 Today, we are here to listen to Justin Neely talk about test tracking the design process. Justin is passionate about WordPress and helping people build a powerful online presence. Along with that, he gets the opportunity to lead a small team that go daddy every day, help aspiring entrepreneurs and web pros make their own way each and every day. By day he works as supervisor, by night he's designing websites and possibly fighting crime. The jury is still up. Welcome Justin Neely. We got through it. A little bit of a tech issue there, but we made it. Hello everybody, my name is Justin Neely as she said. Today I'll be talking about fast tracking your design process. A bit about me before I really jump in. If you guys get really awkward photos of me while I'm talking, after Justin Neely make fun of me, I love it. I'm a dad, a beautiful little girl basically there in the little image. She's my absolute world. I'm a good daddy employee. I run a small sales team at GoDaddy. We do hosting support with a lot to do with WordPress. That's really where I got my start with WordPress. I'm a side hustler as well. I've had quite a bit of side hustles from anything from like helping startups to designing sites or almost a coffee shop once. That was not the thing for me. But it all went back to WordPress. Again WordPress enthusiasts for over seven years, but I didn't really experience the in real life IRL WordPress experience until earlier this year. I got to help out at WordCamp Phoenix. I was, as the belief organizer said, a booth babe helping out at the GoDaddy booth. I got to experience just how awesome this community is and how helpful everyone is. Just the support was overwhelming. It didn't matter what you did or who you're from. We're all here for the right reasons. That's just to help each other. Shameless blog and WordCamp Phoenix organizer. Our WordCamp is in February. So if you guys want to come visit a state that's super hot right in the wintertime, it's freezing in room for me. So how I WordPress. So like I said, a little bit in Phoenix, Arizona here. So I get about a week of nice weather and then it's super hot. But in that week I'd love to kind of just hang out in my hammock. Best WordPress sites. And if I'm not there, I'm at a local coffee shop. Or at this bar right across the street. It has great Wi-Fi, even better beer. If you guys know any great craft beer places, hit me up after. I want to check them out. So let's jump in. So what designing a website, right? The entire process can take forever. Especially if you're a designer and you have multiple clients. So you've got to have the initial consultation. You've got to get the material from them. The entire space to start to finish takes way too long, right? Especially just the design to get back and forth. But it doesn't have to. It doesn't have to take as long as it does, right? There are things that we do over and over and over that we shouldn't eliminate. We shouldn't kind of basically get a head start. And that's what this talk is about. Hopefully fast-tracking that design process, as the title says. And give you those countless hours back to go to Tahiti, or have your vacations, spend time with the band there, whatever that looks like. So I'd really like to kind of gauge the experience in the room. So it's going to be a little hand-raising, bear with me here. So if you've created more than 10 websites, raise your hand. Basically the order is awesome. How about 20? Still a lot. That's fantastic. 30? Over 15? All right. Super tender. I love it. So we all know how long that process takes. And some take even longer than they should. So I'm a big statistics guy. I have a podcast that I ran in the back. And I was always coming up with statistics. Everybody would make fun of me because that's just what I did. So some stats. How long does it take to create the WordPress site? This is from, first three are from WP Shell. So a dead, simple blog, basically no customization. It's two hours of work. You're not really doing much into it, right? Informational site, home, about, contact, maybe a blog. And a barely, lightly customized thing is eight hours. A simple e-commerce site is 20 hours. And then from WordPress.com it can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks to create a website. That's a long time. So as I look at, just trying to be more efficient so I can handle more clients or just get more free time, right? Because I'm a side buster. I have a full-time job plus I'm designing websites. If I let it, that's my entire life. I don't want it. So I looked at it and tried to figure out what do I do every time? On every site, no matter what. And what I found is I'm setting up probably the same plugins, themes, and WordPress settings on almost every bill. And then I'm setting up my own page framework. So not so much like the actual client listizations, but just getting the overall flow of how I want the page to look. I did that over and over and over. And as a designer, I pretty much have the same style, right? If you do some of the same things over and over and over. So based on that question I asked you guys earlier, raise your hand if you've done more than 10 sites, 20, 30, and 50. If you built more than 10 sites, that's roughly 25 to 60 hours where you're doing the exact same thing, right? And that sounds ludicrous to me. Like when I do the math, if I had 25 to 60 hours right now, I can do so much, probably most of it will be sleeping. But the bad news is that time flies, right? The good news is that you're a pilot. I love this book. And we have the power to control our time and what we do with it. So I want to tell you all about a story. So when I was a first-time newbie designer about six months or a year and somewhere in that great mix, I wanted to really impress my clients. I was all gumball. I wanted to do everything from scratch. Literally everything. I wouldn't mess with the theme CSS and to create my own child themes and even mess with more CSS. I'm trying to make my own plugins while I did all that and it was a colossal mess. So I want to tell you about a time where it didn't work out for me, right? So I had a client. I'm going to call him Frank in this example here to hide his identity. But I had a client named Frank and he was a friend of a friend. He was a startup business consultant and he's been preaching to his clients. You have to have a powerful website present, right? To kind of wow your customers, but he didn't have one. It's like the toddler shoes. Kids have their shoes. So he talked to me and was like, hey, I really need a website. I need to basically back up what I'm talking about. So I'm like, great, let's absolutely do it. So he goes through the consultation and figure out what he wants. He wants basically just a place to show off his brand. He wants a couple little courses. He can add to it in a membership site. So when he has his clients, he can go through up there. So I go, cool. Go ahead and do it. I go, let's go ahead and make this happen. So I go start going to work, right? I went out, still that new designer. I went out and found this brand new theme that had this, what I thought at the time would be this cool, like, visual builder. That was automatically graded in. I found some new membership plugins that I had to work with before because I thought they were super cool looking and I started to work. And what I found is that theme was awful. It was just atrocious. Like, the builder inside of it wasn't, it didn't flow. I had to click and drag things over and over and over. I had to do different browsers. I had to wipe my plugins. I had to restart. Then it was just chaos for a week. And I had, I told him by a week I would have something. So I showed him what that something was and he was like, what is this? Like, you're right. I get it, right? Like, it's been a struggle when I'm going to make this happen. I'm going to get it done. So I keep going. Another five days go by. I've sort of got the homepage going, sort of the contact. The courses aren't working that well. I should have messed with the CSS to make it presentable and work with the theme. And it just wasn't working. Right? And I was literally looking like this guy, just hand to the head, just like, I don't know what to do. Right? I was at a point where I thought to myself, maybe I just stick with my full-time job. Maybe this isn't for me because I am failing hard. So then I talked to him like, hey, I really don't have much yet to show you, but give me another day or two and I'll have something. I'll have something that I will be proud to show you. Right? That it's my work at that point. So I sit there and I'm trying to think, how the hell do I get out of this? I've already spent a week and a half of my time and I really don't have much to show for it. I don't have much to say that, hey, at least I got you something. So then I remember I had a client about three or four months back that was kind of similar. It was in a start-up business consultant, but it was a consultant of some sort. I already knew the theme that they were using. I knew the plugins. So what did I do? I stole for myself. Right? It's a little puppy there. I stole my own design, so I cloned it, threw it over, and then customized it to Frank's liking. Everything he was trying to do. I had the membership set up. The course is, I had his face on the homepage look beautiful, right? And I presented it to him. And that process took me probably four or five hours to do and redesign and make. After a week and a half of headache, and he was so happy. And I was like, yes! I made it! At a point where I thought I was about to quit, but I decided to steal it for myself and try something new and do what I already knew. So my whole experience was the start of something magical, right? And that's exactly what I'm basically teaching you all to do, to hopefully skip through that and essentially steal from yourself. And the way you do that is you create a template library. So as a designer, you build a variety of different sites over 50 for a lot of you. So you create your own template library. All your plugins that are already set up that you pretty much use on every single build, right? We all have our security plugins we use. We all have our optimization plugins we use. You go and set up basically the same settings for most of every time. And then same thing with your theme, right? You set up your template to have the couple themes that you use. The settings are already set. And the pages as well, set up just the frameworks. Not necessarily the customizations, but the frameworks of the page. So you have your big hero image and you're called to action and contact what happened. And then as I was creating this talk, I was trying to find other examples of people that already do this and do this incredibly well. And it's not so much web designers that are doing it. It's theme developers, right? If you ever look at a theme demo site, they've already created that template library. So that's what I'm going to teach you to kind of create that same model. So we're going to look at two different models, that two methods of madness. So the first being a beta. Beta is one of the most popular themes but what they do is they have their basically, they have a hub website as their demo page and a ton of example or home page versions. Like on this they have 19 different home page versions. And it's not for them, it's for people that get that theme and they can start from it and build on to it from there. Same thing with you all. Create your hub website, create a couple different versions of your home page however you guys typically do it, right? And then when you have a new client you edit from there. So beta has all sorts of different versions of their website that people can use. You guys see the same thing, have a couple different versions of your website that you can use and start from and skip all that remedial stuff that you do every time, right? So that's the first one. Have a hub and then multiple versions of your page. The second way is vtheme. So vtheme instead of having just one site of different pages, they have a ton of different websites with different versions of that site, right? So with just their, looking at their demo page they have their default theme, they've got range, renovate, tailor, cakes, there's burger, which I'm super hungry lunch is right after this. School, coffee, agency and cars. They have different versions of their site tailored to different potential clients that want that theme. So you do the same thing. So if you have a site that you do for restaurants and have a couple different restaurant type sites and maybe you do some car sales on type sites or what have you what have that looks like. So if I had a restaurant client I would just spin up my that's the burger site or whatever page that I create as my template and then I'll edit it from there. Allow me to save that time to use to go find more clients or just relax. So to break your template library there's a lot of different ways to do this. I'm going to show you guys how to do a C pinup but I'll give a couple shout outs to other ways. Some pros and cons as well. So if you're all using backup plugins such as Uptraft this one's a pretty popular backup plugin you can create your website, your template site and just create it as a backup. So when you spin up a new site you just restore that backup and then build on from there. The downside with this is that your plugins and themes don't stay updated. So that's something to keep an eye on just because if you haven't messed that in a while you have to update like 12 plugins and themes things can break. So I wouldn't recommend this one but if by all means use what you like best. There's multi site management tools such as MUDev that you can create basically backups and spin up and clone. There's ManageWP or GoDaddy Pros, ProSites template builder that kind of does the same exact thing. Again I'm going to be showing you Cpanel. It's pretty universal to a variety of hosting companies that almost anyone can use. So inside of Cpanel there is this section called InstallChop. It's your home for installing applications and what not. So we're going to go ahead and just install a new WordPress build. Go ahead and throw in the details what domain you're using. What I recommend is having an example site. Like my would be like olddocnealy.pro of my actual site. So I'd make my example site or my template site however you want to do it using a password back up to the whole 9 yard and then go into this. But with creating your template library so my recommendation unless your sites are vastly different, usually you make them up. Usually the one site with a variety of different pages you can kind of just delete the extra pages and customize from there. It's going to make your lives a lot easier. And then as you grow and expand you can do what I typically do. So I'll have my example site that has my variety of pages my home pages, my contact about my plugins are already set up so on and so forth. Then I'll clone that site and create an e-commerce version of it. I'll set up the WooCommerce, have my demo products customize the pages to look like an e-commerce site and I'll take that and clone it again to a new membership site. If you have different types of versions that might require more functionality you do this. These sites would be lives and then you can make your updates of your plugins and what not in real time. So you don't have to go potentially break a new build and that's going to cause even more headache. And so on and so forth. So any other potential genres of site you can do is just keep cloning your template. So how do you use this in the wild? And now you don't want to do it from scratch. You want to use one of your templates. So we're going to talk about Lisa. A fictitious client but for my example here. So Lisa needs a new website. She's a health nut. She just got certified to be a personal nutritionist. Thank you. So she's going to be a nutritionist. So she wants a place to basically show off her branch and show off what she does. So we go through the whole consultation case. So I'm getting the material. I go to work. I'm going to use Installatron to clone my template to her site. So inside of Installatron you can go ahead and click that little arrow with the two splitting arrows. That's going to take an exact replica of that site and do the heavy lifting of the searcher in place. So it's going to replace the URLs with your new ones so you don't have to go and do that. It makes your life super easy. So if you're hosting the website for your client, you would just choose their domain name and then build it from there. But if you're doing a staging type site, choose your template domain and then put it into a new format. And then you go through whatever settings you want to do or just let the manager do sales and then click clone. It'll spin up. It takes probably 30 seconds to a minute to actually clone the site over and you have your new build. All your plugins, artist setup, you don't have to do there other than maybe a couple tweaks depending on what you use. Your themes are there. You have one to three themes that you've already set up. So you can really go and pick which ones works best for you. And then you're going to kind of clean up and customize this. So you're going to have extra pages that you're not going to want to use. So go ahead and delete those extra pages that you're not going to use. Delete any other themes that you're not going to use because you don't want that excess blow. And then delete any plugins you may not need on this build, right? I'll end up with this plugin list for an example. I have A3 lazy load just for optimization. There's a lot of optimization stuff that I use. Atoptimize Elementor and Elementor Pro just because it's super easy to hand off to a client. Let them make their edits from there. Manage WP worker so I can back up into my second stuff. Smush, again, optimization. Security, security, some mouthful. Just for my securities preferences. I have load, craft, and clear fly. Helps get rid of some of the excess that I don't really need on a WordPress build. And then Yoast for SEO. Then my themes. I'll go ahead and switch up my theme. Ending on which one that I would use. Again, pages. You're going to delete extra pages and then customize it from there. So I'll take a just generic hookset template that I've had built in my library from a while ago. And she gave me her color scheme. She gave me her images that she wants to use and some of the tests on it. I didn't spend a whole lot of time really customizing this for a fictitious client. So for example, they're going to look pretty similar. So I go ahead and I spin up, throw an image in the back. I increase the header space of the bed so it shows more of her. I'll add the little content that she's given me and add some images in text. Now with this what you don't want to do is just literally copy, cookie cutter every website because then all your sites will look the same. That's not what this is for, just to help get you to that head start. So you can go and customize it to that client's need. Add extra stuff. You want to add extra stuff like go wild, but at least save those hours. And then you just migrate the website to your client. So use a tool that you're familiar with. If you like backup plugins like web draft, use backup plugins. Use installtron. There's sort of a migration path doesn't always work the best. You know old school, if you really want to have an FTP in MySQL and do search replaces, please. I wouldn't recommend it because that's just a ton of time. Multisite management tools or our pro sites can help manage it over as well. So with this, right when I really started to do this I almost felt like I was cheating my clients because I was charging the same amount but it's taking me a lot less time. And that's a valid feeling to have especially when you're using your own type of library. And I don't want you to feel that way. I want to tell you about a story that somebody really told me that really hit home. So we have this small business owner he needs a logo. So he goes around, search around, finds this logo designer and he goes to the office talks to her and goes great I want this logo as my business he has all the information. She goes perfect, I can absolutely make you a logo that you can be proud of. We have 500 bucks and I'll make it happen as quickly as possible. So he goes great that sounds pretty good. Here's the 500 bucks what could I have this by? So she goes one second she sits down takes about 15 minutes and creates a beautifully stunning logo. Don't get me wrong but she created 15 minutes. She goes here you go and he was kind of pissed off. He's like you can spend 15 minutes for my 500 bucks why would I pay you that? And she goes you didn't pay for that 15 minutes of work you pay for this. She goes opens up her closet door now pours out hundreds and hundreds of artwork and paintings and logos and everything that she's done to get to that point where she can make you a damn good logo in 15 minutes. That's what you're paying for. Same thing with this your clients are paying for your experience just because you get it done a lot quicker they're probably going to be happier they don't have to wait as long. That's what I really want you to take away with don't feel like you're cheating your clients because you are using your own template that you created that's your experience you're still going to customize to them that website's still going to be beautiful at the end of the day and they're going to get it done a lot quicker then you can focus on building up the brand or whatever other service you have with that extra time or go on a trip to GED So that's the that's the essence of my talk. We'll do a little Q&A in case questions at the end. But there's really four levels of takeaways that I want you to have from this talk. So level one walking away saying that wasn't a complete waste of time that's my bare minimum, right? Level two, try this at least once see if it works for you if it does that will take you to level three and use this with all your builds save that time, expedite your process and become more efficient with your websites and then level four is the one I really want you all to do is to teach someone else that's the power of WordPress that's the power of the community that we're in we're all here to help each other support each other and teach each other so if this works for you go ahead and teach someone else or anything you've learned from today that really touched you teach someone else, help them out see if you can brighten their day with a couple of little pro tips or even go on as a huge training course for all I care do something to help each other out at Justin Neely, talk to me on Twitter I'll be at the GoDaddy booth if you guys have any intimate questions or just want to talk but that's all I have for you we'll do some Q&A in case anybody has questions no questions usually use commercial games so I've been pretty reliant on Aveda, Hestia and then baby for some customers yeah are you posting a lot of your clients on your website? yes so I mess around with multi-cycle forks, one of my side hustles was essentially my customers would pay for a temple that would spin up and then they built it there so yes I have tried that I like just having everything pretty separate but I love multi-cycle any other questions? do you find all your sites start looking the same using this methodology? they did at first it took me a little bit to really make them my own I was trying to speak quick with it then you start to kind of get your basic framework and then you'll add your different sections and I try to look at my past like three or four designs to make sure it does look unique and it does look towards their brand so yes it's absolutely a thing especially just getting started with it it takes a little bit of time to make it your own but then you're good from there yeah all over that's why I was going to do the beef theme method with the multiple versions of the page but I keep my templates that one was a really old one but most of my actual templates are super generic that I can then spin off to whatever they need to do yeah yes I actually prefer that I don't like to host my clients websites she basically asked if I migrate the sites over to my client or if I keep it in house I'll use like our GoDaddy Pro tools to help that migration or use whatever works best for you yes yes and I almost do do maintenance services on top of it but I'd rather have everything in there control I don't want to own their stuff I think it's theirs cool again thank you all so much for attending this session I really appreciate it