Web Design Business with Josh Hall

384 - Will Etch Save WordPress? with Kevin Geary

• Josh Hall

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WordPress is in a tricky spot…and while still over 43% of websites on the internet use it, other platforms and builders are picking up steam and gaining in market share.

My big questions are:

  • Has WordPress reached it’s potential?
  • Is WP just for old dudes?
  • Will Gutenberg (aka the block editor) EVER improve?
  • Do people care more about WordPress or their page builder of choice?
  • Is the WordPress leadership team secretly a commune outside San Fran?


All of that and more is covered in this episode with repeat guest Kevin Geary.

Kevin has been on the leading edge of making products for WordPress which help designers build faster, best practice sites that are focused on maintainability and sustainability.

His new venture etchwp.com has loads of potential to not only rival and overtake the cumbersome native block editor, but many page builders as well.

If you know Kevin, you know there’s no fluff, no hiding opinions or stepping around honest thoughts. I always love talking to folks who are 100% transparent and that’s what you should expect in this one.

Head to the show notes to get all links and resources we mentioned along with a full transcription of this episode at joshhall.co/384

Kevin Geary:

There are predators circling WordPress, but they haven't been able to take it out, and that's only because it's open source. If WordPress was not open source, it would have died years and years and years ago, right? So what I've been saying is, hey, we better wake up, like. I don't think this ace in our back pocket of open source is going to be there forever, because there could be other open source providers that come along with a modern environment and like the experience that everybody wants. The WordPress is donezo at that point, right. So we don't have a lot of time. Clock is ticking. We might want to start taking things very seriously. 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 Hall:

Welcome, friends, into episode 384. This one doesn't need much of an intro. We're going to get right into it. Kevin Geary is back on the show. Those of you who are WordPress users probably know he needs no introduction.

Josh Hall:

The reality is, there's a whole lot going on with WordPress right now A lot of uncertainty, a lot of questions, a lot of things up in the air, a lot of leadership conundrums, a lot of drama. Who will sweep in to save the day? Will it be Kevin Geary with his new product Etch? Will that replace the god-awful gutenberg block header? Oh, so much more is covered in this one. Here's kevin geary. Make sure to head to the show notes for this one to get all the links that we talked about. We do cover quite a bit. That'll be at josh hallco, slash 384, and if this sounds of interest, obviously I recommend scratching your edge. Uh, that jokes right. Here we go, kevin. It's so good to have you back, man. Good to take some time to chat with you here. Let's just get into what the heck is freaking going on with WordPress. Freaking going on with WordPress. Let's have some fun. If you could describe the current situation that WordPress is in in one to three words. It can be as vulgar as it needs to be, what would it be?

Josh Hall:

And it could be three separate words and they could be three states. What's the state of WordPress?

Kevin Geary:

You know, it's like that old relationship thing where somebody just says it's complicated. You know, that's what I would say it's complicated, it's a complicated situation. We have a community of people that's massive, obviously, and brilliant, talented, passionate people, and those people are, for the most part I think we have to keep our eye on this ball Like, those people are responsible for the success of WordPress. I mean, it's thousands of freelancers and agencies and DIYers and these are the people that really, really really have moved WordPress forward, along with all of the third party developers that have built all of the tools that we use on top of WordPress on a daily basis to do the work that we are doing. I think a lot of people and Matt thinks Matt is highly responsible for all of the success of WordPress, or a big part, or whatever, and considers himself to be driving the ship or whatnot.

Kevin Geary:

But I look to the third-party developers and I look to the community when I say why is WordPress successful? And really specifically, it's third-party developer tools Element or Divi. You cannot discount the impact that these tools have had, whereas if we say, well, what has automatic really done? Well, there's that Gutenberg thing, you know, that most people opt out of and a lot of people are still standoffish about. So, you know, I look to the elementers, the divvies, the third-party developers, the agencies. These are the people moving. So I have just stayed out of the drama and I'm like it doesn't matter, like he doesn't he, and that drama doesn't really matter to me. I'm more concerned with what the community is doing.

Josh Hall:

So we just joked before. I think like one second before we hit record, we said like etch may be the only optimistic thing, aside from some. I'm excited about Divi five and some other upgrades and other builders and tools, but I'm wondering where is the optimism right now? Is it with? Is it with these third party builders?

Kevin Geary:

Yes, it 100% is, especially with regard to Etch, because Etch brings something new to the table. It brings a brand new experience for using WordPress. It's not just a page builder. It's not just like a new element or a new divvy or something like that.

Kevin Geary:

There are a lot of aspects of WordPress that people are not super excited about. There's the disjointed WP admin UI. You know where you have half of the old UI and then in FSE land it's a completely like new modern UI and that's confusing and it's not great. And media management that's not super fantastic. Nobody's super hyped about media management in WordPress. They're always asking for more features. They're probably never going to come. If they do, it's just going to be years down the line.

Kevin Geary:

You know major stuff has to be refactored in WordPress because it's very old, and you're looking at core functionality that people really rely on, like custom post types and custom fields not being native probably never will be native, existing in what I call magic areas, and this creates a very disjointed workflow. There's a disjointed UI. There's a disjointed workflow. We have the theme system, which we could get into, which I think is super archaic and should be abandoned ASAP, and you look at something like Etch, where you get everything that you need to do your job. You get the page building experience, but you also get the code editing experience inside of that, which has never happened before, really, in wordpress.

Kevin Geary:

You get the media management, you get the custom post types and custom fields. You get you get all the things that you wanted wordpress to be in a single package and in a new layer, and you don't have to wait on Matt and you don't have to wait on automatic to find the funding or find the people or whatever they need to do that they haven't been able to do to to unify this experience. And so, yes, when people like that's literally what we're hearing people use etch and their feedback is not like, oh, this is fantastic, or this is better than Element, or this is better, that's not the feedback. The feedback is this is what I always wanted WordPress to be, or this is absolutely what WordPress should become Like. That's the kind of feedback that we're getting and, yeah, that's why people are, and should be excited.

Josh Hall:

When did when did you take it seriously? I mean, my first impression of Etch was that it was going to rival the Gutenberg and just the native block editor. But as upon skimming your videos and hearing some real-time feedback from folks, I have a student, Antoine, who's a super fan of yours and really, really enjoys Etch. So far he's an early adopter. Yeah, it seems like it's much more than just that. Enjoys that. So far he's an early adopter. Yeah, it seems like it's much more than just that. But I guess I'm curious like when were you?

Kevin Geary:

like damn it. I got to do this thing Cause we can't wait on WordPress anymore. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's a great question. Um, people ask me for years to build a page builder and and I actually did a long thread on Twitter about this, uh, yesterday, um, and I said no, I said no, like repeatedly, and I'm on live stream after live stream, like every live stream. I did cause I did weekly live streams for a long time that I would just say no, no, no, no, no, we're not going to do it. And it's cause I didn't really have a good vision for what it was supposed to be and what, like, the next era of WordPress was supposed to look like and what the next era of page building and WordPress was supposed to look like. And I don't like building lookalike products and Me Too, products. Oh, you got a product, me too. Oh, I'm just going to do it a little bit better. We don't like doing that. We like bringing actual innovation to the table.

Kevin Geary:

And it was until last year, probably the beginning of last year, where I started to get a really clear picture of what needed to happen, and my CTO Mateo put a couple other pieces into place. Happen, and my CTO Mateo, put a couple other pieces into place and we just started looking at the landscape of, first of all, like what was the premise that these tools were all built on and why have they made the decisions they've made? Why do they have the limitations? Why do you know, professionals and aspiring professionals tend to look at a lot of these tools and say I would never use that. Why do they say that and why do those limitations and problems exist? And we started to realize that all of that is essentially self-imposed. These are not technical limitations, they're just self-imposed limitations because they're designing software for a specific user and that user tends to be because it's the biggest market DIY, beginner, et cetera, et cetera, not aiming at, like, the professional, because it was always like well, the professional will just live in a code editor or whatever they do. They do their stuff over there. They're never going to use this anyway. That was kind of the theory or the thesis, right, and we've completely like turned that on its head. And we know that when professionals, even coders, use an environment like Etch where they can visually see what they're doing, but they have no limitation.

Kevin Geary:

That's the thing is, there was always a tremendous cost to using these page builders. It was a cost in terms of your code output. It wasn't clean code, in accessibility issues and limitations in functionality issues and limitations. There was this cost and professionals would never tend to say, ok, I will accept those costs, like they don't want those costs, right. And so we build an environment that doesn't have those costs but brings all of the efficiency and all of the ease and all of the unification where I'm not bouncing around back and forth from VS code to the block, editor to some other thing, editor to some other thing. Um, all of that put together creates an environment where they're like oh, okay, this is like. This is literally a, a new era for, for wordpress, how?

Josh Hall:

does. How does edge fit in with other builders? I'll ask some kind of basic one. I was one questions on behalf of anyone who doesn't know really anything about this. Like, yeah, is this? Uh, again, my first thought was, or my impression was, that it was just a better block editor, but much more than that. It sounds like it can replace builders as well. Where does this fit in in the WordPress ecosphere? Like, are people going to be able to choose Elementor, divi or Etch or Bricks or Etch, or is Etch going to be the one to replace them all, including the editor? I mean, is that what we're looking at Essentially?

Kevin Geary:

yes, so we call Etch a unified development environment so you can do all of your development work in Etch when you're building a website, just like Bricks or Element or Divi allows you to build a page and you can build templates with it and so on and so forth. You can do that in Etch. You can, for sure, do that in Edge. But Edge goes well beyond all of that. You can manage media in Edge, you can create custom post types and custom fields and it's built. It's the first environment where, instead of saying how can we build an environment that's easy for beginners and lay people and DIYers to use, which is pretty much the premise of every existing tool we are the first environment that says how can we truly innovate a professional workflow in WordPress? And so we give access to the code right. We create, we prioritize features like true component functionality where you have props and insane levels of conditional logic available to you. You can author JavaScript, you can author PHP.

Kevin Geary:

We've done things where the CSS like there are styling panels, just like you will find an element or a divvy right, so you can add an element to the page via drag and drop. You don't have to write code if you don't want to write code, but you do have access to the code and if you select an element, you change the background color. What we have is it's called bidirectional CSS authoring, so there's style sheets attached to the elements. Right when I fill out the background input, I can see Etch writing the CSS right there and if I want to touch that CSS, I can edit the CSS and it will edit the input as well. They're bidirectionally related together. So there's no cost to using input panels like there are in other editors. So there's no cost to using input panels like there are in other editors. All everything that we are doing, the loops, the logic, all of it is designed for professional use. But it's also in a package where, if a beginner wants to come and learn and this is, like I think, the biggest point, because there's two different scenarios that are going to happen as a beginner.

Kevin Geary:

If you're a beginner and you're, like I, want to learn web design, ok, if you go into Elementor, you are not going to learn web design as much as you are going to learn Elementor. Like it is a proprietary workflow. They use proprietary names for things. They don't follow standard practices. You're going to learn Elementor and you can get confident in Elementor and all of that, right. But if you really going to learn Elementor and you can get confident in Elementor and all of that, right. But if you really want to learn web design, you need to go on a tool that speaks the language of web design. And Etch speaks the language of web design. And so when you're learning in Etch, you will come out empowered to actually know what you are doing, and then you're going to be using a tool that doesn't have any limitations. So, yes, it replaces to answer your question it would replace an Element element or replace a divvy. You can do all the page building stuff in it. You just don't have any of the limitations of those tools. And you can do other things with a unified workflow, like creating custom post types and custom fields, managing my media. I don't have to go somewhere else to do those things, which that does.

Kevin Geary:

That disjointed workflow does come at a tremendous cost. You know, if you are having to stop what you're doing, you're building an about page or whatever, and you're ready to make your team grid. I use this example all the time. I want to create a team grid, right, all my team members on there. Well, the best way to do that is to create a custom post type for your team members. This is how you manage content in WordPress.

Kevin Geary:

Well, in order to do that, I have to stop what I'm doing in every other tool and I have to leave the tool and I have to go to a different tool, usually something called ACF or Metabox. Right, that's where I create my CPT, which, by the way, is an add on for WordPress. You can even do this natively in WordPress. And then, when I create the CPT, I need to attach custom fields to it. Well, where do I go to do that? We have to go to a different area. So, in a completely different area, creating these custom fields, and when I'm done doing all that, I have to go to a different area to put the data in for those things, to put the person's name in and their headshot and all of that. That's a different area. So I'm now four different areas into this workflow before I can then go back to the tool I was already in and finally make the grid with a loop, pulling those team members in.

Kevin Geary:

That is a very inefficient, disjointed workflow, and this happens dozens and dozens and dozens of times across normal projects, where in Etch, none of that has to happen. In Etch I'm building the about page, I get to the part where I need to create my CPT. Okay, just create my CPT right there in Etch and then I create the custom fields right there in Etch and it's all native in WordPress. It's not proprietary to Etch, okay, and we'll talk about the block editor in just a second. But I'm able to. I'm even able to put the data in for my team members in that custom post type, because I can manage posts, I can manage pages in Etch. I don't have to go anywhere else. So tremendous efficiency, zero limitations. And then, really, the icing on the cake. The icing on the cake is that Etch is the first environment that liberates your data completely out of the builder.

Kevin Geary:

Okay, so where?

Kevin Geary:

If you build something in Elementor, it's trapped in Elementor.

Kevin Geary:

If you build it in Divi, it's trapped in Divi.

Kevin Geary:

Okay, all these tools, they all work the same way. Etch has a feature that we call automatic block authoring, where essentially, it takes everything that you build and it converts it to core Gutenberg blocks automatically and it keeps them bidirectionally synced. And so if I build a page in Etch and I hit save and I go back to the block editor. That exact page that I just built will be sitting right there in the block editor and it's no longer even related to Etch at that point and the site renders with the block editor. So we're liberating people's data and the block editor now becomes a very simple client editing interface where a client, if a client, needs to edit content, they can just log in, open the block editor, do some simple content editing, hit publish. That all comes back into Etch, but it also goes to the front end. It's just bidirectionally synced at all times and everybody has a great experience. The pros can do the pro things, the clients can do the client things. It's all native in WordPress and it's just a great experience.

Josh Hall:

Well, you just answered like five of my next questions there, Kevin I was curious about how the block editor would literally fit and work in with this, but that makes a whole ton of sense. You mentioned the admin area for WordPress.

Kevin Geary:

What about?

Josh Hall:

that. Does that affect that you?

Kevin Geary:

mentioned the admin area for WordPress. What about that? Does that affect that? It doesn't. It doesn't change the admin.

Kevin Geary:

What we essentially determined was if I can, if we can just make those aspects of the admin that we think are never going to be improved or the improvements are far off into the future and people are just going to keep begging and begging and begging.

Kevin Geary:

It's not that we need to do it, it's that we need to create a tool and a workflow where people it just makes those areas irrelevant. You know, if I can manage my posts and pages in etch, I'll just do that because it's a modern interface and it's lightning fast and it's got way more control and I can see I can control the data columns and everything that I want to see the way I want to see it. Why would I ever go into the WordPress version of that? If I can create custom post types and custom fields, why would I ever go into ACF or Metabox and those old school interfaces and all? There's just no reason to. So you just avoid them and essentially what the workflow becomes is you pull up your site, you hit edit in Etch and then everything happens there and you don't have to go anywhere else, and it's just, it's nice.

Josh Hall:

You're a bricks guy. Well, maybe until etch. How's that? Are you gonna leave bricks then, once that's? Yes, I've already left.

Kevin Geary:

yeah, I've already left. I've already left bricks. Um, I've done, I've been doing all the videos on my channel, um, for the past month or so have been in etch um. You know we're that far along, like my uh, the digital gravy site is rebuilt in etch um and the my garyco site is being rebuilt in etch right now. Like we're building real sites with it, which we said our goal was one year to build brochure sites. We're way ahead of schedule on that and the brochure sites thing is even going to like it's. We're even well beyond that. I mean, we have the most powerful components of any environment. We have an extremely powerful conditional logic engine. We have the most robust selector system out of any environment like this. You have the free code editing, you have the auto block authoring, so much of the magic is already happening. So, yeah, it's going to be quick, is it a theme or again?

Josh Hall:

I'm going to stick with some very elementary questions. Is it a theme or is?

Kevin Geary:

it a plugin? Going to stick with some very elementary questions Is it a theme or is it a plugin? A really good question. It's, um, it's both. So the, the entire environment, is a plugin. So you add the etch plugin, but for the auto block authoring and to hook into WordPress's FSC system. Because, again, if you make a template in uh, let's say, you make a blog post template in Etch, that template actually exists in WordPress FSC. Like, if I go into FSC's template area, I will see that blog post template right there. It is all native. Everything that you're doing is converted to native WordPress, right? So that aspect of it, in order to hook in, has to be done through a theme, because that's WordPress's architecture. So essentially, what we give you is the plugin, which does pretty much everything, and then the theme, which is just a blank block theme. Essentially, that enables the block functionality.

Josh Hall:

Okay, I was just curious if there is a way to use a combo of Etch and something like Divi or a page builder for like. If we were to use Divi for like, certain pages, if that's what somebody's comfortable with, but then use Etch for blog posts and repeating content and client stuff, sounds like that setup wouldn't work, though right, I don't know if they could.

Kevin Geary:

I mean, maybe theoretically they could exist side by side. It would be a situation where the site was already built with Divi, for example, and you wanted to tack on a landing page that you wanted to build with Etch. Maybe you would have them exist side by side, but if you're starting a new project, it just you wouldn't need Divi at that point, Like Divi wouldn't be required for anything that you're going to do on the project.

Josh Hall:

So it's plugin and the theme. Is that right? Are there two uploads?

Kevin Geary:

Yeah, the theme essentially doesn't do anything related to what you're. All it does is hook into WordPress's architecture. That's all it does.

Josh Hall:

Well, I want to just highlight what you said a little bit ago which is crucial and I think I don't know of anyone else in the industry is doing this to where you have the options available for the pros and an option for the clients with the basic block editor. I mean you could do similar things with Divi and other builders, as you know, to create like a basic template or just use the text editor block editor. I mean you could do similar things with Divi and other builders, as you know, to create like a basic template or just use the text editor or block editor. But I mean we're running into so many problems now that we're years into WordPress. I have my own issues with joshhallco, which is Divi 4, slow and unscalable. I've made it unscalable. You would not have been happy with Josh, you know.

Josh Hall:

10 years ago, when I came out with that site, but I didn't know any better. So, um, it is interesting because now that we are years into particularly WordPress and a lot of these agencies are running so many different sites with certain builds, I mean I do feel like you are on the forefront of a lot of happy people in 10 years, you know like looking back and like thank. God, we didn't create a blog or a podcast that has, you know, 500 episodes using one builder. It's a native platform, yeah.

Kevin Geary:

Yeah, absolutely. Plus, you know we're getting into the era of AI and obviously that's going to be a big part of people's workflow going forward, be a big part of people's workflow going forward. I really feel strongly that if you are going to use AI to assist you in your workflow, you should absolutely be using a tool that speaks the language of web design. Why? Because AI speaks the language of web design. Ai doesn't speak Elementor, ai doesn't speak Divi or anything else. It speaks the language of web design, and the examples that you're going to get, by the way, are supplied in code, okay. And so if you're asking Grok or Claude or ChatGPT, hey, can you build me a nav menu that looks like this and has these requirements? It's going to spit back HTML and CSS and JavaScript.

Kevin Geary:

Okay, the ability to import those things into another builder not so much, whereas in Edge I can literally take the HTML it gives me and I can paste it in and everything just renders and I can attach the CSS, because we're going to have a we already have the prototype for it, but we're going to have. We're going to be the first environment that I know of where you can literally import HTML and then scan a URL and say find the style sheets that are on this URL, find the styles that belong to this thing I just imported, and import just those things, and it will import it. And then that section that you're trying to import, or that component or whatever it is, will just come to life with no bloat, with no excess stuff being imported. You're gonna be able to just take HTML and CSS and even JavaScript from anywhere and just plug it in and play. You're gonna have AI in the interface where you're saying, hey, I need you to do this.

Kevin Geary:

Ok, it's going to do it all inside of Etch, with Etch's native controls. That is vastly different from an experience standpoint than trying to use a builder that does not give you code access. Because when you don't have code access and AI spits back we know AI is not perfect AI is going to spit back something imperfect and you're going to say, ah, it's not exactly what I wanted. And then you're gonna have to reprompt it and then reprompt again. And then we all know also that as you reprompt and it fixes those things, it's like tends to break other things and it's like, man, if you just gave me the code, I could fix it, like I can make it the way I want to, but you can't touch the code in these other environments.

Josh Hall:

That's a really important point too with the AI thing. Just because, like, there's Divi AI and does Elementor have AI, they probably do, I feel like every, every page, a lot of it.

Kevin Geary:

Most of it is just content related, though right now I think it's not structural much, yeah, and said it's it's based off of that builder.

Josh Hall:

So, yes, no, that's a great, great point. I'm really curious because I feel like you're still using circle for your inner circle, right, yes, so it's a very it's. It's not fair to compare them because circle is so different from wordpress, of course, in every regard, but the last couple years, I think, probably around the time when you really made Etch a priority and a focus, I've just realized these other companies are just light years ahead with innovation and getting things out quickly. I am like astonished by how slow and fragile and like stuck the wordpress team is from the leadership down, and again, I know, you know I would.

Josh Hall:

I'm not envious of that role. It's 44 percent of the internet still right now, plus maybe, um, you know, because of all the third party builders and apps and developers, that every little decision has so many layers behind it, but still, I just I don't know. I guess, hearing you talk about when you did this, it just kind of felt like we all got to a point where like, okay, this is just not going to get better. It's just not, gutenberg is never going to get to a place where it's like this is awesome.

Kevin Geary:

Yeah Well, a lot of people don't realize they've been doing it for seven years. You know, the Gutenberg project started seven years ago. It still doesn't have responsive controls. It still doesn't have a lot of the basics we just figured out. Because we're adding SVG support into Etch, it has no support for SVGs. You can't add an SVG element in the block editor.

Kevin Geary:

After seven years, this craziness, it's lunacy and it's because they hide behind the. It's an open source project and we all have to come together and you need to be a contributor and da, da, da, da da. I think a lot of that is. They like the advantages of open source in terms of free work and marketing and you know, just open source attracts a lot of attention in those ways. But when it comes to actually getting things done, that's what they hide behind that wall of excuses. Well, I mean, you know it doesn't even make any sense. Like you can, you can literally have a team the way you have in any in any software company. You can literally have people assigned to do things like I. Just just I repeatedly hear that wordpress, from an organization standpoint, is a lot of people just kind of wandering around, just doing, kind of working on what they want to work on and there's not a lot of direction.

Josh Hall:

I feel like it's a commune like I feel like, you know like they're just all in like robes and it's very like. Well, bro, what should we do today?

Kevin Geary:

it's a lot of that. I mean, I've heard it from insiders that, like you know, yeah, that's kind of the, it's kind of the vibe. So yeah, I think it's a leadership issue. For sure it's not a funding issue. It is now. It is now they've pulled the funding because of the WP engine and all of that, but it was not a funding issue before, it was just an organization issue and a leadership issue and an excuse making issue.

Kevin Geary:

You know there's a lot of excuses for like why something can't get done or why it hasn't been done or whatever. And you know like they always I've been told 15000 times like, well, go contribute the feature. So many people have contributed features and they go absolutely nowhere. And there's no transparency on who actually, at the end of the day, approves or disapproves a feature from being included, and so there's no guarantee that if you spend all the time working on the feature that it's actually going to be put into core and it's just a it's, it's a distraction, it's like, oh, here's a guy complaining. Let's just let's send him down a rabbit hole of go go work on the feature yourself and then maybe he'll just get lost in that rabbit hole and we'll never see him again.

Kevin Geary:

I think that's literally why they tell people that. So yeah, it's never going to, it's not going to get better, it's a very, very slow thing and it's not going to change anytime soon, in my opinion. So we have to just build on top of it. That, just build on top of it. That's what I've always said, like that's already. Where the success came from was building on top of it. If Elementor didn't, it did not exist, and and Divi and Beaver and all of those, a gigantic portion of WordPress's community would not exist. Those are pivotal, pivotal tools in that era of WordPress and we can't discount that, and it's going to stay that way going forward.

Josh Hall:

That's a great point and I do think there's a lot to say about the, the respect of the, the first round of page builders especially.

Kevin Geary:

I mean I was I've been using divi since early 2014 and yeah, I mean, back in those days it was just an absolute game changer, but yeah, I mean that that's literally what empowered people to do to transform wordpress from a blogging engine into something where people are actually building huge marketing sites, dynamic websites, e-commerce sites like that. Automatic didn't do anything to facilitate that. That was all third party developers coming in and enabling that to happen. And if that did not happen in the third party market, it was going to be gatekept by coders, essentially because and that's still if you, they tell me all the time like, oh, the block header doesn't do that thing that you want it to do Open VS Code and make a custom block. No, come on man, this is 2025. Like, this is not what we should be doing. It should not be like oh, our basic thing doesn't get the job done, so now you got to open a completely different environment and hook into this thing. Come on man.

Josh Hall:

This is craziness. This is not going to move anybody forwards. What's interesting is the change of the DIY landscape recently, over the past couple of years in particular. I don't think there's any coincidence that late 23 is when things shifted from what I saw in WordPress and just web design in general. But you mentioned the DIY thing earlier. Now I don't see WordPress as a DIY solution at all.

Kevin Geary:

I mean as you mentioned.

Josh Hall:

Divi Elementor, more so than Divi, even as far as like DIY is doing it. But to be honest, if you're a small business owner and you're trying to tinkle around with yourself, or even if you're just a very, very newbie web designer or junior, there's these tools. I mean Wix Studio. It gets a little more complicated. You can with wix studio, but squarespace show all these others are so much better positioned for diy tools. So wordpress. I think the the real conundrum they're in is like, yeah, do they just go all in helping the pros? But I mean, you're taking that seat for them. Like what, what? They can't, they're not going to help the pros. I think they're in a very. They're stuck in between a rock and a hard place with, like our DIYers are fleeting. We've got these builders. Our core stuff is just terrible right now. So Kevin's here to save us all. You're here to save WordPress, aren't you?

Kevin Geary:

I said years ago. I said years ago wordpressorg. There are two different forms of WordPress. There can be, and there can be many, many, many of them. Actually, WordPressorg is the core software, but nothing is stopping a hosting company from like automatic Automatic is a hosting company, okay, Nothing is stopping them from taking the core WordPress experience and transforming it into a different experience for a specific type of user. Okay, and that's what wordpresscom does. In a lot of ways, it does it poorly, but that's what it does. It's what it attempts to do, and any hosting company can actually do that if they want, if they want to do that. And what I told people years ago and the person I told it to and a bunch of other people looked at me like a goldfish and. But it rings true. It's still true to this very day and it's proving itself to be more and more and more true every day that goes by. Wordpressorg is a professional platform. It is a platform for. It is not a platform for my mom or her cousin or anybody else off the street.

Kevin Geary:

And you could just look at the fundamental aspects of this, why you got to choose a hosting company. Well, they're already my mom's already out on that right there, she had no idea what you're talking about. You have to one click install it. Then, as soon as you log in, you have to understand this concept of plugins and themes. You have to go through an entire theme library not realizing that the theme you're choosing is not just look and feel, but it's actually architecture, because WordPress made the brilliant, brilliant decision to marry look and feel with architecture in themes. Okay, that, which is another massive mistake which they're continuing to make with the block editor. I don't know why. Um, and then if you've finally picked a theme which also kind of picture architecture, you're then in a situation where it's like, okay, I need, I need plugins to add on functionality, because that's not core. And if you just pick any piece of functionality, like I need a slider, Okay, Well, it's not just go find a slider plugin. It's literally like how about you try out 10 slider plugins and see which one actually is going to do what you needed to do versus might have some deal breaking limitation that you don't even know about?

Kevin Geary:

Navigating this. There's so many prerequisites. There's understanding posts versus pages, understanding permalink structure. These are all very, very technical things and WordPress does not make it easy. There's no onboarding experience. And that has led me to conclude WordPressorg is for people who know what the hell they're doing. It's not for my mom, it's not for the mom, it's not for the rando business owner.

Kevin Geary:

Okay, Rando business owners that are on WordPress are on WordPress most often because they hired somebody who said we're going to build your site on WordPress, and now they're a WordPress user. Okay, they didn't choose WordPress, they didn't go. Oh, that looks like the most friendly environment Wix, Squarespace. They are dominating WordPress in the beginner and the DIYer market because they have a unified experience that takes all of those technical hurdles and gets rid of them. And WordPress is unable to do that, completely unable to do that, except for WordPresscom or any hosting provider.

Kevin Geary:

So I said for a long time and this is what killed me about it the block editor especially, by the way. So they built this whole native block editor thing and it's super simple and dumbed down. And I was like why is it so simple and dumbed down? Why can't a professional actually do work in this? And they're like well, you have to think about the layperson.

Kevin Geary:

And again, I'm like the layperson who's not using wordpressorg because it's so technical, because all the other 10 hurdles they couldn't get past. So you have to get past 10 technical hurdles to make it to what they call is like a dumbed down super basic environment. None of that makes any sense, it's not been thought through and we need to abandon that completely. We need to accept wordpressorg for what it is. It is an open source CMS for professionals to do professional work on, and sure you can onboard people onto it like the professional can onboard somebody else and help them and assist them and all of that. But it's not just for people off the street to walk in and sign up like it's fucking Wix and have a good experience. That's not going to happen.

Josh Hall:

Yeah, it's so true. We had a family friend who, about our age, like pretty savvy too and I remember just she couldn't even get wordpress installed and it was just like, I mean, most people, yeah, it's to us, it's like, oh yeah, you go here and you're here, but to delay, and yeah, even a basic install is like rocket science. So, yeah, very, very interesting times that we're living in with wordpress. Do you know the statistics, like where are some of these other platforms? As far as popularity? I mean, I know, obviously population is growing. That means more people are online. So, you know, percentage may be skewed, even if the numbers are down for WordPress. But where's, like, the best place to see the latest stats? Do you go to, like W3Tech or whatever it is?

Kevin Geary:

You can go to BuiltWith. You can go to BuiltWith and check the Wix stats. You can check them against Squarespace. Wix is dominating in a lot of ways. A lot of people are hype on Framer. I think mainly it's designers that they don't really know anything about the coding side of things, because Framer's code output is absolutely atrocious and there's a lot of limitations with it, and it's just here's the thing like WordPress.

Kevin Geary:

Why does WordPress still exist? Because it's kind of a dinosaur. It doesn't have an onboarding experience, it's really only for professionals, but it continues to dominate. It continues to dominate because it has the ace in its back pocket, which is it's open source. So if you look at Wix, it's not open source, squarespace not open source, webflow not open source, and so that's the linchpin of WordPress that they've been essentially surviving on. I mean, it's like we have there are predators circling WordPress, but they haven't been able to take it out, and that's only because it's open source. If WordPress was not open source, it would have died years and years and years ago, right? So what I've been saying is hey, we better wake up, like. I don't think this ace in our back pocket of open source is going to be there forever because there could be other open source providers that come along with a modern environment and like the experience that everybody wants.

Kevin Geary:

The WordPress is done, though at that point Right, so we don't have a lot of time. Clock is ticking. We might want to start taking things very seriously, whether that's via Edge, and of course, automatic's not going to take it seriously. We already know their MO, so I think Edge kind of positions this as all right. We've got the open source thing and now we have a modern environment that sits on top of it and we can do our work. And, by the way, the client, the beginner, the lay person who's being onboarded, can come in and use that very simple block editor to just do their content edits and hit publish and call it a day, right. So everybody's happy and nothing huge needs to change.

Josh Hall:

We both run communities and I don't know anyone who has joined my community under probably 25 who uses WordPress. I mean, there is a massive, massive, and that may not be completely fair to say. We may have a few, but but that may be more of like. They looked up web design on Spotify, I saw my podcast and then I, you know, helped get them into wordpress. But what I'm trying to say is the generation coming up is not going into wordpress. It is a dinosaur. It's viewed like that, it's labeled like that, it is like that in a lot of ways. Um, what needs to change? Is it etch? Is it? Is it? Is it the onboarding? Is it the positioning?

Kevin Geary:

or is it fair to just not worry about that positioning? Well, it's the positioning?

Josh Hall:

Or is it fair to just not worry about that and just be the place where the pros go?

Kevin Geary:

Yeah, that's exactly it. It's the positioning. It's positioning. If you try to continue to position WordPress as a Wix competitor or a Squarespace competitor, wordpress is going to lose that battle every single time. And it's not just going to lose the battle on the onboarding experience and people actually being able to technically do things on the platform. It's going to lose in terms of marketing Wix's marketing dollars versus what's put into work. I mean, it's like it's like a it's a behemoth against a child Like it's, it's, it's.

Kevin Geary:

it's not even a competition. It's not even a competition. How does WordPress?

Josh Hall:

even market, by the way, I don't.

Kevin Geary:

I competition. Um, how does wordpress even market, by the way? I don't. I don't know if I honestly really does not. It doesn't, it doesn't. So we go back to why is it successful? Um, it's successful because millions of agencies and freelancers onboard people. They, they use the software as professionals and the and clients come to them all the time.

Kevin Geary:

I mean this used to happen to me over and over and over again hey, we need a new website? Okay, great, what's your existing one on? It's on GoDaddy. It's like, okay, well, we use WordPress, here's why, here's all the benefits. And then I'm like, oh, yeah, sure. Well, guess what? Now that person's a WordPress user, now their site's on WordPress, and we're just constantly doing this popular. It's because of us. It's because of us, right, and people are educated on that, like I would. I would probably.

Kevin Geary:

It would stand to reason that those young people that you're talking about haven't done a lot of thinking on open source philosophy, haven't done a lot of thinking on why should I be on an open source platform, what does it mean to own my content and own my website and not have to lease it from somebody else? And if I'm going to build a real, actual business, why should I do that on my land and not somebody else's land? Those are like very important philosophical discussions that young people typically don't tend to have, and so they need to be educated on that. Well, who educates them? Well, I automatically not doing any marketing, wordpress not doing any marketing.

Kevin Geary:

So they have to watch WordPress being for professionals, you know. If they're deciding I don't want to be a professional, like, I just want a website, okay, well, like they're not going to watch the pro tutorials and adopt WordPress and all of this. So, yeah, we have to focus on our people. Our people is do you want to be a professional web designer on the modern web and an open source platform? Then you need to be using WordPress and now we take those people in and we don't worry about anybody else. The other people will be onboarded by the people that we get.

Josh Hall:

Yeah, you're totally right. You just you just laid out a beautiful marketing strategy for WordPress. It's very similar to how I recommend that web designers sell the value of a website compared to social media when clients are like what do I need a website if I have a Facebook page?

Josh Hall:

It's rented land. It's not your home, it's you know you're at the mercy of their whim. That is truly the marketing gold for WordPress, I think. Very, very interesting point there, and I only mentioned that because I'm just wondering younger entrepreneurs getting into web design or marketing today. I don't know if maybe there's just more of an emphasis on design and aesthetics or if there is just an aura of wordpress being old. I mean, I say this because one of my younger web designer pro members was like I logged into wordpress and it just looked awful and I was like yeah, yeah, yeah, I, I get it, I can't yeah, I get first, like I understand.

Kevin Geary:

So, yeah, they log into etch and they won't. There won't be the problem.

Josh Hall:

Yeah, because I think you end up going with framer or one of those. So, uh, yeah, it is another interesting. Just you know, as as I'm really thinking about the next five to ten years, as far as we can just looking at the landscape, I think that's another hurdle. But I think you're totally right, kevin. Like, like, the core of WordPress in people terms is already there. There are, you know, hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of solopreneurs and agencies using WordPress as their main builders. So I feel like it's really just a matter of strengthening the core, what's already there to help it succeed.

Kevin Geary:

Strengthening yes, strengthening the core, actually putting out very helpful content, pushing professional development forwards and really appealing to people who want to be professionals, which, by the way, includes designers. And this is a good point that you made, because this is how Webflow really kicked WordPress's ass. For a very long time, they appealed to and actively recruited very talented designers, and when very talented designers come in, as you know, you can build a great looking website on almost anything, right? So, yeah, the technical side of it might be hugely different, but somebody just surface level looking at like, oh, there's a website on the internet. You can build a very beautiful, awesome, modern website on pretty much any platform, right? So if you have a bunch of talented designers rushing into Webflow, building these beautiful sites on Webflow, and then people are like it creates a culture of like Webflow, good design, modern, goes to get like. That's a narrative that people attach onto and it attracts more talented designers and more talented people, right, wordpress is the opposite. Wordpress does not attract, it attracts everybody and it attracts a lot of people.

Kevin Geary:

And this is crazy to me, like I went to WordCamp WordCamp, eu right, were you at EU last year? Okay, okay. The running discussion underlying everything was have you seen the WCEU website? Have you seen it on mobile? It's awful looking. It didn't work on mobile. This is a WordCamp. This is an official organization sponsored event, not like a local meetup. Yeah, and I was like guys, I was like you got to understand this.

Kevin Geary:

Like this is an official, organization sponsored event, not like a local meetup. Yeah, and I was like guys, I was like you got to understand this? Like do you think Webflow would be caught fucking dead with a website looking like this for their platform? No, like, what are we doing? And people look at that and that contributes to the oh, I see a dinosaur looking website came out of a dinosaur looking CMS. What is the conclusion? That every single person is going to come to, not the one we want them to come to, right, and so we're not doing ourselves any favor in that regard. I'm talking about people at the top and the people putting these organization events together. Like we got to get our shit together. We've got to get our shit together and stop.

Josh Hall:

Stop shooting ourselves in the foot like this so I have a two-part question and it's together here because I want to ask you, like when and if there is a time to not use wordpress, you chose circle, like I did for your community. Why did you choose circle and not just use an lms or something on wordpress or a community plugin or something?

Kevin Geary:

yeah, it came down to technical stuff. With regard to like I, first of all, I think communities, like community functionality and you look at things like push notifications is a very simple one. It is a it's, it's, it's an app based thing, and trying to do this on WordPress not that you can't, it's just you're sticking a square peg into a round hole is what it feels like, and like you might be able to cram it in there, but it's just not going to be. It's not the best fit, you know, and there's a lot of overhead and there's a lot of maintenance and there's a lot of keeping up with everything. And so I look at something like Circle where I'm like, okay, all right, this does everything I needed out of the box. It's not going to be perfect, but it's going to be 95% of what I want and what I need, and it's a great experience. And it's got the app to go with it. It's got the push notifications, which is very important for making a community successful.

Kevin Geary:

Like the idea that somebody has to log into a computer to like that's not good. You know, they need an app, right, and they need to be able to do this stuff on the go. So that was all very, very important. And it's so fast to set up and no maintenance and so easy to maintain. It's just like. Let's do it and people will be like, well, you don't own your stuff. I'm like I do. I have every single person's email address. I have all my content archives. I can move anywhere I want to at any time. If they decide they didn't like me and shut me down or whatever, I can move it. It's fine. But it's on WordPress.

Josh Hall:

All my websites are on WordPress, Something that's on the side, like that. I feel like I can use a platform like Circle. So when is the time to not use WordPress? What use cases would you recommend today? That maybe another solution is all right, and I ask this because I don't know if you know that Circle I think I can say this publicly Circle's coming out with a builder oh, okay, A builder on top of their stuff. Siteground just released I mean, tons of hosts are releasing like actually fairly good builders for something simple, not something scalable and, you know, super legitimate, but by golly a portfolio landing page or something could probably go up there just fine.

Kevin Geary:

What are some use cases that maybe don't need to be on wordpress? Um, I mean, it's hard to ask me because, like, people will say, like, oh, I use this for simple sites and I use wordpress for a bigger project, like that's what I'm getting to.

Josh Hall:

Yeah, I'm wondering like, yeah world, where that works, or I mean I get it.

Kevin Geary:

For some people, like for me personally, I'm so involved, involved in experience with WordPress that I can spin up a single page landing page on WordPress as fast as I could actually probably faster than I could do it on any other platform so it would slow me down to go try to use a different platform. Now, that's not the case for everybody. Um, I would say, if you're a small business owner, uh, you're a lay person and you're like one, if you don't have a website of consequence is what I call them. Like there's no consequence to the website disappearing or performing, like it's just a hobby kind of thing, whatever. Okay, like, yeah, sure, you don't have to use WordPress or whatever.

Kevin Geary:

If you're trying to validate a concept, validate an offer, validate a landing page, and you don't want to hire somebody yet you don't have the technical skills, you can put that together with any other tool that you want. Like, I mean, go to go to, uh, uh, what's that design tool that everybody canva, canva. You can make a website with canva these days, right, like, go do that If you're just trying to validate a concept. But if you are doing something of consequence, that's serious, that you want to own, I would say it should be done on WordPress. It doesn't matter if it's one page or 100 pages, like it should be on WordPress.

Josh Hall:

Yeah, that's a good point, Good rule of thumb and, like you said, for folks who are really really proficient with a certain tool even though technically it's more complex. There's no reason to jump ship for something simple when you can just bust it out yeah.

Kevin Geary:

It's like what would I? I mean, even even if I went to Canva like I would want, it would be uh, horribly like. I would just hate it, probably the way I've hated somebody like I try to use canva. I try to use wix pro uh, which is like their professional version, like wix studio is what it's called and I was like this is frustrating as hell.

Kevin Geary:

um, and it's just, like I would be 10 times slower than anything else and and by the way, that's I'm not saying that it's a brick-specific thing, or even etch Like I could do it in bricks, I could do it in etch, I could probably do it in Divi faster than I could do it anywhere else. Like it's just, I just. These other builders don't make a lot of sense to me. They don't speak the language of web design, they just they drag you, put it down. It absolutely positions everything. It wraps it in 18 000 divs. It just.

Josh Hall:

it's a nightmare um, so not the way I work. So for me I can't do that. But I understand people off the street, you know, maybe they can. How are you positioning etch with everything we've talked about to this point? I mean like, and particularly with the amount of agencies who, like, like my agency, we've got hundreds and hundreds of sites using divi. It would. It would require a massive change to to move from a builder to etch. Now we can start with that on some new sites and things like that. But I guess I'm wondering, like I don't want to say how you're going to compete with those, because maybe that's not even the goal. But how are you? How is etch? How do you envision the marketing of Etch over the next few years, with things like Divi 5 coming out, elementor probably eventually revamping some things, the block editor not changing at all? How you know? How are you going to? Where's Etch going to fit in on how this is positioned, moving forward?

Kevin Geary:

Yeah, in my experience one is you know a lot of people told me that people that use page builders they are afraid of technical stuff and that's why they use a page builder. And if you talk technical to them or you position like you have too many technical features, they'll run away. They're just they're not interested in that. And and I did this free course called Page Building 101, which anybody can go look up on YouTube it's just like hundreds of thousands of views at this point.

Josh Hall:

Yeah, we'll link that in the show notes too.

Kevin Geary:

Yeah, for sure it's a really like anybody that really just wants to learn for free, like the most, like you will know, at the end of that course, more than 98% of people building websites in the modern era like on, especially in WordPress or in a page builder environment. So tremendous education. But the biggest thing that's come out of that is the feedback and I'm literally watching elementer user after elementer user. I get the emails all the time. The Divi user after Divi user, beaver user after Beaver user. They are saying one is like you know how long I've had like imposter syndrome where, like, I can put the sites together but I really don't know what's going on under the hood. And now they feel free of that and they're like they actually are running towards technical tools and technical knowledge because they love feeling empowered. They love feeling of they actually know what they're talking about when they talk to their clients and when they're advising their clients and when they're building sites. They love the fact that the sites they're building now are scalable and maintainable so that when things need to iterate and change, it's easy for them to do that and it's not a nightmare and a hassle and they're not having these awkward conversations with clients like, ah, we didn't really build it to be able to do that, you know. And like that's not a conversation you ever want to have. So they're empowered and they're running towards technical stuff and so all we have to do with etch is demo it Like I don't even have to sell it.

Kevin Geary:

Literally, as in the same thing happened with automatic CSS I just build things and do tutorials, and the tool I do it in people are like what the hell is that? What was that? I want that thing, right, cause, they see and this was the intro to page building 101 was literally like hey, open your page builder. Like, let me, I'm going to open mine, I'm going to open and I'm going to open all of them. We'll look at the seven different ones and I want you to see the clear differences between something like an Elementor and a Bricks, right, I want you to see the differences in the code output. I want you to see the differences in what this class system allows you to do. And, by the way, people should recognize because I've said this as well it's clear that we're entering a new era because for the longest, what was I? A proponent of A class-based workflow. Okay, when we use classes and then variables.

Josh Hall:

Oh, hold on Okay you're going to lose me for a second. It's all right. It's all in video. I'm in here. We'll keep it rolling. I don't. I don't edit anything out of the podcast.

Kevin Geary:

I'm in Florida and I'm on my B set up and my B set up as a Sony camera that likes to overheat. Okay, so that's what happened. It overheated, um it, I turned it off it. It'll hopefully come back to life in just a minute, um, okay, so essentially we have, you know this, class-based workflow variables, components, loops and logic, yada, yada, yada. Okay, what is Elementor now coming out with? A class system? They are they are migrating.

Josh Hall:

DB5 is very similar.

Kevin Geary:

DB5 is going with this variable first approach right. They're moving towards this era which is, by the way, away from, and I'm going to. I think it's going to be very interesting to watch. They have a giant community of kind of DIYers and lay people who chose that tool because it was less technical. And now they're making the tool more technical and I'm curious to watch how that happens. But again, I just have to demo Etch and people just love it and they want to use it.

Josh Hall:

Well, a recurring theme for this conversation that I love that you've been circling back to is it's just good to know web design, like the core principles. Um, it's funny because my top tutorial on my youtube channel is how to manually migrate a wordpress website. I threw it together in like an hour thinking you know, whatever, I just this is how I know to do it no plug-in, no, no premium, anything. It's just you go into the database, use my sequel and that's how you do it. To this day, kevin, people are like this is the only tutorial that worked. Uh, even though it's, you know, seven. No, it was 2017. So, yeah, seven years old and it's still killing it. It's the only one that is like it stands the test of time.

Josh Hall:

I do think there should be a real emphasis on standing the test of time. I do think there should be a real emphasis on standing the test of time with web design, just knowing those good old classic principles For those who do want to know those, like what you need to know, regardless of any platform, any tool, maybe for those who are getting into web design. Now, what are just like the basic categories that people should know? Html, css, a little bit of Java, what?

Kevin Geary:

do you think? Yeah, yeah, yeah, I said that the mandatory requirements are HTML and CSS. Those are the mandatory requirements. Page building does a lot of heavy lifting in terms of PHP and a lot of heavy lifting in terms of JavaScript. So those tools will. They will get you very far, but you should start to. You don't have to learn all of JavaScript, but you have to understand the basic fundamentals of JavaScript in terms of, like, what is actually happening, you know, like, when I click this button, how is this other thing changing? Just kind of understanding how it works. But when it comes to HTML and CSS, you really need to practice those. You need to be an expert at them, because HTML goes into and this is why you can't just rely on a drag and drop environment.

Kevin Geary:

Html has semantics, html has accessibility requirements and these things have to be decided by the person building the site. They can't be decided by a drag and drop tool. Willy nilly. If I drag in a heading and let's say it defaults to H1. Okay, well, the user could drag in 50 of those. So now I have 50 H1 headings on my page. The page builder doesn't know, like you know. It doesn't know where you're putting these or why you're using or whatever, and so most page builders to to fix that default to H2. So I can drag in 50, but then a user might end up with no H1 because they didn't know to change it to H1.

Kevin Geary:

This is just somebody that doesn't know semantic HTML and the very, very basics of it, right? And you can take this deep into the rabbit hole of HTML. There's a lot like when I make a card grid that actually, semantically should be a list it should be a UL with LIs inside of it. And semantically should be a list. It should be a UL with LIs inside of it. And most people don't know that and many page readers don't even allow you to change the HTML tags to make it correct, right? These are the limitations that we talk about, and this is because people don't know the fundamentals. And so, yes, you should learn the fundamentals of HTML. You should learn the fundamentals of CSS.

Josh Hall:

W3schoolscom is usually my recommendation. Do you have another recommendation for learning the basics?

Kevin Geary:

uh, I, I love, I love youtube, like I. I really think that people should he's back, I'm back, I'm back. I put that. I put the. I put a fan on it back there, I'm babying it right now. Um, so, yeah, I, I I love youtube. Find somebody you like, who, you like their personality, you like their personality, you like their teaching style. I will also say this instead of using AI to answer all of your like spit code back at you, you can open AI and ask it to teach you the fundamentals of something. You can ask it to quiz you. You can ask it to explain things to you like you're five. You can say, hey, give me a thing that I need to build as like a test project, right, and then grade it when it's done. You can use AI now to teach you the fundamentals of these things, and that's what you should be doing, versus asking it to just answer every question for you and spit back every solution.

Josh Hall:

I couldn't agree more. That's a great point. I'm so glad you said that.

Kevin Geary:

before we wrap up, I'm going to ask ChatGPbt explain etch for wordpress to me it may not be trained on it yet, because it's so new, I don't even know what it is I'm on 4.0, so let's see yeah, maybe not.

Josh Hall:

plus, we've been very secretive with it. There's not a lot of published.

Kevin Geary:

Yeah, there's no documentation or anything like that yeah, there's some videos.

Josh Hall:

Yeah, what is it? What does it say? I'd be curious. What is Etch? Etch is like a magical clipboard that helps people build websites for everything they need. It's hallucinating. They need from their clients without all the back and forth emails. I don't. Is this right? No, this is this can't be right. Imagine you're building a lego castle. That's your website, but you don't have all the lego pieces. Etch is super smart, okay. No, this is something else. There must be a different edge.

Kevin Geary:

So, yes, well, it just makes it up. I mean it just yeah, right it hallucinates all the time.

Josh Hall:

Yeah, like, don't remember. I will keep an eye on when. Etch is uh, as you know, available in the uh in the ai world for for some uh yeah, yeah, for sure um, your page building 101 free course real quick. Does that lead to bricks or are you going to do an updated one for it?

Kevin Geary:

Yeah, it was. It was done in bricks Cause that was the best tool at the time, uh, to teach those kinds of things. But it's going to be redone in edge, so I'm going to take the bricks version down. And another reason I it's not just to redo it in in our tool, um, but a lot of feedback was like it's 19 episodes and I think almost all of them are like 45 minutes to 60 minutes long. Okay, uh, which I know is a lot for people Like they're very detailed and so it's also hard to find certain things when you're going back later in that format. Yeah, and I've explored different formats in the inner circle for things lately and what I found is very granular. It might be 60 videos, right, but it's so granular that one they're easy to digest and two they're easy to find later. And that's how I'm going to redo the second version.

Josh Hall:

Same. I'm learning, I'm about to revamp, like all my courses, which is incredibly overwhelming, but I know it's time that it's. It's the smaller granular bite size super filterable, super searchable. Um pat flynn is actually I think it's releasing soon. He has a new book called lean learning. I'm gonna oh nice, I'm gonna check that out. Just because I do think that's where online education is going is like not that, because attention spans can be fine as long as someone's hooked in it. But I think the quick win, the nature of quick wins, the like okay, I'm through a three minute video, move forward five minute. I I'm probably as guilty as you like. My course lessons are like 20 to 30 minutes and I realized one course lesson has like five topics in it.

Kevin Geary:

That could be five to seven minute videos.

Josh Hall:

So, yeah, yeah, what do you know? Do you have any idea of when the new 101 is going to come out? Going to come out Cause I, we can definitely recommend this, but I'm just wondering.

Kevin Geary:

Yeah, I mean what I, what I did with the last one is I announced it and then I did it like just every every week I'd release like one to two, I'd record them and just release them as they were done. So I don't like doing it all up front and then, you know, releasing it, and I also like to feel it out like how people are keeping up with it and if we need to pivot somewhere in there. Cause I can outline it, but the outline is just a theory, you know. It's like.

Kevin Geary:

You know, once we get into it, I realize, oh, there's a lot of questions about this. That was kind of already covered, but people are still stuck on it. I might do a follow up, you know, I might stick another video in there or something like that, and I can only do that if I'm kind of monitoring how people are going through it. So I I'm thinking about starting it probably after summer. So when the fall starts, um, because we'll be, september is literally scheduled to be V1, like the official V1 of etch being launched. Uh, we'll be much closer to that, and so, um, there shouldn't be any limitations with what I need to teach in it and we'll be able to just get started there.

Josh Hall:

Kevin, thank you for your time. Dude, Good to catch up.

Kevin Geary:

Good to see you again.

Josh Hall:

And there we have it. My friends, I think that is a good, honest, real world. Take on where WordPress is right now. What's going on, the pros, the cons, the goods, the bads, all of the in-betweens. Big thanks to Kevin for taking some time to come in on again. I know he was, I believe, in a vacation spot and he made some time to come on for the podcast. So big thanks to him again.

Josh Hall:

If there's anybody who is on the leading edge of what's going to help WordPress, particularly for professionals who use WordPress, kevin is somebody I recommend checking out. You can go to his website, gearyco. And if you would like to check out what we talked a lot about in this episode his new product Etch go to etchwpcom. That's E-T-C-H-W-Pcom. That is where you can get on the list to find out more and more about that. So all those links and more are mentioned at the show notes for this one, which will be at joshhallco slash 384.

Josh Hall:

If you're a WordPress user, regardless of what builder you use, whatever camp you're in, I'm sure Kevin would love to hear from you. I would love to hear your feedback as well on this one. You can leave a comment at joshhallco slash 384 as well. All right friends, thanks for joining. Stay subscribed, because we've got some other doozies coming up ahead. We're going to have a fun summer on the podcast, so I hope you pull up a beach chair, grab a drink of your choice and have a good time. All right friends, see you on the next one.