54 - WordPress & World Travel

Note: This transcript was auto generated then some poor soul sat and listened to it, and followed through correcting any mistakes they spotted. Please however expect human error and shout if you spot an issue. Email: lee [fancy curly symbol] trailblazer.fm.

Verbatim text

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Welcome to WP Innovator podcast. The podcast for web designers and design agencies exploring the world of WordPress and online business. And now your host, Lee Jackson. Hi, and welcome to episode number 54 of the WP Innovator podcast. This is your host, Lee, and I hope you’re having a brilliant, creative Christmas season. We’ve got our tree up, we’ve got the lights on, we’ve got tinsel everywhere, and we’ve actually been playing Christmas music now for approximately two months. I’m. I’m sure you Christmas naysayers will forgive me.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
I know some of you who listen probably put your tree up on the 23rd and take it down on the 26th. I get that, I get it. I’m sorry, but I’m just a big kid at heart. And thankfully, so is Larissa. Anyway, guys, today we have David Walmsley. He was freaking fantastic. He’s a good friend of mine, great part of the Beaver Builder community and someone who creates amazing free resources via YouTube. He does videos, etc.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
It’s a great all round guy and I wanted to get him on just to have a good old chat, shoot the breeze about Beaver Builder and also talk about his passion for world travel. He took a massive risk and left a really good, cushy, safe job and decided to go out there into the big bad world with WordPress and build sites and travel. So this is really, really interesting story. So, so sit back, relax, enjoy the ride and before you go, don’t forget, or even before I go, because you need to listen to this anyway, but before I go and hand over to other Lee, do go on and join the Facebook [email protected] group where we can all talk and say hi to David. Alrighty, on with the show. Hello and welcome to the WP Innovator podcast. To David. David Walmsley.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
How are you doing, mate?

David Waumsley:
Hey, I’m fine. I’m really excited to be on this because this is the first thing I’ve ever been asked to be on, so it’s really exciting.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Well, I’m honored to have you on, mate, because I’ve watched all your tutorial videos. You are a real active contributor to the Beaver Builder community and someone I’ve grown to really respect and enjoy listening to, mate. And you’ve taught me an awful lot without us ever actually having spoken physically, which is really cool. You actually affect people’s lives just by putting up those videos, mate. So high five and thanks. Well, let me explain, guys, who David is. David is a digital nomad that’s A great title, I love that. And is currently traveling the world and pursuing his passion of WordPress and Beaver Builder.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
He’s built some amazing videos online, good how to guides that I followed. And he’s a great contributor as well to the Facebook group in Beaver Builder. So we’ll put the link in the show notes if you want to head on over there. But that’s my intro, mate. Do you want to give us the more detailed life of David? Over to you.

David Waumsley:
Oh, it’s a long one because I’m 52 here, actually. I owe you a big thanks. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I actually owe you a thanks because I don’t think I’d be doing so many of the videos if you weren’t so encouraging on the first ones I did.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Oh, right. Well, thank you.

David Waumsley:
Yeah, yeah. Anyway, yes, I’m David Walmsley and got quite a life to pack in, but really over the last three years, it’s probably best to describe me as a traveler and beach dweller. I’m in Goa in India at the moment, but I fund this by helping people with their WordPress sites. So some of that is supporting a friend who has a website business. Had one for about 15 years back in the UK and I kind of offer a white label service if you like, doing the WordPress stuff. Occasionally I do some designs of my own and I also do some odd job solving problems with existing WordPress sites. So that’s kind of what I do.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
That’s a brave man. Solving problems with existing WordPress sites, because I do that. And then I get halfway through wishing that I’d never said I’d do it because of whatever has been done in the past by someone else. And I’m like, oh my gosh, what’s this?

David Waumsley:
Well, that’s exactly how this kicked off, you know, I mean, I’ve been working with WordPress for about 10 years. I originally did it for part of my civil service job where I managed a team of remote workers and I built. So my first real project was really too big. It was building a kind of intranet for my staff, you see, and I never wanted to be a designer. I was quite happy in my job. But then eventually I got bored of it and I did some other things. I made a E commerce site and all that kind of stuff. But this new phase of my life really was because I decided to leave that and go traveling and I gave up the job, not knowing really what was going to happen.

David Waumsley:
And this friend who I do the work for contacted me about a Chinese company she was working for, well, an international company and they were using WordPress and they lost all their sort of developers because they sort of hired them from all over the place. And it just started with a few questions asking me, do I know anything about WordPress? And then suddenly I ended up getting sort of four jobs from them and that’s really where it’s gone. And they funded the first year of me going on my travels.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
That’s brilliant. So what prompted the travels? Was it a book, was it a burning ambition for the many, many years or kind of. How did you get from 15, I think it was 15 years, was it in the civil service to suddenly I am going to pursue this passion and travel the world, damn it.

David Waumsley:
Yeah. I think a load of things come together. You know, there’s different ways of telling this story. I definitely was one of these people who read the Four Hour Work Week. So that kind of lifestyle appealed to me and I was kind of getting bored, you know, I think if you work for somebody else. Even though I had a lot of autonomy in my job, I worked from home, in fact, and I had my own team and the office, you know, didn’t bother me much, but still you kind of get bored working within that. So I always had this yearning to do something, but the travel really was just because I didn’t do it. When I was younger, you know, I, I just concentrated on work and thought, I’m getting older, I need to see the world.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
So where was the first place you went? So you’ve left your comfort of the 15 years of civil service, government job, probably all the perks that come with that. You’re bricking it, thinking, oh crap, what have I done? Where’s the first country you went?

David Waumsley:
Well, it was India and actually to be honest, a bit of a cheat. I did take a career break, which you’re allowed to do in the British civil service. So I took a year out and really when I was there, I spent a lot of time learning about the web and I thought it was really because we had this E commerce shop which we recently closed and we were looking to make some money out of that really. And it was funding as a little bit, but not enough. And yeah, so most of my. It’s just a progress. I think that the thing about it was actually I went to India first and that’s where I spend most of my time because I married, somebody was born from India, so my wife is British, but she’s Indian born.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
And are you spending most of the time now in India or Are you traveling elsewhere as well?

David Waumsley:
Yeah. Well, what’s happened, I mean, in the first year that we came out, we did four months of sort of traveling, so spent quite a bit of time in Thailand, but then went to neighboring countries of Vietnam and Cambodia and that. And last year we did a couple of years out doing pretty much similar areas. We just keep adding new countries and next, next year we’ve already got a plan because we come back to the uk, but we’re going via various places in Europe. So it’s a fantastic lifestyle. I mean, it wasn’t possible, was it, you know, 10 years ago? Sorry, no, this dream has appeared because the technology has been there to provide that possibility.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Well, that kind of follows up with this kind of the next burning question that I have. You are traveling, you’re not necessarily in one place at any one time. There’s a lot of design agencies that focus on their local, doing business locally, so networking locally, etc. So other than the one big client that’s obviously always very useful, how are you finding the opportunities? And are you finding that you’re still working with tons of people in the UK regardless of where you’re traveling, or are you picking up business from the locations that you’re at?

David Waumsley:
Yeah, well, this is the thing. You see, I’ve always known that what I’m doing presently is going to be no good. I mean, if the work dries up for the one person who’s getting me work, you know, it’s, it’s, I’m kind of done in really. But so really over this three years I’ve been trying to work out how to build up a recurring business. I can’t kind of work as an odd jobber as I am for all time. So my passion over these through three years really has been thinking about how I could build up a sustainable, proper business that can scale up and employ people. So yeah, in some ways it’s, it’s partly there because of the fact that, you know, some of these customers there, they’re on my personal care plan. So that’s building up as one angle of it and in some ways doing the videos is part of that as well because I hope to, to offer a service to people that will be some free courses that will be kind of aimed at people who I like to go for, which are these small businesses, but try and give them a procedure that is more like the kind of thing you might do, Lee, you know, which is a full blown procedure where you go two steps.

David Waumsley:
But in order to do that, they’ll need to take a free course to kind of work out what it. To work out how to give us a brief, you know, and the idea of that, that sort of free course will be to give them the opportunity either to work with us, which I might employ somebody, the way I’ve set it up. And it’s a long story, this one, but also give them the opportunity to go off and do it for themselves with something like Beaver Builder, which I love, of course.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Well, speaking of Beaver Builder, then, what is it in particular you’re loving about Beaver Builder right now?

David Waumsley:
Well, the thing that I’ve always liked about it, I mean, I kind of became aware of Page Builders with Visual Composer, but. Sorry, yeah, exactly.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
I know some listeners who might love it. I’m sorry, but. Yeah, carry on.

David Waumsley:
Yeah, it’s that code thing, you know, I’m not like a proper developer or something, but I’ve got those sensibilities, if you like. I like it to be good, clean, proper code and. And really didn’t seem to be much out there when I was looking. I was a Genesis person, so Genesis Framework was something I worked for with for five years. So in that community, I think people are, you know, quite touchy about those issues. They wouldn’t. Many of those wouldn’t entertain something. Many of them still wouldn’t entertain page builders at all, you know, So I came from that background.

David Waumsley:
But when I saw. And it’s all down to Colin Cartwright, Dynamic Beaver, because I kind of bumped into him really in the Genesis community and he loved it and I kind of trusted him. And then I saw the story behind why they created it and that they were aiming at kind of agencies and they wanted it to keep it to be a kind of a Genesis like product, something that was stable and clean. So that’s really. That’s the thing that still is my big thing with it. It’s not the toys, it’s not the. The feature set, which is we generally talk about when we start comparing, you know, products, we tend to look at the, you know, what’s it got? You know, I think one of the.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Sorry, Karen.

David Waumsley:
No, no, no, please.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Yeah, well, I was gonna say one of the things I’ve enjoyed because you’ve met, you’ve mentioned, I mean, I think you’ve already mentioned me, you’ve mentioned a couple of other people. The thing I’ve enjoyed about Beaver Builder is actually more the community around it. We seem to have really helpful, friendly group of people like yourself, Dave and everyone just, you know, creating content, sharing ideas, sharing lots of free code helping each other out in the. In the Beaver Builder group again. I’ll put a link in the show notes for this if you want to. If you want to go join. That’s a great place to be and it’s such an amazing community. And then on the flip side, I’ve been checking out Elementor, which is a very powerful free page builder and obviously I want to check everything out.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
I don’t think I’ll ever be drawn away from Beaver Builder because that’s essentially my first love when it comes to page builders, to be honest. But Elementor is quite a nice tool and be getting used to it. But unfortunately, you know, in that community. On the flip side, there seems to be quite a lot of moaning and fighting going on in that community and it seems really, really unusual. So it’s. It’s been nice just to come back. I mean, you joined recently, didn’t you, the Elementor group. I don’t know if you’ve seen any of the threads that have been going on in there.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
I’ve been like, whoa, what is happening? It’s been like, what?

David Waumsley:
I know I haven’t actually made a comment in that group yet, but the comment I wanted to say, I said, have I arrived at a bad time? You know,

Lee Matthew Jackson:
brilliant. Yeah, it’s scary. So, you know, and that’s been one of the things I think sometimes, you know, there are a lot of products out there, visual builder products, etc. But sometimes when you find the right community, like Beaver Builder, the guys behind Speaking of Beaver Builder are great, obviously, and they’re from their part of the community as well, but everyone just seems to be really helpful. I’ve not seen any fighting whatsoever. And yet you’ve got another product like Elementor that does look great and does work great, but unfortunately, at the moment, at least, like you said, have I come in at the wrong time? Maybe I have as well because I’ve only been in there a few weeks, but there just seems to be an awful lot of fighting going on at the moment. I was like, oh, my gosh. So that’s a shame for the products.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
That can really affect a brand, can’t it?

David Waumsley:
Yeah, I think it’s the early days there. I did see some of those comments there and I can see it. Actually, I think I might have fueled one of the debates in a way, talking to one of the members about. Well, in a way, because I was. Comments I’ve made on when Elementor has been talked about in the Beaver Builder group is that I haven’t really looked into it because I really don’t know who they’re aiming it for. They’re quite new. It’s free. So, you know, I have to know how somebody’s going to be able to, you know, provide for themselves if it’s free to consider it.

David Waumsley:
Because my goals are long term. So, you know, that’s my view. And I said I’ve had real difficulty trying to understand who they’re aiming it to and what they’re about and what they stand for, you know, so, you know, so it’s not even one that I would consider. And I think that’s probably what set off some one person who wrote an article about that saying that they couldn’t really get any details on them. And I think, you know, people have gone in defense, which is understandable, and I think that’s. So I might have been part of fuel in some of that.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
David, you such a stirrer. What is going on?

David Waumsley:
I know, unintentional.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
I think that’s the beauty again of Beaver Builder as well, because they’re definitely focused, aren’t they, on website builders? They’re not. I don’t feel like Beaver Builder has been put out there to local businesses to say, hey guys, you don’t need web designers, you could use this. I think Beaver Builder is predominantly a tool for all of us guys. We’re WordPress developers, we’re website builders, etc. Or we’re WordPress power implementers. Even if we don’t code. Beaver Builder is definitely that sort of marketplace. Whereas I think you’re totally right, Elementor is, hey, look at this pretty page builder.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
We don’t quite know who we’re reaching out to yet. I’ve been playing with it because I love playing with other tools, working out what features they have that I might have fallen in love with and then seeing if I can essentially put that feature over to my first love, obviously Beaver Builder, which we now build all of our websites in.

David Waumsley:
Yeah, yeah, I know. I love the work that you’re doing as well, because I was saying about the clean code thing. I mean, I really love that. I don’t know if you carried on with it, the valid Beaver website you’ve done when you started putting up.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Well, we did until we found out that you can override modules. And I was like, oh, okay. Because you can pop the module in your theme and override it, which means we can just grab it, fix whatever the issue is, let the guys know what we did to fix it, but then we can still use the module because it now gets AA checked and W3C checked. So we’ve got a whole bunch of code now that we can submit back to the guys at Beaver Builder to say, hey, these overrides for us have fixed the problem. Because what you can do now is you can download the plugin and then create in your theme a folder called FL Builder and then a subfolder called Modules. And then in there you just copy the module from the plugin that you want to override. So a bit like woocommerce templates and stuff like that, your theme will then automatically use that code set instead of the one in the plugin. So yeah, so the W3C thing for us became a non issue because we could just fix anyway.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
So if we wanted to use the Slider module, we were just able to fix those. There’s only two or three W3C issues. We’re able to fix that and obviously we’re packaging all that up. We’re going to send that over to the guys at Beaver Builder to see if that’s helpful to them as well. Because in theory at some point it will then become part of Core and they will be fixed as well.

David Waumsley:
Yeah.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Which was another interesting conversation I had with Ben from Elementor because he was actually saying, and I don’t know what your view on this is, he was mentioning that he’s not too worried about W3C validation, etc. He’s more concerned on fast loading websites. And what’s been your experience with clients? Do you have any clients asking for W3C validation or anything like that? Or is it isn’t even a conversation you have?

David Waumsley:
No, it’s not because of the, the type of clients we get. There are the really local business. I mean there are some global work that I’ve done in some national companies, but working one with one at the moment, but it’s not, they’ve not got that far. They don’t know about this stuff. You know, I’d need to educate them about that. So, you know, that’s why I kind of want my tools to be as, as good as they can be. Just for my personal pride. But it’s, it’s not actually.

David Waumsley:
It’s not going to make me money if I spend time on it.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
That’s so true. Yeah. For me, agencies ask me to do it for my own site. I have not concentrated on it. So if people run a validation, I think there’s three errors on my site, which sounds terrible, but I have checked other people’s site and they have like 54 errors. So I’m like, I feel better.

David Waumsley:
I feel okay. Yeah, I’ve only got. Well, I love what you’re saying about the group. I mean, that is a key thing with the Beaver Builder group. And I can’t believe actually, I mean, you’ve been really kind about the videos. But my videos are really quite amateur. You know, my skill level is. But the support, I mean, I would never have done this somewhere else.

David Waumsley:
The support that you get from people in the community is just overwhelming. So, you know, I’m stuck with it now for life. I’ll just keep doing these things until people tell me to stop.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
I also like what you said earlier, David, about Beaver Builder with regards to there being some sort of cost, the sustainability of a plugin. So people get excited about a free plugin like Elementor or some other page builder that looks exciting, but how is that going to be sustained? And with Beaver Builder, it’s not cheap either. Well, it is actually cheap. The amount of value I get from it, it’s actually a steal. But compared to, you know, other products where people might be able to buy something on say, CodeCanyon for $20, you know, you’re actually looking at an investment of maybe $99 if you’re getting serious with Beaver Builder or a lot more. But again, that gives me a hell of a lot of confidence. Yes. You know, there’s always the fallback that this code is open source anyway.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
So if Beaver Builder were no more, you know, I can still get access to the code and self support it for, for a period of time. But because Beaver Builder is being funded, this means that I know they’re probably going to be around for an awful long time. And because people are paying, you know what to some might feel a premium for it, you know, they’re going to be throwing everything they can in to make it the best product. Best product in the world.

David Waumsley:
Yeah.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Now on your videos, it’s funny how we put ourselves down. Like, I sometimes think these podcasts aren’t great and I think I waffle and I get loads of really nice feedback. And your videos are very good. And what I’d encourage you with your videos is you are being picked up very quickly by Google. And anyone listening, follow David’s example. Go and check out David’s videos. He’s doing some really good how to guide videos. And I ran a search the other day for Beaver Build Lightbox subscription, I think that was the phrase.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
And you came up as the very first video where you showed how to do the Pop Up Maker tutorial where you could actually use the shortcode and use Pop Up Maker which is a much lighter weight pop up plugin than say something as complex as Thrive leads. So just by following your video and I mean it was very, very clean, easy to understand video, I was able to create really cool pop up call to actions for a client without having to install a really big bloaty plugin.

David Waumsley:
Yeah.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
So I’d encourage you there.

David Waumsley:
I love that. It’s great to hear some feedback that they’re useful. I mean I could just do these things anyway. It’s just things I discover and want to talk about. And you definite don’t waffle and I think I do. So yeah, we’re patting each other on the back.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
We are, aren’t we? People are like being sick. So what are your plans for Beaver Junction? Because you’ve got this website, Beaver Junction at the moment, you’ve got some live demos. Have you got any particular plans to take this anywhere? Make something up now because you want to know what state you’re going to do next.

David Waumsley:
Do you know, this is the strange thing, I mean I always telling people to make plans and everything but I’m terrible. They kind of evolve, you know. I did my first videos just because knowing Colin Cartwright did and I knew wasn’t going to do any anymore and I needed a bit of practice to make my own course. So that was it, just to do that, just to get used to doing it. And then I thought, well, I better have my own website for this. I bought that Beaver Junction thing. So now I’m hoping to sort of build this up as a list of resources. But what I don’t want to do is I don’t want to, I want to add something that’s not in existence at the moment.

David Waumsley:
So there’s quite a few of us out there providing resources all of a sudden for Beaver Builder. So largely my plan is to try and not tread on anybody’s toes and fill in the gaps that they don’t have, you know. So I’ll do more interviews and that’ll be a page full of more my interviews with people in the Beaver Builder community because I, I love talking to those people and I’ll keep doing my how tos and hopefully I’ll be able to section those into different areas so they, they provide a small course for people, you know, little tips. But everything keeps changing, doesn’t it?

Lee Matthew Jackson:
It’s.

David Waumsley:
That’s a cool thing.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Well, we’re still such a new community as well. You know, so, so there’s so much. I mean the new features coming out in Beaver Builder as well are really exciting. I’ve been playing with the, with. Well, it’s now beta, it was alpha a few weeks ago and where you’ve now got things where you can do columns and columns. I mean that was something that didn’t even exist a few months ago and I was like creating little hacks to allow you to do kind of to make it look like you were doing columns and columns, whereas actually I was just doing clever CSS tricks, etc. But I think even Beaver Builder is changing so much. I think all of us are still in this early stage, aren’t we, of what can we do to help this community? So at the moment I’m doing the odd video or the odd little snippet of code to help people, etc.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
But I know I want to do more in the community. They’ve got over 3,000 members in the Facebook group, you know, so that, that’s exciting in its own right. You know, that’s a huge community of people that they’ve built up, you know, people. And that’s, that’s not all the people who are using Beaver Builder either. I think for you, if I can give you advice, I think, I think one of the things you’ve mentioned is that you kind of want to put together some form of course or package to help, you know, those small businesses go from no presence to a process of getting themselves online. So is that a potential area for you, do you think, with Beaver Builder perhaps you could not only get the process for online but also the process for using Beaver Builder itself to get themselves online. For example, the pop Up Maker plugin tutorial you did, I could probably give to my mum, she’s got a startup business, she’d be able to do pop ups based on your instructions. I’ll leave you with that thought.

David Waumsley:
Yeah, fantastic. Well actually, funny enough, my wife just built a website last night with Beaver Builder and it’s an E commerce one. I’m so proud of her because she’s not done anything. I know.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
So yeah, the only thing is she had access to you though. Like she could just, you know, whereas we have to just wait for the next video.

David Waumsley:
But she didn’t though us.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
So Ken, let’s rewind some time a bit and you said that you had made or tried to make an intranet. That, that did fascinate me and we’ve waffled about Beaver Builder a bit because you know, obviously it’s Both of our passion. But I do want to get back to some of the questions that I had. As you were Chatt mentioned this intranet right from the get go. Can you tell us the story behind that Internet? I mean you’re working in civil service with no web experience. How on earth did you go around making an intranet in WordPress?

David Waumsley:
Well it was very basic and back then as well there wasn’t so much available. There wasn’t even. There wasn’t the premium theme market and much can’t remember what plugins they used as well. But yeah, well it’s more I guess

Lee Matthew Jackson:
the question is though, if you are not necessarily into into websites and that how did you get from doing whatever it is you’re doing in the civil service to oh, I need to find something to build an Internet. And can you remember this far back?

David Waumsley:
Yeah, well actually it wasn’t the first time I started playing around. I did help a friend I think the year before do a HTML site. So it’s just a general interest in new stuff really but then it’s always been to solve a problem. There’s a friend of mine wants a website to set up a business and I’m thinking yeah, interested in learning a bit about how you build a site. So you know, that led there and then I learned all of that to build their site and then a little bit, you know I started you know, obviously following people on the Internet. I started listening to a guy, another podcast actually Boag World and I got addicted to that. So that was really quite I guess high level for my status at the time as somebody was just looking to build my own website at some point, you know. But yeah, they’re just came out of jobs so I needed to communicate better with my staff that I had and and I just sort of bumped into WordPress.

David Waumsley:
Luckily WordPress was really the only one I considered way back then. I had a quick look at Joomla and Drupal and Drupal was too confusing, Joomla was too homely and yeah, so just went from there. It’s just curiosity, that’s all it is this endless need to learn and an intranet.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Then in your understanding of what an intranet was, was this just a publicly available website full of publicly available information or was this something that was actually installed on the internal network or.

David Waumsley:
No, it was, I mean it was a live site but it was a membership site effectively.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Right. And can you membership plugin you used back then? Because back then there wasn’t a million.

David Waumsley:
No, I don’t think there was any. Effectively, it was just in Tadlock, I think, was the guy who did something that I used. Justin Tadlock, Yeah.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Yes, I know Justin. Not personally. Yeah, I know his work. Yeah. Well, there you go. So you were able to put together. That’s the cool thing about WordPress, isn’t it? It empowers pretty much anybody to build a website. And I don’t mean you’re anybody, obviously, you’re awesome.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
You know, it does empower people. Like your wife put together with no programming experience just yesterday, an E commerce website. It’s phenomenal.

David Waumsley:
I know, it’s amazing. And that was another thing that was in early as well. You know again, another friend of mine had a website that was built for them which was an E commerce site and they were losing money all the time. They had to pay the developer all the time to have to do the updates on it because the way it was built, HTML with some car added to it. So that took me off again further into it because I was starting to help him. He didn’t use it. And as it happened, my wife’s and her sister were selling greeting cards and we thought let’s just use what we’ve learned to build an E commerce shop for that. So that was another five year project then running that.

David Waumsley:
So it’s always been that way with me.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
So I’ve got a couple of questions, the first one being with regards to traveling. Can you describe your office as in how do you work? The idea being this might sound a very attractive solution for some of the web developers listening today. What is the extent of your office? Is it a bag and if it’s. So what’s in your bag?

David Waumsley:
Well, it really is just my laptop and my mic that I’m talking to you on now. You know, we’ve really scaled down. We were able to manage to. We don’t, we don’t. When we go traveling, we manage to keep the hand luggage that we carry on in the plane with us. So we really have to scale down. It’s a laptop each really. That’s it.

David Waumsley:
And some tiny little speakers that I carry around with me and always a dongle so that I can top it with a new SIM card. And that’s how I get by. I mean there is a problem with monitor sizes. You know, I’d like to, yeah, I’d like to have a. I had a dual monitor set up till recently until the, the electrics here blew that up. So that’s one of the downsides of traveling is that you get Strange things happen with. Particularly when you’re traveling in the east. Yeah.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Dodgy electrics. I remember a few years ago, so Karthik, who works for me, when he was in a different area, there’d be often a lot of down times. Eventually we ended up buying like a full UPS battery so that he could in theory survive with the computer for up to 12 hours of no electricity. That’s how we’ve gone on ever since. You know, we’ve always had to make sure we keep that UPS updated and well serviced so that if there’s any power downage you could just keep going now.

David Waumsley:
Yeah.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Over the last few years then, mate, you’ve obviously you’ve been getting heavily involved in the WordPress community and you’ve been using quite a lot of plugins. Are there some plugins that you could drop for us and let us know what they are, why you think they’re awesome and where we can find. Well, I can put. Where we can find them afterwards if I do a bit of Googling.

David Waumsley:
Yeah, well, we’ve talked a lot about obviously my favorite one, Beaver Builder. Really?

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Oh yeah, that one. Yeah. Okay.

David Waumsley:
There is. I’ve really tried to reduce with the plugins that I use. I’ve now got into WP types. I don’t know if it’s one I’d recommend the tool set. Yeah. And I really just got into that and realized just how powerful that is.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Well, tell us.

David Waumsley:
I don’t know.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
What is it?

David Waumsley:
Well, it is literally a toolset, so it’s types and views. It started off as a, as a plugin, I didn’t use it then, but it allows you to create custom post types. The recent and most exciting thing, why I’ve been looking at it more is that it now can be linked or the Views side of it. The Views plugin, which I think can be bought independently, can now be connected up to Beaver Builder. So you can create a template with Beaver Builder and then create some fields with types and you can basically display all of those fields in your Beaver Builder template. So you could do.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
You mean like a loop? Like you could create. Wow.

David Waumsley:
So it’s just custom post types with fields and then with the Views plugin, you can then use a Beaver Builder template to design that. So all of your fields will get laid out in your Beaver Builder template. Now it’s not perfect because it’s still effectively short codes, so you have to. But you can still do things like put them in. Put different content in different tabs or something on individual pages. So you could easily build your own. This is how I’m going to be using it at the moment while I’m looking at it is that I’m doing a site that’s got a ton of products now. Previously I might have just thought they don’t want to sell it online at the moment.

David Waumsley:
I probably still use, as I have done before, woocommerce for that because all the layout and all the fields are all there and it displays correctly and I would just do some adjustments now I wouldn’t do that. I’m using the toolset to do that because I can create all of those fields and then I can move the design around in one go, which I couldn’t do on WooCommerce on all the product pages by just moving around the template. The one template so I love is pretty impressive.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
I’ve popped along and had a look at Toolset a little while back. So I was looking at the cred option because they’ve got the front end content creation so that allows you to actually take form submissions and then they can get automatically converted into post type posts as it were. So in theory you could create a business directory or something. I thought that was pretty cool. Obviously I use advanced custom fields for stuff like frontend entry and that, or gravity forms. But if you’re using. If you want to find like one tool set, wptypes definitely looks attractive because it seems to include an awful lot of features that you would normally be finding lots of other plugins for when you. And that.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
That’d be different types of plugins. Yeah, the tool, the view thing. I imagine then if you create like a view, you could create that as a shortcode, but then you could very easily for a client just create a module in Beaver Builder that had a dropdown of different views they could use and they could just drag that into a page then. So they’re not even touching shortcodes themselves, are they? So that would make it even easier. So it would be something that a developer could use just as well as the end client. I think shortcodes get a bad rap, but at the moment I’ve been using them like crazy in code, not having my clients using them, but using them in conjunction with Beaver Builder because it’s just so useful to be able to design the header or design the footer in Beaver Builder as well, rather than having to do the the HTML CSS of the theme and then only have Beaver Builder responsible for the content area, you know, scenes. You can create literally anything. There’s been nothing I can’t create in it, you know, it’s been very useful.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
So I’m going to be checking out WP Types. That’s WP Types.com. go ahead and check that out, guys. I’ll put the link in the show notes. Anything else you’d recommend to us?

David Waumsley:
Actually, there’s something I saw. I was actually in your Facebook group today and I didn’t get a chance to comment, but someone was talking about. What was it called? Gonzalez Plugin, which was. Yes, well, I related one to that. I just thought actually something similar is Plugin Organizer. Have you heard of that one?

Lee Matthew Jackson:
No. Tell me more.

David Waumsley:
Okay, well, what it does is it just allows you to conditionally turn off plugins based on whatever criteria, like whatever page. So I’d love this plugin and it doesn’t get talked about a lot. I don’t use it that much. But in the Circumstance you’ve got WooCommerce on maybe one page on your site, it’s a heavy plugin that outputs a load of CSS JavaScript and also has a large page load. Well, you just turn it off the whole of the rest of the site, except on the pages where it’s used and the cart pages, obviously, and the checkout pages need to be on and that’s it. So you reduce your sort of page load, get rid of all of that junk.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
I can’t even imagine how that would work, but that sounds amazing. Yeah, you can, actually. So you could say, right, I only want the following pages or URLs to have the plugins active and disable them everywhere else. Because that’s the thing that definitely annoys me. That’s the conversation in the thread. It’s leejacksondev.com group that will send you to the Facebook group, guys, if you’re not a part of that. But yeah, that’s the thing I like about Gonzalez, because it allows you to disable the stuff it’s putting in the header and the footer, etc. But that still doesn’t disable functions triggering, etc.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Every time you load. Because essentially WP head then loads everything, doesn’t it? Is it WP header or something like that that triggers first and everything pretty much gets loaded as well. I can’t imagine how that works in my head though.

David Waumsley:
Yeah, well, check it out. It works. I mean, it just basically, you know, I’ve heard this a lot of times people say about, you know, I don’t want to load something like WooCommerce. And there are other programs that are large, like that just for one function. Well, this is the way around it. It just doesn’t load anything with like any plugin then.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Or is it like it only works with specific plugins?

David Waumsley:
No, no, it’s. It’s just you define which of your plugins you don’t want to show on whatever pages conditionally. It can get very confusing and you can put these plugins into different groups as well. And it’s a one. Well, it was. I haven’t looked at it just recently. It was a fairly ugly interface at the back.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
I just looked at the screenshots whilst you were chatting. Yeah, they are not nice, but so powerful.

David Waumsley:
Such a clever idea because it’s always bugged me that you know that kind of page. It’s not just the CSS and the JavaScript, it’s just the actual plugin load as well. You know, I mean you get around it with caching but you know, that’s true.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Got to admit, when I think I’m quite a visual guy because if I see something that looks ugly I tend not to go there. And the thing that’s always bugged me about WP types website is it’s not a very nice website and padding doesn’t quite look right and some of the line height doesn’t look right and then it bugs me and then I end up not using a product and I imagine I would have looked unless you’d have told me. I would have looked at the plugin organizer screenshots and just moved on without realizing the power that it could potentially have. So I’m going to check that out on our main website to be honest, because we’ve got quite a few things active. I make the mistake sometimes of testing stuff on our live corporate site just because it’s the quickest one I can get access to and I’ve got all these plugins that I really should sort out. It’s funny, isn’t it? We kind of like we tell our clients to not activate loads of plugins, don’t do this, don’t do that and then we just go and do the total opposite.

David Waumsley:
Absolutely, yeah. Other plugins that I quite like as well, I mean even though I love Beaver Builder, I don’t use the slide or the gallery that they provide. So I, you know, soloqui and Vera Gallery, two plugins that I really like to take care of those things.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Awesome. And are there any WordPress or Beaver Builder related resources that you like to regularly read and consume other than the WP Innovator podcast?

David Waumsley:
Other than that. Well, you know, I mean, we’ve got some great stuff coming out now for Beaver Builder alone, obviously. Pro Beaver, I love that. Particularly love the newsletter that comes out every week.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Yes.

David Waumsley:
Something that’s going on in the Beaver Builder community. That’s an institution now, isn’t it?

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Yes, definitely. I’ll put a link to Pro Beaver in there and sign up guys to the. The mailing list they have. They essentially send out all the news. I’ve been in it a couple of times. David’s been in it a few times as well.

David Waumsley:
I should just run off a load of things. So you’ve got loads of work to do with links.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
I’m doing it literally as you’re saying it, so that I don’t forget later.

David Waumsley:
Well, but in Beaver Builder Community, yeah, we’ve also got Beaver Brains, which of course has just changed ownership and that looks really promising. There’s a lot of great stuff building up on that. And of course we’ve got Beyond Beaver, which is definitely one to check out because I love Grant Ambrose’s tutorials is another one who does kind of much higher level tutorials for people with Beaver Builder, doesn’t he?

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Thing I like about Beyond Beaver is he seems to be doing online marketing very well. Like his adverts are appearing, everywhere is in, I’ll be reading the news and his template offer for Beaver Builder is slapped right at the top of Sky News and I’m like, mate, you are doing this right. Obviously he’s using pixels etc. With Google or however he’s doing it. And I’ll be in Facebook and boom, in my feed comes up another sponsored one of his offering, one of his offers, etc. So he really knows how to work that system. And like I said, his tutorials are great and his site looks lush as well. I really like them.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
I’m very visual, obviously, I’m very fickle. I like pretty things, which is why

David Waumsley:
I think we all do.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
I hate my own site all the time as well. Do you do that, like hate anything you create but love everyone else’s or is it just me?

David Waumsley:
No, no, no, no, that’s exactly me.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
I think we just need a group hug right now. This is like therapy, isn’t it?

David Waumsley:
I can’t.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Yeah, so how. Oh, carry on.

David Waumsley:
No, no, I was just gonna say about resources and everything, you know, I mean, it’s not just the Beaver Builder stuff that I look, but it does seem to be that way now. I’ve tried to cut down a lot on the blog post that I read. Because it used to get insane. Do you find this?

Lee Matthew Jackson:
I do. And I tend to. Instead of reading them a lot of the time, I tend to use the voice to the text to voice apps now so that I can actually listen to them. And I actually prefer to go for podcasts if I can, where it’s real speaking rather than a computer reading something to me, because I tend to listen better than I do read anyway, because I’m one of those people who. I’ll read a sentence and I’ll get onto the next sentence and I won’t be 100% sure whether I understood the previous sentence. So they start going back and rereading paragraphs and that. And I just take ages in reading. So I’m better at consuming audio now.

David Waumsley:
Yeah.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
I know that you’ve been doing things like interviews online, etc. Could you just expand on what you’re thinking about with that and where people can find some of your latest interviews?

David Waumsley:
Yeah, well, I’ve only done six of these and six more than many, mate.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Six more than many.

David Waumsley:
Yeah. Gosh. And I mean, I’ll carry on again. I mean, I hope to get the Beaver Builder guys actually just before Christmas to do another one. I don’t know how long I’ll carry on doing these interviews, but this. This just seems to be. More and more people pop up who I’m interested in, you know, so I’m absolutely useless at it, doing these interviews. But fortunately the, you know, people.

David Waumsley:
I ask, sensible people and can just talk for hours, so I can just, you know.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Well, that’s useful, isn’t it?

David Waumsley:
I think that’s the case. I mean, the quality of people in the Beaver Builder community is amazing, don’t you think?

Lee Matthew Jackson:
We’re so lucky.

David Waumsley:
I know. So asking any of those to come and chat to me for a little while, as you’re doing now with me, you know, it’s. It can’t go wrong, can it?

Lee Matthew Jackson:
No. Well, how do we find the backlog, as it were, of interviews?

David Waumsley:
Where can we find. Yes. Well, they’re not placed on my. They will eventually I will do this. They will go on beaverjunction.com but for the moment, you’d have to. You need to go to YouTube and look for my name, David Warmsley.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
I will do that then. And I will do that for the community of WP Innovator, because they’re definitely great interviews to watch and you’re very good at it. You’re a natural. You’ve got a voice for radio, mate. Deep, spacey voice. There’s Been a lot of compliments on this interview today, so I do apologize to everyone if anyone’s had to be sick in a sick bag or anything like that. Me and you being super nice to each other. We’re not one of those people that hate each other offline.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
We’re actually just nice anyway, aren’t we?

David Waumsley:
No, well, I think we. I mean, I don’t you come from Northampton? Sorry, I’m taking this off in a completely different direction. But you’re UK Northampton, is that right?

Lee Matthew Jackson:
The office is in. We’re sat in Wellingborough right now.

David Waumsley:
Yeah, See, kind of. I. I kind of tune into your voice anyway because I used to live a little while in and up the road, really. In Leicester? Yeah. And bits of Northamptonshire is where I worked as well. So I kind of feel an affinity, you know, feel the connection.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Yeah, I like that. My sister’s a copper in. Up in Leicester, so we’re up in Leicester very often. It’s a small world, isn’t it? And yet you decided to abandon England’s beautiful home country for the delights of the rest of the world. And I can hardly say I blame you, mate. So how can people connect with you whilst you’re traveling the world, mate?

David Waumsley:
Well, they can go to davidwarmsley.com where I will put up my blog posts. You can always join by Beaver Builder. Just buy it and go join the Beaver Builder Group and talk to me there, because I’m there all the time as you are, Lee, as well.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Indeed. And is there any parting piece of advice as well that you could give to people from what you’ve learned on the road?

David Waumsley:
Well, I guess the. Yeah, one thing. I guess I’ve been ill just recently and I’ve realized that what we do as people who work in this, we. We actually spend a little bit too long, I think, on our computers, obsessing about stuff. So when we got our free time, we. We tend to start reading these blog posts and things like that that we’ve talked about. So I think it’s really important to take time out, I think, you know, and get away from the computer. I’ve realized this just recently, having been ill, that the time I spent with the traveling and having time off, going to the beach and stuff like that was really important for productivity.

David Waumsley:
So if you’re not having a period of the day when you’re completely not thinking about your computer and your websites, you’re probably doing yourself more damage than good. Probably be more ineffective than you could be.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
I feel like that advice is Totally for me there as well. Because especially the last few weeks, I’ve fallen into the trap of when I have free time messing around on the computer, still looking at new plugins or trying to do new things and not taking the time off. So that is very good advice. I will let you know how that goes over the next few weeks. I’ll let you hold me accountable, mate.

David Waumsley:
Okay.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
You’ve been a legend. Thanks so much for coming on chatting, letting me pry into your private life there. That’s phenomenal. And obviously loving what you’re doing in the realms of the world of beaver builder doing cruise.

David Waumsley:
You.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
You do. Keep going, mate. You’re doing a great job. Have a wonderful week, buddy.

David Waumsley:
Yeah, you too. Thanks very much. I really appreciate this time.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
No worries. You’ll be live on Monday. Alrighty, take care.

David Waumsley:
Okay, bye.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
So there you have it. The end of episode 54. If you’re inspired to go ahead and travel the world, then come and join us on the Facebook group leejacksondev.com group. You’ll be redirected and tell us all about your future plans. If you are traveling the world, we want to know as well, do you use WordPress and do you travel the world building websites? Because that would be freaking amazing. To find out more about if you want to be on the show. We’re trying to get some people who listen on the show. We want to hear stories from agencies, freelancers, designers from all around the world.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
We’re not just looking to get big names in WordPress, remember, we want to get people, you know, doing the everyday thing, the everyday site, build the everyday design, working on everyday projects on. Because we can all learn from each other, not just those people who have maybe something to sell because they want to sell an online course or anything. We want to hear from people. So do get in touch. No matter what your story is, it would be so cool to hear from you. That’s leejacksondev.com contact. Thank you so much for listening. Have an amazing, amazing week.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Merry Christmas in advance and I’ll see you in episode 55.

David Waumsley:
Bye.