Episode 7: What's Old is New Again | Chad Heinle & Joel Baglien, High Monkey

In this episode of the Discussing Stupid podcast, the first in 2019, host Virgil Carroll and Principal Solutions Architect at High Monkey, has a conversation with Chad Heinle and Joel Baglien about how technology has changed due to people’s needs changing and how certain technology has been recycled to reflect a market that’s now ready to utilize it. Chad Heinle and Joel Baglien are both VPs at High Monkey. Chad heads the production team and Joel, co-founder of High Monkey with Virgil, heads the sales and marketing team. Both Chad and Joel briefly discuss how they became interested in web work and got to where they are now in their careers.

Virgil starts the discussion by highlighting the developments and changes in web design. While previously a web developer was essential to program and put together a website, today with advanced CMSs almost anyone can build a website and almost everyone does. Chad voices his concern of a current issue that was not present before – now people who are not well versed in web development have tools at their disposal to create websites; however, many of these non-developers tend to make subpar websites. Chad believes, however, that people are coming to realize that for the sake of efficiency and ease of use, more consideration is going into who makes a website. Virgil also shares his take on user-friendly website development and its correlation with technology growth. Joel brings to light the fact though many years have passed; yet for many organizations, institutions, and companies, their websites are still inaccessible to certain site visitors. Joel suggests that this can be rectified with proper design, development, and content role allocation. With the recent push for more simplistic, accessible sites the need for knowledgeable web developers and programmers has returned. 

This trend has also changed things in the domain of search engine design. Search engines have become better at finding and displaying information. However, if a user is drowned in information and is not able to quickly find the information he needs, he will most likely not use the search engine or the website that he happens to be on again. There’s the simple truth that some companies and messages resonate with visitors and potential customers, while others don’t. In order for your message to resonate, you need to be efficient. One should also aim to use the platforms that fit your company, message, and brand – for instance, don’t focus on Twitter if you are a visually oriented company. 

Another trend that contributed to the recent strive towards simplicity is that the everyday activities of people have become digital. This digital-centeredness can be overwhelming and socially stressful for some people with having to deal with different media sources, information, platforms, and passwords on a daily basis. Hence, the desire to have more simplified search capability and user-ability, since having to navigate the daily digital landscape is complicated already. The difference between today and a decade ago is that things that are done now need to have a purpose – rarely are elements on websites there just to have them there (Macromedia/Adobe Flash anyone?). 

Developments in various markets and niches are cyclical, as can be attested by the recent renaissance of the muscle car. The recent trend towards simplicity might develop towards complexity when it has run its course. Virgil, Chad, and Joel’s advice to you is that it pays to follow trend developments and not forget that things happening now, probably happened before at one point in time in the past.

Buzz words for this episode: digital workplace

LINKS

https://www.highmonkey.com/

https://contentstrategyalliance.com/resources/csa-handbook/

Transcript

Announcer: 0:00

Note. This podcast does not discuss nor endorse the idea of discussing stupid ideas because we all know there are no stupid ideas. Hello, and welcome to discussing stupid. The podcast where we will tackle everything digitally stupid from stupid users and the crazy things they do to stupid practices and the people who use them. We'll explore the stupid things we all do and maybe even come up with a few ideas on how to do things better. And now that I got your attention, let's start discussing stupid.

Virgil: 0:41

Hello, and welcome to the broadcast of the podcast. This is Virgil Carroll, your host and principal human solutions architect at HiMonkey. Well, I guess the easiest way is to say this sometimes life gets in the way, but it's been a little bit since I've had my last broadcast. There's a lot of things that happen, but probably one of the biggest things is being a single dad. Sometimes, like I said, just life gets in the way. But I'm really happy to be back and continuing on for the new year. I think, got a good lineup of guests and topics that I wanna talk about here coming up. And really gonna kick it off the new year by kinda was chatting the other day with some guys in my office, and we were talking about how funny it is that after doing this for over 20 years and seeing how technology has changed, but people's needs and the things that we look at really haven't. It's kind of felt like, to us, especially over the last year, a lot of things are very much recycling from things that we thought were important a really long time ago, but maybe the world wasn't quite ready to what we kinda see as important today. So I asked Chad Heinle and Joel Baglin, 2 gentlemen that have been with me for a really long time, to kinda kick off the new year by having a conversation about what old is is kinda new again and talking about some of the things that we're seeing that really we've seen before, but how it applies to today. So hope you enjoy it. And here, take a listen. Alright. Well, welcome to the program, guys. Obviously, we all know one another. But since all of my listeners don't really know you guys, why don't you introduce yourselves? Tell a little bit about who you are and kinda how you came to this world.

Joel: 2:24

Yeah. I'll start. This is Joel Baglin. I head up the sales and marketing side of things at HiMonkey. Cofounded the company with Virgil ages ago, and I actually came to the web world through the business side and worked my way into the early days of the web in 94, 95, trying to figure out a business model for it in the corporate world and eventually migrated into consulting and joined forces with Virgil in 2001, and we've been going strong ever since.

Chad: 2:53

Yeah. My name's Chad Heinle. I head up the, production crew at HighMonkey. Been working here for about 12 years now. And my path then kinda started off almost hobby wise in my teens, and then to college, just doing my own thing on the web, and then kinda getting that translated into a career.

Virgil: 3:15

Great. Well, I appreciate you guys both joining me. Like I said, I thought it'd be kind of fun here kicking off 2019. And, of course, Chad, you and I especially have talked a lot about this, how we're kinda having a laugh because we feel like the world thinks it's always changing and it never really is. And that's the same with technology, albeit, you know, technology itself is changing and things are getting more innovative. But we kind of keep seeing these patterns that kind of cycle over and over and over again constantly. And I think one of the ones that you and I have kind of discussed the most and thought the most about is about development. And we started back in early in the days of web and intranets and all that kind of stuff, and everything was program based. You you had to be a programmer, you had to be a developer, you had to be somebody who's very sophisticated in that stuff to be able to build something that had any level of anything in it. And then we kinda moved to these tools, and these tools started being able to take it over. They would build the pieces. You could get marketers or internal communication people, whoever it might be, and they could actually do something with those tools versus having to go to developers. Well, now we're kind of at the other side where actually a lot of that world is actually going back to saying, well, let's get in developers involved a lot. And I know you've been dealing a lot with this in projects, but why don't you talk a little bit about how you've seen that side?

Chad: 4:39

Well, I guess, in the 12 years with HighMonkey and even a bit before that, I was really entering this world on the tail end of that developer oriented approach to sites. We're just kinda seeing a lot of the CMSs take off. I know we were working with very early versions of KentCo and Sitecore back then. So we were still in this mode where if you wanted to be on the web, you probably had to have something coded to HTML. And there were tools to help with that, but it was really still much developer world. But then all these tools came in, and anybody there could point and click a mouse could now build a website. And I think that led to, in my mind, a great advent of being able to expand the web, but at the same time, kinda letting anybody do it to be maybe a little more blunt than I should be, kind of led to some really awful websites. Because there was no planning around them. They did what they wanted to do without any thought behind it, and it it was really just focused on their own opinions without any background backing up that with data. During that time, and like you said, we're really coming back around to the other end again. I think people are getting that same thing where they realize that giving certain people control of what goes out should be limited, and it should be limited to those that can make it the best experience possible. Now that might not always be the programmer, but, certainly, having that information, that background for efficiency, for ease of use, kind of falls more in that developer and agency approach. We build in our own projects. We build in accessibility, and we have all this backlog of experience. So having that background and that knowledge, I think, helps to put these forward in the best foot forward, I suppose. And then just leaving the editors, leaving content managers to do content and not have to worry about actually assembling pages and writing up code or picking out what should go where and making it a more consistent experience as well.

Virgil: 7:00

Yeah. Well, first, Ed, I have to pick on you because we're supposed to call that organic growth so that we don't actually pick that. We call it I mean, lord knows, Joel. How many times have you and I been at meetings such as I was gonna say where the first thing you say is our site's grown organically in that, which be

Joel: 7:18

Which basically means it's a cluster

Virgil: 7:20

and it's out of control. Totally. Nobody's had any control, not been doing anything. They really never put anything in it, which I agree with you, Chad. I think I, of course, being the person that has really liked the tools because I'm a firm believer from kind of the user experience side of being able to enable the end user, you know, the business user to be able to do something. I did kinda have that epiphany moment where I kinda understood, well, here's the problem is, 1, technology changes so damn fast these days that it's really hard for organizations to keep up with. So they might have a part of their website that they're like, oh, man. We could really take advantage of this new tech or this new way of doing something, this new model of doing something. But with the tools that did all the work for you, a lot of times that meant waiting until that system was up to date and then waiting until you could upgrade and doing all the changes and have to do this mass change, where this whole model is. Well, instead, if you have more of a developer centric site, now you can just take that one little piece and kind of make the modifications of that piece and do something like that on that side. The other piece that I think kind of fits into that is just the whole process of allowing people to work just a little bit differently in unique situations because, you know, obviously, we've been a big proponent of getting companies and organizations to have some consistent practices around what they do. But where maybe 5, 10 years ago, we really saw this as a really succinct process. Now we've kind of brought it to practices where we're saying, well, the reality is here's the good practice of doing something. There isn't always that need to follow an exact process around getting there. And Joel, you know, you and I have conversations with people all the time that that's kind of what they're trying to do, especially when you start going into that higher ed and that government agency side is they're trying to get everybody to follow a specific process. And the reality is they just have too many cooks and not a big enough kitchen.

Joel: 9:24

Yeah. And actually kind of on a tangent to what Chad was saying too, it comes down to there's a trend. So what's old is new again? There's a trend to go for more simplified types of sites and including that ability to have the consistent practices, but have content be consistent, the placement of it, and really looking at it as, hey. How do we distill this down so that it's the absolute essentials of what people need? And related to that, that kinda gets to that point of accessibility, which for those people listening that haven't been paying attention, especially in 2018, there was one particular person in New York that filed lawsuits against 50 higher education institutions yet to be determined if he's gonna win. This individual is blind. And the reason he filed them is because, hey, it's been 30 years roughly since the ADA was passed. All of these higher education institutions have been on notice that they need to be more accessible and more compliant, and a lot of them haven't done anything. So it's kind of this this has been around for a long time. People wake up. Now, lawsuits, unfortunately, are the things that are getting their attention. But it's not just colleges because, like, I think there's Peet's Coffee, Aldi. I'm trying to remember there was one other one that was referenced in this particular article that have also been sued for being non accessible, which gets to that point of simplification, not just in the way it's developed in the code base, but also the overall architecture, look and feel, the design of the site, the use of colors, all of those things that get to that point of simplifying it and putting the content in the control of people who write content, but don't give those content people ability to change the look, the feel, the design, and some of those other things that start to violate ADA best practices.

Virgil: 11:19

Yeah. You know, it's a good point because, I mean, of course, Beyonce is getting sued. And I mean, if somebody of that level is getting sued, obviously, it's becoming important. But to us, since we've done so much government and higher ed work, I mean, this has been an important thing to us for a very long time. But part of that is, again, being able to give people more individual control over things. And sometimes you have areas of a site or an intranet or whatever it might be that are frequently visited and pieces that are not so much. So there may be you have to prioritize kind of where you're putting your effort. But it is kind of ironic that nobody's really been caring as much except for those that considered themselves legally mandated. But you're right. We're seeing a huge uptick in this from that side that is gonna become very significant.

Chad: 12:07

When I think here too, this is a really good example of why I think we're kinda switching back to this developer model of sites. In that, it's kind of this division of labor, making it more clear who should be handling what on-site development, who should be handling design, who should be handling the development and the actual assembly of the site, who should be handling QA, who should be handling the content. Accessibility is in there. I think it's getting more clear with companies who's actually responsible for that instead of having these platforms of these methods where one small group or one group could do so many different things. Now it's kinda getting divvied up.

Virgil: 12:56

Well, and we also had that moment where we thought that really the main most important thing was to make sure the contact contributors could do what they want. And over a long period of time, we've kinda figured out that's a really bad idea and that we need to have a lot of controls over them. So it is kind of ironic because this probably entails, you know, if you think the last 3 to 5 years worth of projects we've done, you probably could look at them and say, a fair number of them, we've kind of added controls on top of CMSs to lock down certain things from people being able to do or adding monitoring tools or whatever like that. But that's actually a really good point of why when you have that bigger separation of marketing and the development side, it adds a lot of benefit. But I think we also have the flip side where that also is going to continue to cause a problem that we're very familiar with, that a lot of organizations face, which is, 1, their need then to have somebody internally to develop, or on the flip side, whatever consulting company they bring into feel like they're married to them for the next 20 years. Or 2, there's the risk that it's gonna greatly slow them down because they won't have those resources. Therefore, they may have requests, but those requests will go into the queue and the queue will be 10, 16, 24 months long in that side. And so I think we've got that other piece which is going to be how organizations are able to adapt and be able to do more with this.

Chad: 14:28

Yeah. I'm very interested to see here in the future if we don't see more of these site builder sites. That's a bit of a tongue twister there. But stuff like Wix, handling smaller sites, smaller groups with something some platforms more like that instead of these larger CMS platforms that are, like you said, going more towards that developer model.

Virgil: 14:54

Yeah. That's an interesting thing I'd Go ahead.

Joel: 14:56

Another thing I'd like to add to this too is the old is new again. If you look back 20 years ago or even 25 years ago, if an organization had more than one URL, it would be unusual. But if you had entities that maybe had multiple products or had all these different sites, you typically saw a more centralized form of control around the consistency of the layout, the formatting, the you know, how content was delivered, all those types of things, or at least there was consistency of control of how the sites were developed. And what happened then, kind of to your semi joking point about organic growth and using that in the best possible light, what happened is a lot of organizations just basically said, oh, here we go. These tools are simple to use. Go ahead and build all these sites. There's no problem at all. And you end up with, I'll just mention, a large university that we know of locally here that has, I think, 245 websites that I can guarantee a lot of them are not consistent from any standpoint to the main site, the main campus' site. So that's the sort of thing that's happened gradually and organically, and now I think what we're starting to see is more of a trend toward Chad, we've worked with this one of the county governments that basically has said, you know what? We're gonna have the process for how sites are built centralized. We're gonna give people independence as far as content and being able to manage it, but all the sites are gonna follow a similar template. They're gonna be accessible. They're gonna have a common layout and format. So there's this centralized control coming back into play, at least for organizations that realize that you can't have organic and still manage sites in an intelligent way.

Virgil: 16:40

Yeah. You know, it's actually ironic that you bring that up, Joel, because that kinda segues well into there when you talk about an organization with too many sites and too many things going on. Because, again, another obvious piece is if we look almost 20 years ago I mean, of course, I've been doing this for 20 years, but you and I have been together for, what, 18, 19, and 17 of that, something like that. But we look back to there, and one of the key problems that organizations had was they had let all these things get out of control and they had kind of went crazy and they decided to put up every piece of information ever about their organization online, and nobody could really go through. Nobody was doing information architecture. Nobody was doing any of these practices. So we had this other piece, which I think has come back into vogue or been more popular lately, or at least we hear a lot more about it. We see a lot more about it. And that's search. And it's kind of ironic we say that because people use search pretty much every day, not their organizational search probably or not a public website search, but they use Google and Bing and all those different search engines. So maybe some people will be stopping using Bing right now. But from that side, search has really come back on there and that is a lot of what's happening. As a matter of fact, it's a topic of kind of a future discussion that I'm gonna have next month with a friend that talking about how do we bring the cohesiveness of all these disjointed pieces. And even in an organization that only has a website and maybe doesn't have a ton of content, they're still developing and distributing a lot of content in other channels, whether it's Instagram or Facebook or Twitter or all these other mediums in here. And their customers are really looking for, how can I get to all this information there? And so that's definitely something we're seeing a lot more now too, is we're seeing organizations saying, oh my god. We can't just use these out of the box CMS search engines. We actually gotta do some search and have some planning around it to be able to get people to what they need to get to.

Chad: 18:40

It's funny that we bring up search because it's I mean, it's always been present, but I think there was a time there too where the focus was taken off of search, and the focus was put on you have to make everything available within a couple clicks. If you're on the home page, you click once on a category and then once on a subcategory, and then you're there. Instead of organizing the content, how it most logically made sense and even if you had to go deeper into a site, which is what search provides, it provides that path to get there. You still need that architecture, obviously, so people that don't search or that don't know what they're searching for can find information. But being able to use search as a navigation tool is certainly very helpful in my mind and something, certainly, that we're coming to see more and more of.

Joel: 19:36

Yeah. And, Chad, to your point too, and hopefully, we'll never see it come back, is that organic growth of the homepage with 500 links on it, which was something that was very common.

Chad: 19:47

Yeah. That's yeah.

Joel: 19:49

Oh, god. Yeah. And it was horrible. But then again, people were thinking, oh, well, we'll make everything available. And they had no governance and no plan for figuring out what mattered or what was important. So you'd have these lists of links, and no one could find anything. What a shock.

Virgil: 20:03

Yeah. Well and I think another thing that we're starting to learn a lot from, and this is kind of that other side of it, is that the Internet kinda went to this trend of plain and simple in that, which is great from a consumption perspective. So if I'm walking through a site, it's not great to always get to pages that have a ton of content that I have to read through and have to really digest, but be able to have short little bullet points and that kind of stuff. But on the flip side, that's made the world of search a lot worse, and a lot of organizations don't understand why they're not getting higher up in the search engines of Google and all those kind of things. But the reality is they are. It's exactly what you said, Chad. The structure, the content, all play into how good a search is. You can't just turn on a search engine and it works. You have to put some type of effort around that. And I think that's part of what we're seeing too now is that organizations are trying to figure out, well, how can they find that balance of content so that they're both feeding some rich information to search, but then also at the same time not overwhelming their users.

Chad: 21:06

Yeah. And then top of that too, I think search is expanding. I mean, when you talked about search 12 years ago, you were talking about searching a site. And now we're talking a lot more about enterprise search, a way to expand that search so it's not just focused on one area of content where you have multiple searches focusing on separate areas, but really kinda consolidating everything. So, again, that structure is important for the results and for people that are just gonna look, but the search itself is just becoming more prolific in being able to surface information just a lot faster as well.

Virgil: 21:49

Yeah. And I think it's good to point out that I'm sure if there's a marketer listening right now, it's like, I don't care about enterprise search. But it's like I said before, enterprise search is not necessarily just mean internal systems, which is kinda where that phrase kinda goes to, albeit that's getting to be a bigger piece. It's about all these different systems that you use to be able to tell your story to your end customer as well, and how people can kinda peruse through those and actually figure out and find information. And one of the things we're seeing more and more, and and I've read a lot about, is how much organizations as they're using more social media channels to publish their content, they're actually missing out on the fact that most people don't search Twitter, and most people don't search Facebook and that kind of stuff for content. They search your website, and they search the Internet for that information. And there's just not this overall roundabout practice that is good enough that people kind of understand. And that's why probably even though I still kind of hate the phrase multichannel or omnichannel, It's probably where that's really supposed to be as it's supposed to be you have a source of the truth, but you can share that source of the truth in a lot of different ways. And I think that it's not only from an internal standpoint, but also from kind of an external customer facing standpoint that organizations are really starting to struggle with this. And this is where search technology has improved so much that it can really bring about that ability to bring that all together and do that. I mean, you know, just recently one of our customers, they have their internal systems and then they have these knowledge bases that are hosted somewhere else. Well, being able to bring that all into a cohesive search can make a big difference. The same as on the flip side, if you search everything and you crawl everything, you know, the reality is it's gonna be a lot harder for people to get there. So you have to find that balance, but overall, I think search is really kinda moving in that direction of, again, being a premier part of an organization's kinda digital strategy. Again, whether it's internal or external, they've gotta be thinking about this because they're just aggregating too much content, and nobody has a really solid way to find it once it's there.

Chad: 24:09

Well, you know, I I think too the technology is being evolved to the point where before, we were talking about divisional labor and people in charge of content should be in charge of content. So I think, historically, search has been something that more of the technical side of a company or group has been in charge of. And now we're seeing, like I said, that technology is swing back to where it's being more accessible for a marketing group to manage their search, to see what their search results are, being able to control them, and kinda shape them to put their content forward that's driven by their analytics and their customers are actually looking for.

Virgil: 24:59

Yeah. I think that's where things are going now and not. So and, you know, speaking analytics, I mean, when you start talking down that path, I mean, that's a whole rabbit hole. I was actually gonna start making jokes about artificial intelligence and how that's the new search silver bullet. But I, you know, I think I'm gonna let that stray on another topic.

Chad: 25:18

But

Joel: 25:18

Yeah. And Virgil, let me kinda interject here too on the analytics side because something that I've observed, it seems like and maybe this is more difficult for me to even quantify, but it feels like or seems like a lot of the challenges that people face on the marketing side these days are around justification of some of the different platforms like social media in particular and finding analytics that actually make sense to justify the effort, the expense, all of the time and commitment that are made for those. And, again, in the theme of this podcast where the old is new again or whatever, What a lot of people may not realize is back in the late nineties before the whole web crash of 2,000, 2,001, there was a lot of that going on too where everyone just assumed, oh, it's a website. Let's build it. It'll be awesome. Build it. They will come. We don't need to justify it with analytics. And some people would try. They'd try and figure out, is there a way to justify all these 1,000,000 of dollars being spent for these platforms and these investments? And it led to this crash. And I'm not trying to predict doom and gloom. That's not the point. But there's a feeling it seems to me like there's a feeling amongst a lot of people, and I'd be interested if marketing people feel this as well, that it is difficult to justify sometimes the time, effort, and expense around some of these newer platforms because it's so difficult to quantify a result back in, say, revenue or contract or deals or whatever it might be. It feels like history. What's that saying? History doesn't repeat itself, but it feels like it's rhyming a bit.

Virgil: 26:59

Yeah. And as a matter of fact, you know, you said go along with the theme of the podcast. We could really go to the theme of discussing stupid by saying you know, I just recently read an article through CMS wire that was talking about that there's still a huge percentage of digital strategists that look at hit as something significant. And they do kind of rely on the fact that the typical business person doesn't really know what the hell they're looking at. So they're like, look, we've gotten 10,000,000 hits in the last month. But let's 15 years ago, we knew that didn't mean crap for anything in there. So we have these things in that. But I agree with you. I think I think there's definitely an importance from that side, and I don't think in any way we're advocating dumping those strategies. But the reality is even us internally, we've learned that there's platforms that resonate well with what we do and kind of the stuff we put out. There's others that we put out stuff on, but basically don't care about because it it really means nothing to that. You know, and I think a perfect example of that is Twitter. I mean, you know, the reality is if you don't have a message that I hate to say is almost controversial today, you just don't have anything that most people care about on Twitter. And I don't see a lot of prevalence through Twitter, yet Instagram, since we're a very visual company, has been something that has had some really good effect for us from helping the world know that we're out there.

Joel: 28:26

And with all due respect to the marketing professionals out there too, I gotta imagine there's a cringe worthy moment when, say, your boss or the CEO of the company says, hey. We spent all this money on x social media. What did it get us? And there's this big pause in the room. That's gotta be tough.

Virgil: 28:44

Yeah. Well, on top of that, even take internal communications people. How many times have we met with internal groups that manage communications that try to use social media to connect with their employees? And the reality is there's still kind of a prevalence of people not wanting to connect with their employer via that for a whole plethora of reasons from that time.

Joel: 29:03

Yeah. And there's and there's the social piece of it, too, which, you know, again, we're not trying to get into dissecting people and humanity, but

Virgil: 29:10

why not?

Joel: 29:11

You know, people are probably getting Okay, well, let's do that. Okay. So here's the theory. Depending on the point in time that the person maybe came from in technology and their comfort level, some people are more easily overwhelmed, some are less easily overwhelmed, or people just get cumulatively overwhelmed. And we hear that all the time now about how there's all these different types of media sources, all these different options and venues and ways that you can get all of your information. And you hear more and more frequently now. But you heard it 20 years ago or 30 years ago. People would say, screw it. I'm done. I'm going to shut myself off. I'm going to stop listening. I'm going to stop paying attention. And they'll do that for periods of time. Or they may decide, Okay, I'm going to become a hermit. But that's still a thing now, and I think it's becoming more prevalent because people look at this and they say, jeez, this is too complicated. I have to remember 50 or however many passwords just to go about my day to day life in work and personal. And it wasn't that bad 20 years ago, but it was starting to be. And it's continued in some ways socially to become extremely stressful, which is why I think there's that return on the website in particular toward simplicity, simplified access, look and feel, search, make things easy to find because life is just damn complicated already. Anything we can do or anything a company or a government can do to make it easier is gonna be better.

Virgil: 30:43

And you bring it up, and I swear, you almost sound like a plant that you're kinda moving into each of my next topics. But I doubt you even

Joel: 30:51

know what I Yeah.

Virgil: 30:53

Yeah. But, Chad, you brought it up before we did this podcast, you know, about one of the ironic things. Of course, Chad joined HiMonkey back when Flash was, oh my god, everything had to be in Flash. You had to have a navigation that if you rolled over, it flipped and it sang songs, and it did all these crazy things. And it was the best Flash developers in the world were charging 3, $400,000 for one template that you could use and not do anything. And, I mean, it was just this crazy thing. And so then we kinda went back to simple, and I personally am still a proponent of simple myself, but the world has evolved. And now you can't just communicate, you can't just manage these things by putting out texts and images and that kind of stuff. Now you've got to have video and interactive content and all this stuff. And I agree with you. It kind of feels like back when we were doing that stuff that interactivity is kind of the new cool on the web. But I think today, maybe the biggest difference, and you can tell me what you think is, you at least have to have a little bit more of a purpose for it now than what you used to.

Chad: 31:59

Absolutely. Absolutely. I think that's the biggest difference between then and now. Thinking back 15 years when you'd go to a website and you had to keep your speakers down because you didn't know if it was automatically gonna play music or not or what it meant.

Virgil: 32:16

Don't forget. And I'd be I understand this is before you were there, but we did have an actual toilet flush on a website. Right, Joel? We did have an actual toilet flush that you could watch over and over and over. I mean, how cool is that?

Joel: 32:30

That was one of our highlights. Yes.

Chad: 32:33

One

Joel: 32:33

of our proud moments.

Chad: 32:34

But, you know, I'm thinking even if both of you recall the GeoCities days, I know that just recently shut down or is going to very soon. Believe it just finally shattered its final, servers, believe it or not. But, I mean, the entire purpose behind those was you got to put all this fun stuff on your site, sounds and animations and little GIFs and all these little things. But to your point, there's no purpose to it. There's no plan there. It was these silly little sites that you could put together. And so I think that kind of proliferated out to the general web. We had started with text, images, maybe some videos, some flash video, and then we really, I think, swung full into flash websites, highly decorative, highly animated, interactive. But, again, there wasn't there wasn't a lot of purpose behind many of those. It was their Flash was there for the Flash. Yeah. It was supposed to be Flashy. Flash is for Flash. Yeah. And it was just because you could, really. I've already had it. Everybody was using it. All the browsers supported it, and that's just what you did. But then, right, I I think it was information overload and people got enough, so we went back to simple again. But now, right, I think what happened in my mind is that the web just got boring. You think about other things that you consume, TV, movies, books

Joel: 34:06

Kinda like cars in the 19 seventies.

Chad: 34:10

That's true.

Joel: 34:11

But it's, you know boring.

Chad: 34:12

It you don't wanna consume these things if they're boring. There's certain things that you have to do, obviously, that you're just gonna have to suffer through whatever website it's on to get the information. But if a website's boring and you don't have to be there, you're not going to be there. So I think that purpose has come back of retention, keeping people on your site to drive them towards doing something.

Joel: 34:38

K. And, you know, I gotta tell you, this is an interesting irony. Yesterday, I just I don't remember what the reason was, but I stumbled onto the National Geographic website and they were having a throwback Thursday. And they had put in place their overall site design and architecture from, like, 20 years ago, and it was actually refreshingly easy to use. What does that tell you?

Virgil: 35:01

Yeah. No. It's weird. Yeah. Yeah. No. I always my litmus test has always been if I can't go to a site and know how to use it right away, and I I consider myself relatively intelligent in the world of using websites and that kind of stuff, then it's really bad. But I agree. You know, the funny thing is is I also think this is where you're just gonna continually kinda get this kinda more generational divide and that kind of stuff. Because, like, for myself, I kinda find that I don't really have the patience to sit and watch a long video or do that kind of stuff. I kinda wanna be able to get in there, get the main bullet points. But that's me, and I understand that I have teenagers that sit at my house and literally look at videos all day long every day, and you've got that whole other side of it. So I think, you know, again, from kind of an organizational standpoint, organizations have to find that right balance. But I do think one of the benefits is that there there's still a lot of crap being produced out there, but at least now it's maybe more crap with a purpose. Is that a good way to stand, to go away?

Joel: 36:03

Which which I think the corollary to that is what's still old and still new is there's a segment of the population that's still terribly confused and terribly poor users of the web. And there's some people that are just they just struggle no matter what, and they always will. And that was the case 25 years ago.

Virgil: 36:21

Well, I was gonna say, you know, ironically, as we were going through this, I thought of another probably not gonna go down that path because it's a little bit more technical. But another thing is when you and I were first getting in here, everybody outsourced everything. I mean, you know, very very rarely they they use a web hosting company, they use a company that manage this, manage your IT, and all that kind of stuff. And then, you know, of course, the dot net bubble burst and along with it, all these managed companies just went under. Born, who was here, you know, went under, like, 10 minutes, and that's not really even an exaggeration. And then it came to everybody wanted to do it internally. Well, now we have the cloud. And, of course, you guys can't see me, but I'm sure you can imagine the air quotes I'm putting up right now, the cloud. And everybody talks about it and everything's in the cloud, and we should be doing everything in the cloud. But again, it's kind of this whole thing of, well, now nobody wants to host any of this stuff. Nobody wants to manage it. They wanna put it out there, and I think a lot of that is a little bit security driven, a lot of it is ease driven, but I think that's part of it. Now today, when you start thinking about videos and all this other interactivity stuff, to do professional quality stuff takes a lot of time, a lot of money, and a lot of effort. But the reality is that's not what captures most people. What captures them is raw, very simple, grabbing it from your phone type of stuff that we're starting to see more organizations use. You know, we have that one college that was actually giving phones to, you know, their their student ambassadors, and they were just going around just recording things that they thought was cool on campus and that kind of stuff. And and there's a lot of lot of things there. So I think that that's kinda where the world's going. But overall, there we go. The interesting thing I think to all of us will be, if we're still doing this 10 years from now, will we go back the other direction again? Otherwise, do we start finally hitting a level of information overload that the world starts to retract from that and go back to, god, we need information to be simple and digestible versus being thrown at us every millisecond. And we need to go back to having tools that we can do very simple things with, and we need to go back to things that we can find stuff on very easily. I think that's gonna be an interesting thing because, you know, I'm sure there's somebody that could say that we're in a direction that we could never go back. But I think it'll be interesting to see if we someday hit a point in which we've went too far, and the only answer is to turn off the Internet for a short amount of time or something along that line. Let it reset.

Chad: 38:53

Let it reset. Make sure Skynet doesn't take off.

Virgil: 38:56

Make sure Skynet. Yeah. Yeah. Which of course is is the Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Joel: 39:02

Evil cyborgs. So well, hey, actually, let me give you one quick analogy since I mentioned cars from seventies before. One of the things that for those people who pay attention to cars, if you look back in the muscle cars and muscle car days in the sixties, there were some really cool cars. They were not always that safe to drive. You know, they leaked oil. But on the other hand, they were fast and they were fun. And then in the seventies, they all kinda started to decline. And in the eighties, they almost disappeared. The nineties, it was like nonexistent. So then they started to have this renaissance of new versions, improved technologies. You know, the engines didn't leak. They actually ran. They had a lot of horsepower, really good brakes, safe to drive, great to handle. So you've got this renaissance of muscle cars that are even more fuel efficient than you would ever thought possible. So the analogy is, I wouldn't wanna predict what the web is gonna look like in 10 years, but there's some analogy to that where the original was rough and raw and leaked and was fun but crazy. And then it kinda went through this period that I think we're coming on the end of the boring, bland and stuff. It's like, okay, god. There's gotta be something better than this. And it's starting to evolve to whatever this next version of the muscle car is. That's kinda where I see the analogy going. And cars, no, not the same as the Internet. But on the other hand, technology has merged. So, you know, you've got the Internet in cars. Who would have thought that 30 years ago?

Virgil: 40:29

I gotta just tell you, Joel, I'm just impressed that you shared, like, 5 or 6 analogies and not one has had a motorcycle in it. So I'll give you that one right there. So

Chad: 40:37

Actually, I don't. I really

Joel: 40:38

I'd like to hear it.

Virgil: 40:39

No. No. There we go. We don't need to hear that yet.

Joel: 40:41

There it comes.

Virgil: 40:42

Well well, guys, I mean, obviously, we talk all the time, but I appreciate you joining me on here to go through this. Hopefully, people got a little bit of insight in there, but I do. I think we're at a point in time in the world of technology where all this new stuff feels very old to us. Like, we're kinda going back in time to go forward in time, and it does kinda make you always wonder because they talk about how the world goes in cycles. But I thank you guys very much for joining us, and I'm sure the listeners are going to enjoy hearing what we all had to say. So thanks a lot, and have a great rest of your day.

Joel: 41:11

Thank you. Thanks. You too.

Chad: 41:17

Well, now

Virgil: 41:17

we hit that point in the podcast where we talk about our stupid buzz. Otherwise, we look at a buzzword or buzzwords out there that maybe at one point in life had meaning, but really don't have meaning anymore. And today's stupid buzzwords is digital workplace. And so one of the reasons that this just really irritates me is because it's really kind of a nonsensical phrase. It really doesn't have a place for us. So in very simple terms, I've been doing this for a really long time and back in the day, one of the things when we really first started doing things like collaborate and work together on things, there were a lot of different tools that we could use and a lot of different things that we could do. And people really hated that because everything was really jumbled and nobody could really figure out, well, do I use this tool? Do I use this? Does this exist here? Does it exist there? So then we started building all these systems. And with those systems, we started bringing all those functions together. But then everybody hated that because what happened is that you take those systems and those systems never really adequately did any of their individual jobs really well. They did all of them okay, but there were other systems that did this piece really good, this piece really good. So the reason that we started moving to the phrase digital workplace is because we used to call it collaboration, and collaboration meant that everything kind of worked together. Well, now we're back to a world where we use a bunch of different tools, and these tools have a lot of different functionality. And some of them talk to one another, some of them don't who are doing it. So we needed this phrase to basically overcompass that and say, hey. We've got an app for that. So let's call it digital workplace because digital workplace can be we can use anything, we can do anything, and we can kind of have it be however we want. And the reality is is where there are some opportunities around this and some advantages, there's also that disadvantage side too. But more so than anything, it's become this phrase that you hear at least 10, 15, 20 times a day in different literature talking about it like somehow this was some type of revolutionary concept. When in reality that just means we've got a cluster out there and nobody knows what to do with the cluster. So we'll give it a really cool name. We'll say, hey. Look. You're all working together because you're working in a digital workplace. And so if you're more interested in this topic, actually, I'm gonna be part of one of my future podcasts talking about how do we really work across that spectrum and use a lot of different tools to get a single job function complete. Well, thank you again for joining me for the podcast. I hope you really enjoyed this episode. I'm looking forward to many more coming up. As always, if you're interested in more information about it, you can always visit us on the web at discussing stupid.com or you can hit me up on Twitter or Instagram or on Facebook. You're welcome to do that. All the links will be in the show notes. We'll also have a full transcript of the program and a lot of information. And of course, if you haven't done so already, please feel free to subscribe either via iTunes or Google Play or whatever different type of player that you use are attached to our RSS feed. So thank you very much for joining me. I hope you enjoyed today's program. And until we do next, go ahead and talk stupid on your own.