[00:00:08.960] - Gordon
Hello.
[00:00:09.290] - Taylor
Hello.
[00:00:09.450] - Gordon
My name is Gordon from Drayson Design.
[00:00:11.410] - Taylor
I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.
[00:00:13.440] - Gordon
And welcome to "This Week With Taylor and Gordon," a weekly podcast and vidcast where we talk about things that have affected our businesses over the last seven days. And we're back. Sorry, we weren't here with you last week. That was my fault. Last week, I was celebrating with my partner because it was a special birthday. And we went to London and we went to Soho, we went to Chinatown, we went to Oxford Street.
[00:00:43.460] - Taylor
Camden.
[00:00:43.880] - Gordon
Camden Lock. We went and saw two shows. We went to see Grease with Jason Donovan, and we went and saw Mrs. Doubtfire, which was great, really really good. And there was a few cocktails and maybe a stay overnight as well. And that's why I wasn't here. So it's my fault. I completely forgot I was going the week before. Otherwise, I'd have mentioned it. Interesting week we've had, Taylor. We've had Apple announcements, first of all. So they've got a new iPhone, iPhone 15, and the Pro version, which is coming out next week, I believe it is.
[00:01:23.340] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:01:23.880] - Gordon
We've also got an update to the watch, so we've got the series nine and the new series two Ultra.
[00:01:32.400] - Taylor
Yep.
[00:01:33.250] - Gordon
Interestingly, they've changed all of these phones. These are the first phones and devices, in fact, that have now got USB-C. They were forced to do it, but I think it's a good thing because it's actually going to make speed of transfer a lot quicker, which we've already seen on the announcement. They've done the same for the AirPod cases. They've brought new Airpod cases out. And with the watches, I think it's the watches, yeah, they've now made them carbon neutral.
[00:02:09.520] - Taylor
That's very good.
[00:02:10.480] - Gordon
They're not costing any carbon to make the product, which is great. Plus, the other thing is they're making the iPhone 15 easier to repair by allowing the back glass to be taken off easier, which is great. It looks like Apple is all going in the right direction. That affects us. Any announcements of interest to you?
[00:02:37.720] - Taylor
So I was looking at the Apple Watch Ultra, but getting the series one, so I was waiting for the series two to come out, so that the first-generation price dropped a bit.
[00:02:48.800] - Gordon
I think you'll only get a second-hand one, though, because they'll probably stop selling the one, won't they?
[00:02:54.870] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:02:55.570] - Gordon
And just bring out the two for everyone. I don't know if anyone would have old stock, but if they do, it's unlikely they'll bring the price down. So, let's get on to this week's topics. Would you like to go first? What have you been doing this week?
[00:03:10.020] - Taylor
So this week I was in Amsterdam. I went on my "12 months of coffee" trip to Amsterdam this month and it was great. I really enjoyed it. I made a couple of friends, which was nice. I got to explore the city, some nice coffee shops, different types of coffee shops as well, which was also interesting. Making sure I went into the right one.
[00:03:34.560] - Gordon
Special Amsterdam coffee shops?
[00:03:36.300] - Taylor
Yeah. I tried House of Fries, which is a number one rated chip shop where you have different types of toppings and stuff, bacon and cheese and poutine stuff, which is quite nice. I visited some of the attractions and stuff, so I saw Anne Frank's house, which was quite cool. That was interesting. I got my Starbucks mug because it's always important to get.
[00:04:04.090] - Gordon
Is it that one?
[00:04:05.200] - Taylor
It is, yeah.
[00:04:05.670] - Gordon
For those who are watching, do you want to show them? There you go. This is the Starbucks mug if you are watching on our video. There we go. If not, then you can just go and watch the video to see it. Very nice.
[00:04:20.590] - Taylor
It was nice. There was lots of nice green areas. The transport was good. I enjoyed going on the trams. Very bizarre because the trams go around the roundabout as if they were a car and they have like... They had two different lanes. They have a bike lane which cars are allowed to drive in, and then you have the tram tracks, I guess, in the middle, and then the bike/car lanes on the outside. And it's always got to make sure they don't get run over by a bike or whatever, because you've got to make sure you're looking each way every time you're crossing. The bikes have priority over everyone, really. Not common to have the bikes to have right of way versus the cars and things like that.
[00:05:16.000] - Gordon
Well, that's what we have now, in fact. Our new laws states that pedestrians have right of way on a road, then the next ones up are cyclists, and then cars and lorries are last.
[00:05:27.920] - Taylor
Yeah. It's just mainly like the infrastructure, the way that all of their junctions are built are very much catered towards bikes first, cars second.
[00:05:36.640] - Gordon
Right.
[00:05:37.350] - Taylor
Or public transport first, bikes, then cars, which is different to how it is in the UK. Although we've got new laws, the roads and stuff are very much, and junctions are very much built for cars rather than the other way around.
[00:05:54.700] - Gordon
Any differences in business or did you get any work done that you want to?
[00:05:58.660] - Taylor
Yeah, I got some work done. I found a nice coffee shop called Canary Club. It was an old tram depot, I believe, where the trams went to overnight and things like that. It was really interesting because you could see the old tram tracks, the big gate doors and things like that. So yeah, there was lots of cool history that I could find because it's a relatively old country.
[00:06:29.900] - Gordon
Very good. Anything else you want to say about your trip?
[00:06:33.390] - Taylor
I don't think so. Overall, I really enjoyed it. It was one of the places I probably would go back to.
[00:06:38.140] - Gordon
And have you got your trip for October planned yet?
[00:06:42.140] - Taylor
Yes, I'm going to North Macedonia. It doesn't have a Starbucks, sadly, so I won't be able to collect a mug. But I'm going to see a friend, and so I'm going to be hanging out with them.
[00:06:55.880] - Gordon
You'll have to see if they've got one of these places where you can decorate your own mug and have it fired and you can just do a Starbucks one for Macedonia. You'll be the only person with one then, which would be great. Cool. My topic this week is a little project that we've been working on. So at my children's parties, for some of the parties, I have a Deluxe party, and part of that is that they get a slideshow. So I take a little camera with me and somebody takes photos throughout the party, and then when I get back to the office, I go through them and get rid of all the rubbish photos, leave the ones that are really nice, and they get made into a little animation, a bit of movement and slide show with some music, some captions. It's a really nice memory for the family who I've entertained, and they get to relive the party in the future. I've been doing that for many, many years now. And every time I get a new slideshow to do, I've got a workflow that I go through to make sure everything gets done properly. Right at the beginning, all I was doing was putting them on YouTube as an unlisted video, so it's a private video to them, and then sending that link to the customer. Which is fine, but it's not really branded in any way. So, I came up with the idea of creating a page on my website and embedding the video on that page so that I'm sending people to my website rather than to YouTube. That way, if YouTube ever have problems, I can take all the videos that I've already got and just upload them elsewhere and then the videos will carry on working. Not that YouTube is going to go anywhere anytime soon, but that is all well and good. Apart from I have to create a page every time. What I was doing is I was basically duplicating the previous slideshow and then changing all the details because I upload all the photos as well. So if they want to download them, they can do. There's a link to those. And it meant that all of my slideshows were taking up a ton of space as far as pages go, because there was a new page for every single person. Plus you've got all the editing that I had to do to make sure that it read right and hoping that I didn't leave someone else's information in, like the date of the party, for example, left it at the previous date without seeing it and making a change because that doesn't look professional. And then I had the problem of making sure that the naming of the pages was constant because I would forget after a little period of time. 2020 didn't do many shows, didn't do any slideshows, came back to it and I started a different naming convention just because I'd forgotten how it was. And so you came up with the idea...
[00:10:03.870] - Taylor
Yes.
[00:10:04.300] - Gordon
That we should move all the slideshows into their own space; take them off my main website. And so we're using what's called a subdomain. Now, subdomains are very cool because, for example, my main domain is disbelieving.com, and then a subdomain is something.disbelieving.com, and the something can be anything you like. You can have as many subdomains as you like. So if you look at it in the way that Google do it, they have google.com, they've got images.google.com, they've got docs.google.com, they've got sheets.google.com. They're using an awful lot of different subdomains, and there's probably hundreds that we don't even know about that are just used internally. And so that's what we decided to do. Taylor came out with the idea of creating a layout and then bringing all the information that we need in dynamically. So basically, we're creating a post, we're putting all the information into that post, and then it will create the page for me. Which means that if I want to change the design or if I want to add something in the future, I can change the design on one page, the template, and all of the pages that I've ever done will automatically then be updated; which makes life a lot easier. I also added a picture, a photo, one of the photos from the photos that were taken, and added that on the page because I thought that was a nice little addition. There's two things we had to take into account here, though. First thing is that if people went to the old address, because that's where I told them to go, they need to then be redirected automatically to the new address. So we sorted that out. That was all done. The second thing is making sure that if a customer forgets the URL or they lose the email and they don't know how to see their videos anymore, an easy way for me to do it that's secure. So it doesn't allow people to just basically guess at a URL and hope that they'll find someone's slideshow because that's not secure at all. So the solution we came up with was to have on the homepage of this slideshow section is to have people being able to put in their email address. And I've got an email address that's attached to every different post. And sometimes people have more than one post because maybe I've gone back and done two or three parties for them. And so their email address will be in several posts. And then once you put that email address in, if it's an email that's recognized, it will then send an email to that person with the link or links to their slideshow or slideshows, and then they can click on those and go and have a look. And the other advantage to this is I can offer the customer the option of giving me other email addresses for other members of family, so that they can go and do the same thing. And that is a really nice way of doing it. For example, I have a joint birthday party. Well, I can take the email address of the second family or the third family, and I can send that to them as well. So it means that they get to see the slideshow and they can go in and do it as the person who booked me has always been able to do or will always be able to do. So that makes life really really good. And it just streamlines the process again. If anyone rings me up and says, "we had a slideshow with you, but I can't remember the address," I'll just say, "go to the address that we've come up with, the subdomain, and type in your email address, it'll email you." Or if I'm feeling like it's easier, I'll just go in and do it myself, type in their email address. It will send them an email and it looks like it's come from me and it looks like I'm the one that spent time finding the links and sending it to them, which again, is a really good customer service thing. Have I missed any benefits out?
[00:14:13.590] - Taylor
The only other thing was the title generation.
[00:14:17.790] - Gordon
Oh, yeah. That was a real logical nightmare, wasn't it?
[00:14:23.270] - Taylor
Yeah. So we had up to three children that you can add. And the way that the titles were formatted were, it was, for example, Taylor's 10th birthday party, for example. Now, if you have two people, it would be Taylor and Gordon's birthday party with the and as in the text rather than the ampersand.
[00:14:48.010] - Gordon
And the apostophe s only goes on the last name, not the first name as well. Otherwise, Taylor's and Gordon's 10th birthday party is wrong grammatically.
[00:14:57.620] - Taylor
Yeah. And then if you have three. It would be Taylor comma Gordon comma Bill, or and Bill's birthday party. Again, with the apostrophe s on the last one.
[00:15:08.530] - Gordon
Yeah.
[00:15:09.630] - Taylor
That is all good. However, if you have two children that have a birthday, but they are different ages, you'll then have Taylor's 5th and Gordon's 10th birthday party. And so both children need the apostrophe s, and you need to use an and to join them together.
[00:15:29.450] - Gordon
And you need to make sure you've got the birthday year and what do you call the bit after it?
[00:15:36.830] - Taylor
Ordinal suffix.
[00:15:38.190] - Gordon
An ordinal suffix. So three R-D, four T-H, 1 S-T, they're all different.
[00:15:47.270] - Taylor
Yeah, the endings of the number or the age. And then obviously, if you've got three and you've got two that are one age and one that's another, it would be Taylor and Gordon's fifth and John's second...
[00:16:00.910] - Gordon
Birthday party.
[00:16:02.460] - Taylor
Yeah. And then it would if we had more than three, if you had three, one age and one another, it would be name comma name and name, age. And then and, name, age. It gets a bit confusing, but we basically built it so that no matter what format or format we have it, it will build the title to be correct. And that is used as a slug. That's used for the title of the page. When we send them links, that's the name so they can see. And yeah, it just makes it really easy. And then it doesn't mean, you don't have to build or write out and figure out what the title needs to be.
[00:16:46.880] - Gordon
Yes. We've set it up so that I just fill in a form, basically. I just fill in. It asks for the first name, last name, age. Is there another child? Yes. Put the first name, last name, age in. Third child, first name, last name, age. The date, the link to the video, the link to the photos, the email address of the people who are allowed to get the email sent to them, and that's pretty much it.
[00:17:15.360] - Taylor
Yeah, it's quite interesting, mainly because if you update the child's name or the age or anything like that, it will automatically update the title and the slug, etc. We found that... We were going to do a dynamic redirect from your old site or your main site to the subdomain. And that would have worked perfectly fine if you had used the exact same formatting in every single-
[00:17:41.320] - Gordon
Which is one of the reasons we changed it.
[00:17:43.390] - Taylor
So for example, and some of them you had an apostrophe s on some of them, and in others you didn't.
[00:17:50.900] - Gordon
And that was because it wasn't something I was doing all the time. It was whenever there was a slideshow that was being done. So trying to remember the format, I didn't have a process for it, which I now do. And I can't remember... If I create a new post, does it automatically email the customer to tell them it's been set up? I can't remember.
[00:18:14.230] - Taylor
No, it doesn't.
[00:18:15.110] - Gordon
No. Okay, so that's good. It's a manual process, which is fine because that's how I want it, because every time I go in and make changes, I don't want it to then email the customer to say, "your slideshow's up. Here's the information," because they'll already have that.
[00:18:29.340] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:18:29.570] - Gordon
But it's a much better system now and makes my life a lot easier, makes the customer's life a lot easier, which is the important thing. That's the main point, really.
[00:18:38.760] - Taylor
Definitely.
[00:18:40.060] - Gordon
That's all I want to say about that. Do you have anything else you wish to add?
[00:18:44.380] - Taylor
I don't think so. It's a nice solution because it's scalable and it also takes it off the main site, which when you get to, how many do you have? 100 plus or whatever, you get to a lot of pages and then it becomes hard to manage it in the back end and you're ending up with lots of stuff that isn't really needed because it's not the primary function of the site.
[00:19:06.820] - Gordon
Yeah.
[00:19:07.030] - Taylor
So if you can, you should always try and move stuff to a subdomain.
[00:19:10.360] - Gordon
And that doesn't actually make a big effect on people visiting the site, but it makes the database a lot bigger and the search requests are going to take a little bit less time... Sorry, it's going to take a little bit longer because you've got so many more records to go through. So anything you can do to optimise your site will, in the end, make it better for everyone.
[00:19:37.630] - Taylor
Yeah, exactly.
[00:19:39.450] - Gordon
That's it from me.
[00:19:40.840] - Taylor
And that's it from me as well.
[00:19:42.230] - Gordon
Thank you for joining us. As always, you can like, share and subscribe. We're on Facebook and on YouTube.
[00:19:49.650] - Taylor
You can also go to our website thisweekwith.co.uk to find all of our past episodes.
[00:19:54.270] - Gordon
Hopefully, we'll be back next week, assuming that everything goes to plan. Until then, 1pm next Friday, we'll see you for the next episode. My name is Gordon and I'm from Drayson Design.
[00:20:06.070] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.
[00:20:08.540] - Gordon
Goodbye.
[00:20:08.980] - Taylor
Bye.
