All right, we're coming up live. A little bit of music for everyone that will probably cut just a little short, but to give everyone a moment to
understand. [Music]
Oh yeah. [Music]
Don't claim to know your story. Don't even have mine. In the search for glory,
gone with them sacred rules of old. They went missing.
Down high 49. [Music]
Devils at the crossroads sitting doing time.
Preacher man discovered passed down from saint to sage like a kindhearted lover
who's been lost on this stage. Went missing
down high 49. [Music]
Devil's at the crossroads sitting to his side.
Come on now.
[Music]
Not saying they are the answer. Not saying they're right or wrong. I ain't no text and dancer knows where I belong.
went missing down Highway 49.
Highway 49. Devils at the crossroads into town.
[Music] Chunky and the trigger to see who done
the crime. Captain pulled the trigger. Guess who's doing time? They went
missing down highway 49.
Devil's at the crossroads. Is he yours or is he mine?
Is he yours or is he mine? [Music]
Don't claim to know your story. Don't even have my own. I search for glory.
wrong with them sacred rules of old. We're missing
down highway 49.
Devils at the crossroads sitting doing town.
Devil's at a crossroads. Joker's doing fine.
just been doing. [Music]
There we go. Nice little intro. It is time for the show. Ladies and gentlemen, it is time for
WordPress plugins A to Zed, not Z.
Welcome to another episode of WP Plugins A to Zed interview show. In this episode, we are talking with James
Welbus, who recently swapped the traditional WordPress Kool-Aid for an Etch license after nearly switching to
Statamatic. Stay tuned for more.
WordPress, the king of content management systems, powering the web with over 80,000 plugins to choose from.
How do you sort the junk from the gems? Welcome to WP Plugins A to Zed, where
we've been keeping the pulse of WordPress alive for over 16 incredible years. Join us every week for an
unrehearsed real talk breakdowns of the latest and greatest plugins, developer, and community member interviews. Some
weeks, Amber and I team up to dig in. Others, I'm flying solo, unpacking WordPress news, demoing a standout
plugin, or sharing tips to power up your site. No scripts, no fluff, just the
good stuff from A to Z. So plug in and let's get rolling.
Oh, good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you happen to be hiding out on Globe today. It's another interview for WP Plugins A to Zed, where
we're diving deep into the world WordPress innovation and branding with a true veteran of the game. Today we're
thrilled to have James Weldus, the founder and strategist behind Apex Branding and Design, a fullervice agency
that's evolved from his humble Cedar Rapids web design beginnings in 2014 to
a powerhouse helping businesses rebrand and thrive. With over a decade of
WordPress wizardry under his belt, starting from building sites as a kid, James has recently traded into
traditional WordPress Kool-Aid for an Etch license and nearly jumping ship to
Statamatic along the way. As a cigar smoking, Guinness enjoying WordPress dork, husband, dad, and grandpa. He's
not just about code. He's a master of strategy, client magic, and even plug-in prototypes through his prototype WP
service. Stick around as we unpack his journey, branding tips for the WordPress community, and why he's etching a fresh
path in word in web development. Let's get into it. Welcome to the show, James.
Wow. Um, thank you for having me. I have to say that I didn't write any of that.
And if you if you don't already sell your services as a bio author, you you should
be marketing that. Well, you know, I I had a little help to be honest on that. You know, that's that's where AI comes
in real handy is it can write some fantastic bios if you give it the right prompts. Yeah. Um, you must have done a little
bit of research, too. Oh, absolutely. I've I have made it a a point to research all of my guests as
best I can to find out who they are. Um, so that way all the listeners get a
really good interview and find out a bit about you. Starting with that, we're going to work with a little bit of your
background. So, you've been into WordPress for what you jokingly call a number of years that reveals your old.
Can you tell us a bit about how you got started with WordPress and what drew you into it initially?
Yeah, so I absolutely hated WordPress the first time I looked at it. Um, the
reason for that is, you know, I never took web development seriously. When I
was 12, I was I thought my friend was a wizard because he could make basic
crappy little websites. And then he told me I kept asking him to teach me how to do that. And finally, he was like,
"Dude, just right click on a website and click view source." I was like, "What?" All right. So, I did that and I saw the
code of a website, which back then was much much simpler. And you actually could just look at the source code of a website and teach yourself how HTML
works back then. So, I did that. Thought it was cool. I felt super smart. Um, didn't do anything with it. Years later,
um, I was I started to hear about this thing called WordPress. And so I was looking into WordPress. And there was a
number of things that that I hated. And the only reason I hated them was because I I was just ignorant. I didn't know
anything about uh how a dynamic website, what a dynamic website even was. I didn't understand what a database was or
how that worked. I remember creating a page in a WordPress site and then going
in and trying to find that file like the about.html
and I was like where is it? I just created a page in the dashboard. Where is the corresponding file for that page
in the in the file manager? Because I didn't understand that there was no file. It was in the database and you know templates and all that stuff. So
that frustrated me. Um, this was way back in the day before page builders and
so I would spend so much time trying to find a theme that I liked and then I would install a theme and then my site
would not look anything like the demo from the website. So things like that just really frustrated me and so I hated
it and I just like I don't understand why anybody uses this and um I just stuck with it. I just kept I was I was
still intrigued because I thought so many people use it. It you know it's got to be me. It's not WordPress. this guy,
I must be the reason that this is a bad experience. I need to actually figure out what's going on here. And I did. So,
eventually I I learned how it actually works and I I discovered what a database was and what templates were and blah
blah blah. And and so then I kind of became a WordPress guy and I that's I
started sipping on the Kool-Aid back then. I I was mixing it back then.
Yeah, I was I was all I was all part of all the word camps here in uh lower
Vancouver Island during the first couple of years. So, your agency and since you started
figuring it out, you started an agency in 2014, the Cedar Rapids web design.
So, can you tell us a bit about those early days as a new business owner, you know, working your way through the
marketing, sales, clients? What were the biggest lessons that shaped you rebranding to Apex Branding and Design?
Oh man. Um yeah, so the early days um I think the
first technically the first client I ever had uh which tanked my career at
GoDaddy was uh GoDaddy switched from their old website builder to a new
website builder and they weren't it wasn't like compatible. So if you wanted to use the new website builder, you had
to rebuild your entire website with it, right? So, I put out like a YouTube video.
It was just like, "Hey, if you're on the old GoDaddy website builder and you want to use the new one, like, I'll redo that
for you. Like, I'll build it." And I charged somebody 100 bucks to rebuild your website. That's when I discovered that these easy page builders are not as
easy as they want you to think they are. And I was like, I can't believe I'm doing all this work for $100. But that
was my probably my first ever paid client
experience and I don't even know if at that point I I had started Cedar Rapids Web Design yet. Um I remember getting
probably my first real client I would call it. Uh he paid me $1,000 which I
thought was basically a million dollars back then. And we never even went live with the site. I really didn't know what
I was doing. I absolutely blame myself. Um, he says that he just gave up on the project because he got moved in his job
and he didn't want to deal with it anymore. And I'm almost certain it was because I wasn't doing anything good for
him at the time. And uh, but it just it got better. You know, I got another
client who actually uh, appreciated the work that I was doing. I I learned I knew kind of knew what I was doing by
that point. I actually made her an actual decent website that did what she wanted it to do and so on and so forth.
You you just get better and better. But that was kind of the early days. Um, and and the rebrand happened not long not
too long ago, probably longer than it feels like. Um, but uh, it it was
basically, as you mentioned, my old business was Cedar Rapids Web Design. So, I live in Cedar Rapids and I do web
design, technically web development. I'm not a designer, but I realized that I
didn't want to only do things for people who live in Cedar Rapids. didn't only want to do websites. I didn't want to
pigeon hole myself in that way. So that's where the rebrand came. Apex branding and design. That basically is a
vague nebulous of whatever. I can do whatever I want with a with a business name like that. So um I can do whatever
I want. I can do it for whomever I want in whatever city, state, country that I want. So that's kind of where the the
biggest reason the rebrand came about. The other interesting thing is uh with
your rebranding to Apex, you also rebranded to your BS podcast.
Although that was seems like it's shortlived. You might want to revive that because uh some of the episodes were actually pretty good to listen to.
I appreciate you saying that. Um that was a lot of fun. that happened during COVID and then the place where we were
recording COVID related reasons, we weren't able
to record there anymore. And so, um, and then my co-host Sarah, she doesn't
really, she kind of got out of the marketing game. Um, I would consider
possibly bringing that back. It would be a hassle, especially to try and revive
the actual same exact podcast because I had a company that was managing and producing it for me. So, I don't even know if I would be able to just jump in
with another episode or if I would have to like start over from scratch. Pick it up. That was a lot of fun.
Just pick it up where it leaves off. I do that. I've got several podcasts that are defunct and every once in a while I
decide to revive them and start producing new episodes. Yeah, I just pick it up where I left off even
if it's been three, four or five years as if I just went on a hiatus.
So at any rate though, what was interesting was is when you rebranded, you got into the marketing of brand
strategists and working as a brand strategist. How how has that evolved
your business to doing things? It's just finding sites.
Honestly, it really hasn't yet. Um, I spent so much time trying to learn as
much as I could about branding and um, I've really only had one client
where I got to actually help them craft their brand and that was a lot of fun. Um, and years later she ended up
shutting that business down. So, which was I felt bad for her because she was doing so well um for so many years and
I'm not actually sure what happened. She just kind of said one day that she's she
had a space in the mall and she said she's leaving that space and going back to working out of her basically her
home. She's setting up a studio there. She taught music lessons. So, that was it was sad to see her see that happen to
her after she'd been doing so well for so many years. And um I absolutely loved working on that project. And it's it's
just sad because I I can't show that to people now. I can't say go look at this um brand that we did because it doesn't
exist anymore. But um I loved it. I have a designer who I usually hire for most
of the design things that I need and he designed a beautiful website. Um I built it in WordPress. We got to work with her
to um come up with her new logo. She came up with the name which was really clever. I mentioned we live in Cedar
Rapids and she teaches music lessons. So, she came up with the name Cedar Rap City School of Music and I really like I
think her her wife came up with that name. Um, I wish I could say that I did
because that's clever name, but we did everything else besides a name and it was a lot of fun and I even commissioned a videographer, film producer to record
a short documentary about that process, which if I remember correctly, I think that is still on the homepage of my
website. been around did run into the uh the
client uh thing about the music that you did for old logo compared to their new
logo except oh very you know that aspect now let's
uh dive into a few of the WordPress tools you know as a self-proclaimed
WordPress dork what is the one plugin or feature in WordPress you couldn't live without early on in
not currently But early on, what what did you really have to have in every
website you built? And then you can tack on how to kids changed over.
Yeah. So, I have such a terrible memory. I don't even remember
what I was doing in the very early days. I think I was probably doing what a lot of people do and just googling, you
know, I need a plugin for this. But then I took a job working for an agency and that I basically just adopted sort
of their workflow because it just worked. It was good. It was good stuff. They use a a form plugin called
Formidable Forms. So I got myself a lifetime license on that and I've been using that for like over a decade. Just
about every website has a form on it, even if it's just a simple contact form. So pretty much every site I build is
going to get Formidable Forms installed. Um nowadays of course uh advanced custom
fields I used to use custom post type UI to create post types and then you would
use ACF for custom fields but now the ACF also does post types. Sorry AC CPT
UI but you know there's really no reason um
yeah so ACF definitely on just about every site. Um SMTP I use a what's it
called? I think it's just called like WP or SMTP mail or something like that. It's there's there's so many of the free
simple SMTP plugins. They all basically do the same thing. Yep. Yep. So that gets on just about
every website. And then I use I just use the free version because I just need to connect to you know my SMTP service
which I use Brebo which used to be called Sendin Blue. Um, yeah, those three plugins pretty
much just about at every single website. And then I until recently I was using them for the theme/builder.
Okay. Well, as this leads us on into our next one, as uh you've recently stopped drinking the WordPress Kool-Aid for the
most part and bought yourself an Edge license. I mean, you haven't completely stopped using WordPress. Still using
WordPress, but you're Etch as your connection into it now.
and almost going to Static. I'd never even heard of Stamatic looking all this
stuff up. What frustrations with WordPress led to those choices uh going
that way? Um you already made mentions here and there about themes and digging
into them and the problems of dealing with the themeing systems. I've gone through dozens of them myself over the
for a couple three years. I was working with Gravity Genesis. That's I got I got I got hooked
into WordPress and got hooked into the Genesis and they started changing and beatic and
then I started all the add-on themes, the themes that come with 42 plugins that can never be updated and crashed
everything and then I finally ended up realizing and settling down on a completely blank slate theme that wasn't
the theme and everything from scratch on top of that. Mhm. So enough of me and so what tell talk to
us about how you stopped the the Kool-Aid ended up with etch you know why were you headed for um stomatic and then
what drove what drove you to edge. So I was still drinking the Kool-Aid
until fairly recently. Um, and by drinking the Kool-Aid, I mean, I was one of those guys who would try to convince
people how easy to use WordPress was. And people would say, "Oh, WordPress is not user friendly." And I'd be like,
"You're crazy. It's so user friendly." And just ignoring the fact that none of my clients felt that it was user
friendly. Like, oh, that they're just special. They don't, you know, they don't matter. It's definitely super user friendly. Um, and I think I also kind of
had to believe that, at least for a little bit. I had a job working for Liquid Web as a product owner. I started
in customer support for the events calendar. Eventually was product owner for um Restrict Content Pro and a new
membership plug-in called Member Dash. And then I was product owner for Learn Dash Premium Add-ons. And so,
you know, we we all just sort of were like, "Yeah, WordPress is great. It's it's for everybody. It's for the It's
for the absolute noob. It's for the professional. It's for everybody in between. Um, and then I started I saw
like a a post or a video, probably just a Twitter post uh from Kevin Giri and
he's talking about, you know, what he talks about. And I I remember thinking like not
really liking him at first because, you know, it takes a while to wean yourself off the Kool-Aid. So I I was like, nah,
he doesn't know what he's talking about. He's just some elitist guy who, you know, he just wants to feel smart and
wants everyone to think he's super smart. But I just kept reading more things he was saying and it I it just I
just started to realize that I didn't have any sort of uh like rebuttals to
anything that he was saying. The things he was saying made me feel upset, but I couldn't describe why I felt that way
and I couldn't refute anything that he was saying. And then when my clients I
started to notice things that my clients would say and it started to
kind of click and I started to realize, you know, WordPress really isn't all that user friendly for for an
absolute noob. And I started to try and um
imagine that I was a noob. Like, okay, pretend I've never used WordPress before. And I just imagining the process
of getting a website up and going. And I was like, there's no way my wife could do this. She's a smart lady. She knows
how to use a computer. She has to use a computer at work. She's an occupational therapy assistant. She's a smart person.
She'd There's no way that she would get a a good-looking, functional WordPress
website. She would give up and she'd be way too frustrated. If she had to build a website, she would probably use something like Squarespace.
And so then I just started consuming everything Kevin said, not agreeing with
everything he said, but agreeing with most things that he said. And uh and then my friend, my designer that I
mentioned, he's also a developer, and he complains about WordPress all the time. He uses it when he has to. Um I don't
know. My is my computer making? That's mine. I forgot to turn off my I forgot to turn off my notifications. I
seem to do that on a regular basis with every show. I've turned them off. I've turned them off now. So when the emails
come through in the next five minutes or 10 minutes, they won't ping us. Okay, cool. Um, so my designer is also a
developer and he started using something called October CMS years ago and he's been using that for several years and
then he recently has started using Statam and he's been talking about how great
that is. And I I haven't looked into Statmick very much yet, but I was I was
starting to. I followed the founder on Twitter. Um, he's a funny guy. Even if you're not into static, I'd recommend
following him. Um, and I was just kind of starting to think about
possibly jumping ship away from WordPress because I was kind of getting tired of
not I didn't feel like WordPress was built for me. I felt like you either had
to be a complete noob and use a page builder like I was doing. I was using themey, which if you don't know what the themey is, it's just another like
element or divvy, whatever. It's a page builder. Themifi. I know them. Well, I've I've
run into it a few times. Yep. And I really like it as far as page builders go, but I I was getting kind of
frustrated because it's either you do that, you use a page builder, or you use Gutenberg like a total noob, or you
build everything from complete scratch, which I also was dabbling in. Um, I was
starting to use AI to generate layouts and then take that layout and use another AI to turn
it into an actual block and, you know, then I put that block on the website and I would get pixel perfect. You know,
websites look exactly like the mockup, whatever. And that was kind of fun for a little bit, but I know that I would have
gotten tired of doing that if I started doing that for clients all the time. um
just being in React all the time and you know having to build stuff. So it felt like you either had to be a complete
noob or just an absolute freaking legend of a developer and I'm not either one of those things.
And so I was starting to think that maybe I would look at other options and uh Statam just seemed like the right now
it's kind of a it's what people are talking about. If you're going to leave WordPress you're you're probably going to be looking at something like Statam.
And then Edge that's when Edge came along. And I, you know, I was watching what Kevin was talking about and he kept talking about this new thing that was
coming, but he was being super vague about it and I didn't know what it was and is it going to be a page builder? What is it? I was not one of the people
who was brave enough to purchase a license before they'd even started writing code yet, which I know a lot of
people did that, but I had not experienced automatic CSS or frames. So,
I wasn't like, you know, a Kevin Giri fanboy yet. I had to see the product
before I jumped on and and but after I saw him once he once he started demoing the product on YouTube I was like this
is what I need. This is for people like me and it will make building a website a lot more enjoyable than fussing around
with the page builder. You've been working with Edge for a while. So much so that you're starting
to create contributions for it now. here. I I looked at it when he first
introduced it and he caught he caught my eye back around the beginning of this year when they had that crazy uh YouTube
video. They did that created all kinds of drama for a little while. But I did
look at his stuff, but it was not some place I wanted to go. I dug a little bit deeper into it and
been doing the research here for this interview here and I still don't I I
have my mind partly wrapped around what Edge does. And as you mentioned before,
you said you could talk about Etch all day. So, we're going to put you to the test on that one. And we're going to we're going to dive into Etch. I know
this is going to sound like a thing, a promotion for Etch by the time we're done, but hey, get over it, folks. The Kool-Aid and WordPress are is made from
all kinds of ingredients and I've been mixing it for 17 years now.
For a while there I stopped for a while there I stopped delivering it but uh I've started delivering it back again
and all these new things in WordPress has revitalized it and brought it back to the four and even etch is a good
point of it. By the way, coming back to the etch, I see that it's it helps you
build from my perspective, there are different elements that you build that you then put onto your page and it
integrates them into Gutenberg for blocks. Now, I'm not a Gutenberg fan. I'll admit it. I don't use Gutenberg at
all. Um, we we use Elementor for our site building. It's not just a page
builder get into the back end of it and doing things. So as you mentioned yes you either have
to be Gutenberg beginner hardcore developer or somewhere in between which lands you in a page
builder or a helper page builder such as I see Etch as. How does Etch integrate
to say all different sorts of plugins for example say Woo Commerce or the new
Fluent Cart. So,
um, Etch, I don't know if Kevin will like me saying this, but if I was to try to describe what Etch is, I would say
it's like Dreamweaver for WordPress. You remember Dreamweaver? Oh, I built my first websites using
Dreamweaver. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. It's Everybody knows what Dreamweaver is. My first five
years was Dreamweaver and PHP and CSS. Yeah. And it was so cool because it
would preview what you were doing. So you would type code on the bottom and you would see in real time what you're doing
which felt like magic back then but you know today it's not that magical but yeah Dreamweaver was kind of a game
changer back in the day and that's how Etch is to me I when you're in there
you're typing HTML you're seeing what you're doing you know in real time you add some CSS you see what what's
happening in real time so you're you
know you have access to the code. It almost doesn't even seem like that's a good way to describe it because you
don't just have access to the code. That's just what itch is, is you coding your website. It's not like you're using
a page builder and then oh, I can go access the code if I need to. You're building your website with HTML. If you
click, they do have buttons. So, like if you want to add a a section, you click the section button. All that does is
literally add a section element into your HTML. There's not a bunch of wrappers like you get with Elementor
Divy where you you add a section and then you go look at the code on the front end and it's div div
like a a paragraph. It's none of that crap. It's just pure HTML, pure CSS,
pure JavaScript. Um, and then it has tools that let you
do WordPress stuff. So like you're working with WordPress, you obviously need to be able to loop through something, right? So there's a very easy
loop syntax that you use to loop through a custom post type or you can loop through a JSON object. And again, this
you'll see that syntax in your editor, but when you look at the front end, it's not adding any more wrappers. You can't see that you did a loop on the front
end. All you see is a grid of images. There's no clue when you look at the code that that's actually a loop of
custom post types, right? Or a JSON object. So it's just very very clean code.
And um you can just about do anything you would normally do in WordPress. Like I said, loops and there's conditionals
and um JSON objects. It's it's just very powerful.
And with the powerful of this is how does it work say bringing in something
like um short codes from plugins that or short codes.
So yeah, that's a great question. Right now, if you want to add a short code or
like a block that um either a core block or like a block that a plug-in is adding to your website, you have to do that in
the in the block editor. So, and I think they said that, you know, eventually
you'll be able to do this stuff from within the etch editor. But let's say I want to add a formidable forms to my page. I just save what I'm doing in
Etch. I click the button to go look at the block editor. Everything I did in Etch is now there in the block editor.
like you mentioned earlier, it it turns everything you do into blocks, right? So, you'll be looking at the block
editor and you'll see everything that you did and you can drop your formidable forms block or you can drop a short code
block and put in your formidable form short code. Save it. Go back to the edge
editor and it doesn't render it yet. It just shows a like a block and it says um
like short code pass through or block pass through or something to that effect. So you know when you're looking that there's a block there's a
formidable forms block right there and then on the front end it it renders just like it normally would. So it's a little
bit of a of a workaround at the moment because you have to leave edge go into the block editor and then come back to
Edge. But you it does work. It works just fine. Okay. That's it. That's the thing is I I
was wrapping my head around all of the aspects of everything that goes into a WordPress site like the ones I build. I
build oftentimes sites that have e-commerce stores, the forms, sometimes
membership sites included, then they have their then they have their blog with custom post types, etc. So, it's
like and what I saw with my brief research of Edge is a it's an editor. I
like your description of it as a Dreamweaver for the code because that made it make all the more sense to me
watching the few videos I did on how it was used.
So with Edge, what other things um you know brought you to brought you to Edge
besides this and getting away from the theme development or the themes like themeify builders I should build page
builders could be worse. You could have been using Divvy. Oh gosh. I since I started using
Etch, I have moved one client site away from Elementor to Edge and I've moved
another one from Divvy to Edge. Um I just I
I don't like Elementor and I think most of that is because I'm so used to themify, but I really don't like DBY.
Like I just don't understand how DBY works, how anybody uses it. The the UI is just so confusing to me. It seems
like doing simple things is very difficult in Dibby. Yeah. Yeah, I'm right there with you. I
inherited a site like that. Didn't take me long to move them out of there. Um Oh, man.
But yeah, it's there's there's a lot of challenges in those in those aspects here. I don't
like to bate all the different competitions and problems. Uh the off-hand comments about what I've done
with them. Now you built um how you just mentioned two websites
that you moved into Etch. What kind of what kind of processing was that? Did that take a a long time to do or was it
pretty straightforward to them over? Sure. Um one random aside, I wonder if
you could give that page that you're looking at a hard reload page that I'm looking that video. Yeah. You have Apex branding
up. Oh, I all I all I did was I keep changing things.
No, I know. I just I the video should be showing up if you do a hard reload. That's all I'm saying. Oh, the Oh, the video um on your
homepage. Yeah. Um but Oh. Oh, there's the video. Well, the
video never showed up the first time. Yeah, I was using Adam Pryer's uh Presto
plugin, video player, and it had an update available. I updated it and now the video is showing.
So, I don't know what I don't know. Um, but to answer your question, yeah, it really,
um, one of the sites took a little bit longer than the other because it just
had a little bit more going on. Um, but it really didn't take a whole lot of
time, especially with that site, the site that that had a little bit more going on. I was also able to utilize
components, which I haven't mentioned yet. Um it for folks who for folks who
are actual web developers, they know what that a component is like an actual term that means a real thing. So if
you're building like apps in JavaScript or even PHP, like you can create a component and a component is a reusable
bit of code that for the most part, you know, is exactly the same in every instance. But if you utilize things like
props then you can like modify this instance in a little bit this way and modify this other instance that way. But
then overall globally if you want to change something in all the components you just have to change it one time in
the in a component and then that change you know takes place in all the components right so it's very it's a
very very useful tool to use components in web development and etch has a
component feature that is very very much like what you would expect as a web
developer coming from building actual components in JavaScript or whatever some page builders have things like
theme by and whatnot, they have a component-like feature that is they
usually call it like a template or something. Um, and they're okay, but they're just not quite like actual
components. So, I was able to utilize components quite a bit for for instance, just about every page had the same sort
of hero lay uh hero section layout. So, there was a background image which was
different on every page. There's a title, which of course is different for every page, and there would be like a little blurb of text, which is different
for every page, but it was the same exact layout. So, I was able to create a a hero component that was exactly the
same, but it had three props. The background image, title, and the description. So, I could drop a
component on the page and then just type in the the title would be dynamic. It would just pull in the page title. So, I
didn't even have to mess with that. The image would just be the featured image of the page. I could have made a custom
field for that, but why when there's already a featured image? So, I just up add a featured image to the page and that shows up in the hero section as the
background image. And then I think I just used like excerpt or something for
the for the uh little blurb. Or maybe I had a I might have actually just manually typed that in. But the point is
it was very easy. I create a new page. I drop the component. All I have to do is say here's the image. Here's the
description. Boom. That entire hero section is done. It's styled exactly the way it's supposed to be. Um, and if I
ever need to change that styling for whatever reason, maybe I want to make the font bigger or change the spacing, I
just have to make that change once and that change will take effect on every every instance of that component
throughout the website. So, utilizing things like that sped the process up for sure. Uh, made it a lot easier to to do.
And there was other there were other components that were I didn't even bother putting props because they're exactly the same on every page. like
there's a testimonials component that just has it's a very nice layout that shows cycles through uh testimonials
which is a custom post type. So that was super easy. Every time I want to put that on the page, I just click add
component uh testimonials. Done. Moving on to the next section. Right. So
um it's just stuff like that just actually makes building a website with etch like enjoyable. Um, I was
definitely getting burned out building building things in theme. Um, and dabbling with the like I said
building custom blocks for everything. I was hadn't even done that on a client site yet and I was already starting to
get burned out trying to do that. So, sounds like it's uh sounds like Etch is
uh pretty useful in multiple areas, more so than I thought. I may dig down into
it and see what it can do. Yeah, absolutely. Especially if you You used Dreamweaver for five years and and
you're you're that kind of developer originally. You're actually actually a
developer. I I gotten lazy over the last 10 years. I was originally me too because I was
originally, but I I got lazy and lazy as as the tools got simpler and simpler. I got lazier and lazier. And
it's just having that knowledge allows me when something frustrates me, I can just go into the code and fix it.
Yeah. That is 100% that's me as well. I I learned CSS and then basically
never had to use it in a real in a real project. I would like you said if
something wasn't doing what I wanted to do in the page builder then I would go in and modify the CSS but I didn't
really know I never developed any actual real skills as a front-end developer.
And since using Etch and watching a bunch of Kevin's videos and watch watching other people's videos, um, just
having the background of knowing how HTML and CSS and JavaScript works, even though I never really got into those
things at a professional level, Etch has increased my skill in those in those
areas a lot just in the past few months. would yeah I I actually did develop some skills back in my Dreamweaver days and
using PHP and integrating what led me to WordPress was in my early
days I was had all these different shareware PHP programs that I used for
building websites with different functions had to calls and bring I had
one client one time that insisted we have a right-hand column menu back in
those early days next to impossible to stick a menu to the right hand side.
Took took me a couple of weeks of of coding to figure out how to stick it to the right hand side for and keep it
there. Mhm. Did you ever build a site with um
frames, not frames? Oh, yeah. Frames. I I used to build I used to build sites and that was the that was where I started was in
and then I realized these frames were a pain in the neck because they kept breaking. Yeah. Yeah. But that's that was like my
first experience with a I'm going to call it a dynamic website. Yeah. Where you could you could create a a
header.html. Yeah. And and just put that on every page in the in the frame.
I've still got I've still got some old code from those early web pages. I I'm a I'm a data hoarder. I've got data going
all the way back to my early days in the late. Does HTML 5 even support frames? like
could you actually do that if you wanted? I have no clue. I've never even thought to check into it because I once I got
hoo once I got hooked into WordPress and the way it works, I was like I didn't have to bother with all of that anymore.
I just that information got pushed back to the back of my head where it's no longer you.
Yeah. Yeah. That's been the joys of being in this as long as I have. I've seen a lot
of things come and go and I've been part of part of the mess along the way.
So, let's let's well, we've talked quite a bit about Etch here, and let's talk a little bit about your branding and
WordPress community stuff. You know, you've been to events like Groundhog Day where you've talked about uh marketing,
great marketer, full of BS, you know, your brand strategy. Well, how does uh strong branding help
WordPress professionals stand out in the freelance market, which is where the vast majority of them are?
Yeah, you you really did your research, man. I'm I'm impressed. Uh, like I said, man, I I I want people to I
want to we want to find out about my guests and that's one of the goals of this show going forward is the guests
get surprised by things. Even the last couple of guests, well, was it I did the interview with it was
the co-founder of Termageddon. I found out about his beer bong. Pulled that out for
him. There you go. That's that's awesome. Um, yeah,
branding branding is very important and there's a lot of you can I mean, man, you can get down
some really interesting rabbit holes if you start like doing some searches for like what's more important, branding or
marketing or what's the difference between branding and marketing? And people will like fight each other on
this topic. It's very strange. Um, I heard I saw somebody I saw a post one
time that kind of made me chuckle. It said, um, marketing is when you tell people you're really good. I'm going to
say at kissing. You're a very good kisser. Branding is when other people are saying that you're a good kisser.
And I think that's I think both of those things are important. If you are good at
something, you need to be telling people that. But if you can get other people to be talking about how good you are at
something, that's even better. Because of course I'm going to say I'm a great web developer. But what does that mean
if you don't really know who I am? Anybody's I'm no one who's in the web development business is going to go around saying they're bad at it, right?
So that doesn't carry as much weight when I tell you that I'm good at something. But if somebody else says,
"Oh yeah, I know that guy. He built a website. It was great." That carries a lot more weight with people. So it's
very important that you consider your brand. Um, Marty Newire,
see if I can remember this. Uh, Marty Numeer is kind of, some people call him the godfather of branding. And, uh, he
defines your brand as, um, oh gosh, I'm blanking out. It's been so
long since I've thought about some of this stuff. Um,
that's going to come to me later. I'll have to bring it back up. But essentially, oh, it's a gut feeling. It's a it's a gut feeling. When somebody
said hears your name or sees your logo or sees your business name, they get a gut feeling.
And I butchered that quote, but that's according to Marty Nummire, that's what your brand is. It's it's more of a it's
a feeling. When somebody experiences you and your business, how does that make them feel? When you see an Apple logo,
how does that make you feel? versus if you look at a Android logo or HP or Lenovo logo. A lot of people would say,
"I don't feel anything when I see an HP logo because who cares?" For a lot of people, HP is just another one of many
PC manufacturers. But people see an Apple logo or they see the Android logo
and now suddenly they're getting feelings inside, good or bad. Um, and so
it's very important that you you keep that in mind when you're when you're marketing. So, I'm not going to sit here
and say, "Oh, forget about marketing. All you need to focus on is your brand." That's stupid. When you're doing your
marketing, you need to be thinking about your brand. When you're hiring somebody to work customer service, you should be
thinking about your brand. When you're trying to decide which materials you're
going to purchase to build your widget, you should be thinking about your brand. Basically, every decision you do should
be done through the lens of what is my brand? How do I want people to feel when they see me, hear me, look at me?
Now, with that, many WordPress users focus on tech as
strategy and creativity. And what's a common branding mistake you see
in the word? Um, well, the biggest branding mistake I
see in general is people just not caring about their brand. Um, one thing I like to say is if everybody has a brand
whether you think you do or not. So if you if you think because I saw one guy posted something on LinkedIn a while
back and he said don't even think about your brand for the first five years of your business. And I'm like what are you
talking about? And I think he was he was talking about like don't don't hire
somebody don't pay somebody thousands of dollars like Fabian Garhalter. He's also
he's another he's not the godfather of branding. He's much younger than Marty Nummire, but he's sort of one of the big
names right now in the arena of branding. And he charges upwards of
probably over $10,000 right now for like a single day of branding consulting. And
so I think this guy is saying don't do that on day one. And I would probably agree with that. However, I would never
tell someone to not think about branding or not worry about branding until five years in because if you do that, you're
going to end up with a brand anyways and it's probably not going to be the brand that you want. And now you have to try
to undo that. And it's very difficult to to undo a bad brand or change a brand.
So, at least think about it from day one. Even if you're not paying a consultant for it, you should at least
be thinking about it. Sounds like you should always be thinking about how you present yourself along the way. Know I said I've been
doing this for 26 years and initially my company brand was Smart Pump Enterprise.
Uh 911 did away with uh the use of that name.
Yep. And uh so I rebranded myself as John Overall and I stayed as John Overall who
I am. I only recently rebranded myself changes
that are coming in this five years managed to maintain those brand way and
in particular the most interesting thing I found and something I've suggested to people is if you've picked a name but
it's not working try rebranding as yourself if you're just an independent developer because people like deal with
people I found my business jumped dramatically when I re
Yeah, those interesting things. Absolutely. All right. Well, at this point here, what I'm going to do, uh, we've got a
couple more things I want to ask you about, but I'm going to, uh, cut off for those of you that are listening in the
downloads right now that are listening to the podcast feed. You're going to have to sneak back over to the YouTube
channel to catch the bit. For all of you, Wow, we've got eight people sitting there in the YouTube channel. Hey, say
hi, folks. We greatly appreciate it. Comments, try to make them in here. Oh, is that how you pronounce Hey, Blake.
Blake popped off. So, I I did I did I get Welbus right for your last name? Because you did. Blake just po he popped off in the in
the comments. Is that how you pronounce James's last name? I thought it was Wells.
Yeah. No, you got it right. And that is the most common uh Welbs is the most common attempt.
Oh, and and and Blake's sharing the whole podcast with his whole office right now. Thanks, Blake. We greatly
appreciate it. All right. So, that's Blake Whittle. All right. So, everyone say hi in there. And we will be
back after I let my girl take us on out of here. And this is for those of you in the downloads listening to the podcast
feed. Come on back over to the YouTube channel and catch the rest of the show. There'll be a few minutes of stuff here.
Don't run away, James. I will be right back after our
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And while you're there, subscribe to the newsletter for more useful information delivered directly to your inbox. WP
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or email her directly amberwpro.ca.
Thanks for joining us. Have a great day and we'll see you next week.
All right, we're back. For those on the YouTube channel listening, the reason I do that is this is a live to tape show.
Uh that is the taped version out into the podcast feed for those who want to that segment of the show.
So any what I've got here is just some, you know, some future advice, couple of personal things that we want to dig into
a little bit. Looking ahead in your point of view, where do you see WordPress heading with especially in the
last year with so many changes having occurred and so much drama in and around
the WordPress community. It's been very in it's been very entertaining. It helped actually reinvigorate me for
working WordPress. I was getting so bored with it. Um, how might tools like
Etch or Stematic influence the community? Yeah, that's a great question. Um, I
don't know how much Etch has influenced other company
companies in WordPress yet, but I think that there are I think that there are companies that are starting to come
around to the ideas that the Etch team had already come around to. And you can see that
when you look at things like um I think divvy 5 is the newest version and people
are talking about how great that is because they're I think they're really cutting down on all the bloat uh like
containers and just divs inside of divs inside of divs. They're apparently cutting down on that. I've heard Elementor is jumping on board with like
a class-based system for for developing things. Yep, they are. That's that's I've been
experimenting periodically with their new class-based uh editor. They haven't released it yet. It's still in alpha
alpha beta, I should say. Okay. So, I I it seems like
maybe the community is slowly starting to shift in a direction that Kevin and
his team shifted to two years ago. Um maybe even longer if you because really
probably Automatic CSS was probably uh the
beginning of of Kevin and his team's shift in that direction where they're trying to make developing a website in
WordPress uh something that you can actually do properly rather than using
all of these proprietary builders and dealing with Gutenberg's nonsense. That
was kind of the beginning. And so I it's it looks like maybe WordPress is heading in that direction. Um, I don't know I
don't know if something like Elementor would ever be the kind of thing that I would enjoy using, but if it if it at
least shifts more in the direction of allowing real people to build websites
the proper way or at least closer to the proper way, I can only see that as a good thing. WordPress itself,
I don't know, man. I it's hard to tell the direction that a
product is going to go when what when it's moving so slowly you know
that has been one of problems slow that has been one of its problems over the years WordPress is now 21 I think
and in the beginning it moved very rapidly and very quickly and lots of
quick changes like I've been working with WordPress since version 1.9 give or Okay.
But it was making major advances very quickly and then it got from my
perspective it got bloated with um call it um decisions by decisions by
committee is what is as is how I put it. It's like uh dealing with a corporate uh client.
Everything you do is a committee decision and it sometimes takes you what should what you should accomplish in a
week can take two months to accomplish. Has to go through this this group and this group and sometimes it has to go up
to head office etc. um decisions by committee and that's one of the things I see with WordPress and
they've had things that have been on their plate for about a decade or more cleaning up the
the uh media section up and that's never been done. So yeah, so I've seen lots of
those things happen and it does move slow unfortunately, but where it sits now is pretty decent
with all the add-ons. That was one of the best things that that WordPress allowed is the ability for people to
just plug into it with different aspects. Sounds like Etch has been able to do.
Yeah. And I mean Etch is the Etch is the only reason I'm not looking at other options right now. So that's absolutely
correct. Like if if you're going to go this strategy of trying to keep
WordPress itself super bare bones and allow other people to hook into it and
sort of rely on them to make it great, then you just have to really hope that
that uh great people make great stuff. And I feel like,
you know, that hasn't been happening. I don't it's subjective. Like people say,
"Oh, Elementor is great. Look at the market share. Elementor has so many customers." Oh, they refer they were first to the uh
to the trough. Yeah. And so I know it's kind of subjective, but in my opinion, I haven't
seen anything really great happening in the WordPress space for a while. Etch is
the first thing that that has really um just surprised and and impressed me. I
I've been having some conversations uh with some folks even just today. Um I
was talking to to Remiss and I was talking to a couple other people. Yeah.
About it. I've had conversations. I saw our that that little comments on Twitter started a whole feed. That was
actually kind of entertaining. Yeah. Yeah. And there's just so many people that for whatever reason they
feel like they have to come to WordPress's defense. And I get some
people if you work for automatic or whatever, I kind of I kind of get it. But if you don't work for automatic, I
don't understand why people take criticisms to WordPress so personally.
Good question. Nothing gets nothing gets better because everybody who's involved just pretends
that it's great all the time. You've got to be open to the criticisms or ideas. And when somebody says so,
yeah, sometimes it hurts if it's your own little pet project, but sometimes it helps you rethink your direction you're
going. That's happened to me multiple times in life. Got several people around me that uh do that.
Take take me down a notch when I'm getting to uh lack of better term, egotistical on what I'm doing.
Yeah, absolutely. I one of the spicier things I've said that um I know will rub
a lot of people the wrong way is I don't think that opensource software is any
better than closed source software. No I think there's a lot of what
I say the advantage to open source software is it's the the um access to it
is easier for someone to build a business on top of it. Yeah. And there's there's there's a lot
of people who are they they almost treat open source as like a religion. Like
they think if something is open source, they automatically assume it's good. They're like, I love this because it's
open source. And I'm like, well, what if it's terrible though? Like just because it's open source doesn't mean it's
great. And just because it's closed source doesn't mean it's bad. Yeah. Um, and so for me, WordPress is
really my only experience with open source software. And if I'm being completely honest, based on that, I'm
not a fan of open source software just because I look at WordPress and I see,
you know, I see Gutenberg, which looks like a a side project of some college student his sophomore year of computer
sciences, and it's been eight years. And when I say things like that, it pisses a lot of people off. And I'm
like, well, how many PRs have you submitted to Gutenberg? Like, well, none. Like, well then why do you care? Why are you so mad that somebody's
criticizing how slow Gutenberg has progressed? Why is it that that the Etch
team can do what they've done in one year and Guten Gutenberg after eight
years, it still feels like a beta product? Well, that people just don't like that. That was what I thought it was when they
forced it into the core in 2020 and it's like, oh, keep it as a plugin.
And it's one of the things I do because I when we build a lot a lot of the websites we build for clients we turn
over the content production to the client and we've had to make sure that they can't load up the Gutenberg
templates the blocks because they're not intuitive for people who don't
understand for people building content need that basic that basic editor but it says title here
content here couple other things here, you know, use custom post types, custom fields, you fill out all that stuff. PE,
your average user understands that quite well, whereas they don't understand. I still have a tough time wrapping my self
around a block editor when I'm forced to use this. Like, wait, is this my title or is this my content?
So, yeah. And that that's the whole problem I've always had with it is those things. Yes.
Uh Ryan over there at InfluenceWP. I love his there. Rainbows, unicorns, and
wppers. That's the open source. But I I've been working with open source software. It used to be called shareware
back in the day. Been using shareware and freeear since the beginning of the internet.
Fact, I still have a few sharewware and freeware programs that I've been converting over to WordPress uh plugins
because they're nothing but JavaScript and you just have to rewrite JavaScript to work in word plugins.
Yeah. And I really I love blocks. Okay. I love blocks as a replacement for short
codes. We've all we've all added a short code where we had to go look at the docs and the short code is like a mile long
because we got to add all these attributes to make it do what we want. And replace
that nonsense with a block that has a UI and settings and toggle switches and stuff to just very easily do what you
want to do. Yeah. Blocks are a thousand times better than short codes. And that in my opinion is what Gutenberg should
be. Gutenberg should just be blocks. Make it easy to make new blocks. Make it
easy to extend existing blocks and just focus on banging out blocks. And eight
years later, people are actually excited about the fact that you can control the
border radius on a block. Now, after eight eight years of this page builder,
I thought that was rather comical on that when I saw that. It's like, really? It took that long.
And you can't comment on that. People get all mad at you. Oh, why can't you just be happy? Why can't you just celebrate the wins? I I can't I can't
celebrate border radius after eight years. I'm sorry.
Well, on that lovely note, um I think we'll start to wrap it up. This has been
uh one of my longer interviews in a while. Thank you very much for that. Um,
one last brief question though on a personal note. As a father, grandfather, enthusiast,
uh, woodworking, soccer, cigars, Guinness, how do you balance your family life and running a creative agency?
Oh, it's easy. The secret is to just not do any of it very well.
Not my coffee. That's that's a half joke. Um I it is
hard. It's difficult to balance all that. And the the short answer is you just make sacrifices. So you're not
you're not building as many things out of it would as you would like. You're not smoking as many cigars as you would like. You're not playing soccer as much
as you would like. You have to have priorities. You have to do what's best for you and your family.
And try to try to just not kill yourself with work. you know, this hustle culture. I'm I'm definitely not on board
with the hustle culture where people think you got to be working, you know, 10, 12, 14 hours a day. It's like, like
you mentioned earlier before we started the podcast, like you you can choose to try to make money. Every second of your
life can be trying to make money or you can actually try to have a life and enjoy yourself. And that's what I that's what I try to lean
towards. Yeah, that's why my that's why my agency is not very large. It's large enough to support us, but it keeps us from having
to spend 14 days at it. Enjoy time this week. My daughter's
getting married this week, so it's going to be a gonna be a gonna be a crazy week.
Congrats. Yeah. Well, congrats to her. Congrats to her with a good man. So, on
that note, thank you very much, James. I greatly appreciate your time here in the show. Thank you everyone who showed up
and listened to the show or almost the entire show. We've we hit a peak of 10 people here on it or peak loads. Sounds
like um Etch may have been a uh a prompter for any Rick. With that, we're
going to play a little music to carry everyone out of here. Don't run away on me, James. I'll come back to you after we exit the show here so you listen to
the music one more time.
We're going to make time stand still.
A quarter after midnight and I'm watching the wall.
Sometimes I feel so uptight I just can't sleep at all.
every day doing the same old thing. We're losing time.
The weekend comes, we got to have some fun and rewind.
These are the days of thunder. We're going to make time stand still. We
got to feel the hunger hanging over the edge just to taste the thrill.
[Music]
I feel the rope tightening, choking off our air.
We need to grab some lightning. Friday's almost here.
Caught in a web. We need to cut this thread. We're hanging by.
Where is it? said you have to be half dead to survive.
These are the days of thunder. We're going to make time stand still. We
got to feel the hunger hanging over the edge just to taste the thrill.
[Music]
These are the days of thunder. We're going to make time stand still. We
got to feel the hunger. Hanging over the edge just to taste the thrill. These are
the days of thunder. We're going to make time stand still. We
got to feel the hunger hanging over the edge just to taste the thrill.
These are the days of thunder.
All righty, folks. That's all we got now. Take care. Bye-bye. Oh my god, that is amazing.
Oh no.