 Get me out of my shell. So my title of my track today is Fast Track Your Design Process, and my name is Justin Neely. A little bit about me. My Twitter handle is right here, just at Justin Neely. If you guys want to grab some random photos, especially weird awkward faces, the more awkward the better. Please go ahead and tag me, get some blackmail for later. I'm a dad. That's my beautiful little girl there, Paisley. She's five years old. My absolute world. I'm a GoDaddy employee. You might have seen me at the GoDaddy booth. I was giving out those little water containers, talking about a bunch of stuff. But I run a hosting team that basically sells WordPress and maintains it and manages it for customers. I'm also a side hustler. I design WordPress sites. So by day I'm a supervisor at GoDaddy. By night I'm building out websites and fighting crime, if you will. But I've been designing WordPress sites for about seven years now. I did a whole build from scratch, used Dreamweaver, the whole nine yards, attempted Joomla once and I hated it. I switched to WordPress and I've been here ever since. I just started getting into the actual WordPress community outside of online, so in real life. Earlier this year when I helped out at WordCamp Phoenix and I was just blown away with how supportive and how friendly and how just amazing everyone that attends. I knew that I had to really jump on it and be a bigger part of the WordPress community. Which is why I'm talking here today. Public speaking is a fear of mine. I'm just going to try to get through this and try to give back some of my perspectives. I'm also helping out at WordCamp Phoenix, so shameless plug if you guys want to go to a little bit brighter weather. It's upper 80s right now. So it's freezing here for me. I'm going to organize for that, so that's February. So how I WordPress? So Arizona is super hot, so I get about a week's worth of nice weather. That perfect world. I'm in my hammock, busting out WordPress sites, just enjoying the weather. If I'm not doing that, I'm at a coffee shop or there's a cool local brewery that has great Wi-Fi and even a better beer, so I'm over there. If you guys know what you get great beer spots after at the Codati booth, try and check them out. No, no, darn. So that's how I WordPress in a perfect world. So let's jump in, right? So this whole talk is about fast tracking and design process. And that design process, it can sometimes take forever, right? Everything from getting the initial client, going through the consultation, getting the stuff from the client, because that's not always easy, and then actually going in and designing the site, that whole process seems like it just takes way too long. And if you ask me, it is. And there's different ways that we can help save that time, because it doesn't have to take as long as it does. So with a couple of things that I'm going to be mentioning today, it's hopefully going to save you just a ton of time, and it's not going to cost you anything. Some of you may be doing this, which is awesome. Some of you may know about it, but are not doing it, and then some of you may have no clue. But if we look at the experience in the room, I kind of want to just gauge where we're all at. But ask you to raise your hands, I know participation, super fun, right? But show of hands, if you've built more than 10 WordPress sites. How about more than 20? More than 30? More than 50? We got some experience pros in the back. Those are who to talk to. So a ton of experience in this room, which is super awesome. So we all know how long it takes to create a WordPress site. But here are some statistics. I love statistics. I used to run a podcast a little while ago, and my co-host would always make fun of me, because I always had something to talk about or some statistic. So from WP Shout, a dead simple blog on a simple blog theme, no customization, that's two hours. Informational site, home, about, contact, maybe a blog, very lightly customized premium theme, eight hours, a simple e-commerce site, 20 hours, and then directly from WordPress.com, using a WordPress.org template anywhere from a few days to a few weeks to create a site. That's forever, right? And as designers, like most of you all, most of you are, your time is your money. And that's important. So we look at some of the things that we do most often in every build. We have to do these parts of it, right? We have to set up the plugins, themes, and WordPress settings. On the super efficient range, it's about 30 minutes to get the basic setup when you know exactly what you're wanting to do, the long end, 60 minutes. Setting up the page frameworks, like just the layouts of the page, not necessarily exactly what the client is needing, just getting the home page functionality going. You have your header image. You have a couple little images, things like that. Anywhere from two hours to five hours, the 300 minute mark. So a long time, right? So based on that question that I asked you earlier, kind of gauging that room, so if you've built 10 sites, that's roughly 25 to 60 hours doing the exact same thing over and over and over. So that's setting up all your plugins, that's setting up all your themes, going through the settings, setting up the page frameworks that is. And that's a ton of time. Like think about, if you had an extra 25 to 60 hours, what would you do? I'd probably go on a trip to Tahiti. So I know it's not good practice to read a quote, but I have to read this one because it speaks to what this talks about. The bad news is that time flies. The good news is that you're the pilot. You're a control of your own time, right? So I want to kind of tell you a story, back when I was kind of a newbie designer and I came to this fruition, right? So as all newbies, you want to impress the clients. You essentially do everything from scratch. Let me tell you about a time when this went terribly wrong. So I had a client, we'll keep his name out of it, but we're going to call his fake name Frank. So I had Frank, he was a friend of a friend. He was a startup business consultant. His advice that he gave to his startups was have a professional website and presence and he did not have one. So he's like, I might want to back up what I'm talking about. So like, cool, I need a brand new website. So we talked, we had our consultation, we went through it. I was like, cool, this is absolutely something I can help you out with. Be able to get this done for you. So I go in, super excited, super gung-ho, newbie designer. I'm like, cool, I'm gonna find the best theme out there. I'm gonna get some new plugins, I'm gonna do all these things. So I grab a theme and a plugin off of a theme forest, one for the theme, one for like a membership type plugin. Then I go in and I start building it. And what I found with this theme that it wasn't the best theme out there. It was super buggy. The builder that came with it didn't really work. I'd like click and drag things multiple times just to get it to go, regardless of what browser I used. And then the desktop to mobile conversion was just awful. And then the membership plugin that I paid money for, it just didn't jive, it just didn't work, right? And I went back and forth and I tried to get it going but it just was not working. And then the first rough draft that I present to Frank, I did so like here. And I know it wasn't my best work. I know I've already spent a week and a half on it, but I needed to give him some side of progress, get that feedback going. And he's like, what is this? This is not what I asked for. Like I know I'm struggling through this website build. I try to do everything to get it to your liking but this theme and this plugin just isn't working out for me. And at that point he was like, oh, I need something better. Like this, I can't be proud of this. I'm like, you're right, right? So I go, I'm thinking there. I'm almost at the point of like, maybe this isn't for me, right? Cause this, I'm a side hustle. Like this is a side hustle. Maybe I should just go back to my, just to my full-time job and just focus on that. Maybe designing websites, it's just not for me. And then I thought, what can I do? What can I do to win this back and not spend another week and a half, two weeks of my time? Cause I still had other sites I was building. I still had my full-time job. I still had my family. I still had all these things, right? So what do I do? I decided to steal, but for myself. So I remembered that I had a client that I did about a year and a half, two years prior to this. So that was kind of, kind of for fun, not really a job at this point. I think I charged him like 300 bucks. But I remembered that I had this client and he wasn't a startup business consultant, but he was a consultant of some sort. And he had some of the similar functionalities that this client needed. So I went and I stole my design, threw it over, cloned it over. My plugins were already set up. My themes were already set up. My pages were already set up. I just rebranded and reskinned it and moved around some stuff to make it fit for Frank. And then that took less than a day. After all that, that painstake week and a half, two weeks later, took a day and I finally got it. I gave it a Frank and I was like this, just super happy. Frank was super happy. He's like, this is exactly what I was wanting. It has the functionality I needed. I have the membership portion so I can have my clients have access. And then the design looks great. It really captivates what I was going for. And that was the start of something magical. And that's what I'll be talking about here today. It is essentially you're going to be stealing from yourself. And the way you do that is you create your own template library. So this is how you fast track your design process. So instead of doing everything from scratch every single time, why not skip that? Skip the stuff that you do over and over and over. Like the plugins. We all pretty much use the same plugins on almost every build. We don't deviate once we really find our niche. Same thing with themes. We use probably one to three themes on almost all of our builds and kind of edit and design from there. So you create your own template library of repositories. So all those plugins are already set up. Those themes are already set up. And then set up your pages as well. And there's two methods of madness to creating these template libraries. And there's a market that's already doing this exceptionally well. And that market are theme developers. If you ever look at a theme, they've already created their own template library of some sort to help people get started super quick. You guys can do that with your own builds but with your own designs. So the two methods of madness, the first one I'm gonna use Aveda as an example. So the first method is having essentially a hub website or a hub template that's gonna house different versions of your pages. So if you look at Aveda, they have 19 different homepage versions. I don't recommend you have 19 different homepage versions. You probably need what, three to five? But set that up. Set up a couple different versions of your about page. Set up a couple different versions of your contact page. Maybe you just need one that you don't really aren't that customized right. Set up some services pages. Then you're gonna have your plugins already set. And on your homepage, you wanna keep it pretty basic, pretty plain. Same thing that Aveda does here. They're not too complex. And this one's a little bit more pretty with the colors that really pop, but make them plain so that way when you get your client, you can rebrand it to them and then rearrange things as you need to. And then same thing if you have a shop as well. Now the second method of madness, instead of having a hub website, you can be like how B-Theme is. So B-Theme has over 300 different versions of websites. So you're gonna use this method if your sites are pretty vastly different. Like if you have one for a gun range and you have one for a car salesman or one for a burger shop, that's going to be your way to make your template library. And then if I wanted to have a burger shop, I would just port that over and then modify from there. Does that make sense? We follow it along. Make sure you're good and cool. So how do you actually create your template library? So understand that two methods of madness having, yeah, yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Give me about 10 minutes. I believe I'll answer your question for you. I got you. All right, so creating your template library. What does this look like? So there are many tools out there. I'm all about the free and efficient, especially when it makes sense. So these different methods are gonna be free for you. So one way is to use backup plugins such as Updraft. If this is the way that you like to do it, the only problem with this is what that gentleman said, it's not gonna keep those live updates. So you're gonna have to spend more time making updates when you create your new sites, right? There's using a multi-site management tool such as like MUDev to create your backups, clones, things like that. There's our ProSites template builder that does some similar stuff as well. And then what we're going to be using is Cpanel and Installatron. Cpanel is a pretty universal control panel used on a variety of different hosting providers. So we're gonna go through this. So inside of Cpanel, we have Installatron. Installatron gives you a range of applications to download and install onto your hosting account. Question? Oh, good. All right, that you can use. So we're gonna go ahead and install a WordPress site. So that's the first step. We're gonna make that that hub website that we're gonna base all of our templates off of. So you install your application, you choose your domain name, choose your username, choose your password, get all your settings going and you have your website there. So my recommendation, unless your sites are vastly different, you're gonna want to use the Aveda model. That way your plugins are all the same, your themes are all the same, and then you just have your different versions of your pages. And now with this and using Installatron and having one hub site, this hub site will be live. So you can go in and make your updates. It's when you need to. You can go in and modify things when you need to and those will be cloned over whenever. So how I do it, cause I kind of take it a step further. So with this, I'll have my base website as example.nealy.pro. It's not live, but for the sake of example it is. And then from there, I have about three different versions of home pages, three different versions of about pages, three different versions of services pages, one contact page, cause that doesn't need to be that advanced. And then I have all my plugins set up and all my, I think I have two themes set up on my local version. And then what I do from there is I'll clone it into an e-commerce build. And I'll just make a couple of tweaks, but the brunt of the work is there. Then I'll clone that one and I'll make a membership site. So now I have three sites that effectively I can use as templates based on whatever my client needs. And so on and so forth. So if you had different site builds that you need, essentially clone from the template, clone from the template, clone from the template. Right? So using this in the wild, like what does this look like? So we have the foundations of creating your template library. We know how to use it using Installatron to set up your WordPress sites and then clone from there. But you get your client, you know you have a template that'll be perfect to help expedite that process, save you those countless hours. Let's use this in the wild. So we have Lisa here. Lisa needs a new website. She's just got certified to be a nutritionist. She's been working on her personal brand, but knows that she needs more than just Instagram. She needs a home to drive that traffic to. So we get together, we talk, like cool. So you're really needing just a home to present some of the stuff that you do, get new clients to help them with their diet and their lifestyle. So we do that. She gives me her color scheme, gives me her logos and all that information. And then I get to work. So I'm gonna go ahead and use Installatron to clone a template. So I'll get my base website that I have. For example, .nilly.pro. Inside of Installatron, there's a pretty cool clone feature that makes your life super easy. So you click that clone feature. If you're gonna be hosting for your client, you'll just choose their domain name. If you're creating a staging environment, you'll just choose a folder or whatever domain that you really wanna set up. And you click clone. It's gonna copy everything over. It's gonna do the search for a place in the database. You don't have to mess with anything on the backend. You just, cool. New site is set up with your new domain. And it's cloned your templates. So once it's installed, you're gonna go ahead and clean up and customize it. So you're gonna clean up any pages that you don't wanna use. You're gonna customize the pages to be towards your liking. You're gonna delete any plugins. You're not wanting to use that with that build or add something that may be outside of your normal template wheelhouse and go from there. So a couple of the plugins that I'd have for this client, for example, that I use pretty often. I have LazyLoad, just for site optimization. Autoptimize for site optimization, Elementor and Elementor Pro to design the sites. I have managed WP Worker for my multi-site management tool. I have Smush to optimize my images. I have Security, security, that's a mouthful, to help with my security. Webcrafted, Clearfy, again, site optimization. WP Optimize, site optimization, and then Yoast SEO for SEO. I like to make sure my sites run fast and that's why there's all those optimization plugins within it. So those are some of my common plugins that I would use for this, right? I don't, personally. This flow as far as optimization seems to work with me. Autoptimize, though, with certain themes, can run in issues, so I have found that. But I've used the Aveda theme and I've used the Hestia, Hestia, something like that theme and those work pretty well with those builds. Yes, yep, so that's the visual builder. I mainly use that just because it does make my life a little bit easier and then the handoff to the client, they don't have to go and learn something complex to them. It's gonna be a visual builder. Yeah, they will be. I'll send them out to you guys once I get everything loaded up for you. Cool, so then, got my plugins all cleaned up. I deleted anything I don't want, got rid of the extra pages. Now it's time to customize my homepage, right? So I chose just one of my generic templates. This was for the fitness type industry. So I have this base website, just generic, no real information there. She told me her colors, she gave me her images to really showcase her and she gave me a couple things that she wanted to update. So the actual redesign to be towards your liking took me 20 minutes. So I added an image with her in the background. I stretched out the header a bit, added her information, switched the icons a bit, added just a stock photo that I thought that would work well and I built it from there. Now, you guys get more complex. I was doing this mainly just for efficiency and just to show you all, but mess with it, move different things around, add different stuff to it, but give yourself a base template to start from. That way you don't have to do the basic frameworks and getting the pages set up, right? Cool. So then when you're done, you finished, yeah. This is the fictitious, yeah. Just for the sake, let me get back to that. So I've got that too. So migrating the website to your client. So as soon as you have that done, you migrate the site, use a tool that you're familiar with if you're not gonna be hosting the site for it. I'm not gonna teach you anything brand new. So if there's a method you already use, use it. Use your backup plugins like Updraft. Use installatron, it sometimes works. Go old school, FTP, PHP for my admin, it's a way to do it, multi-site management tools such as MUDev or ProSites as well. So back to your question about how much I would charge. So when I first learned this, I felt bad about outcharging clients about the same amount of money for that's taken me a lot less work, right? And then I had a good buddy of mine. He told me about an anecdotal type story. I don't know if it was actually real, right? So the fictitious story. So we have a small business owner looking for a logo. So he goes and finds this logo specialist online, goes to her office, tells him about all this stuff that he's wanting to be done. She's like, great, I can absolutely do that for you. It's just gonna be a flat fee of 500 bucks and I'll make it happen for you. So he goes, okay, cool, that works my budget. Let me go ahead and get that set up for you. So she goes, sits down right in front of him and draws out the logo, gets everything done in 15 minutes and then hands it to the client. She goes, all right, cool, here you go. This is perfect for you. And then he's a little pissed off and frustrated. He's like, you just spent 15 minutes and got that done. I gave you 500 bucks. What was that, right? Like he was a little frustrated and she goes, well, no, you're not necessarily paying just for the 15 minutes, you're paying for this. She opens up her closet door and outspills out hundreds and hundreds of different sketches and logos and artwork and everything she's done to get to that point where she could make a damn good logo in 15 minutes, right? She goes, you're paying from my experience. You're paying, the quality is still there. So when you do this and you do use your templates, use your designs, don't feel bad about charging your clients the same amount, because the experience is still there, the quality is still there. They're gonna be happy that you can get that site built a lot quicker than the two, three, sometimes four weeks that it might take for a client build to be done. True, well, yeah, yeah. Right, it's all the experience that got you to that point, right? Like we're all gonna get better, we're all gonna be quicker and more efficient, and be able to do more projects. Right, that was just for the sake of argument, right? But yeah, so this process, save you guys some time, right? Create, it's gonna take you a little bit of work upfront to create your templates, or even use some of the sites that you built and rebrand them to more generic, but save yourself the time. Even if you just set up the plugins and the themes, you wanna make the pages from scratch, save yourself that time, stop doing the same things over and over and over, right? Our time is our money. Think about everything that you can do. You can go on that trip to Tahiti, you can spend more time with family. You can do all these things, or even go out and find more business and work on more sites, right? That's what we're here for. So there's four levels of takeaways for this talk that I'd like to for you to at least have one of them. So level one, walking out of here is saying that wasn't a complete waste of time. That's my hope. Level two is to try this at least once. See if it works for you. If it does, awesome, which will lead you to level three. Use this with all your builds. Save yourself that time. Again, 25 to 60 hours on 10 websites. That's a ton of time. That's potentially a couple more sites, right? Then level four is to teach someone else. That's the power of WordPress. That's the power of community. We're all here to help each other and support each other and just make our lives better. If you can go out here and help a peer or help a friend that you know that this might work for, teach them, see if it works for them, right? Because that's why we're here. And that's why I'm in love with WordPress, especially the in real life WordPress. And that's why I'm talking here today. Getting out of my comfort zone and I feel like the Eminem song, the palms are sweaty, knees weak, arms are heavy, right? But that's all I have for you guys today. Again, at Justin Neely, if you have any awkward random photos, tweet me. It'd be fantastic. I'm at the Go Daddy booth. You wanna talk more about this on your specific builds. But I think we have a little bit more time. I ran through this. Any questions? Installatron, what specifically? As far as the cloning management, absolutely. I think it takes like 30 seconds to clone one of your builds over and then it's going to do the whole search and replace based off whatever domain and path you have. Depends. Usually I'll just do a path. I have an example site. I use that, example.neely.pro. But I'll have a temporary type domain name that I'll just throw all the builds on. Oh, hey, I think it was sourced. So that's kind of like the building up the templates, right? So you're gonna have your wire frames, your setups of your pages already and your builds and then you'll design it from there when you get your client and you clone it over. Did I answer that right? Okay. I usually just build the site and throw it in the clients. I mean, at the end of the day, like we're designers, like we're the professionals, right? They might have an idea, but we know what sites work well. It's not just a pretty site, it's an effective site. And we need to kind of be leaders in that conversation and say this is what you need and present it that way. So that's my take on it. I think he was next. I agree. I didn't want to talk about GoDaddy stuff the entire time, right? But I agree. Yes. Again, come talk to me at the GoDaddy booth. I'll preach GoDaddy stuff all day and talk to you all about it. Yep. You have to even just log in, update, right? Just that one click update. Yeah, so I'm taking my template site and I'm cloning it to like a staging environment and then I'll design it for the client and then present it that way. If I'm hosting for the client, which I usually don't like to do, I'll just keep it there. But if I'm not, then I'll migrate it to my clients environment. Installatron's first C panel to just to clone your sites and manage your applications. It's just going to take the coffees a lot easier than you doing it manually. It's a part of C panel. So if you're hosting provider, it gives you C panel. Most C panel will have Installatron in it already. Yeah. I know you're talking about WordPress.com type sites or just using WordPress. Okay. As far as like getting content. So in this example, it'd be like a reskin and rebrand and redesign of their current site, if you will. Yeah. I mean, with what you're talking about at first with just their blog posts just throughout, they don't really have a homepage created. They just have their feed going. You would just specify one of your template pages as the homepage and in that you might have your blog posts listed in there, but it's not the majority, right? It's going to have your header. You're going to have whatever visual that you need. And then you'll also have a blog page where they can just go and read everything. So yes, that would absolutely work. Yes. Because you're going to set your template already up. So you're going to have your site there and layout however you need to. And then you'd use the WordPress export to get all their blog posts over to yours. And that's tools in the dashboards tools. Then there's like import, export. You'll choose export. It'll give you an XML file. And you just take that over into your WordPress build tools, import, and it'll throw all the blog posts into your site. Yeah. Any other questions? You have five minutes. Sure. Yeah. I mean, if you have a very small niche, you can still use this. It's just that once you get your basic stuff done, you have to customize a hell out of it to make it not look identical. And that's not the point of this is to make your every site look identical. It's just to get the main pieces there. So then you just add on to it, right? So not every, like my homepage may have like a header, a couple of boxes and some text, but my actual client site, it's not going to just have that. I'm going to add some stuff to it. I'm going to add their functions that they're wanting to do. Kind of give yourself just the things that you're going to do almost on every build. And then you just build it from there. Yeah, that's valid. And you kind of just kind of just have to know your audience, I would say, if you're going to keep them pretty similar. Couple of minutes. Any other questions? Yeah. We all have our design flows, right? I mean, to his point, like if you go back and look at some like your last five or 10 builds, just look at them. Look how similar they look. We all have our flow and all our designs that we usually like most often. They're all going to have the same features pretty much. And that's why you can kind of skip past them, the stuff that you do every time and save yourself that time and start from there. It's going to depend on the theme, right? So if that theme has a dependent type of builder and it's included with it, you're probably going to need multiple hubs. That's why I use Elementor because it's independent from theme. So I can use any theme with it. So I'll have three themes with the backend settings already set up and then my pages are independent of that theme. So I usually don't present the templates into them. I usually keep that just for me to kind of base it off of. But as far as specifics, it's kind of keep it just really what they're going to get out of it because that's what matters. Like you can go into the exact specifics and all the technical stuff. Many of these small business owners, they don't care about that. They just care about what's the benefit? What are they actually going to get out of your design in the site beyond just having a site? I think we got one minute. One last question for let y'all go. It's lunch time too, so I get it. All right, I'm hungry. It's Arizona time. All right, thank you all so much. If y'all want to talk to me, come and do the GoDaddy booth. Thank you.