How to prepare for Gutenberg, WordPress’ new visual editor

Randy:

Now, the first time you’ll notice it is when you’ll make the update on the page and that page breaks and then you panic on that one and you try to fix it and you go to another page, make a change, and that page breaks and then you got this domino effect of everything breaking in your site.

Lionel:

Hi folks, this is Lionel Johnston with the Master Modern Marketing podcast and that was Randy Milanovic, the CEO of KAYAK Online Marketing. Randy runs a very successful marketing agency and today we talk about something that he has been very vocal about recently and that’s WordPress’s Gutenberg update. The Gutenberg Update is one of WordPress’s largest updates and is likely to create some short-term pain for a lot of small and medium-sized businesses. However, even if your site isn’t on WordPress, I do encourage you to stick with us right to the end, ’cause we also dive into some really important topics such as what should a client actually expect from their marketing agency? We also discuss HubSpot marketing automation and how it could add value to your business and play a role for you. So, let’s cue the intro and dive right in.

Announcer:

We really love marketing, telling stories and sharing ideas with others to help them achieve their goals. If you enjoy growing businesses through digital marketing or would like to learn how to take your knowledge and skills to the next level, you’re in the right place. Welcome to the Master Modern Marketing podcast, with your host Lionel Johnston.

Lionel:

Hello Randy, welcome to the Master Modern Marketing podcast, how are you doing’ today?

Randy:

I’m doing’ great, thanks for having’ me on, Lionel.

Lionel:

Well, I really appreciate your time, I know you’ve got lots on the go and we just were speaking just before the podcast and it sounds you have some exciting new client onboarding that you have to get through by the end of the week and the year here, so I definitely appreciate you taking the time here, so. We’ve got a really great topic, Randy, and actually the reason that we’re having this discussion on the podcast here is I’ve noticed a lot of your posts through KAYAK on LinkedIn actually and talking a lot about WordPress and Gutenberg and some potential pitfalls for a lot of small and medium-sized business owners so I thought we could dive into that. Does that sound good for you Randy?

Randy:

Yeah, it sounds perfect actually.

Lionel:

That’s perfect. Well, Randy how about could we just have you introduce yourself quick just to all of our listeners, if you could just say your name, the company you’re with and a quick overview of your company and if you have any interesting anecdotes you’d like to share with our listeners, that’d be great.

Randy:

Sure, as a matter of fact so, my name’s Randy Milanovic. I’m the CEO of KAYAK Online Marketing. We launched KAYAK in 2011 right after I returned to work after a stage four cancer diagnosis. So I managed to survive it, came back, had a bit of a different view on things, part of that new view was that I knew for people to really do well with their business, they had to be a part of it. So, I decided right then that I would not do it for them, I would instead show them how to do it. That was the launch of KAYAK Online Marketing, we’ve since gone on to work with approximately 500 companies across North America to teach them how to do better marketing with the website as a base.

Lionel:

That’s great, so, hey, I should ask, where did the name KAYAK come from?

Randy:

Ah, that’s one of my favourite stories. You know actually, coming out of the cancer battle, I was very frail. I’d never been one to go to the gym so what I did to regain my strength was I started walking, initially, it was across the room, then it became upstairs to my bedroom and then eventually out to walk around the pond near my home. And I realized I was starting to get some strength back and getting a bit more fit with my lower body but I wasn’t getting any exercise for my upper body. And so I thought, I need to find something fun to do that would involve my torso and my shoulders and arms and things like that and I thought, you know, I grew up in the interior B.C. and I was always kayaking, canoeing, and hiking and all these kind of things and I love those things so I thought, hey, I’m gonna go get a kayak and so I went and got my sister to take me to the local Canadian Tire. I actually wasn’t driving yet, I still hadn’t regained my strength enough to feel comfortable and so we went to the Canadian Tire and we looked at some kayaks and I looked at her and I smiled. And I said to the person there, we’ll take two. And my sister kind of gave me a look and I said if you don’t mind, you’re gonna have to carry them ’cause I’m not strong yet. So my sister carried the kayaks out to the truck and she put them on the truck and she tied them down and we got them home and then I started going out and I would invite my friends and my family members and my neighbours and my colleagues and everybody and we’d just go out kayaking every day. And so I did that as an exercise to regain my strength. And so, after about a year of that, I was looking at how we were going to do our new approach to marketing which was the teach people how to do it versus doing’ it for them and I thought this is different than the design firm that I used to have so I think I need a different name now. And so I thought why not KAYAK and I doodled out the logo, actually the logo we have now and I talked to one of my colleagues and I just showed him my doodle and he just said yes. And so we went out and we did a name search and we found that we could incorporate was kayak and the name was actually Kayak Creative Services Inc. we got and so we’ve gone on now to use the term KAYAK and now it’s kind of worked, it’s worked really well actually but, yeah, it’s been an interesting journey so far.

Lionel:

That’s great, well thanks for sharing your story. I don’t think I actually ever mentioned this Randy, but the very first time I called your office, I thought it was cool and instantly had a lot of respect for you ’cause I called you and said, hey I’ve got a new opportunity and I need your help and you were like, hey that’s great but we’re gonna have to talk later, I’m going kayaking. So, I’ll call you back when I have time. You know, maybe there are customers that could be miffed by that, but I was like okay, this guy has got his priorities straight. We need to work hard but we need to have a life as well. It’s something that stuck with me anyway.

Randy:

Yeah, I totally love it, absolutely. If it was only a little bit warmer, we could get out there now.

Lionel:

For sure, for sure. All right well let’s dive right in here Randy. So I actually in terms of WordPress was doing some research getting prepped for this and I found that about 30% of websites across the world are using WordPress and maybe a couple percent plus or minus that but either way there’s a lot on WordPress and there have been lots online and in the news around this Gutenberg update so I thought, yeah, let’s take some time to explain what a Gutenberg even is and why it matters to small and medium-sized businesses. What they should do about it and then I know you’re definitely an expert with HubSpot marketing software and automation so I thought we could take some time with that. So that’s basically the outline of what we’re going to cover and Randy, just to give some background, the majority of our listeners actually are small and medium-sized business owners and we basically sit down with them, do an audit of their business and have a live coaching call and the other half of this podcast is bringing on experts like yourself that you’re able to share a very specific skill set or philosophy or tactics or something that can help both those small and medium-sized business owners grow their business. So, let’s just dive in with this first question here and if you could just explain what is Gutenberg and this update and why does it matter to a typical small and medium-sized business owner?

Randy:

Yeah, excellent question. So, you know in the software world, things are always evolving, always getting better, better, better. Things move at different speeds all the time. In this scenario or this situation with Gutenberg, it is WordPress’s new approach to content. So how content is deployed on your site, whether it’s an image, a video, a block of text or whatnot. And it’s actually called blocks, is how they term it internally and what it is, is it replaces the standard interface, the editor that most people are familiar with which essentially looks almost like Microsoft Word, you type into it and you have the controls that say you wanna make it bold or italics and things like that. And it’s pretty straightforward, pretty simple to use. What’s happened is with Gutenberg being the replacement of that component, WordPress has actually pushed it right into the core of the WordPress platform, it’s actually automatic to the parent company, but they pushed it into the platform very quickly. So, they really haven’t given clients or their developers an opportunity to update websites. It’s kind of an odd thing because of course if you’re paying attention and you’re proactive, you will have been moving towards that already, but most people haven’t. A lot of people said forget it, or a lot of people let the developers take care of sites and clients don’t know. But what’s happened is when the Gutenberg is in a site and you go and edit a page, it essentially disconnects the old Classic Editor and replaces it with this new editor and it’s entirely different user experience and what happens is a lot of the technical things that developers put into a site, things like Advanced Custom Fields or page builders, there are literally hundreds of different page builders and other tools, including tools that you may be more familiar with like Yoast SEO, these are all things that all these technologies that people put into sites, whether it’s through plugins or customizations, essentially what happens is these things will break because they were not made for Gutenberg. So now what happens is the change was made in version five, so a lot of sites are probably 4.9, 4.98, 4.99 and a lot of people have automatic updates for those incremental changes. But those people who are smart, don’t automatically let the four switch to a five, or the three switch to a four because that usually signifies a big, big change and you want to control that ’cause you don’t want things breaking.

So, what’s happened with Gutenberg is WordPress has pushed it quickly into the core before people had a chance to think about migration paths. And I say migration path as opposed to updating because if you have content on your page now and you have Advanced Custom Fields that are perhaps creating a sidebar on your page, as soon as you hit that page, that sidebar breaks because it’s no longer part, it’s been disconnected. So what happens is now you have an instant crisis and you have a broken page. Now, the first time you’ll notice it is when you’ll make the update on the page and that page breaks and then you panic on that one, you try to fix it and you go to another page, make a change and that page breaks and then you’ve got this domino effect of everything breaking in your site. The temporary fix to that is a, just don’t update it unless you’re ready to deal with that. So, if you’re at 4.98 or 4.99 just stay right there until you have a plan of how you’re going to address these things. So that plan usually is you do a site update on a staging server and you put Gutenberg on, you make sure it’s updated, and you pass through all your content over and then you relaunch it. So that’s why I call it a migration pass is ’cause we can’t go straight from classic to Gutenberg. There’s been a bit of a fix. There’s been such an uproar, so many people essentially been caught napping by this quick update and no fault from anybody, it’s just the way it works. It’s going too fast.

What has happened is the community which is all open source, the WordPress community, so people do stuff for free and help build those tools. What the community has done, the developers, they’ve created a Classic Editor that’s now available in WordPress so if your site is updated to five and you’re not ready to deploy on Gutenberg, you install that Classic Editor plugin and it will bring back that editor and basically downgrade it to what you’re used to and buy you some time before you need to do your transition into Gutenberg. Now, from my perspective the transition into Gutenberg is dramatic as transferring to an entirely new platform, so going from WordPress with its Classic Editor to WordPress with Gutenberg to me is the equivalent of going from WordPress to Squarespace or to HubSpot or something, it’s a significant change in the way it works. So, when I see a significant change like that happening, I go oh, the opportunity to fix what we’re doing or optimize what we’re doing. So I look at it actually as an opportunity to improve. I think a lot of web firms, unfortunately, are also looking at it as a way to generate revenue because that also means brand new sites. So, if you think about it from a client perspective, it’s not good news on any level. You know, either you’re forced into a broken site or you’re forced to downgrade the upgrade or you’re forced to make a big spend on a new site, all because automatic and WordPress have pushed this very quickly and not allowed us time to think about it as users of the platforms.

Lionel:

Okay great, well thanks a lot for the overview there and just to step back one little bit, if let’s say, someone,, you know, a typical small and medium-sized business owner’s in their site, they’re updating their plugins and they don’t even really know what’s going on, they click yes to install Gutenberg. Once they’re at a point where there are things that are breaking, are they easily able to update with that Classic Editor now? Or is it now too late because things are already broken?

Randy:

Yeah, I would immediately install the Classic Editor and make sure it’s active or running and it should reset things. I say should because every site is different, we don’t know how much customization has been done to it.

Lionel:

And you may not know this but I’m in a WordPress site right now where it says you’re using WordPress 5 and I know for a fact with this site there hasn’t been anyone clicking on yes, update to WordPress 5 so do you know have some people just been now forced into that where they’re already on five even if they haven’t actually clicked to install it?

Randy:

Well if you just created a site, it would be automatically done with five ’cause that’s the current version. But, or there’s been an automatic update set to, either by the hosting provider or by the settings you’ve put in on the site to automatically deal with updates. So if that’s happened and you have existing structure where you have either a page builder or you have a tool like Advanced Custom Fields which is what is used to override some WordPress settings to change where headings are, to change the way the hero on the top of the page works or to add a sidebar, those kinds of things, then you’re probably going to be in for a bit of a surprise. Things can break on that.

Lionel:

Yeah well, we’ll definitely dive into that more with this website specifically. I know it’s a WordPress site, but it’s built using the X Theme and I believe I’ve seen some updates from X Theme themselves saying that they’ve pushed through some updates and have by default installed the Classic Editor.

Randy:

That’s exactly it so I’m glad you mentioned that because a lot of the developers out there are responding and trying to desperately get patches so, the funny thing is so X Themes is installing the downgrade So, you know it’s temporary ’cause there’ll be another update later on where you’ll want to migrate up because I mean the technology itself behind Gutenberg is pretty robust and it really allows you to do some really wonderful things. It just has a lot of gotchas at the moment because it is software in development and it’s quickly going forward and there are patches and fixes and new things happening all the time which is kind of exciting. You know we always like to see that things are improving. It’s really just the issue is only the speed at which they’ve deployed it, that that’s the challenge. Is if they did it a little bit slower and the developers could patch their software or upgrade their software to match. One of the things, for example, I’ve mentioned Yoast and Advanced Custom Fields. Those are two pretty standard tools that are used in WordPress globally, they’re massive, massive. They have the resources to develop for any platforms. So they’re on it, they’re doing it. They’re not doing it happily because it’s extremely difficult to develop for the new platform. It’s based on what’s called a React and React is actually something that is related to Facebook so there’s a connection in there somewhere. We don’t know exactly where it is but there’s some sort of connection there. So, basically, it is a new platform. The bigger guys are taking steps to upgrade and when they can’t upgrade, they’re doing patches and so on, so which is pretty standard practice actually, just not a lot of fun.

Lionel:

Yeah, okay. All right great, well let’s just switch gears a little bit although it’s still very relevant to this topic. You know, I wanted to talk a little bit about HubSpot and I have a lot of experience with that and actually for Farmers Marketing we use it on our own company and for our own company and our website and actually I’ve run some Master Modern Marketing seminars at a local coworking space here in Winnipeg and presented on an introduction to inbound marketing and an introduction to marketing automation and then we had a third seminar where it tied those together. So, I just hope that you can take a little bit of the time just at a high level, Randy, to explain what HubSpot marketing automation is overall and then how does that create some opportunity for a small and medium-sized business owner to potentially either bolt this onto their current website or actually pull their website into HubSpot.

Randy:

Sure, well first of all there’s a lot of different levels through HubSpot right from individual tools around marketing or around sales or around customer service and the levels on them go from free tools to paid versions of the tools to fully different tools that are professional grade and right up to enterprise level, so they have a toolset to satisfy almost any business. So the thing I like about them and is actually why I use HubSpot and I use professional level, is everything is connected. So, it’s all the full toolset, so those things we talked about before on WordPress where you’d have Yoast for an SEO plugin and you’d have Advanced Custom Fields to do customizations and then maybe you’d have other tools for email marketing and so on and so on. These are all built in HubSpot, so you don’t have to worry about connecting multiple tools together, it’s all in. So generally, my rule of thumb is I deploy HubSpot sites when I have a consultative selling model. I know I use fancy words, I shouldn’t, it just really means B2B

Lionel:

Okay, okay. All right, good. Well yeah I know in my experience with HubSpot, it’s like you said, you know especially showing it to new people and if someone can figure out how to do an email in HubSpot, they know how to build a landing page, you know, they know how to do a blog post so it’s really quite handy because the whole interface really is very consistent so it’s nice compared to having different tools where all of your different options where you need to click billings in different locations and can become quite complicated. So, explain the website component to me, please. If someone wanted to actually move their existing WordPress or Squarespace website, or let’s say they are a new business and they have a new website, how would they actually go about building that right in the HubSpot platform?

Randy:

Sure, so HubSpot deploys at two levels. One is as an external tool, so all the free tools, things like that as all external tools where you just plug a script into your existing site and you see all the data and do all the communications and whatnot through that tool on a separate login. The other one is where you include your website within HubSpot and it’s called the CMS and then within that CMS you basically have all the same kind of tools you would find in a Squarespace or a WordPress except of course it’s that uniform interface and it’s very powerful, it’s software as a service, by the way so is Squarespace, that’s a difference between paid sites and the free sites like WordPress is WordPress you install it, generally speaking, most people would install it on their hosting and then they would deploy it themselves and then you have to maintain that platform. And when we get into HubSpot or Squarespace, the organization maintains it in exchange for our subscription fee. So what happens in those two is their software as a service so generally they take care of things like security and the operability and upgrades and we just get to worry about the fun things like making sales and doing marketing. So that’s usually the difference so when we go and we have the HubSpot’s CMS, we just get to build our website within the platform.

Lionel:

Okay, so yeah that’s great. Thanks for the overview of that as well Randy. So, is it a similar process to someone building their website in say something like WordPress or because of how the environment is actually designed is it a quicker process, or more complicated? You know, and is that even a fair comparison?

Randy:

Well you know that all three of the platforms, they’re referred to as content management systems, that’s what the CMS stands for. And essentially what that means is that we have templates that we build our websites on. So, if you are in Squarespace or WordPress or HubSpot or many others, there’s a ready-made template, in WordPress, they call them themes, in HubSpot, they call them templates, I’m not sure what they call them, I think it may be themes as well, in Squarespace. The idea is you can pick a set of theme files and install them in your site and then basically, at the click of a button, you have the design of your site. So at least the visual appearance of it. So, then it’s up to you to put your content in, organize your navigation and make sure your user experience is really good, things like that ’cause that has a big impact on SEO and just organize it well so your visitors can see what you’re doing and how you can help them.

Lionel:

Okay, all right, sounds great. So, Randy, we can wrap up in just a moment but I just wanted to ask you about one other topic that you’ve actually mentioned a couple o’ times and I know we’ve spoken about over the time that we’ve known each other but you had mentioned, and this is a bit of a tangent from our topic here, but you mentioned how you wanted to really focus on educating clients more so than doing things just for them. And I have, you know, in my experience working with marketing firms I’ve found a number of them have been pretty cagey and, you know what I mean, there is that they want to do the work and make me be beholden to them and sometimes you’re limited on the results and analytics that I’m able to get. Even I’ve seen this with other marketing companies where they actually hold all of the access to a website, a Facebook account and so on, more so than empowering the client to do that. So I just wanted to ask you a little bit about your philosophy on that and what should a client expect, should they expect to be educated or should they just have someone roll in and do things for them? Could you explain a little bit about your philosophy on that?

Randy:

Yeah, I gotta watch I don’t, that my temperature doesn’t rise on this one because, boy you hit a good one. So, my belief is that we as agencies are guests within our clients’ websites. We may be the ones with the understanding and the knowledge or the expertise to deploy but it’s their site, not ours, they should have the keys, we should be using the spare. So, then in no time ever do I ever want a client to feel that they’re being held hostage by me or my company. I don’t want them to, I would rather have them go in and break something and then I’ll show them how to fix it because then they’ll learn how to do it than to have them call me at five o’clock as I’m about to go for dinner and say, hey, fix my typo. So obviously that’s a pretty light version but there are significant things like passwords are one of the biggest ones. The first thing that happens, I get a new client comes in and they say, oh here’s my password and I go, what? Go change them now. Immediately go and change them, don’t even talk to me, just go change your password because you just threw away your security. So change it right now and then invite me into the site, I will set my own password and I’m not gonna tell you my password but guess what, you’ll be super admin, I’ll just be admin, if you want, you can kick me out and I take the responsibility of being there very seriously and I wanna make sure that I’m adding value and helping you and when I’m not doing that then I should not be in there so you should not have to wait for me to release it back to you, you should be able to say okay, you’re done and off I go. And you know, and we grow and that’s actually a part of my model is that I want our client to become so self-sufficient they don’t actually need us.

Lionel:

All right, very good. Well, I appreciate you taking the time off so to explain that and share your philosophy. We’re of the same mindset on this topic. You know, it sounds like a lot of things we have the same mindset but this one especially and I know it doesn’t relate directly to the Gutenberg situation right now but I thought it was important enough that we can help educate people on what they should expect from a business that is helping them out and I really like your phrasing there that we’re guests within their businesses, that’s a good way to look at it for sure.

Randy:

Maybe this is the one thing that I would just close that out with, is you know a lot of business owners, especially small business owners think that the website is technical and so they definitely need somebody to do it, that’s true to a certain extent where you need developers and code experts to build templates but you don’t need those people to do content. You don’t need them to write your material, you’re the one that actually knows the topic and you should be writing about it. If you’re not a good writer, you hire somebody to help you write it, but it’s your content. So, you should be able to do this. You should have an understanding of what’s happening in your site, you don’t have to worry that it’s too technical that you can’t handle it because there’s no such thing. You may not have enough time to do it in which case then you need an assistant. You know you don’t need a third-party billing you at an hourly rate or project rate when you can do it in 15 minutes internally amongst the other stuff that you’re doing’. So, it’s such a cost saving. And imagine if you have the knowledge to be able to create a page or create a landing page, create an ad that links that landing page, you’re in control of your own destiny. There’s not somebody else taking a shot, thinking they know what you know ’cause you actually have the smarts and the knowledge about how people are interested in your, or why people are interested in your products and services and you know what’s happened in the past, how you’ve sold those things and how you’ve serviced your client. If you just take those same, that same knowledge and you put it on your website, you will be more successful. You didn’t need a third party to do that.

Lionel:

No, I fully agree. All right, well that was awesome Randy. So, thanks a lot once again. How can people contact you if they wanna learn a little bit more about KAYAK specifically or they wanna learn more about potentially moving their website to HubSpot or they even wanna learn more about HubSpot itself or anything else in the digital marketing space. How could someone reach out to you?

Randy:

Yeah sure, just come to our website. It’s KAYAKonlinemarketing.com and I’m very visible out there, LinkedIn and Twitter and Facebook and those things and I’m pretty open to meeting people. I do want to help people move forward who have an attitude of rolling up their sleeves and participating. Honestly, I don’t know if I can ever help somebody that just wants it done for them. I think when somebody does that, they’re essentially abdicating their responsibilities to their business to somebody else. And it’s, it just doesn’t work, you’re not going to be successful that way so I can’t help those people.

Lionel:

Okay, fair enough. Well, I’ll have in our show notes your contact information, your profile for LinkedIn, KAYAK’s information for Facebook, your website, any other content that we can share from your website, we’ll have all of that in the show notes.

Randy:

I have a few linked to articles from Yoast and Advanced Custom Fields and a few others, opinion pieces on Gutenberg and how it’s rolling forward and I’m happy to share those as well.

Lionel:

Yeah, that would be great Randy, so I’ll add those to the show notes as well. All right, that’s awesome. So, for all of our listeners that are small and medium-sized business owners, if you’d like to be able to be a guest on our podcast and have a marketing audit and live coaching call to help take your business to the next level, please reply at Farmersmarketing.ca. It’s a very simple process and at the end of the podcast you will know exactly where you stand in terms of Modern Marketing tactics and you’ll also have a game plan, you’ll know what your priorities are and how to go and tackle them. Whether that is also choosing a company like Farmers Marketing or KAYAK or is doing the work on your own, you’ll be well prepared to go take your business to the next level. So, Randy, once again, thank you very much for spending your time with us and educating us on this really important update with WordPress and Gutenberg. I’m sure there’s going to be some people that are panicked right now but let’s get the word out to be able to help as many people as we can here.

Randy:

Yeah, it was fun, thanks a lot, Lionel.

Lionel:

All right, thank you. And for everyone else listening, until next time, onward and upward, we’ll see you on the next podcast.

Announcer:

The Master Modern Marketing podcast with your host Lionel Johnston. A podcast for lovers of marketing and growing small businesses. If you enjoyed today’s podcast, please rate and review and we’ll catch you next time on the Master Modern Marketing podcast.