282 - Let's Get Nerdy : WordPress, Page Builders, CSS Class-First Design and more with Kevin Geary

Fellow web design educator Kevin Geary (creator of automatic.css and frames for WordPress) is on the show to share his perspective on where WordPress is headed, the role of page builders moving forward, CSS class first design for scalability and more.

In This Episode

 00:00 - The Future of WordPress
 11:15 - Comparing Page Builders for Web Design
 18:14 - Discussion on Web Design Approaches
 29:47 - Best Practices and Future of WordPress
 37:29 - WordPress Block Editor vs. Page Builders Controversy
 49:31 - WordPress Community
 53:16 - Divi 5 and the Future of WordPress Frameworks 

Get all links, resources and show notes at:

https://joshhall.co/282

Transcript

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The Future of WordPress

Kevin 0:00

I don't think WordPress is at risk from any competitor because of its open source nature . Everybody goes to WordPress . We don't use WordPress because it's the best CMS . We don't use WordPress because it has the best page builder or whatever . We use WordPress because it has no limitation and it has this gigantic ecosystem behind it , and that's just like an intangible asset , really , and that's why it's so protected against a lot of competitors . Welcome to the Web Design Business Podcast , with your host , josh Hall , helping you build a web design business that gives you freedom and a lifestyle you love .

Josh 0:46

Hey , friends , welcome into the show . So great to have you here , hey . Before we dive into this one , I want to say just how thankful I am that you have , for those of you who are subscribers , that you have the show on your weekly rotation . It is an honor to spend an hour , sometimes two hours or more each week with you between interviews and solo episodes here on the podcast . If you're a brand new listener , welcome in . Great to have you here .

Josh 1:11

With the Web Design Business Podcast , the goal is to help you with the business side of your web design business . In this episode , though , we're actually going to take a bit of a deep dive into the development side of things , and we're going to get a little nerdy . The reason I wanted to do this is because there are so many changes going on right now and a lot of different things afoot in the land of web design and specifically WordPress . As a WordPress user myself , there's a lot of stuff going on with the changes that WordPress is making and whether or not page builders like Divi , elementor , oxygen , bricks , etc . Are going to fit in in the future of WordPress . So , to take a deep dive into this , I'm so excited to have fellow web design educator , kevin Geary , onto the podcast Now . Kevin , the reason I wanted to specifically talk about this stuff with him is because he is on the front lines of the technical changes up ahead with WordPress . Kevin , you can find out more about him if you go to gearyco . He is the creator of a CSS tool for WordPress called automaticcss . He's also the creator of Frames , think Figma for WordPress web design , and he's got a really great community as well called Inner Circle . So we share a lot in common . But Kevin is much more deep into the development side of things and in this conversation we have a really , really interesting chat about not only where WordPress is , but where it's headed , the future of page builders , some best practices when it comes to implementing CSS , and why class based CSS best practices are not dead . In fact , they may be more important than ever with the wake of page builders and a whole lot more . I really , really enjoyed having Kevin on the show , and he is a wealth of knowledge when it comes to creating websites that follow best practices that are sustainable , no matter what tool you use , and if you're struggling with figuring out what tool you should use for your web design business , I think this episode is really going to help you out , so , so excited to bring Kevin on here Now .

Josh 3:10

Speaking of helping you out , this episode is presented by my web design process course . If you're not familiar you didn't know about this I have my entire process , my entire 50 step , five phase SOP inside my web design process course . It is literally a step by step checklist and complete guide for building every single website that you build for you and your clients , and in fact , a lot of what we cover in here when it comes to best practices for building a site that is scalable and maintainable is a lot of it's covered in my process course in the way of making sure you create sites that can be easily updated at scale moving forward . So I highly recommend . If you haven't yet dive into my process course the link will be at the show notes for this episode at joshallco 282 . It's also available inside Web Designer Pro , my coaching community . So when you join pro , you get access to all of my courses and my process course . So I hope to see it in there .

Josh 4:07

And for now , here's Kevin . Let's talk nerdy WordPress where it's heading page builders , css class design and oh so much more . Enjoy , friends . Kevin , we got through some technical issues . We're recording this on zoom now instead of Riverside . Great to have you here , man . Thanks for taking some time out of your day to chat .

Kevin 4:30

Thank you for having me Glad to be here .

Josh 4:32

I was telling you before we went live here . I'm actually glad that the technical issues happened with you , because you have a lot of similarities to me in the way of being a , I guess , a web design coach . I don't know if you have an official title , but you do a lot of YouTube , a lot of live calls , a lot of trainings . You use circle . So I just wanted to take some time to talk shop with you and to get your perspective on what's going on in web man . I actually would like to start with that , because on your website you have your page where it says I think it's your projects page , right when you say like I don't people ask you what you do and you don't know what to say . In our world , somebody in web design and WordPress , if they ask you , what would you tell them , being that they're maybe in our world ?

Kevin 5:14

I tell them that I'm a educator . Like a web design educator , I talk a lot about best practices , but I'm also a plugin developer , plugin author , really the author of a CSS framework . I don't develop the actual plug inside of it my team does that . But automatic CSS a lot of people are getting more and more familiar with it . It's making the rounds and we have an add on tool for it called frames . It allows people to rapidly wire frame sites and it's I call it like a wire framing and pre design tool . It's an it's unstyled , unopinionated layouts , so people can just start designing as soon as they add them to the page . And then I have a private community as well , called the inner circle . So , like I said , I do a lot of things right . It's hard to tell people like one thing , but I educate on best practices and I build tools to make web designers lives easier .

Josh 6:08

Yeah , that's beautiful . That's well said right there . Man , how far do you go into the business side of things , or is it mostly best practices on the end , the tech side of things ?

Kevin 6:17

It's , it's I . I chose best practices because it's best practices in a lot of ways , like it's technical best practices , but we do talk a ton about business . A lot of people know me mostly for talking about business . So , especially like in the inner circle , right Like , I teach a lot of technical stuff on YouTube . I have technical trainings in the inner circle as well , but I feel I probably should survey the group . But I feel like a lot of people join the inner circle because they want the business insights . I talk a lot about proper pricing . I talk a lot about processes and workflow and then , of course , the professional standards side of things like you know , doing a really good job with your work and for your clients .

Josh 6:59

Yeah , it's interesting with web design because I think for anyone who wants help with either the technical or business side of things , there's just so many options . Yeah , and I think that's because there's no right or wrong way to do things , aside from a coding perspective , because that is a right or wrong like you can literally break something . But particularly on business it's I mean , I tell people all the time find somebody you are attracted to in the way of like you , like their teaching style , you like what they're up to , you feel like they're a good fit for you and vice versa , because there really are so many options . I mean , you and I in a lot of ways are probably co-operative because you go further into best practices and the tech side of things , but we do probably cross paths a lot on the business side of things . But your journey and your life experience is probably very different than mine . So I think that's kind of cool .

Josh 7:47

Like what are your thoughts about just the industry of web design as a whole right now ? I'm really excited about just that . Like there's so many ways to do things that can be overwhelming . Yeah , what's your take on ?

Kevin 7:57

that that is overwhelming . It's yeah . If you're already in it , it's exciting , like we got a lot of cool stuff going on . If you're not already in it or you're trying to get into it , it can be very overwhelming . You don't know what you need to learn first , you don't need to know the totality of what you need to learn to be able to do this work . And then , of course , like a lot of people are intimidated by the business side , where maybe they're not intimidated by the technical side , of course , then you could have vice versa , right , yeah , right . So , yeah , I am very excited with where everything is going .

Kevin 8:30

I mean , css is rapidly evolving . I love CSS , I love teaching CSS , page builders , wordpress , and we're kind of in this right now , this limbo area , so to speak , with WordPress , because it's like they're trying to get the FSE thing going and the they're trying to get the block editor to be a cohesive experience . We've got all these page builders that people can choose from . They want to use those . For me , especially as a product person , that's very exciting , but I also empathize with all of the people who are trying to learn and get a business off the ground , because having a gazillion options isn't the best thing for your business . Right Like picking a lane and actually knowing what you're doing in that lane and then getting that lane working for you is really where people should be focused .

Josh 9:19

Something I didn't really consider is what you just said , which is how overwhelming things are now to get started . I got started in 2010 , which was like Dreamweaver beginning of WordPress , when it was taking off , and it was because there was just less builder options . It was harder , in some ways , to hand code things for me at least . That's not natural for me , but you're right , there was less options . So it's a good , I think , reminder for me and , I think , for everyone listening and watching for our clients to let them know like there are a billion options to build a website . This is just what I use and choose and recommend . But you're right , man , it probably makes it 10 times harder to get started now , like there's so many options to make it easy to get started , but at the same time , when you have a ton of options , it does make it hard .

Kevin 10:07

Yeah , you know , and I created a course it's a free course called Page Building 101 . And I started out the course talking about , like , what is the role of a page builder in our workflow and that could be the block editor , considered to be a page builder as well , if you wanted to go that route . But I talked about , like , what is the role of a page builder and what are we trying to do with the page builder ? That's kind of how it started and I was comparing page builders . You know , this is what a webflow experience looks like , this is what a oxygen experience looks like in bricks . And then you've got Elementor over here and here's the block editor , and I explained what they're all trying to do and what they all allow you to do . And then we talked about limitations and we talked about advantages and disadvantages . And then but as the course went on , actually very early on , by episode three or four I'm not teaching concepts in like a variety of page builders anymore I had narrowed it down to like , let's , let's just go this route , let's go . And I chose bricks as the route that we went , because that's the page builder that I currently use and teach most of my stuff in .

Comparing Page Builders for Web Design

Kevin 11:15

But it felt to me as if , and because I was getting a lot of questions from people and I could sense , you know , there's a tremendous amount of overwhelm and a lot of beginners are just like just tell me the tool you recommend and then let's , and then teach me all the page building stuff , and I just want all the decisions to be done Like I don't , I don't right . So I tried to make it as amicable as possible in the beginning , like hey , it doesn't matter which page builder you know , here's some pros and cons of this one . I'm just going to teach you the fundamentals of page building . But then it became just that it's you can't even teach . Really , it's like because if I teach how to do this in this page builder , that's a different process in another page builder and a different process in another page builder .

Josh 11:53

Right .

Kevin 11:54

So you know , it's easier for beginners just be told , hey , use this one . And then here's here's how we're going to do things .

Josh 12:00

Yeah , and you can always . I've found as a web designer , you can always add to your tool stack more easily moving forward . Like what's interesting is I got into Divi in 2014 . That's when I first was exposed to it , cause I'm still a Divi guy and it would you know . I know there's plenty of of of other incredible tools out there and I've even looked at some , but honestly , I'm such a if an eight broke , don't fix it kind of guy . It would take a lot for me to leave Divi , especially with Divi five coming out soon .

Kevin 12:26

Yeah , you're getting a whole rewrite , which is fun .

Josh 12:29

Oh yeah , yeah , I'm keeping a close eye on that . I have the beta version so I'm testing it out . But I say that to say one thing that I've seen in the industry , particularly what with page builders and Divi , is when I got into the Divi community , everyone was almost completely Divi , like that was it . It was just WordPress and Divi . Now more often than not and a lot of my students are doing this they'll have like Divi , bricks and Elementor or Divi and oxygen and the in the block builder , like there really are . It's like a few themes , but that does make it tricky to keep up with a few . But do you think that's probably a good best practice to have like two or three themes that you're familiar with ?

Kevin 13:08

I've always advocated that people stick with one , because in business , with process and workflow , it's just really important to master your process , master your workflow especially . You know , I one of the things I teach in the business side of things is really getting people to look outside of just themselves doing all of the work , like being a one man band kind of thing . And I tell people , it's like you don't have to build in a huge agency , like you don't have to have a bunch of people to manage right , but you need like one or two other people that can help you on projects , especially if you're not good at a specific part of the project . One of the biggest things I think that we have to try to overcome in the web design industry is people who are decent at development or page building also trying to be the designer when they're not a talented designer right , and then vice versa . You've got maybe a talented designer who is just throwing sites together and the code's not that great and the SEO sucks and all this other stuff . They're trying to force this to be like a one man band situation . To me it's like no , it's it's be okay with saying , hey , I'm not the best designer , so when a client hires me , I'm going to hire a designer , or I have a designer basically in my back pocket and that person's going to do the design and if you're pricing properly , this isn't a problem . But you end up doing your best work that way .

Kevin 14:28

Plus , it's not all on your shoulders to do everything , which is , by the way , a giant risk to any business . You know you get sick . It's like nothing can move forward . If I get sick , my designer can keep doing his thing . Right , my copy person can keep doing their thing . It's not all on me , and so it takes away some of the risk . It makes the workflow more efficient . It makes the work that you're doing better . So just being willing to , and it's . It doesn't even have to be an employee situation . It could just be a contractor situation , right , but getting people to think in that regard of you know we need maybe a couple of people you know doing the work and pitching in here , and if that's the case , you can't be in like this builder and that builder and that , because you can't get everybody on the same page with every builder that you're trying to use . If you have one process , one workflow , it's easy to bring other people into the mix .

Josh 15:20

Oh my gosh , so many thoughts on that , kevin . First of all , you're preaching to the choirs . Speaking my language , man , it's exactly what I say as well to my community , which is I don't mind somebody having two builders in the way of like a backup , or if they are familiar , they feel good about both . But you're right , when it comes to scaling as the business owner , that just makes your life two to three times more difficult . Even when it comes to hiring , even as a subcontractor , it can be really difficult because now suddenly , let's say , somebody's scaling and they've got 10 sites on Divi , 20 sites on Elementor and seven sites on Bricks . Well , now , if you're going to bring somebody in , they need to know three builders , whereas if you just use Divi , like I did when I scaled , it was quite easy for me because I had the Divi web designers Facebook group that I'd founded . Everyone in there was just Divi , so does make it a little easier . So you're right .

Josh 16:08

I think sticking with one tool is quite ideal . How do you ? What's your framework ? I don't know if you thought about this in detail , but I guess one of your top tips for choosing the right tool for you . I've got my own ideas on this , but I'd love to hear from your perspective .

Kevin 16:22

Yeah , I actually did a whole video . It's like 20 , 20 important things like a page builder must have or something like that . And I went feature set by feature set and I do a lot of stuff with . You know I'm very unique . Well , I don't know . Yeah , it's unique in the page builder world . It's not unique in web design .

Kevin 16:42

Like , in web design , a class first workflow is like the way to go . Like you use classes , the style things , and in page builder land that's typically not the case . You know , like elementors and the Divis of the world , they don't really use classes all of that much . So I teach a class first workflow . So I look for class first workflow builders like oxygen and bricks , and that's that's like the starting point for me . Like I look for . If it's not , it does not have a class first workflow I typically shy away from it . If it does have a class first workflow , then I start to look for other things and , like I said , I did that whole video . It's like 20 things that are that are important to me . You know , query loops and dynamic data and conditional logic , and it kind of goes on and on and on .

Josh 17:26

So it's funny to mention that we we saw each other at WordCamp this past weekend here and I think right after my wife and I ran into you , we were walking , I ran into one of my students who , just like I mentioned , came from just using Divi and is now using I think , bricks is the main one he's using now and he mentioned the exact same stuff . He got further and further into the development side of things and that's why he kind of moved . He went originally to oxygen and now to bricks . So this is something I was curious from your perspective on and that is do you feel , since there's kind of a difference between designers and developers ? Although I'm kind of a weird hybrid , I can do both I'm more of a designer , so I think that's why I was attracted to Divi . Yeah , Do you feel like that's safe to say that , like Elementor and Divi maybe on purpose , are more of the designer , maybe even DIY , crowd , whereas bricks and oxygen are more to the developer

Discussion on Web Design Approaches

Josh 18:14

crowd ? Do you think that's fair ?

Kevin 18:16

They could be . Yeah , I don't know . It's to me it's like are they , do they cater more toward designers or do they cater more just towards like like beginners , for example , you know , like a Wix or a Squarespace kind of approach , is kind of like it's built for the masses kind of approach . Right , you watch the commercials and it's like , hey , you got a business , come make a website . And I don't know if that's the route . The Elementor's kind of went , where they're just like we just want anybody to be able to use this thing and , you know , they don't know what classes are and so we're not going to have those where you know and they . Maybe we need sliders for things instead of actual inputs where you could put in values . And it kind of creates more of like a closed system to where a developer does open a tool like that and the developer's like , ah , where's all my control ? What happened to everything ? A more newer person is like , oh , this is , you know , I slide things around , that's easy . So , yeah , I don't know if it's webflow .

Kevin 19:17

See , webflow to me is the interesting . I always go to webflow as an example because they are legitimately marketing themselves to designers and you have a lot of talented designers in the webflow community , but at the same time , it's a very powerful tool for developers . So they took an approach of like yeah , we are going to cater toward designers , but what we're going to do is we're going to spend millions of dollars teaching designers how to be decent developers with this like professional tool . So you seek a class first workflow inside of webflow . Even though it's marketed to designers , you see all of the inputs . It's a very advanced builder when you open it up , right ? The difference is they put a ton of money into educating their users on like , how to build websites with this tool , and I just don't know if that's why . I wonder , like did the element or route say oh , we're going to target designers and just make it easy for them , or did they say we're just going to target everybody and make it easy ?

Josh 20:17

Yeah , just from my personal perspective , largely from what I've seen is and this is true in my community and just the wider WordPress community as a whole more of the design front pay like front end type of users and designers are going divi , elementor , and then , yeah , the developer , the folks who are deeper into development no CSS , no HTML , no other code . They're getting into bricks and oxygen more , which does make sense . It's interesting that webflow is kind of straddling both , which I mean elementor and divi are too , but I don't know many like design . First . People are DIYers who are using bricks or oxygen . I think they would probably see that and be like I don't know what to do . I don't know what to do , yeah .

Kevin 20:57

Well , the thing is , is they when they get the education ? That's what the feedback on page building 101 has been really tremendous , Like a ton of people have switched from elementor over to bricks and divi over to bricks after watching page building 101 . And you know , they will admit readily like , hey , you know , when I first opened this tool or saw this tool , or I had no idea , like how it was going to work , and but after watching page building 101 and they start to implement the stuff that they're learning , then they're like , oh , I , I would want to do it any other way . You know , and there's one main thing that when we talk about classes and this really is an important discussion , because WordPress is not moving in this direction , WordPress , like with the block editor , they're not moving toward a class versus workflow .

Josh 21:46

They're glad you mentioned this . This is the next segue .

Kevin 21:49

I wanted to take .

Kevin 21:50

And this is , I you know . So the main question I have for , like , let's say , the WordPress core team . You know , when they think about this , when I talk about best practices , I talk about building websites that are scalable , which doesn't matter to a lot of people because they might be like oh , I just do a little . Brochure sites for companies is not that big of a deal , but maintainable is another one , and the ability to iterate on websites . So I make a couple of points . One point is that websites in like the modern era , if it's going to actually benefit a business , it's like a living , breathing thing , right . There's new content that needs to be added to it all the time .

Kevin 22:29

You're typically building a site in phases .

Kevin 22:32

You might build if it's a local service business , for example , we might start with the brochure part of the website , but then we might start building out this whole network of like service area pages to really help you rank , you know , number one on Google in these various cities that you serve , and then we might come over here and start doing this other area of the site .

Kevin 22:51

And when you don't build with classes and you're not taking like a component kind of based approach to web design , you end up with a lot of manual work that then needs to be copied and pasted everywhere . And then if a style needs to change across an entire site , it's like open up every page where that thing exists and paste the new style to it . And it's like a lot of manual work it's . And you just realize how much of a problem it becomes . And as the site gets bigger , the problem gets larger and larger and larger . Whereas with a class if I have a class on a component that's used , it doesn't matter how many times it's used , it could be used a gazillion times I can change it style from one place one click . Ud of .

Josh 23:31

CSS . Yeah , exactly . It doesn't know what we're talking about . Yeah , that's right I cause . It's interesting . I never thought of myself as a class based designer , but I am like I have classes on a lot of my tutorials and stuff that are certain parts of the website . Now Divi , interestingly enough , does have . I don't know how far you are into the Divi side of things .

Kevin 23:49

The presets right .

Josh 23:50

Presets , global presets . Have you played around with the extend options for Divi ? It's one of my favorite . No , is that newer ? Yeah , I think probably last year . Maybe they came out with it it is .

Josh 24:00

I use this all the time . It's kind of like a hybrid between a class and , and you can do it per page or per site , which is like , let's say , I've got a huge page and I want to change all the H2s on that page . Well , now we're talking about breaking best practices , but any element you could choose , I could choose that and you can extend it in that section and the row or the page or throughout the site . So there are some things like that , but it does . Still , it's not as seamless as having a class that just is like , yeah , border , you know , or , or video background or video outline or video box , and just changing throughout the site . So I I think you're right . That approach is is something that is maybe I don't know if it's underutilized , overlooked or maybe not appreciated enough in web design as a whole . But again , you get into the to the designer and DIY crowd and that's probably something where it's like maybe it's just an understanding .

Kevin 24:50

Well , yeah , I think it's an understanding . I think they almost don't even know . You wouldn't know , you wouldn't know by default that this is even option , that this is even a thing . Right , if somebody didn't tell you about it or or teach it to you . But , like most good designers know , like they Figma Figma , for example , just came out with tokens right , which are more or less CSS variables and , yeah , I'm not a user myself , I did , okay , yeah , so I teach . You know a lot of stuff with custom classes , but then I tie that in with variables or CSS custom properties which are very powerful . And so , for example , you know and designers pretty much understand this by nature If you're going to use a color and you have a name for that color , like this is our primary color , this is our action color , or something like that there's a hex code associated with that color .

Kevin 25:40

Well , when you're developing the website and you're styling buttons and backgrounds and all that stuff , you don't want to be pasting that hex code everywhere , because if the designer , the designer knows like , hey , brand colors change , right , and so a year from now , that action color might be a different color . Well , now , like what do I want the situation to be ? Do I want to take the new hex code and go find everywhere on that website that that thing was used and go manually replace it ? Or do I want a placeholder for that , for that hex code called like action or primary or whatever ? And I've used the token everywhere , but there's only one source of truth for the value of that token , and so if the action color needs to change to a new hex code , I just open the action token and I change out the hex and everywhere across the website instantly fixed . That's a maintainable website , right ? So it's things like that that I think are overlooked and designers in Figma look for that sort of thing .

Kevin 26:38

But then when they get into Elementor or Divi or you know these other builders block editor , suddenly it's not something that is talked about very much . You know people are using raw hex codes everywhere and then the solution is just well , copy the style and paste the style and copy the style and paste the style . And still a very manual thing and , like you know , the extent thing sounds good , especially if you can do it across pages , because that's been the biggest problem with copy paste style so far , as you can only do it on the page you're on and it turns out that we actually use components across the entire site , not just on this one page . So to me , it's teaching these best practices because I don't want people I've been in the situation before many , many , many times where I'm copying and pasting things and manually change , and it's just not a good situation . To me , it's like let's teach people how to avoid that situation , and it comes down to using classes for that and I've made the case before .

Kevin 27:31

It's like look , if we're talking about web design , the fundamentals of web design is HTML and it's CSS . And if you look at the fundamentals of CSS , it's classes . You know , if anybody is doing a website in a code editor , they're not like hey , you know what's a great idea ? Let's style everything at the ID level , like that's a fantastic idea . Nobody says that right . They say use classes , right . So why aren't we using classes in ? The builder has always been my argument , and bricks allows you to do that , oxygen allows you to do that , so that's why I flock towards those .

Josh 28:02

Yeah , no , and Divi does too . Luckily , that was one big thing for me , coming from the dream weaver world . When I started using Divi , I was like , okay , I was able to use a class for sections , buttons and stuff . You know what this is . Challenging me on , though , kevin , is I'm glad we're talking about this I haven't had a conversation like this in a while which is the idea of maintainability and scalability . Yeah , so what ? By the way , what you just talked about last five to 10 minutes is the literal example of scalability and maintainability . That way , when the client does say , hey , we got a brand , redesign our buttons . Instead of a green , now they're red , yeah , and you're like , ah , shut that I got that Okay .

Josh 28:41

That's going to be , like you know , 40 hours to go through not 40 hours , but it could be a while depending on the size of the site . But if you have a class that you're right , action , color , boom , red and then you do it , and then the clients like , oh my gosh , josh or Kevin , you are your own magician , like I know . That's why you pay me well . So this is a great reminder that it's actually challenged me because I've actually gotten a little I guess lazy is the term and maybe I don't know if you've seen this or I'm sure this is really common when you start working on your own site , it is easy to break .

Josh 29:11

It's so easy to break these best practices . I've got some pages where there's hex codes and even having 10 course pages , I have 10 courses altogether . When I want to , you know , streamline them together . I do need to be careful to use more classes . That way , if I want to make a change on one , it goes to all the others . I've done this with a lot of global elements in Divi , but there's still some things and some disciplines that I've got away from . So I almost want to say thank you , because this is a good reminder for me to like stay disciplined and stick to best practices . I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels that .

Kevin 29:44

Well , it's , yeah , and it's a .

Best Practices and Future of WordPress

Kevin 29:47

I think a lot of people would send their client an invoice for three hours of work to change , you know , a bunch of things manually , right . And a good client would be like why did this take so long , you know ? And then people will probably be like well , you know , it's a lot of things I got to change and the client doesn't necessarily know that there was a better way to do it right , but it is really . It's just .

Kevin 30:08

Nobody likes this . It's not fun work . It's not fun work . It's fun to do meaningful things for the client's website , right ? So if I can do wrote like nonsensical things in seconds and then focus on the really important things , that's much better for the client and it's also much better for me . And yeah , you can , you can build , you know , with with Divi , you know , using their presets and things like that . There's limitations to the presets that aren't there with classes . There's probably limitations to extend that aren't there with classes , but not doing everything manually , like you still have some level of maintainability and control , which is good . But yeah , it's . It's that's why I teach process so much , because the process that I lead people through it's like the best practices are baked in and you know the process that I teach accounts for all the things that can go wrong that I've run into before . It's only because I've done it all wrong before so many times .

Kevin 31:00

And it's , it's just a big problem . And you know , I was starting to write an article because people ask about the real importance of big , of best practices and the implications and all of that . And I was trying to sum it up and it's like our goal as developers when you're building a website is to not create big problems , and when you do , when you don't follow best practices , you end up with big problem after big problem after big problem . Accessibility is another one . If people care about accessibility and you don't follow best practices at the . You know , I was at WordCamp talking to an accessibility expert in a car ride over to one of the after parties and I asked her .

Kevin 31:38

I was like how often do people pay for a brand new website and then somebody mentions accessibility and they hire you to come do an audit and you tell them the whole thing is like broke , like the whole thing has to be fixed , and they're like all the time it's it's the most horrible conversation I have to have because they will spend 10 grand or eight grand or whatever it is on this brand new website . Developer doesn't know anything about accessibility , just builds the site . A designer didn't know anything about it . And then someone mentions hey , by the way , that you know you might want to look into this accessibility thing so you don't get sued and all this other stuff and this . So they hire this accessibility person coming into an audit and it's like , okay , glad you spent eight grand on that . Now it's going to be another eight grand to fix it and it's just man . So but if you're following best practices , if you know about these things , then your client goes hey , we need to get an accessibility .

Kevin 32:27

I was like no , don't worry , we already did that . You know , we already . We already accounted for accessibility in our process . Or if there is an accessibility problem , an accessibility problem fixed with a class is a couple seconds and accessibility problem that needs to be fixed at the ID level on independent elements all over the website . That's a lot of hours that are going to be needed . So it's just always better , in my estimation , to follow the best practices , have them baked into your workflow , know what they are , and then all bases are covered and you're doing them like that's doing the most professional level of work . You know , like if I hire a photographer or something and you know it's like the lighting wasn't accounted for , I'm like isn't that your job to account for the lighting Like you can't . You can't tell me like the you know the lighting didn't work out for this .

Josh 33:14

It's like that's kind of your job as the photographer , you know what's funny , I never thought about this until we just went , took a deep dive into this , like class first way to to build something out . But when I chose circle to to build my communities off of which I know you're a circle user too yeah , I would . There was another platform I was looking at before that and I was really close to moving forward because it was recommended to me , but the problem I had with it the honestly , the main problem was the landing pages you would create for signing up and everything . I could do it on WordPress , but this was all baked in yeah , each one of them . There was no class based option at all . So any different page you would have to manually enter in the hex codes on all the buttons , all the fonts you had to choose per page . It was a very , very dated design aspect and it didn't occur to me then , but now , as I look back , the reason I didn't choose that was because I there was no class based options for that . I couldn't choose just global style on buttons or implement CSS or anything . So that is so important for everyone .

Josh 34:16

I hope everyone listening , watching this realizes this is all about maintainability and scalability , moving forward because it is . You know , if you have a site that's like five pages , okay , if you go to five different buttons on five pages , you could change this pretty quick , right . But in five years , when that site is 50 pages or 100 pages , that's going to look very different . Yes , and times that by 50 other clients that you've got over the past five years . Suddenly you got a really big situation .

Josh 34:43

And , quite frankly , going back to the scaling talk , how much nicer would it be for every website you build to have the button class of like action button , right , that way , every website I'm sure this is what you teach , I imagine it's like every website you just use the same classes . That's what I recommend . I have a process course , probably somewhat similar to something you have , which and I say it in there like have your classes and your style set up and have those repeated in all of your websites . That way it's really easy to know . This is the primary button , this is the action button . So , yeah , all that to say .

Josh 35:16

Yeah , it's a great way to explain scalability and maintainability .

Kevin 35:19

Yeah , and that's really what automatic CSS is like as a framework for web designers to use . All of the tokens are already made for you , all of the utility classes are already there , everything's automatically responsive . You can manage everything in a scalable , maintainable way on every single website , like the process of building the next website , and the next website and the next website is the same process you used on the last website . Everything is named exactly the same and it's as easy and efficient as it can possibly get . You don't want to treat every and that's really what manual development does . It treats every project as like a separate entity where it's like oh , we're just naming things different things and hex codes are floating everywhere and it's yeah , it's a nightmare , it's a nightmare .

Kevin 36:05

I tell people when they when they to identify . You know , when we teach about best practices , part of it is identifying that you're doing something that's not scalable and not maintainable , and you should start to like sweat Like you should like hear a alarm at the back of your head . It's like you know you got to be uncomfortable because you're about to create a big problem and you know goal , like I said , is to avoid creating big problems .

Josh 36:27

Love it , man . Let's switch over to WordPress now . So I have your page builder one-on-one course linked up . I'll make sure we include that in the show notes because that definitely sounds like a great resource to to get a glimpse of a lot of different tools and choose the best one for you WordPress , specifically . Trying to think of the concise way to ask this question , but I guess , what are your thoughts on WordPress moving forward ?

Josh 36:50

Or did you see Matt Mullenweg's talk ? I did . Did you watch FreePlay ? So yeah , like I have to be honest , I know he showed some things on , like the block editor and stuff , but I was just not impressed . I'm like , especially using Divi , which I mean they've been working really hard for a long time to make such a beautiful experience from a builder perspective . So part of me is like that looks like the infancy of Divi from like 2014, . A lot of ways . Quite honestly , I know there's probably a lot of rudimentary things that are nicely native in WordPress , but I guess WordPress specifically , like you mentioned earlier , they're not going to class-based system . Yeah , well , I mean , what are your thoughts or what do you think could be improved with WordPress

WordPress Block Editor vs. Page Builders Controversy

Josh 37:29

?

Kevin 37:29

Yeah , I've not been the biggest fan of the block editor . Like , I'm actually a big fan of the block editor for what I thought it was initially for , which is like blog posts , right . So it's like , you know , we had the old classic editor where you couldn't really do anything . It's just giant wall of text and it's like good luck . So then they came out of the block editor where it's like oh okay , now you can put a button in a blog post if you want to . You can put a image gallery in a blog post if you want . That's all great , I'm fine and Danny .

Kevin 37:55

And then suddenly , out of nowhere , I was like oh no , no , no , no , you're supposed to build like whole sites with this thing . And to me it's like , well , we're just , we're building websites in like Microsoft Office is what I've like kind of compared it to . It's like you're in a word editor and you're trying to build a website and the back end doesn't even match the front end , which I know they're fixing . They're trying to get this to be like in an iframe situation , but it's never felt like the ideal page building environment to me . And then they've got FSE coming , which is , if you go into it now it just looks completely different than every other part of WordPress and they've got like three environments going . They've got the block editor , They've got FSE , They've got the main admin dashboard area . All three environments look completely different from each other . It's totally disconnected .

Josh 38:39

And that's full site editing for anyone who does it . Full site editing . Full site editing . Yeah , so that's in the block , like you could do that on a page , right it leverages the block editor .

Kevin 38:49

Yeah , but what it is is like a , it's like theme styles and it changes the behavior of the block editor based on the theme that you have installed and what the theme developer wants to do with it and what I will say . It's actually quite hard to like understand , which is interesting because it's like supposed to be for like beginners and like lay people and all that right , it's supposed to be easy for people , they , they . It can go . I actually just did an interview where we talked about this exact same thing and I said it can go either way .

Kevin 39:19

It can stay disjointed and disconnected and a pile of trash , which is more or less what it is right now , or or they can magically tie all this stuff together and , like this vision that they have in their head , which you know we can't see , unfortunately . They've tried to explain it a bit it could all come together and it could end up being one great cohesive experience . I'm , as , as a product developer , with frames and automatic CSS , like we're going the FSE route , like we we're getting on the bus and we're going to see where the bus takes us because we have to . It's native and they , you know , to me I don't know if you got the same gist , but Matt seems to be like we want everybody on FSE like as soon as possible .

Josh 40:02

Yeah , I was . Yeah , I wasn't quite sure how to read that with , like , divi Elematerna , the page builders Cause . The one thing about WordPress , though they've always been so empowering towards the people who use it to where , like , let's say , somebody wants to build a website and they see a Divi tutorial , well , suddenly they are using WordPress . It wasn't a WordPress tutorial that they found as a .

Josh 40:21

Divi tutorial . So in a way I mean Divi Elematerna , oxygen Bricks all these tools have helped build WordPress . So part of me wonders like would they really want to try to overshadow all those builders ? It's weird , cause he ?

Kevin 40:32

took a shot at them at the end . I don't know if you heard he took a shot . Oh no , I missed that . Yeah , he said something about I don't want to like misquote him , but something about like you know , anybody who's doing real work in WordPress is using the block editor .

Kevin 40:43

Like you know , he was kind of like shunning the , the page builder things and I get the gist that like he wants people to have a more cohesive experience , which you know , if you are using like Element or Divi , they are all completely different experiences that have with WordPress and I think he sees that as a bad thing , almost . So I don't , but I don't know for sure , because he talks very , you know , politically correct . It's like , you know , let's just make everybody happy , sinkumbaya . Like he's not really , you know , opinionated in a camp . So it's hard to understand what he really sees as the vision , which is a problem because he's supposed to be giving us the vision of WordPress , right . So I wish you would be a little bit more clear and like , if you don't want page builders , tell us that . Like it's too damaging .

Josh 41:30

Maybe I don't know , I don't know Well it is interesting when , when Gutenberg first came out and I remember one of his talks I forget what word camp it was , it's probably like 18 or 19 . Somebody asked like , is Gutenberg in the block header ? Is it a straight competition towards Elementor Divi and others ? And he said no , they wanted to . He was pretty frank about wanting to to play nice with everyone . But you are right , I didn't see the full talk and don't worry , we're not going to take that as a snippet and say Kevin Geary destroys me .

Josh 42:01

But it is true , it does seem like things are just a little bit like vague right now , and I don't know if that's just because things are still so far in development , or I mean , let's be , let's be real . I wouldn't want to be trying to figure out the vision for that Like , that is just a . There's so many different tools and I mean WordPress is still what , like 43 or 44% of the internet , something like that , so that's no small task . So I I almost appreciate that they're taking a very long time to implement all this stuff . But yeah , either way , I mean .

Kevin 42:31

I mean , like the argument I always made is it's not really necessary for WordPress to be doing what they're doing . Like there , there's actually a lot of work on the CMS side of things that they could do to make the to make the CMS side of it a lot better , which is the reason people are using WordPress . Besides the ecosystem right , true that it's a content management system . I have the fact that we don't have , like you can't duplicate a page natively in WordPress . That's odd , right , like you need a plugin to like just do something simple like that Custom admin columns , like just very , very simple stuff to make the CMS better they could be focusing on . Instead , they're trying to build a new , like a novel it's really like a novel page building tool inside of WordPress , because it doesn't look like any page builder that's out there and you already are in a situation where there's plenty of page builders to choose from . It's not like people using WordPress can't get what they need the building environment that they need . So this block editor thing just seems like a pet project almost . It didn't need to be there and it doesn't have to be there for WordPress to be successful , but for some reason they're putting all the time and attention on it to the point where we're not really getting CMS improvements because so much is being put into the block editor . Yeah , good point , good point . Yeah , that's what's kind of a little bit baffling , right . It's like let the page builder developers do like they're doing a great job , like there's a lot of really good page builders for WordPress , and this FSE block editor thing has become a little bit of a distraction .

Kevin 43:58

But to me it's if you know , matt doesn't have to come out and say I don't like page builders and I wish they didn't exist . He can kill them if he wants to kill them , he can kill them slowly , he can kill them quickly . And I think he believes if I build a better thing with the block editor and everybody flocks to it because it's native . That's the one thing I've been hearing People have told me like with generate press , generate blocks right , why did you switch to that ?

Kevin 44:23

It's not as good of a page building experience as like a bricks or an oxygen or even a Divi or whatever . And they'll say because it's native . I want to be close to the native environment and I think Matt knows that intrinsically about a lot of people using WordPress . It's why he got NASA to come in and build their brand new website with the block editor . It's why WhiteHousegov was built with the block editor and not a page builder . Oh , I didn't know about the White House one . Yeah , so these projects are closer to Matt . Right , and they're done with the block editor .

Josh 44:55

No wonder WordCamp was in DC this year then .

Kevin 44:58

Yes , yeah , exactly that was there . Yeah , nasa was the keynote talk and then there was another talk about how the WhiteHousegov website was built with the block editor , and I think he's going to be pushing this more and more and more . And I think he knows , if we make a good experience with FSC and the block editor , that people will naturally switch away from page builders because they want to be doing work in the native environment . And what it does is it creates uncertainty around page builders , and uncertainty is a bad thing in business , right ? People don't want to be uncertain , right , and we go to scalability and maintainability . It's hard for me to say I'm building scalable , maintainable websites in an uncertain environment , right ? That has an uncertain future . That doesn't speak very well to scalability and maintainability . So I think he knows that it has that native advantage and he's like , oh , I'll just kill them eventually , so I don't need to tell them they need to go away . They just will eventually go away . I think that might be his strategy . I don't know .

Josh 45:57

Yeah , I don't know either . It is interesting because WordPress , since day one , has always been such a community-focused tool . It's one reason I've loved it , but it does seem like I mean I wondered that when the original talks were getting going about the block editor and Gutenberg and stuff , it's like , yeah , like if it does , it sure seemed like they would want a full in-house native experience , which I do understand For them . I would understand that . But again , at the same time , I mean take JustDivvy , for example . They've been working on the Divvy Builder since 2013, . Like 10 years of work , nonstop , full-time employees , developers all over the world working on Just the Builder . So how is even WordPress going to compete with that level of market research and design ? And the same thing with Elementor and Bricks and everything else . These builders and these companies have poured their probably millions of dollars and the bloods went into tears into crafting their own experiences . So , yeah , I have nothing else to add .

Kevin 46:54

That's why Matt's never going to come out and say I want Page Builders to go away . He's never going to say that because they'll just pull the plug themselves and they'll go , maybe make a competitor . There's no telling what would happen . But if he's just like , hey , you know what , like FSE1 , I don't know what to tell you , then the blood's not on his hands . He's like hey , it's competition , it is what it is . So what do you ?

Josh 47:18

again , we're just expressing our thoughts as WordPress guys and I'm sure , just like me , you're keeping it . Obviously you're probably keeping a better pulse than I am on the tech side of things . But I'm curious with Webflow and these other platforms , do you think that WordPress is almost at its peak , like do you think it's potential ? There's a potential that Webflow and some of these other platforms are going to creep up in percentage of use on websites and that WordPress may end up dipping in the next five , 10 years .

Kevin 47:46

I don't think so . I think that Webflow has the distinct disadvantage of being very expensive at the enterprise level , and you know there's always that baked in . It's like hey , if your site becomes really successful , get ready to shell out a lot of money to Webflow .

Josh 48:02

No , I do it by like traffic and hosting . Is that I think so ? Yeah , yeah .

Kevin 48:06

It's by like number of visits or something . Oh , screw that man , yeah , yeah . So I've heard of people like hitting the you know 100,000 visitors a month mark and now their bills is sky . It's like thousands of dollars a month and stuff . Wow . And one of those are bots .

Josh 48:18

How do they read that traffic ?

Kevin 48:19

I don't even know . I don't even know . It's crazy . So I don't think WordPress is at risk from any competitor because of its open source nature . Right , like everybody goes to WordPress . We don't use WordPress because it's the best CMS . We don't use WordPress because it has the best you know , page builder or whatever . We use WordPress because it has no limitation , right , and it has this gigantic ecosystem behind it and that's just . It's like an intangible asset , really , and that's why it's so protected against a lot of competitors .

Kevin 48:56

And somebody did ask you know what's the biggest threat to WordPress ? They asked Matt that directly and he basically said us like it's our , it's ourselves , which I haven't put enough thought into it . I don't know if that's the best answer , but it is actually like a good answer because you know , if they don't , if they aren't aggressive enough , if they , if they don't put all this stuff together properly , like FSE block editor , if they don't manage to execute their vision in a really good way , you could see a lot of people turning away to other things . I just don't know what they would go to right now . That's , that's the problem .

Josh 49:30

That's well said

WordPress Community

Josh 49:31

, Kevin . I think you hit the nail on the head there with the just the fact that WordPress does have such a community and there's so many assets that come along .

Kevin 49:39

People , yeah , the people behind , you know , not the direct contributors and so just all of the plugin developers , all the agency owners , all the people involved in WordPress using it as users and , as you know , product creators themselves . It's .

Josh 49:54

They're amazing , Like you know , yeah , and I don't have you ever like I have some students , because my community is agnostic towards any platforms . We just focus on the business side of things primarily . So yeah , you could I have people who use Squarespace , Webflow and others . But I do kind of wonder , like does Squarespace have like Squarespace camp and I mean , I don't think they do , I don't .

Josh 50:14

I don't think they do . Yeah , like I know that one of my students said they have smaller meet us , but I don't know of like a big annual come together . We're all here for each other community type thing and , and it's honestly probably by nature , with WordPress being open source and being literally community led , I mean they had like contributor day for everyone who contributes to WordPress before word camp started . So , yeah , there it's a great point , man , despite like any objection or hesitancy towards WordPress , and we can bitch all we want about the problems as a CMS and everything , but they do have so many other things going for them which does give me hope , at least for for the future .

Kevin 50:51

Yeah , for sure . Oh , just the . You know that one of the number one business kind of pieces of advice is , like when you're doing online stuff , is don't build your business on land that you don't own . And so the prospect of going to a Webflow or , you know , a Squarespace or a Wix it's like I'm building in a closed environment that I don't have any control over and that's just not a good business decision , like fundamentally . So the fact that WordPress gives you this open into nature and you can take it with you wherever you want it to go and where you , wherever you want to live , that , like I said , it's an intangible asset , right ? So I think it's going to stick around for sure for a very long time . It's just up to us to , to , you know , build great stuff on top of it .

Josh 51:40

Yeah , Well , I think that's a great closing thought , man . Yeah , yeah , I really appreciate hearing your insight on that , and we're at a really interesting time right now with WordPress and just websites in general , with page builders , and I go back to what you said earlier it's a great reminder for me as a teacher , and probably for you too , that people who are new to the space like how overwhelming it must feel now because it's like okay , I don't know to choose WordPress , squarespace or Wix or Webflow , okay , I'm going to go WordPress . Okay , cool , oh , by the way .

Kevin 52:11

Now you got to choose .

Josh 52:13

Now you got to choose block editor , gutenberg . You got to choose Divi or Elementor or Bricks or whatever it is , so it's multi-leveled . So it's a good reminder for me to try to make this simple Again , we'll link your one-on-one page builder a little free training course in there as well . I guess my last question for you , gary , because , kevin , because we'll , of course , have your automatic CSS frames . We'll have all that linked up For you , though , like personally , on your side of things , what are you most excited about moving forward here Is your focus on , like , automatic CSS or automatic CSS Excuse me , what's ? Yeah , what are you excited about ?

Kevin 52:49

Yeah , automatic CSS and frames , because what we're angling to do is , you know , our job is to sell people on the value of a framework . Right , and that's what I do in a lot of the videos that I create , a lot of the trainings that I make is showing I just I teach things , but I teach them while I'm using the framework , and then people end up saying like I really want that thing , you know , but we want to be the number one framework for WordPress Right

Divi 5 and the Future of WordPress Frameworks

Kevin 53:16

now . We're the number one framework for oxygen . We're the number one framework for bricks . We're coming soon to quickly . I don't know if you've heard of quickly .

Josh 53:23

I haven't . I saw you just about that recently .

Kevin 53:25

But yeah , quickly is actually for people that like the idea of building sites in the block editor natively but with a page builder experience , quickly is the way to go and it's a class first builder Very , very powerful they have actually . They're actually one of the only builders that have true component based functionality A lot of really good stuff coming with quickly . So we're going to be the number one framework with quickly . But as we move into the FSE space and the block editor with our own custom blocks and you know all the other ideas that we have coming , we want to be the number one framework for WordPress . So , like we're on a mission to make that happen .

Josh 54:03

Does it work with Divi , alameter and other builders ? It ?

Kevin 54:05

doesn't currently , because we look for class first builders to integrate with Gotcha , because it's so much of what we do is like you know , when people watch my trainings it's created a custom class style , the class with variables , and then you know that's the max scalability and maintainability . I wonder if Divi five it is kind of curious .

Kevin 54:25

I'm curious , I've got my eye on it because I'm looking at two things . I'm looking at how much are they cleaning up the DOM output , like the actual code output when you're building a website , like are they able to get rid of some of the div section stuff that's going on ? And number two is what are they going to allow in terms of variables in input fields ? So , because that's that's huge . Like we use a lot of variable stuff in our workflow and so somebody wants to put in padding right , it's like space M instead of like a value , like you know , 30 pixels or something like that it's . I want medium spacing or large spacing . It's actually like done on t-shirt sizes . So it's very easy for people to understand . That's cool .

Kevin 55:07

But if the builder doesn't allow you to use those variables , then you just can't use the framework . So that's why we haven't done it . But I'm really really interested in the rewrite because I'm a user for a while and you know I like to divana . Divi gets a lot of hate from certain people . I would much prefer Divi over Elementor , for example , and I'm really excited to see what 5.0 brings .

Josh 55:30

Well , you can join the beta program . I think it's it . Is it open to everybody ? Yeah , anyone can apply . Okay , that's what I saw .

Kevin 55:37

So do you have to like ? Get selected or like . Yeah , it is an application Okay .

Josh 55:41

It is specifically for developers . So , yeah , I'm announcing Divi 5 beta . This was last month Actually , just wow , just last week . Here I'm going to put this in the chat for you here , kevin . Okay , yeah , that's good . I'm only going to show notes too . But , yeah , you can apply for it . It is specifically for developers , so I would imagine you'd be fine with your brand and everything . Yeah , you can apply to join , but you'll get . I just , literally a couple of days ago , got the zip file for Divi five , so I haven't even opened up yet . So over the next couple of weeks I'm going to play around with it . It is like the very first phase , so it's probably pretty crude , but we'll be curious to see your thoughts , I imagine .

Kevin 56:16

I mean they've they've kind of they've learned so much from doing Divi for so long that that's what really excites me . It's like these are , these are people that know , like , exactly what needs to happen with a rewrite .

Josh 56:28

Yeah , and they're smart . It's a smart team man . I mean . I've known them for a long time . Um , I think it's actually one reason they didn't have a Divi meetup this year or a presence at word camp or been pretty hush hush online for the most part . They're like all in on this . So , um , I would not be surprised if if it is much more , I guess , developer friendly , maybe scalable friendly , um , yeah , yeah , but I'm sure they're just going to try to continue to market to the , to the designers as well , since that's such a big user base for , for elegant themes . But , yeah , actually , yeah , I'm kind of curious . I don't want to say it'll make or break Divi , but this is a huge turning point up ahead here with both word pressing with Divi .

Kevin 57:08

Yeah , it's always like when you come out with a gigantic rewrite , it's like um , I think a lot of people have very high expectations . So the risk is like , if you let them down , like if you , if it's just not like what people expected , then that there's definitely a lot of risk there . But you also have the ability to take a lot of people who had written off Divi and be like oh , now I'm , now I'm looking back at Divi right it it , you're right . It is like it could go either way .

Josh 57:33

Yeah . And one thing to consider too , for for elegant themes , I'm sure they're considering this is a big part of their community is just like wordpress . They have a ton of child theme creators and plugin developers and folks like myself who promote Divi and use it and teach on it . So , like they , I'm sure they're not going to want to break everyone's right .

Kevin 57:53

Have they talked about uh , how are they handling backwards compatibility and stuff .

Josh 57:57

No , I don't know . I I know that they broke this development down and I think four phases a lot faster than Gutenberg . Yeah , the multi year I don't know the timeline and everything , but in that video , if you get a chance to watch it on the Divi five beta , it is broken down into a few different phases . So now I was like crude phase one , but probably right down here , alec man , you'll probably have a blast of an afternoon .

Kevin 58:20

I'm excited . I'm excited Because if I , if I can integrate with another builder , I want to . You know , we're targeting as many as we possibly can . So yeah , and .

Josh 58:30

I think you probably agree with me and saying like there's not one right builder for everybody . There's so many options . Like you , I have students who absolutely love elementary and hate Divi . I didn't personally jive with elementary . I maybe that's just because I'm used to Divi , but I've heard the same thing from a lot of the people too . So the reality is there's so many different tools . Use what you feel good in if you trust the company and trust the direction . I actually liked that we spent a lot of time talking about the direction on all this , because this is important when it comes to choosing tools for your business . That's paying your bills . So , yeah , great stuff . Well , Kevin , thanks for your time . Dude , Really enjoyed chatting with you . I know we had a very brief meeting and a word camp , but I'm excited to continue to see what you're up to and keep in touch . Man , this has been awesome .

Kevin 59:14

Yeah , Thank you for having me and yeah , for sure , let's stay in touch , let's do it . Thanks , kevin Yep .

Josh 59:20

So there we go , friends . Kevin Geary . What an awesome time getting nerdy and talking shop Again . Dude is a wealth of knowledge when it comes to this stuff . You can find out more about him and follow all his stuff at gearyco . And if you are a bricks and oxygen user , definitely check out automatic CSS . I forget if we talked about this live or if it was after we stopped recording , but I asked him if automatic would work on a Divi and he says that's in the plan . I think they're going to wait to see what happens with Divi five here when it comes out . So keep an eye on all that Again . Really really great stuff that Kevin's up to . I really kind of am going to be leaning on him more and more to lead the way for , like the development side of things , as he's so far into that side of stuff , so really great having him on the show .

Josh 1:00:06

Thank you for listening , as always , and again , if I can help you out with your process specifically , be sure to join my web design process course . It's also a part of your membership . When you join my community web designer pro . Go to Josh Hall dot pro . Josh Hall dot co slash pro to join us there and I hope to help you with making awesome websites for each and every one of your clients in a scalable and maintainable way . I hope this conversation helps you as well , so see it in there . Until next time , friends , please leave a podcast review if you've been listening on Spotify or , ideally , on Apple , and I will see you on the next episode because we got some other fun ones coming up . So don't go anywhere . Make sure to subscribe . It sounds cheesy , but it really does help . So I'll see you on the next one . All right , friends , cheers .