Mastering Web Design Fundamentals: A Conversation with Kevin Geary

**[00:00:00]** hello everyone my name is Alando peris careno and welcome to the web talk show today we are very excited to welcome Kevin giri you might note him from frames automatic CSS ET and obviously a bunch of different YouTube videos and videos across the internet and some courses so welcome Kevin can you tell everyone a little bit about yourself yeah thank you for having me first of all uh I am um former agency owner that's probably where lot of people know me originally uh and then in 2020 or so I started my YouTube channel I started teaching and educating around web design uh started doing product development uh open the Inner Circle for people to come in and learn about agency growth and processes and advanced Dev and all that good stuff uh and that's really where automatic CSS was born and Frames was born and then etch it's all just kind of been a progression of identifying problems in this space and Building Solutions for them and so uh late last year we actually shut down all of the agency work we moved our company to full-time software development and uh we're hitting 2025 running and we're working on ET which is a very important and and major project and that's kind of where we're at today nice thank you and we'll definitely talk a bit about Ed later on in the show because I was on your original live stream when you sort of one of them you did the launch and yeah it was impress I mean the we'll get to it we'll that's not tease people too much but it's it's impressive what what you guys are doing so let let's do a little bit of a background for anyone who's listening **[00:02:00]** who might be in web development or web design or looking to get into it or even from the client side why I I I've seen a lot of this in your videos where you talk about like page Builders the difference between page Builders etc etc and so one of the Concepts that I've seen you talk about a lot is why someone should learn web design versus learning a page builder which a lot of times people think they're learning web design but they're only learning that particular thing yeah that's a big challenge in our space uh people come into it and they don't have a a long background in in web design obviously they want to learn they choose a tool that is Market to them as easy to use and easy to come to grips with and that sounds great to them and it is very empowering to them in the early stages it allows them to do things uh that they otherwise otherwise would require a big learning curve right um the problem is they get very familiar with that tool they feel I would say over owered by that tool and uh they never leave that tool they can't leave that tool because if they go to a different tool they can't really do anything they don't really know the fundamentals still because when you use these pag these page Builders all talk a proprietary language they've taken the fundamentals and they've abstracted them away they've watered them down they've removed a lot of the fundamentals uh if we look at Builders like element or and divy and and uh Beaver not really having a class-based workflow and a class based system uh at least a proper one um what what ends up **[00:04:00]** happening is is these developers get trapped in these tools and um that's not great that's like I I I want uh people to actually be empowered and actually have the real underlying fundamental education which is what my Channel's been about since day one essentially uh that if you and and this the freedom that comes with that the Liberty that comes with that to use uh a number of different tools and to change tools if a if a tool fails or a tool goes away uh you're not left just like oh my gosh what what what do I do now I have to learn something all over again if you know the fundamentals you can pick up any new tool that speaks that language and use it right um and so that's why I promote brics I think brics in terms of a page builder is one that speaks the language of web design the most out of the current options um and uh oxygen previously but we see that some of these tools don't always survive right and so we have to be able to change and switch and we need the underlying fundamental knowledge to be able to do that that makes sense yeah and actually that's a great example oxygen then not right so you have to be able to move to another one and so I this is very important for for anyone who's thinking of getting into web design or that is already doing it because these tools are great I mean I I've used Elementor a bunch through the years back back then now we don't use it anymore but when we used it it was great because it allowed you not only to build I have a software engineering **[00:06:00]** background so it's fine for me to move platforms but I start seeing now some disconnects not only for the person who buildt it but then on the customer side as well because some of these Elementor sites that maybe they've been working eight years 10 years and they're fine the problem is now the platform gets bloated it starts getting more than before not just the D but actually it actually affects performance and we can get into that stuff too but then when the client is using it maybe there's an update and it breaks everything and but you rely so much on that thing you turn it off it's not like turn off this plugin to see if compatibility or whatever you turn it off it goes away right and so that that's a big issue that I've seen and so so this is this is very important now another thing that you mentioned is workflows right so these tools might have their own flavor of a workflow right and so you you talk about about what a professional workflow is and I think for the audience this is a very important topic to learn what a what does it mean to have a professional workflow in web design that allows you to grow scale and and obviously maintain things down the line right so why do these why do you think these tools don't have that and and also which of them actually do or or get close to so that's someone doesn't have to learn everything from scratch wise but yeah so it let's let's give uh we we just let's lay the foundation for anybody listening who doesn't understand you know the the big picture of what we're talking about in web design since **[00:08:00]** the beginning of the days of web design and building websites there's been a fundamental problem of how do we we can get to the initial like what the website is supposed to look like we can anybody can do that anybody can do that in the earlier days it was much harder you had to learn HTML you had to learn CSS you probably had to learn a little bit of PHP y Yad y okay so now it's very easy to get to that first iteration of a website but that was never the problem the problem in web design has always been a question of how do we scale this website in a way that makes it still possible to maintain it because as a website gets bigger and as a website gets older it becomes very very difficult to maintain right um and so they we we we or the industry developed a bunch of techniques to improve scalability and maintainability uh loops and logic class-based workflows right using classes in a very specific way makes things very easy to maintain across and it doesn't matter how big the website is you know uh to give a very specific example if I use uh a a uh a set of classes to build a card like my service card or my testimonial card for for example and I have a thousand of them across the website on dozens of different pages and I want to change the Border style or the background color well if I've used classes appropriately I could just go in and I can change that style and every single iteration of that card updates if I haven't done it that way it's a it's a massive Nightmare and it's massively expensive for **[00:10:00]** the client and the client's going to be wondering why why is it so expensive to maintain this website well it wasn't built properly right and so very very early on in the days of web design we got away from like don't don't style things at the ID level style things with classes and organize those classes because this greatly improves scalability and maintainability well the page builders in WordPress all of the ones that I just mentioned earlier have completely rejected that previous knowledge and previous insight and previous set of techniques and they've said you know what we're going to empower users to do we're going to empower users to style everything at the ID level level and this has resulted in just thousands millions of websites that yes the person was empowered to build it but now nobody can maintain it and nobody can scale it and it's an absolute disaster and so that's the problem that really needs to be addressed it's not how do we help people get from point A to point B it's what about Point CDE e f g like the website's going to continue living on and somebody's got to maintain it and somebody's hopefully going to be scaling it if it's of consequence to the business or it's for those are the problems that need to be solved and the page Builders right now are not solving them and by the way they are um realizing now uh through various uh you know creators putting out education in in this form and fashion and competing tools uh like bricks and oxygen and etch coming into the scene people are starting to figure it out that oh these tools are not they're not designed the correct way an Elementor is **[00:12:00]** a good example they know this and if you've seen the element for previews they are moving to a class-based system and I have this is of particular interest to me because they have a gigantic audience of people who don't know what classes are or how to use them and they are now migrating this is what we were just talking about a minute ago with fundamentals and understanding and actually having the the requisite knowledge to do your work what happens when the tool that you chose that makes life supposedly easy for you doesn't die but evolves to keep up and evolves in such a way that you now are like kind of Left Behind um so I think very interesting things are happening right now that makes a lot of sense particularly Elementor and again we're not bashing on any specific tools just because because I think you touch on a good point which is they'll get you to point a yeah right and if that's all you need by all means right the problem is that you mostly if it's a business you hardly ever just need point so that's another reference if anyone wants to build up a site like we have all these AI tools right that you can ask it to build this thing yeah it'll give you the code and then can oh do you want I just need to style this heading yeah you can go in and just style that heading sure you'll get it I mean you can build a site in a day right in a few hours but then maintain it across time it's going to be a mess and so element are evolving for example we've seen it again clients that have had these sites **[00:14:00]** fortunately running for a long time you jump back in after not using it for a few months and the whole interface is different corre and they have they change the names of things and now the containers do something and now now that now that they have globals great that's great but as you said they evolve in a way that if you are not actively using it every day and paying attention you get left behind and it's not like you could just go to w3c right or and and find out out like okay what are the standards let me learn that's yes it's like no it's a whole other terminology huge huge problem it's it's it's been one of the biggest criticisms I've had of these tools is that they don't follow naming standards they they and they' the reason they don't do this is because they know their user base doesn't know fundamentals and doesn't like you know particularly look for those standards and they feel like well you know some of the official names for things might be a little confusing to lay people and so what we're going to do is we're just going to come up with our own names we're just going to rename everything we're going to get very cute names uh for things and that's going to make people feel more comfortable when they don't know what they're doing and I've always said that this is this just takes a problem and greatly expands it and what it does is it makes people who actually know what they're doing incapable of using the tool when I go into an element or a divvy or a beaver or whatever and I'm looking at these names for things I'm like I **[00:16:00]** don't know what that does I've been in web design 20 years I don't know what that control does because they renamed it and if we don't have some semblance of like a universal language for this stuff where everybody can be like okay I mean like anybody in web design who's been in web design and knows the fundamentals will point to the standards they'll point to the docs they'll they'll they'll point to mdn or w3c or whatever and they'll be like guys this is what this thing is called and this is how this thing works right and all the page Builders don't respect any of that and so that's another I say it's actually a problem for beginners I see I come from a a standpoint of beginners that really want to build websites and really want to do this work do in fact want to learn they do in fact want to learn okay they don't want to stay ignorant they don't want to stay naive they don't want to feel disempowered by their like lack of knowledge Because deep down they know like and that's where the impostor syndrome stuff comes from a lot of times deep down they know they're kind of an impostor that they don't really know the fundamentals and they don't like feeling that way they also don't want to it a lot of times but they don't like feeling that way right but again they're trapped by these Builders because if I learn Elementor and then I try to switch to a different I switch to Bricks I'm not empowered to switch to Brick I have no idea what's going on in bricks if I've spent my entire life in Elementor Elementor has sold me short and it's prevented **[00:18:00]** me from making that leap without another gigantic learning curve right but the thing is is if you just learn the standards in the first place you can go to any tool that respects the standards and if you learn all the name names for things the proper names for things you can go to any tool that uses the proper names for things you're actually liberated to do anything you want to do and work the way that you want to work and that's where I want to get people to yes that and also for example if you if you think of like U just a very basic thing a grid right you you are Flex box and you have in your mind the layout you think I need this thing here I need 30% and then the rest of it should be over here but then it should flow differently for the next row okay so you okay so you search for it and you're in your page builder but you search for it online they're like sure just drop a flex whatever or a CSS grid whatever and it'll give you just these values and there you go flex grow Flex shrink blah blah blah that's it you check the standards that's okay perfect you go back into the Builder it's like where do I and some of them have Flex options some of them have grid options but then they don't they just show you some of the controls for Flex not all of the ones that exist that have existed for a long time and there's no choosing them there's no controls for for for things that are like Bare Bones basic CSS not even the most advanced newest features correct and so you're **[00:20:00]** stuck but with uh well I guess I should strap on another ID on it and yeah and add custom code to that which now it's never going to be maintainable ever again right correct yeah I think flex and grid is a good example uh if you and it just starts with the names right um another element that I've been critical of that uses either Flex or grid and then you can't ever you got to inspect the page to figure out which one they're using uh is you'll go in and like element or actually brics has an element that does this which I've been very critical of I turn it off um oxygen had it back in the day I I think break dance has it is the columns element it's it's okay let's add columns and they call it columns because that's very simple for a lay person but that's very confusing to somebody who understands web design because we think in terms of flex layouts and grid layouts and to us columns means CSS columns which is a very different thing from flexor grid so not only have they changed the name and by the way the columns element uses Flex most of the time when it should ALS when it should be using grid and it should be called grid so that's another fundamental problem but it's not just that they Chang the name it's that they hijack an existing name in web design columns is a thing in the docs if you go to mdn and search for CSS columns you're going to see that it's a very fundamentally different thing they just didn't bother with that they're just like well you know we're not concerned with that we're just going to **[00:22:00]** hijack that name and use it for something completely different this is so confusing to everyone it yes it's friendly to beginners in the very early days but it traps them in this inability to actually go learn the because now everything that they try to learn from that point forward is going to be upside down to them to their brain like that's hold on hold on like they've been told a lie essentially this entire time and what about bricks for example so I've never used Bricks by the way and I hear great things about it now we use Gutenberg for everything we'll talk about Gutenberg uh it's it's I think it's a great concept I think it's missing a lot of things we can get to it but I've heard good things about bricks what what differentiates bricks because I know I mean for you to use it sort of says something and so is is the output different as well I mean from apart from everything you've discussed right now does it provide a cleaner output that some of these other page Builders do is it more aligned to some of the the CSS and web features or or is it sort of in the same space as the other ones no it's it's fundamental different the interface looks very similar like if you put the bricks interface next to the Elementor interface and that's all you looked at is where are the controls where the yada yada y it looks very very similar I would say it's like a 90% match almost right same fundamental workflow of where you have elements on the left side and you drag them into the canvas and but the way the Builder works the additional features within the **[00:24:00]** Builder and the output of the code couldn't be any different right there are different universes in that regard um the fact that brics is a class first workflow okay so now my my criticism of brics is if you add things to a page and you just start styling willy-nilly like you don't know what you're doing it allows you to do that and it puts those styles on the ID level it encourages bad practices in that regard that's why a lot of education is is necessary uh when we do when we're building etch ET is not going to allow that you have to explicitly you can't style an element in etch unless you give it a selector whether it's class or you purposefully give it an ID okay but you can't just willy-nilly start styling stuff and we just attach all those things to an ID and like just let you go Haywire like you know if you wanted to go Haywire you could say I would like to go haywire and you could put an ID on there and start styling it but we're not making that the default workflow right that's I'm very critical of that kind of workflow and that's the workflow every page builder uses like let's just make everybody style everything at the ID uh level which is terrible practice terrible practice um so fundamentally clean code output is a big difference now there's a lot of I I hear the criticism a lot of times Kevin that doesn't matter clients don't look at code well guess who does developers who know what they're doing and when you when something's not working you have to inspect the page and find out why it's working and if the code is spaghetti nonsense **[00:26:00]** it's very hard to do your job and when selectors for example are added to the wrong elements it becomes almost impossible to do your job I don't know people people defend Builders like Elementor um they don't they don't really understand what's going on under the hood I inspect Elementor Pages all the time uh when you add a class to Something in Elementor it doesn't actually add the class to that thing it adds it to a parent or sometimes even a grandparent when you add a data attribute it adds it not to the thing that you wanted it added to it adds it often to a parent or grandparent this makes life for people who actually know what they're doing and are trying to accomplish something uh uh almost impossible and so you know it they don't realize that that's even happening to them it's like oh Elemental works fine for me um again you know you're styling everything at the ID level you're not really doing the fundamentals of web design so um it would be good if they just you know took my examples took our word for it right that bad things are happening under the hood these things don't happen in bricks in bricks if you add a selector to something it adds it to that thing if you add an attribute it adds it to that thing if you inspect the code there's no extra rappers it's very clean code it's semantically accurate these things do in fact matter they that's a that's one of my biggest gripes with a Lor where you add a an an ID or a CL because I I need to use it for something else yeah like take it further like I need it for **[00:28:00]** JavaScript right yes correct and so you add it and then you look at the code you're like oh my where is 1 2 three four levels and you're but this it's supposed to be styl that and so it's it's a mess so and then for anyone's listening so JavaScript if if you want to manipulate the Dom or the whatever the website has physically the little elements right the HTML elements if you want to work with them a lot of times you're going to Target them with CSS classes or identifiers and the problem with the page builder approach in many cases is that even if you try to add these identifiers or classes they're being added like Kevin said in a different part maybe higher up so then you the developer or someone else who has been hired to add additional custom functionality or or Advanced tracking or anything like that needs to go in and figure out within this Maze of code do a whole lot of drilling down and up again and down to get to an item where it could have just been a class or an ID directly to it that's absolutely that's where it gets important right yeah and Bricks well it was oxy first oxygen really proved that a page builder can write clean code I think that there was a initial myth that well if you're going to use a page builder you're going to have to deal with bloated code because it's just a thing and actually it's not a thing it can if you code the the tool properly it will output clean code and oxygen proved that oxygen was really the first Builder that came in and I mean you you look at the code and **[00:30:00]** it's kind of like you would have written it yourself and then brics thankfully carried on that that kind of mission um bricks was not perfect though like when we when myself and my community at the time because really bricks benefited if we go back in the history of like how this all evolved brics benefited greatly from oxygen essentially just pulling rug pulling their entire Community right and so a bunch of people shifted to Bricks all at once including myself including my entire Inner Circle Community you know that's like 15 at the time it was like 1500 people just right into brics uh who these are people that know what they're doing and brics was not perfect at the time there was a lot of things missing there was a lot of things not uh done really the way that they should have been done and through Bunches of feature requests and all of that like we kind of helped shape brics and to Thomas's credit you know he took all that feedback and he and he did those things that we were asking him to do and brics is now a a very powerful tool and by the way element are to give them props are they recognize bloated code is a problem and they are working on resolving it they recognize that not having a class system is a major problem in 2025 that's why they're adding one in they're so they are evolving their tool which again I give props to okay um I don't like the the tools that are not trying to keep up with the times and not listening to user feedback those are the worst kinds of tools right um tools are going to make mistakes and as long **[00:32:00]** as their development team and their leadership are responsive and they recognize those things and they say okay we are going to improve this we are going to make this better that is what we want to see that is fantastic so I don't want to feel like I'm or I don't want people to feel like I'm just ragging on element or yeah they made a lot of mistakes and there's a lot of fundamental issues but they are in fact trying to correct those things and fix them and that's that applies to everything right so plugins tools themes whatever you're using at the end of the day I in my opinion what makes all of these great is the support and them listening to yes the user base because I've had let's take a a basic example of a plugin like a filtering tool right there's many out there but there are some that are great that that have resilience and have lasted through the years for which I have maybe a site that I built 10 years ago never touched it again still works right and so they might come up with a new version and some some people will know exactly I'm talking about they might come up with a new version it might have its Kinks because it's a totally refreshed version but I will still trust that because I know they will listen to us to fix all those little issues to make a fantastic product right instead of using someone else's that yeah they sell it on COD Canyon and they sell by the tens of thousands so they don't they don't don't really listen to people's feedback and it's just there and there's no communication over here I can talk to **[00:34:00]** the owner to the founder or to their team and explain and present the situation and they fix it and they put an update out and to let you know oh we we gave you a better verion that works right and so that whole support is very important that what that's what really makes it to your point and especially for a page builder because that's where the your whole Foundation is being built right absolutely and you know I like to bring this discussion back to actually our end clients we talk a lot about ourselves as developers and oh this is such a pain in the butt for me it's such a I don't like this and we should have standards and and everybody um kind of loses sight of why that stuff is really at the end of the day important and this goes back to my agency life I can't tell you how like this is a big problem in our industry I can't tell you how many clients would come to me and they would say hey uh you know I I can't really get a hold of the agency that built our site like there's all Fly by Night agencies and Freelancers and um or they just close up shop for whatever reasons or they get too busy too swamped whatever they can't respond to their existing client there any number of reasons why they're not just not serviceable anymore and clients would come to us all the time and say hey like can you take over our site can you start managing our site for us we've got XYZ plans we want to add two three pages to this thing we like they're trying to scale they're trying to maintain cuz they've **[00:36:00]** got a real business and there are people that rely on that website scaling and being maintained and being functional right um and it could be as as like bad as like the the one of the last ones that I had was none of our lead forms are working like our leads shut off overnight and the agency is not going in they're not able to fix it for like can you please go in and fix it so this would happen over and over and over again and we would log in and it would be an absolute disaster on the back end I mean like no architecture to the website whatsoever zero maintainability just any best practice you can think of not applied not used not followed and what we have to do is have a very hard conversation with the client essentially saying look we'll fix the immediate problem right now like if it's the lead form thing not what we'll fix that but this is not a maintainable website this is not a scalable website and they'll tell me ke like there you you can see the distraught on their face like they've spent $110,000 $155,000 over the last couple years trying to build this thing and and and get it going and we have to be informing them of like that you essentially lit that money on fire like the the who you hired and the practices that they're following this all has to be redone in order for this thing to go forwards and that's a very very I I don't like having that conversation with clients over and over and over again so when we harp on best practices when we harp on using professional tools when we harp on things like **[00:38:00]** craftsmanship and following standards we're not just doing that to be elitist we're not just doing that to rag on people and rag on tools we're doing that because there is a real monetary economic impact to our end clients and that is a very real thing that you have to respect that that's an excellent point I think we do as a community lose sight of that sometimes and it's all about the yeah building the site but at the end of the day like you said no matter the business size it might be that they're literally getting all of their money through the site I mean or that's how they significant yeah exactly or or that's what they used to keep track of what their work lead firms not working that's I mean that's the worst that could well one of the worst things that could happen um a little bit next to like the site actually coming down completely and I well what you just said is very important having a an immediate solution I think a lot of agencies don't do that they're like oh we have to do it again everything and and well you're not fixing the customer Spain right so actually telling them we need to have the discussion but let me fix what you have right now yeah it's a patch and it'll work and it'll get you out of the trouble but we need to restructure and and rebuild essentially and so which brings us again back to the tools if if they're used to if they're ever only if they were ever only taught Elementor or that interface then getting them into something better right can be a problem and I see this with modern WordPress versus some of **[00:40:00]** these page Builders again Gutenberg um one of the things that I was very confusing I think for me for clients for for everyone was yeah yes you can build a whole layout and everything in elementary very nice okay but what about the posts so when you're building posts well you should use native WordPress to build the posts right I mean the interface is there and and it's very easy for editors it's used all around the world and the editing experience now it's a lot better for posts and so but if you built those posts in Elementor because it looked nice and you used to it oh it's a problem because if you build a hundred or a thousand of those and then suddenly you have to migrate into something else because you need to scale perform you're getting a big performance hit which we haven't talked about with some of these page Builders then you're in big trouble because now you have to convert 2,000 posts that have just gibberish if you look at the code into something that can actually be used in a regular either classic editor or or block editor yes yeah no that's a that's a that's a huge problem where it's you take a violation of a best practice which causes a problem but then it's magnified by however many posts there are you know so and the era like this this was a huge thing in like 2012 2010 like when blogging was huge but page Builders were coming into uh the Forefront of workflows right that was one of the biggest problems that we saw constantly on websites and because at the time like with blogging being so popular it would easily have 500 posts on a website **[00:42:00]** right um over a couple years and to come to find out that every single one of those was created inside the page builder manually instead of with a template instead of and instead of with the native WordPress editor at the time just injecting that content into a template that is absolute that's a nightmare scenario that's that's absolute chaos and that's just one example of the kinds of things that we see over and over and over again and if the impact to the client is like the 20,000 foot view we have to then go to the 30,000 foot view for everybody to consider which is the fact that as thousands and then tens of thousands and then hundreds of thousands of clients continue to have these problems with agencies where they get abandoned or they they realize after spending thousands and thousands of dollars that their website is not maintainable and not scalable and it's kind of a disaster they start to come to understand that oh the web design industry is very a very shoddy industry and in WordPress maybe in particular it feels like there's a lack of Standards it feels like there's a lack of quality control you start to create a um an opinion of the industry and these clients that's extremely negative and that devalues all of the work that we're doing and makes it very difficult to uh demand top dollar for the work that we're doing we don't want to create that kind of image in the minds of clients it is in everybody's best interest you know I get I get a a lot of criticism for talking about best practices and standards and craftsmanship and all of this uh because there's a lot of people who they **[00:44:00]** they don't want to they don't want to learn they don't want to deal with that stuff they don't want they don't want their they don't want their work measured against any sort of a standard right and so they object to that but it is in all of our best interests for those standards to exist for those best practices to be followed because then we create an image in the minds of clients that oh look these agencies know what they're doing yes I would like to hire an a agency right I would I'm going to pay what that agency is worth because I know they're going to do a great job that's the kind of reputation we want to have so if we go away from best practices and standards and if the tools that we're using don't respect best practices and standards we're going to create a very negative reputation if we all go towards standards and best practices including the tools that we're using we're going to create a uh image of professionalism and that's going to do us all a a really good service and I've seen that when sometimes clients will will come in potential clients and some of them know they want to use WordPress because it's a great tool and many people know how to use it but then others are wary of Wordpress they're like no no no it's insecure it's not safe it's not scale it's slow right and they get all that like you just said because of experiences that either them or people they know have had because of shady practices or just not following standards because at the end of the day WordPress is blazing fast for what it's doing yeah it's amazingly fast especially **[00:46:00]** if you're doing things properly if you're not adding just a bunch of bloats and it's it's amazingly secure as well if you're doing things right and so I think you're hit on a nail there it's the it's giving a bad reputation as well just by not following standards because even in the plug-in ecosystem people don't follow standards and so corre all the code is loading on every page load and and some of the big players are guilty of this like I see some of these I don't I won't say cuz it's going to be very clear what I'm talking about but some of these features that like you would expect this is a normal feature that a lot of businesses use to Showcase their events or something it's if you put it on the site immediately you get a performance hit just by having it not even on the page not even on the grid not even it's just like every single page across the board even the back end gets hit because they're not following best practices in this case of the WordPress core and seos system so that's another tough one like just getting back to basics is so important in the sense yeah I mean if you look at the plugin ecosystem for WordPress obviously there's just tens of thousands of of plugins lots of them are free and a lot of people see that as a very great thing but I see it as a not so great thing I because when you're using a free plug-in um you can't really be like okay I'm going to use this thing for free and also demand the highest quality from you as a developer and demand that you're constantly available and demand **[00:48:00]** that you're constantly innovating it nobody's paying you right so I can't really demand that if I pay for something guess what I can start demanding things because hey I'm paying for this you know and and this is how it needs to work this is like you need to follow these standards um and so I and I've always told people when when they ask about stacks and they're like well you know that that thing I I see you're recommending it but there this free version over here why don't I just use that instead no pay for your tools pay for your stack we're we're professionals like professionals pay for professional things and they're not wary of paying for things and you get a benefit of paying when you pay theoretically that's how it should work uh you get top-notch support you get top-notch Innovation you get top-notch security you get top-notch performance those are the things you should be expecting out of a paid tool that's why we should be using paid tools so I tell people to you know Steer clear but again there's again no standards no craftsmanship no and so it becomes a game of like well let's just use all free tools let's use all free plugins and then we get into a situation where the themes aren't maintained the plugins aren't maintained and again is anybody thinking about the end client and not ourselves as developers you protected your wallet but what happens when your client site gets hacked who's protecting their wallet you made choices that benefit you and really they don't benefit the end client you're not doing what's in the best interest of the end client that's a big big big problem that is and there's there's a **[00:50:00]** misalignment of priorities between you and the client that should never happen you should always think in my opinion in the shoes of the client like if this was me what would I like and I think what you mentioned about the tool paying for your tools is so important because you see the other ecosystem Shopify for example a lot of people go into that ecosystem with these agencies and used to paying for everything because everything is paid right well there's some free stuff but but the good things are paid and so and they a lot more expensive than what we see over here and so because most of it is is recurring or it's SAS based and so it's sometimes astounding to me that people over here they're they're nitpicking they're trying to get the cheapest thing right and then clients get sort of used to that they're like oh there's a free like you said there's free version let's why don't we even clients sometimes go with that whereas over there you see people going in and since there's a very clear path well if the agency is a good agency there's a very clear path of we're going to use this this this this is going cuss you see people building these sites let alone I mean you can ignore what the cost of the building the thing was they're building them plus right they they go into Shopify plus so now they're they're paying $2,000 or more or more a month just for the platform yes and it's fine because it's a business business and it needs to scale and it needs everything so so sometimes we lose a lot of as as the war ecosystem a lot of the the big Commerce **[00:52:00]** stores go over there just because they see I mean everything works they're not they're not listening they're not hearing about uh dramas they're not hearing about whether all these plugins are all over the place whether this page build this other page it's not this is what you do so they sort of focus I'm not I'm not a huge fan of Shopify because we have more much more extensibility over here but but there are some things to learn right not only Shopify but maybe even wigs and Squarespace and whatever other tools that exist out there yeah well the the benefit of those tools is that they've created kind of uh there's a there's a unified standardized interface and and language that is used over there right um if you look at WordPress WordPress is the Wild Wild West it's completely the opposite it's everybody doing whatever the hell they want and um it's just it's chaos to an outsider and a lot of people are very very terrified of that and that that is a hurdle you know as a when you're selling websites to people if they've heard of Wordpress before and they have negative connotations you're trying to defeat those in order like you're trying to uh make them comfortable with the idea of being on WordPress um and depending on what they now Shopify is only e-commerce right for so it's like you know if you're not dealing with e-commerce clients you're not going to get the well should we use Shopify kind of thing um if it's more like I was very very heavy in service-based websites so we never had to have the but the the conversation was Shopify but we did with like well you know what about Wix what **[00:54:00]** about Squarespace what about these other platforms they feel very stable they feel very secure I like the ads and the ads say that anybody can build a website so by the way why are you charging so much money like Wix just told me everybody could do it in five minutes you know um that that is a big uh a big problem with WordPress there is a technical learning curve and then it's a it's chaos with the plugins and the themes and the this and then that and then you know you get into a situation where and we're very critical of where kind of Wordpress has gone over the last seven to 10 years where there's like three different uis now it's like the the there's one WP admin UI and then there's the FSE kind of UI and the then the C is the customizer going to be around or is it going away are they getting nobody knows you know there's like it's a little bit chaotic there in terms of the back end those things that all make it very difficult like clients don't want to deal with any of that stuff like they don't they just they want it to work they want it to be you know a smooth process they want it to be secure they want these things and and that's you know it's getting harder to achiev that on WordPress which is very unfortunate which is why I've been critical and we need to unify this kind of thing um so yeah it's it's uh it's a big problem what you described I I there's I'll be honest when I've seen so I've seen your content a lot and a lot of times I would just you're browsing **[00:56:00]** over things and I'm like this guy's just so critical of everything but then if you actually listen yeah well I actually agree with most of these criticisms it's just the way if you're just browsing through and see like a little piece of the thing it might be out of context but many of the things you talk about are really accurate from from the standpoint of of both the professional and and the client and so yeah I'm advocating too for clients a lot of my criticism is advocacy of clients and also advocacy of our industry and advocacy of the beginner right do I want the beginner to go into an Elementor indivi and learn their proprietary terminology and proprietary workflows and then essentially be trapped there with no real skills no that's not what's in the best interest of a beginner I want the beginner to learn actual fundamentals and be empowered to use any tool that speaks the language of web design fundamentals I don't want them to feel like an impostor I want them to be in calls with clients feeling very confident that they understand what's going on under the hood of what they're selling right right those are all things that are in the best interest of the client in the best interest of beginners who are trying to come into the space so yes that's where the criticism comes from because these problems that I talk about are real problems with real impact and real consequences and it would be nice if they were fixed yeah and I think you're you're gonna talk about it in a bit but there are ways to fix it right uh especially with things like Edge which which I want to ask you about about **[00:58:00]** um quick thing before that Gutenberg block editor some of the things are great the way the it's clean I guess in some regards I think they're missing a lot of controls for a lot of things so that can be better and the code output is fine in certain regards as well but like you said some things are to the identifier basically right they don't use identifer but they just put in an inline style basically which most of the times we don't want so how does etch solve this because one of the things when I saw yeah ET the whole thing looks fantastic but I don't want another page builder blah blah blah but I what really caught me about it is it outputs content or markup that will fit in the blocks ecosystem basically how does that work and and what does that mean yeah so to be clear etch is not a it's not a page builder right it's a it's a visual development environment it does page building like things but it also goes well beyond what any page builder does and it unifies a a workflow right so if you're creating custom post types in custom fields for example you're just doing that in ET you don't have to leave ET go to somewhere else B add another plugin do all this other stuff right that's a fundamental part of a web design workflow to build good architecture in a website so ET is going to handle that all in the same place where you're doing all of your other work we we eliminate everything that we call a magic area right I got to go to this magic place to do this thing I'm trying to do I got to leave **[01:00:00]** what I was currently doing and I got to go to this new magic place to do something else and then I can come back and I can integrate it all together that's what we are completely eliminating we are also giving access to code so if you now you don't have to access the code you don't have to write code but we give you access to code um there is very few page Bill like bricks element or oxygen you could just divy Beaver down the list they do not give you access to the code um and that's a big big big problem right ET gives you access to the code ET allows you to write the code freely if you want to write the code but you don't have to you can still use a kind of a traditional page builder interface I wrote a good article on is it is etch a page builder right and it's kind of like a um it's I I like to use the analogy of a phone when the iPhone came out um would it be fair to be like that's just a phone right obviously not they created a new category called smartphone and so now we have phones and we have smartphones and there's a clear distinction everybody knows when you say smartphone what you're talking about versus the old school Nokia like flip phone thing they're very different things and they and they changed uh technology in a very unique way right that's kind of like ET you wouldn't call it a page builder because it's not just that it does that functionality but it's not just that it's so much more and so it's a new category uh it's called a visual development environment and **[01:02:00]** by the way people who code and VSS code and create custom themes and all this they're going to want to use etch because of the benefits that they're going to get from it and the fact that there are no limitations like there are with traditional page Builders so we're even unifying that side of the uh of of the workforce let's say right now like what you said yes if you are building a page in ET um this is the only page builder that does this everything that you build it translates into core Gutenberg blocks instantly immediately in real time at all times right and so the entire page that I have built in ET if I close ET and I go into the block editor it's all there as core blocks right uh which is another reason why people who are stuck in vs codeland trying to create custom blocks and things like that this is that that that workflow was I can't believe that that was the proposed workflow for the next era of Wordpress that's insane to me um and once CH is available nobody is going to use that workflow because it doesn't make any sense when you have a uh environment like chch that just does that for you um so yeah it's it's a very unique environment uh and yeah the the block authoring already it's not you know a goal it's not a hope and a dream it works right now it works right now um it was working three months after we did the etch launch right um it was one of the first things that we built the architecture for and there is great benefit to this there's the client editing benefit so if you are the **[01:04:00]** kind of person that wants clients to be able to easily edit content Maybe move things around now I'm not really on that boat I don't I don't really recommend that um but if you are the kind of person who likes that you're going to love it cuz they can do that stuff they never have to open that so they can do that stuff in the block editor it is Major for data Liberation no other page one of the biggest criticisms of page Builders is that your content is locked in everything that you build in the page builder now relies on the page builder and most of them output short codes if you disable the Page Builder and it becomes an absolute mess ET liberates your data into the block editor into WordPress core and that's with custom Fields custom post types custom everything ET does uses core WordPress on the back end none of it is proprietary and so you get this massive data Liberation uh that comes with using Ed so there's so many fundamental benefits uh that's why we call it the next era of of uh essentially site building in WordPress that sounds like a dream it's just there are so many things like like we were saying the the the that's wor foress now right okay so we have the block I'm I'm not opposed to blocks I build I create custom blocks for clients all the time I like the fact that all the code is sort of uh contained right and you don't have a bunch of CSS everywhere in JS that doesn't need to load at all except if you're loading on the page so I like that thing I don't like the fact that it's missing a **[01:06:00]** lot of controls which something like Edge fixes it's I don't like the fact that it's missing a lot of CSS standards lot of CSS new features that we could use then something like Edge could could fix and then I don't like that I'm it gives you if you are giving the client access to make adjustment those adjustments are still being done at the item level and so even if you export a lot of this out it becomes messy so if if something can come along that gives you the exper experience that you as a professional want to have but at the same time that someone that's not a professional would like to have and that even if you turn it off you still have all the data as it should be then that I think is aideal because the block creation process it's it's easy if you know development yeah you can you just creade your files you have the build process blah blah blah but it's slow I cannot go just in and make an adust on the Fly and you're working yes and you're working in different environments often with different languages right you're having to switch from PHP to react to maybe vanilla JavaScript over here for this thing and it that's that's chaos in itself right and I I don't want to get too technical but there are limitations that people don't even realize exist in the current just big picture part of Wordpress and involving the block editor really um I'm going to give an example I don't want to get too much into the weeds but it's again something that we're fixing and it's something that I I'll I'll I'll put out there as a alarm Bell for people **[01:08:00]** um so there is a library like a they call it the pattern library in WordPress and I believe there's a public one like on wordpress.org where anybody can share patterns and all of that stuff and it it's actually very very valuable for people to be able to design patterns and you can import them into your website right the theme architecture in WordPress breaks a lot of the ability to do that and the fact that these patterns uh and the way that word the way that um Gutenberg is created the block editors created there's no such thing as element level CSS okay and so or we could call it pattern level CSS um in fact in the block editor there's no CSS sty like the CSS stylesheet is hidden away it's a glorified text editor it's not but that only applies to Global CSS right in bricks we have a product called frames which is an ENT library of it's a pattern library and dynamic element library for bricks right and I part of my job and what I do on a day-to-day basis is I release new pattern I build new patterns I release new patterns so does my team okay we're in this world at all times and I love the concept of pattern library and people get so much value out of something like frames the thing that powers that like the technical side of that the what what makes that possible is the fact that we can write CSS by the way bricks is a much more powerful UI interface than the block editor ever dreamed of being right and we still for every single frame have to write custom CSS to do the things that we want to do and to **[01:10:00]** do things the right way that CSS can live with that pattern so that when and there's something called a dynamic root selector so the class the classes that we put on there the names of the classes don't actually matter because all the CSS is written with Dynamic references to the class right which means the user can actually change the name of the class and not break the CSS so there's two critical things happening there one that the CSS that when we share that pattern the CSS goes with the pattern seamlessly okay and two the user can actually change the name of the classes without breaking the CSS that's another fundamental thing neither of those things can happen in wordpress's version of their pattern library and that makes their pattern Library until they have that capability dead in the water and most people I would say 98 % of Wordpress users don't even realize that the native pattern library for WordPress is a dead inth water concept until those two things happen right um and so ET that's another thing that etch solved because of course etch has pattern level CSS uh in fact it's SAS powered so it's not even vanilla CSS you can write vanilla CSS but it's fully SAS powered it also has an instant SAS processor that doesn't exist anywhere that we've ever seen on the internet there are things that that that we are doing that people have not even considered doing yet um and when you put all of these things together it's just to me there is no question that once people see it and once people start getting their hands on it it will be the deao standard for building in in WordPress I that's not even a **[01:12:00]** question in my mind that's and the one of the reasons that might be the case and I again I haven't used frames and or automatic but I've seen the documentation I've seen one it does m and and the explanations that you provide or your team provides and it's clear it comes from a perspective of a daily user of the thing yes which is very important because you are actually building these things day in day out or at least you were on the agency side for clients all the time yes and hitting the barriers all the time and overcoming them and thus you buil a system or or a library or all these elements that fix these issues resolve these issues based on real usage and what people actually need and sometimes this sort of bottom up approach if you will will be a lot better down the line I don't think a lot of people realize that that the tools they're using are very often developed by developers who are not in the world of web design anymore they are strictly in the world of software development and a lot of times their direction for the product is either sitting around brainstorming and theorizing about what might be good or just doing feature requests from users right and they're not in the world of building websites all that much anymore and so they don't even a lot of times use their product for what the product is for right they just get so hyperfocused on the software side of things uh and that is a major major major issue right and it's why people are people who are doing work in the real world are constantly kind of complaining about why why is the tool **[01:14:00]** doing that why is it like it's obvious that we it should be doing that and we don't wanted to do that well it's because the person who developed that feature didn't actually use it in the real world we actually have a policy the ET team has a policy that when you when we develop a feature um and this is down to the person who develops that feature not just people who are responsible for testing the whole team's responsible for testing but the person developing the feature we've all talked about it we've all theorized about it we all know why we want it we all know what the mission of the feature is but you can't release that until you actually build a real thing with it like so what they do is they build they build the feature and then it's it's essentially like did you build like a a hero section with that did you build a Services section with that did you actually create a CPT and loop through it and do it the way that a user would do it because if you haven't done that then it can't go to users yet right so we have a policy of like you have to use the thing you can't just work on the thing you have to use the thing uh and I'm using all of our tools on a daily basis on every single website that we do so I'm very it's like a very intimate thing like I know exactly how it works in the real world and I also know what real world users are running into in terms of problems and challenges and I can be proactively solving those most of the features that we release for automatic **[01:16:00]** CSS are not user requested features most of the things that we do in frames are not user requested features they are us solving challenges and problems that we ourselves are running into in Daily driving of these tools and these workflows that is fantastic I for one I'm very excited for it to come to its full fruition it's something that man if it does everything it's supposed to do and I don't I don't have any doubts about it um with with your history it's it's going to be there's so many roadblocks with with all these like even the good ones even the ones tools that I love oh a lot of times I'm just frustrated because I want to do something and I know why didn't you include this control like it's there if you just did web design you would know why is it missing so very excited about this so Kevin I don't I there's a bunch of things I I want to go RIT hole through a lot of everything we discuss but I want to take more of your time where this is not going to be hard where can people find you uh they can go to giri doco G A r.co and that's kind of my central hub for you can find everything from there so uh I just send people there and then uh just get involved in all the stuff we're doing we've got a bunch of free education like hundreds of hours of free education on my YouTube channel uh we've got our products we've got the Inner Circle we've got a lot of stuff that you can do to grow your skills grow your agency grow everything that you're do take everything you're doing to the **[01:18:00]** next level excellent and what would be one tip that you would give to a developer or freelancer or agency who is either starting out their web design career or trying to get better so I would say uh bite the bullet in terms of learning the fundamentals and making sure that you are not just Le earning the proprietary language of whatever page builder you happen to be using because I will tell you uh this is a warning this is another alarm Bell for everybody we know AI is coming AI is going to replace all of the people who don't know fundamentals AI is going to replace all of the people who do low-level work for low-level clients you must up your skills immediately and you must shift to using professional tools immediately because anything that AI can do which is all the surface level stuff if that's all you're capable of there's no need for you anymore okay so you have to bite the bullet you have to learn fundamentals you have to build craftsmanship into your workflow and you have to start to become more of a consultant rather than someone who just pushes pixels around a screen that's who people are going to be hiring going forwards if you're not that you're not going to get hired that's my alarm Bell to you that's would be my recommendation um and again that's why that's why people follow me okay they because I'm taking them away from the the AI death that so many many people are going to experience and we're going to a much better place thank you Ken that was excellent advice everyone if you are't subscribed to the web talk show you can find it on Spotify you can also find **[01:20:00]** us on YouTube you can follow us there and of course follow Kevin on all the different social channels he's putting out some absolutely wonderful content thanks again Kevin for joining us and I hope to see you again soon thank you so much