 Well good morning everybody. Is everybody awake and having, having coffee? Good morning. Good morning. Good morning. Most great place is like a school class, you know. Alright, so like Judy mentioned, the goal, what we put together last October was 48 and 48. The idea was to create 48 websites for 48 nonprofits in 48 hours. In this talk, I'll kind of be covering sort of what we learned from that, what we can take away from it. Hopefully some useful things that you can use with clients and other folks as you use Wordpress. So, I guess really, and this is all my information by the way also. So I've got too many Twitter handles on here. I'm taller 48 and 48, or me and my company, Sideways 8 and the co-founder of 48 and 48. Also the co-founder of Sideways 8. Sideways 8 is a digital marketing agency here in Atlanta. 48 and 48 of course is a nonprofit organization to run our events and expand nationally. So, you can see also my personal blog up there. I blog about productivity mostly and habitability. And anything else that I would want to walk about. Mostly productivity and habitability. So, okay. So the first thing is, what's 48 and 48 and why did we do it? Why would we be insane enough to try to build 40 websites in 48 hours? That's a good question. So, it came out of the brainchild of my friend Jeff Hillemeyer, who's well known in the tech community here in Atlanta. And he basically came to me and he said, hey, if we could build a website or a couple websites in a weekend for a nonprofit. I said, yeah, we can do that. And he said, so what if we did like 20 websites for 20 nonprofits? Yeah, we can do that. What if we did 50 websites in a weekend for 50 nonprofits? Yeah, we could do that. Okay, how about 48 and 48 because that sounds better from a marketing perspective? Done. So, we basically came up with the idea and had absolutely no concept of if we could do it or not. We just figured it out as we went along. But really the question is why do it, right? Why try to accomplish this? And really it's a simple goal. It's that most of us that work with WordPress, most of us that do digital marketing, we're professionals in that space. And nonprofits tend to look really bad, right? I mean, if you go to a nonprofit website, if you look at nonprofit brands, they just aren't. And so we had this idea and this concept that we could take 48, we could take roughly 150 digital professionals that really know their stuff, that really know brands, that really know websites, that really know storytelling online. And we could connect them with nonprofits and enable them to help those nonprofits look better online. And so that was kind of the why we did it. Because it's great to go drive your car for meals on wheels, it's great to go pack lots of food and those are important ways to volunteer for nonprofits. But a lot of people can do those things. Very few people can tell a story online. And so we wanted to get those people concentrated in a room telling website stories. So why give back is the next question. So that's what 48 and 40 years, why give back, right? Why would volunteers spend 48 hours doing this? There's a couple of reasons. Some selfish and others not selfish. The first reason we give back is because we have the ability, we have the weekend, we have the time. Why not dedicate a weekend to give back? There's nothing wrong with that, right? It makes us feel good, it helps people. Can I speak louder? Absolutely, can I speak louder? So we give back, it helps us feel good, it helps the nonprofits, it helps the community that we love and live in, which is a great investment for us. It also connects with other professionals that are in our space, which also makes us better. I can't tell you how many people I've met. At 48 and 48, I've been able to connect with afterwards, that I've been able to learn from, that I've been able to grow with. It's kind of like hanging out here, you come here, you meet people, you connect, you learn, you grow, and you're able to give back together. And that's kind of what we do at Workhead with the WordPress community. That's what we do at 48 and 48 when we're trying to build websites to build things for nonprofits. So we give back to that, and also give back to this is good networking, so ultimately it probably helps your business, so it doesn't hurt to give back. I've found that volunteering in nonprofits doesn't hurt my business, generally speaking. That's not to say that that's the only reason I do it, in fact it's not at all the reason I do it, but it's a nice side note, I'm not going to lie. Try not to do that. And it helps your business to grow, so we're doing that job well. Right? So that's the bottom line. The next question is, how do we build 48 websites in 48 hours? That's what everybody wants to know, how did you do it? So that's an interesting process. It started off with me saying, because listen, Sideways A are digital agencies, we're passionate about custom websites, design, custom build, that's what we do, we do design custom in Photoshop, we build custom things, we build custom plugins, we build custom. And so when we first started on this idea, so hey, let's build 48 custom sites. We'll have this amount of time to design them, this amount of time to develop them, no time to quality assurance, test them at all, and then we'll just ship them out the door, that would be great, right? That's a good idea. And I said now with a couple of people, one in particular in the back of the room, Mr. Cliff Seal, and he said, yeah, that's not good work at all. Completely ignored him and continued on my track, because that's what you do when you get advice, you ignore it, and you continue to do it. And with more conversations, more, no, that's not going to work, you can't do it that way, more ignoring, well, you know, three or four or five, and eventually I came around to a close way of thinking and decided that we needed a platform to build this stuff on, because building it without a platform was a really, really bad idea. So we ended up going with a closed platform, which is based, it's a closed platform based on, basically it's a curated, more crescent environment that has really, really solid themes, really solid plugins that are all vetted, that are all worked together well, and it's perfectly and totally maintained, so that I knew we could build on it, I knew the Codes Rock Solid, I knew that if the nonprofits stayed on their platform, that they would be safe and secure and not hacked, and they would be really, really, really well supported. So that service, in case you didn't know, it's called Evermore, I told them that I was going to promote them heavily during my talk, because I like them, and because their service is amazing. So if you have questions, by the way, after this talk, they're pulled back, and they would be happy to talk to you about their platform, but I will tell you, yeah, just raise your hands, guys, bottom line is, it's a really solid platform, it's stable and secure, and it's very, very hard to mess up, and so, for that reason, Cliff was able to help us spin up 40 websites, that, we were able to get themes on them quickly, they use all the studio of all the best, I should say all the best studio press genesis themes, not all of them, because all of them are up to standard, apparently, some standard, I don't know if it's standard, I'm just saying, and a lot of really, really good plugins, a lot of premium plugins, that Evermore also covers the licenses form, which is nice to be a part of the platform. So I won't beat on that drone too much, but the bottom line is, we need a really, really good platform that we can trust and use. So I know what you're thinking, why not just use ThemeForce? That's what Evermore is thinking, right? Because Evermore loves ThemeForce. Just shake your head. Shake your head inside this little bra. Yeah, right. So the thing about ThemeForce is, they have pretty designs, but it looks pretty design, and scary too. It's just for the novice. Yes, ThemeForce. So ThemeForce is a fun marketplace, where you can go and shop and buy premium themes, and they look spectacular, and they promise to do everything. And the code is scary. So for those of you that are not super into WordPress, just be aware of that, and really bet themes before you go after them. I mean, honestly, I'm kind of dying on ThemeForce, because it's kind of the most common example that we all sort of struggle with, but there's a whole lot of themes out there that are premium themes that are just a little scary. So read your reviews, find out who the theme authors are. Are they any good? Did they get to know more than one theme? Is the theme being used more than 20 times? I mean, like, it's like that with plugins too. Like, I was looking at plugins last week, and I was trying to solve, like, a very specific problem with plugins. And I'm looking through the repo, and I'm like, oh, there's a plugin that'll do it. Oh, good. It has 20 installs. Next. That's terrifying. If there's a plugin with 20 installs, just keep running. Run as fast as you can. You don't want to be an early adopter when it comes to this stuff. I don't think. I don't know. That's just me. It's you. So, yeah. Feather theme, Feather plugins, because the other one, the other thing about a closed system with Evermore, the nice thing about this is it was a closed system, right? So we needed a system where everybody could just go, oh, I have this idea. Let me just go find this plugin, and let me go to this one. And then they add, like, 45 different plugins that don't work well together. And they're all like you and Jake were here, which is lots of fun. And, you know, and then they just break. And it's terror. Sure terror. So, we needed an environment where we could not do that. We had a lot of people now. I don't like locking people down necessarily, but that's the only way to ensure quality is to lock people down. That's what we had to do in this particular situation. So, a couple of other themes on themes. So, while we're kind of on that subject, I'm a big fan of Genesis themes. I think they're really good. I think they're well-coded. I think they're well-maintained and well-supported. There's a lot of documentation around them. I'm also a big fan of elegant themes. So, my business partner in the back did a whole talk on Divi yesterday. We used Divi a lot in our company to build lots of really nice websites for kind of our clients that don't have huge budgets. So, themes are great, but just picking the right ones are important. So, I met those talk to people here. There's a whole time of themes out there that are really solid and great that I know nothing about. So, just because it's not super popular doesn't mean that it's not good. It just means that you have to really pay everyone. Right? So, are you okay? Okay. All right. I know people are like sneaking up to make a creation of that pocket and turn on my mic or something. That would be really popular. Another thing to consider are plugins. So, plugins that we use that were particularly helpful during the process. We're a big fan of Gravity Forms. So, Gravity Forms is a really good forms plugin. Ninja Forms is also a good forms plugin that we kind of always use Gravity Forms. It works really well for us. And it does a whole lot more than just build forms. We can use it to create monthly site instances, users, and all kinds of other crazy stuff, which is really great. I know we're going to plug in modern trends in this calendar pro. So, you need a calendar and some advanced calendar functionality. This calendar pro is really great for nonprofits. Also, design palette pro. I will say this was a caveat. So, design palette pro gives you a lot of really cool ability to customize and make things look good. And for us in this room, that's really great because we can make things look fantastic. The flip side of that is that if your client has the same access, they can make things look fantastic. So, you need to be careful about that because when they have access to that sort of stuff, things get really ugly, really fancy. So, just be aware. I'll look at all of that probably in this one. Okay. Also, the Yoast SEO plugin and pretty much all of the Yoast plugins for SEO are good for analytics. I like these plugins a lot. They work well. You've got the local SEO plugin, you've got the video SEO plugin. I think it's premium. There's a lot of good options for that. Yoast SEO is YOAST, I believe. Yoast SEO plugin is really good. Also, Psychic, it's kind of like a kind of like a digital guide you can sort of say, hey, I want to do this in WordPress. It'll say, okay, click here and then click here and then click here. It's great. Especially for like, when you're training over the site to a novice that really doesn't know anything about WordPress, they can look at it in Psychic and Psychic and guide it step-by-step through the process of how to do what it is they want to do, which is really nice. Another one that's great is Dimpy 101, which are training videos that will also walk them through how to do things. I'm a big fan of handing users tools and saying, here's a whole slew of videos on how to do everything you want to do with WordPress. Go learn. Have fun. That would be great. Dimpy 101. So otherwise, they will call you over and over and over again and they will email you. Dimpy 101 fixes that for you, so I would, I would struggle to recommend that. So I would say, good things, good plugins, closed environment was huge. It's not for takeaways. It never required a few takeaways. We kind of have the same pain points with the nonprofits that at Sideways 8 we tend to have with our clients, which is not too surprising because people are people. Websites or websites and applications are always outrageous. So the first thing that we learned that I wanted to mention through the content is always a monster. It's just the worst part of every project. It always is. It always will be. There's no way around it. I had one client one time that waited for two and a half years to give us content from their website. So I'm not going to tell you what type of company they were. It does make it funnier, but it's worth you can figure out who it was. But all to say, two and a half years is as long as that waited and I wish I could say that only happened once but it happened at least twice. So there you go. Content is always a monster. So what we learned is basically it needs to be all done up front in WordPress. And so for our clients at Sideways 8 we've done that by creating a basically a blank WordPress multi-site install. And it's running like 2010 or 2015 or whatever the most recent one is. And so obviously not 2010 because I clearly don't know how to count. And essentially we build out all pages very quickly for the client. One page is let me say hey client here's the username here's the password here are all the blank pages here's how you edit those pages go put in your content and have fun it'll be glorious. And then go ahead and put in their content and it works out pretty well and give feedback along the way and then we're ready to build the site and just do a little export and a little import and it's all done. It's great. We did not do that for reasons that I still do not understand. I think I was really busy doing other stuff and didn't think really well at some point I think we should do here 40 to 40 I don't know just the two and two together so we didn't do that and content was a big issue because of that we limited content to 10 pages which was a bad idea because then clients didn't need more than 10 pages so we needed 50 pages so now they're calling everywhere and saying hey how do we have more pages and publicize pages all that kind of stuff which was unnecessary we could just have a little bit all to begin with so the big thing about content the big takeaway is have it all down the front and make sure the client can fill all the content over until their hearts content and then lock them in and tell them they can't so again until after the hearts is finished which is what we do this year and it will be new Any questions about the content kind of for Sunday? Because it's kind of I'll take mid talk questions It's a great idea It's fun it works out really well Well when our content are they adding after the site is launched they're adding it to the site now they add it all on a blank WordPress install before they ever even see a desired site and then we take all that right put it into the dev site build the site pretty good pretty good I'll teach them that part I've got training videos specifically for that one thing and that's easy to do it's pretty quick screen capture it's 10 minutes long maybe and good to go I'll say here watch the screen capture here's the login go push your content in That's a great idea because it gets them a little confidence before you act Well we're going to have to load our WordPress anyway might as well do it on the front end or the back end The images are there too images of everything If you don't do that you've got all this like they can't find the Dropbox file they can't in their pictures or somewhere else The other nice thing is you leave comments on on the pages and then you can dialogue about the page and the comments and how it's going to work and you have a nice great record No I stole that idea I want to say it's from Green Mellow I don't think you've credited to Mickey Mellow I'm pretty sure You can thank Mickey Mellow later He's not in here Please You said you do a blank install Is it done on a sub domain or how do you do that? We have a dedicated domain for it for our content lines Okay Yeah So Alright that's content Next Set expectations early and often So I should know this from having worked with clients for eight years or so that you essentially agree with a client that you're going to build a building and they expect you to build a city Right That's always the case It's going to be five pages If you page it later you're having conversations about scope That's the nature of it And it doesn't change just because you're talking about something giving away to a nonprofit nonprofits have the same level of expectations and perhaps higher level of expectations than normal flight students because they get given a lot of stuff I understand that I get why they're that way I've run many nonprofits I've run another profit now I'm just waiting for you to know it's a nonprofit So I get that we don't like to pay for stuff nonprofits don't like to pay for stuff I know that going in But setting expectations and then coming back over and over and over and over and it's critical And it's critical too to come back not only the expectations in in terms of saying it but how you communicate it So make sure you email them letting them know what the expectations are Make sure you verbally communicate it letting them know what the expectations are And over and over and over and when this project is complete you will have a website it will have 25 pages it will have these plugins it will have support for X amount of time and then you're good to go You need to say that people tend to hear only what they want to hear surprisingly yes amazing isn't it they always hear what they want to hear and so we have to constantly and continuously reiterate to our clients what it is we're doing what it is we've agreed to why we're doing what we're doing and how we're doing what we're doing So for 48 and 48 that's a huge thing What about setting up some sort of formal contract or you know when they redundantly push the envelope say here what do you think Absolutely So having a statement of work for things like this is critical the problem with the statement of work is that they still only hear what they want to hear and so you've got to still come back over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over And so then they're like, oh, we need this, you know, we need this, you know, we need this, you know, we need this, you know, we need this, you know. You know, and to, you know, everyone's really taking more of a front of that than, actually, the full run, than the full run, the entire run of that from my mistake on that. So the thing is, is you have to walk in there early and you have to read right off of them. There can't be a given take, but otherwise, it just spins out of control. But one thing I found is they wanted, they needed so many things, like, they never should be e-commerce. You know, they need more than the usual small business, by the way. So, then Evermore had all of that. All of it all today. Plug in, plug in, plug in. Yeah, in fact, we, we got, it was pretty interesting, so we got a group of plug-in developers together before the event. I think they were like, how many plug-ins that we should write before an uproar during the event? Because if there's like some hardcore developers here, they just, you know, they want to be able to put in writes and code, and it was basically going to go down to the plug-in that Evermore had and just figure out ways to do it without writing it, you know. So, okay, I wrote that well. I mean, may not if they wanted to write code, but it worked out well for me for providing good solutions for the uproar. So, and then, the, the last big takeaway was planning the path, replan and re-iterate. Right? So, I mean, planning the path to that uproar, make sure you have the details uproar, make sure you've got really solid discovery, you understand the needs of the client. That's what we definitely need to do. It's hard to do that at scale for 48 hundred profits, but it's absolutely essential because there has to be a solid plan for what their website needs to be. You just can't fly by the seat of our pants. I mean, it's like Judy said, we need members of some of them. We need private pages or some kind of super simplified members of some of them. We need donations, but they need donations to five different kinds of gateway, not just one. Now, the profits generally aren't going to strike the process, they're donations. You know, like they just, just all kinds of stuff. And we really have to understand their needs, make a plan for their needs. And then, as we move forward, we've got to be going to re-iterate that plan. It's locked in as you can, like I said, up front, and then you have to figure out the nuances of it as you go through it. It's really, really well-planned. So, moving forward, the way we do that before 48 hundred will be having solid project managers that are working with the nonprofits very early in the process. We start the process much earlier than we did last time and be sure that there's solid time for discovery, for exploration, explanation, and really locking in everything that they need so that in the day we can say to each of the 48 nonprofits, okay, you need a website, and that's 45 pages. It's going to have calendars, it's going to have memberships, it's going to have payments given to this gateway for this purpose, it's going to have a call to action for this, these types of donations, you know, and just some really good solid list of things that they need so that when it comes time to build the sites in 48 hours, you know what we can do. So that's the big thing there. The bottom line as far as what I kind of took away from the whole thing is that WordPress is an amazing platform for building really cool stuff I mean, 10 years ago who would have thought you could build 48 websites in 48 hours? I mean, 5 years ago who would have thought you could build 40 websites in 48 hours? You could do it 2 years ago, but we did it 1 year ago so you know, like it's a great platform, it's a great foundation and it does a lot more and it's a lot more capable than what I think we give it credit for, right? I mean, the fact that Evermore was able to come up with this closed system and say, oh, you need 50 sites? Okay, give me 10 minutes and I'll give you 50 sites or maybe we're even... How long does it take to create 50 sites for it? You know, on Evermore? Uh, 30 seconds? 30 seconds, I'm sorry. You can put 30 seconds and you can have 50 sites for it, I mean, then we'll all be in the same location here, we've got to build them out and make them pretty, but nonetheless 50 sites, so in 30 seconds that's the power of work, that's fantastic. And Any questions? I've no idea, I'll do it a little time I'll look, 30 minutes, right on the down. How did you select your non-profit? Great questions, so non-profits signed up on our website and gave pretty detailed amount of information. There were just a handful of criteria that essentially filtered out non-profits so ideally, this was not sure for all of them, ideally one of them had one full-time employee, that was for the purpose of making sure they were non-profits that were moving the ball forward, for non-profit but they don't have a full-time employee, sometimes it's kind of a part-time sort of hobby so we wanted to make sure that we did do several websites for non-profits that did not have a full-time employee but that was sort of one of the criteria. Secondly, we asked that they had committed some funds for after the event, for getting access for any of those types of things. Thirdly, they could not be religious or political in nature so a suit kitchen based out of church was fine because they're serving food but more than church, synagogue, mosque, websites okay, because that would be super awkward for somebody. And they were politically the same thing, you know so I got to have somebody move the whole site for a politician they don't agree with, that's super awkward so after that they met those criteria, they submitted everything we had a team that made sure they were 511c3 actual non-profits and kind of vet them a little further and then that team made selections basically just looking for both of those non-profits that served the metro line area so they did have to serve the metro line area they did not have to be headquartered necessarily in metro line I had to serve metro line up and that team came up with a list of 48 we did have a couple of them drop last minute because they're a pretty rigorous process of getting us content filling out all kinds of really in-depth questionnaires so we had each non-profit fill out an in-depth branding questionnaires so we really understood who they were where we based, it was glorious we basically asked them the same question over and over again which is what branding is and you said hey what do you do, give me a page and then they gave you a page and you said hey what do you do, give me a half a page and you give me half a page and hey what do you do about the time they get down to five more years you know what they do, it's glorious so it's a little more in-depth than that we had them do a website design questionnaire as well and then we had to do all kinds of content in the world so this is like 8 to 15 hours of work on their part this is something that I'm probably just going to handle that for the name of it we're about a couple minutes more you're moving to the right things this year, will that replace the questionnaire? no we're going to have to have the questionnaire but to do really a full discovery and a full brand analysis and there's no profit there were three steps one step was brand analysis and discovery second step was website analysis and discovery third step was hey put more content in this way we're changing the third step for that yeah that was the idea but it's flexible it's not a hard and fast rule it's a desire there were about I want to say there were five to seven that did not have a full-time employee that got in yes two questions could you re-post your content info up there sure and second of all was it just the two of you doing all of this or was it like did you have 48 developers I'm sorry I should have been more clear about that we had a huge we had a huge team of people if you were there at 40 and 40 raise your hand so this is some of the team there were a lot of people there I should have made that super clear I meant to really upset that we put out the call to developers, designers WordPress people originally we were thinking we needed a lot of developers until I finally listened to Cliff and then I realized we needed digital marketers more so so we moved our thinking and started shifting that direction I think we had about 150 volunteers over the course of the weekend from all over the place I mean we had a bunch of volunteers from large agencies like Moxie we had a bunch of volunteers that just worked for themselves we had one volunteer who was hilarious not hilarious was great so he lived across the street we had the event at Punt City Market in General Assembly which is a fantastic space and this guy lived across the street it was Saturday night he was watching the news and the news did like a 10 second, 15 second blurb Punt City Market tonight building 40 websites for 48 nonprofits in 48 hours and that was it it was like this little 10, 15 second blurb and this guy heard about it came across the street, found us and volunteered for the next 15 hours helping us build websites and he was a rock star it was fantastic he knew WordPress he was like some CTO of some commerce company so it was amazing for me it was great because we walked in and you had all those things on the wall that you could pick and nobody knew anybody and he knew people but we just put the name down and then you got this crew who was watching the reality TV show you got a crew of people like you got a great designer I'd never laid eyes on before a fantastic programmer who knew WordPress so the three of us were just like it was fantastic there were some really neat connections that happened through the event just like what Judy said and having people there that knew WordPress combined with people there that didn't know WordPress really was kind of a cool and unique thing as well I went out to talk to him about something he was running out of point I needed to be able to get into the code I had to choose navigation it's in the wrong place it's a menu and primary menu oh ok that's great I'm forgetting I have already answered this but I've looked at everything before cost is prohibitive so for the not that you get a different price because of this we helped offset some of the upfront cost with them so we helped some of the non-profits set up whatever you know what I'm trying to say and Evermore they're a sponsor so they work for the sum too I guess in a sense but ultimately they gave away 6 months free to the non-profits and then the non-profits at that point pay monthly just like an Evermore customer should and that was known to the non-profits up front we were actually really clear like hey look you don't have to stay on Evermore because we weren't going to lock them in actually Evermore doesn't lock anybody in anyway which is actually one of the beauties of their service they're closed super safe environment and then if the client outgrows it you just ask for their files they give you the files and they can go somewhere else and so the non-profits were locked in but they were strongly advised to stay because I mean if they go to some other cheap posting they're just going to get hacked so yeah I mean really when you think about it it's 50 bucks so many of the non-profits come back to me after they've been hacked and they're willing to have somebody to be their technical person give them a little extra care along the way with Evermore they need somebody yeah a maintained platform is going to be cheaper in the long run like 50 bucks a month sounds like a ton I get it but after the site's hacked you have to pay somebody to unhack the site and then I mean there's all kinds of problems that flow from that I mean you're always going to end up paying for so I mean to me it's having a platform start with a... I mean it doesn't have to be Evermore, I like Evermore a lot of a big fan you can tell but I mean there's lots of good platforms out there that are worth paying for all I'm trying to say I just mean if if you go up there and find the absolute dirt cheapest hosting and put WordPress on it and don't update it because they never do they have a lot of viruses I mean I guess what I'm getting at is if you're using WordPress use good WordPress focused hosting I think most of the hosting companies here I would never speak against a sponsor so I think most of the hosting companies here that I'm aware of have that option it's a good option yes so oh for sure yeah I mean wait until the nonprofits know about lots of things or I mean in general oh yeah you might have to ask April because I think they had a lot of requests after the event so April can probably tell you some fun stories afterwards better than I could I mean we facilitated the event and we sort of handed it off to Evermore knowing that they have amazing support and so the clients have been the nonprofits I should say have been well taken care of but I think that means they get more funny and horror stories than I do so yes I didn't think about doing that good grief I don't know I mean it would take me too far there are several really good after-sites but I don't have them before I'll have to I'll try to yeah well I've got screenshots I'll try to post something on Twitter later today and I'll tag WCATL and put a picture up they were awful basically yeah made them re-put it in there yeah because it's my experience from Sideways 8 and from 4048 that anytime you say to a client like hey you have this whole website just get 20 pages are you going to use that content for your new site they go oh yeah we're going to use some of it but then we're going to write new stuff they're not going to write they just want to write new stuff but they're not going to they're just going to pretend they're going to and think about it and then they're going to get writer's block and you know then they're not going to do it so yeah everybody always says they want to write new content they never actually do it they just say they want to yes besides content being of actually designing where things are placed how they are the U.S. the aesthetic is also key oh yeah but you're in a time crunch how much did you do any like pre-prepped to decide okay this is how we're going to do it or we just handed it to somebody and said okay this is the content you know so great question the question was essentially how did we make sure it was good design right how did we want to make sure it told the story well so we designed the design and branding questionnaires and website design questionnaires in such a way that it sort of fleshed out what the story was that they were actually trying to tell so the first step that each of our teams did or was supposed to do anyway was to go through those documents in great detail and then have a conversation with the non-profit so typically a 30-minute conversation with the non-profit to ask their fine questions and really understand what their needs were and then come up with a strategy based on that and begin building the page now then we had several people that were following up on that after the fact and saying kind of looking at the sites and going okay this is pretty good and we see how this is telling the story but have you thought of this and let's do this and let's do this and there were I mean a handful of sites that just needed some extra touch up work before the clock started ticking there was a lot of information gathering before the clock started ticking the actual dissemination of that information and creating strategy happened at 4848 itself now we'll probably do a little bit more of that pre-work this time around we'll see, yeah I don't know, I haven't thought about that, if you have some ideas I'd love to hear them talk afterwards, great yes how did you know more about how you found the sponsors and where their sponsors should have been right, how did we find the sponsors so one of the nice things about partnering with somebody that knows everybody in Metro Atlanta is that he went and got sponsors and I didn't have to worry about it so I mean essentially we just called a lot of people that we knew well I mean around town and asked for help we got a lot of sponsors a lot of in kind donations so that was a big part of it so like people brought out their gaming center that nobody at the event used which was I thought odd I mean it was like for free video games take a break play some video games and nobody played but like my eight year old he was all about it when he came to visit so that was cool you know we got a lot of product sponsored moes Jeff had a contact at moes they catered this just this meal that was so enormous like you wouldn't believe it like I think we took more than half of the meal and actually ended up donating it to another nonprofit in the city that feeds a lot of people and they were just so overwhelmed to have what was left from that meal it was amazing so I think twitter did some cool stuff they bought breakfast all over volunteers and gave us a tour around their facility I mean so essentially we just called and asked a whole lot of people and it's such a interesting thing is you can always get more sponsors for crazy ideas right so I mean if you say like hey I want to you know this thing and it's sort of been done and it's a great cause but it's been done then sponsors are a little more reluctant I think when you just say like hey I want to build 48 websites in a weekend they're like oh we want to sponsor that for sure I don't know it's weird so we just asked a ton of people and got a lot of support and we're continuing a lot of support as we move into this year so this year moving forward just everybody knows we're going to do another 48-48 here in Atlanta in the fall but it's going to be in October you can sign up to get on our mailing list at 4848.com make sure it's back up on the screen we're also going to go to New York and doing a bit there and then moving into 2017 we're going to try to go into some more cities so if anybody has any contacts in New York I'd love to get to know them we're looking for connections with sponsors agencies, work press professionals in New York City and then obviously we're going to need a lot of help here as well so we'd love to have anybody there Yes Have you met the designers at all or how did you find them I would love to say that we did I would also love to say that we've met developers but there was no good way to do it we're working with some ideas on that this time around we had a team of people that were sort of saving the day in certain aspects Brett was on that team I believe you can wave your hand there Brett yeah Brett and I think Cliff saved quite a few things and I know Judy saved quite a few and I think there's probably a few more people in the room that did as well we decided to have a lot of follow up and a lot of interaction among different teams because it became pretty obvious as everything went forward which teams were struggling more than others and we were obviously also reviewing the staging sites real time so it was pretty obvious to me and I was highlighting the ones that needed some additional assistance from a design perspective and the ones that did not now the bigger problem really was vetting like some of the CSS that got written because there was some CSS that got written during the event and while it was good on desktop it was not always good responsibly and that caused trouble down the road so we're going to be figuring out how to not run into that issue it was written in like some CSS editor plugins or things like that and probably some in line too I would say oh yeah good you can ask April that she would know better than I would we did not do a good job of getting good analytics data beforehand because I just missed it completely so I think we have some data on some improvement that's happened and some more interaction that's happened but not the data that we should so the next two events we'll be making sure we have really solid data up front and afterwards and we'll make sure we have a more smooth process for getting the sites live much more quickly good question there have been several and we need to showcase them in like some videos and stuff so that's a really good idea what about using bootstrap bootstrap for your mobile for the CSS so I think well we use genesis theme I think Evermore primarily has genesis themes and it's built on is it built on bootstrap? what are genesis themes built on? they're on the CSS so the themes themselves were mobile responsive to begin with but the problem was the CSS that was written to override the theme CSS was not always any other questions? your giveaways were effective I should mention the giveaways so we gave away devices of all kinds every 3 hours every 4 hours every 4 hours 24-7 for the whole 48 hours so it was great because it kept people engaged the whole time and kept at least some of them on site so we had Samsung phones Samsung tablets Chromebooks I want to say something else we had one thing that was like a hybrid smartphone point and shoot camera it was like the weirdest thing ever it was amazing it was really fun every 4 hours we'd gather in we'd grab a raffle ticket and we'd wrap up these items and it was a blast was any of them non-partisan site like you were doing? no they were not we were concerned if they were on site that we would never finish the project I really wanted them to be on site because I wanted that level of collaboration but it just wouldn't happen so I yeah a few of them showed up on analysis which is great we did have them on the phones so there weren't collaborations right but it was if they were looking over the team's shoulder it would have been bad I'd like to find a way to loop them even more into the actual event itself I don't know if there is a way yet I don't think there is like a live feed they're like in an off-site room it's a live feed of a bunch of people doing this so it was great yeah yes yes so 48 we've incorporated we are a 501c3 non-profit yeah I said that right and with the purpose of helping other non-profits that's our goal so we want to help other non-profits essentially with their marketing digital marketing needs so far we've got a board and an executive director and that's it so whether or not we expand beyond then I'm going to support my vision no not yet I haven't thought about that but that's a good idea that's a board and an executive director who's fantastic and not me so that's great alright is that it? alright well thanks for listening