Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to within WordPress, the podcast about people within WordPress and the WordPress community and everyone around it. In today's edition, we have a new guest. With us today is Robbie.
Welcome to the podcast, Robbie, and how may we know you?
[00:00:18] Speaker B: Hi, so Grimkas, because I'm trying to learn how to say your name properly.
Thank you for having me on. Yes, my name is Robbie Adair and most people in the WordPress world know me through OS training, which is the training company that I have because we train all versions of cms. So we've got WordPress, we've got Jumla, we've got Drupal, and then we also now have some tools that are SaaS products in there as well. So basically anything web development. But obviously, as we all know, the market share is over in WordPress. So I do spend a lot of time in the WordPress world with the WordPress community.
I also have an agency that I've had for over 20 years now and we do web development projects and video production. And so we have worked a lot with WordPress as well over the years. And in the last five years or so, we've really been doing some interesting things with WordPress in our agency where we're using WordPress in conjunction with react apps or Laravel apps and things like that.
[00:01:20] Speaker A: That's a lot of training that you're doing. How did you get into training?
[00:01:25] Speaker B: So oddly enough, before I started my agency, I worked in corporate America in training. I was the training director for New Horizons. Actually. I developed the web development training that we offered in and you know, back in the day when we were doing Dreamweaver and things like then, you know, I just stayed with web development after that when we started the agency and we did a lot of custom training with our agency for clients, but we didn't offer just open training but OS training. I knew the owner, Steve Burj, and he was looking for someone to do in class training for Jim Le in the Houston area. And so I was know I miss training running my agency and so I would just every now and then go and teach some classes for him. And I enjoyed it because it just got me back in front of the classroom and I really do like doing that and I do a lot of speaking now. So that was kind of where I was like, I'll just move into doing speaking at conferences and such. And I do enjoy that a lot. I do a lot of it because it keeps me on my toes. I feel like you're always having to prepare to present right or you're preparing to teach, and so it keeps you where you're always constantly having to learn yourself.
But then whenever Steve was looking to sell Os training, I was really, I loved doing the little bits of training I was doing for him. And so I was, this is, this is what I want to do. And so four years ago, I purchased Os training from him. And so we have the agency and Os training, and Os training is pretty well known in the junglaw and Drupal world already, but it was not very known in the WordPress world because WordPress is a big, so it's like you're a small fish in a big sea. And so I said, well, I need to do the exact same thing that we do in the Drupal and Jimla world, which is we participate in their conferences, we speak at the events I coordinated, Joe Texas and Jumala USA for years.
Rod, one of my trainers, he speaks at the Drupal camps all over the place. And so I said, I'm going to start getting involved in WordPress. And so that's what I do. Right before the pandemic, actually. Of course, I went to the first WordPress event and then everything shut down. And I was like, oh, no. But as soon as they even started doing online conferences, I was like, let me speak. I want to get involved. How can I help? What can I do? Just get involved and meet people in the community. So I was so happy when you asked me to be on here because I was like, I love these kind of things because I'm always looking at podcasts, just trying to see who's who in the community and who does what. And so I love it. So thank you for doing these type of podcasts.
[00:04:00] Speaker A: Oh, happy to do so. It's been on my bucket list for ages to do it, and I just couldn't make time for away from whatever else I was doing that just didn't happen. But yeah, the whole goal of this podcast is for anybody listening to get a better understanding who was inside of this huge community. Because I've been part of the core community, I would say probably around 2007, 2008, and I know where plugins come from. Who was the original developer, great example, for instance, is all in one SEO.
Most people know that that's awesome motive that is running that, but I know it was originally created by Uberdose and nobody even knows that. But having that history is all nice. But if nobody learns from a little bit of that history, then we're just looking at the current state of affairs. And I think that is a poor way to look at things. Just from the here and now there is history, so we might as well find a way to incorporate that. And that's one of my goals, to have people interview people, talk to people that are contributing in one way or another. And there were multiple people pointing you out to me, that'd be a great person to talk to. So I'm like, okay, let me.
In hindsight, I knew who you were, but when you start looking into somebody, there's always like, oh, this is happening. Oh, that's also happening. Interesting.
So my curiosity is on the training side of things.
Little sidestep before, but probably around 2010 to 2015, I did a lot of training myself for a company here in the Netherlands called learn it, and a friend of mine was the country director for New Horizons. When you just said new Horizons, like, hey, I've heard that name before, but I did a lot of Microsoft office project. I did a lot of advanced excel and that sort of stuff.
And oddly enough for them, I did some custom WordPress courses at the time. Nobody was doing that.
Funny that there's a shared sort of small history there.
[00:06:29] Speaker B: Yes. It's always interesting to find how we connect. I mean, I find it all the time, too. I was literally just at a conference last month, and I was talking to someone who also, we have a shared passion in theater. And so we were talking about theater, and she's doing some directing now. This is like on the side, right? These are just things that we like on the side, but she's doing some directing on the side. And I was like, oh, and she lived in the city I was at high school in. And I said, oh, you know, I said, I went to this high school. And she said, oh, I've done some teaching there or whatever, I guess.
Teaching. And I was like, oh, do you O'Neill? And she was like. And then she was like, oh, wait, yes. She was like, I don't know him from there, but I directed him in a play last year. Or like, I was like, it's such a small world. It really is. And I find that all the time when I'm going to these conferences and talking to people, we can find shared things, just like you knowing someone from new horizons and doing know. And by the way, I was also teaching Microsoft. I was mouse certified. I did a lot of teaching.
[00:07:36] Speaker A: Yeah.
So I always had a knack for understanding complex stuff and explaining it, relatively breaking it down. Like, explain it to me like I'm a five year old. My dad used to always say that whenever I learned something new, he would just throw that in my face. I have no idea what you just said, but you can find a better way to say this, probably. Let me think about this.
But yeah, so that's how I rolled in.
I think I left a comment somewhere on some excel forum, whatever, and then they reached out to me, could you possibly do training? I'm like, sure, not a problem. But that's funny how that goes. It was a sidetrack then. I haven't done it in ages.
[00:08:20] Speaker B: Well, but I will keep that in the back of my mind. So I may be, don't you worry.
[00:08:27] Speaker A: This is very deep.
[00:08:30] Speaker B: That's right, you're getting yourself in trouble now. See, but training, it's so key. It really is, because you've got to think, yeah, I do development, my team does development, but there's so much work out there right now that you can't find enough people a lot of times to get a project done. There's just that much work. So you wind up having to say, well, we can do this project, but we got to push it out. Right. And so to me, training is key. We need more web developers, we need more people that know how and they need to know from ground up. So I'm a big proponent of even if you're going to teach word, let's say you need to start from the ground up. You need to teach them where menus are located, where tools are. You've got to start and you've got to start from the whole ground up of saying, here's the breakdown of this software, because then that's going to make it easier as you flow through your training to know where you're going to find things. I mean, if we're talking about WordPress, the left hand menu and the local settings versus a particular setting, how do plugins actually work in there and things like that. So learning some of the core theory behind how something works is just going to make it way easier for you to learn more advanced things later on. Can you teach somebody how to just go into WordPress and make a post? Yeah, but you're kind of doing them a disservice. That's all you're going to show them how to do. They need to know a little bit more. Even if they work, maybe they're one of your clients and all they're going to do is go in and add blog posts. Let's say you still should teach them enough about it so that they understand when they go in there and they're not overwhelmed and they just kind of have a sense of that's where those things are and I don't need to touch those. This is where I'm going to go. But at least they understand something.
[00:10:17] Speaker A: Yeah, I fully agree with you.
So I've always been in the habit of creating short tutorials for clients. I publish them on a separate YouTube channel. Nobody has access to it other than the client that I send the link. And instead of just answering the question that they have, like how do I change a menu or where do I add this or that? Or I keep forgetting how to do this, which I then obviously is the meat of the tutorial that I create. And they're like short ones, like five, six, seven minutes. That's it. But I always navigate to that and don't just start in that screen. Right. So for instance, in the beginning, now most of them are very well used to the yoast SEO settings. What to do, where to pay attention to it. That's right.
But what you'll see in a lot of tutorials is that they'll just start with that screen and I know how to get there. But there's clients that don't understand that you need to be in a post, whether that's an existing or new one, and then find the meta box and then add your insights to it. So I always take into account that they may forget what I find such a normal thing to do.
So that's a good example. Yeah. So don't assume. Right?
[00:11:40] Speaker B: Yes.
And we've, over the years with our agency, did the same thing you did when we were turning over a website to a client, or at least turning over so they could start putting some content in. We did that same thing. We would either just do a live zoom that we recorded and then chopped up into pieces for them later on, or we would actually just record some little snippets and a lot of times we would even put it in the administration of their site so they could access them for the back end or whatever, but giving them those little chunks. But I always did start from, okay, we're going to start with log into the administration. Now go here. Now go here. Now go here. Now we're going to do what we're doing. Even if I was going to be showing them like five things in a post, I still would start each one that way. Because you're right.
Especially when you talk about people who have to just maintain websites out there, they're not necessarily in it every day like we are. And so it may have seemed real easy that day. You showed them how to make a post and then fast forward two months later and they've done all this other work that may not be related to web at all. And then you're expecting them to log into a website and make a post and they're just like, I flipped. Since then.
[00:12:47] Speaker A: I have the example of every now and then I get the simple question, like how do I log in?
And they know how to log in, they just don't know where to find the login.
[00:12:58] Speaker B: Exactly.
[00:13:00] Speaker A: Because I remember at one time I was recreating a site into a modern version of the same site, but in a different theme and essentially just copy pasted over a lot of CSS a day's work, published it, emailed the client and they go, great, this works so much better. Wonderful. But how do I log in? And I go, how do you log in? So what I had not included in the new version was in the footer at the bottom. There was a little link that log in and why would you need it there? So I just left it out. But yeah, people need that stuff.
[00:13:44] Speaker B: They do.
[00:13:44] Speaker A: Not everybody is wired the same way.
And that's funny to learn where somebody's entry point is. And speaking of entry points, is there a particular crowd that you're focusing on?
Are you focusing on development necessarily, or configurators?
[00:14:08] Speaker B: I was going to say I call them integrators is what I call someone who's going to have to do a little bit of everything in web development. Here's someone who wants to actually learn how to do everything or to learn how to be a full time web developer if they wanted to. So our classes are geared more towards beginner, and then we have some intermediate. We break down a lot of things into plugins or very specific things, or how to build a website that does x those kind of things, or just in general, learn WordPress, learn joomla, learn drupal. And those are our, we build a site in those courses so that they actually get practical experience, not just watching videos and listening to it if they follow along, and that at the end of it they'll have a full website build. And to me, doing is the best way to learn, but you need guidance to do it right, otherwise you get frustrated and you quit. So having something where it walks you through and guides you through doing it, I think it's the best way for people to learn.
Some of those other courses are good for like intermediate or people who are already, or web developers may just go, hey, I'm going to go watch this course to see if that plugin does what I need it to do for this project. So I think we sometimes have some people are just web developers that are using it for very specific need that they have in their education. Not necessarily I need to go learn how to do a CMS because I know how to do that. But I want to see this particular plugin. How do you configure it, how does it work and is it going to fit the need for what I have in this project? Because we have a lot of companies that may have like ten seats because they have a whole web development department and each person has a seat and so they're all looking at different things.
We do have some development courses, just not as, I wouldn't call us a heavy core development training, though.
We're not doing like learn Java and things like that. We're not there. We do have some development. It is all obviously based around the web languages like PHP or JavaScript, so it's based on those languages. And then of course we do have. I actually had Jen Kramer do new HTML CSS courses for us a couple of years ago that know just learning from scratch HTML and CSS. And then I had her do a second course where she took what they built in that course and then made it all responsive. And my whole point of doing that is we tell people in all of the CMS classes, we're like, if you don't know any HTML or any CSS, we highly recommend that you do one of these courses. Because even though you're probably noggin the code when you get into WordPress or Joomla or Drupal right off the bat. Anyway, understanding, being able to look at the code and see why is this not doing what I'm telling it to do at this, but I'm telling it to be green, but it's turning out blue. Why is that? Being able to look at that source code and at least have a hint of where do I need to go? Or if it's just not an option that I can do, how can I put in custom CSS? Now of course, the other thing that I've started, I've been doing talks and I'm going to work on from those talks that I'm doing at conferences. I'm going to build a little course which is using AI to help you speed up your web build.
[00:17:14] Speaker A: I was going to ask, how do you integrate AI?
[00:17:16] Speaker B: So good for a good segue.
Yes.
And I tell you, my AI talks have been very popular. So I was always amazed because I usually speak about pretty niche things and so I have smaller crowds, I feel like. But I was like, wow. I just spoke about it up at work Camp Montclair, and it was standing room only. There were people who couldn't even get in the room. I felt bad.
But it is a hot topic right now, though. It's a hot topic.
And I tell people when you're trying to learn about AI right now I subscribe to emails that daily send me updates on what's going on in the AI world and it is literally like drinking from a fire hose to try and keep up with it. Right now we have so much going on. I listen to podcasts and I'm just like, oh my gosh. I mean, in one week's time, AI kind of shifts a little bit and the next week it's shifted a little bit more and you're just like blown away every week by what's being done out there. But there's just some key core things that web developers or web builders is what I should start saying. I'm trying to correct myself because I say web developers because we've been called that for so long. But now when you say web developer, typically people think of back end developers and such. And I'm really meaning a website builder, right? I'm meaning builders. They could be on front or back end builders of websites can use this because one helping you write CSS, it is brilliant at. I mean, you could use Bard rchat, GPT and helping you build your css.
[00:18:53] Speaker A: In words what you want it to do.
I guess the only thing you need to figure out is what's the class I need to target? Other than that, just tell it what it needs to do.
[00:19:04] Speaker B: And even better than that, you can tell it the class you want to target. Or if you don't have a class, you can tell it what you would like it to name your class in there.
And the beauty of that is it remembers your conversation, right? And so if you go and you then show it to the client and the client's like, oh, I love that rounded corner red box with the orange outline that you did there. But can we make that a green outline? Or could you make one corner square or whatever? And you're like, sure. And then you can just go back over there and go, hey, could you give me that same css but only with a round or a square corner in the right? And boom, it remembered. It spits it all back out to you properly with the right class name that you have said and all that, and you just pop it in. It's great.
[00:19:45] Speaker A: I'm thinking now that the famous question that people in web development in the broader sense of world really don't like to hear is when a client says, can you make the logo bigger or smaller, right? I guess we can just tell them that, no, but you can do it yourself. Just ask Chat GPT to do it for you. Here's how you would do that. Knock yourself out. And if you want the logo bigger, but the footer, whatever, less high, figure it.
[00:20:16] Speaker B: Know, I do try to stress to people because there was a lot of anxiety. Like if you think about a year ago, people were kind of getting very anxious about, oh, AI is going to kill web development jobs and it was going to eliminate jobs and things like that. Actually, so far, all AI has done is created a new career called engineer. But it's only helping people in those industries. It's not taking their jobs away. Because yes, you could tell your client, you know what, Chat GPT can write that CSS for you. But guess what? Your client has no clue really what to ask Chat GPT for. And even when Chat GPT gives it back, they're going to be like, well, that's real fancy and pretty code. Where do I put it? How does it work?
[00:20:59] Speaker A: I have the example of whenever you're at a client and they tell you something they've read and go, how did you find that? And then you see what they actually type in the search machine.
I don't know. But most people working on front end development type of stuff know how to engineer a search engine prompt, right? So we know we need to target, especially if you know the extra parameters you can use. But we play with that. Most of us do, at least. And then when you see somebody who absolutely has no clue other than just type in words, hit enter and use full sentences and stuff, that actually makes no sense, right? And to have that in the back of your mind looking at how AI is going to rob everybody's jobs, I'm like, no, you don't get, it's going to enrichen it. And it's only going to start with a very small niche, very small part of the population that understands how to leverage this.
I don't know if you've seen the example Joe Hoyle from human made demonstrated month and a half back or so, where he essentially has an AI hooked into, essentially outputting ready code that you can have the blocks and the content inside and the images and all that. Essentially, it just generates it for you.
[00:22:22] Speaker B: The editor, like scaffold did up for you. Yeah.
[00:22:26] Speaker A: So the only thing you have to do is double check the text, if that's what you want to say. And then next, and then the next page, you'll want a different layout and you tell it what kind of different layout you want, and maybe include two testimonials and this and that, but it will spit out the code for you. I'd like to think that's the type of direction we're going into. So when you spoke of implementers, another term that you'll hear is configurators. It's essentially that crowd will see an enrichment of what they can do because they'll need way less time to do the same thing. And if you can find yourself in a position where that's what you're doing and then charge same, then that's profit and time.
[00:23:16] Speaker B: Exactly.
Yes, exactly. What I see is that we're all going to be doing what we've been doing. We'll just be able to do it faster.
Could I write the CSS code for that? Absolutely.
Because you get rusty and you have to go, like, let me go Google. What's that command for this? I want to make whatever, or, oh, I need this to be cross browser. So what do I need to do to make the rounded corners? Be cross browser. So that's time. Whereas if I can just go in and go write this for me, that's faster. I do have to know enough and have enough knowledge to know that what I have received from it will work.
[00:23:51] Speaker A: And is you need the verbiage, you need to understand the words you need to use. Yeah, for sure. But yes, I agree with you. I think it's a huge enrichment of.
I've used it for so many things, like from code enhancing, dissecting spaghetti code. That's my favorite. Tell me what is happening here, because I'm lost. Like, this is 500 lines, please help me out here. And it will tell me exactly.
[00:24:18] Speaker B: So, by the way, if you tell chat, GPT, explain this code to me like a noob, it will break down line by line and tell you what is going on in each line of that code.
[00:24:29] Speaker A: It is brilliant for those of us who keep forgetting what a boolean or a variable in strict mode and all of those things.
I love it. So I'm assuming that you do not see this as a threat to training at all.
[00:24:46] Speaker B: No. So in training world, we actually use it as what one? Like I said, I'm using it to train people how to do what they do a little bit faster. Right?
Like, for instance, have you ever had to dig through web logs trying to figure out what the error was that happened on a server? You can just throw a web log into chat and you could say, please find any irregularities or whatever you can tell it to sort that log how you want saves you so much time. So there's so many things that are time savers on there. Now, on the training side as well, though, it also helps speed up creating your training because you can actually use AI to help you generate content for dummy sites, let's say, or help you. I want to explain this in a different way. This is what I say. Explain this to me in a different way because again, like you said, sometimes you tell somebody something and they're like, I don't get it. And so you have to then think of another way. Write another story or analogy, just something like that. Well, sometimes you're just like, I can't think of another way to explain this. Well, you could put that in there and it could give you other ideas. And from that it'll probably spin off and you'll create your own idea from it. But it may get you out of being stuck. And that's what I tell people, especially if you write, let's say you write blogs or you write training materials or you just write creative, whatever, you get like writer's block. You're like stuck in a way where you're like, I don't know what I need to do next, or I don't know how to explain this better or whatever. Using AI to get you unstuck is a great thing because not saying have it, write it for you. Because I always tell people, if you take anything straight out of one of the AI tools, please go run it through a plagiarism checker.
[00:26:27] Speaker A: You're not that unique. And it tells you exactly. This is AI.
[00:26:31] Speaker B: Oh, yes, it knows. Yeah, you can go to zero GPT and it'll tell you if something has been created with AI, generated with AI and imagery.
There's, I love Adobe Firefly or the Adobe products, I should say in general, we were talking about the adobe products before this. I love the Adobe products. And I will say I feel like they're kind of moving in the right direction. We've got Dolly and we've got mid journey, but Adobe is trying to approach it from, we're going to train our AI from our own stock. We're not just taking anybody's artwork out there. So they're trying to be ethical about what they're putting into their AI. They are also now writing a script that people will be able to put on their own artwork that says I do not want my artwork to be included in.
So to me they're doing some really, they have to. I mean, they're all about graphics, right? I mean, Adobe, they have to make sure that what they're going to put out there is going to be usable for everybody out there. So I like what they're doing in the AI space for creators out there and protecting artists and things like that.
[00:27:38] Speaker A: Yeah, I agree.
It's refreshing to see Adobe actually getting it, if I'm being really honest.
[00:27:45] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:27:47] Speaker A: For the longest time I think they've been sort of cruising.
At least that's how it came across to me. They're sort of cruising on their path of features and stuff, that they're improved and sure, but I've never found them to be on the innovative side of things. But now with AI, they definitely are. It's amazing what they have added to the capabilities of the system.
Do you have any courses and training in that area or is it strictly to CMS and code side of things?
[00:28:19] Speaker B: So, so far what we've done with our courses has just been really web tool. So cmss or maybe plugins that work in those, or maybe some of the tools like this is how you use Filezilla, things like that. So it's toolbase. We have not spread out to the graphics world. We did have a gimp. We did have a gimp.
[00:28:40] Speaker A: That would make sense with Os in your name, right?
[00:28:43] Speaker B: Exactly.
[00:28:44] Speaker A: But I'm assuming it refers to open source.
[00:28:47] Speaker B: That is where it started. Yes. Steve, when he started it, it was open source training. When I bought it, I just changed it to be we're, because we have some things on there now that are not necessarily open source. Mostly it's open source, but we do have some tools that are not open source on there and some SaaS products that are not open source, like equed or Shopify. We have some courses on those.
And just because we think it's important. I mean, we love open source and we work in the open source world in our agency and such, but I do think everybody, even in the open source world, we work with tools that are not open source. And so I feel like we've got some missing chunks in our training here if we don't have some of those things.
So we were like, maybe we'll just call os as like one stop or something like that. We're like, we'll call it something, but it originally was rebrand within the. Exactly, exactly.
That's funny. Yeah, but I would like to do some graphics. But there's so many good, very high end training courses out there for Adobe, not to mention they themselves put out a lot of good training. And so I'm not sure that Adobe would be the path that we would take. Or we might do something very specific, like how to optimize your images using Photoshop or gimp, something like that. So something that's still more web based, web development based, but using Adobe or using GiMP or using an online, there's a lot of online compression tools now that are pretty good.
[00:30:23] Speaker A: I think the whole on the tool side of things, I think there's a huge field that is, let's take YouTube as an example. The stuff that you can find there in depth is just mind blowing.
There's very little on the creating side of things, not necessarily code, because code is very dependent on how someone is able to bring across what they're actually trying to do or having you learn on the creative side of things. So me starting my podcast, having to have a video camera in front of me, there's folks that explain that in depth, like where to take care of this, how to do this, how to do that, make sure you have this because that might also happen. And then if that happens, you also need to have that whole field of information.
If you look at what is available on YouTube, I would say media is a great example where that works perfectly. Canva tutorials, for instance. I've learned a bunch because canva is a great tool, like really great tool.
There's very little that I had to figure out myself that wasn't available on YouTube. From bulk stuff to just quick do this and short codes and stuff like that, how are you looking at YouTube as a content different type of provider of training?
Is that something you're even bothered with and have an opinion about?
[00:32:02] Speaker B: No, I do. I think YouTube's great.
I feel at this point, I also get many degrees on YouTube myself because I learn on YouTube as so, and a lot of people do ask, they're like, how could you ever sell training memberships? Because I could just go on YouTube and learn this for free. I was like, well, you can go on YouTube. First of all, you've got to find it on YouTube. Second of all, most YouTube truny is very short and concise and it's very pointed, right? Like canvas canva. I mean, when you want to go learn how to do something in canva. It's probably pretty, I mean, there are a few where they're going to take you through and teach you the whole thing, but most of them are fairly pointed. This is how you do x in canva. Right. And so that's really good. I enjoy that. Sometimes I go use, so, and I never worry about it because it's just like web development. I never worry. Like with my agency over the years, a lot of people were like, oh, my gosh. Or you worry that there won't be any work. I'm like, there's so much competition here with other web development agencies. And I'm like, there's so much work out there. There's room for everyone. That's what I say. There's room for everyone. And same in the training industry, there is room for everyone. We're pretty pointed about trying to always give you something that you can follow all the way through and build if you want to. And so having that where you can build along with it. A lot of times when your YouTube training videos, they're really just showing you, this is how you go do X and you go to this setting and do this and do that and do this and they do show you and you can follow those steps.
Yeah. So it's pretty concentrated.
So I don't find it as competition necessarily. And we actually have our own YouTube channel and we put out some of our, what we'll do is like, if our classes are getting older, so they're getting a little long in the leg, let's say drupal seven. So drupal seven is getting a little long in the legs. Right. So we took drupal seven.
[00:33:51] Speaker A: I would hope so.
[00:33:52] Speaker B: Yeah. We put it. Well, you'd say that, but there are still people trying to convert.
[00:33:56] Speaker A: I know, that's why I said hope.
[00:33:58] Speaker B: Yes, exactly.
So we moved that over to YouTube. Actually, our drupal classes had over 2 million views now, I think at this point.
Yeah. So it was pretty popular. Even now it's getting views. I think it's a newer drupal, but still. So we will take some of our courses and put them out on our YouTube channel, where we've got over 40,000 subscribers now. And so we get a good amount of views. We get a lot of comments and interaction with our videos. So we like that. We also do our OS tip, which is a weekly short little tip video that we do. We've been on a Drupal stream lately.
[00:34:38] Speaker A: You're properly leveraging YouTube because I bet that if you have such a presence, 40K subscribers and that amount of views that that sort of starts to trickle back to people actually signing up for current courses. I don't know if you track that, but I'm assuming that's happening.
[00:34:54] Speaker B: Yes, absolutely. That's why we do it. I mean, we don't put something out there just as an advertisement for a course, let's say. No, we do try all of our stuff that we're putting out there. We are trying to give useful, helpful tips. Same with our blog. It's like we want to give you useful, helpful tips. These are free, but we may say, hey, we have a full course on this if you want to come in. Of course.
So it is lead generation in a way, but it is useful lead generation.
And people may just take what they learned in that and go on about their day and that's fine.
But we do want that information in our blog and in our OS tips and things like that to be something that could actually help you and be something you would want to watch. And we try to make it short format. Those are sharp format, so it's a quick little bite of something. It's that more pointed niche information.
[00:35:39] Speaker A: Yeah, I agree. I think the only downside for me, YouTube as a learning platform is that it's siloed into just that one channel. There's very little interaction. There's no real communication with the creator other than hopefully he sees your comment and then possibly responds to that.
And that's what I like about WordPress as the community. That is a different place to learn. They may not all output their stuff on YouTube because my favorite way to learn is visually, but the added value of the community for me is a huge plus.
Absolutely.
It's a good way to separate something that's just learning or something that is then also something like it's learning, but it's the added benefit of getting to know the person behind it and seeing their other writings and how they interact. Like for me, better, or I guess I should say x silly name, but is still the best platform to do this.
How is your experience in terms of the community side of things? Of learning?
[00:36:55] Speaker B: Totally, totally agree. As a matter of fact, learn WordPress.org, I think it's a great resource out.
Yes, yes. And part of the training team with Courtney. She does a fantastic job, by the way. I tell her I don't think she ever sleeps. That's what I've decided. I don't know how she gets so much done.
So I think those are great resources and you're right. Having communities, having forums that you can work in. I think a lot of the groups. So like just on Twitter. Yes, there's a lot there, or x. I guess I'm going to start as well. But anyway, it is weird. But yes, the community there is good. But I like the more pointed communities that might be in LinkedIn or Facebook because there are really narrowed down focus groups. When we redid our OS trading website, it was a sneezing and it was over ten years old. And so we redid that last year and we put in a little community inside of OS training that was never there before. We had a ticketing system that people, believe me, people contact us all the time about our courses, asking us questions. They ask us questions outside of the courtswear. They also just actually send them, just send us compliments, which is really nice. And so we also wanted to have a community, like a timeline in there. And so we have that and it's starting to pick up some traction because it was new. So it's one more community out there for people probably. But we do have some people that are starting to post on there, even if it might be like, hey, I think this is the wrong video that's on this lesson or whatever. Like, oh yeah, thanks. We had the wrong number on that. We'll switch that. So sometimes it may be they're just helping us, but a lot of times they may have questions and so we can answer them directly in there and then everyone sees it and everyone can benefit. And that was why we wanted to shift it. We had those ticketing systems and we were helping a lot of people, giving them good information, but that was not going anywhere unless we wrote a blog post about it. So we wanted to make it more visual there for people to be able to see and learn from other people, which I think is that's the key about community, right? That's why live classroom training is always very beneficial. Well, two reasons. Two reasons why is problem with YouTube learning, right? You have less distraction, it's more focused when you're in a classroom or if you're on a training site and you're doing training, I'm not also seeing little blips over here of, oh, the latest trailer on Upenham. Whatever, the Barbie trailer, whatever. I'm not seeing distraction, whereas on YouTube I'm seeing distraction and I can go down all these little rabbit holes, right? And all of a sudden you're like, what did I even come to?
And so. But when you go to a training site, I feel seen now right? Oh, I do it too. I do it too. I know. I'm like, no one needs to look at my history.
[00:39:47] Speaker A: The Apple TV takes 10 seconds to boot up. And then I go like, what was I going to watch again?
Never mind, never mind.
[00:39:56] Speaker B: I mean, I have that problem with my phone. Sometimes I pick up my phone pointedly to do something, send somebody a message or send something to one of the team members in slack something. But then I've got notifications and I'm like, oh yeah, I forgot about that. Let me do this. And then I set my phone down and then I'm like, wait, that's not what I even picked my phone up for.
[00:40:17] Speaker A: You certainly don't have that in the classroom, right?
[00:40:21] Speaker B: I really like classroom, especially in classroom where they don't have wifi connectivity for their phones, where you can really get them to hone in wifi blockers. Yeah, we see that less often these days though, that kind of focus learning. Once you get past college, you just don't see that kind of new horizons. They're still out there, but they're much smaller because there's less people going into classroom learning. Unfortunately, because we're all busy and now we're all used to, well, I can just do that remote. But sometimes I think you do yourself a disservice because you'll, okay, I'm going to sign up for this remote class. And you'll go in there and you'll open it up and probably mute your mic. And then, oh, bing, you got an email. And then you're looking at that email and you're answering somebody over here. And then you might listen to what they're saying there. And then you're like, oh wait, somebody's pinging me on slack. And so it's very distracting. And so having something where you can just focus in more, we even have a focus mode that you can turn on in our classes so that it's like all you see is the video that you're watching.
[00:41:26] Speaker A: That's a good point, that the distractions within learning is a thing that we have to overcome. So I'm old enough to remember none of this existed. And when you've grown up with something that is introduced, you know how to kind of find the mode before.
But if I see my kids and my eldest is 25 and youngest is 16, they don't know anything else.
I've been fortunate enough to have them wanted to listen to me in terms of setting up their profiles on their iPhones.
You're blocking these apps from this time to that time, notifications are turned off by know don't have that constant. I need to see what's next, what's new.
My son in the beginning thought it was a good thing to have WhatsApp and email be prompted on his screen. With the sound. I'm like, it's probably not the best idea, and here's why.
But yeah, that's a challenge to find a learning environment where you can provide the optimal learning methodology and environment, and in reality, you can't. You can only do the methodology.
So you have a destruction free mode. You said, is there anything else that you incorporate? Like, here's what you need to be not doing?
[00:42:54] Speaker B: No, we really don't.
People might get a little upset if you start telling them, you really should turn on your do not disturb while you're doing your training because they're going to be like, I can't, I'm in work, blah, blah, blah. You get it?
[00:43:09] Speaker A: I can do what I want.
[00:43:10] Speaker B: Exactly.
So one of the things is because again, and this is also, it's not just the younger generation, I don't want to say that because I think I'm the same way.
Our attention spans are shorter, our attention spans get shorter and shorter as we get more and more notifications, more and more social media platforms that have little blips.
This is shortening our attention span. And so we always, when we're building our classes, we try to make the lessons not too long each lesson. Now the whole, like, our drupal class may be five and a half hours if you watch the whole thing, right, but you can watch it in little ten to 20 minutes chunks or even less. Maybe it's a six minute lesson there. And doing that, it allows people, because they can go, okay, well, I can watch six minutes or I can watch twelve minutes about this. And so I think that mentally it sets you up that you're like, okay, I can concentrate on this for that long, and then I'll decide when this lesson is over. Can I go on and watch another lesson or do I need to pause this and go do something else and then come back and watch another lesson? Which is distracting, but at least if we've broken it up for them, they have multiple stop points that they can give themselves, and I have to do that myself. Like I said, I could sit and watch a four hour class in one sitting and learn, but that was a very long time ago that I could do that. Can I do that today? No. I mean, first of all, finding a four hour block.
Yeah. Good luck.
[00:44:46] Speaker A: With that one. Well, as you were giving this example, I was reminded of there's a few very WordPress heavy content creators on YouTube.
Most of them have relatively short videos, but there's a few who have like these two, three hour long, this is how we create a WordPress site. And I go like just by looking at that number, like 3 hours, I'm curious what they would teach and what they would say and what they would made. And I don't even want to start thinking about sitting down for 3 hours.
[00:45:17] Speaker B: And then I was going to say, so the content creators on YouTube, especially if they are content creators and this is how they are making their money, luckily for us, that's not how we're making our money. It's a side benefit to OS training that we put those videos out there. It is lead generation back with our OS tips, but it is by no means how we are making our money. Right? So we're not making our money being content creators on there, but if you are making your money being a content creator on there, it does dictate some things that you need to do to make more money, right. So therefore YouTube was giving you much more. You were getting like a bonus money almost for doing long format. So they were wanting the long format and so we saw a lot more. You'll see trends and the trends are typically happening when you see them change the monetization in the back end of YouTube. Right. Like they'll shorts, right. So shorts are a thing now and so they're really wanting a lot of the shorts content and so they're pushing that in the content creator worlds and in the monetization, they're pushing that with the long format.
Yeah, I'm kind of like you if you're going to do a long format. I mean, I would prefer instead you break it up into a lot of little videos and put it in a playlist for me and then let me hop around myself.
[00:46:35] Speaker A: Exactly.
[00:46:35] Speaker B: But if you're going to do it in long format and this is a lot more work on their part, please put it in little chapters so that I can see all the logical breaks on that long format and skip to where I want.
I was going to say even if they don't have it, I'm kind of like scanning through. I need to find where they're going to do this.
Sure, yeah. Which I guess they still get credit for that. So they guess that's a good thing for me. I think so, yeah.
It service.
