\nNathan Ingram opens his virtual office doors during this informal, unstructured webinar to answer your questions. There is no agenda and no planned content. Bring your questions and Nathan will answer them first come, first served. Get your answers and learn from the questions of others.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n","EventOrganizerNames":"Nathan Ingram","inline_featured_image":"","livestream_public":1,"is_multi-day_event":0,"livestream_replay_set":1,"livestream_zoom_registration_link":"https:\/\/us06web.zoom.us\/webinar\/register\/WN_hoEiSlLOThWt_w3B2IbuHA","livestream_vimeo_video_id":890062068,"livestream_chat_log":"https:\/\/drive.google.com\/file\/d\/1mmFgumC_QUyso580Co4sF3JSG2wd8MRG\/view?usp=sharing","livestream_live_transcript_url":"https:\/\/otter.ai\/u\/gKzFIa21xDHGunwz8t0E4QO5AFk?utm_source=copy_url","livestream_live_transcript_text":"I think I've got the new camera roughly figured out\r\n\r\nyeah it usually well on my end it always says custom live stream. It is not raining out here minute it is a beautiful about 55 degree day it is very beautiful. Okay, captions are starting to show up, which is awesome. Let me just get everything connected.\r\n\r\nOkay, well, Fourth time's a charm going to be one of those days I'm afraid. Okay, I haven't even looked at questions yet. So let me get all that up and going.\r\n\r\nOh my goodness. Okay.\r\n\r\nToo many things All right. Welcome. Welcome, everybody. Okay, nine questions in queue. And so there's room for a few more. The link to ask questions is there now in the chat? And I'm just about to actually kick this thing off, get the recording going. And all that here in just a second. Oh boy. This does not bode well for the rest of the day. All right, here we go. Everybody ready?\r\n\r\nWell, happy Thursday everybody its office hours here on the solid Academy. Glad you're here. Few minutes late getting started this morning technical difficulties but we are ready to go so glad everybody's here today. Did you survive the Starter Site course this week? How many of you went through that? And have you started it? Have you started your Starter Site course your starter site from the course. Have you started putting that together? Awesome. Awesome. So let me hear from you in the chat. Any challenges with that or did you any wins like have you had some success getting it going?\r\n\r\nAre Billy's got it done? Awesome. Billy.\r\n\r\nNext week's job for Sue. Yeah, very good. All right. So that's always a fun one. I really enjoy teaching that course every year I think as far as takeaways and the practical effect that a course can have on day to day work. That was probably the best one of the year. Getting that starter Simon we every I think everything we do has have value, especially in the premium courses. But that one in particular so if you missed it, go back and rewatch the replays are there ready to go the giant 46 Page handbook is there to download and all of that. So ah, let's get going with some questions since I'm already a little bit behind here. Again 10 questions now in queue. Let me start those and drop in the link one more time. If you have questions, ask away All right. First question comes from\r\n\r\nOh, no, what happened?\r\n\r\nOkay, there we go. There she is. All right, Beth. is up. First question.\r\n\r\nAll right.\r\n\r\ntechnical question from Beth Livingston.\r\n\r\nIf a live website is completely dead, and redirects are not necessary, is there anything I need to do other than deleted?\r\n\r\nYeah, delete it.\r\n\r\nGet rid of it. I can't think of anything else you need to do. If you don't need to redirect anything then just trash it. Can anybody think of anything to do? I can't?\r\n\r\nOh, yeah, absolutely. So yes, Stacy, keep a backup because you know, who knows?\r\n\r\nYeah, as soon as a good point about email is their email on the domain by chance or is it dead dead?\r\n\r\nIf it's dead dead, then okay. Yeah, no email. Yeah, just nuke it. You're good to go. That was easy.\r\n\r\nOkay, next up, John, John M.\r\n\r\nTwo questions.\r\n\r\nAll right, John, question number one in Kadence. I want to change the color of the menu based on which page I'm on.\r\n\r\nReally, okay. If I'm on the about page the menu will be a different color from the other menu choices.\r\n\r\nOkay, so, John, what is what you're saying? That when, for example, you're on this page, whichever page, you want the menu item in the header or wherever to be a different color than the rest? Is that what you're after?\r\n\r\nOkay, yep, so that is the pseudo class called active and, or actually, you can, WordPress even has a class for this. So if you look at the the class of this page, which is the one that we're on, you will notice that it is there's this class here current menu item and so what you can do is just say I would just probably go all the way back up to this nav item and I would do something like we're actually would just be nav li dot What was that last li dot current menu item.\r\n\r\nSay, you know, this is not really helpful for code. Let me\r\n\r\nshoot let me get a code editor up here.\r\n\r\nThe nav menu item\r\n\r\nwhen you can say color is, you know, whatever, right.\r\n\r\nYou can also make your second question is can you change the background color? Sure it would just be background.\r\n\r\nWhatever, just like that.\r\n\r\nYes. Don't forget to semicolons. Does that help John? So you can do this here. If you're asking if it's I don't know if that's a customizer option, or not. I think Kadence does that by default. Unless you tell it not to or there may be let's just take a quick look. I've forgotten this\r\n\r\nAlright, so we're in menu and design nav colors. Initial color, hover color. It's right here. It's this active color.\r\n\r\nActive means it's this is like what you're after. So if I go here to this page, and I make the active color red, then you'll notice that that page is red.\r\n\r\nJust like that. You can do it in CSS anywhere. If you're in Kadence. There is a menu option. If you want to change the background, it's right underneath here. Background initial hover again active if we want the active background to be like this, and the active color might be like that, then you can do it that way.\r\n\r\nYep, it's this\r\n\r\nYeah, it changes it's throughout the entire site. So if we make this our default and I go here to this page whichever page I'm on is going to take the active styling\r\n\r\nso there you go. Is that what you're after John?\r\n\r\nGet rid of this stuff.\r\n\r\nNo.\r\n\r\nNo no, you have to put that back.\r\n\r\nInteresting, I'll just exit out. But that's how you do it. Top publish it exactly. But you can also do it with CSS. If you if you choose to.\r\n\r\nOkie dokie.\r\n\r\nAll right question. Yeah, Karen. So questions go in this form. The link is there in the chat. I take them in the order that they're received just to give some structure to this madness. That is Office Hours. All right. Any other that good, John, are you good on that one?\r\n\r\nOkey dokey. Next up is Ben.\r\n\r\nI figured we're gonna get a lot of Starter Site questions today. Which is great. All right, Ben.\r\n\r\nOkay, from your Starter Site recommendation on the database character set to remain the same. You have helped me solve part of the problem. Awesome. Yeah. So UTF eight to UTF eight and before that's a big deal.\r\n\r\nOkay, a client who loves to add emojis and all their content was reporting a moments where some parts of the site emojis would not save.\r\n\r\nAfter rolling out plugins and themes, it turns out the client site was set to UTF eight yep, yep, there was a mixture and that will happen. So after testing, staging site, updating everything into this emojis work, super. You mentioned not to change the database on a site where the character issues is the only option of the site to rebuild Okay, no, so you can it's not a good idea to change the character set unless you have to.\r\n\r\nThis is a case in which you probably have to and it's safer.\r\n\r\nLike you're not gonna get issues going from Okay, now. Okay, disclaimer, caveat. All of this is surrounded by I think, Okay, this is what I think you'll want to test it and make sure you're backed up. You know, there's there's your disclaimer, as usual, however, usually, like UTF eight, like okay, let's do this. If this were a Venn diagram, okay. Ah, doggone it, the stupid camera did it again. Go back.\r\n\r\nAh, I keep forgetting that I have gestures on this new camera.\r\n\r\nOh, what camera is it? Yeah, so that talked about that today. I will just not at this moment. I've just got to I've got to get this put back. Okay, there we say to the Trump me crazy. Okay, so think of a Venn diagram, okay.\r\n\r\nUTF eight is a subset of UTF eight MB dadgummit.\r\n\r\ndrive me crazy. Okay, I can't use my hands at all. And I don't know how to turn gestures off. So sorry, I don't know what to do with this.\r\n\r\nOkay.\r\n\r\nAll right.\r\n\r\nSo because UTF eight is a subset of UTF eight and before\r\n\r\nI'm getting annoyed.\r\n\r\ngetting annoyed at this at this.\r\n\r\nI can't I can't I don't know. How to turn this off this trap and be crazy.\r\n\r\nOkay, all right. Um, anyway, the bottom line is you can probably go from UTF eight to UTF eight mp4 without any issues because UTF eight mp4 contains everything that UTF eight does. Does that make sense?\r\n\r\nYeah, you should but backup backup backup of course like then you're smart enough to know that so just backup.\r\n\r\nOkay.\r\n\r\nAll right. Okay, yes, for those that are curious about the camera.\r\n\r\nAfter reading many reviews, I settled on the OBS bot which is a really super cool\r\n\r\nbut I was even looking at\r\n\r\na mirrorless DSLR which is what a lot of people do they have gorgeous video on streaming. And I really didn't want a to spend $1,000 on the camera and be to have to deal with all the mounts and all the garbage. So I found this and this a lot. I got a better deal than this on Black Friday or on site, whatever that was, but this is it right there. It's super cool. It's really tiny. It's about just you're not gonna do it. It's it's about it's small. It's probably two and a half inches tall. in it. It has a little monitor clip. And it's it's on a gimbal so it actually will fall it's sitting on top of my monitor. I would show you but it's right there. I can't use the camera to show you the camera. But it's got like a little a little angle mount that sits on top of the monitor and then it magnetizes right there. It's really cool.\r\n\r\nI like it a lot. It's USB C it's 4k.\r\n\r\nThe lens it has a very large sensor on it.\r\n\r\nYeah, it's got HDR, and a bunch of intelligent video settings and so forth. So I still like that my background is still too saturated. It's washed I gotta figure all that out. But it's kind of cool. Yes, it has its own software that was the other part. So there you go. Those of you that are camera geeks, pretty cool. I have been using for many years. The old Logitech BRIO which is a great little camera. This is just the not the not 4k version. But it's I've had this probably five years and it's been a really great camera.\r\n\r\nI think my daughter is going to inherit that.\r\n\r\nOkay, man, Paul, if all we had to do is talk about cameras to get you to leave we should do that more often right.\r\n\r\nOh, that was bad. All right. Let's go quickly now moving along.\r\n\r\nOh my goodness. Usually we reserve that sort of hostility for Beth Livingston. All right, next.\r\n\r\nOkay, follow up questions from the Starter Site. This is from Tanya. Hey, Tanya. Oh, my Yeah, did Beth Oh, just just smile and nod. It's okay. It's just bad. Alright, bad bad jokes on my part. Here we go follow up questions from the Starter Site class. Is there a live or recorded stream on how to use the Starter Site to create a new site? No, but what a great idea. We should add that to the course next month. Oh, wait. It's in there. Yes. So part of optimizing your Starter Site. Let's go there really quickly. Optimizing your starter site. The course is coming up the December course we used to do this by the way, all in one giant nine hour course. The Starter Site course it was three hours for three days. And it was brutal.\r\n\r\nSo we gave up on that when we changed some of our training model here. So this is coming up December the 19th and the 20th.\r\n\r\nAnd yeah, here we go. So day one agenda is the Starter Site spin up process. And I'm actually going to change some of this. Well, maybe I won't know they the this was going to change the speed optimizations piece. I'm taking that out and replacing it with the desktop replacement that we talked about this week. So the spin up process is in our one I'll give you I have a checklist for you to do all that. And then preparing a site for the client and then a website launch process. So this is all about taking the Starter Site and using it. So kind of building it this month and using it in your workflow next month. Yep.\r\n\r\nGood, good. Number two, does solid security pro transfer correctly? Or do you need to uninstall it? No, no, that's the beautiful thing. Just get all your solid security setup, the way that you like it and your base site. And then when you migrate it, all you'll have to do is relicense it for the new domain and everything works great.\r\n\r\nThat's that's the beauty of getting all these plugins settings done for backups and security and Gravity Forms and whatever else you use, just get all that stuff together and set once and that way you don't have to redo the work. It's gonna save you so much time and who likes doing all those settings anyway? Not me.\r\n\r\nAlrighty, next up is Hillary.\r\n\r\nAll right, Hillary.\r\n\r\nA client wants a site recreated and moved off of Duda. So Duda if you're not familiar with it, is like a an agency focused Squarespace where agencies can white label their own little website builder, it's actually fairly decent.\r\n\r\nAnyway, on the bottom right, there's a widget that pops up with various options contact follow. I'm not sure how to recreate that building with Kadence Pro I don't think conversions or modal will do it.\r\n\r\nOkay, we can see it here. So probably even before I see it, my recommendation is don't use that.\r\n\r\nYeah, I I wouldn't use this. I think this is first of all, its slowest Christmas.\r\n\r\nI would not use this for a couple of reasons. First.\r\n\r\nThis is going to probably have some accessibility issues. Watching all these interactions that are necessary. There's a mouse over interaction that's here. In order to get to this menu.\r\n\r\nI don't think I would do this. You probably could do it. Yeah, you can't even tab to it. This is not accessible. And even though they've got whatever, which is this, I've never heard of audio i It's another overlay get rid of. Yeah, don't.\r\n\r\nSo this is not a great interaction.\r\n\r\nThe other reason I would do I would consider changing it is that there's no way you're going to track conversions with this and analytics because of the modals This is why I 100% recommend having a standard call to action that goes to a page with a form that has a thank you page. And the reason for that is you can create a funnel or a goal in Google Analytics for very easily. Like just take a quick look at David Zimmerman's course we did a couple months ago on Google Analytics for and setting up goals in GTA four is so easy like it's so easy. And so you'll be able to quickly show the client you had this many visitors this many of them went to your contact page, this many filled out the form. You know, it's really easy to see that conversion funnel I would dump this all together. If you have to keep it like they are requiring it.\r\n\r\nInteresting.\r\n\r\nThen you can probably build something like this with a Kadence conversion. But\r\n\r\nI I would encourage you not to do it if you can. So does anybody have other suggestions? Besides a Kadence conversion?\r\n\r\nA Kadence conversion should do it with a with a slide in the opt in type situation. But it's going to be hard to build this exact thing. It's just I would I would urge them to go a different route to try to create a conversion.\r\n\r\nLike what happens when you get in touch and this is what they want anyway, right.\r\n\r\nYeah, I would dig into why, you know, Why is this here and why is it different than their standard contact form and how do these things relate? This is a conversion issue that I will talk to him about.\r\n\r\nOh, Kenneth, pass the Google Analytics certification. Everybody give Kenneth a hand. That's awesome. Good job. Working with David Zimmerman. Yeah, super cool. So Hillary, I know you're not here but hopefully that gives you some perspective on that.\r\n\r\nAll right, next up is Lydia Hey, Lydia.\r\n\r\nOkie dokie.\r\n\r\nWhen we use gravity forms with postmark Is there a way to limit what is shown in the from email drop down field.\r\n\r\nI currently see signature emails of all my postmark clients but would much prefer to see only emails with the relevant domain.\r\n\r\nLydia are you using the Gravity Forms postmark add on is that where you're seeing all this?\r\n\r\nOkay, you don't need that so I would not use you don't need the the postmark add on for Gravity Forms. What you want to use is the postmark plugin like this one right here that we talked about in the base site yesterday. Active Campaign postmark official so the Gravity Forms add on only uses postmark for the for your Gravity Forms. Whereas this plugin here that I've highlighted takes over all the mail sending for your entire website. So are you using this plugin also Lydia and the Gravity Forms add on.\r\n\r\nOkay, you don't need the Gravity Forms add on so just delete that. And your settings here are going to just take Gravity Forms is going to use the WordPress level mail sending which is powered by postmark because of\r\n\r\nbecause of your plugin here so just delete your gravity forms plugin and you're good I think my camera just turned on me\r\n\r\nno good.\r\n\r\nblinked at me. I gotta learn how this camera works. It's cool, but it's also annoying. Okay, ah Yep. So that'll solve that problem, Lydia.\r\n\r\nwink at it.\r\n\r\nI don't know. I don't know.\r\n\r\nAll right, Lydia. Another FYI sharing with the community. According to postmark, you should not use their platform if you need to be HIPAA compliant. Correct.\r\n\r\nAll emails including sender and receiver as well as all their content are retained for 30 to 40. days. That's correct. So if you need if a site that you work with needs to be HIPAA compliant, then yeah, anything that well.\r\n\r\nAnything that contains patient data, so like a contact form, or whatever really needs to be managed through a HIPAA compliant form service. Jot form has one there's some other HIPAA compliant forms that are out there. There is an add on for Gravity Forms that does it. I'm a little weird about that. I don't know how that one works. We've started using the job. It's very expensive. It's like 100 bucks a month. But we've started using the Jot forms embed on a couple of medical clients for this, but correct now. Now.\r\n\r\nJust to clarify here, and again, I'm not positioning myself as a HIPAA expert, you should probably, you know, talk to an attorney to be safe about all this but the issue with HIPAA is not like WordPress, sending security emails, right.\r\n\r\nThe issue is patient information. So even an appointment scheduling form that doesn't even necessarily talk about a condition is borderline whether that's HIPAA compliant or not like we just don't You don't want to take that responsibility yourself because it is it's it's not good and a contract is not going to protect you from this because it's a federal law. Tonya general I wouldn't even do a general contact form because if there's a free form field where the person can enter in something that looks like medical information, then you're liable. It's a bad deal. It's a bad deal. So Lydia is talking about a health coach client receives emails, so you got health coaching. I don't mean depends on your area and whatever. I don't know that health coaches have to be are governed by HIPAA like you have to figure all that stuff out. And the most important part of this is you as a web provider don't need to be the HIPAA expert. You can get yourself into a lot of trouble that way. This is where you want to tell the client you need to be sure whether or not what you know whether or not you have to meet the HIPAA compliance right. And that's true for any kind of legal compliance. That's why in Monster contracts, there's the whole section about any kind of legal or comply any legal regulations or compliance that your website needs to comply with. You have to tell us that as your developer, so you know, that we can advise you the correct way.\r\n\r\nSo, all right.\r\n\r\nGood, good question. Good subject. All right, next up is Manu.\r\n\r\nAll right, Manu, there are three questions in here. We'll do our best.\r\n\r\nOkay, Manu. I've been doing page analysis, the GT metrics and that particular website that gives me the following error. Yep.\r\n\r\nManu you're using Cloudflare in front of this website, aren't you?\r\n\r\nYep. And probably you have the web, the web application firewall rule that restricts traffic to only us. Is that right?\r\n\r\nYep. So you got to add Canada. Because if you go to GT metrics, what you'll notice is GT metrics free servers. are in Vancouver, Canada. And so you are blocking access to your website, because you're telling it only US traffic. So that's, that's your issue there.\r\n\r\nYeah, so it is easy to fix. And weak. I'll just show you right here. You don't even have to really get into the text of the WAF rule to change this.\r\n\r\nOops.\r\n\r\nHello, websites. Alright, so there's rules for WP Nathan. We'll go into our WAF settings. Alright, so outside USA, there's our rule. And see I've just stacked up a bunch of other like if you want to add Canada right right now you probably just have us in here. You can just start typing and add Canada and hit Deploy you're done. It'll work.\r\n\r\nSo that will solve that problem. We ran up against the same thing not long ago.\r\n\r\nQuestion number two regarding improving front end optimization or back end code optimization, better hosting now liquidweb okay, I'm trying to decide on hummingbird pro image optimization plugins. Okay. So money. i What? What are you asking here? Are you trying to decide which\r\n\r\npage optimization plugin to use and which image optimization plugin.\r\n\r\nAlright, is that what you're looking for recommendations for? Okay.\r\n\r\nSo hummingbird is fine. I think you have to buy the whole WP mu suite for that. Hummingbird is fine. Dairy PMU. I have a license for them. I've had it for years and I continue to maintain it because I'm grandfathered into a crazy low old rate.\r\n\r\nThe thing was WP mu is they have really, really good marketing.\r\n\r\nReally, really good marketing about products that do about 80% of what they say that they'll do. Okay, so, with that, I will say that Smosh and hummingbird are pretty good at out of all the WP plugins. Those are probably the two best hummingbird works quite well actually. Even the free version of hummingbird will probably get you where you need to go. It does pretty darn good.\r\n\r\nJust at the free level. If you want to spend money probably the if you're just going to say what's the best page optimizing plugin out there. I would go with WP Rocket. And they did have a Black Friday deal. I think it might still be available.\r\n\r\nWill you see the results in GT metrics? Okay, so here's the thing. All of the like these plugins, don't think that just because you spend money on a page optimization plugin that you can just activate it and the world gets better. It doesn't work that way. You still have to go in and tinker with settings and back and forth and you might break your site and you know or goof up the CSS like it's really easy to mess up the site. With these optimization plugins. So it's not just simple. Turn it on and forget it. You will have to go in and and play around with your settings. Once you get them right you definitely should see improvements in your speed by deferring JavaScript and doing other things like that. You just have to be careful because if you don't know what you're doing, you could defer a JavaScript that's actually necessary per page interaction. It could cause some problems and it's just it's complicated. Page Optimization is complicated. Okay, Manu, okay. You were mentioning Lightspeed are you running Lightspeed on your server?\r\n\r\nIf you're running okay, if you're running the Lightspeed plugin for WordPress, then you don't use hummingbird Pro or in or WP Rocket because you'll that's what Lightspeed does and you'll probably break something by adding another optimization plugin. So if you're running now, are you just running the Lightspeed plugin? Or are you running actually Lightspeed web server?\r\n\r\nBecause you have to have Lightspeed web server in order for the plugin to work really well.\r\n\r\nAnd that's a fairly expensive, okay? Okay, so don't just the Lightspeed plugin doesn't help you a lot. If you're not using the Lightspeed server. Lightspeed isn't a patchy server replacement. It's a server level thing. It's fairly expensive.\r\n\r\nAnd yep, so in that case, I would take Lightspeed off and use something like hummingbird or they'd be rocket.\r\n\r\nAnd that's okay. Melanie's gets a good recommendation, what works with your server? If you're saying that you are, what did you say?\r\n\r\nOkay, if you're on liquid web Yeah, hummingbird or DAP rocket is probably your best bet.\r\n\r\nAs far as image optimization plugins go, like I mentioned the other day we use E dub right now. And it's pretty good. There's a bunch of them out there Smash.\r\n\r\nYou know, if if you're gonna go hummingbird and smash you might find yourself saving money just by buying the WPM you suite, but you'll want to test out the pricing and see what you know if it makes sense for you.\r\n\r\nAnybody else uses short pixels another one anybody else? Have a hoops?\r\n\r\neyebrow?\r\n\r\nAny other recommendation or image of Fi any other image recommendations?\r\n\r\nYeah, and the thing is, regardless of whichever one of these image optimization plugins you choose, make sure you pay for it, get the paid version because the paid compression is significantly higher. You get much better results. Like I said in the Starter Site course a couple days ago. This is one of the kinds of plugins you want to pay for.\r\n\r\nAll right, final question.\r\n\r\nAny past webinars the best way to optimize five second videos we haven't done a video optimization trainings kind of beyond our purview.\r\n\r\nSo a five five second videos five second video for a service I don't understand what you're after here Mani.\r\n\r\nIs this like a background video?\r\n\r\nBecause I don't think five seconds is enough to adequately Oh, it's just a visual okay. So I would put that either in some sort of CDN space, like Bunnie CDN or just put it in Vimeo and or a video platform like that and drop it in and embed it as the background most Kadence blocks. Most page builders will embed a video from Vimeo All right, moving on down the list gene\r\n\r\nyou hear Gene\r\n\r\nHey Jean, okay. Okay, big question with lots of related questions. Awesome. Even your general take on how to handle this would help me know okay. All right, here we go. Once upon a time, a former colleague turned solopreneur has now moved to a full time company job. He has a number of clients he'd like to pass on to someone he can trust. And is offered them to me. Okay, cool. About 12 of them are hosting only clients not any updates or care in place. He said they don't pay enough to pay for the hosting package he has so they're not worth keeping. If I don't want them he'll advise them to get their own hosting. He is not open to me hosting.\r\n\r\nHe is not open to me hosting where I host other sites that would like them kept on the same platform as where they are because it's simpler to move them.\r\n\r\nGene if he's trying to get out of the business, why does he care what you do?\r\n\r\nMaybe I'm just miss reading that.\r\n\r\nAnother five or six clients require content updates and other forms of assistance. The sites are built on a theme and builder I'm somewhat familiar with but it's not in my stack. There would be some learning curve for me to make updates on these sites. Some of these clients may be open to a package that includes updates and care. Some of them are used to paying almost nothing and a few of them pay well. Okay.\r\n\r\nOh, it's easier for him to move them. Okay.\r\n\r\nWhat builder are they using what theme and builder? Are they using these?\r\n\r\nRow theme and I've never even heard of that. Wow. Anybody else heard a Pro theme and Cornerstone interesting yeah, that's a new one on me.\r\n\r\nYeah, all right. So gosh, so, Jean, my spidey senses are tingling a little bit on this whole situation.\r\n\r\nMostly because you've got clients who are used to not paying a lot for the most part. And it's a stack that you're not familiar with.\r\n\r\nI mean, the does he want? Does he is he just trying to get out of the business and just give you these clients or does he want compensation for the clients?\r\n\r\nInteresting He's not asking for compensation. So Jean, if I were you, though, the first decision you have to make is are you willing to support these clients that are in this builder that you're not super familiar with? I mean, that's the first question you have to ask yourself. If you are, if you're willing to go forward with that. Then I would create a package and honestly kind of a take it or leave it package for these clients that is going to be on your hosting which you control with a certain number of fast tasks.\r\n\r\nAnd you know, with the understanding that their site you know, what a fast task is not redesigned a page and this builder that you're not familiar with. A fast task is change a picture, copy and paste some text, add a blog post these sorts of things.\r\n\r\nThe other thing I would do if you're going to move forward, is I would go out to Upwork. And try to find a developer that knows this platform that could be kind of on call for you. So that if a request exceeds a fast task, and so you would build them for this change. I would you have somebody in your back pocket that you can reach out to to do that work. Does that help? But I would not lower your prices at all for this. I would give them the you know this is kind of a take it or leave it package that includes everything. And if they don't want it, they don't want it they can figure it out themselves. If they do want it. You're happy to help them.\r\n\r\nI mean, if you want to do out, yeah. So you could do it hourly as well. But as long as, like, what I would want to avoid in this situation is you know, a client thinks, oh, great, I've got you from the clients perspective. I've got this new developer, they're going to help me just like this other person did, but you don't know the stack. And so everything's gonna take you longer.\r\n\r\nYou know, so that's why I would say, have a developer on call that you know, you can hand something like this to them and then you can mark their rate up or if you're billing them hourly, you have plenty of margin in your work with this developer. And you could just pass on, you know, you'll you'll make money, not as much as you do in the work yourself. But I don't think you want to try to learn a new builder. It's just nobody's got time for that. Especially one that's like learn it. If it's like the next generation of things coming like learn the block editor. But this old who knows what builder like I wouldn't try to learn that.\r\n\r\nYeah, Sue saying it's really tricky to work with those.\r\n\r\nOkay, does that help Jean?\r\n\r\nMake can be a good thing could be immediate, recurring revenue, you just got to make sure there's good boundaries around it.\r\n\r\nAll right.\r\n\r\nNext up is Ben B.\r\n\r\nOh, my dear lord.\r\n\r\nOkay.\r\n\r\nBen.\r\n\r\nBen has an 80 gigabyte buddy boss site and growing.\r\n\r\nHey, y'all, that can happen buddy boss is a beast. It's also super cool. By the way, if you've never played with Buddy boss before, it is really, really neat. It's definitely WordPress but it is like it's becoming its own.\r\n\r\nAlmost like its own content management system. It's it's really cool. They've got like, a team of 50 developers working on that I met the founder of buddy boss at Cobo press few years ago. brilliant guy anyway. Okay. So really neat thing if you've never played with it. It's kind of cool. And yes, it's like Facebook. It is like your own private Facebook platform. Okay, so currently these image sizes are defined. Okay. Can you recommend a past webinar to go through the process of removing the image size is not required and optimizing all the images? I don't know. That we did a webinar on that Ben. However, I gave you the code just yesterday in the custom functions to unset some of these that you don't need, like I would probably keep thumbnail medium large.\r\n\r\nAnd I don't know what the these are two probably.\r\n\r\nI would look up and see if you can figure out what's defining post thumbnail and EA W thumbnail and see if those are needed. But once you once you go through and turn off the image sizes you don't need, then just run Regenerate Thumbnails the plugin that's in the stack that I recommended. Run regenerate thumbnails in there's a setting in there. Let's see if I've got it on here. I don't think I do.\r\n\r\nYeah, I do. Okay, so right here in the Regenerate Thumbnails plugin.\r\n\r\nUncheck this box and check this box. So what this says it's going to do, it's not going to skip any regeneration. It's going to delete thumbnail files for old unregistered sizes meaning, you know, these sizes that used to exist but don't anymore. This is going to delete those as it recreates. New thumbnails. So actually, you could skip this if you want it unless some of the images have changed.\r\n\r\nAnd then just regenerate. And it will should you should see a shrinkage in your media library size.\r\n\r\nAnd again, that's the Regenerate Thumbnails by Viper\r\n\r\nthis one Yep. So that should work. Hey, Ben, make sure you backup first.\r\n\r\nI know you know that.\r\n\r\nAnything that sounds like deleting always backup first, of course.\r\n\r\nOh, all right. Doug is next.\r\n\r\nDoug, a client doesn't like the form submission format received and her email. I've explained that form submission send data and not formatting at want to try to help by offering a different solution. Is there a plugin, which will create a PDF from a complete form and send us an attachment? Yeah. So Doug, what form plugin are you using? Let's say gravity. Forms\r\n\r\nhe's still with us, Doug.\r\n\r\nOkay, you can use Gravity Forms okay? Then.\r\n\r\nGravity PDF is your friend. Right here.\r\n\r\nThis does exactly what you want.\r\n\r\nIt will. You can customize what you want the PDF to look like. And it will generate the PDF and attach it to the email.\r\n\r\nYou can make it look however you want it to look kind of cool. It does take a little bit of work. You got to get into the nitty gritty, but it works quite well.\r\n\r\nYep. I've been using it for a long time actually, for in the coaching work that I do when somebody fills out a coaching conversation prep form. It emails me the form in the PDF is attached. And then I import that into my little notes app on my iPad so I can write on it. It works really good.\r\n\r\nGood. All right. Next up is Stacy with an E.\r\n\r\nOkay, stay see you installed MailChimp for Gravity Forms. Excellent. Good. Got your MailChimp API great. It's been years since I connected MailChimp and Gravity Forms where does the API go?\r\n\r\nReally good question.\r\n\r\nI think, well, I'm thinking out loud. I think you have to.\r\n\r\nIt's not the API key anymore. It's you have to log in.\r\n\r\nLike it's bounces you ought to log into Mailchimp but we'll we'll do a quick check here and see. So all right MailChimp add on is there\r\n\r\nthey'll be nice and slow today.\r\n\r\nAlright, MailChimp.\r\n\r\nConnect to MailChimp. Yeah, it's a login process now. So they've changed this process, Stacy. So what's your you know once you get the Okay, so if you've done this already, then you're connected. And here in the MailChimp settings, it will show you connected as account name in here.\r\n\r\nAnd then that's going to work across all your Gravity Forms.\r\n\r\nAh, they haven't updated that tutorial. Yeah. So they changed it. It's more secure this way.\r\n\r\nWhereas, you know, not putting an API key in your database. That's that's a good thing.\r\n\r\nOkie dokie Karen is next.\r\n\r\nHey, Karen.\r\n\r\nAll right. Okay, help.\r\n\r\nWe went live with the site yesterday and apparently the blog image import didn't work well, and we couldn't tell during testing on the staging site. Oh, yeah. Most of the images didn't import. Yep.\r\n\r\nOkay, so I think I know what the issue is here. And it's not going to be fun.\r\n\r\nSo there should be an image here. Yep. Yep, yep. Yep, yep.\r\n\r\nOkay, let's see what this image is supposed to be.\r\n\r\nYep. And it's usually this issue where it's a sized down thing. So, Karen, this is not a featured image, right. This is somebody dropped the image in and probably scaled it in the blog post.\r\n\r\nYeah, I don't think it's a feature. I've seen this happen and you can always tell because\r\n\r\nit's this. It has the sizing like a bedsheet like if you go here, this file doesn't exist yet, but if you take the size off of it, it probably does exist. Oh, no, that didn't come in either. Whoo.\r\n\r\nAll right. You got major problems. Okay. How did you import the images Karen?\r\n\r\nDid you just did you like use the standard WordPress export? someone on the team did that up instead of all okay. All right. So they just did the standard WordPress posts export that never works. There is a great plugin called Export media that found it\r\n\r\nYes, this one.\r\n\r\nThis one is awesome.\r\n\r\nRight there. And what this does is actually export the media along with the posts. So and probably the reason you didn't see it in development was because the images were still live on the server. And they were pointing out over there and it probably didn't even update the URLs. The WordPress post export is awful.\r\n\r\nThis will help WP all export will probably do PL Import Export will probably do the same thing. If you've got that. If you're familiar with it, you might want to use that one. But this is a free alternative that we use a lot.\r\n\r\nAnd we have all the PL import as well and we actually liked this one even better. So that is probably your issue.\r\n\r\nIt's not like you can't even just copy the files over from the old site because they'll have to be registered in the media library in the database.\r\n\r\nThe URLs on the staging actually all point to the staging server URL.\r\n\r\nYeah, so yeah, I would, I would go read do a re import on these. And if you've got no PL import, use that one.\r\n\r\nThis one is also good but then if you're if you've got no fuel import, it's just a more robust plugin all the way around.\r\n\r\nOkay, if you can't cop, you're gonna have to do or I would. My suggestion is I would re import all the posts.\r\n\r\nThere's otherwise you'd have to touch every single one of them. Which is just doesn't sound like any fun.\r\n\r\nYeah.\r\n\r\nThe domain is so do you have access to the old site? Like a backup?\r\n\r\nOkay, yeah, so just exported out of the out of that.\r\n\r\nIf, depending on how the backup is like if it's live someplace where you can access it, otherwise, restore it in the staging environment, and just do your export there and import to the live domain. Or you probably want to make a staging site in the live domain too because this could break something but likely you'll just be able to import straight over and it'll be fine. rerun that import Yeah.\r\n\r\nThis is one of those things I wish they fix in core WordPress because, like why would you want to export posts and not get all the media like that's just dumb.\r\n\r\nBut it's always been that way they haven't touched the WordPress export the core export thing at tools, import export.\r\n\r\nThey haven't touched this since God probably WordPress 2.0. Or something. It's just it's really unfortunate.\r\n\r\nYeah.\r\n\r\nOkay, well good luck with that. Karen. I betcha WP all import solves all your problems and wring the neck of your team member whoever did that they should have known better\r\n\r\nAll right.\r\n\r\nNext up awesome, Paul. Oh dear.\r\n\r\nOkay.\r\n\r\nAll right. Many errors Backup Buddy file solid backup I restored it on a new domain and get these errors\r\n\r\nokay\r\n\r\nwell Oh,\r\n\r\nwhen you set up the\r\n\r\nso I think all of these errors are following off of this database collation. Err,\r\n\r\ndoes this error exist in the knowledge base\r\n\r\nnow there's a follow up question.\r\n\r\nYeah\r\n\r\nI have not seen this but I'm not sure why I would have ever looked at that\r\n\r\ndon't know this is a question for backup support.\r\n\r\nHave you put in a ticket on this? I've never seen that happen before. It's really weird Is it Is this like a different hosting environment you usually work with?\r\n\r\nOkay.\r\n\r\nI'm pretty good on the regular usage of solid backups, but debugging these errors is a little beyond me sometimes.\r\n\r\nOkay, was the host you don't work with and you restored it on your host. There's probably something screwy with the way that database was set up.\r\n\r\nI mean, we could actually make it as chat GPT was just didn't and see what happens to except for we'll see if I get any luckier.\r\n\r\nOh, look at that. It's probably a MySQL version that should just love chat. GPT by the way, chat GPT one year old today. One year old today. It was November the 30th of 2022 that chat GPT was turned on\r\n\r\nand how it has changed all the things.\r\n\r\nOkay, I think this table doesn't exist error\r\n\r\nis related to this one. Hey, y'all. It's Paul's birthday.\r\n\r\nHappy birthday, Paul.\r\n\r\nWow.\r\n\r\nHope you get to do something fun today, my friend.\r\n\r\nOkay, so I bet if it's the SQL version doesn't support this. I would take this.\r\n\r\nI would take this to your host oh look, I bet you're running. You know what version of MySQL you're running Paul? Because I bet it's this I bet it's less than eight dot O dot one. And it doesn't know what that collation is, and that's what's causing the problem.\r\n\r\nVersion 1000 Okay, anyway, does this help people?\r\n\r\nYeah, so and if you're running Maria, it might be a Maria version issue as well.\r\n\r\nSo I'm going to paste this and what can you copy from the chat pole? Well, you will be able to after we're done here, but there you go. Or actually, I could just give you this link. There's the link.\r\n\r\nGive this number one. I bet you once this is solved, this will this will restore. And that's a kind of an uncommon coalition, that that other host is doing and that's why it's weird. Yep.\r\n\r\nInteresting. All right. Next up while we're already at two central Tanya Europe. We'll try to get through these last four questions.\r\n\r\nOkay, Tanya, follow up on the HIPAA issues. How about emails at the server? Level? Oh, 100%. If you're any doctor's office, any medical professional office, that is using email needs to be on HIPAA compliant email period.\r\n\r\nYeah, that's a huge issue.\r\n\r\nAnd any IT company working with medical provider ought to know that. But yeah, they need to be absolutely on a HIPAA compliant email.\r\n\r\nAll right, another question from Tanya.\r\n\r\nFollowing up on caching optimization question, how do you reduce initial server response time? Great question. That is the first and most important thing you can do is have good caching either at the the like the Cloudflare level, or the and or the hosting level. Because what's happening in this initial server response time, is when you're saying I want this page and the server is going and is trying to grab all the database queries and stuff to hand you the page. That's what the initial server response time is.\r\n\r\nGathering of things to give you the page. So the more you can do to cache everything, the lower that response time is going to be also how beefy your server hardware is also plays a role in this. So obviously, a server with faster hardware, more resources is going to have a faster initial response time. That help\r\n\r\nthere's more texture to that answer, but that's the we're already Four Minutes Overtime answer.\r\n\r\nThat's the basics.\r\n\r\nOkay, yeah, Manu, the CPU and RAM. It all goes together, you know, and what kind of RAM what kind of disk? You know, is the server using SSDs are in Vietnamese in the M E. Yeah. How fast the access to the storage is all that matters. But it's all it's all part of that.\r\n\r\nOkay, Billy, your next looking for an updated PHP version on some sites. Is there any quick reference PHP 8.2? Or is this a case of searching each plugin? Yeah. So Billy, if you're\r\n\r\nlet me let me take a running started this. For those of you that weren't aware PHP, eight reached end of life four days ago, I think it was November 26. So it is now out of date, no longer receiving security updates. PHP eight is dead.\r\n\r\nThere are no existing security issues I'm aware of, but there could be and if there are, the PHP people are not going to patch it. So it's time to upgrade.\r\n\r\nWe're in the process. We just about to have everything now over to PHP 8.1. I'd have had no issues with PHP compatibility. PHP, eight, two. I don't know what.\r\n\r\nI'm not aware of any major plugins that have PHP 8.2 But the way I would do that, Billy, is I mean, you can certainly check your plugin support for like for major plugins like Gravity Forms and events, calendar and WooCommerce. And all those WooCommerce I believe does support 8.2. But you should be able to find in developer docs or put in a ticket if you have a license for major plugins. The other thing I would do is look just spin up a dev site and then\r\n\r\nspin up a dev site and then upgrade your PHP and look at the error logs, right. So flip over to click through your site a little bit and that will let you know that and then you can look at your error logs and see if there's any errors that have been collected. That are 8.2 related.\r\n\r\nSo there you go.\r\n\r\nHelp. Okay.\r\n\r\nGood, good. Good. All right, coming down to the end of the list. Tanya is final question for today.\r\n\r\nTanya is using the Kadence advanced gallery when I create a gallery using the thumbnail slider, big image over thumbs. Normally it works fine, but when I add dynamic images, the thumbs are clear and the large image is blurry. Why? I have no idea.\r\n\r\nActually, that's not true.\r\n\r\nI've never done this before so I don't have an immediate Yes, I've done this and here's how you fix it answer. Probably. The issue is typically like if you're loading an image and it's blurry, it's because you're loading a smaller image size that's being expanded to\r\n\r\nit's being expanded to fill an area that's larger than it should be. Right. So I don't know how to fix it either.\r\n\r\nI would reach out to Kadence support because they're quite helpful.\r\n\r\nSo I mean, look for the record. Your question was why? And I did in fact answer that question.\r\n\r\nHow do you fix it is a different question and I do not know the answer to that question. I would reach out to Kadence support. I imagine they have a solution for you on that tiniest thing, it's probably a metabolics issue since that's what creates the images it could be and you might need to reach out to Megabox and say it's serving this image size and oh, here's what I would do. Tonya can you go into the through inspector and look at the exact image\r\n\r\nand look at the exact image that's being loaded.\r\n\r\nWell, there you go.\r\n\r\nSo it's loading thumbnail size. So I would go to Megabox support then and say, here's the link and even record a short video and just show them in the inspector what's going on and ask for what you need to do to fix that. Meta Box supports generally pretty darn good. You have the paid version, right? The Pro version.\r\n\r\nYeah, they're really those forums are quite good. Or support.\r\n\r\nOkay.\r\n\r\nAll right.\r\n\r\nThat's it. We're done. questions are answered.\r\n\r\nNext week. Can you believe it's already time for plug in round up? We got a lot to do next week. On solid Academy. Take a quick look here.\r\n\r\nWe have one round up and the best odds are coming up next Tuesday and Wednesday. This one's all the December plugin Roundup is always fun, because it is holiday plugin spectacular. And then of course our best of the last six months of top votes from each of the plugin round ups. Also news roundup coming up the 12. The final fly course here on solid Academy will occur there on December the 13th. And just a little FYI.\r\n\r\nI am going to change this so that it is a webinar. Pardon me it's a zoom call and not a webinar so that we can do a face wall of everybody. If you want to participate that way you can keep your video off if you don't, but that was a suggestion that I think that'd be a fitting way to draw to a close the fly course. That we've run for the last four years here. We will not be running that again next year. So this is the final fly of forever on solid Academy. So I think we'll do that but that means you'll have to re register Okay, you'll have to re register. It's going to be a zoom call.\r\n\r\nNot a zoom webinar.\r\n\r\nNo fly. So the fine folks at solid did not want to renew the fly course for next year. There are reasons for that.\r\n\r\nAnd yep, so that's gonna do it. This is the final fly.\r\n\r\nComing up, and of course Oh, and this is this is one that we just added. This is outside of our normal cadence of webinars. This is a Friday webinar, and this is what we've been talking about for some time.\r\n\r\nThe this is monetizing the solid suite to grow recurring revenue. So we've been talking about how, especially those of you that have been members for a long time, maybe you have a legacy, I think toolkit or one of the old unlimited solid security or formerly I think security packages and of course those legacy security plugins don't get access to the patch stack firewall because those actually cost per site.\r\n\r\nI'm going to in this webinar, I'm going to talk about you know, how do we create care plans but also how to use packaging and pricing and selling care plans, which is super helpful. But also and more importantly, we're going to talk about how do you add patch stack licenses so that you can sell another level of care plan to your clients that includes the patch stack firewall, and this will be this will be something you can use to charge more because patch stack firewall is pretty awesome. So that's coming up December the 15th and go and register for that. Now that's a Friday afternoon. So again, it's outside our normal cadence of webinars.\r\n\r\nSadie will the materials will be available for fly Absolutely, it's in the library.\r\n\r\nAll of that will be available. Those are listed under there in the live stream library. And if you go here to fly, there are currently 58 of them.\r\n\r\nAnd so you can all the years of fly will still be here as replays just like every other webinar we've done.\r\n\r\nJust like that.\r\n\r\nTanya, we are no longer selling Academy standalone memberships so that was one of the big changes when we move over to solid. There's no longer a standalone training membership. The solid Academy premium is included as part of the solid suite at no extra charge. And the good thing about that is you the solid suite at one license is actually like way like half the cost of the old iThemes Training standalone membership. So it was the training membership was 399 a year and I forget what the deal is right now the deal is super low through for a few more days. So yeah, right now it's $119. So it's like a third of what it used to be.\r\n\r\nSo yeah.\r\n\r\nBut if you buy the solid suite, you get access to solid Academy premium. Yeah, Christine, we talked about that for quite a while prior to the rebrand Yeah, we talked about it a number of different ways but I still know people miss that bit of information\r\n\r\nAll right, yeah. So if you the deal is if you have the I iThemes Training membership and you want to keep it you can keep it as long as you want, but it'll actually be cheaper for you to buy the suite and get extra stuff.\r\n\r\nSo it's up to you how you want to do that.\r\n\r\nOkay, now we're actually done.\r\n\r\nHave a great weekend. Everybody gets some rest. We will see you back here Tuesday for plug in round up. Here on the solid Academy where we go further together."}},"postCountOnPage":1,"postCountTotal":1,"postID":448446,"postFormat":"standard","geoCloudflareCountryCode":"US"}; dataLayer.push( dataLayer_content );
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Help Docs Software Kadence Nathan Ingram’s Office Hours

Nathan Ingram’s Office Hours

Nathan Ingram opens his virtual office doors during this informal, unstructured webinar to answer your questions. There is no agenda and no planned content. Bring your questions and Nathan will answer them first come, first served. Get your answers and learn from the questions of others.

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