In this podcast episode, Cory Miller and Corey Maass discuss the progress and updates on their project. They talk about refactoring the app using React and the importance of simplifying the workflow and talking to customers to understand their needs. They also discuss their approach to building products and the importance of conviction and belief in their work. They touch on topics such as creating visually appealing images, using presets and templates, optimizing images for SEO, and the potential for AI-generated content. They also discuss the challenges and possibilities in marketing and accommodating different users. The episode ends with plans for future improvements and excitement for the project’s progress.
Top Takeaways:
- OG Image Importance: The conversation highlights the significance of OG (Open Graph) images in content marketing. Creating visually appealing OG images is essential to engage audiences and drive traffic to websites or content.
- Templates for Visual Consistency: The use of templates is emphasized to maintain visual consistency across OG images. Templates offer a structured approach for users to create appealing visuals that align with their brand.
- Guidance and Best Practices: Providing users with guidance and best practices is crucial. This includes offering tooltips, color suggestions, and layout tips to help users make design decisions effectively and create compelling OG images.
Mentioned in the show:
You can follow Post Status and our guests on Twitter:
- Corey Maass
- Cory Miller (CEO, Post Status)
- Olivia Bisset (Intern, Post Status)
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Transcript
Cory Miller (00:00:07) – And YouTube. We’re on Session 25.
Corey Maass: And we are live.
Cory Miller: I’ll just kind of preemptively set up your webinar. Nah, that’s weird.
Corey Maass: What are you saying?
Cory Miller:It’s. Private. If I did something wrong. Well.
Corey Maass: Section 25 live, it says.
Cory Miller: Okay. All right.
Corey Maass:And heard my comment from 60s ago.
Cory Miller: Okay, cool. Session 25 Cory and Corey launching a WordPress product. All right. What do we get on the agenda today?
Corey Maass (00:01:17) – Uh, yeah. So I’ve been heads down. We haven’t connected for a couple of weeks publicly, and I’ve been pretty heads down, cranking out the new version. The couple of things to talk about or like part of part of my status update, I guess, is so I. Looked at what we had and had decided. To to look at refactoring down the road. But then the data structure, the way we were approaching actually building templates and stuff was like, okay, this is painting us into a corner. And so I’m going to take the opportunity to like, I’ve solved the hard problems, I’ve solved image rendering, I’ve solved saving images to the media library to then be used as images, all that kind of stuff.
Corey Maass (00:02:18) – So it’s like, okay, let me step back, let me rebuild the app while I can. Now in React, which definitely the right choice like gave us so much more options. The UI is better, faster, more stable, more easily sustained. And not without, but obviously not without its overhead, like diving into a big React app. And this is of course, this turns into a big React app, you know, not without its downfalls but I also. Fell into the trap of. It’s it’s like a subtle version of over optimization that people talk about. Like, you know, you shouldn’t if you if you don’t even have the app out the door, then don’t stop to optimize. But as a developer, it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking too much about like data structures and all that type of stuff. The techie side. And so I was focusing a lot on saving a project. Like you’d go in and you’d be creating this image and treating it mean. Think.
Corey Maass (00:03:43) – I think it’s okay that I was thinking about it kind of in the sense of like a blog post. Like you save a blog post and you come back to a blog post and you, you know, you might edit it a few times or work on it a few times and then eventually it gets published. But then also that thing has that blog post has to exist in order for there to be a public facing version of it. Right. Versus what what we were talking about was or have been talking about. Is generating these images and these images. Once they essentially get printed into the media library, like the the stuff behind it doesn’t have to exist anymore. And and I actually realized, like I was going further and further down this rabbit hole and then did a customer interview, so called and it was. Eye opening, to say the least, where he’s like, I don’t know, man. I just want to upload a featured image and have that be the the image, you know, sized correctly look good.
Corey Maass (00:04:53) – Maybe down the road I’ll add some other stuff like a title or a watermark or something, but just, just get it out, you know, just I just I don’t even want to have to think about it. And I was like, Yeah, so this guy’s never going to save a project. He might eventually create a template. He wants that template to auto generate images, you know, But so it, it I wound up walking back, back and then I and then I checked in with you last week and you’re like, Yeah, like, think simpler. And so unfortunately, I mean, it’s no harm that I created some of these, some of this code that I can repurpose or comment out for now or what have you. But some of it, it definitely like it changed the whole UI. Where I was like, What is the title of this project? And and the truth is, is most of the time I think our our first major assumption here is like you’ve written a blog post, you open omg, OMG.
Corey Maass (00:05:53) – You might or might not have a stock photo. You know, you add some title and stuff. You say save featured image, save image and you close omg omg and you might not even save the project because it’s the work is done. Um, and it’s been interesting to go and look at Canva and, and look at in particular how I use Canva. So there’s a couple of like for my music blog as we’ve discussed. I have a, an image that I created once and that is essentially a template. And so every time I a new article goes live on my music review blog, I duplicate the page, I change the title. And so it’s exactly what we’re talking about. And I’ve now got this Canva document that’s 50 pages long. Every page is identical just with different artwork and different title, but the layout is the same, the font is the same, the watermark is the same. And so it’s like, Oh, right, okay, that’s what we’re emulating. And it’s actually been.
Corey Maass (00:07:06) – It’s it’s I’m I’m happy to report that I realized that we’re actually going to be solving the problem even better than Canva. As far as that’s concerned, you know, and it makes more sense with the way we’re integrating it with WordPress.
Cory Miller (00:07:23) – Yeah, I think, you know, when we talked earlier this week, the decision to go to the React side I think is really smart and it freed up so many more options. And then the other comment was on the simplified workflow. I think we’re doing that in and I love how you’re always trying to talk to people and see how people use it. That’s just good product, you know, work. Um, and I know we talked. We’re trying to get to some of this stuff to get to the presets, the templates, so somebody can start from something and with minimal effort, it looks really nice. It showcases the content that they’re trying to display.
Corey Maass (00:08:11) – Yeah. And that’s that’s what I’m racing towards. And at this point I’m. Like I’m I’m still I’m pretty much done like, ripping things out, but I’m like, come with.
Corey Maass (00:08:26) – With abandon. Am commenting things out or hiding things because I’m like, oh right. Like let’s just get this out the door. Simplest interface possible. Like there’s, there’s metadata that, you know, I was displaying, which I think we’re going to want eventually. So like it’s kind of like at the, you know, at the top of the WordPress editor. It’s like when, you know, when was the post created? When was the post modified? What is the status of it all, that kind of stuff. I’m like, you know what? For now, like for the sake of people being able to install something and edit something, um. Dead simple. And so, yeah, I had I it’s this whole thing has been a mean any any long process is always going to be an opportunity to learn things. And one of the things that we’ve talked about is you and I coming to a logical conclusion before I build a product which is not my usual Mo. And then I also because of that, I’m often usually building a product because I have an idea.
Corey Maass (00:09:32) – And so I build what I want and I’ve read all the books and gone to all the seminars and I know better. But I also often choose to ignore. I’m like, I know the right thing to do. Everybody talks about like, you know, find a market, find a problem, talk to the customers long before you build a product. And I’m like, I don’t I don’t want to like, I know I’m wrong. I freely admit I’m wrong. I’m not saying I’m right or that anybody else is wrong. I’m wrong, but I don’t wanna. That’s not how I build products. It’s like I don’t because I for me, for better or worse, like, I still view building products like writing music or something that is a creative process rather than a business process, which is why I have not made the millions of dollars that I should have made by now. Um, I was supposed to be funny. Um.
Cory Miller (00:10:25) – This this is philosophical, but I go, you know, there’s a lot of people that go, this is the way to do business.
Cory Miller (00:10:33) – I was one of those. And I go, maybe, maybe for some people, like not everybody. And you think like, our logical mind goes, okay, you know, do this, get customer demand, see market build product for that. And then there’s others that go build it and they’ll come and, you know, through this whole process, I think what we’ve emphasized is iteration is but with the parallel of belief, like this is something I’m going to blog about at some point real soon. But, you know, the Colonel Sanders KFC thing, you know, the cliche business case studies on this, like he tried X amount of times. You know, kept on. And then it finally happened. And you could take that for book Authors is probably another instance where they kept trying, you know, 100 publishers said, no, that’s them building a product. Not finding the right customer. So, you know. But what really, Lindsay and I have been having this conversation quite a bit is conviction, belief.
Cory Miller (00:11:42) – You know, one of our partners said conviction. I think if a conviction belief, is there something here, We both believe there’s something here. We’re willing to do the work because we care about it. We believe in it and we’re trying to keep download it in. And some at some point you just look at the law of probability. It’s going to happen, you know? One thing I like about you is you’re persistent. We think there’s something here. There’s going to be something here. So philosophical rant almost over. But I go the ones I go, this is the way to do it goes. That’s the way you did it, right? There’s probably a bunch of others that can say that’s the way we did it. But we miss the point that man, this thing happens in different ways. And so anyway, philosophical ramp over. I always doubt someone that goes, This is the only way to do it. This is the the way you did it and it worked. But, you know, I’ve tried to even use paths I’ve done before.
Cory Miller (00:12:44) – They don’t always work. So rant.
Corey Maass (00:12:48) – Yeah well and it’s you know, and what what do you what do you want out of it. Right. And like I’ve seen I, I had a lot of years ago who was. Who walked the path like we had a co-working space together. We had a mastermind group together. And at some point he. He finally figured out a product and he dropped the mastermind group. He he left the the co-working space and went downstairs and got an office that did not have a window so that he was literally just facing a wall because he’s like, I’m going to make this happen. And he had that kind of mindset. Right. And and then he and he he got like VC capital, like he and his wife were the moment he had, you know, X number of customers, they moved to the San Francisco, you know, to so to be where the money was. I mean like he was on the path and he made it work like he didn’t have the biggest exit in the world.
Corey Maass (00:14:01) – But, you know, there were hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars involved. Um, you know, but that doesn’t like you said. I mean, he could and he could have taken any number of steps, missteps or the right steps along the way, but also, like, some of us can’t work like that. Yeah. Um, you know, and the older we get, the more we don’t want to work like that and, and don’t, thankfully don’t have to rely on it. And for me, a lesson I learned a long time ago building a product, I was like, I all of my clients fell away and I was like, I have to make this product work or, you know, I’m going to go broke. And like, it was the worst product I ever made because I made all the wrong decisions, because I made them from a position of desperation. And so I was like, okay, I can never do that again, you know? Um, so yeah, it’s all all this kind of stuff.
Corey Maass (00:14:55) – But I guess the reason why I brought all that up was because I typically, I’m 90% over my own ego, but I still build products for myself. If I don’t, then what then? Then I’m not going to do a good job. Um, but in this case.
Cory Miller (00:15:17) – For me is when I embody the customer because I am it, you know, and this has been helpful for me, you know, the dev and you embody the customer, but I do too. I go, okay, this is what I think I even showed you on screen. Start post, get over to featured image Boom, everything attaches magically publish, you know. Now am I the typical you know, am I the one that’s going to pay us money? I don’t know. But like I that’s anytime you get in that mindset, I feel like it’s better.
Corey Maass (00:15:49) – Yeah. And you know, but guess the, the funny come full circle sort of instance here is I have come to rely so much on myself being the customer that I forgot to go talk to a customer and in so doing immediately was like, Oh, I’m way over engineering this.
Corey Maass (00:16:09) – Let me dial this back because and obviously I talked to what is it, a statistic, you know, I have a data point of one. And then I did talk to somebody else too, and he’s like, Yeah, think like you’re solving the problem. Go forth. That I was like, Cool. And eight minutes later we were done with the call mean it was great to connect with somebody, but it was like, Oh yeah, okay. You know, I, I, I am the customer in that I will use the plug in, but I’m not the only use case or something like that. You know, like there’s it already, it helps that I can bounce stuff off of you. So already we’ve got two data points instead of it just being me. But anyway, just it was a nice reminder to myself of like, oh, you know, I’ve for so long now I have not done what all the books say to do, but I might, maybe I should revisit that like because it’s I chose not to do them in certain instances.
Corey Maass (00:17:09) – But I’ve sort of, you know, it’s easy to forget.
Cory Miller (00:17:12) – I do think there’s a principle in all of this, which is. You know, embody it yourself, talk to people you think have a similar problem that that part you know, where you trust enough your own instinct and what you’re trying to get done. And then with some feedback from a like customer, you know, which is what you’ve done, which I currently. Martin Product. I think those are the two calibration points. The whoever’s leading the product understand what you’re trying to achieve. We’ve done a ton of that work together. Yeah, you’ve done a lot of this work on your own, talking to people, getting feedback. Yeah. And you know, Lindsay’s default avatar for this, too, because of her content marketing work and. I think I showed her it before WordCamp US and I was like, the idea is this save this time flow, get this. And I think it started to click not going to be the dead horse, but that’s why that templates the Presets are just I think so critical when you can see it.
Cory Miller (00:18:18) – I’m a visual person and go, Oh. Oh, I write my post. Click Featured Image. Templates to help me get there and then end product looks better than having to go all these different long ways that just really don’t matter and they’re not even going to be linked up properly. Yeah, that’s our value prop, you know, one one perspective of value prop.
Corey Maass (00:18:45) – Yep. Yeah. And I think we mean we’ve talked about like afterward camp I, I, I received so many compliments. That we. I mean, it’s the old adage show don’t tell, right? And so at some point we started writing copy for the home page. You know, a good exercise. And immediately even then, we came up with the idea, Oh, what we need are images before and after, before and after. And I think we’ve done a good job of illustrating by showing, not telling with pictures on the home page, the problem and the problem and how we aim to to solve it. And it’s been on me to hurry up and get the damn thing built so that we can show people how we’re going to solve the, you know, the tool that solves the problem and where they fit in with it.
Corey Maass (00:19:45) – But I think you’re exactly right. Even within I mean, I’m sitting here, obviously, nobody has the benefit of the view that I’m looking at. Next to your smiling face is the product, you know, well in progress. And because I happen to have just hit refresh because I’m trying to fix something, I’m I’m staring at essentially a blank canvas. And so for somebody to walk in like I’m my intent is the couple of customers that I spoke to and and the people on our beta list. By the way, if you if you’re listening and you haven’t signed up, go sign up. OMG, img echo. But yeah, the I’m going to, you know, get on again, get on a call with people and walk them through and say, okay. Pretend you’re writing an article or, you know, call me when you’ve written an article and you want to now create an image and let’s take ten minutes to install the plug in, get you set up, because I kind of want to see where you stumble.
Corey Maass (00:20:45) – Um, but obviously other than the first 2 or 3, four people that we do that with you and I being two of them, we’re not going to do that with everybody. And so what we need is some people to walk in and not see a blank canvas because that’s one of the most intimidating things and have those presets and they go, Well, we’ll start here. And what I really liked even is the first preset that we’re going to build. And in some ways I think I’m going to actually build this into the plug in. Like on the welcome screen, I’m going to say, do you want to use your featured images as your images and just stop there? And people are going to say yes, right?
Cory Miller (00:21:31) – Yes.
Corey Maass (00:21:32) – They’re already there already.
Cory Miller (00:21:35) – You’ve got something that’s going to be per blog post display with all the Google stuff. You got to love it. Yep. Yep.
Corey Maass (00:21:42) – And and technically, that’s a preset, right? And like we will, you know, and then we can extend from there.
Corey Maass (00:21:49) – But the first one is, you know, you’re already uploading an image, but it’s whatever size and shape your template needs it to be. We’re going to resize it to be an image and and already your SEO is better. Now, do you want to add a watermark? Do you want to add the title of the post? Whatever you want to do. Take it to the moon. You know, but the first simple step is just that, um, and and I but even that, it’s like it’s a check mark. They’re going to say yes. And the next time they write a blog post like that’s going to happen. And I’ve, I’ve added meta boxes so that on the edit screen you can see what the plugin is generating both in meta tags if you’re not using Yoast or all in one SEO, but the image that is being shown to the world. So it’s so already I think it’s going to be helpful. But again, as we’ve talked about to a lot of people, the OG images, this it’s this other thing, it’s ethereal, um, because they don’t see it unless they’re sharing their own blog post on Twitter or whatever.
Corey Maass (00:22:56) – Um, so then it’s going to come down to, you know, okay, every time you write a blog post and you upload a featured image, you know, and you click if you click OMG IMG, we’re going to show you what you’re already, what you’re already doing generating. So a square featured image now becomes a rectangle so that it’s the right size and shape for an image. Now do you want to add the post title on it so that it’s more clear and you can sort of grow with it? But we’re going to have, you know, and or like you said, choose from our selection of Handsome presets that have color overlays or, you know, borders or what have you. So.
Cory Miller (00:23:38) – Well, I know you’re still working and on this to get to the presets would behoove us to talk a little bit just in in ideation form when we get to preset. Just. Every time I been excited, right? We’re both excited to get there. My mind goes, okay, what? On the OG image.
Cory Miller (00:24:06) – To take advantage of things like really not just you know you can do blog post will have this ability. Blog post title featured image. Right logo. You know that kind of stuff. My mind keeps going to. How to make this even better. So in the age of so much content out there, it’s like you’ve got to hit somebody with something compelling enough to click through. That, to me is the OG image, the social share image, what we’re doing like, oh, there’s some you know, it’s that like we had this conversation in months ago. I see it. It’s not just same old, same old. It’s like, that is interesting to me. I’m going to click it. But there’s another purpose for this I think is just real quick Instagram picture type. You know, something of value to that person. Tell me if you don’t want to do that. But I was just thinking I. I’m really eager to get there because I know you’re going to. You’re doing all this amazing tech work to get us there.
Cory Miller (00:25:19) – And then I go, one edge is like. You know, three points, a quote, something that goes, oh, that’s it’s the bait. It’s the bait to click through to go over here. And I don’t see this done very well at all. I don’t even see it. I don’t even know if I see it done right. You know, it’s blog post, featured image, click over. You know.
Corey Maass (00:25:45) – Your your original original concept was slides. Yeah. And I still think that’s the perfect analogy. Metaphor. Whatever. And. Yeah, I was talking through. I was just describing the plug in. To somebody anyway. And they they said, well, let me play devil’s advocate. You know, is it overkill? Like we now live in a world of thumbnails? This is all a really interesting way for it to be put. And I liked the conversation because they’re like, we’re we’re already we live in a world of thumbnails. You go to Netflix and it’s to choose what you’re going to watch.
Corey Maass (00:26:34) – I mean, they.
Cory Miller (00:26:35) – They have to those little thumbnails have to sell the series to go click. What’s it about play.
Corey Maass (00:26:43) – Yep And that was and that was the perfect that was yeah. How it was how I was able to convey this. Like we went to album covers.
Cory Miller (00:26:53) – You talked about that. That’s right. You know like. And this is why I come back to believe. I’m sorry to catch you. This is why I come back to belief. Like we. We’ve been embedded in these worlds. A book cover, an album cover, Netflix. We. We. We kind of sent some of the stuff. It’s that I needed enough to get the click through, because when I’m scrolling through Amazon or Netflix or Amazon, whatever it is, I’m going to go, Oh, there’s something they’re appealing and what they want, the intention is the click okay, sorry.
Corey Maass (00:27:26) – No, it’s true. And yeah, and what I wound up like they were sort of complaining about, you know, there’s, we’re all these thumbnails and I’m like, You’re selling this for me.
Corey Maass (00:27:40) – I was like, you know, when you go to my favorite one, I’m like one of my favorite YouTube series. And you look at the thumbnails and clearly they, the, the, the people who create the videos create separate thumbnails and that’s what they upload so that when you view it this big, there’s some word on there that says, you know, we fell off a bridge and you’re like, wait, what? You know, And they’re driving, you know, they’re driving around the country in a van and you’re like, I want to go click through and see what see the latest video and what’s going on. And so, yeah, it’s it’s that adding extra value. Like early on I got real excited about sort of the, the Photoshop aspect of it or. You know, Canva. I treat in some ways like Photoshop because that’s my background or one of that’s something that I’ve done for a long time. And so I’m adding these visual effects, right? Like the ability to have gradient backgrounds and stuff like that.
Corey Maass (00:28:49) – But what but what actually gets us there is words like a compelling and that’s the irony of all this, right? Like we started this whole project by going WordPress covers words just fine, but doesn’t do images well. And so what we’re introducing is a way to introduce better images that contain words. Um, but that’s seriously. But that’s human nature.
Cory Miller (00:29:13) – Yeah, but. We’re really doing a service because you think there’s a bunch of text, there’s a bunch of information out there. I love Twitter because it’s like very encapsulated, you know, kind of get the point if you need to kind of extend, you can thread. But like that, that thing is a phenomenon right now. I started in 2006 when blogging was just kind of getting started with blogging and like it was the only thing long form content, mostly long form content. I didn’t even care what the word count as long as it express something. Now we’re in kind of a glut. Potentially. AI is going to even make that more so.
Cory Miller (00:29:49) – Let me give you an example real quick. We’ll just eat our own dog food. So this is last episode 24. Sorry. Um. Okay, so I’m going to give you some background, and then I’m going to get to the featured image. So we take our episode, it’s going to YouTube, all that stuff. But I said, we got to have this too long, didn’t read. Now sometimes we ramble, but we have a lot of golden here. But so we’re taking this using a service and going, What are these two? You know, what are the top takeaways? And was getting better at this, which that’s going to come into in a minute. But I go take your long form and go you know chat GPT three highlights. So right here if we just use prop up our this podcast for this, it’s you go it’s product. We get the name and the title like if you’re interesting interested in product then you know because we kind of have an hour or more sometimes we talk through and there’s so many pieces of gold.
Cory Miller (00:30:55) – If I’m going to do featured image image and I want to share it on social to this right here for our audience, there’s a lot of technically minded product people in WordPress in particular refactoring man, what they have to say on that. Okay, this is a big okay, user centric development, engaging early users. Now this came from. I don’t remember what we talked about. This is what we talked about. So if I go to the OG, the social share image, I go, I that’s where I think I’m thinking about all this. You can take whatever content you have over here on your website that you ultimately want people to land on and convert into a prospect, you know, a customer, whatever. And I’m a proponent of this style stuff because now even better, you got to distill this, but we need just saying launch a product. I was looking at some of our YouTube, so if we just take this for a second, I was looking at. Some of our views.
Cory Miller (00:32:02) – You know, we’re getting, you know, 25 probably on average, it looks like, over time. And so this is great because it gets us launch the headline. But if we’re posting this like. Oh. This. That social share image. I want to say Episode 24. We talk about the importance of refactoring. I’d want those three things to be on it. Sure. Like, okay, you got my attention. You’re talking about WordPress product. I don’t want to go through an hour to find out what you’re actually talking about. There’s obviously people that are doing that. They’re, you know, they’re viewing it. But if we want to increase same thing as our customers here, increase accounts, we’d say this one’s about refactoring. Right. So. Now converting over to the OG image. I think I’d want we talk about these three things. Refactoring development, giving users.
Corey Maass (00:33:06) – And. And there’s. And this is where. I have to rein myself in. Clearly I have to do that anyway.
Corey Maass (00:33:16) – But from. You know, we. We see. We see. What do I want to say? We see the forest or something like that. It’s like because not only is it as we talked about. You know, the the, the standard screenshot right now would be you and me. Yeah. And and the first step is adding, you know, big text so that when you see this thumbnail, this big, it says episode 24, you’re like, Oh that’s cool. They’re 24 episodes in and it says, you know, user centric building, refactoring, etcetera, etcetera. And you’re like, okay, now I’ve got some topics. And so you’ve gone from maybe a compelling image of Corey and Corey. I mean, we are two handsome guys to to value in the image. And then what? For me, the the I’ve talked about this more, but, um, I don’t I don’t yet know how to convey. The exponential value of. Creating one, designing one image and having it generate multiple images.
Corey Maass (00:34:36) – Right. So different sizes because that’s something that I already have to do. It’s like if I if I write a blog post, I’m because I post on Twitter, because I post on Instagram, because I post on Facebook, they all have to be different size images. And so the you know, you’re taking a featured image, you’re changing the size and shape of a featured image. So it works on all these channels, adding more content to those. And then but we still haven’t talked about the fourth dimension of time. And for me, that’s, I mean, just going up, up, up, up in value of exactly what you’re describing so that your first slide looks like go back to where you just were a second for a second. Oh, Cory, close some tabs, man. Um, but like, if this is the first slide, right? Like as soon as our episode is done, this is what this, this is what is on. This is the image for this episode on the website.
Corey Maass (00:35:48) – Great. It’s, it’s got more value than just the picture of you and I. But then. Long term clicking a button so that you’ve got three versions of this slide, each one that has one bullet point. So you end up with three images and each one of those images gets posted. Every couple of days. So you’ve got original content with value, different value going out over time. So now you’ve not only are you, you know, going up and out sideways, but then you’re going over time because you could end up with, you know, generating images for Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. But then three per and and posting one per week. And so you end up with these these campaigns of content. Because that’s you know, that’s one of the to me, that’s like the the bigger struggle is not even I mean, let’s cover the very bottom of the the pyramid of value is making sure that you have images. Middle of the pyramid is images that have value, but you post an image or yeah, you post an image or you make a post on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram.
Corey Maass (00:37:04) – What’s the likelihood that you’re actually posting at exactly the right time to catch everybody low mean? That’s the whole point of all these tools that have come out for creating whole marketing campaigns. So down the road it’s it’s that you know starting with a kernel and then going sideways and then going up and then going forward. So the whole thing ends up being three dimensional and you’re covered all your bases and all your amazing content goes everywhere the way it’s supposed to. Which is version two.
Cory Miller (00:37:40) – So can you hear me? Okay. So just a second. Slam and stuff in here, but. This is what I was like. Okay. To make this image and all the work we’ve done on the podcast more valuable. Like, you want the name? You want the three points? That’s about as simple as I’m thinking. Yep. And I’d be like, okay, best practice. Go get your post. Put it in chat GPT. Say, what are the three takeaways? Copy paste. Yeah, like at a minimum, that’s going to be better than just.
Cory Miller (00:38:46) – Our image, you know? Yeah. And so that’s where I’m going on some of the. Tips. I know we’ve already got quotes in there and stuff like that, but I think when we get to these presets, if we just do nail some of this taking one little bitty step and give those bullet points, which I think you’ve actually already got in there in the.
Corey Maass (00:39:12) – Yeah. And so, yeah, you know, start with human curated. Even if it’s AI generated. And then as soon as we can, like once we’ve got a stable product that generates images. Um, integrated. I mean, one of the things that has come back to me of mean and no real surprise specifically at WordCamp US because AI is, is on everybody’s mind. People kept saying like, you know, how soon are you going to is your plugin going to generate images and or or have I generate images. Which is, you know, and so it’s like people sitting on a picnic blanket with laptops or something, but generated by AI and then also using AI in the same context or in the other context of scan my like right now if you add some text to an image in OMG img from a dropdown, you can select post title and author name and all that kind of stuff.
Corey Maass (00:40:21) – Imagine if there was another option that said like AI. Bullet points. Summary of product. And you’d select that and it would go quick, skim your article and come back and say, Here’s what we got. So, so exactly that, you know, and that’s not that’s not a terribly complicated integration of I. But it does take us. You know, it is still a, you know, version 1.6 or something. It’s down the road.
Cory Miller (00:40:51) – Go ahead. Absolutely. That’s that’s for a version later where the tool is integrated to do to do this. But in the in the beginning when we get to the Presets. Yeah. This is what I’m going to want to do, a template like this. Okay. Headline. Three points. Yep.
Corey Maass (00:41:15) – Watermark. Image on the left.
Cory Miller (00:41:18) – Yep. Yep. And like, there’s one. You know, I was trying to tell me that out to go, like. I think we still have this right, the iPhone thing.
Corey Maass (00:41:29) – It’s because. It’s because I built it.
Corey Maass (00:41:32) – It will get re-added, but okay, soon. But probably not at release time. Because again, at this point I’m trying to just get the essentially a a featured image as OG image out the door. Because that’s what the MVP should have been all along. And then and then you can add other stuff, add formatting, add a title and stuff like that, just as you said. But generating device images is, you know, it’s kind of it’s a it’s a little app within an app and so I’m. Punting on that.
Cory Miller (00:42:11) – So this for me is really kind of doing some of the pre work when we get to the. The Presets. So go. Using an actual test case. It’s like. Nope. Probably see. I’m trying to use this as a test case for a second lunch in a project. That’s the title. Think you’d want some intro text? We’re like some takeaway.
Corey Maass (00:43:12) – Oh, yeah. Call to action.
Cory Miller (00:43:13) – Call to action. Yeah.
Corey Maass (00:43:19) – And I hadn’t thought of that specifically.
Cory Miller (00:43:22) – This is the kind of pre-work I wanted to do to get ready for that, because if we did this lab, we go, okay, we’re a podcast. We’ve already said this is a best practice. Session, You know, podcast session 20 could be blog post. Here are the takeaways. Yep. And then what’s our what would be our call to action? CTA.
Corey Maass (00:43:56) – Tune in now the you know, the the unfortunate part is, well, good and bad. What I guess what I was just thinking is like I don’t have. So I, I, we absolutely already have the way the option of adding text. So if we just add text that says, you know, tune in, listen in, have a listen. Listen, watch, learn. And but I’m like, I actually want to I want to an option to make it look like a button because, yeah, technically you’re not clicking on a button. You’re clicking on an image that contains a thing that looks like a button.
Corey Maass (00:44:35) – But if you’re most places that you post, the image is linkable. You can click the image on the Facebook post that will then take you through to the article. So I’m adding that to my notes of I want to I want to be able to make. Make something that looks like a button just because I think that’ll be. That’s compelling.
Cory Miller (00:44:57) – See that kind of stuff? I was trying to stay with what Senior features will be on launch, but that kind of thing is so smart. We’re thinking about the image. It’s not a boring, what do we call it? Ugly. WP Ugly. It’s not boring static, it’s something. So that kind of thing is what we’re right here. But you think about it. So. And that’s it, right? This could be blog post.
Corey Maass (00:45:32) – Yeah, we are. And we are so close like I am. I am now. I am essentially in the nuts and bolts. The plug in needs to auto update when there’s a new version. Um.
Corey Maass (00:45:49) – I. You need to be able to save. Save a product template and see those available when you’re like create a new image. Oh, here’s my template at the top, things like that. And so and one of the other things I found myself saying talking to a customer is I said, So he he showed me the images that he generates. And I’m like, Yep, we can do that, you know? But there already I see. Like there’s a couple of little style things that we don’t yet accommodate. The nice part is we can, um. Sorry about dogs barking. Um. And that’s that was that was the big thing about that that kicked off the rewrite was like he’s he’s going to want borders around a certain section and I was like crap like that means we have to generate a whole template as opposed to just adding the option of adding a border. Um, or we have to have infinite options. And they were all, all had to be visible the way I was building it.
Corey Maass (00:47:00) – So I walked that back. But. Um, but I’m going to include the same mechanism that you and I talked about a bunch of episodes ago of like essentially being able to collect feedback on every page because I and I said to him, I was like, you know, if I, if I gave you the plug in today, you would not be able to add the borders that you’re using as part of the style of the images you’re generating. But I want to make damn sure that you can send me a two sentence email, click a button, say, Hey, I need borders around the, you know, da da da. And I get that email and I ship a new version the next day that includes the option to add borders, that kind of thing. So. So, yeah, like I think as we roll along, like we’re going to be able to accommodate more and more sophisticated layouts, designs, text options. All that stuff and hopefully, hopefully in a way that isn’t overwhelming in the UI.
Cory Miller (00:48:11) – Trying to use this.
Corey Maass (00:48:35) – Mm. Like a newsletter, a summary of the newsletter or something.
Cory Miller (00:48:41) – Yeah, I was trying to throw some different use cases, so we got the podcast. We just showed that here. But to your point. Yep. And then throwing this in? Yep. Where the at a glance can read the headlines. And then go, Oh, I want to see what this is. Click. Yep. It’s still a little boring. We’d probably want to add some like because I know this plugin already does it. Is a background.
Corey Maass (00:49:43) – Yeah, I and what I like is that I think what we’re setting you up for, as I talked about a minute ago, is. You’re going to grow with it, right? It’s even a it’s even the sort of thing where, like, that’s what you set up out of the box. You’re like, Great, I need an image. I want to take ten minutes. It’s done. It’s boring. But but it technically it works and it’s still better than nothing or an image that is just your logo or whatever.
Corey Maass (00:50:16) – But then the next week you’re like, Oh, right. I wanted to spend a little more time with this, so I’m going to go in and add a background color, add more in my branding, what have you, and then you also can get to where you’re like, Oh, I want to add, you know, we’re really going to be featuring Michelle’s section this week where she’s talking about the community. You know, let’s put a little, you know, put her face in here because we all know that, you know, human faces, humans are drawn to, you know, faces and stuff like that. So you’re like this week in in business of WordPress Michelle talks about and here’s a picture of Michelle and there’s a drop quote or whatever, you know, so you start to spend more time with those. Yeah.
Cory Miller (00:51:01) – Yeah. Okay.
Corey Maass (00:51:02) – So and different ones, right So you can you could even and I’m looking forward to like we talk a lot about. Teams of one, teams of three people who are doing all of it.
Corey Maass (00:51:17) – Right. You know, but offline, you and I talk have talked about how, like in a perfect world, you’d have like or at the big corporations where you’ve actually got an an intern or an employee whose whole job it is to make images square, Right. So like you’ve got the right, you know, New York Times, you’ve got the writer and the editor. So already you’ve got two people messing around with words and then you’ve got the photographer, but you’ve also got a graphics department because people are touching up those photographs. It might not be the photographer. And then you’ve got other people who are editing and manipulating and making those images square or rectangle or whatever for all the different instances where where they’re used. And so what I’m looking forward to is getting even into that space where we’re going to, you know, people are going to have multiple templates. And so for every story they’re going to generate multiple images of different styles with for different intents. And just again, it’s that exponential, these uses that I’m so looking forward to.
Corey Maass (00:52:34) – And I think it’s going to be an interesting. It’s going to be an interesting challenge in marketing. Down the road, too, because of there’s all these different use cases. And right now I think we’re starting. At the bottom, which is fine. Like the bare minimum. Again, a featured image as an OG image or something like that. But I think this is I’m speaking off the cuff here, but it’s like I kind of want to look at. Of course, I’m thinking of music software. There was a what? There’s a thing called FL Studios, and the FL stands for Fruity Loops because back in 98, they wrote this program that was a simple little looper for samples. Kick. Drum. Kick. Drum kick. Drum kick. Snare, kick, snare, kick, snare. And then people said, Well, I want to be able to arrange it and make a whole song out of it. Um, and then and then it eventually it became a full build a song.
Corey Maass (00:53:43) – FL Studio, right. And same with like Yoast or Monster Insights or I’m trying to think of some of the other big what we think of as like the big sweet plugins that do do lots of things like what was, what did version one of Yoast look like? What did version one of OptIn Monster look like? You know what one little problem did they solve and then how did they grow and market, you know, all the different features, all the different use cases. And then I’m also wondering.
Corey Maass (00:54:20) – How. How do we. What do I want to say? How do we not only move upstream? Like, obviously I’m now pie in the sky, but like we talk in a number of different contexts about how so much of WordPress has moved upstream. Like you need to be a WordPress WordPress professional in order to use so much of WordPress now. Or set up a WordPress instance. So. You know, looking at all these scenarios like the big the big business team scenarios, but then also making sure that we can always accommodate the.
Corey Maass (00:55:03) – The person with a blog. You know.
Speaker 4 (00:55:09) – It’s fun to think about.
Cory Miller (00:55:11) – So here’s two. I use those two and I go. Right there. Yeah. Like you’ve already got this thing. What I was trying to conceptualize is have you given the tools to basically, we used to call it make everything ugly. So you given all this range of tools, presets are going to help theme. And so I go, okay, put here on the left like we’ve got these. Column names. We have a podcast that we do and we’re going to use this side to share what’s in that click like that would work for post status for with OMG. That’s that’s our first template right there.
Corey Maass (00:56:11) – our second.Our first template is just the featured image.
Cory Miller (00:56:17) – Oh, yeah, the basic ones. Right.
Corey Maass (00:56:20) – It seems redundant, but. But. But I hear you like that’s. That’s what we’re going to look at. And that’s, that’s the other reason why I walked a lot of this back. I was like, we need.
Corey Maass (00:56:31) – Text and images. We need one, 2 or 3 columns. And and that’s what that’s what we’re starting with. Because like this template two column, the one you did a minute ago, one column. 36. 35. Guess it’s two columns at the bottom, but you get my point.
Cory Miller (00:57:03) – Yeah, that could easily be. Yep.
Corey Maass (00:57:21) – Because. So the one of the things we haven’t talked about, we’ve talked about the image gallery that we’ve referred to a bunch of times, which is like curated the best OG images out there. And I showed you as a little fun, Build it on the Train kind of project at WordCamp US. I built OG image dot me where I, I dropped in my own websites and then you can add and basically the 100 top websites of on the internet. That I pulled off of Semrush. So we need to we need to pull a couple of other sources, but and people can add their own. But it will go and scrape the images from the top sites on the Internet.
Corey Maass (00:58:19) – And it’s been really interesting to see how many how many sites are doing it wrong or not doing it at all. Look at that first one, sugar. It’s just a black bar. Is there even anything? Oh, okay. So there is something there. But then also to see like, you know, so some of the bigger brands are are doing it right, you know, but the overall there are these very simple examples of your device image on the left and some content on the right or and and and usually fairly static because again, I think nobody’s solving this for WordPress like so it’s not you know we’ve got most of the SEO plugins are are a single image for the site. Or some very simple generation for an image that has the title or something. But anyway, it’s like. Taking taking this a lot further. You know.
Corey Maass (00:59:24) – But it’s fun to do these little side experiments to like, see what see, in some ways it’s kind of to see what we’re up against because it just shows that major brands are not spending any time thinking about this.
Cory Miller (00:59:40) – So I know the plugin can do this right here. Text one column logo at the bottom.
Corey Maass: Yep.
Cory Miller:I think what you also have if remember. Is like on this image. You can do a background. (01:00:01) – Okay. Put something in real quick.
Corey Maass (01:00:12) – You’re not going to be able to see it. Orange on orange. There you go.
Cory Miller (01:00:22) – And just placeholder for now, but
Corey Maass: For sure.
Cory Miller: Okay, so here’s my design problem. This looks boring. What do you suggest putting like. Great background or something. Obviously, I’m not. I’m just slamming this together.
Corey Maass (01:00:40) – Yeah I mean. And this is why it’s like I want, I want to give lots of options, like something that I see a lot modern web is, is gradient. I don’t know. You must be able to do gradient somehow but like. So it you know, you’d have your brand colors, orange, orange and black. And so you might make the whole thing white text and, and then have the background fade from orange to black, which looks very Halloween, but.
Corey Maass (01:01:08) – Mean, already what you’ve done is more compelling, right? And if that listen, watch, learn was an actual button. That would look more interesting. And then and then you could also do like what its the people are taking from Instagram stories, stuff like that, right? Like, so somebody posts about my music on Instagram. I take their, their video and I add little, you know, hooray icons around it. Yes. Stickers and things like that because of exactly what you’re talking about. Like one to make content my own and to to take something that often is inherently boring and try to add a little pizzazz. And so yeah, at some point we’ll we’ll mean we support emojis, but at some point, like we will have stuff like that where it’s like add confetti and a confetti effect, whatever. But that’s kind of why, you know, I want. I have this with with some of my other products. Like I we could sit here and brainstorm this stuff all day. I want people to start requesting it.
Corey Maass (01:02:14) – I want to cover the bases and then have people start requesting it before we actually build it.
Cory Miller (01:02:22) – Yeah, but now am I doing anything that we haven’t already built? Okay. I was just trying to go. Okay. It’s one thing to give people all the tools in this. Give them a head start. Right? You know, like this. I was trying to only use the tools we built currently. And go, okay, what would that template be for that right now? Is the images in here too though, right? Yep. Okay. So see right there. Like I’d go. There’s one. You know, this is the way to make it, not what I’m trying to do is say, that looks boring. I need to jazzed up. Okay. I know you got the background tool. You know? Yep. This would be great. Like launching a WordPress product. Session 24. Importance of refactoring. You know, it still needs a little design bling to match the brand colors, but.
Cory Miller (01:03:27) – Sure, right there. Plus one. Yep.
Corey Maass (01:03:34) – Yeah, it’s I mean, you look at I mean, it’s the app you’re on, right? Like Google slides set, you know, has a like add a slide that has one big word that has two columns, that has, you know, an image on the left and some words on the right, like very simple layouts that then you can take as far as you want. Yeah.
Cory Miller (01:03:59) – Because I know we’ll cover these bases, you know, we’ll do these. But I was trying to go, okay, I’ve seen all the tools. When I was looking at them, I was like, Oh, man. I know the users are going to have this problem. I can put. You know, a color picker. I can pick a color, but. Okay, use the headline here and put one of your brain colors. Do a softer, lighter color here for your takeaways. Ways to get people in. We’ve got a call to action which we can do just with text for now.
Cory Miller (01:04:35) – And then logo. Yep.
Corey Maass (01:04:38) – No. And you did a great job already just by making it not just black on white text. Black text on white background. Yeah. I mean, the the I just realized as you were scrolling back, I’m like one of the good and bad of the post status style is black on white looks clean and refreshing and modern and sleek. But that’s not everybody’s brand aesthetic like that looks great because there’s so much white space, but a lot of other brands aren’t going to benefit from that. So. So these later ones. 36 Et-cetera. Go the other way. It’s kind of it’s it’s Apple versus Microsoft, right? That first version up top. Very Apple. Lots of white space clean down here. This is a lot more. What’s the not slides not keynote. What’s Microsoft Slide builder presenter. I can’t believe I’m blanking on that. But anyway, you get the idea. But it’s that, you know, it’s being able to accommodate different styles. Think we’re in good shape.
Cory Miller (01:05:51) – And. Like that. We’ll definitely do basic, you know. Um. They go, This is a way. This is the one we I would tell people I do something like this, like you can use it to do. Headline. The plus one. Headline. Give a couple takeaways. Give something of value to the reader. Urge them to click more to learn all the rest. Yep.
Corey Maass (01:06:27) – Yeah. And I just added. Author name, author, Avatar. If they have one, that kind of thing. So so exactly what you just did, you’re like, okay, so this is an article written by Nathan. Let’s generate an image, pull in, you know, pull a Nathan’s name and and Avatar, which would be different from the next time Michelle writes an article. Yep. But you could use the same template and it would pull in her image and, you know, her byline, whatever it is. And so, again, it’s these little things that I think are going to make.
Corey Maass (01:07:03) – It’s. It’s not, you know, fine art. But it’s it’s valuable, valuable and compelling.
Cory Miller (01:07:16) – Okay. Okay. Thanks for just letting me go down that route because I was I wanted to be ready when we do that.
Corey Maass (01:07:22) – And no, I’m glad you did it because it’s I’m determined, like next week. Hell or high water where we’re at least going to sit down together and and build some of these and see how it goes.
Cory Miller (01:07:36) – Yeah, I sit with this and I go, okay, it’s not compelling. You know, And I go, okay, we can do this. It’s just not compelling. That’s where templates come in now. We and we direct a user. Hey, this is the. Blog post. This is what we share with people. It’s just like, take, take five seconds. Put that into ChatGPT. Say, what are the three takeaways? Copy. Paste them right here into the text, document into that template. Have a call to action. And I think, Corey, when we get this, these, we’ll get the basics right.
Cory Miller (01:08:18) – And then when we work on. These two. Really.
Corey Maass: Yep.
Cory Miller: We do. Video. And we say, listen, they’re boring. You can do this. You know you can do this. You should. For your overall site. That’s your overall image. That’s the biz card. Now for each specific content, this is what I’ve been excited about to get to. It’s not enough just to say. Go read this now. Put a little value use template 35. Okay, here’s another. There’s two basic options just to get you a little bit more value, and we’ll share that through our videos, text on the home page, different things. It’s like, no, start here.
Corey Maass: Yep.
Cory Miller: You’re going to be ahead of the competition just doing this.
Corey Maass: Yep.
Cory Miller: So thanks for letting me take some of that time because I just wanted to be ready because I’ve been stumped. I saw all the tools and I’m like, you know, when everything is an option, everything sucks.
Yeah.
And I was like, Oh my God, I don’t know what I would do.
Cory Miller (01:09:27) – But taking those use case studies for real quick really help. Like even knowing. Yes, if, if it’s just you put your picture, put your author byline That can come in automatically.
Corey Maass (01:09:41) – Yep.
Cory Miller (01:09:42) – Take five seconds and give a couple takeaways. And we this works for this column. This works for the podcast, this works for longform video or longform video too, but it works for long form content.
Corey Maass (01:09:58) – Yep. Yep. And if it’s.
Corey Maass (01:10:01) – If you can’t do. If you can’t. If you if you don’t have ChatGPT, if you can’t do bullets or whatever, you can also pull in the excerpt, which is serves the same purpose.
Cory Miller: Yep.
Corey Maass: That’s already built in. And something we had talked about. And I want to see if this is a use case. It’s a use case for one of my clients, a big magazine website. But they they go through and they do big drop quotes. And so without I can scan a document and say, pull out anything in a block in the block, quote, tag.
Corey Maass (01:10:44) – And so then you could go and, you know, say, you know, because presumably a a a block quote serves the same purpose. It’s huge text in a wall of text that that tries to grab the attention. So somebody skimming their eyes are starting to glaze. Now you’ve got 36 point text that’s like and then our van went off the bridge and you’re like, Wait, what? And you scroll back and you’re like, Wait, I zoned out. Let me read this. This is, this is interesting. And so serves the same function. You know, this episode 24, in which Corey punches Corey in the nose and you’re like, What? You know? And that might have been a it could have been a subtitle. It could have been an excerpt, It could have been because we’re all of these things like the magazines over there. But, you know, all of these things serve the same purpose. You look at a newspaper for those of you under 20, that’s a thing that used to exist.
Corey Maass (01:11:46) – Um, but magazines, you know, all of it is meant to capture our attention. And so you look at the formatting of magazines and they don’t just have side to side, top to bottom. It’s not a book. They’ve got two columns and they’ve got big drop quotes and they’ve got images and they’ve got, you know, all this compelling stuff that to try to catch your eye and all of it serves the same purpose. And you think about it. What’s an excerpt? An excerpt? Is it it academically it might be a summary, but more realistically, it’s a sentence or two that’s going to try to capture the attention of the person so that when they’re looking at the archive page in in WordPress parlance, you’re like, Wait, Corey punches Corey in the nose. I get to click through to that, you know, and then that and then again, that might be a drop quote somewhere along the page. So there’s lots of different ways that we can even use already what we’ve got because it’s again, historical, the history of publishing and you’ve got that option of AI generated summaries.
Corey Maass (01:12:55) – Tldr. somebody who’s actually listening to it and going, No, actually this is the the thing that matters, you know?
Cory Miller (01:13:04) – So where this comes from too is with the work Lindsay does with marketing for clients, I’ve seen some things that I go, it’s not compelling. Take some of this stuff, put that like for that magazine. Put that quote.
Corey Maass 4 (01:13:21) – Right.
Cory Miller (01:13:22) – You know. Go read the latest. Latest article. Go click through. And I’ve been thinking in this of okay, there’s I was just thinking for a second to Instagram. It’s one column maybe. Court scores in this. And the text. We know you can’t click and LinkedIn, but it’s like, go read the latest article. With the logo, right? The LinkedIn version is here’s the three points, the Facebook same. You know, it’s just this is where we’re on to something. This is where the intersection where we’re showing. It’s not just you should saw the plugin ogm it’s for your site can look way better. And the plus, which I think is going to get people to buy, is, holy crap.
Cory Miller (01:14:18) – They’re they’re thinking about this not just from the product level. They’re thinking about it from got ran over by bus. Three takeaways like this is not just checking the box. It’s the plus. And. Right. I really like that.
Corey Maass (01:14:34) – Yeah. And that’s and that’s the funny thing to me is the like. Or. And I think it’s going to be a bit of a challenge. People know. People keep saying to me, I know I’m doing it wrong. And it’s like, okay, so with In a perfect World, one click, now you’re doing it right. Now stop thinking about that. Now start thinking like a storyteller, like a marketer, you know, again, going, going broad, going deep with with content and value and then going over time. And people aren’t thinking like that, you know, which is fine. I get it. Like we’re all struggling to be the one person team that does all these things.
Cory Miller (01:15:16) – You just gave two gold. We got to write this down.
Cory Miller (01:15:20) – Stop going from the one person team. Act like. Act like you have five person team and the other is I’m doing it wrong. Stop doing it wrong. Start doing it right. OMG img dot co.
Corey Maass (01:15:35) – Love it. It’s a good thing we record these.
Speaker 4 (01:15:39) – And that came. From you, said everybody, all the people you’ve been talking to. I know I’m doing it wrong. Yep. Start doing it right.
Corey Maass (01:15:50) – because it’s because it’s WP ugly.
Cory Miller (01:15:54) – Yeah, it’s WP ugly. OMG omg stop did it wrong. Start doing it right. These are all tweets.
Corey Maass: Totally
Cory Miller: updates. Exes, whatever they call them.
Corey Maass (01:16:15) – Yeah. Mean it’s like. It’s like when I call it when I showed you OG image dot me, You’re like, this is this is content marketing gold. It’s like we need to just like, we’re not there yet, but to queue up a tweet a day with all of the the the sites that are doing it horribly, horribly wrong and just being like, hey.
Cory Miller(01:16:36) – That’s what you. You said earlier this week when we talked, you were like, I want to put a check mark. They’ve got it in a stop sign, whatever went wrong. And that’s the that’s the stop doing it wrong. Start doing it right. Own IMG. Yep.
Corey Maass (01:16:53) – Come talk to us.
Cory Miller (01:16:54) – Come talk. Yeah. Just connecting these dots. I. Good stuff.
Corey Maass (01:17:02) – Yeah. I’ve just got to get the damn thing out the door as I think I’ve finished every conversation with.
Cory Miller (01:17:07) – I know it sucks because I know you’re working hard, and then I’m trying to, and you’re like, Well, hold on. That has to be later. And I’m like, okay, wait.
Corey Maass (01:17:16) – No, but.
Cory Miller (01:17:17) – Want to use the tools we have? I want to when we get I want to be fully ready. When you’re like, We got it. Okay, We’ve got a head start already on these.
Corey Maass: Yeah
Cory Miller like this. And we’ve kind of plumbed out the post test one as our as a showcase. Now I got to get.
Cory Miller (01:17:36) – Brand. Colors in there?
Corey Maass (01:17:40) – Yep.Which which you can set in the settings and then they are automatically pre-selected in your color pickers.
Cory Miller (01:17:47) – Yeah. We’ll need to do some guidance, like maybe there’s a link in somewhere like. Best practices, thoughts of how to do that. Okay. What’s your main color? Ours is orange. Okay. What’s your secondary other colors And just give some simple design guidance. Maybe it’s a tooltip or something. Hey, I’d use darker background light text on this side panel, you know, and how they can like really quickly go, Oh yeah, just color pick over there fun that boom.
Corey Maass (01:18:23) – Yeah and and go save it so that it’s repeatable because as we’ve talked about in the past, like consistency makes a huge difference. So, you know, always use the same branding colors and if you like we’ve talked about a minute ago, these things grow and change over time. But if you you update your template, then your then your every image you generate going forward, using that template is going to be consistent.
Cory Miller (01:18:47) – This is just these little things like if it’s a tooltip, whatever the expression is, I go, You’re doing such great work, just building the tools, these little things just smooth that experience out. Just give them some guidance where they okay. Like my first thought was what colors am I going to do? And I got red blocked as a user. Okay, See what they’re done here. There’s a darker here, you know. Okay. They’re using darker text with white text here. Okay. That would work for me here. We need to think of the other side, you know, a more ladder brand. But I just remember we could create a builder and I think each builder and flexing before that. And we created all the base tools and people needed like paint by numbers, you know. So but that’s I think that’s very simple. That could be a tooltip.
Cory Miller (01:19:43) – Text saying. If he had this logo pull these two colors, you know? Yeah.
Corey Maass (01:19:50) – It’s also really good, like for social link pages, I had a really good drip campaign that I stubbed out and then I handed to a writer friend of mine who wrote the like, Okay, over the next six days, you’re going to get six emails of all the best practices for using your link in bio pages.
Corey Maass (01:20:10) – And then obviously it’s a lead gen, but you know, we can do the same sort of thing. Like we’ve got essentially mini courses, you know, blog posts broken out of, you know, here’s things to think about. Day one is fonts. Day two is colors. Day three is general layout. You know, now you are a design pro, go forth and tweak our templates.
Cory Miller (01:20:35) – Um.
Corey Maass (01:20:35) – I got a jump. Um, but yeah, this is awesome. And. And I loved what you just did where you were like, now that you’ve seen, you’ve looked over my shoulder, you’re like, Let me use what I saw. Because the templates are a lot less abstract already, Like we know what we can do.
Cory Miller (01:20:54) – So that’s that’s it. All right. Thanks, man.
Corey Maass (01:20:57) – Talk soon. See you.
This article, Launching a WordPress Product in Public: Session 25, was published at Post Status — the community for WordPress professionals.
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