web will be like, Oh yeah, I’m supposed to dream like I’m just going to custom manually code this and take an extra three weeks on your site. That’s not going to happen. Right? So if you are going to do this and have wordpress and that’s fine. Use a hosting provider that has automatic backups and the hosting is specialized for wordpress. There’s management pressure to go at it.

21:38 I absolutely love it. And uh, they, it was, things were one click backup on the database and the content are one click, restore, restore to the previous stuff and it gives you some time to figure something out. Until then, um, and I don’t care what you’re going to ever tells you, they’re probably say, well, I don’t want c panel. They don’t need c panel. And if they tell you need c panel or guess what, you find another web developer for high care because they don’t actually need it. You can do it all through the wordpress builder or they can do with what’s called SFTP. They just are going with what they just, they don’t like the change. Stick with a hosting that’s meant specifically for wordpress. That relieves all these headaches, has no, it can’t be that. It has to be c panel. There’s not a reason why that I’ve ever seen why they need it.

22:26 Don’t need this specialized hosting for it. So with, uh, with that, I mean if your web developers really that combative with it, it’s not about really what they want. It’s about what you want long term because that led, well, there’s fixing the immediate need, but chances are you’re done with that drug developer as soon as they’ve given you the content for most, most, most. This truth is that relationship going. And there’s some, there’s one, some open companies that will say, yeah, you can contact us. It’s um, you know, we pick up the phone, you’re being charged and that goes all through the build and they will do the updates. But the reason why you’re paying that premium is so that they can be available to do the updates and uh, take care of all that stuff and deal with all the headache. Right? So the main thing is in kind of this will go on with Justin saying the web developers, your employee, they don’t call the shots.

23:23 The hosting account is going to be your host in, in your go daddy or hostgator or whatever. It’s in your account, not. And there’s number one. Number two, get hosting that is specialized for wordpress. I mean, that’s the only, the only thing that’s compatible with his wordpress as specialized features like automatic backups, easy plugin blacklists, all those things that we removed the struggle and headaches with wordpress. And if you do that, your life is going to be a little bit easier. And then when it breaks, you have something to rely on until you get someone over to look at it.

23:58 So we’ve been rambling on about pros and cons of it. When you really go back to the initial question, initial reason for this podcast episode is wordpress, right? For you. The main thing I want you to kind of think about, it’s if word press is right for you, is if you actually have the time to learn the basics. If you have the initial time to learn the basics or know how to find what you’re looking for, then yes, word press is right for you. Or if you’re willing to pay someone every time you need an update, yes, word press is right for you, but if not, you need to look for something else.

24:36 Well, I do want to cover some other things though. Let’s talk about the functionality. If you need a login system where presence is actually right for you on that. A lot of ways, if you need any commerce, if you. If you want to have a site that has a lot of different functionality, a lot of very advanced functionality, then it might be now if all you need is a contact form and some home page with some texts and pictures and me, the other pages, I feel your web developers is using something so much more powerful than you actually need to actually to build it in granted. As much as I hate to admit this bill, to make it more beautiful looking website in wordpress, I say that again, the website would probably look better if it w w if the wedge our builds it and wordpress rather than a do it yourself builder.

25:20 So if you want to just have that phenomenal website that’s really pops and is very much unique than. Yeah, sure. If you want to have a, you know, but if the same time, there’s not going to be, you don’t need to like advance logins or you don’t need databases if you don’t need e commerce. Um, you know, you can always, uh, have a great looking website that people still wanna do business with, with the dewalt yourself builder. That what oprah can still do, use and just stay with the confines of it and they can probably still make it look really awesome.

25:51 I 100 percent agree with you, right? Um, yeah, that’s wordpress. I mean it’s, it’s my passion. I absolutely love wordpress. I get it’s my baby. Like all I do is,

26:01 it’s the bane of my existence. We got really excited. We were talking about this episode, like he’s a con the pro and we kinda just like went. Okay. That sounds like I’m a criminal justice before crest on the optimistic,

26:16 um, not to say that I’m wrong or he’s right or I’m right and he’s wrong. Like it’s, it

26:22 is, it very much depends on the situation. And by the way, I’m not saying that no one should use wordpress. There’s a, there’s a ton of people that use wordpress. It’s a, it’s a great. Do your research on it. We kind of gave you some basic things on the functionality side, uh, and also on more of the business running side and then do some more research on your own food. Press is actually right for you. So it sounds like a medication. Speak to your doctor if your website is down from within four hours. So wordpress for the day. Guys, I quit. My question of the day regarding wordpress is what is your favorite wordpress plugin? If you’re a wordpress user, it’s pretty basic, pretty simple. If you have decided to use wordpress, what’s your favorite plugin? And why? Techie side of me is really excited because there’s some some plugins for wordpress and with that I’m BGC and I’m Nealey and this is crafted thinking.