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Verbatim text
Lee:
Welcome to the agency Trailblazer podcast. This is your host, Mr. Lee Jackson. And on today’s show we are talking with Mark Crowell who is sharing his journey into design and web development as well as virtual reality. And he’s currently making the transition into a full time agency with his wife. So it’s a brilliant story, fascinating. So sit back, relax and enjoy the ride. Before we kick off the show, here is a word from our sponsor.
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Lee:
Welcome to a conversation with me, Mr. Lee Jackson. And today we have Mark Crowell from Wicky Design. Mark, how you doing, mate?
Mark:
Good, how are you?
Lee:
Yeah, I’m doing really good. We were just having a conversation about your accent and the joys of Florida and you were rubbing my nose in it. The fact that you used to be an hour and 10 minutes away from Disney World.
Mark:
Yep. Yeah. Straight from the parking lot to my house, 1 hour, 10 minutes flat.
Lee:
So me and you aren’t going to get on now for the rest of this call? No, I’m joking, man. Mate, do you mind telling people a little bit about yourself? Something like your favourite colour as well, some random fact and what it is you guys do?
Mark:
Sure, sure. So I’ll start out. My name is Mark Crowell and I’m here in Philadelphia and my wife and I, we run a web design and branding business for small businesses. So if you want to. Do you want to start going backwards in time or.
Lee:
Well, let’s learn a little bit about you and your wife. So you, your wife, name, even tell us how you met. Something crazy. Let’s just find out a little bit about you guys before we get into the business.
Mark:
Yeah, we met back in 2013. We actually met online through OkCupid. So I was just out of a big divorce, she was out of a relationship, so we found each other online. And the very unique thing was, is that we both were big web design gurus. So we wanted to, we got together just because of our love for the web. Yeah, that helped out a lot.
Lee:
That’s awesome. And then to help us Understand the dynamic. Then do you both do the exact same thing or do you both have very unique skills?
Mark:
We do the same, but she tends to be more of the front end for the graphics design and logos and branding. I like to be the geek in the back and do the web servers and all the coding and stuff like that. So it’s a perfect match, literally.
Lee:
OkCupid actually creates web design companies now as well. That’s amazing.
Mark:
Yep, I know. I should be on the front page.
Lee:
Yeah, you totally should. You should go tell them your story, send them this podcast afterwards. Just be like, hey, guys, seriously, there’s a little case study for you here. Yep, that’s awesome, mate. And it’s wonderful that you found each other. It’s great that you guys have something that you can share both as your passion and therefore as your business as well, which is phenomenal. Now, do you mind? Can we jump in a time machine? I love doing this. And kind of going back to when, you know, you’re a wee whippersnapper and you were thinking about your future career, how did you actually get into either design or web design originally? Whatever happened first, or even coding.
Mark:
Okay, cool. Yeah, I mean, you could go as far back as when HTML was first introduced. That’s when I was starting to play around with it. So I was about 15 years old and making, you know, just static HTML pages. One of my first websites actually was a Quake 1 clan website. I was in a clan, so I created a website for the clan. So this was probably back in 95, 96. So at that time I was, you know, still in high school. And it’s pretty ironic. I was actually getting job interviews while I was in high school. The problem was is that they couldn’t hire me. So I was going on these job interviews and they wanted to hire me for HTML stuff. And, you know, I would have to try out of school. I wasn’t going to do that route. So, yeah, right out of high school, I knew I wanted to stick with web. So I went to International Academy of Design. So it’s a tech school. And the degree I got was called Interactive Media. And what that covered was a little bit of everything. So to me, it was a good degree because you got your got your hands dirty with all the different things, so audio, video, 3D, web.
Mark:
So I learned about a bunch of different skills. And from there it took me a little while to get a job. It took me about two years after I graduated. And I eventually landed a job at an engineering company at the time called URS Corporation. This was back in 2004. So from there I got hired on as actually a 3D animator because I had some 3D skills. And from there it was more like entry level. And after a couple years working in 3D there was a web development small little portion of our business in the Tampa office where I originally lived, there was a web position that opened up. So I was able to take that on full time. So I kind of dropped out of 3D. I would still do 3D stuff every once in a while and then I just started taking on the web clients full time.
Lee:
So with regards to the 3D, before we get to the web stuff, can you just let us know what sort of 3D was it 3D animation? Was it just 3D modelling? What were you doing there?
Mark:
Yeah, it was 3D animation. And so it’s for an engineering company. So we would make animations for new, you know, roadways or bridges being built. So pretty cool. One of my biggest project I worked on there was, it’s called the Woodrow Wilson Project. Huge bridge and undertaking in the Washington D.C. area. But the animation was actually on. Was it extreme engineering on the Discovery Channel? I remember that. Oh, cool. Yeah. So the animations that you saw in the video. Yeah, I was part of that.
Lee:
No way.
Mark:
Yeah, it’s pretty cool, dude.
Lee:
That’s your claim to. I would like print that on a T shirt probably. It’s quite a lot to print on a T shirt but yeah, on several T shirts. Yeah.
Mark:
I don’t know how many people actually saw it, but it was cool to say it was on the Discovery Channel, you know, so.
Lee:
Hey, meet my friend Mark. As seen on the Discovery Channel.
Mark:
There you go.
Lee:
That’s really cool. So, and so that was predominantly to help clients of that company visualise what it was that was going to be created. So rather than you designing kind of like a nut or a bolt that was going to be integral to the build, it was actually more here as the overall, this is how it’s going to look. This is a fly through. This is what it’s going to look like to scale with other objects around it, et cetera.
Mark:
Yep, exactly.
Lee:
Cool. And that’s, that’s kind of the root of the part of your design skill then, isn’t it, that solving that problem of, you know, how is this going to look? I think people can really kind of visualise, can’t they, and capture things when, when they can see it. I found very often that once the client gets past the design stage and they’ve Seen the picture of what their website is going to look like, that’s when they get craz excited. It’s not before when it’s all just talk, it’s when they see the visual. So I think that’s a really cool. Does that mean you could actually make your own like 3D animated movies as well in the future, like Toy Story 5?
Mark:
Yeah, I could, but it’s. I don’t have any machine power so now when I leave the company. So you have to have a render farm, which is tonnes of computers that render one frame at a time and that costs, you know, I think our render farm is like $100,000. So it’s, it’s inexpensive. Yeah, that’s why you don’t see a lot of like freelancing animators. Yeah, you have to like outsource your rendering and it gets expensive if you do that.
Lee:
So gap in the market there for someone if they want to fill it. All right, well then. So similar story I think to me with regards to moving within a business. That’s one of the things I love about working with these bigger companies. URS became aecom, I believe, didn’t they? Yep, yep. So being a part of these big massive companies is awesome because there is opportunity for you to start to pursue a passion. Obviously you enjoy the 3D, but you’d already been dabbling in HTML way before that and you finally were able to have this role within web design, web development within the business. Can you kind of describe your first few months of that role and how you got into it and how it progressed?
Mark:
Yeah, sure. So I was handed off the position from another developer at the time and so this is where the CMS route started. So he was a big Drupal guy, so all of his websites were done in Drupal. So I had to start learning Drupal because that right at the time that Drupal was, you know, just becoming pretty, pretty big at the time. And then of course you started having WordPress and Joomla. So I started out in the Drupal route supporting the clients website. So I was doing some static pages, but yet some Drupal pages. I didn’t really care for Drupal that much. Then I went to Joomla. So I started making client websites on Joomla for a little while and then I found WordPress and that’s it. As soon as I found WordPress, I haven’t, I haven’t gone back. So I used to support Joomla and Drupal but yeah, not, not Anymore.
Lee:
I hear you. So you’re essentially building HTML static, static builds. And then on the job you were able to kind of discover all of these new platforms and fell in love with WordPress, which I think a lot of people. Why do you think you fell in love with WordPress? Was it because it was easy for you to manipulate or was it because it was easier for other people to use?
Mark:
I would say for other people to use, but I think the community aspect for sure, because I remember with Joomla, like it’s. It was hard to find, you know, well supported themes or plugins or modules is what they call them. So yeah, that I noticed was the huge strength for WordPress is just the community aspect.
Lee:
Yeah, yeah, I think that’s something as well, isn’t it? That’s carried on. This podcast was born out of the WordPress community. It’s now called Agency Trailblazer, but we used to be the WP Innovator podcast. So it was all about agency owners that use WordPress and we still very much are about that because most agency owners that listen do actually use WordPress, which is awesome. So we’re very often talking about it, but obviously, obviously we’ve expanded beyond that. But there’s so many, so many communities. You’ve got the WPE builds community and podcast as well, which is phenomenal. You’ve got WP Elevation over there with Troy Dean as well. But you’ve also got the masses and masses of free information that people are putting out there on site, is it not? SiteGround. That’s a host. You know what I mean? All These different places, GitHub as well, all the people contributing. There’s just so much, so many people helping. And I think it’s a big strength for WordPress because if someone says, what if you’re not going to be around in a year’s time, you can say, don’t worry. There is a huge army of WordPress people around the world.
Lee:
You know, there’s all sorts of people that can help you out with this. So yeah, yeah, sorry, just. Just loving on WordPress a little bit. Although top story, I think it was more from the Agency Trailblazer community. She pointed out that somebody has made some sort of copy of Elementor and managed to fit it into Drupal.
Mark:
Oh really?
Lee:
Which would be pretty cool. So if there is anyone who listens and would like a page builder for Drupal, Check out Elementor, apparently someone’s managed to port that over. That’s pretty awesome.
Mark:
That’s crazy.
Lee:
Drupal on steroids. So yeah, there you go. All right, so that’s. So that’s where you got to. So you fell in love with cms, you’re building it for aecom, what’s next in the journey?
Mark:
So from there I just kept specialising in WordPress and learning it more and more. So what I did at AECOM is I mainly supported the websites because they had the budgets to, you know, keep me around because I was an employee at the time, of course, so they’re you know, to do updates and like, stuff like that. So hardly ever did a client need me to pass the website on to them and they do the updates at Aecon I would say like 9 out of 10 times I’m. I’m just manage the back end part. So just continuing supporting web clients. So what One thing that did happen was during the URS AECOM merge is I’m still part of the 3D group technically but now I’m kind of merged into a marketing aspect of aecom and within that I. I’ve been working on the, the official AECOM website. Some stuff on the back end which is 100% built on WordPress which is really cool. Yeah, yeah that, that was. That merged over a couple years ago to WordPress and there’s a group in New York that kind of managed that. So I’ve been helping out on the back end of that a little bit.
Mark:
But one cool thing that is that I will be missing when I do leave AECOM is I do virtual reality stuff too in the web. So whenever there’s. It’s the same group where you know, the 3D animations where we have roadways and bridges. So they need, they wanted a way to have VR experiences on the web of those same projects. So I dabble in that still to this day a little bit, which is a really cool thing.
Lee:
I am pretty envious. That sounds pretty damn awesome and it’s surprising as well going back to just beating the old WordPress drum, but it is surprising and really encouraging that big corporations are embracing products like WordPress, especially open source because I mean, you remember you’ve been building websites since 95. Back in maybe the early 2000s, there was a massive stigma around open source. Open source was really negatively perceived, especially in big enterprise circles as a security risk is just too dangerous. And now, I mean the fact that they were using Linux is another story but you know, it’s absolutely blowing my mind, which is phenomenal.
Mark:
Yeah, I mean to this day the company still, it’s like a hybrid. So I could see companies officially, you know, transitioning over to more open source. But like our back end, there’s a lot of SharePoint servers still, so there’s still a lot of, you know, Microsoft kind of closed systems in the, in the company for sure. So it’s a little bit of a mess because during the merge, you know, we had different email systems, different accounting systems. So it took a good two years to kind of get everything poured over because it was a huge, huge merge. Two companies, about 50,000 employees each merging together. So, yeah, it was a fun transition.
Lee:
So how did the. Obviously in between all of this happening? Then you met your wife and that. At what point did you guys decide to start the agency?
Mark:
So we met in 2013 in Florida. And so she’s got family and friends up here in Philadelphia. So we came up here one time. What was it, 2013? 2014, in October 2014, for her cousin’s wedding. And so I went to Philly one time and I fell in love instantly. So I knew, I kind of knew that this is the place I need to be. So we came back, we had a little conversation. I was like, you know what, let’s just move to Philly. Why not? So about four or five months later, we officially moved up here to Philly. So at that time, my wife Barb, she was working at an agency doing website design, and they allowed her to come up here and, you know, still work remotely. But we quickly found out that there’s a lot of small businesses that need websites and branding up here in the Philly area. So that’s when it. That’s when it started happening. So right when we moved up here, she was able to quit her job and focus on our business full time. And she’s been doing that ever since. So if we fast forward a little bit more to current day, just this year, 2018, we’ve definitely had a need where I need to start focusing on the business full time and leave the big corporate gig that I have now.
Mark:
So at the end of the year, I plan to leave the corporation and then do this full time working on wiki design.
Lee:
So your wife is full time and you are kind of in that transition stage?
Mark:
Yeah, like part time. But yeah, it’s definitely starting to become a full time gig for me for sure.
Lee:
So that’s awesome.
Mark:
Yeah, I.
Lee:
Look, one of the things I mentioned before the recording was how much I love the pictures that you guys have got on your website. I’ve harked on about this on previous podcasts, seeing people’s Pictures, I think, is a really great way of kind of connecting with people. And one of my favourite pictures is of the both of you looking at a website that you’re developing on your about page. So folks recommend you go to wikidesign.com about. It’s really encouraging to see. We’ve started to take my own advice by putting some pictures on the homepage of our site. But we absolutely want to go down the track that you guys are going at. You know, getting these action shots of. This is us working and we happen to look really nice as well. We look super friendly and I loved that picture.
Mark:
Oh, sweet. Thanks.
Lee:
With regards to your setup then, have you guys, I mean, have you set up an office at home or do you have an office off site that you work at? How are you working together? What’s the. The setup, virtual, etc.
Mark:
So we’re just, we’re still at the home, so we have a home office here. We. We’re thinking in the future, you know, we’re get a standalone office somewhere. A co working space. That’s one thing really big over here is there’s co working spaces everywhere. So there’s one a few blocks away.
Lee:
So I wish we had them all here.
Mark:
Yeah, they’re almost like too many now. It’s. There’s. They’re just taking over everywhere. Yeah, yeah.
Lee:
Okay. I was gonna say because you’ve got that black on that picture. You’ve got like that blackboard paint and chalk on it. Is that at home then?
Mark:
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, we painted that wall. That’s where we, we write down like any existing client work. We write on there sometimes and just have a list of stuff to do and then cross it off. Yeah, it’s a fun board.
Lee:
Yeah, I love that. And who was the artist that did the creativity is intelligence.
Mark:
That’s Barb for sure. Yeah, she’s. She’s good at drawing and everything because.
Lee:
Like a calligraphy or something like that, it’s that kind of style, really well drawn font. Love it. Folks, again, wikidesign.com forward/about just having a bit of a key count moment about your setup. It looks really nice.
Mark:
Yeah. Ever since we had the professional photos, it’s been. That’s, that’s been a great experience for us and you know, it’s helped out a lot because. Yeah, I think that’s one thing that a lot of people miss out on is that direct connexion with the person because, you know, you’re investing in a person, not a company. You know what I’m Saying, so when you see people, you get a connexion to them.
Lee:
So yeah, absolutely. So since you launched the business, then, how predominantly have you guys been getting business in?
Mark:
A lot of it is like word of mouth from existing clients, but a lot of it’s local search for in Google. So we’re trying to focus heavily on local SEO. So that’s a huge one for us. We’re in a good part of the city where we’re a little bit north of centre city where a lot of our competitors are. So we’re in an area that’s pretty dense and there’s not a lot of competition up here. So we actually have had several clients that live right in the neighbourhood and we. Did they just walk over to our house and we have, you know, our kickoff meeting here in the house. So it’s great to have, you know, that densely populated area where we can get clients to walk to our house.
Lee:
But I’m pretty impressed with you. I was just Googling you whilst we, whilst you were chatting and just to see where you appear. And you are third for web design Philadelphia. That is really impressive. And you’re also on the Google Places as well, which is awesome with five stars, folks, you’re always missing a trick if you don’t remember to do your Google Places thing because that’s what we get tonnes of traffic just from Google Places, which is freaking awesome. That’s on the local SEO side, which is phenomenal. So you guys are predominantly local SEO and have you kind of picked up kind of an ideal client and an ideal industry or an ideal type of client?
Mark:
Yeah, so our niche is definitely startups and small businesses. So we’re starting to find kind of like a sub niche where there’s a lot of people that are kind of in our situation where we leave, you know, these big corporate gigs, these nine to fives, and wanted to start our own business. So we’re starting to see that there’s a niche there where people want to connect with people similar to their situation. You know, we’re, you know, we’re a little bit younger and we left the corporate gig after a while and we’re starting our own thing. So, yeah, like I could give you an example. We just had a client, she worked, she worked at a law firm for about 10, 15 years and she wanted to start her own law firm. So she reached out to us and, you know, the rest is history. So she reached out to us and she, she liked our story because she was in the same situation where she was leaving her job and Wanted to connect with somebod else in a similar situation and she felt comfortable connecting with us rather than a bigger web agency in the area.
Mark:
So I was starting to see that as like a niche for sure.
Lee:
I love it. So working up with startups and I guess a interesting question for this is startups predominantly, at least over here, have a little bit of a perception of not being very cash rich and struggling for money and you end up struggling trying to build lots of really low cost websites and it can be hard to run an agency. So how are you guys solving that problem? Or is that even a problem for you guys?
Mark:
Yeah, sometimes we run into that. So one thing that we’ve definitely learned this past year is having processes and that has helped us out a lot. So what we do now is, you know, if we get a lead coming in, we’ll give them our intro packet and inside of our intro packet will explain, you know, our processes, how the scheduling works, you know, timelines and then the pricing. So that’s a huge thing. We’re very upfront about pricing and it’s even on our new website that we have up right now where we have.
Lee:
On that page right now, forward slash web Python design. There it all is.
Mark:
Yeah, so that was like one thing we kind of kept going back and forth on because we. This website that you’re looking at is actually all done in Elementor. We just, we just converted it over a couple weeks ago from Divi. Yeah, so we switched.
Lee:
Finally saw the light. Yeah, sorry, sorry. Divi lovers.
Mark:
Oh yeah, yeah, it’s okay. I still have a lot of Divi websites. But yeah, once I found Elementor, I was like, we’re 100% running with Elementor right now. So yeah, we needed to convert over and you know what, honestly, since we’ve switched over to Elementor, I’ve. I’m starting to play a lot more around with, you know, the coding and the SEO aspect of it and I’m starting to see a little bit of a kick with you just switching from Divi to Elementor for SEO purposes.
Lee:
Wow.
Mark:
I had to. I’m going to do a little more research into this, but yeah, I’m starting to see more positive results. Just the way I think the page is structured and coded is a little bit cleaner.
Lee:
Yeah, I think so. Because they tend not to wrap so much. Like there’s not, I mean there’s still, it’s a page builder. There’s going to be quite a lot of divs that they’re wrapped up in, but that tends not to be as many. The code seems a lot cleaner. So I am interested though a common. I did this as well recently. I actually went out there and put an estimate generator on the website so people can flat out see how much it’s going to cost. And we are not cheap by any stretch of the imagination for the service that we provide. And you can totally go and get it for dirt cheap from these companies that just pile them high, sell them cheap. So I dealt with a lot of fear and I thought actually I’m going to just put it out there and see what happens. How did you guys deal with that fear about putting your prices out online?
Mark:
We kind of played around with it at first we were like reach out to us. And then we started doing the starting out price. But. But just doing more and more research on it, we found that a lot of people are doing this where you’re kind of just putting the price out there. And especially for startups, I think they want to kind of know are you making websites for $500 or $10,000? They want a quick we’re right in the middle of the road. We’re not the cheapest, but we’re not the most expensive. We like to fall in the middle for our pricing.
Lee:
That makes sense. I liken it because we had a big internal discussion. I likened it to when you go out to say a craft fair, I don’t know if you guys out there, but very often we’ll go to craft fairs. They’ll be at say a church hall and there’ll be lots of stalls where there’s beautiful objects have been created but nothing has a price tag. And I have that really awkward conversation of well, how much is this? And then they say astronomical sum. And I have that awkward kind of oh, that’s nice. And then, then I sheepishly walk away or I just don’t bother asking because I think it’s probably really expensive. So I don’t want to go through that whole embarrassment of having that conversation in the first place. So I do like what you guys have done because I know it’s like a web stall, isn’t it? You’ve set out your stall, you’re setting people’s expectations. And like you said, especially for your target audience, they need to know how much they’re going to invest. And you’ve actually used the word investment as well because that’s what a startup, that’s their terminology right now, isn’t it?
Lee:
That’s what they’re looking. They’re investing in their new business and they are seeing this as an investment. And I like as well how you guys split that out into like your silver, your gold and your platinum packages, etc.
Mark:
Yeah, and I would say like 9 out of 10 times all of the requests are coming in. They, they fit usually in those packages. So that’s why we can kind of predetermine the timing and the prices. So once in a while we get a very customised website where, you know, they need like a membership back end and stuff like that. That’s outside of that, those quotes. But yeah, most, most of the clients, I would say, fall into our silver package a lot of times and then in the future they may want to grow it and then we could just, you know, go from there. But yeah, that’s like. Another thing is we found out that it’s, it’s just convenient to have all those on there right out of the gate so you could kind of just figure out real quick how expensive we are. That’s a very important thing.
Lee:
Now a lot of clients I assume will approach you without a brand, which is quite common, although just have a terrible brand. So you guys do a branding package as well. What I’m interested in finding out, especially because you guys are very local, are you finding that most of your clients are coming in through asking for a new logo or a branding solution first and then going onto a website, or are you finding it’s the other way around or is it even people coming in for the strategy as well? Because you’ve got your three core pillars, you’ve got web design, you’ve got your branding and then you’ve got your strategy as well. How are you finding clients engaging with you at first and then going on to work with you further?
Mark:
Yeah, sure. I would say the majority of times, if they’re completely brand new startups, they usually start out with a branding package and then we bundled in the web, the web design package as well. So most people are coming in with no brand or a weak brand. So I would say, I don’t know, it’s hard to say. Maybe like 75% of the time, if they have an existing brand already, a lot of times they want to start all over again completely because they might have just gotten a cheap logo from somewhere and it doesn’t fit their brand and their look, you know.
Lee:
So will that somewhere remain nameless? Fiverr.
Mark:
Yep.
Lee:
99 design. So I just swore. Sorry. Actually, joking apart, I mean, absolutely. If you need to validate a business idea and get something on the road quickly, yes, fine. Go and get a cheap logo just to validate an idea. But then when you’re ready, absolutely believe in investing in a proper. Yes, exactly. Right.
Mark:
Yeah.
Lee:
And I really like some of the logo. Well, I like all the logos, not some of them. That sounded rude, didn’t it? I like all of the logos, like everything that you guys have got on your speak again portfolio. It looks fantabidozy, as they would say.
Mark:
Cool, thank you.
Lee:
No worries, mate. No, this is, this is really cool. I love learning how people are working. How are you guys managing the projects? Because you’re like you said, you’re in this transition, aren’t you, from working with the big company and you’re going back into your. Well, you’re going into your new business full time. How are you guys managing the workload and also balancing kind of free time as well.
Mark:
Yeah, yeah, that’s the one issue definitely is this full time company is starting to become a lot. So yeah, as of right now, she’s dealing, Barbara, she’s dealing mostly with everything. So I want to take a lot of that off of her plate because she’s writing the blogs, doing the client interaction and doing the physical work. So when I start going full time I’m going to be more. I’m going to start trying to get the, the leads coming in, start interacting with the clients more and then just. She likes to do a lot of the front end design and then whenever there’s a technical thing that’s when I’ll come in and start fixing stuff in the back. So. So we’re going to do a complete transition where as of right now she’s like the face of the company and dealing with the clients, whereas I think I’m going to be dealing with the clients more and then just kind of letting her do all the work and then me finishing it up.
Lee:
Yeah. So she would like create all the visual aspects and do some of the front end code and then you’ll be doing a lot of the implementation as well.
Mark:
Yeah.
Lee:
Which would be awesome. Match made in heaven, mate. I’m excited for you guys. It’d be great to see your journey and see how it is in a year’s time and see where you’ve got to. Which is phenomenal. Do you think it’s going to be like in. Is it like literally is there a date on the calendar for you guys to do this or. Or is it still a work in progress?
Mark:
What’s that? Me leaving the company or. Yeah, yeah, yeah. End of the year I already gave them enough Notice because I don’t know if they’re gonna find a replacement for me. I’m not sure. So I just wanted to give them plenty of.
Lee:
You could always become a very highly paid consultant on the side.
Mark:
Yep. Yeah, that’s, that’s what I offered that for sure too. I was like, you know, I’m always available. You know, that’s, that’s the route I hope they go. And I, I think they actually will because, yeah, it’s. I think they’re going to have a hard time. Yeah, they’re going to have a hard time finding somebody to do. I think the VR aspect of it is going to be hard. It’s not very many WordPress guys out there who do VR as well.
Lee:
No, it’s definitely a unique talent. I do love the journey though. It’s something that a lot of us have done where we’ve worked for companies, we’ve helped those companies and we’ve learned on the job. So we’ve learned on the job. But by learning those things, that has massively helped the businesses that we’ve worked for. But there’s always been that kind of inner rich, hasn’t there, where you really just want to go and do something for yourself and eventually you can kind of just make that slow transition and then launch something exciting and you’re lucky enough to be able to launch that with your wife. I love your brand. I do love your website as well, like I said. And I did notice Elementor because I think every web designer ever or web developer just goes to a website, right? Clicks and hits inspect.
Mark:
Oh yeah.
Lee:
I do it out of habit.
Mark:
Oh yeah, everybody.
Lee:
The first thing I knew was the, that you’re using Elementor. So I was like, oh, there we go. Looking good on that then. Because obviously with page builders, I mean, they’re not a new thing. We all know that there was visual builders in the past, etc. But there seems to have been this kind of rebirth of page builders with Viva Builder. Elementor. Brizzy is the new kid on the block as well. Oxygen as well. I keep getting spammed about, but there’s all these different builders. Has that changed in a way, the way that you guys design your websites? I’m interested in finding out this from a few people because a lot of people in the past would have done it it with Photoshop and presented the Photoshop files to their client and then gone ahead and built it afterwards. Is that the same process you guys adopt or have you changed anything up with the use of these tools?
Mark:
Okay, cool. Yeah, I’m glad you covered this because this is something that I face with our clients and you know, at the company that I work in, Wikidesign. So, yeah, what we do now is we’re 100%, we build in the browser in real time. So. And what we do is, you know, I used to do the old school way of, you know, creating mockups and you send them the mockups. But then what we start to realise is we’re not mocking up the content or the website around their content or their graphics. So that changes dramatically. If we’re making a homepage and we put in a placeholder for two or three paragraphs, it’s going to look different than if they give us 12 paragraphs. So what we do is we don’t offer mockups at all anymore and there’s been no kickback at all from the client on that because I think there’s a big transition now to just building it in the browser because I think I could probably create something quicker in Elementor than I can in Photoshop. So it saves us time too. So when we’re physically building the website, it’s. We’re not doing double the work, you know, but we do work with some great web designers.
Mark:
So they, you know, they, those are the bigger client. The bigger budget websites were, you know, they could afford to have a web designer build out every page and then we would develop the website from there. So some of the bigger clients can handle it. But yeah, I would say for our clientele there’s, there’s never room in their budget to do mockups.
Lee:
No, I understand. And that’s brilliant. I do love the fact that these tools have given us that ability. It’s almost like having Photoshop within the browser. You can design and you can also get a lot of inspiration, I think down from Be it for builder, from Elementor, etc. Because they also preload a whole lot of stuff in there, which is awesome. Absolutely love it. And again, on fonts and stuff, just going back to your guys website, I really like the combination of fonts you guys have done. Whose responsibility was that? Who got that combo together?
Mark:
Barb. Barbara. She’s good at that. Yes, typography is good for her.
Lee:
We should be interviewing Barbara. This is awesome. We should get a typography 1011 from Barbara. That’s fantastic. I think that’s something that’s really difficult as a designer and as an agency is to find that nice combination of fonts that work well together and that give the Right. Image mate, I’m really, really inspired by your guys story. I really, really wish you all the very best of luck in transitioning and I do hope as well you get some really high paid consultancy gigs from them. That would just be so cool. The WordPress VR specialist. There must literally only be one on the planet and that would be you. So that sounds awesome. Until someone puts a comment on later saying well I do it too.
Mark:
I do too. Yeah, I do too.
Lee:
I do too. I’m Spartacus. So thank you very much for sharing your journey. It is really, really exciting folks. You can Check out their website. That’s wikidesign.com that’s wiki w I c k design dot com. I think what would be phenomenal, mate, is it at some point, if possible to arrange, if we could get both you and Barbara on the call at the same time to do the hashtag agencylifeseries, where we just pummelled you with some questions and you guys can kind of share the answers and just we can learn a few more things about how your agency is working. So I’ll send you an email after this recording and we can perhaps arrange that, which would be awesome. Fun. I think what I would ask for in closing then is for anyone who is either launching their agency or perhaps has got to a point in their business where they’re feeling a little bit frustrated or anything. Do you have any words of encouragement or anything that you guys have learned over the last few months or years that might help inspire or encourage people.
Mark:
In their business to transition over? Is that what you’re saying?
Lee:
Yeah. Well, let me go I guess go into a bit more detail. I think especially because you deal with startups, especially when people are launching a new business, their new agency, etc. It can be really, really scary. You guys have been doing it and you’re actually making success of it. So have you found anything that’s really worked well? I guess for you that might encourage everybody else?
Mark:
I would just say reaching out to other people in Facebook groups and just talking to other people who have done it, that helps out a lot. That definitely when we’ve talked to clients, that was what sold us to them, was the fact that, you know, we were in a similar situation. So I think just talking to like minded people who have started the process or have done it, connect with those people because yeah, they want to share their story too, just like I’m doing today. So absolutely, yeah. Connecting with people is huge.
Lee:
Connect with people, share your story. They are two amazing pieces of advice, mate. I will absolutely reiterate that we all love stories, we’re inspired by stories. And by being in those communities that you are in, you are generating leads as well for your business and you’re also helping other people out and I assume passing referrals to other people as well. So I would highly recommend, folks, that if you are not a part of the Agency Trailblazer Facebook group, it’s free, there’s no charge, you can go hang out in there. That’s on agencytrailblazer.com group. That’s a great community to be a part of. But as well be sure to Check out the many other communities as well. There’s grow you your own web design business. There is. That’s by James Rose from Content Snare. You’ve also got WP builds and if you’re in either of the page builder camps, Elementor or Beaver Builder, there’s a couple of great communities online as well. For those. I assume you’re rocking the Elementor one, Mark. Oh, yeah. That’s a great place and tonnes of inspiration as well as a few snarky people with a few arguments. But you know that’s the Internet, right?
Mark:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’ve just started going into the Elementor GitHub and starting to help people out if I can here and there. So that’s great that you can do that.
Lee:
Yeah, absolutely, mate. Thank you so much for your time. I really, really appreciate it and we look forward to getting you guys on for the hashtag Agency Life series as well. So all that’s left for me to say is thank you and have a wonderful day.
Mark:
Cool. Thank you so much for having me.
Lee:
All right, buddy, cheerio. And that wraps up today’s show. Can I encourage you head on over to our YouTube channel and subscribe because there is great content and we have even more great content planned for the next few months. Go to agencytrailblazer.com YouTube. If you are not part of the Facebook group, you should be because we do all sorts of wonderful things like sharing GIFs for a start. Gifts are obviously life, as well as cat pictures. So head on over to agencytrailblazer.com and you will be redirected there. And until next time, have a wonderful day.
