No Script Show

Modern Web Standards

2026-07-16T00:00:00Z

Show Notes:

Here's the presentation slides. Below is the text version.

Modern Web Standards

Shared rules that keep the web open, interoperable, and robust across devices and browsers. They cover HTML, CSS, JavaScript, accessibility, performance, and security practices.

This means we:

Use well-structured, semantic HTML to give content clear meaning.
Separate content, presentation, and behavior so sites are maintainable.
Aim for cross browser and device compatibility instead of relying on proprietary or fragile features.
Standards evolve, so it’s a commitment to stay aligned with current best practices.

The Historical Evolution

The W3C was founded in 1994 to guide the web through open, shared standards.

Designers often used HTML tables for layout because CSS support was still immature.
In 1998, the Web Standards Project (WaSP) began pushing browsers to support standards properly.
In the 1990s, browser competition created incompatible implementations and fragile websites.
Better support for HTML, CSS, and JavaScript helped the industry move toward semantic, maintainable, standards-based web design.

Why it matters

Makes sites easier to update, extend, and integrate with other tools.

Web standards reduces technical debt, improves performance, and helps site to works well for more people, in more places, for longer.

Visitors get faster load times, better accessibility, and fewer glitches.
We avoid unnecessary lock-in to proprietary technologies (where an open standard exists).

Core principles

Progressive enhancement: Start with a solid, accessible core that works in basic conditions, then layer on enhancements for capable browsers and devices.
Semantic structure: Use HTML elements for their intended purpose so content is meaningful to both people and machines (browsers, search engines, assistive tech).
Responsive design: Design layouts, typography, and media that adapt gracefully to different screen sizes and orientations.
Performance and resilience: Favour lightweight assets, efficient code, and graceful fallbacks over fragile, heavy solutions.
Security and privacy: Use secure protocols (HTTPS), avoid unsafe patterns, and respect user data.

How website owners apply this

Prefer solutions that work in a regular browser without special plugins or proprietary viewers.
Avoid demanding features that rely on “magic” if they create performance or accessibility problems.
Keep content structured with meaningful headings, lists, and labels rather than styling alone.
Encourage use of responsive layouts and media that work well on mobile, tablet, and desktop.
Periodically review the site for outdated technologies (unsupported APIs, insecure embeds, obsolete formats) and plan to replace them.

Website owners don’t need to know every technical detail, but they can still make decisions that reinforce standards-based practice.

References

Transcript

[00:00:06] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the No Script Show. In this episode, we are looking at web standards, what they are, why they matter, it's principles, and why we should apply them. You can find all of the show notes and resources at no script show 33. So that's no script show slash the numbers three three. And the link, if you're watching on YouTube, will be in the first comment just below the subscribe and like buttons.

And as always over there is David Waumsley. How are you doing, David? You all right?

[00:00:38] David Waumsley: Yeah, I'm very well, Nathan. Thank you.

[00:00:40] Nathan Wrigley: Good. Yeah.

[00:00:40] David Waumsley: Yes, I'm in a strange location at the moment. Quite uncomfortable, but,

[00:00:44] Nathan Wrigley: oh, just

[00:00:45] David Waumsley: bear with, oh,

[00:00:45] Nathan Wrigley: bless you. Let's hope you managed to keep going for the next 30 minutes or so. Good luck.

[00:00:51] David Waumsley: Anyway, so this is actually the kinda last in a bit of a series that we're doing. Really, it is the last philosophical pillar of our, website owners manual. Just for a bit of context for this, so the website owner's manual is this kind of living document and style guide that we're working on to help us with web projects.

And underpinning that is some of the, well-known, established principles. And web standard is just one of these that I mentioned in the preface of the manual itself. The others, which we've already covered so fast, this brings to the last is inclusive design, designing for everybody, content design, giving users what they need and when they need it, the indie web and agile development.

So really the last one, I think that sort of dovetails together to give us, if you like, some, I don't know, credibility to, the, way we approach websites is, web standards. So that's what we're going to talk about. And I, there's a lot, again, as always for you to read on this.

[00:01:51] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, it's all good.

I, luckily I'm all at reading, so that's fine. We can,

[00:01:56] David Waumsley: and I'm useless.

[00:01:57] Nathan Wrigley: We can totally do that. So if you wanna stick up the next slide, I will read it out for those people. Yeah. That benefit from that. Here we go. So I guess we're trying to figure out what web standards are, and this slide is entitled Modern Web Standards.

Shared Rules is what they are that keep the open web open and interoperable. They keep it robust across devices and browsers. They cover things like H-T-M-L, C-S-S, JavaScript, accessibility, performance, and Security Practises. This means, and there's three bullet points here. This means that we can use well-structured semantic, HTML to give content, clear meaning.

We also separate content, presentation and behaviour. So sites are maintainable and aim for cross browser and device compatibility. Instead of relying on proprietary or fragile features, standards evolve. So it's a commitment to staying aligned. With the best current practises. So that's the slide red.

They're all very laudable, aren't they? They're lovely. But, whether or not we, managed to keep up with those, we'll see. Do you

[00:03:01] David Waumsley: wanna bring our faces back?

[00:03:02] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, there we

[00:03:03] David Waumsley: go. B to see.

[00:03:03] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:03:05] David Waumsley: I've got really nothing to say 'cause that's a good summary of this. So I'm gonna another slide with to read, so

[00:03:12] Nathan Wrigley: That's okay.

I enjoy the reading. It's all good. So, have you moved it on? Yes, you have. So this is the evolution of all of that. we're quite lucky to have had that evolution, by the way. it could have all started as a proprietary platform locked down by, I don't know, governments or private equity or whatever.

So we're quite lucky that we had this history, but here is the history potted into five little bullet points. The W three C, which I always struggled to say, was founded in 1994 to guide the web through open shared standards. We're very lucky that we had thoughtful people back then that made those decisions.

In the 1990s browser competition created incompatible implementations and fragile websites. Designers often used HDML tables for layout because CSS support was still immature. And then by 1998, the web standards project or WASP with a small a, began pushing browsers to support standards properly. And more recently, better support for H-D-M-L-C-S-S and JavaScript help the industry move towards semantic maintainable standards based web design.

yeah. Yeah. Okay. Good.

[00:04:25] David Waumsley: I find this history quite fascinating. Yeah, I, we talked a few episodes back a little bit after I'd read the, Tim Burner's lead book, the most recent one, I think from 2025. where it's talking about. So it's quite interesting how at certain points that the W three C could have not existed or could have been taken over by, commercial concerns.

But, I've got a few notes, so I'm gonna read my ones out actually. Okay. which is, that the, web standards was never just about clean code, which is I think what a lot of people associated with it. It was always about preserving the web as a universal low friction medium, something for everybody.

And in, in a way, it's there to safeguard the future against the more harmful effects of capitalism because, we would all end up with proprietary and it is a sort of stand for democracy, isn't it? It does empower people there. And I think, I, we've talked about this a lot 'cause we've gone over the history and that with this whole table base things with the websites and stuff and how, in a way that kind of wrecked the web because it was a way of being able to, with your HTML be able to reach so many different people because screen readers could read them.

the content had some sense to its markup on that. And it's, still quite incredible because in recent history, I still think of React and I think others do as well, as a, very similar mistake, this idea that Yep. your JavaScript before your HT ML and do that, but it seems to be dying out bit.

yeah. is there anything you wanted to say? I could go

[00:06:03] Nathan Wrigley: No, I, just think, I'm just gonna reiterate the fact that this really genuinely could have gone another way. And we are, I'm really struggling to find anything where humans have been Let's say I, I guess philanthropic, that's the wrong word.

Egalitarian. Let's go with that. Where this endeavour, which anybody could have seen, could have been just packaged up and sold. if, oh, access to the internet is pay to play, if you wanna have a website, you've gotta pay a fee to this company over here who controls, I don't know, the northeast of England internet or the, UK internet or the French internet, or whatever it may have been.

It really could have gone that way. And it wouldn't have surprised me if the people who, the sort of founding fathers of the internet, for want of a better word, it wouldn't be surprising to me if they had intuitions, which they had to bury deep, that oh, I wonder if you should do it this way instead.

Maybe there's a, but also, it wouldn't surprise me if they were approached by some fairly deep pocketed individuals who would've loved it to go that way, but they managed to resist all those temptations. And now we just take it for granted in the same way that, I don't know, we take shelter as a basic human right, and we take the right for freedom as a basic human right.

We now pile this in with that, access to information via the internet, more or less as a human right. And it really didn't have to go that way. And I guess we're lucky in the parts of the world where we live, because that is, is available to us. But, there are certain areas of the world where that is not the case.

And I'm sure it would be a different description that would be given of the internet in those places. So yeah, we're very lucky, basically. Long may it last.

[00:07:56] David Waumsley: Yeah. And I hope, we see, wasp, the web standards project was, I really remember that. I came into web design, when that was strong.

And you've got leaders of that creating, oh, I've forgotten the name of it. That thing where you could restyle HDML to show there was a something Garden, Zen Garden, Zen

[00:08:16] Nathan Wrigley: Gardens. Yeah.

[00:08:17] David Waumsley: That's what you

[00:08:18] Nathan Wrigley: mean.

[00:08:18] David Waumsley: Yeah. And yeah, the people voices there were fighting, if you like, against the tables, because that was taking the web off in the wrong direction.

And I think, hopefully it was seen more that, again, because it's always under threat. I think the web itself, AI is obviously a threat to it at the moment.

[00:08:35] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I think an interesting pivot has happened at some point where when the web began, almost nobody was employed. On the web, like there, there maybe a few people were getting paid to make websites, but it, it was just this buildup of protocols and buildup of, infrastructure and hardware and the backbone to the internet.

But very few people were actually getting paid in order to be on the web, if But fast forward to now we're recording this in 2026, there's a lot of people who are being paid to be online and it economics compels those people to wall up as much as possible and to, create as much wealth as they can from that thing.

So there's this interesting shift where the sort of philanthropic side, back in the day that we're talking about here, we're looking at all this history, people, I think just approach the internet in a different way. It was more of a thing that you did perhaps as a hobby, perhaps in your spare time, perhaps as a greater good mapping things, how they might be in the future.

And now that there are so many people whose jobs are online, we do have this sort of more walling up thing. you build a platform and you put a pay wall around it and all of those kind of things. So it'd be interesting to see if we can survive it, whether we can have both the open web as well as the more closed web living in harmony.

Because certainly the closed web requires the open web in order to operate. But sometimes I think the closed web forgets itself and forgets to, acknowledge that the open web needs to be there.

[00:10:18] David Waumsley: I've made some notes about open source as well. 'cause that comes into it. Yeah. But I'll move on to the next slide.

Yeah, sure. Another, one for you to read out, which is just going over some of the basics.

[00:10:26] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So, here we get to the knob of it. Really why all of this matters. So web standards reduces technical debt, improves performance, and helps sites to work well for more people in more places for longer.

That's a nice summary. it makes site easier to maintain, extend, and integrate with other tools. Visitors get faster load times, better accessibility and fewer glitches. We avoid unnecessary lock-in to proprietary technologies where an open standard it does exist. Yeah.

[00:10:57] David Waumsley: And I think that's where you can live.

there are reasons why you might need some proprietary stuff, but often what's happened is that the need, to wall people often make money means that the, open standards often get ignored. Everybody has to be on the platform when actually they don't, do they? no, there were so many websites.

Yeah.

[00:11:16] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:11:17] David Waumsley: like that. And I think, it, moving on to the open source thing, which I, for me it was, it's pivotal to this, us doing this show and me moving away from WordPress was the fact that, the, I was very much into the open source and that, and there's a new automatic documentary, which is out at the moment talking about the freedoms that something like WordPress or open source offers over proprietary.

But I think that's all well and good, but my problem often is, the same attention doesn't go to open standards. and a lot of the open source is really controlled by investor or corporate money that keeps it running who may not be so committed to the web standards themselves. So I'm, I think it's just remarkable.

It was just saying that the W three C has managed to bring together, if you like, all the biggest competitors. to agree on things for the common good. it's always been a bit of a push and shove thing where perhaps some people, as I think Tim Burners Lee mentioned about those, some people in Google that were splitting up a little bit of the W three C.

That's why we end up with, and I always forget what it is, what wg the, standards for HTML came out of a bit of a tussle there.

[00:12:38] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, okay. Oh, interesting.

[00:12:39] David Waumsley: Yeah. Yeah. So we had this sort of two documentation thing going on because it was a kind of a power play. I think subtly it's in his book anyway.

It's

[00:12:48] Nathan Wrigley: always politics, isn't it? Always. Yeah. There's

[00:12:50] David Waumsley: always this attempt. But I, this came out of that sort of shift of the fact that we got this end of browser war interoperability. Yeah. This idea that the common good, all of these browsers are gonna, at least at that level, allow, have a common HTML and CSS that everybody can use, and it will work the same in all of the browsers.

[00:13:10] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:13:10] David Waumsley: So there is at least that, which I think has been,

[00:13:14] Nathan Wrigley: quite, oh, it's a miracle. It's a miracle that any of it took off. It's a miracle that it's maintained itself. It's a miracle that people did avoid the temptation to wall everything off. we're very lucky to have all of this.

'cause, you can, rewind the clock and replay the universe, it feels like 999 times out of a thousand, this doesn't happen. it just goes into, proprietary, locked, walled garden systems right at the beginning, so that, that history and those loud voices at the start we're very lucky to have had them.

[00:13:51] David Waumsley: Yeah. Yeah. Tim Burnley particularly is, it was quite astute to realise how things could go wrong with something, which of course, the web was created outta public money, as most things aren't they? They come initially the public fund for these things. It's just, this, some billionaire turns up and able to buy.

[00:14:09] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. It'll be really interesting to see in the future, in the same way that, I don't know, a great way to summarise it would be you look on bank notes in any country and they've always got their kind of great figures from the past, and often they're really peculiar people. people who won battles and killed lots of people, Oh yeah. We'll put them on a bank note. But it'd be interesting to see if in the future, this thing that we're talking about, the internet gets that kind of status. it becomes this, epoch making thing and whether the likes of Tim Burners Lee get that moment, get that, plinth outside of an important building in the world somewhere where there's a statue of Tim and Vince Surf and all of those kind of people.

It'd be interesting to see how their legacy plays out. Yeah,

[00:14:56] David Waumsley: yeah. For the web anyway, not yeah,

[00:14:58] Nathan Wrigley: for the web. Yeah.

[00:14:59] David Waumsley: Yeah. let me move on to the next thing, the core principles.

[00:15:04] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. All right. So core principles are summarised in five bullet points and they go as follows, progressive enhancement, that's the first one.

So start with a solid, accessible core that works in basic conditions. Then layer on enhancements for capable browsers and devices. Then we've got semantic structure use HTM element, sorry, I'll start that again. Use HTML elements for their intended purpose. So content is meaningful to both people and machines.

That could be browser search engines, assistive tech and so on. Responsive design, layouts, typography and media that adapt gracefully to different screen sizes and orientations. Performance and resilience favour lightweight assets, efficient code and graceful fallbacks over fragile heavy solutions.

And finally, security and privacy. Use secure protocols, for example, H-T-T-P-S, avoid on patterns and respect user data. Gosh, there's a lot in there.

[00:16:05] David Waumsley: Yeah. Sorry, that was a long Yeah. List of things. Yeah. I should put some tongue twisters for you.

[00:16:09] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, there was one in there I had to get my head around. Yeah, well done.

[00:16:16] David Waumsley: I think I probably does somewhat the core principles. is there anything that you want?

[00:16:21] Nathan Wrigley: No, hopefully if you are building websites, all of those dominoes have fallen at some point. whether or not you implement them, at least you at least, you know what they all are. they're the kind of basis for literally everything.

you, the, thing is, it would be nice to be brilliant at all of those things, but I think it's fair to say there's a, lifetime of research in every single one of those, bullet points,

[00:16:47] David Waumsley: yes. I get stuck on the first one, which is progressive enhancements. there's a lot of great progressive enhancements, which I use now, which is we've got the views transitions, API, which lets you gracefully move from one page to the other in an app-like way, which of course you can add.

And because the fact that I think Firefox is added in it later in this year. Oh, really? Okay. Nice. Yeah. So it's, there. I think it's just, it's under the hood at the moment. I don't think it's, out for the public, but it's almost there. But you can add something like that 'cause it doesn't affect people.

And it's the same with things like text wrap, where you can, have this automatic, the browser will automatically balance or make pretty, or text, so you don't have these widows. And these are great progressive enhancements, which I use. But when it comes to the things where you go, I want to use one of the new tools, but it will break it for people who don't have, who have whole browsers.

I'm pretty poor on that kind of stuff.

[00:17:42] Nathan Wrigley: okay. Yeah. But, it's amazing that is possible. It because if you think about it, how many things have you used in the real world as well as online where basically it, it is what it is. if, there is no enhancement to anything, you can't slowly move up the ladder of capabilities, it's just no, That's not possible with that thing. it's brilliant that the web can evolve and new capabilities can be launched into browsers and it, in some cases they may work or they don't work, but in the case of view transitions, if you don't use it, nothing, worse occurs. It's just you don't get that lovely, I don't know, the title moves across the, page as you go from an archive to a blog post or something like that.

But, that's wonderful that's possible. You can slowly build it up over time. This sort of trickle effect of capabilities that land that people can use. You can see it out there in the wild, other people implementing it and copy them. Yeah, it's lovely.

[00:18:46] David Waumsley: And I think, on the semantic structure, I think, there's never been a time where, certainly for me, that I've been so aware of the fact that we have all these HTML elements that if you use them, it helps to make sense of the content, particularly for people who, for accessibility particularly.

But I, I've never known a time where people are so conscious of it, even if they getting it, for a long time, particularly with visual builders, you just put, even, you use diffs, you weren't really bothered whether you're putting it ahead and,

[00:19:15] Nathan Wrigley: oh yeah. The, you would use the font size to indicate a header and it would, a paragraph with a font size of 40, followed by a paragraph with a pon size 14 that was a header, because it was easy that way, wasn't it?

Without any knowledge that a header is actually useful. if you're just going on the visuals of it. Yeah. Sorry, I interrupted.

[00:19:35] David Waumsley: Yeah, no, that's fine. That's it. And, the fact that there's more, there's over 140 now HTML elements. It started with only 18 when it came up. Okay. So number there.

Yeah. Yeah. So I'm gonna move on. I think we may only have one more slide.

[00:19:51] Nathan Wrigley: I think we do.

no, we got the goodbye slide as well. But here's the, next one then. So this is about, application. So how website owners can apply this or apply this website. Owners don't need to know every technical detail, we just alluded to that.

But they can still make decisions that reinforce standards-based practises. And here come five points about that. Prefer solutions that work in regular, a regular browser without special plugins or proprietary viewers. View transitions, I guess is a good example of that. Avoid demanding features that rely on magic, in quotes, if they create performance or accessibility problems.

Keep content structured with meaningful headings, lists and labels. Rather than staying styling alone. Encourage use of responsive layouts and media that will work well on tablet, mobile, and desktop. And finally, periodically review the site for outdated technologies, unsupported APIs in secure embeds, obsolete formats, and plan on how to reduce them.

That kind of summarises what we were talking about one minute ago perfectly into how go from A to B how to implement. that's great.

[00:21:01] David Waumsley: Yeah. And that's it. it's particularly last point actually for me because I'm just redoing a, site, that I only did I think maybe a couple, three years ago.

And I'm just so surprised how much, particularly with CSS, how much Oh,

[00:21:16] Nathan Wrigley: really? Ah,

[00:21:17] David Waumsley: yeah. It's just things like, which things we talked about before, which we've got things like, details and summary, which now, you can make it work, without JavaScript to be, frequently asked questions, a sort of drop down thing, which works as a group and all that kind of thing, and be accessible.

So there's a whole load of stuff, which I'm surprised how much I'm chucking out of old CSS only from a few years back, which was,

[00:21:41] Nathan Wrigley: so in that scenario, you're, I don't know, you're going in and getting rid of I don't know, accordions and things like that with, Yes.

[00:21:48] David Waumsley: I'm

[00:21:48] Nathan Wrigley: just popping them out details and summaries instead.

Yeah. There's a lot of overhead that you can get rid of, JavaScript libraries that you don't need anymore simply because the browser now handles that. yes. Yeah. Okay. That's interesting.

[00:22:03] David Waumsley: Yeah. Formats of things like web p Replacing, I'm surprised that there wasn't support for that a few years ago.

And just the whole logical properties where you don't talk in terms of top, bottom, left and right, but you now talk about inline and block positions. So it's for internationalisation, so I had to change all of that stuff out. Anyway, sorry, that was just slightly off the point. looking at these, when I'm looking at these bullet points that you read out, I think the first two, which is, avoiding plugins, and, avoiding, features, that work like magic.

I think a lot of this kind of stuff is, covered. And I think we maybe should do a show on this one because there's the W three C rule of lease power, which to me is something which I have to keep, telling myself all the time, like the mantra because I think it's natural to want to overcomplicate things all the time.

But

[00:23:01] Nathan Wrigley: I think I, isn't there a, isn't there a an urge to impress clients all the time? don't you, that isn't there, that urge to show them that you are at the cutting edge and you can do these modern whiz bangy things that they've never seen before. And yeah, look, I can do this for you. Look, nobody's seen that before.

That's new and exciting. but maybe we don't, maybe we need to get out of that.

[00:23:22] David Waumsley: Yeah, there is that level of it, but there's also the level of the, reach. I was mentioning it as well, there's a lot of times when WordPress is the only solution and still is for the clients that I've got, because that's what they need.

They need to be able to go in and update the content, and that needs to go live straight away. But a good chunk of the sites that I made literally are so simple that they should have been done with H dml and CSS. And it's that kind of,

[00:23:46] Nathan Wrigley: yeah,

[00:23:46] David Waumsley: thinking it's like, why did I jump onto all of these things which need all this extra support when I've just got something that works in the browser with the most basic, web standards,

[00:23:57] Nathan Wrigley: ease would time, and it's, it is, yeah, it was muscle memory and things like that, but yeah.

You, you've had a wonderful journey though, haven't you? Because I, I think it's fair to summarise your journey as you've had to do a lot of learning, but curiously, I think you've really enjoyed it, like actually enjoyed it. I think you've got a lot of, a philosophical standpoint now that you probably didn't have before.

that you are much more wedded to open standards and interop and all of those kind of things because you are now running up against them and why they're important. Whereas before it was more about, where can I find the latest plugin to do this thing? And, I think from a, an excitement point of view and a philosophical point of view, you've, really made leaps and bounds and it's made it, it's enriched your life studying this sort of stuff, I think.

[00:24:52] David Waumsley: Yes, I think so. And it gives you a sense of optimism. There is a sort of sense at the moment. I think most people feel it with technology is, it's a bit because it's run by people who are far away, who, you know, because there's inequality in our Access to technology.

And I think, I really think, there is a growth in the sort of indie web, and I think it speaks to Gen Z who are even more sceptical of what, our generation have done under global capitalism, and I think, we're standing up for the where, but gives you a sort of purpose, if you like.

It's a statement of democracy, a simple technology that we all own and should be encouraged to use and keep it that way rather than get too, we wouldn't be where we are without, capitalism, I think anyway. And, proprietary work that's been done by people, but the, it, the shift has gone too much and I think we're seeing the shift back.

So Yeah. Yeah. It's should something very, something to be excited about where I feel with a technology that I'm locked into and I have to go with whatever, the person who controls that particular platform says I have to go with this. no. and it's quite positive how the, web CSS and HML has been improving over the last few years, Yeah. Yeah. it

[00:26:18] Nathan Wrigley: affords you some sense of freedom and ownership. And also I think it's fair to say that during the course of doing these podcasts, it we've been able to paint a picture of really moral custodianship of the web by these, individuals and organisations that we've mentioned multiple times towards the beginning of this episode and multiple others, that there does seem to be like this, I don't know how to describe it, this moral backbone, which runs through the whole thing.

And, yeah. that freedom that it affords is amazing. I'm really struggling to encapsulate what's in my head there, but I hope you get a sense of it.

[00:26:56] David Waumsley: No, I do.

[00:26:56] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. just this, yeah. Optimism maybe is the, a great way to sum it up. But, yeah, we're, lucky and privileged that we have, we are able to stand on the, the shoulders of giants, Yeah.

[00:27:11] David Waumsley: Yeah. And we've got no more apart from our final slide, which has just got a few

[00:27:16] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. The references. Yeah. So I'm not gonna read these out. The, there's just a bullet pointed list of various different pieces that have been covered and which map onto, this topic. I guess these will go in the show notes.

Yeah.

[00:27:29] David Waumsley: Yes, they will.

[00:27:30] Nathan Wrigley: So I'll just say that one more time. no script show, forward slash the number three three, I think that's right. Is it number 33? Yeah, I think so. So no script show forward slash the number three. Three. And I'm desperately trying to make that caption available to us. Yeah, there we go.

There it is. Like that no script show slash three three. Go and check it out. I think that's probably it. Is it,

[00:28:01] David Waumsley: it's a wrap.

[00:28:02] Nathan Wrigley: It is not text wrap, Not at. Oh, very good. Yeah. Very, good. in which case I will say Ciara and we will see you next time, David.

[00:28:13] David Waumsley: Yeah. Thanks Nathan. Bye-bye.

[00:28:15] Nathan Wrigley: Bye-bye.

Agile Development

2026-06-18T00:00:00Z

Show Notes:

Here's the presentation slides. Below is the text version.

Agile Development

An agile approach treats a website as a living product, not a one-off deliverable. It emphasises starting small, learning from real-world use, and iterating based on feedback and changing conditions.

Deliver improvements in small increments instead of big launches.
Start with a Minimum Viable Product rather than a “perfect” first version.
Use feedback to guide rather than sticking rigidly to initial assumptions.

It’s a mindset more than a specific process. It shapes how we plan, decide, and work together over the whole life of the site.

The Historical Evolution

Agile emerged in response to the rigid, plan-heavy software delivery models that struggled with change, commonly described as “waterfall.”

In the 1990s, methods like Scrum and Extreme Programming explored faster, iterative ways of working.
In 2001, 17 practitioners met in Snowbird, Utah and wrote the Agile Manifesto.
Since then, Agile has spread beyond software into digital products, website projects, and many unrelated industries.

Why It Matters

We prioritise outcomes, what works for users and the business, over outputs, how many pages or features we ship.

The web, our audience, and our business context will all keep changing. An agile approach helps a brand stay responsive, reduce risk, and focus effort where it makes a difference. Working in an agile way means:

We accept that some early ideas will be wrong and treat that as learning, not failure.
We plan with intention, but leave room to adapt when evidence or circumstances change.

Core Principles

People and collaboration over process and tools: Clear communication and shared understanding beat rigid workflows.
Working website over exhaustive documentation: We favour getting a usable version live, then improving it, rather than over-planning.
Responding to change over following a fixed plan: We treat the plan as a guide, not a contract, and adjust it when reality disagrees.
User value over internal preference: We prioritise the features and content that make a real difference to our visitors.

This borrows from the spirit of the Agile Manifesto and applies it to web design and development.

How Website Owners Apply This

Define a MVP: the smallest set of pages and features that delivers genuine value.
Work in short cycles with a “plan → build → review → adjust” rhythm.
Regularly review analytics, feedback, and priorities, and update the backlog accordingly.
Limit work: finish and launch small improvements rather than starting many things at once.
Capture ideas and “nice-to-haves” in a backlog instead of trying to do everything in the first release.
Remove or change features that are unused, confusing, or no longer aligned with goals.

References

Transcript

[00:00:05] Nathan Wrigley: Hello there. And welcome to the No Script Show.

In this episode, we're looking at inclusive design, what it is, why it matters, its core principles, and how we can apply them. You can find our show notes and resources at no script show slash 31. That's the numbers three one. And if you're watching this on YouTube, the link will be in the first comment just below the subscribe and like buttons.

And as always, I'm joined by David. Hello David. He's the one that does all the work. I just show up genuinely. I just show up and talk. he does all the hard work, makes the slides, does the research, thinks about everything, makes the website. Bravo. David,

[00:00:44] David Waumsley: thank you. yeah, this one, hopefully this is gonna be quick, because we're just covering, The five pillars of this, website owners manual, which I started doing, which is eagerly awaited by absolutely no one but me. Oh, and I'll bring it up actually for those who can see it on the YouTubes, if I can get my screen working Okay there. So yes, on this website owner's manual and the preface of that, I've got these sort of standards, which is how we're going to build sites in the future, and it's got these, five pillars.

And we covered one last week and we covered, which was content design. We covered, the indie web and today we're looking at exclusive design. And I've put this one, number one as the sort of priority because I think it sums up that the whole concept of inclusive design really the real unique, strength of the web as a medium.

offline, if you wanted to reach everyone, there's a significant cost. so if you have a physical location, installing ramps or something for wheelchair access, or if you, need translation services to account for other people's languages or printing out some of your materials, you might have to do that in braille.

That's expensive online. And I think this is the real beauty of online is that much of it is just free just for following a few standards. And I think, it's good to get back to I think the basics here because really for the last 30 odd nearly 40 years, really the whole industry has ignored the, this key thing about the web is the fact that it can reach everybody and include everybody quite cheaply.

when we started, with, table based designs because we wanted things to look pretty, but that really threw out the ability for screen readers to be able to read the content that was there. And right through to now we have many of the page builders that we're using really don't do a great job on putting over the HTML.

In a way that it means that, we can use services to translate it into other languages and that screen readers can read them and that kind of stuff. So I'm gonna hand it back over to you after that on spi. Yeah,

[00:03:11] Nathan Wrigley: I have a few comments about that. And the, first one is that the, the legislation in the physical world started to, ramp up to coin a phrase, quite a long time ago.

And you couldn't get away with it. So certainly in the uk, things like accessibility for, toilets and the capacity to get into a shop, over the initial steps or whatever there may be, you have to put ramps in and lifts or elevators, those kind of things. And I suppose the curious thing about that is, it's really obvious because there you are in the physical world and you're about to enter the post office and there's somebody in a wheelchair that can't get into the post office and you can see it.

It's right there. You see the, the injustice of that situation before your eyes, the web, which is becoming an increasingly important part of everybody's lives, with banking and tax filling and all of that, more or less required now online. Nobody's standing over your shoulder. Most of the time you're doing it in the privacy of your own home.

And even if they were sat next to you watching you browse the web, they wouldn't see the, problems that you are having. they might see the frustration on your face, but it's all very private, isn't it? And so I think this whole thing about 30 years on the industry hasn't really caught up. I think it's a ba basically because there's been no legislation, which is changing, but b, because the, inconvenience, it can be invisible.

It can be not seen by anybody. So anyway, there's my 2 cents. yeah,

[00:04:49] David Waumsley: no, I think it's a really good point. And I think, but it's even in with web standards themselves. they've not been particularly inclusive until recently. We've only recently have we really considered other languages when we're writing the htm l the, fact that we now, able to, in fact, we've rewritten CSS so it's no longer fixed to its dimensions, so we can actually do it, so we can code it.

So if someone's, using a, right to left language or vertical language, the design can adapt to it. But that's a really very recent thing. Anyway, I will move on to the next slide and I'll let you read that. the main points on this, if I can do this site. Okay.

[00:05:32] Nathan Wrigley: I just, that's alright. See if you can find it.

Here we go. There, Okay. So here are some four bullet points, related to inclusive design.

Inclusive design is an approach that aims to make product, services and content usable and welcoming for as many different people as possible across ages, backgrounds, abilities, and context.

It goes beyond minimum accessibility, compliance to actively look for who might be excluded and to remove or reduce those barriers. It assumes diversity as the default, not the edge case, and is an ongoing mindset, not a one-off checklist. It has been adopted by many global corporations, government bodies.

And nonprofits. I think the one that resonates most there for me is number three. But over to you, David, to give us your commentary. Yeah, again, I'll just take the last point actually about the fact that many global corporations and government bodies, and nonprofits, take inclusive design seriously.

[00:06:29] David Waumsley: And in a way I think it's the kind of likes of you and I who, have to make sites for clients who don't have the time to, to really do this kind of work that needs to be done on there. Because you'll find, with big tech, there's Microsoft, they've published their principles as well. You can find that at inclusive Microsoft do design.

Google has a process for it called product inclusion. And Apple, they've integrated accessibility features like voiceover and assistant, touch tech, technology directly into their operating systems. So they're really on the ball and they make a lot of money out of it. That's the reason why they're going to do it, isn't it?

Because the more people you can reach, Yeah. The more money they're gonna make. I think, all of it really goes beyond, exclusion. I think it's quite interesting when you think about, inclusive design and why it's useful because if you just take this recording that we're doing at the moment, so YouTube is going to take our words and turn those into closed captions.

It's gonna literally read those. Now that might, that sort of benefit there might primarily be there for people who are deaf, but it's also gonna help anybody who's in a noisy environment, it's gonna help people with a temporary ear infection. And it might just help anybody who wants to listen to this without letting other people know that they are listening to us as well.

Very sensible. Yeah. So I think, a lot of this with the inclusive design is, there's a term, actually we mentioned these before, gov uk, and they're government digital services, they refer to, this kind of inclusive as solve for one and extend to many. oh, nice. Yeah. If you put something in like those closed captions, not only does it benefit those people who would be excluded otherwise from it, but actually everybody gets those sort of benefits.

it's not something that's just for a particular fixed group of people who it helps with that. I think the interesting thing from the little bit that you just said there is the three examples that you gave are these giant corporations that are swimming. In excess cash.

[00:08:52] Nathan Wrigley: And so them being able to create these incredible technologies. So in the example of YouTube, I don't even know what the turnover for that platform is, but it's eye watering. I'm sure that feels like such a brilliant cog that they can turn to make things available to people who, I don't know, are hard of hearing.

Let's go with that. and it probably costs them pennies per video. maybe in some situations if they examined every video that they've got on there, the calculus doesn't work. hardly anybody's looking at the closed captions and what have you. But like you said, solve for one, export to many or whatever the phrase was.

[00:09:35] David Waumsley: Yeah, that's, it's amazing that those platforms can do that. But the burden for, for the audience for this podcast is people who don't have that, excess of cash. there's probably a bit of nickel and dimming, living from paycheck to paycheck, building websites, trying to, yeah, trying to just make a living out of it.

[00:09:57] Nathan Wrigley: And so those calculations are a little bit more difficult to justify, making everything accessible and doing that extra work. We're at that point where perhaps that's still being neglected because it takes that extra time and that extra expertise and so on. So there's not really any sort of question there or indeed insight, but it's just, I think, worth pointing out.

[00:10:19] David Waumsley: Yeah. No, and I think it's good I didn't put this in the notes, so it just crossed my mind as you were saying it is the fact that you, I do notice, 'cause I'm still in builder, page builder communities and stuff that when a lot of accessibility, law came out, there was a lot of people going, oh gosh, it's just one more thing we have to do to to abide by what the eu 'cause it's EU regulations that are coming up.

Yeah. Particularly with Americans who use page builders. and I think really where I've got to is that's exactly how I'd feel like gotta add in some extra work to the page builder stuff I've done to make it work. But now you're getting back to the basics again. You just think, if we'd just done it properly in the first place With decent code, we wouldn't be in that situation at the moment. and I think that's where we're going with this. If you just build them with the right mindset instead of just primarily being worried about what on the screen and think about what you are communicating in the code, in the basic html, there is so much to be gained by doing that.

So that, yeah. I guess if you're in the business of retrofitting things and that's, that takes, I don't know, two days or three days or whatever it may be, that seems like a burden. But if each time you add some semantic element to the HTML, you do the four second edition at that moment, that burden is spread out over the entire build and prop, you maybe would never notice it.

[00:11:51] Nathan Wrigley: In fact, that's interesting. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Okay. let's, I'll put on the next slide for you to read, a little look at sort of the history and I'm sorry, I'm struggling with my slides. Here we go. That's okay. Here we go. So this is the historical evolution. Shall I just read these into the record? Yeah, please.

Yeah. so this is fascinating actually. And much of this I didn't know until I caught sight of this slide. So going back right to the 1950s though, the 1950s to the 1960s, barrier free design. So this was the idea of removing physical obstacles to help disabled World War II veterans. The, that's really interesting that the world was suddenly, more full, let's say, with people who were struggling to move about.

And so things started to happen because of that. And then we move on to the 1970s, the social model of disability. This was an era which challenged the medical model, which viewed disability as something to be cured. Instead, advocates argued that people are disabled by a society that fails to accommodate their needs.

That is so profoundly interesting. Moving on to the 1980s. universal design. This aimed for a single one size fits all solution that works for everybody without needing adaptation. And then the last point on this slide, 1990s onwards, so we're into the era of what we're talking about today, inclusive design.

This acknowledges that multiple variations may need to be truly, sorry, may need be needed to truly include everybody. what a whole turning the ship scenario. This is go one direction, then go in another direction, but also the real world challenges that made that all possible. That's really interesting.

[00:13:35] David Waumsley: Yeah. I think our modern world all starts from, second world war where we, people had more than they ever had before in terms of, democracy and, things that are available to them. But yeah, I've got some notes. I'm just gonna, that, I'll just add some extra details.

So the inclusive design was popularised by Roger Coleman and his colleagues at the Royal College of Art in the uk and Universal Design, came from the us. so that's going back to the eighties there by an architect, product designer, an educator, Ron Mays, who coined that term there. And that's the one that I you know, that's the period that I grew up where was that was the whole thing.

You made everything so it would work for everybody now. And I think where you get into the inclusive design is that earlier point that we mentioned where was saying that if you, add one thing extra for a group of people, then every, everybody gets to benefit from it. So it's that may just shift there, I think.

Yeah. Yeah. a lot of what we do is universal anyway, so it is, but I just find that, anyway, I just put that slide in because I just thought it was interesting how we gradually, move forward. you could say at the moment while we're recording this, we've gone in the opposite direction where we're might is, right?

And we're, less inclusive I think at the moment of this. But, the only thing I would add is that if you were to look at that slide in a hundred years time, there would no doubt be other bullet points that have been added as the future will definitely be not the same as the present for sure.

[00:15:19] Nathan Wrigley: There'll be different interpretations and things tend to swing in different directions, but the, hopefully the thread running through it is that, the idea is that you make it easy for everybody given whatever situation they're in. But anyway, yeah. Yeah, and it just makes good, even in a capitalist society, you would still expect, obviously that's why Google and Microsoft and obviously are on board with this because it actually works.

[00:15:45] David Waumsley: anyway, I'll move on to the next slide for you to read out. okay, so this is, getting to the underpinnings of what's the point really? So why does it matter? Why it matters? Four bullet points here. Designing inclusively strengthens brands by making it easier for more people to find, use and trust what we offer.

[00:16:06] Nathan Wrigley: It also supports our ethical commitments, reduces legal and reputational risk. It often improves the experience for everybody, not just people with specific access needs. And start with a competitive edge. 95% don't even manage basic accessibility. Gosh, there's a lot in there, isn't there? Some of it more moral, some of it more carrot and stick, let's put it that way.

Some of it more moral and some of it more legal in nature. Yeah, we've covered before about the fact that, every time there's, accessibility, surveys done, they really come out with still in the sort of, in the 90%. it starts to increase, but very basic accessibility is just not done, and, and it is a case of nothing that's an extra cost, it's simply just picking the right colours in the first place so everybody can see that and, just marking things up as they should be marked up rather than just forgetting about it and just concentrating on the visuals.

[00:17:09] David Waumsley: So the really easy fix to make in short, really, the summary of this is it just makes better products and services and yeah. if you are into that, it's gonna make you more money for doing that. yeah. calculus is pretty straightforward, isn't it, when you look at it like that?

[00:17:23] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah, so it, we just only have to start with, semantic accessible HTML in the first place, and we're going to, by default, we're going to get better SEO, we're going to reach more people. let me just have a quick. you've got some downsides listed 'cause we've only ever mentioned the benefits here, haven't you?

But, you haven't got downsides listed, but you were saying are there downsides? yeah, this, I don't, I don't think there are any downsides in other accommodating, apart from the fact that you might have to start with some of the basics. one thing I suppose that I put in my notes here is that accessibility experts, are often reminding us that disability in some form or another touches nearly everybody's life at some point.

[00:18:15] David Waumsley: so we are so used to the fact of thinking about accessibility of a group of disabled people who we have to accommodate and do all this extra work for, but in reality it's not, and you realise it as you get older. I'm noticing it all the time. Oh, I have to enlarge my text so much more and that means that somebody needed to design their website so I could enlarge it on my browser, Yeah. But people have accidents, all the time. You had an operation, didn't you? yeah. Yeah. affected you for some time. So it's just all those kind of things and it's all the temper, accessibility, the experts will like to point to the fact that there'll just be situational, events where there may be a parent holding a child who only has one hand free to be able to manipulate the internet, so there will be needing to use tabbing.

And so often, because we don't test in that way, we tend to just use our mouse on the way that we typically do. We don't test whether our tab in order is correct on every page, which can just throw somebody out. So it's so interesting that, and how obvious some of these problems are when you have that little, in my case, I've had a very, straightforward life, let's put it that way.

[00:19:36] Nathan Wrigley: But I have these little moments where, like you said, you have a bit of surgery and for a period of time, normal is no longer normal, and things are different, and you suddenly encounter all these problems and the amount of totting and, moral outrage that I would, I would have, whereas before I would be completely oblivious to it was fairly profound.

And, yeah, you suddenly notice, oh, that's why is it? so yeah. but you're right. you break an arm, you break a leg, you have to carry an object. You, I don't know, you're temporarily unwell. All of these things fall into this category. So it's not necessarily just for, people who have conditions that are permanent, although I think the moral calculus is that they're probably the target audience.

[00:20:24] David Waumsley: Yeah, we, you don't want to lose the fact that there is an important political group out there who needs to be voiced as well. But, yeah, certainly we're all growing older as well, so it's more likely that we do need our internet to serve us better in that way. Do you know what I was just thinking about this.

I think I only ever once had a client who said to me, on a page where I had a form that my tab in order was all wrong. And, oh, and I just wonder, it was quite late into doing this. 'cause I obviously wasn't testing myself, so I, it just makes me wonder how many forms I created in the past where the tabbing was completely out until yeah.

Took a client to tell me. Terrible. Really. and the curious problem there is that, and this is such a compounding problem, the capacity to report the problem is potentially through something like a form. So where we're funnelling people who have these problems into platforms, which they have to overcome the very same problems in order to report the problems.

[00:21:35] Nathan Wrigley: You can see where this is going. The, the infrastructure to report complaints is often the same infrastructure that they're complaining about. Yes. And that's that. Can you imagine how frustrating that would be? I dunno, you wanna report a form not working, but the form you need to use to report the form is also not working in that way.

And, on it goes, you can imagine that writ large across almost every aspect of the internet, navigation to find the form that you need to fill out and yada on it goes. It's, yeah. that must be extremely infuriating. And I expect probably, a lot of dead ends. I find it very hard.

Let's say for example, I'm on my insurance website and I wish to cancel my policy. That is hard enough. Just being able to scan that with my eyes. I have no idea how somebody with a screen reader would finally navigate to that final button and go through the nine different pages that you've got to figure out which button am I pressing, which is the correct one to proceed here.

All of that must be just so unbelievably infuriating. Anyway, I'll get off my pedestal now. that's my, no, all good points. That's my thoughts on that. I've got another slide for you. okay. And I find it. There we go. Core principles, I think is what you're looking for. There we go. Yeah. okay, let's list out the five core principles.

They are, equity, flexibility, clarity, tolerance for error, and participation. Starting with equity, people with different abilities or context can complete key tasks with similar ease and dignity. Ooh, that's an interesting last word, isn't it? Dignity. Wow. flexibility interfaces work with different input methods, preferences and assistive technologies.

Clarity, content and controls are simple, well structured and easy to perceive. For example, pleasant contrast, clear hierarchy and plain language tolerance for error. The experience helps people to avoid mistakes and recover easily when they happen and participation. Finally, we seek feedback from a diverse range of users and iterate based on what we learn over to you.

[00:23:47] David Waumsley: Yeah, nothing to say on this. apart from the fact that you pointed out that word, dignity, it's a great word. Respect and dignity. for all. Imagine that today, and it is the bedrock of so much, isn't it? it's the sort of thing we carry around and often we don't show it, but it really is the basis of all sorts of levels of happiness.

[00:24:08] Nathan Wrigley: if you don't feel, that you have dignity. I think so much collapses on the inside and we present this interface, the internet, where that dignity is just shattered over and over again, day in, day out, minute by minute. And it must be some somewhat soul destroying, and this wonderful technology, which in theory could have enabled everything to happen suddenly becomes shut off.

Frustrating. And that whole internet, ah, I'm just not bothering, and what a shame that is. Yeah, indeed. Yeah. I'm gonna move on to the next slide, and leave it to you. So here we're looking then at how website owners apply this, so I'll just read through them again. the way to apply this is, for example, to use concise language and explain jargon when it's unavoidable.

Use meaningful headings lists and descriptive link text check actions can be completed with a keyboard and are announced to assistive technologies, alt text for images that convey their purpose. Avoid relying on colour and maintain sufficient colour contrast. Choose imagery and examples that reflect a variety of people in situations without tokenism.

[00:25:18] David Waumsley: Okay. Yeah, over to you. there's nothing new here. I guess we've probably talked about all of these things at some point. I think. why, because obviously we're in a time where everybody, particularly with the EU law coming into effect last year, 2025, where if you are serving people in the eu, you have to abide, particularly if you are earning, more than 2 million or you have 10 employees, you have to abide and bring things up to the work kind standard.

I think it's, 2.1 or whatever. so everybody's aware of this, but this is a bit more rounded than this one because there are a few things, the, particularly the things that reflect in a variety of people without tokenism, in those lists of things there and things like, language as well.

These aren't covered in accessibility. And I think the interesting thing about that is, is the fact that also what we're going to find is W CAG is changing as well. The yeah, there set of rules, which we have to apply presently, but they're moving towards a version three of the web content accessibility guidelines for those, we dunno what w CAG is, where it is going to be a little bit less rules based.

It's going to be about looking at the totality to, can't say that word Total totality. Totality, yeah. That's it of, of the experience, if you like, rather than, specific rules that you will break with it. it's gonna be quite a shift in that. I think, with all of this, I'm tempted to have a bit of a rant about AI as I often am, I could see in the notes there was that you were definitely swerving in that direction.

[00:27:10] Nathan Wrigley: Go on, do it. it's just, I think I might do later. I bought another note in there I couldn't resist. But, but yeah, we moved towards that where, we shouldn't be letting AI do our HTML. It's the thing, it's our cont content and how we market up and how we want it to be interpreted by us to other human beings.

[00:27:36] David Waumsley: And I think, That's really what we have to get back to with the inclusive design, where we're creating this for other people with respect and dignity. And I think this is always the thing that we're trying to get across with this over, over and above the legal things that we have to cover with accessibility.

I think it would also cover when we're looking at, inclusive design will be avoiding the thing of that I think you were alluding to before with sort of dark patterns. You were talking about trying to, cancel your insurance or something, and it might be nine pages or something like that.

These are often purposeful, dark patterns, aren't they? To Yeah. Stop, prevent somebody doing what they wanted to do in order to keep them on longer and make more money out of them. So I think, this is also included in this. It's something that we want to avoid all the time, keep that kind of respect for people as we're doing stuff.

[00:28:31] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, you would hope that there would be some sort of self-correction mechanism, but that doesn't seem to be the case. companies employing these deceptive designs seem to thrive. Unfortunately. I wish it were not the case. I wish that people would, express their fury and these things would go away, but sadly it seems to be reasonably effective.

So they keep them in. the w the worst of them is airline booking, airline tickets. you've got, you've paid for your ticket, you think, and then what's going on here? you've got this 17 pages of cars and insurance and hotels and confirmation of seats and all of this, and never quite know whether I've succeeded.

Yeah. Book a ticket. Anyway, I digress. But yeah. Yeah. But it's a, it's a real key thing because it's such short term thinking, isn't it? Because it works for a little while. People can't cancel things that they want to cancel, so you make more money. But in the long run, everybody gets so tired of it that, you are you're no longer considered a company that people want to deal with.

[00:29:41] David Waumsley: Eventually you might make a lot of money in the short term, but eventually, it spoils it for everyone. and interestingly, despite the fact that the internet's been around for a while, we still are a bit of wild west mentality. Yeah. And it's still an emerging technology, so I know you've been able to book flights for a while.

[00:30:00] Nathan Wrigley: I, I also know that a lot of people still use the telephone and, contact a travel agent to avoid all of that kind of stuff. But it, I, what I'm trying to say is I think the jury's still out with this sort of stuff. Maybe in a decade we really will have grown weary about them and things like the airline industry and the.

Insurance industry and whichever industry is employing these deceptive designs, maybe they will wake up to that and realise that quick buck is actually, something that the longevity of the company in into decades and, multiple decades might be affected by that. but at the moment, profiteering seems to come before anything.

but maybe that will change. Yeah, there was another note that I put in here because I think when you read through that list that you did first there about how you can apply it, and most people might look at that and go, that's just a list of things that come under accessibility. And I think probably one of the key things that the web industry seems to be learning at the moment is that about this particular medium is that, the skill sets themselves can't work in silos.

[00:31:08] David Waumsley: So we were talking last time about the, that being the point of content design. The fact that content isn't written first and then designed second, both have to happen at the same time. And I think that's the case with all of this, design that we're realising, that we all the skills need to come together, we need to work together.

that's the whole thing about agile as well, which we'll talk about as a separate thing. They all interconnect this idea that you work on a ongoing basis with, multiple skills at the same time to constantly keep improving and making a website better. And I think this kind of fits into that whole thinking.

Does that make sense? yeah, that does make sense. That makes perfect sense. But again, time will tell what Yeah, it will. Let me move on to another slide, shall I? Okay, sure. And we're on to designers, I think. yeah. How a designer, might apply this. I'll just read them through again. So inclusive about patterns, most exclusion happens through common patterns.

[00:32:14] Nathan Wrigley: For example, navigation menus, dialogues, forms, carousels, et cetera, which are implemented badly. They start from semantics and HTML, not from visuals designed for variance. Not the average user. For example, hand injury, noisy train, cracked screen. Oh, cracked screen. That's an interesting one. test with assistive tech and real people and bake it into the process, not just audits at the end.

That, that's number, the last one there, the number five. That's how I would've always handled it. Just some sort of audit at the end. and like I alluded to earlier, or you alluded to, if it's like a 22nd task repeated hundreds of times, that's, that feels much nicer than the three day headache at the end, where you've then got to go back and rebuild everything, which is probably gonna take more like six days or 10 days.

But that's quite a shift. That is quite a shift getting into that pattern. And I'm doing all of those other four things that you've got. In front of you, especially when the tools that we're using page builders in the WordPress space, for example, just drop this stuff in a handy one click, easy way to do it with no necess necessarily.

No way to understand how that's been implemented badly. yeah. Yeah. And I think, the last point back into the process, and that's why I think it links in with Agile. And that's generally the way, we used to have a sort of waterfall process that we would follow, where we would have an idea, something would get signed off as a visual on our website.

[00:33:49] David Waumsley: Someone would go away and then you would do a checklist to check everything's working, and then out it would go, we're agile. We bring in a small group of different skills that keep the focus on what we're trying to do all the time, and we keep adding to incrementally improving the product that we're doing.

And I think that's why this kind of links in with that, and we'll talk about that, I think, separately. But yeah, it's interesting because most of the things we don't even consider, the crack screen and stuff like that where we're trying to think about all the different situations that someone could find themselves in trying to access the web and think about them as we're going through the process.

there is a good book, often mentioned this fellow, Hayden Pickering, he's written. Yeah. You, he gets a lot of attention, doesn't he? From He does, yeah. He's a really, a serious thinker on this. He's wrote a book, which I have, called Inclusive Components, and he walks through for those on the technical side, some of the common, UI patterns that you'll have.

So accordion's menus, tall tip sliders, all that kind of stuff. it will talk about the code, about how you can do this in a, an inclusive manner, and try and make it as bulletproof as possible. In fact, one of the things, it is still unsolved because, there is no HTML for the card, and we talk about cards Oh yeah.

All the time. Yeah. And we're always stuck with this. This is going off point actually a little bit, but I was just thinking about this again today. so we use cards so much, they're often, a little, preview of a blog post or something like that where there might be a heading, some text, an image, perhaps another link in there.

And we want that whole thing to be clickable because it seems obvious that this whole card should be clickable. And obviously the wrong way to do it is to put it all in an A tag. So everything is there. Now, why that's wrong is because the AAG should just be containing, the text and link to it, not all of this other stuff with images and all this other stuff.

So that's the wrong way to do it. But the only other solution we've got is this sort of CSS hack at the moment where we put this overlay over the top of it, but also this, and Hayden doesn't solve this by the way. It's still to be solved. This thing about the web, you can put an overlay on, so the whole thing if you like, becomes clickable, but you can't select the individual text within that, which is something that you should be able to do.

So the, there still is no good solution. there's a sort of a JavaScript hack for this kind of thing, so you can delay it so the JavaScript will, so you can select your text and when you, anyways, it's a complex thing, but it's just a really interesting, and that we're still at that point now, you know what, nearly 40 years on since the Yeah.

Still evolving. It's still an emerging technology. There are still bits, key bits like that which need, another look basically. Yeah, there are, I'll put 'em at the end there. There are some other links to some things as well where you can learn if you like how to, start applying this.

I'm, I think actually we are at the end. I'm going to move on. I'll just quickly add that, any links that are mentioned will go into the descriptions and, what have you on the no script, show website. So if you go to no script show slash three one, the numbers 31, you'll be able to find the links there and actually showing them on the screen, on clickable, in a video.

[00:37:27] Nathan Wrigley: That would be nice. there's some, links. You don't need those reading out I'm guessing, or do you no. put them on for those who can see it. But yes, you're quite right. They'll be there. And the PDF that we're using there will also be online and there'll be the clickable links on there, but there's a whole bunch of them things that we've mentioned before, which I think if you want to learn more about this topic, these are good resources there to get into it.

[00:37:52] David Waumsley: And I think that's the kind of way the web is moving at least at the top end. and I think the summary of the whole show really is the fact that it costs less to do it right in the beginning. and I think that also shows that it makes you more, not only does it cost less to do it right at the beginning, but it makes you more in the end, curiously.

[00:38:20] Nathan Wrigley: So it's a bit of a, I hate to use the phrase, but it's a bit of a win-win. Yes. Oh, I, I wonder though, where fighting this, because it does seem, obviously page builders, they were popular for time and now AI is really popular and it's, this idea that, AI will be able to make our websites for us and, I'm really becoming.

[00:38:43] David Waumsley: Much more adverse to this. we should be creating websites for human beings all the time and not trusting, ai. And there was a wonderful quote, and I just included this that I saw. That's lovely. A guy. Yeah. Alex, Wood, who's a software engineer and a bit of a tech writer. He is got a blog and he said, let in an LLM write for you is like paying someone to work out for you.

And I really find, okay, it's exactly that, isn't it? It you de-skill yourself, but also when you apply this to the web, it's almost like you are tripping other people over at the same time as Yeah, because yourself, it's a black box, isn't it? You're just, you, don't look at the code and with regret, dear listener.

[00:39:26] Nathan Wrigley: I think the code is the point. If you're gonna build these sites correctly, you do need to get into the code. Yeah. And, examine whether or not it's been implemented in the most accessible way. So yeah. Gosh. HI love that. Anyway, that, that brings us to the end. I dunno. Okay. In which case, I will bid you adia.

Just one more reminder, no script show slash 3 1 31 for the show notes and what have you. And, we'll see you next time, David. Yeah. Have a good, thank you. Have a good day. And see you soon. Yeah. Bye-Bye. Bye.

Inclusive Design: Websites for Everyone

2026-05-20T00:00:00Z

Show Notes:

Here's the presentation slides. Below is the text version.

Slide 1: Inclusive Design

Websites for Everyone

Slide 2: Website Owner’s Manual

The Website Owner’s Manual is a project management tool. A hub for strategic planning, brand assets, and resources.

Its job is to give owners control over the legal, technical, and business responsibilities they inherit with website ownership.

Standards:

Inclusive Design — Designing for all.
Content Design — Meeting needs.
Web Standards — Building resilience.
Agile Development — Being adaptable.
IndieWeb — Taking control.

Slide 3: Inclusive design...

Is an approach that aims to make products, services, and content usable and welcoming for as many different people as possible, across ages, backgrounds, abilities, and contexts.
It goes beyond minimum accessibility compliance to actively look for who might be excluded and to remove or reduce those barriers.
It assumes diversity as the default, not the edge case, and is an ongoing mindset, not a one-off checklist.
It has been adopted by many global corporations, government bodies, and non-profits.

Slide 4: The Historical Evolution

1950s–1960s: Barrier-Free Design. Removing physical obstacles to help disabled WWII veterans.
1970s: The Social Model of Disability. This era challenged the "medical model" (which viewed disability as something to be cured). Instead, advocates argued that people are "disabled" by a society that fails to accommodate their needs.
1980s: Universal Design. This aimed for a single, "one-size-fits-all" solution that works for everyone without needing adaptation.
1990s onward: Inclusive Design. This acknowledges that multiple variations may be needed to truly include everyone.

Slide 5: Why it matters

Designing inclusively strengthens brands by making it easier for more people to find, use, and trust what we offer.
It supports ethical commitments and reduces legal and reputational risk.
It often improves the experience for everyone, not just people with specific access needs.
You start with a competitive edge. 95% don’t even manage basic accessibility.

Slide 6: Core principles

Equity: People with different abilities or contexts can complete key tasks with similar ease and dignity.
Flexibility: Interfaces work with different input methods, preferences, and assistive technologies.
Clarity: Content and controls are simple, well-structured, and easy to perceive (for example, pleasant contrast, clear hierarchy, and plain language).
Tolerance for error: The experience helps people avoid mistakes and recover easily when they happen.
Participation: We seek feedback from a diverse range of users and iterate based on what we learn.

Slide 7: How website owners apply this

Use concise language and explain jargon when it’s unavoidable.
Use meaningful headings, lists, and descriptive link text.
Alt text for images that convey their purpose.
Avoid relying on color and maintain sufficient color contrast.
Check actions can be completed with a keyboard and are announced to assistive technologies.
Choose imagery and examples that reflect a variety of people and situations, without tokenism.

Slide 8: How designer apply this

Inclusive design is about patterns — most exclusion happens through common patterns such as nav menus, dialogs, forms, and carousels implemented badly.
Start from semantics and HTML, not from visuals.
Design for variance, not the “average” user (for example, hand injury, noisy train, cracked screen).
Test with assistive tech and real people.
Bake it into the process, not just audits at the end.

Slide 9: References

Humane Web Manifesto — principles for a more respectful web.
Inclusive Design Principles — people-centred principles for digital interfaces.
Inclusive Design Guide — an evolving, practice-oriented guide from the Inclusive Design Research Centre.
Microsoft Inclusive Design — guidebooks, tools, and videos on inclusive design practice.
NN/g: Inclusive Design — overview of inclusive design and how it relates to UX and accessibility.

Transcript

[00:00:05] Nathan Wrigley: Hello there. And welcome to the No Script Show.

[00:03:11] Nathan Wrigley: I have a few comments about that. And the, first one is that the, the legislation in the physical world started to, ramp up to coin a phrase, quite a long time ago.

It can be not seen by anybody. So anyway, there's my 2 cents. yeah,

[00:05:32] Nathan Wrigley: I just, that's alright. See if you can find it.

Here we go. There, Okay. So here are some four bullet points, related to inclusive design.

Inclusive design is an approach that aims to make product, services and content usable and welcoming for as many different people as possible across ages, backgrounds, abilities, and context.

Content Design

2026-04-02T00:00:00Z

Show Notes:

Here's the presentation slides. Below is the text version.

What Is Content Design?

Is a discipline created by Sarah Richards (now Winters) while transforming GOV.UK from hundreds government websites into a single resource.
Has been adopted by other governments such as the US, Australia, and New Zealand.
Meta (Facebook) formally switched to content design, embedding content designers across every product team.
Companies like Shopify, Atlassian, Apple, Google, and Microsoft have followed.

A Different Way of Thinking

Content is not written first and designed second — both happen together, shaped by evidence.
The format (words, video, a tool, a table, nothing at all) is a design decision, not a default.
The goal is to meet a genuine user need, not to fill a page or promote the organisation.

Why It Matters

Most websites are written inside out - reflecting what the organisation wants to say. Content design flips that and starts with what users are actually trying to do. So...

We create content because there is a real user need for it, not because it feels like something we should have.
We choose the right format for the job, whether that is a short paragraph, a list, a video, or a single direct answer.
We treat content as a live thing that can be improved, pruned, or removed when it stops serving users.

Core Principles

All content should answer a real question or help complete a task.
Decisions are based on research and audience — not internal preference.
Words are not always the answer — consider tables, checklists, and visuals.
Use words the audience uses, not jargon, brand, or insider terminology.
Unclear content erodes trust — be consistent, accurate, and honest.
Content should be planned, reviewed, and retired — not forgotten.

How Website Owners Apply This

Look for evidence — search queries, customer questions, or analytics.
Use plain language; avoid jargon and provide meaningful headings.
Choose the simplest format — if a list works better than prose, use a list.
Remove or update content that is rarely visited or no longer relevant.
When in doubt, cut — short and clear tends to perform better.

References

Transcript

[00:00:05] Nathan Wrigley: Hello there and welcome to the No Script Show. In the last episode, we talked about creating a website owner's manual. This is an editable document that is both an online brand guideline and a checklist for creating a website and online presence. In this episode, we're looking at content design, which is a relatively new discipline, and it's one of the main pillars.

Of the website owner's manual, we'll talk about what it is, why it matters, what are its core principles, and how a website owner can apply them. You can find all of the show notes and resources, which we mentioned in this episode at No Script Show. Forward slash three zero. So 30. And if you're watching on YouTube, the link for that will be in the first comment just below the like and subscribe buttons.

And as always, I'm joined by David Wamsley. Hello, how are you doing?

[00:00:57] David Waumsley: Hello. Thanks Nathan. Yeah, I'm very well. I thought this year we were gonna be just doing a kind of content on building websites. That's, that was the plan. That was the plan. Start with that. Yeah. Start with that, plumber site, which we started there, and then we moved into this idea of this kind of owner's manual and I'm pleased because it's.

The show I think was always about looking outside of the world that we knew, which was kind of WordPress and page builders and all that, and seeing what was going on more generally in the web and the building. And so it started off as off with the kind of modern CSS. And then, as soon as we.

Got into that and that's changed so much because of browser interoperability. Then suddenly I think our content started moving towards, wait, we ought to try and look at the HTML before we move on to the CSS.

[00:01:50] Nathan Wrigley: Right?

[00:01:50] David Waumsley: So we've moved into that and now I think I've gone one step back even further to say, hang on.

Perhaps we ought to decide why we're actually putting this HGML out in the first place and what I think it is. Yeah. And I, so I'm quite pleased. So I think our content will. We will take this kind of idea, this concept of a website owner's manual, and then we should cover all aspects of this kind of profession, I think one way or another with this.

Yes. So yeah,

that's,

[00:02:16] Nathan Wrigley: I'm gonna rename you David derailed warmly. that's, that's what's happening. I'm

[00:02:22] David Waumsley: totally makes sense a bit because I've gone off. So many different tangents. I said, oh, I love it. The show's gonna be about this and it's gonna be about, but I think I finally got that. We've just stepped back enough to get back to some of the fundamentals.

Yeah.

[00:02:33] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. That's lovely. Okay, shall I put the slides up? Would that be helpful?

[00:02:37] David Waumsley: Yeah, please do. Yeah.

[00:02:38] Nathan Wrigley: Are you on the correct one for now? Let's see if we can find it.

[00:02:41] David Waumsley: Yeah, I am. Yeah,

[00:02:42] Nathan Wrigley: we. Go content design, giving users what they need, when and how they need it. It's a lordy claim, David. It's a, there's a lot in that.

[00:02:52] David Waumsley: I'll move to the next slide here, which I just got. so the website owner's manual, which we featured, started working on it, is working in progress at the moment. But, so in that it's going to be a link and hopefully this episode will be one of the resources that I can link to on, on the preface.

People who are listening to this won't be able to see the slides, but showing the first few pages of the website owner's manual. And there's a selection of standards there, which I thought we would cover now. And these are, if you like, these are gonna form the pillars of the manual. They give it some academic weight, so it'll, talk about, where these kind of philosophies and these ideas and standards come from.

Okay. We've already talked about one of those, which is, indie web, which actually turned out to be our most. Popular video so far. Oh

[00:03:43] Nathan Wrigley: okay. That's interesting.

[00:03:44] David Waumsley: yeah, by far. so I dunno why people tuned into that. So it's probably of interest. And this one is obviously content design, which is a, fairly new thing, which is really about meeting.

actual needs. So we'll do something on the others, which you can't see. Probably over here. I'm, I dunno if you see my little pointer, I

[00:04:04] Nathan Wrigley: can actually see your little pointer. Yeah. you're hovering over the preface section, aren't you? The standards?

[00:04:08] David Waumsley: Yeah. So I put standards, so we'll have links in the manual that will go to the EASE videos as some other resources.

But, in there, there is, Content design in, the indie web inclusive design, which is all about designing for all and reaching more people web standards, which is about building resilient sites and keeping the web interoperable and open. And then there'll be, I think we should do a, video as well on agile development, which is really about.

Kind of being adaptable if you like to change, which is always going on when it comes to technology and not wasting money.

[00:04:42] Nathan Wrigley: yeah.

[00:04:42] David Waumsley: Yeah. So that's just to put that in context. Let's move on to the actual slides. I'm gonna hand it over mostly to you.

[00:04:48] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So we are on the content design slide. Shall I just go through the bullet points?

Would that be helpful?

[00:04:55] David Waumsley: Yes, please.

[00:04:56] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. first of all, we're looking at a picture of Sarah Winters and David's covering her up now. Sorry about that, Sarah. so content design, this is a discipline created by Sarah Richards, who is now Sarah Winters whilst transforming the Gov UK website from hundreds of government websites into a single resource being a user of those websites.

we'll get onto that, but. Blooming good. it has been adopted by other governments such as the United States, Australia, and New Zealand. Facebook or Meta, I suppose more correctly, formally switched to content design, embedding content designers across every product team and a whole bunch of other giant companies like Shopify, Atlassian.

Apple, Google, Microsoft have also followed suit. I actually didn't know about the, the sort of cascade of the government in the UK doing this and then the US, Australia, and New Zealand kind of tweaking their operations in the same way. That's curious.

[00:05:56] David Waumsley: Yeah, I think the Cov UK site, has really changed the industry, at least at the high end.

I think, for most people, building small business websites, probably not even aware of the sort of impact of it and. So content design itself is, it's a formal discipline that's pioneered by, gov UK or the government digital services as they are. So they've been adopted, as you say, by the, the us their digital services, as well as the Australian government.

And, I'll probably mention this later as it go, as we go on through the slides, but, Really, I think without Gov UK we wouldn't have got the growth of things like Agile as well. this kind of new approach to building websites, very user focus and adaptable way of building websites. We used to see them as projects that had a set amount of money to be paid on 'em.

And that was it. You planned it and that was done.

[00:06:56] Nathan Wrigley: I didn't realise that. So the Gov UK website was a sort of pioneer in that whole field of Agile, was it? That was one of the.

[00:07:02] David Waumsley: Yeah, Agile goes back 20. I mean we're going back to 2013 when this started with it, but it was such a big break to find someone like the UK government of all people who are.

Generally would expect with governments, they want to know what they're paying for upfront with public money. Yeah. They want a set price for everything. And when you accept agile, you accept the fact that there is no actual end price for this one. Yes. You just keep reiterating as much as is needed to do the job and hopefully it will be an A saving in the long term rather than these projects.

And so to take that kind of risk to move. for a big organisation like the UK government to do that was major in backing up, if you like. Other people do it agile and now, most companies, I think, who've got serious online presence will use Agile as a way of developing their sites.

[00:07:56] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. It, I guess it stems from the fact that the web has gone from something which was nice to have.

Into something which is certainly in the, in terms of the UK government website is necessary to have, isn't it? It's like a utility, basically. There's so much functionality of normal life paying taxes and booking, driving tests as we'll see in a minute, that kind of thing. It's moved over there and so in a sense it becomes like another branch of government, which in the UK we have this thing called the NHS, which is, the health service.

it doesn't have an end. there's no pot of gold which runs out it, every year there's a further spend on the NHS, and next year there's more money, and next year there's more money. And so it's like that, it's just now a thing which you have to pay for each and every year. anyway, sorry, I digress.

[00:08:45] David Waumsley: No, it's fine. the other points that I need to cover is just that the Gov UK replaced over 300 individual agencies that were working. they did it over a 18 month period. So it finished in late 2014 and it merged thousands of websites. And, I'm just bringing it up on the screen here.

Yeah,

[00:09:07] Nathan Wrigley: I see it.

[00:09:09] David Waumsley: so the argument from Sarah Winters was, That, with. Kind of government sites. If they were complex, then users need to turn to third party copycat sites to be able to do things. which she says, I quoted her is that this made a tax on the poor or the confused. And her prime example for pushing this forward was booking a driving test, something which Nathan, you were telling me you just doesn't actually feel.

[00:09:36] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, literally did it like a few weeks ago for my youngest son, and it took minutes, like minutes from Googling. I, I didn't know where the URL was or anything like that, from googling it to completing it, paying for it, having it booked, and it's in the calendar. Four minutes maybe, something like that.

Yeah, I had to have a few minutes lying around like my Dr my son's driving, licence number. But really beyond that, everything was just so self-explanatory. It was dead simple. Yeah. Breath of fresh air, actually. And also what's curious about that is now the bar that I've set myself for this website.

It's always simple.

[00:10:15] David Waumsley: yes.

[00:10:16] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, cool.

[00:10:18] David Waumsley: No, it's fine. what I was gonna say is that wasn't really one of our examples that previously that's what you would need to do, is that you would need to go to a third party most of the time. Or most people were to book the driver test, which was more expensive because you're paying this third party where now, 'cause everyone will go to the Gov UK site.

And we were talking about this because you've been getting a visa for India and that's been quite a, hassle and I know. Being in India at the moment that obviously they haven't adopted this process here. So literally everything you do, you go through a third party here. If you want a visa, if you want your sort of ID cards that we have here, the sort of, ration cards as well that they still have over here.

You do everything by third parties because the websites are just a jumble of

These

[00:11:08] David Waumsley: different sites.

[00:11:09] Nathan Wrigley: yeah.

[00:11:12] David Waumsley: on the slide here, I've just got some examples on it, and it's because I was listening to a, an interview that she did, Sarah Winters, that is, and she was mentioning in that, that there were before, three and a half, 3000.

Government websites that were put into one, so it's not just these 300 different

[00:11:31] Nathan Wrigley: wow

[00:11:32] David Waumsley: bodies. and most of 'em had their own teams and one that she mentioned before. So I looked them up and I've got 'em on the screen for people who can see it. There's one called Beefy and Lamby. Dot co. Your uk, it's now deceased.

Do you remember this at all?

[00:11:46] Nathan Wrigley: No, but when I saw this slide, it made me chuckle that, what the heck was the government paying for this for? I can get it, but equally it's like they've got some famous people to do cooking,

[00:12:01] David Waumsley: but not

[00:12:01] Nathan Wrigley: even

[00:12:01] David Waumsley: the

[00:12:02] Nathan Wrigley: famous chefs to do cooking. Anyway, go on. You just,

[00:12:05] David Waumsley: no.

It's, it is eighties cricket stars. It's kind both them and, Alan Lamb and honestly. The, it's worth going to, YouTube and looking up, beefy and lamby and listening to some of these old, 'cause it comes from the TV ads that they used to do where they were trying to promote quality lamb and beef to have all at the time, and they really are so saucy British postcard type stuff.

The so real double entendres in them. It's hysterical. Yeah. But yeah, absolutely. The point that she was making, why are the UK government giving you, because they needed to fill up this website. They're giving you recipes to what to do with this land. Yeah. And this beef that they're promoting.

It's

[00:12:47] Nathan Wrigley: three and a half thousand though. That's so interesting. So that's three and a half thousand, maybe not three and a thousand Exactly. But many thousands of independent agencies. All with their own sort of quirky design language, ways of doing things, tech stack, the whole thing is a mess. I suppose you had to go through that though.

the internet came along, nobody knew how it would need be needed by the population at general for booking a driving test as an example. yeah. And now we've reached, the point where it's matured enough that we now know that this sort of stuff really is best handled by one entity. I assume it is anyway, if done right.

[00:13:28] David Waumsley: And the other thing about GV UK is that it's the only website to date who's won the prestigious design Museum's Design of the year award, in which it won back in 2013, even before the job had been completed. and I like this, this is the way that I could. Because in this present age, we, particularly with ai, our AI will create you this wonderful looking website.

I think sometimes we just still get stuck in this idea that websites are these pretty pictures online rather than something which actually helps people with their lives and communicates, useful information. And I think, you could tell when you look at this site, you couldn't be more.

Bare bones, but it's more useful than say, beefy and lamby. When we're looking at

[00:14:16] Nathan Wrigley: these two comparisons, you are right. So we're looking at a, page, which is basically a white canvas with black text of varying sizes, some links and a few buttons. But the point is it's, you don't, I don't need. I don't need images and fun overlapping kind of containers and CSS grid and this, that and the other thing.

I just need to know how to book a driving test and that apparently can be done in five or six steps and it makes that You know that case right at the beginning and it, it, really didn't occur to me how profoundly great that website was until you started Explaining it in these videos and now I get it.

Now I'm appreciative of it and it's beauty is in its simplicity without a doubt.

[00:15:02] David Waumsley: Yeah. It's usability.

[00:15:03] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:15:05] David Waumsley: Let's go on. so yeah, I'll leave the slide for you to read out. I should explain what it is. Okay.

[00:15:11] Nathan Wrigley: All

[00:15:11] David Waumsley: right.

[00:15:11] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, here we go. we require a different way of thinking. So following on, a little bit from what we were just talking about.

Here's three bullet points for you. Content is not written first in this process and design. Second, both are both happen at the same time together, and it is all shaped by evidence. And the format. So that could be words, videos, a tool table or nothing. is a design decision, not a default. You'll have to explain that one to me.

And the third one, the goal is to meet a genuine user need. I think we just covered a little bit, not to fill a page or promote the organisation. Yeah. Okay. So let's tackle those, but particularly number two is confusing to me.

[00:15:57] David Waumsley: Okay. Yeah. I think, it all clicked with me, what she was saying with this.

and I think it makes context, it makes sense in context to her history. So she's at the point of Sarah Winters, who's come up with this idea that we should be doing content design is the fact that she was a copywriter, but originally she went into design and she was doing copywriting.

So when you've got this job. Bring it together, all of this copy from all of these different sites to put it in there. You realise that it doesn't really make sense to have this, and then you design over the top. So this is the problem I've been having recently and why it clicked with me is because as a reaction to coming from page builders and templates, I've been keen to get back to designing.

Two content. So I now recently been saying, we need the content, we need good HTML, and then we design over the top of this. But in actual reality, you're doing two things at the same time with it because you already know that you are making design, decisions. A couple of episodes ago, I did that kind of single page website for Paul The plumber.

Yeah, the plumber. I was indicating that if you wrote the text down in a normal thing, then you can style it and you are done. But actually there's a bit of a cheat in that because I already knew, because I had the design, because I'm the designer and the copywriter, I already knew that I was going to put this hide and reveal with this summary and details section in there.

So I think what this is saying here is that you can't separate the content. from the design because the way that you might want to give that content, you want it in its simplest form. Yeah. And to that, degree, you need to understand design. You need to know that you can make this one sentence huge, or that you can put things into lists or that you can hide and reveal certain stuff.

You need to know that. So

[00:17:53] Nathan Wrigley: that's a, really easy thing to say, isn't it? But quite hard to make the shift. Into actually implementing that because the temptation is always to go for one or the other, get this pixel, pixel perfect magazine style, layout. And then, oh, darn it, the, the textbook has been supplied by the, client doesn't fit so we'll reduce the font size a bit and in it will go, I will be very happy.

But if you do it the other way around, then you get the text and then you've got to worry about it fitting in that government website, They've got the perfect. They, fixed it perfectly by just basically obliterating design. You know that there is design there, but it's very minimal.

It's basically text, and so the text is front and centre. It's everything. So there's no real imagery or anything like that they've got to worry about. So they've made it easier for themselves in that scenario, but I can imagine that there'd be. There'd be collisions with this, approach at some point.

But that's the whole point of the modern web is that you can adapt your designs based upon the size of everything. the size of the text can map to the size of the viewport and things like that.

[00:19:04] David Waumsley: Yeah, and I think, on that second point that, the format, you need to, if somebody, if you have.

If you consider there is content design, and that's important at all stages through, the development of a website. And even as it keeps changing that, that should always be there, present it, it does make sense because sometimes, you as a copywriter, it would be pointless. So just writing out when you would be saying no, a table or, a chart.

Yeah. Or something would convey this information much better than just words. Even though, 95% of the web. Words, but sometimes, it wants,

okay,

[00:19:43] Nathan Wrigley: I think I'm following what you were talking about there then. So it's the not a default bit at the end, which I've now understood.

Okay, thank you.

[00:19:50] David Waumsley: that's really what it is. And let me move on to the next

[00:19:53] Nathan Wrigley: slide, which is,

[00:19:54] David Waumsley: yeah.

[00:19:54] Nathan Wrigley: Shall I read those ones out as well? Yes, please. So this really is an exploration of why it may matter. So most websites are written inside out, reflecting what the organisation wants to say. Content design flips that.

Starts with what users are actually trying to do. Let me pause and think about that for a moment. Yes. Okay, great. So three bullet points. The first one, we create content because there is a real user need for it, not because it feels like something we should have that's harder than it sounds, especially if you've got clients breathing down your neck.

Sorry, I'll keep going. we choose the right format for the job, whether that is a short paragraph, a list, a video, or a di single direct answer. The final one, we treat content as a live thing that can be improved, pruned, removed, whatever, when it stops serving users. Okay.

[00:20:44] David Waumsley: Yeah. Yeah. So this is again, flipping it.

And that of course, that's what Gov UK is known for, is being user focused. so everything is put through that lens and there's nothing new about this kind of content design in a way because it's already there in things that people are observing, SEO and UX design anyway. And you could say it is UX design, a lot of it, but I think what sort of makes it different is that, certainly with SEO.

Yeah, you will probably look for content gaps, but you're probably unlikely to be thinking about how you're going to be removing data that is no longer of use. Yeah. So if you get an SEO, they're not going to be doing that. And with a UX design or something, they're going to make what content comes to them easier to consume in their design.

They're gonna be saying, okay, this is the written word I've got from Sarah, and I'll make it beautiful. But they're not, it doesn't feel like it's their remit to be able to question the validity of whether that. Actual data was needed in the first place, whether it should be on the site. And that's in way where this comes at it, because it's, more brutal than that.

It takes you back further and says, nah, does the user need this? Do they need all of that?

[00:21:57] Nathan Wrigley: Yes.

[00:21:58] David Waumsley: Yeah. Okay. And, if they don't need it any longer, take it away. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's what's different. And and we are used to saying, oh, we need to give them this. This is what we, you know about us.

But, if we want to, if we want to serve our customers, we actually have to. Think about what the customer's needs are, don't we? Rather than

[00:22:18] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. That's, so in, and that is a conversation that I basically never had. I was far too cowardly to, to push back on what I was told to deliver. I just, yeah, I'll do that.

And, and it, but it's good to have that prism in your head to know that's a skill that you ought to be able to deploy back to the client, to tell them, do you really need that? Yeah. It's not really serving your users. It might look flashy and lovely, but. Is anybody actually gaining any benefit outta it?

Okay.

[00:22:47] David Waumsley: Yeah. And I looked at, there's, in a way, there's not that much that is new other than the fact that you're flipping things round, I think in this whole process. 'cause I looked at her book, Sarah has a book design, content design, and she talks about things that we've known for ages, and I forgot the name of the guy who.

Brought this idea in. When we, went digital for the first time, the big difference was push and pull marketing. And she talks about that a lot in this, it frames this. The fact that we've moved from this idea where previously when we marketed to people, we pushed out our messages, and now with the job online is that we have to.

Pull people in with what they need.

[00:23:26] Nathan Wrigley: oh, okay.

[00:23:28] David Waumsley: I, who was the guy,

[00:23:29] Nathan Wrigley: ah, that's, no, that's not a piece of knowledge I've ever known, I don't think. But that's interesting. Maybe when you'll say, maybe when you finally get the name after he click stop

[00:23:39] David Waumsley: a big friend of WordPress, you'll know him, you'll, oh, is Yeah. Yeah. It doesn't matter. His name came to mind, but he's the guy who coined that push and pull, so she's still working on that kind of thing. This, getting the men, I think it's taken us so many years to get the mentality of the digital world. we slowly slipped from print and marketing out to.

This. And so there's not much that's actually new. Anyway, let me move on to next slide.

[00:24:07] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So we're now looking at core principles and what we've said here is, all content should answer a real question or help complete a task. Yeah, check that makes sense. Decisions are based on research and audience, not internal preference.

Oh, so guilty. words are not always the answer. Consider tables c check checklists. Visuals use words the audience uses, not bargain brand or insider terminology. I think the Gov UK website is pretty good with that. unclear content, erodes trust, be consistent, accurate, and honest. and the final one, content should be planned, reviewed, and retired.

Not forgotten. Okay, over to

[00:24:52] David Waumsley: you. I guess we've not anything new that we're saying it. This is just the core principles with it and the only thing I can add in here really is that the gov. UK site is considered as the gold standard for anybody doing content design. And actually, I don't think I mentioned this in the notes.

It will be there in the links, but, you can learn all you need to do about the process by going to the Gov UK site anyway, because all of their principles, all of their design systems are something you can follow yourself anyway, so you can learn everything you need from there. Okay, let me move on to next slide.

Oh, I, there's just a couple of examples here. I've put on the slide.

[00:25:32] Nathan Wrigley: this is great. I love this. It's just so handy. Unnecessarily helpful. Let's frame it that way. Yeah.

[00:25:38] David Waumsley: Yeah. For people on the audio, there's just two screenshots I've taken of the page, one page where it's got the UK bank holidays and the other one is checking whether you need a UK Visa.

And I just thought I'd put these up as a couple of examples because following their sort of principles, it's very clear to me that when type in, you want to know about UK. Bank holidays, what you'll primarily probably want to know is the next one.

[00:26:05] Nathan Wrigley: Right?

[00:26:06] David Waumsley: That's

[00:26:06] Nathan Wrigley: exactly that. Yeah.

[00:26:07] David Waumsley: Yeah, exactly.

And so that's got a nice big block where it calls it out to you before you get the table of all the rest of the stuff, and for the next year as well on that. Where I think, without this sort of thinking, you'd probably just put your table there, wouldn't you? And people have to,

[00:26:23] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. Yeah. And you'd have to go through and the old ones would drop would be, you'd have 17 at the top that have already gone into the past that are not necessary and so on.

Yeah, it's great. really cool. Yeah. And it looks like we've got a holiday tomorrow, which is quite nice. Yeah,

[00:26:39] David Waumsley: exactly. There's some probably go out on the holiday day. Yeah. yeah. And the other one was just. Typical of these, as many of these ones start now. So check if you need a UK Visa, and there's these conversational forms where you click on it, it asks you the relevant questions you fill in, so it leads you to where you want to get your answer.

Yeah, instead of my. Indiana example of having to go to various different sites, download PDFs and see if the publish date reflects what I should be doing at this particular moment. This guide you through and you can trust it. You know that this is going to ask you all the main questions to be able to steer you in the right direction.

[00:27:16] Nathan Wrigley: So this happens a lot on that website. There, there's, yeah. So you end up on this website usually because you've got a task that you need to complete. There's a goal, like it might be filing the taxes or booking a, a driving test or whatever it may be. And it very often begins with this start now process.

So you click the start now button and then you are asked a bunch of questions. And although at the time you think. What, why, do I need to do this? What you quickly work out is, okay, I've just eliminated an hour of searching because it, those, that process gets you to where you need to then begin and, it's really easy to ignore the fact that it's really helpful.

But it's brilliantly helpful, so here, with the start now with the Visa thing, it will probably ask you a bunch of questions to, just save you time, to avoid the things that you don't need to do. And maybe it'll ask you where you're going or where you're coming from and things like that.

it's. Brilliantly done.

[00:28:18] David Waumsley: Yeah. It's just great design, isn't it? Yeah. And I think this is what, I think it's so forgotten that this is web design, it's not pretty, but it's, functional, it's proper design. It solves the problem.

[00:28:30] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. And the curious thing here is as well, is that you are, how to describe it, you are making.

So the, complexity is disappears and nobody will ever know or thank you for that work because you'll never reveal to them that the hours that you save them. and yet there you have saved them hours. And I told you about the process I've had getting my, visa, for India. And that's been anything other than fun.

Nobody helps you at all. All destroy.

[00:29:04] David Waumsley: It's sad thing. Good design is invisible, isn't it?

[00:29:06] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. There you go. You encapsulated it in one perfect sentence. Lovely. So two good examples there.

okay. Shall I read these ones out as well?

[00:29:15] David Waumsley: Yes, please.

[00:29:16] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So this is how website owners might. Be able to apply this.

So before writing anything, ask, what does the user need to know or do here? I think we just saw a good example of that. Look for evidence, search queries, customer questions or analytics. Use plain language, avoid jargon, and provide meaningful headings. Choose the simplest format. That's the win that one, isn't it?

If a list works better than pros, use a list, remove or update content that is rarely visited, or no longer relevant, and when in doubt. Cut short and clear tends to perform better. Nicely done. That's encapsulated it beautifully.

[00:29:54] David Waumsley: Yeah, I think that's it. one of the things I think that always makes me take a deep breath is when anything saying, look for research and evidence.

[00:30:05] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. It's easy to write that sentence. It's so hard

[00:30:08] David Waumsley: to do. It is to try and get a client to think about what evidence do we have, it happens and. I was just doing this and one of my clients contacted me and I thought this was quite funny, really, because they contacted me to ask me why they were getting lots of inquiries from people who thought their services might be free.

They were often counselling services and and it just seemed so funny because it hadn't occurred to me to them that they might just ask the person. Providing this information, how valuable that might be, why they've done this, if you was to reply back to them, let's say.

Yeah,

you No, we don't, but maybe you wanna look here or something like that.

But can I ask you why? I have my own theory on it is the fact that their site, they're in a small area and their site looks creditable enough. It's a centre to look like. It might be the centre for. Private and for public stuff as well. That's what my guess would be is the design of the site.

But it's just incredible that people in my experience, like it's really difficult. They often know sometimes through conversations, but forgotten it, but that, clients know more about their clients and their confusion that, but they don't let you know as a designer. And it could be so useful, to,

[00:31:23] Nathan Wrigley: interesting.

Yeah.

[00:31:26] David Waumsley: And that kind of stuff. yeah, but also, I think, yeah, the whole removing stuff is interesting 'cause, I did have. I've only ever done this once, actually. It's a redesign of somebody's site. And this goes way back to that sort of time when the, I guess the way we thought we could do best with traffic and Google is to have as many different posters you possibly could.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. to get as many different keywords featured as you possibly could. And it was generally short content. And we know that Google now doesn't like this low quality. Content any longer it wants, So I went about chopping, so it chopped, there was about 300 plus posts on there and I chopped about 200 of 'em and just killed them.

And it scared the life out of me, but mostly it was justified 'cause there was broken links and everything. It was doing a more damage.

[00:32:15] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. That's really interesting. Also, it's the invisible, boring work that sometimes you have to do. and you're not. maybe you will, but it, doesn't feel like something you're particularly gonna get paid for is cutting work.

But if the bigger picture is to have a successful website and you now know that Google doesn't look favourably on the keyword stuffing, let's have a load of meaning meaningless blog posts that really don't help anything, then that is necessary work. But I can see that being one that gets dropped really quickly by the clients paying the web developer sort of thing, because.

I dunno. It's just who wants to pay to get stuff caught, but it is very important.

[00:32:57] David Waumsley: Yeah, and I think, with a lot of these, principles that we're looking at, I think, there's a good argument to have this sort of annual thing where you look down a list of stuff, right? Which I had to do out this manual in the end where you look at it and go, okay, what things might need to change in for this next year?

Because they just go on for years and years, and some of that might be chopping it. The interesting thing was, even though I was scared stiff of removing, 'cause this site did really well with its traffic and Largely, I had some statistics so I could see which. Posts were particularly doing it.

And actually it was only a couple of posts that were bringing in most of the traffic anyway. Oh,

[00:33:29] Nathan Wrigley: wow, okay.

[00:33:29] David Waumsley: And it wasn't really relevant to them. It was from, a country that wouldn't be where their services were anyway.

[00:33:36] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, okay. Oh,

[00:33:38] David Waumsley: but still, it's interesting. It made no difference to the traffic at all chopping these down.

So it was quite,

[00:33:43] Nathan Wrigley: oh, that's. You did well there, David. Hold on.

[00:33:46] David Waumsley: here. I didn't damage them.

[00:33:48] Nathan Wrigley: no. Okay.

[00:33:51] David Waumsley: okay, I'll move on. And we're actually done. I've just put here there's, those who are watching on YouTube will see there's some links, but they will be there in our show notes here. But yeah, as I mentioned, I think, there is the Gov UK site and if you go to the link that's there, it actually gives you all the guidance you need if you want to get into content design.

[00:34:13] Nathan Wrigley: So you are gonna bury those in the comments on the YouTube. Are you, and also on the website, if people go to, what was it? No script show slash 33 0, then able see those. Okay.

[00:34:25] David Waumsley: There's some really good resources there. And some videos as well with Sarah Richards as well talking about it. But, I think, yeah, it's really, it's helped me just that idea of trying to work out a process for the web where thinking I.

Previously with page builders, I was looking visually and then cramming in the content. Then I thought, that's wrong. I need to get the content and then, put the design on it. And now this has challenged that to make me think, actually no, the two processes go together. You're constantly thinking about the design and the content at the same time.

Yeah. Yeah.

[00:34:58] Nathan Wrigley: I think that distils it perfectly, doesn't it? That's the summation of what you're talking about. It's agile ongoing conversation. Keep, yeah. Okay. is that it? Are we done? Crikey, we are done. That's gotta one of the, that's gotta be the shortest episode we've done in. Ages.

[00:35:14] David Waumsley: I, know.

And the next one will be, I think, we'll come back with one of the next pillars. I think we'll do inclusive design because that's all about designing for diversity, designing for everybody. oh, not

[00:35:27] Nathan Wrigley: nicely, said David, with passion. Love it. so I will literally see you soon.

[00:35:33] David Waumsley: Yeah, you will.

Yes. Over here. Okay.

[00:35:37] Nathan Wrigley: Thanks David. Take it easy.

[00:35:38] David Waumsley: Thank you. Okay. Bye-bye. Bye.

Making a Website Owner's Manual

2026-03-12T00:00:00Z

Show Notes:

The Website Owner Manual is a working progress. In this episode we look at it's table of content.

A complete version will be available when finish, but for now here is a PDF file of the top level navigation plus notes. A text version is below.

The Website Owner's Manual

A customizable guide for creating an effective brand identity

Slide 1: Title Slide

The Website Owner's Manual

Notes:

The Website Owner's Manual is platform-agnostic.

Canva is used because:

It saves to PPTX or PDF for use with PowerPoint or LibreOffice.
Its real-time collaboration and commenting system allows multiple users to edit simultaneously.
Its whiteboard allows one place to store assets and experiment.
It's popular with small businesses (over 230 million monthly active users).
You get one month's free access to the pro version with vast stock resources.
Advanced presentation tools like audience Q&A, remote control, and drawing on slides.

As image editing software, it's limited compared to Figma, Adobe, or Canva's own Affinity Studio, but professional collaborators can add their work to Canva.

Slide 2: Preface

Principles

Web Principles

Fluid before fixed units
Mobile before desktop
Semantics before styling
Performance before bloat
Accessibility before complexity

Business Principles

Problem before product
Justification before dependencies
Local skills before global corporate platforms
Simplicity before automation

Design Principles

Content before design
User needs before designer/stakeholder ego
Objectives before personal taste

About This Manual

The Website Owner's Manual is a project management tool. A collaborative hub for strategic planning and brand assets.

Like Paul Boag's book of the same name, it aims to give owners control over the legal, technical, and business responsibilities that they inherit with website ownership.

It encourages independence and "Inclusive Design" through Web Standards, Agile development and the IndieWeb.

Notes:

Designers can use this to remind clients of the unique features of the web, their responsibilities, and head off potential friction.

For example:

It makes it easier to see what and when a platform is needed, rather than picking it for them and subsequently having to justify it.
It provides the tools to assess other sites, avoiding telling the owner their ideas are bad and having to criticize the work of others.
It positions design as problem-solving to avoid the process becoming a community art project.
Reduces the need for torturous contracts.

Paul Boag's 2009 O'Reilly book is now available for free. It is still relevant, but predates the general shift to Agile development processes.

Slide 3: Table of Contents

Content

Foundation & Strategy
Content & Voice Guidelines

Content: The mission and message that is converted into semantic HTML and made accessible to all people and devices.

Style

Visual Identity
Image & Media Guidelines

Style: The visuals design that objectively improves the usability of the content and forges an emotional connection with the target audience.

Technology

Web Components
SEO & Discoverability
Developer Specifications

Technology: What is necessary to deliver the message. Follow the "rule of least power" to reduce unnecessary lock-in and maintenance.

Progress

Applications
Testing & Tracking
Governance

Progress: The plan for inevitable change and how to evolve and improve in an "Agile" way.

Notes:

The next 10 slides represent the top-level navigation.

Designers may use these to understand what a client already knows and has.

Slide 4: Foundation & Strategy

Who are you and why should anyone care?

Competitor Analysis - Competitors' strengths and weaknesses. Differentiation opportunities.
Brand Purpose & Vision - Why the business exists. Emotions it invokes. Core values and aims.
Target Audience - Personas. Demographics. Visitor behaviour and their challenges.
Market Position Statement - Where you sit and what you stand for. Your elevator pitch.
SEO Strategy - Sanity checking achievable traffic. Content gaps. Keyword competition. Search intent. EEAT.

Notes:

This is often the hardest part.

Creating a brand requires introspection, and many in business are people of action who employ their gut to adapt to situations.

Online, we have to define upfront a purpose and target audience to cut through the noise and avoid being for no-one in particular.

Online, customers can't meet you first, so your brand identity has to act as your "digital handshake".

On the plus side, this work can act as a useful "North Star" for general business decisions and reduce the need to compete solely on price.

Slide 5: Content & Voice Guidelines

How you should communicate

Brand Voice - Tone. Language style. Personality.
Writing Guidelines - Best practices for web copy. SEO structure. Meta description templates. Alt text standards.
Content Types - Blog posts. Landing pages. Social media. Directories. Flyers.

Notes:

People buy from people, so we have to cut through the impersonal nature of the web.

It's not "creative writing", but reputation control.

It tells people what they should expect in advance.

Slide 6: Visual Identity

Creating an emotional connection

Logo and Favicon - Dark/light modes. Stacked/horizontal. Favicon. Open Graph images.
Typography - Responsive type scale (mobile → desktop). Line height. Letter spacing for screens. Title and sentence case rules.
Fonts - Font stacks with fallbacks. Height, letter spacing. Loading strategy and performance impact.
Colours - Colour values. Light mode and dark modes. Hover and focus states. WCAG contrast ratios.

Notes:

This should be congruent with the brand's written voice and mission.

We should choose based on what objectively best represents the brand to users.

Remember that some visitors will only see or hear your written content (screen readers and search bots).

Increasingly, some will have preferences that will remove a website's styling (high-contrast themes and monochrome screens).

Slide 7: Image & Media Guidelines

Making content easy and enjoyable to consume

Image Specifications - File formats. Fallbacks? Responsive image sizes. Aspect ratios for different contexts.
Video & Audio Guidelines - Aspect ratios. Length. Hosting. Auto-play policies. Transcripts. Signing.
Icon System - SVG styles. Dark & light modes. Accessible labeling.
Photography Style - Mood. Filter and effects. Subject.

Notes:

Embedded images and media make sites interesting.

But there are performance trade-offs, accessibility barriers, and the potential for information fragmentation to consider.

We should ask: Does this media supplement the written text, or are we filling because of poor layout planning?

Slide 8: Web Components

Using the power of website conventions

Interactive Elements - Button styles and states. Navigation. Card components. Modals. Tooltips. Details and summary.
Animation Guidelines - Transition speeds. Easing functions. User preferences.
Responsive Behaviour - How elements adapt across devices. Media vs Container queries.
Spacing System - Margin and padding fluid scaling.

Notes:

The web is interactive.

We need to tab, mouse-click, or finger-tap links and buttons, and we should get visual or audio feedback on our actions.

Visitors need to understand our UI and conventions are our friends in this aim.

Unfortunately, design systems have a history of breaking conventions:

Removing link underlines (Twitter Bootstrap V3).
Replacing form input titles with placeholders (Google's Material Design system).

We should avoid complexity and follow WCAG guidelines rather than blindly trust third parties even if they are used by millions.

Slide 9: SEO & Discoverability

Getting found and established with a SEO-first approach

Technical SEO - Structured data/schema. Page speed targets. Mobile-first indexing considerations.
Content Strategy - Publishing frequency. Site structure and internal linking.
Local SEO - Google Business Profile. Geolocation tagging. EEAT. QR code.

Notes:

With well-structured semantic HTML content, SEO largely takes care of itself.

There can be gains from exploiting weaknesses in search engines, but it's risky.

For most businesses, their domain name (and the online authority it gains over time) is too valuable to throw away on tricks for short-term gains.

Slide 10: Developer Specifications

Code standards and policies on the tech used

Code Standards - CSS methodology. Browser support. Accessibility requirements.
Performance - Max page weight. Core Web Vitals targets. Image optimization standards.
Maintenance Protocols - CMS guidelines. Dependency. Update schedule. Backup procedures. Security best practices.
Hosting & Infrastructure - Environment specs, CDN usage, caching strategy.

Slide 11: Applications

How the brand is used across platforms

Social Media - Profile images, cover photos, post templates (per platform)
Google Business Profile - Photo requirements, post formatting.
Email - Template structure, mobile optimization
Directory and Review Listings - Profile images, cover photos, post templates (per platform)
Off-Line - Community & Sponsorship. Print & Physical Materials

Slide 12: Testing & Tracking

How do we ethically measure success?

Our Privacy Policy - Cookie stance. Use of dark patterns. Hidden tracking "pixels". Session replay tools.
Analytics Tools - If needed, do we use privacy-first, no cookies tools like Plausible Analytics or Google Analytics where a visitor consent pop-up is required.
User Testing - Can visitors find what they need. Are they confused about what is clickable. What is the impression of the site?

Slide 13: Governance

Who is responsible for what

Who can update what? - Level of permissions to any CMS, Github or GitLab. Access to the Website Owner's Guide.
Review Schedule - Quarterly audits, annual strategic reviews.
Decision Framework - How to handle edge cases not covered in guidelines. What happens when someone is hit by a bus?
Change Log - Tracking what and how?
Legal - Is the website following the law and who follows changes?

Transcript

[00:00:05] Nathan Wrigley: Hello there and welcome to the No Script Show in our last episode called Trap or Trade Off, what Small Businesses Should Know Before Getting a website. We use the example of a local plumber to highlight that the web is for everyone. We showed that businesses don't always need to get locked into maintenance costs and restrictions of a third party platform.

Often the only technology needed for an effective online presence is HTML and CSS, which can be learned relatively quickly. However, businesses also have to persuade visitors that their services are what searches are looking for. And to do this, they need a credible brand identity too. So in this episode, we're discussing brand style guides.

These long predate the web and here we're looking at how these could be best updated for web projects. You can find the show notes and the resources for this show at the website, which is no script show slash 29. The numbers two and nine. And if you're watching this on YouTube, the link will be inside the first comment just below the subscribe and like buttons.

hint. As always, I am joined by David Waumsley. Hello David.

[00:01:18] David Waumsley: Hi Nathan. So the last time we spoke, which is about a month ago, yeah. I thought I had it planned out. What we were gonna do for this episode, we were going to, I was going to go ahead and create this brand guide and it should have been straightforward because what we've been using for our presentations, we've been using Canva and Canva's got a whole range of these brand guidelines, which you could just edit.

So I thought would make one for Paul, our plumber and his one page site will turn into something bigger. but, instead, because I hinted at it last time, it is the fact that these star guides go back a long way. generally there are document of the visuals that you'll need for your brand.

And not so much for the web. So as I started adding in things that I thought were relevant to the web. I, it took me right back 20 years to when I first started doing web design.

[00:02:14] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, nice.

[00:02:15] David Waumsley: It did really. And at the time, I used to listen to Paul Boag

[00:02:20] Nathan Wrigley: Yes.

[00:02:20] David Waumsley: And his

[00:02:22] Nathan Wrigley: Boag

[00:02:22] David Waumsley: World Podcast.

It was the only one that was available for people who were interested in making websites. Yeah.

[00:02:27] Nathan Wrigley: He was blazing a trail bike then, wasn't he really was.

[00:02:29] David Waumsley: Yeah, exactly. And it reminded me, and that's what we've called this episode, the making of the website owners manual. This was a book that Paul.

Did back in, I think 2010, which is now available for free. Actually, we'll, move on. There's a link actually where you can just get that book. But he was trying to solve this problem, which actually at the time I, I loved making websites and all the stuff that was involved. I loved that show. But what I didn't like is hearing all the stuff, all the friction that people used to have with the designer and the client who didn't necessarily understand the web the way that the designer would.

Right. And his solution was this, website owners manual. So I thought as we're quite keen for the idea that we have a sort of transparent set up, something where people who know, want to go independent can say a business like Paul, that's what we've covered last time, could make his own website really wanted something that would be similar to that in the sense that the website owner would need to know what they're doing.

So basically what's happened is that I've gone completely off this sort of very simple. you really are design identity thing and, turned it into a sort of a living document, if you like. It is carrying on if you like. What I think Paul, was trying to do with his book, which I don't think works so much, because of the fact that it, well, like his podcast, it wasn't hitting the people that he expected it to hit.

Yeah. Which was the people who wanted to build their websites. It would be more for designers. So, and it's logical because no one's going to read a book before they start to get on with their actual work, so.

[00:04:14] Nathan Wrigley: Right,

[00:04:14] David Waumsley: right. So anyway, so I, what I tried to do, so I'll get on to the point no.

Is that I wanted to show you what I've started so far because there's a lot of work and what I'm hoping you'll do and if somebody's kind enough to watch this and give comments, I'd love feedback because, this is obviously something that I make available to anyone, but, if I'm on the right track, this would be the way that I think would start every website.

[00:04:40] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it's, a, I, confess when you'd made it and sent it over to me, I was quite surprised by how in depth this working document is. I think currently it's on about 50 pages or something like that, and it covers a whole, smorgasbord of different topics. I guess I should probably pop it on the screen so that we can see where we are, we're inside of, Canva.

Like David said, this is where it's being designed. and you presumably, I think I said at, in the beginning there, there will be links to the resources and different ways to get it and what have you. but yeah, here we are. The website owner's manual. I guess page one. Yeah, we're current. We're currently looking at the editing view.

David, is that what you are desiring do

[00:05:25] David Waumsley: I think we have to do, because what I've done with this one, so, I dunno if you can read this, Nathan, at all, whether, it's I can and whether our audience can to see what we're doing. Yeah,

[00:05:38] Nathan Wrigley: basically you can click so basic, you can see the notes. They're quite clear on the screen.

I can read them out if you like, but they are very clear on the screen there.

[00:05:45] David Waumsley: Yeah. So what I think what we'll concentrate on this, we haven't talked about this at all, so we're just diving in as it comes up. But what I've done is I've set out a whole bunch of these slides on a Canva presentation. Now, the idea I had for this, 'cause I don't like the idea of just promoting.

one product out there, which is Canva. I mean, it's, wonderful. But I wanted this to be platform agnostic. So we're using it here and I've put it in our notes, because if you make something on Canva, you can save it as A-P-T-T-X document. Yeah. PowerPoint. PowerPoint Or, or if you want open source, you can use Libra office.

but what's great about it is if you use this, you've got a, kind of a way to be able to, particularly if you're on the pro version of Canva, you've got way of getting all these assets and everything to bring them into your presentation of the sort of things that you're gonna use on the website.

Yeah. and it allows for real time collaboration. So if, say, I would use it if I was working with a client, to, go through the steps in this and then use it as a way that they can add in. certain things that they wanted to add in themselves and make changes and comment on it. So you've got a, commenting set up and live collaboration if you want, on something like this.

And it also has, and I'll just go to that. It has a whiteboard option view where you can do this. So this is where I'm messing around and storing stuff for Paul's, site when we get around to making it proper. So

[00:07:25] Nathan Wrigley: it's great. Oh, I see. It's it's atomizing the bits inside the linear presentation with page numbers and you can pop those assets into different scenarios if you like.

So in this case, structure, mood, board, photos and what have you, you can pill for those and pop them into different contexts. That's actually really cool, isn't it? Yeah. So it's recycling the same content in different ways, which might be easier to. To understand, not everybody's gonna want to go through the entire 50 pager, are they?

And read all the words. That's really good.

[00:07:55] David Waumsley: Well, it was just a sort of, you need a, I think 'cause no project runs in a sort of logical order. You'll probably, when you're trying to fill in the idea of this manual is that you fill in all of the things that you'll need to have for your website. So it will be this style guide, which you'll use offline and online, which will tell you how your business, what its tone of voice is.

Yeah. What it stands for, what assets it uses, and the style of those assets. But in order to get there in some ways, and that's what Canva has, it has a presentation which we're seeing here. And then it also has a little bit like Figma. It has a whiteboard. So all I need to do is to link to this, and this is just a place where I can just zoom into any bit.

Yeah. and play around with some design ideas, which I'm doing here. A dark and a light mode.

[00:08:42] Nathan Wrigley: Right, right.

[00:08:43] David Waumsley: Yeah. That's nice,

[00:08:44] Nathan Wrigley: isn't it?

[00:08:45] David Waumsley: Yeah. And then you could just store some of your photos that you might want for some of this and, other things like structure, when I'm trying to work out the structure of this site's gonna be, and of course what you could do is, mess around in here, and have all the assets in one place, and then you can take that and once you're happy with it, then you can start to put it into the star guide or the manual as we've called it here.

Does that make sense?

[00:09:12] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that does make sense. That's a nice repurposing of all of those, different bits and pieces. And I think the, obviously the, website owners manual is gonna be like, like you said, like a working document. You're gonna be going through it and making sure that all of the boxes are ticked.

But the, bit that you just showed us, that whiteboard approach, that's like a, nice first pass. It just gives you an idea of. I don't know. Is this colour palette suitable for you? Do you like gen, generally speaking, do you like the layout of these pages and does the structure of the website look right to you?

Yeah, it's nice, really visual and and I suspect that more or less anybody online these days would be able to pass that information. these kind of interfaces are really normal now, aren't they?

[00:09:54] David Waumsley: Yeah. And I think that's it. It's just like Figma where it's got an open whiteboard, right? You need a sort of fi fiddle document when you're messing around.

I'll chuck a load of things in, does that look nice? And then I'll commit to it later in the manual. And I've got another link here. So for those who are listening, this may very difficult to understand, but what you're seeing is a slide and it says the site owners manual, it's a customised.

Customizable Guide for creating an effective brand guide. And then supporting resources is the link within Canva that goes to the whiteboard. And there's also a link, and of course you could use something else, which I've got going to a Google document. And what's quite nice about Google Documents now is because when you get to your sort of content that's going into your webpage, you probably want to get your page structure.

So you've got the tabs where you can line those up, which I've done here, and then you can start to put in the different sections that you're likely to have on each of these pages. And, go ahead with that. So I've started doing something like that.

[00:10:57] Nathan Wrigley: Is there any reason that you've, you've gone for a Google Doc over embedding that same information inside of Canva?

Is it just a superior sort of text interface, I suppose, with Yeah, yeah.

[00:11:12] David Waumsley: I, just felt, I mean, you could do it within Canva because of course it's, it works, it also has a sort of docs area as well, so it works, like, yeah, it doesn't, have the tab in though.

[00:11:23] Nathan Wrigley: okay.

[00:11:24] David Waumsley: So,

[00:11:24] Nathan Wrigley: and the tab, the tabbing being that column on the left in a Google doc, whereby you can Yes.

Headers and, H twos and h threes, you can organise the document and click through to it. Exactly. it's just a, if you're just dwelling on text, it's a superior interface, isn't it? There's just no clutter. Nothing's getting in the way and, okay. Okay. But nice to see that Canva supports the ability to link outside of itself.

Yes.

[00:11:47] Nathan Wrigley: To other things as well. So although it's obviously in a different space, it's there. You can link to it directly. Okay, great.

[00:11:55] David Waumsley: That would be the idea. And then I've got, I've just put this in as a bit of a preface. If someone's coming to this for the first time, I dunno if you can read that out.

'cause it's actually quite,

[00:12:04] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. Do you mean read what's on the, in the notes or read what's on the screen?

[00:12:08] David Waumsley: Oh, on the screen please.

[00:12:09] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I can do that. Yeah. so the website owners manual is a project management tool, a collaborative hub for strategic planning and brand assets like Paul Boag book, which I guess is a link there as well of the same name.

It aims to give owners control over the legal, technical, and business responsibilities that they inherit with website ownership. It encourages independence and inclusive design through web standards, agile development, and the indie web. Again, links are provided in there.

[00:12:38] David Waumsley: Yeah. And and they are, and the links for the moment, 'cause you don't probably haven't seen, they are put on our site for the moment.

So we might actually do an episode talking about each of these things. Agile development, agile

[00:12:51] Nathan Wrigley: and web standards and, yeah. Okay.

[00:12:53] David Waumsley: That's,

good. So that's a link really, which is, I've just taken the same format here where you explain what that means and why it matters and the core principles that you would follow and why website owners might want to apply this.

And it's the same with Agile as well, so, so everything from this owner's manual has got a link going out to something where it needs some greater explanation.

[00:13:16] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.

[00:13:17] David Waumsley: and I've put some principles on the side of this as well as the sort of introduction to this is that these probably need some work, but principles are business ones that we, tackle problems before.

Product. so we, we don't say I want a website, we want a website because it solves the problem that we're not getting enough business. we always, do it that kind of way, justifications before dependencies. So instead of jumping on the, heavier software that we'll get as a website, we will justify what we need in terms of technology so we don't have to, support dependencies, that we didn't need to, local skills before global.

This is my own branded, corporate platforms and that we should try and contain our website to, to, if you like, localised skills rather than Have a dependency on people. Millions of miles away.

[00:14:14] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:14:16] David Waumsley: so, and that way. favour simplicity before automation on things. So, often, but, well, I'll get clients come to me who want something that's automated, and then if you really drill down, they would've been better.

Just keeping it simple in the first place. And the automate automation actually makes things so complex that they can't manage it. So I've put that in, terms of design content before design, meaning that you get your words and then you design around that first, users' needs before designers or stakeholders.

ego, So it stops being an art project, objectives before personal taste and for the web, but it would've some general views about, fluid before fixed units, mobile before desktop semantic bus, semantics before styling, performance before bloat and accessibility before complexity. So

[00:15:14] Nathan Wrigley: there's a lot there, but

[00:15:15] David Waumsley: there is a lot there.

Yeah. So it's really just trying to set some standards, if you like, which I think are standards that we all hold to, but we just very easily lose them if we don't bake them in at the beginning of our projects.

[00:15:30] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. Okay. and I guess you're just setting the groundworks a little bit, aren't you?

These are the kind of things that are gonna come later, but they're, worth thinking about at the start, so, yeah. Okay.

[00:15:41] David Waumsley: Yeah.

[00:15:41] Nathan Wrigley: Laying the groundwork. Yeah.

[00:15:43] David Waumsley: And I've put again in notes here. I mean, designers might want to use this whole thing or the next level of, if you like, the higher level.

Navigation, which we're just gonna work through here to remind, clients of the unique features of the web and of their responsibilities for having a website and also to head off, potential friction that you can get. So for example, on that, and I've just put this in notes, it makes it easier to, see by going through this process, see, when a platform's needed rather than picking a platform for the client and then subsequently having to justify it.

just on that point, it's probably worth mentioning. There is another website owner's manual. I've stolen Paul Boag name, but there is another one from someone we know, as well in the WordPress space. Yeah. And in some ways that's what theirs does, isn't it? That it's, a document for. To give to website owners to explain the work that goes into maintaining something like WordPress.

So if you're like this, one is a slightly different thing, and the fact that you would try and avoid, you wouldn't need something like that anyway because you would already decide that the client, whether WordPress was the most suitable

[00:17:02] Nathan Wrigley: Right.

[00:17:03] David Waumsley: Thing that was project. Well, that,

[00:17:04] Nathan Wrigley: that was your second point on the business principles, wasn't it?

Justification before dependencies,

[00:17:09] David Waumsley: Yeah.

[00:17:10] Nathan Wrigley: If WordPress isn't the right thing, then that's not the right thing,

[00:17:14] David Waumsley: and that's always been the thing that's sticking with me. I mean, for me it was fine because I came in as somebody who did WordPress, so everybody got WordPress. But of course, the person bringing the clients to me hadn't necessarily gone through the process of whether they needed to be managing WordPress for the job that they had.

So,

[00:17:28] Nathan Wrigley: yeah,

[00:17:28] David Waumsley: so it wasn't covered. also going through the process here would provide the tools to clients to be able to, assess. Other people's sites. so it avoids, 'cause this is often, I think you'll, know that a lot of people will come to a designer and say, and I've seen this on the website and I would like that on my website, this navigation, this slider, this bar.

And I think this is always problem because then you end up with a situation where you might know that this isn't in their best interest. This isn't good for usability. It might not help them to achieve what they want to achieve. So by letting the client go through this kind of thing, there's less likelihood that they will come up with bad ideas, which you'll have to correct 'em on.

Yeah. Which creates friction or that you'll have to get into criticising another website. So it's to head off

[00:18:19] Nathan Wrigley: that, yeah. it feels that, although this is, well we're still on the preface, aren't we? It, there's a lot of conversation to be had here just laying out the groundworks before the, before anything really starts.

[00:18:31] David Waumsley: this is, these are the notes in a way. If you are a designer, I suppose, what's the benefits of going through this approach?

[00:18:38] Nathan Wrigley: yeah,

[00:18:38] David Waumsley: on this one?

[00:18:38] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:18:38] David Waumsley: Also, it, going through this approach from the beginning to the end, and I expect if you were a designer showing this to a client, you could do it in a very quick conversation.

You'd go through 10 slides to just to know you're on the same, in the same place. But I think it positions designers problem solving to avoid that kind of problem that you often end up with where a project turns into some community art project. where everybody's saying, what do you think of this?

What do you know? It gets it back to the, science of it. And I think it just. By going through a process like this, it reduces that need for these torturous contracts that people often set up. 'cause they've been burnt by clients wanting to change things that last minute and all that kind of stuff.

[00:19:22] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah,

[00:19:22] David Waumsley: we can get around that.

[00:19:23] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. That's an interesting position of it as well. Okay.

[00:19:27] David Waumsley: Okay,

[00:19:27] Nathan Wrigley: so moving on, I guess when the next one,

[00:19:30] David Waumsley: right? Yeah, so I'll move on. So we've got a table of contents and this is the higher level of, how this kind of document is structured. And I've tried to structure this into different sections.

So, table of Contents has got this sort of first section, which is the, content, which is really the missing and message, which we convert into Symantec, HTML and make. So it makes the web accessible to all people and devices, which other mediums can't do. And then on that, so it's going in order.

You would start with that when you are starting your project, what your. Mission is, then you would move into styling, which is the visual design that objectively improves the usability of the content and forges an emotional, connection with the target audience. So that would be the next level. Then we be looking at technology, what's necessary to deliver the message, so you want to start with the rule of lease power to reduce unnecessary lock in and maintenance.

And then finally there needs to be a section, I think, which is covering progress. So you need to plan for the fact that the web is constantly changing. Businesses change as well. So there's inevitable change here, and you need a way to be able to evolve, ideally in an agile way where you are incrementally improving all the time.

[00:20:56] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah,

[00:20:57] David Waumsley: nice. So, so what's happened here is that, if I just bring this up here, again, people who are listening to this might find it a bit difficult, but on. That sort of content, table of content lays out these different sections. And here you can link to these.

[00:21:12] Nathan Wrigley: These are

[00:21:12] David Waumsley: links different. Yes. Within the

[00:21:15] Nathan Wrigley: document link.

That's an internal link within, inside this Canva board, you can just shuffle backwards and forwards.

[00:21:20] David Waumsley: Exactly. I can go back here. So I go, oh.

[00:21:22] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, that's what that arrow's for. Okay.

[00:21:24] David Waumsley: I just, yeah, that was

[00:21:24] Nathan Wrigley: a nice, like a bit of graphic, but it's not, it's actually a link.

[00:21:28] David Waumsley: It's a link back. So the idea is that, so if I was going through this, how I imagine I'm gonna go through this as a designer, I'd just say, oh, let's start your project.

Let's go through the things you need to do. You, we need to start with your content, what you're trying to achieve here. What's, your brand? What's its message? Then we would go through that first one, which would be the foundations and strategy, who you are, why should anyone care? And there were different sections.

Nathan, you're much better at reading. Do you wanna read out what's

[00:21:58] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I can read them out. Yeah, that's fine. Yeah, sure. so we, we've clicked the first link in that table of contents document and we've ended up a foundation and strategy. And this is the Who are You and why Should Anyone Care Piece.

And, it's broken up into five different sections, the first of which is brand purpose and vision. So why the business exists? Emotions, it invokes core values and aims. Then moving on, target audience, who are the personas, the demographics, what is the visitor behaviour and what are the challenges they may present?

Market position and statement comes next, where you sit and what you stand for, which is in effect your elevator pitch. Two final ones, competitor analysis. and in this we're looking at competitor strengths and weaknesses, that sort of swap thing that everybody does. Differentiation, opportunities, how you can stand out.

And then finally, more towards the website itself. SEO stuff. sanity checking. Achievable traffic. Yeah. Oh Lord. content. No. Bring it. Build it, and they will come. David, that's all you need. content gaps, keyword competition. search intent and eat. EEAT. Which I actually have forgotten. What's that?

[00:23:07] David Waumsley: well, it used to be just eat with the one E.

so it's, I think it's experience, expertise, blah. I forgot what the A is. And anyway, it's

[00:23:17] Nathan Wrigley: all

[00:23:18] David Waumsley: the

[00:23:18] Nathan Wrigley: stuff. Quickly move it on.

[00:23:20] David Waumsley: It's what? Google check. I should write it out in full. What Google uses authority is the A and ah,

[00:23:26] Nathan Wrigley: you go. That's it. That's what I remember.

[00:23:27] David Waumsley: A trust or something like that for the T.

There you

go.

[00:23:29] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:23:29] David Waumsley: It's all about whether you are a legit business and you show yourself to be somebody very serious. It's a key thing that Google always looking into whether there are signals out there that you are a serious business, so they can rank you higher rather than somebody, particularly if you are doing something which is professional, if it's medical advice, they'll definitely want to see lots of the expertise, some background before they'll favour you.

yeah, so the, that. So again, with each of these, this is the idea. This is where you end up with so many pages. So if I click on any of these individual subcategories, like the first one being brand purpose, vision, then it will take you into Yep.

[00:24:06] Nathan Wrigley: Being moved over. Right. Got it.

[00:24:08] David Waumsley: We won't cover that because that's where I'll put all the sort of tips and that's where you'll write in what they are.

So that's the bit that we'll complete. This is just the overview. so that's the idea of foundations here. So you, hopefully you'll go through this and you'll get an idea about where they position themselves, what is their elevator pitch. with each of these, there are little, ways of being able to do that.

That there are statements you can create, which somebody can pre-fill in. So you know, you are, for a certain type of business, you are your name and your brand is a whatever it is.

[00:24:45] Nathan Wrigley: it's almost like magic tags in an email system, isn't it? You can Yeah. Substitute, substitute the correct phrasing and hopefully something sensible pops out.

Yeah.

[00:24:53] David Waumsley: So the idea is when you go through this, you give 'em all the tools that are around the, there are loads of them for people who do this, that help people to try and come up with their own brand purpose. Because I think if I just go back, let me just come out of this, I just go into the notes here.

I think I put something on that. yeah,

[00:25:11] Nathan Wrigley: you did. Shall I just read those out? 'cause

[00:25:14] David Waumsley: actually I'll go back. Yeah. Okay. I'll just go. is that the one I'm on? Yes. That one. Yes, please.

[00:25:20] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So I'm looking at the, the foundation and strategy document, and it says the following. this is often the hardest part.

Creating a brand requires introspection and in many businesses, people, sorry, and many in business are people of action who employ their gut to adapt to situations online. We have to define upfront a purpose and target audience to cut through the noise and avoid being for no one in particular.

Online. Customers can't meet you first, so your brand identity has to act as your actual digital handshake. and on the plus side, this can act as a use useful north star for general business decisions and reduce the need to compete solely on price. I guess with the, as we come later to Paul the plumber, yeah, this, that's a fairly straightforward proposition, isn't it?

the narrative around what do you do is pretty straightforward. but in more complicated situations where your bus business isn't maybe quite as obvious as that, or you've got some strange niche within a niche, then this kind of stuff starts to matter more and more. You've gotta cut through the noise and make sure that you are, it's clear what you do and that you are trustworthy and reliable and what have you.

[00:26:37] David Waumsley: And I think it's quite interesting 'cause I started to do the exercises and, I'll finish this off with Paul properly, but you start to get, even when you get to target audience, you think, oh, well that's just anywhere in linkage. He is a local plumber and he does these particular areas. But when you start to dig into it, you start to think about.

Actually, who are the people that really come? Well, it tends to, the job of calling in the plumber tends to fall more on, on women. And when you look at it, he is got a particular, range of women. generally there'll be over 30 and, generally, householders. but he's also got other people as well that he deals with because he's dealing with landlords as well.

Yeah. So a different, so it's quite interesting how you start to get into it and even though it seems straightforward and you think it's everybody in that area, actually it's not. And they've got

[00:27:27] Nathan Wrigley: characteristics. Yeah. So I've got, you are not living in the UK at the minute, but you'll know this problem.

So I've got a perfect example of where this goes wrong. And that is, for example, if I did a Google search for, let's say where I live, Yorkshire Plumber.

What I know will happen is the first. Set of cert results will be some content farm that is probably based out of, I don't know, the southeast of the uk.

And there are like, there are call centre for plumbers basically.

[00:28:02] David Waumsley: Yes.

[00:28:02] Nathan Wrigley: And you go there and it's pretty obvious that this landing page, which where the word Yorkshire appears, is just some dynamic data that's been inserted in, it's probably an identical page for Lancashire and Wales and North Umbr and whatever.

[00:28:17] David Waumsley: Yes.

[00:28:18] Nathan Wrigley: And it, but yet they win the SEO battle. But the minute I see that generic nonsense, it's like next. You just, there's no depth to it. There's absolutely no credibility to it. You know that the person that's gonna come has no interest in the area. They're probably gonna have to drive miles. You're just a, you're just a data point to them.

You're not gonna be somebody that you can build a relationship with and have Paul, the plumber's phone number in actually is a contact in your phone so that you can call him up at three in the morning when the tap suddenly bursts open. Yes. so yeah, that's, an example of where this sort of stuff really trumps the, sort of, I don't know, the automated promise of what, what the, on what the world can, sorry, what the web can bring.

We've got a webpage, but we don't look trustworthy.

[00:29:08] David Waumsley: Yes.

[00:29:09] Nathan Wrigley: Presumably it still works. I don't know.

[00:29:11] David Waumsley: Yeah. It's interesting and I think we'll come back to Paul in this site a later point. So I can go into some of these things. 'cause there is some quite interesting thing about what. SEO strategists say about plumbing websites, which I would, I just suggest we don't do, but it's another conversation.

Okay. I'll move on with, I'll move on with, the next slide that was here. So the next thing, which is in our content section on the higher level is defining the, content and voice guidelines. So, basically how do you communicate? so there, I'll read these out. There's the three sections on this.

Each have got their own page, which is, brand voice, which is your tone, your language style and personality. So there are tools again, which we'll go into later, as I fill this out on how to come up with that, but often with that kind of thing. In fact, let me just go to the link so I can just cover that quickly.

Just come out here. I think I might have done some of this, filled it in. Already for Paul. Yeah. So I mean, there are a few tips on how to do that, but I put in the slide, so if somebody has to fill that in, there are tips on how you find your brand voice. You can imagine your brand as a person, in this case, personable, like Chris Packham, the eco broadcaster.

[00:30:32] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:30:32] David Waumsley: Am I on?

[00:30:32] Nathan Wrigley: Yep.

[00:30:33] David Waumsley: there, I mean there are different adjectives you can use as well to define yourself. You can use the this, but not that way of being, professional but not stuffy funny, but not mean as a way of trying to get to your character. Yeah. read reviews. That's often what a lot of copywriters say.

Use the words that people use to describe you as a good way of getting your brand there and creating a do's and don'ts list of what sort of things you would say. wouldn't say so lemme just go back.

[00:31:07] Nathan Wrigley: it's an interesting world for Paul, isn't it? Because he's got a sort of step into a world, which I'm imagining is very unfamiliar to him.

if you are a, I don't know, if you're a financial institution and you've got a marketing team, presumably the people on the marketing team are really savvy with this kind of stuff. But having that conversation with Paul, I think would, it's gonna be weird. It's for a little while. It's gonna be really trying to drag Paul through the hoops here.

I imagine there'll be a little bit, not resentment towards it, but do we really need to do this? Can't we just build a website?

[00:31:40] David Waumsley: I know.

[00:31:41] Nathan Wrigley: No,

[00:31:41] David Waumsley: I, I know and I think that's the, in a way, I, this should be a checklist. I think, if your clients can't do that, you can skip over it. You say, well, shall I fill that in for you?

From what I know of you, you tell me if it's wrong.

[00:31:54] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. That's an interesting, that's an interesting position as well, isn't it? Is you in effect, are. Being the helpful voice of reason. It's not like, okay, unless Paul does all of this document needs to go in the bin. That's the prof. That's where your professionalism drops in.

I mean, you know what a plumber does. There's no, there's really not much of that industry which is disguised and unfamiliar to you, so you really could Right. But I guess if it's some industry that you've never heard of, X companies making widgets, which they sell to this entire industry that you've never heard of, Maybe not so much. Yeah. But for Paul, do you know what, I think that's a bit of a value add as well. I think if you can show this to Paul and, persuade Paul that, you know what we, I can do some of the heavy lifting here. I've done this before. That's, quite nice. yeah. Probably reassures Paul that you are credible as well.

[00:32:48] David Waumsley: And I think just going through the, it's like anything, if you have to come in and you've got a whole bunch, which is on the individual pages of how you can get this information outta people, I think this just a way, but it's really about making sure that you haven't missed something along the way and that you are logically building up the website.

So,

[00:33:06] Nathan Wrigley: yeah,

[00:33:06] David Waumsley: I mean, my little note on this whole section, if you like, brand voice writing guidelines. And that is the fact that, people buy from people. So we have to cut through the impersonal nature of the web. And this isn't creative writing, but it's reputation, control. because people, when they go to your website, so when people go to Paul's website, that should reflect his voice.

So when he turns up. with his spanners, they're not surprised. 'cause he's completely different to what expected, you

[00:33:35] Nathan Wrigley: know, what that is the, that's exactly it. That encapsulates it in a nutshell. That, that SEO farm that I talked about, which You land on the page and it's got the word Yorkshire, but it's also got some sort of generic stock photo of the area in which I live, and then stock photos of happy plumbers getting out of happy vans in indiscriminate location that's doing nothing like, that's like 2010 stuff.

Whereas if I see Paul and I know that this is Paul, this is what he'll look like, this is what he'll show up. Like, here's, him. Yes. it's so much more authentic and powerful and I, actually think there's, a weird undercurrent here of people just wanting to get back to the real world fatigue of what the internet might have brought.

If you know what I mean. That's an ephemeral thing that I can't really grasp hold of, but that there is some sort of reaction and some requirement for local things, for local people. yeah. And a sort of, pushing away a bit of the internet. So we've gotta blend those two things. Use the internet, but be authentic and real and local and all of those things.

Yeah.

[00:34:46] David Waumsley: And not authentic. Yeah.

[00:34:48] Nathan Wrigley: Yep.

[00:34:49] David Waumsley: let's, move on. So, so now we'd be going into the slides. If I was back to my main table of contents, we'd be moving into the visual design bit here. So visual identity, creating an emotional connection is how I've done this. So I think you need your. Well, sorry, I did skip over that.

I'll just go back a little bit on the, okay. Voice on the content and voice. Obviously, it's a good time at the very beginning to decide what types of content you might be putting out there, whether you will do blog posts, whether you'll have special landing pages that you'll need to make, whether you do social media directories, flyers, and all that kind of stuff.

I think it's good to know the range of written content that you're going to put out there. And also, this is a place where you would define, and again, this is another page, area of writing guidelines, which would also do something which I've never done before, which would actually lay out some of your best practises for web copy.

So it would be the same thing. We showed last time, which would be that, crib sheet, if you like, of things that you do, you write for skimmers and you Yep. you start with the, important stuff and work down, but also it would include other things like. Meta description templates, how you might mark up your images, what logic you use to do that, and that, that kind of stuff.

so we've talked about this on other shows there, where often there isn't a logic to how you might, when you're doing the website, right, the descriptions or the title tags in a certain way. it might be your business name and then about your business name, and then contact, or it might be something else entirely.

So setting these things up, I think is good for before you build the website, because then you've got some consistency. And the same with, with how you mark up your images, what rules you follow. Okay. Okay. so yeah, we'll

[00:36:41] Nathan Wrigley: go two. Did you skip six out by the way?

[00:36:43] David Waumsley: Did I skip?

[00:36:44] Nathan Wrigley: I think you went from five there.

[00:36:47] David Waumsley: yeah. With content and then we go into the next, lemme

[00:36:49] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, no apologies. No, I think, yeah. So there you go. Six. There

[00:36:54] David Waumsley: we

[00:36:54] Nathan Wrigley: go. Okay. Seven. All right.

[00:36:57] David Waumsley: Yeah, I think this is Moving on to the images. Oh, sorry. No, I did skip one, didn't I? What happened? Yeah.

[00:37:03] Nathan Wrigley: Visual,

identity.

[00:37:05] David Waumsley: Yeah. So moving into, so now we've assumed that we know the content we're writing, that we've got the rules on our content.

We've got our voice that we're writing with, so then we're enhancing the web. We're starting with that semantic, HDML, effectively, and then adding in. So, I think the important thing about a visual identity is that it should be congruent with the, brand's written voice and message. It needs to stick with that and not be a, should be choosing on what is object.

Best representing the brand that we've defined to the users, rather than making it some subjective art project. and I think also when we're doing our visual identity, it's important to remember that when it comes to the web, not everybody is going to see what you see as well. So, we're adding a layer of visuals to, Add to the written content, it shouldn't be as a replacement for it because some people aren't going to see it. Screen readers, search bots obviously don't see the visuals, and increasingly people have preferences where they may have, high contrast themes on their, or they put it in reader mode or they have a monochrome screen.

So I think that all needs to be told to a client as well, so they understand what the visuals are doing. But then we would define things like our logo, things that we would include in there, whether it's got a dark or light mode. we need to probably have a stacked and horizontal version of it.

We need to probably have a fon and maybe an open graph image as well that we're going to use as a format if we're, going to putting things out that go into Facebook or

yeah. Twitter or something like that. Not Twitter. X x. So, I mean, that's where you would use it as a normal. So here, if I just go to that link there, I've already started to make some of his logos in the different formats here.

And I'd do that on the whiteboard and I'd make it over, to here. So that would be available. 'cause then you could just download it from camera. Yeah. And use it in your projects as you needed it. Yeah.

[00:39:16] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So each of those little assets that we see, so the logo, the light version, the dark version, they, within the Canva book, you could click on those and download them from the asset page and things like that.

Could you?

[00:39:27] David Waumsley: Yes,

[00:39:27] Nathan Wrigley: exactly. Yeah. Okay. There you go. Right. Wow. Gosh, look at

[00:39:30] David Waumsley: that. Yeah. I need to go back to where we was here. So that was, yeah, we

[00:39:33] Nathan Wrigley: were on seven.

[00:39:35] David Waumsley: Ah, okay. So we're moving on. Yes, we did that one. And then there's images and meet. Yeah, it was six I think we were on before. Yeah. Oops, hold on. I keep moving there.

Visual identity. Yeah. So logos to that. And then we'll pick our colours again. I love a format for this one, but we'll want to make sure that we're observing certain things, work criteria on, contrast ratios. In fact, I can do that, actually, I can just go here, but,

[00:40:04] Nathan Wrigley: oh yeah. Nice. Again, it just links to Yeah, look at that.

[00:40:06] David Waumsley: Yeah.

[00:40:07] Nathan Wrigley: Lovely.

[00:40:07] David Waumsley: So, I mean, this is still work to be done. So there's a format so when you go to the next client, you can swap out the sort of way that you just changed the colours over here, so it would make it easier, but it just means that you, it's not so easy to navigate back. 'cause I'm not sure where I've clicked at number

[00:40:25] Nathan Wrigley: six.

You were at, I think six.

[00:40:28] David Waumsley: Yeah, we want that. So I was just showing how that's going. And typography is the same. You've set that out and fonts you would choose those. I've, put that. And I think in style guides they tend to put them in the same thing, but I think fonts, there's enough to write about, the decision making on fonts, whether you're using system fonts, for performance or whether you're going to use them and where you're getting them from and licences and all that sort of stuff.

So I've, got a different section for those. then the next is, the slider, which is looking at images and media guidelines where we want to set those up. And again, there are four overview units to this one. and this is about making content easy and enjoyable to consume. That's why we have media and images.

So we'll set up. And again, these have their own pages. a photography style that we're going to use, whether there's a certain mood, whether there's certain subjects which we incorporate in our, which is pretty simple, I think, with a plumber. it's largely going to be them doing some plumbing, but whether we use any filter effects, in their case, they've got a, standard, rounding of the borders of the images.

Right.

[00:41:38] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.

[00:41:39] David Waumsley: Yeah, so that's the format. we'd also discuss here as well, image specifications. So the file format that we're going to use and the support that we're, because one might want to use WebP with a fallback of a JPEG or something, or we might just say, yeah, no, it's okay. The support for Web P is okay.

So we would define that ahead of time and probably define what sort of aspect ratios we're gonna have for different types of content, whether in certain situations we're using square image in other ones, whether we're using standard, what is it, 16 over nine ratio? Yeah,

And again, audio and visuals with some things that would need to be considered there. Autoplay

[00:42:23] Nathan Wrigley: policies. Yeah. Paul needs a podcast. I think and a YouTube channel. Actually, Paul could probably do really well out of a YouTube channel, to be honest, but maybe not a podcast. Sorry. Well,

[00:42:33] David Waumsley: it was actually, and actually on that first one page site we built, there was a video which,

[00:42:39] Nathan Wrigley: yes,

[00:42:39] David Waumsley: followed from the web.

So yeah, there might be that, and Icon Systems as well. So there's a separate page for this where I can put in the notes where you can find lots of these icons. So you can define these ahead without kind of moving in, which, which is your gonna be, your style and how you'll go about that. now we'll move on to next thing, which is still, I think in the sort of range of the visuals, no, it's not, sorry, it's, into the sort of technology element Of web components and it's, using the power of web conventions with this. I'll put some notes in here as well on this one, so,

[00:43:15] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.

[00:43:16] David Waumsley: Shall I read this?

[00:43:18] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, you could, I guess.

[00:43:20] David Waumsley: Okay. The, really the point on the notes that go with this slider is the fact that the web is interactive.

That we need to be able to tab mouse, click, finger tap to links and buttons. And we should, in the process for that, should be able to get visual feedback or audio feedback. If you are, somebody uses a screen reader and often these things are forgotten about. So this is a, key thing to do that visitors need to understand our ui.

So conventions are our best friend. there's a book, don't make me think, which very much

[00:43:51] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:43:52] David Waumsley: Says about the idea of just stick with what people understand. Keep it simple as you possibly can. Don't go and do crazy stuff. Do crazy stuff if you like, you might win some awards for doing it, but you're probably gonna lose a load of visitors.

So,

[00:44:04] Nathan Wrigley: yeah.

[00:44:05] David Waumsley: You need the pockets if you wanna experiment. and I've just put a bit in there about the fact that the, it's generally good to test all of the components that you are adding and keep it simple as you go, because. We're used to the fact that we can, there are lots of design systems out there, but they do have a history of breaking conventions.

So the classic one is removing link underlines, which is what Twitter's bootstrap did for version three. So millions of people there, basically those people who were relying only on colour to see what will link, many, people were just excluded from the web on those sites. Yeah. 'cause they can't see what's the link.

Yeah. And the same thing is even Google with its material design managed to replace, input titles for place, for placeholders on form inputs. So of course that causes a complete nightmare for someone trying to fill in a form. Yeah. So, yeah. So my guidelines on this one or something to remind ourselves is that we want to test for ourselves anything that we're adding, which should encourage us not to add more stuff than we need to onto our website.

[00:45:10] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. It's, interesting how this is, useful to explain to the client, but also useful as a mnemonic for yourself. These things need to be taken into account because it is easy to forget some of those bits and pieces. I mean, hopefully if you've been in this business for any length of time, they're a bit ingrained, but they may not be.

It might be that some of those things do drop off the radar a little bit and just having a mnemonic to say, wait, hang on. Have a think.

[00:45:38] David Waumsley: Yes. Well, that's the idea with this. I, if you can put so ahead of this, it might solve some problems because if, if it was the first chat you're having with somebody and you just go over, look, these are the kind of, this is better people than me who've worked out all this stuff about the web who had these kind of principles.

If you like that we should work to it heads it off. Because what's likely to happen is that if you don't say something about trying to keep things simple when it comes to these units and the fact that. What on somebody else's website isn't necessarily good for your needs. You might cut down the people who just say, I want this navigation.

So, right. I think for Paul's site, when we go for the navigation to keep it really, simple for him, we'll have a, instead of a really complex menu, we'll have a menu page, which will just Right,

[00:46:27] Nathan Wrigley: okay. Yep,

[00:46:28] David Waumsley: Goal to, oh, okay.

[00:46:30] Nathan Wrigley: yeah.

[00:46:30] David Waumsley: These sort

[00:46:31] Nathan Wrigley: of things. Something really visual, easy to take in.

Yeah. Okay.

[00:46:34] David Waumsley: Yeah, exactly. And makes it easy to maintain and stuff like that. And it's the same with sliders. you take on, what people need to be aware is that you take on a whole bunch of responsibilities, which later you could get fined for, because you haven't thought about those people who need to tab their way around their site or need it to feed back to them in an audio way, because they use screen readers.

Yeah. So it's a way of just trying to, keep. Add what's needed rather than what looks cool on another person's side. Yeah.

[00:47:04] Nathan Wrigley: yeah,

[00:47:04] David Waumsley: so yeah, so you would, this would be web components where you decide the sort of things that you would need, whether you do need tool tips, whether you use, details and summary as a, we will do that 'cause there'll be frequently asked questions thing and what our button stylings are.

We'll have some animation guidelines, where again, we probably want to make sure we honour people's user preferences. If they hate it, then we're not going to show them animation and we'll have some things on there and we'll have some sort of spaces system that would write down. So again, if, even if say I did the site in simple HTML and CSS, it might be useful to, for anybody who had to take over from me, 'cause I'm run down by a bus to know what system was used to create those spacing so they can apply the same, Let me move on. This is going on a bit, so let me move on to the next thing. Did

[00:47:57] Nathan Wrigley: Miss, did you miss out the,

[00:48:00] David Waumsley: SEO team? I did miss the

[00:48:00] Nathan Wrigley: one.

[00:48:02] David Waumsley: SEO. Yes. You're right. So, next thing, again, SEO here. Now this is where we might dig into it a little bit more. most of this will be just reminder stuff. I mean, I've already got links to it.

There'll be content strategy, how much you think that somebody is going to publish. I think in Paul's case, we would just have a few key articles that might help him rather than the blog,

[00:48:25] Nathan Wrigley: unless he's got the YouTube channel, in which case yes. Doing it all the time. But yeah, I think Paul, it's fairly unlikely that Paul's gonna be producing a

[00:48:34] David Waumsley: Yeah.

[00:48:35] Nathan Wrigley: With blog posts. I doubt. Yeah.

[00:48:36] David Waumsley: I thought for Paul, what it might be, might be useful for him because he is, he's a single person with his wife just taking the calls for him. Emergency plumbing, which is popular. He might want to have an article which tells people. That, is it really emergency? Do you need to pay more for me to be called out now?

Yeah. These are a few things you might be able to do and then call me in the normal hours and save yourself some money. Yeah, so you could have an article about that.

[00:49:01] Nathan Wrigley: yep.

[00:49:02] David Waumsley: sorry. Technical, SEO. So that would be about, structuring data and schemas and stuff, what you're going to include on that. pay speed targets.

You might want to set an indexing considerations what, kind of, structure you're gonna have and which you're going to put in. We'll cover this later 'cause I've actually done the work on Paul's. and there might be something as well about local SEO. So you'll cover here. What would you know? What would be the rules on setting up the Google business profile, which is probably gonna get you most of your work, I think, as a local plumber and whether you want to get into things like geolocation tagging.

and again, we're back in with our E-E-A-T-E. Yeah. Yes. And things like that. And QR codes as well. you might be something you wanted to set up. That mean that became a big thing, didn't it? On your advertising elsewhere, you'd have a QR code to come to your website where they wanted the same, let me move on to the next thing.

So the next one would be applications. Again, there's just a section here where you might want a different page, which I've set up, where you would cover the sort of profile images and the sizes. And again, if you're doing a website, it's good to see how the same brand identity is going to go to different applications like social media.

So it might have a different. sizing of your photographs that you do there and different types of templates that you have. Again, the Google business profile, you might put some more details about what photos you're gonna require for that email. Again, it might be something that you set up that needs to be branded.

And same with anything else. Any, directories or review listings or stuff. So they're on the separate page. And finally, I think on, oh no, not finally.

[00:50:49] Nathan Wrigley: There was a 13 as well. There's one more after this.

[00:50:51] David Waumsley: Yes, we've got testing and tracking something I nearly forgot on this one. This would be setting up again.

How do we ethically measure success?

[00:51:01] Nathan Wrigley: I, want to forget this one. I'd love to live in a world where I didn't have to think about this one.

[00:51:09] David Waumsley: So I, mean, I've, put down here, I think it's worth discussing this 'cause this would be a sort of afterthought a lot of the time. So you would say whether you're going to do user testing now, I've actually put a little article in there once you go to this page, which actually gives you a how you could do the simplest of user testing where you just get maybe three to five people.

Three.

yeah. and, you just go and ask 'em to do a few things and watch where their mouse goes and try and get some feedback. So I've got a whole setup for that. So that might be something that Paul might do, if he can take five new customers or something who prepared to give him half an hour on a Zoom call or something like that.

Good luck with

[00:51:51] Nathan Wrigley: that.

[00:51:56] David Waumsley: and analytics, again, this is something that I would discuss at the beginning if it's needed at all. And, if you are and you want to look at your analytics and you think you're going to use those, are you going to go for something like, Oh, I don't think it's written plausible. It should be saying on there.

Sorry, my, oh,

[00:52:15] Nathan Wrigley: okay. Yeah, I know

[00:52:16] David Waumsley: what

[00:52:16] Nathan Wrigley: you meant.

[00:52:17] David Waumsley: Plausible analytics, I think it's called, is the, privacy first. No cookies tool or you've got Google Analytics where if you are in Europe, you might have to be wary about using anyway. Certainly if you are, you would need to make sure that you've got a popup form that comes up on your website and says, I consent to my data going off to.

Google and going off to the us Yeah. Yeah. So, so all those sort of things. And I think this testing and tracking is a good conversation to be having early, what's your privacy policies? What's your stance on cookies use of dark patterns, whether you are against this, whether you are or not, going to have things like tracking, hidden tracking pixels or whether you use, which I did for some time, some session replay tools.

Microsoft Clarity

[00:53:05] Nathan Wrigley: was, yeah, I tried that until I realised that I never ever looked at them. So it was obviously pointless, but Yeah.

[00:53:12] David Waumsley: Yeah. Well, exactly, that's what I found. I think pretty much everybody I used to set up with analytics, but I think. There would be only a handful out of, well over a hundred clients that I know of.

There'd only been maybe about five of them, whoever really did look at their analytics.

[00:53:29] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:53:29] David Waumsley: And when they did, it was only for a certain period of time and then it would be left for years again.

[00:53:34] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:53:34] David Waumsley: So

[00:53:35] Nathan Wrigley: somebody got a memo that they needed to give a pres presentation to the board and analytics and so suddenly, oh, let's analyse the analytics and off they go.

Yep. Okay. Yeah,

[00:53:47] David Waumsley: and there are other ways of doing that, which I hope to cover. I mean, we're going on forever if I cover all of the slides in this. But in that you would put the alternatives in there because at the end of the day, you can get quite a lot of information by just measuring what comes into you and measuring.

What you can already sign up to. If you are, Google Search Console, or Bing, it will tell you a lot of information about the traffic anyway.

[00:54:11] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. '

[00:54:11] David Waumsley: cause most people have signed up to it. And finally, last section would be in this higher, level, would be governance. Who's responsible for what? and this would cover sort of levels of permissions that anybody would have to say a CMS if it was a WordPress site on this one, or to GitHub or GitLab.

If it's, something which I'd probably be doing these days, how they might have access even to this guide, as well. So who would have that? Okay. review schedules, that maybe not one at all, but it's worth thinking about how often you're going to review whether your site needs an update in some form or another.

And what you're going to audit. you're going to look, one of the things you might be looking at, which is non-intrusive. You might be looking at where your keywords are positioned. There's tools, plenty of those where you can say, I'm trying to rank for linkage share plumbing. Let's see how we rank.

and you might want to check those every so often. And then the, there's the legal things, again, a page for that which really just needs to reinforce what laws you need to follow for where your website is and the size of your business, in terms of accessibility and GDPR. Okay. yeah. And finally, this is just a couple of things on this slide, which would have their own slides, which is, change log, who's tracking what and how.

And then a decision framework would be the last thing about. Well, what's not covered in these guidelines and what happens if someone gets hit by a bus, which is my thing at the moment.

[00:55:45] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. You can keep referring to the boss. Poor.

[00:55:48] David Waumsley: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:55:49] Nathan Wrigley: Poor David.

[00:55:52] David Waumsley: I know, I'm, well, I'm well in my sixties now and I'm already

[00:55:56] Nathan Wrigley: be a boss.

[00:55:57] David Waumsley: could

[00:55:57] Nathan Wrigley: be something else. Exactly.

[00:56:03] David Waumsley: So, yeah, and I think it's always forgotten about. I mean, I think certainly who updates what is one and one of the biggest hassles with my, I set up the site for somebody, I think I'm in charge of it. 'cause my job is to do the updating and to make sure that their software's running.

But we've never really finalised that conversation. Who's responsible? So I'm really surprised when they give access to somebody who's able to change my plugins and do stuff. Right.

[00:56:27] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well it's a good idea to get that written down then. Nice.

[00:56:30] David Waumsley: Yeah. Yeah, so that's the idea. I dunno if this has done a very good job.

I'm sure it's probably painful for anyone listening to this, but, I'll put a link to what I'm working on and you'll see how this keeps, changing over time. But yes, there are about

[00:56:46] Nathan Wrigley: 50 odd pages and obviously each of those table of contents pages that we've just spent the time looking at. I think there were 14 of them or something like that.

yeah, 13 of them. They link to subsequent pages, which make 50 in total. I, would definitely go and have a look at it. And we said that the links would be buried in the YouTube, comments and ju just, I'll just pop it on the screen. Sorry, David, it looks like you wanted to say something and then we've

[00:57:14] David Waumsley: Yeah, no, I'll just put the link to our.

Where we'll put this on our website. And in our website I'll put a link to, this. So, yeah.

[00:57:24] Nathan Wrigley: Well, I'll just quickly do this because I might as well, so the website itself, which we've mentioned, it's on the screen the entire time, but I'll do it anyway. So it's no script show. the YouTube channel is that, but that's feels superfluous.

'cause presumably if you're watching this, you've already discovered that. So anyway, and, this episode will be found here. No script, no show slash number 2 9 29. And yeah, that's a body of work you've got there. David, you've been, really busy. let's hope you get some feedback about it.

Let's hope people drop into

[00:58:01] David Waumsley: the Yeah, it be nice. We don't generally get anything here, but it was just nice to just get your initial feedback on it anyway. Yeah. Just to see if it's, a big thing, but the idea is to keep it, A level where you could cover the 10 slides if you like, the main element with a, client and give 'em an overview without

[00:58:20] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:58:20] David Waumsley: But as you want to dig into each thing, then you can get more specific with some notes. And for me, it's a place to store everything that I've been learning all this time. 'cause it always comes up, every time you go to a new website and that you're thinking, oh, what was that site where they had all the collections of all the icons that you can get for free out there?

[00:58:39] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:58:40] David Waumsley: Where have I kept that to? The idea is to have this one central hub.

[00:58:44] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. It's some, for

[00:58:45] David Waumsley: me

[00:58:46] Nathan Wrigley: it's on Google Drive folder or some deleted folder, which is on a backup dis somewhere, or, yeah. Yeah. I get it. that's, amazing. I really am totally blown away by the amount of work you've done there.

So, one last time, no script show slash 2 9 29. If you want to find out more. is that it? Are we done for that one then do you see?

[00:59:07] David Waumsley: I think we are done. Yeah. And I dunno when we'll be next on, or what we'll be doing because well a month today we should be together.

[00:59:15] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, you might be able to, might be able to do it with one camera.

That'd be fun. Assuming I can actually get, to India. We'll wait and see on that. But yeah, in which case I will bid you and I will, we'll be back soon at some point. Take care.

[00:59:31] David Waumsley: Yeah. Thank you. Bye

[00:59:34] Nathan Wrigley: bye-Bye.

Trap or Trade-off? What small businesses should know before getting a website

2026-02-04T00:00:00Z

Show Notes:

Here's the presentation slides. Below is the text version.

What Small Businesses Should Know Before Getting a Website

The website builders market was worth 3.06 billion dollars in 2025.
It is projected to reach 6.68 billion dollars by 2030.

Hand-coded websites have declined from 76% in 2011 to 33% in 2022.
They are expected to be under 9% by 2030.

58% of web designers have been in business fewer than 6 years, with 40% in their first 3 years.
This is a much higher “newness” rate than most professions.

Web design is the number one freelance skill (offered by 36%).
72% of workers in 2025 have considered a freelance side hustle.

Web Design Is Changing

WordPress dominates the CMS market with a 60% share.
Approximately 60% of WordPress sites use a commercial page builder.
Elementor is 30% of that.

Wix dominates the dedicated website builder market with a 45% share.

Wix reports that DIY builders account for 73% of active sites, while 27% are managed by “professionals”.
80% of active Wix sites are owned by small businesses with fewer than 10 employees.

Hand-coding Wins on Quality

The web was invented (initially for scientists) to make information-sharing around the world easier.
It used simple document tags so everyone could use it.

Seeing commercial opportunities, the “brochure” website appeared.
This advanced the web, but brought significant problems.

Understanding the Web

Mimicking print layouts involved complex code hacks, which made learning CSS difficult and led to the commercial WYSIWYG builder.

WYSIWYGs always fail eventually because, unlike print, the designer has no control over what the end user sees.
It depends on the user’s device and preferences.

It created a back-to-front understanding.
The web is not a visual vehicle into which content is added, but a flexible vehicle for content that can be visually enhanced.

HTML First

HTML is a website’s structural foundation.
It defines content and allows it to be shared and understood by people with disabilities as well as machines for search engines.

It is simple, yet over 90% of sites do not use it correctly.

Meet Paul Brown

Paul (a plumber) is one of the 25% of small businesses who did not have a website.

He contacted professional developers, but they were too expensive.
He tried DIY builders, but got confused.

A friend reminded him that a web page is only a document of content.
Start there.

Paul looked at his competition.
Most sites were an overwhelm of animations, stock images, and sales brags.

Paul’s Process – Part One

Paul decided his authenticity was his main selling point.

He looked up the basics of writing web copy, got a few photos of him working, and created a Google document.

He next found free resources on how to turn this into HTML, which he did with the VSCodium editor.

With a few lines of added CSS this was presentable, not well branded.

Paul’s Process – Part Two

Paul created a logo using a free Canva account.

For now, a one-page site is enough to establish his presence.
He knows he can get free hosting and uploads his HTML to GitHub where he can edit his site and collaborate should he need a professional.

Knowing his HTML is semantic, he gets an LLM to add CSS.
Knowing AI is not intelligent, he asks a CSS coder to check it.

He goes live!

Paul’s Site

Website URL
GitHub repository
Google Doc

Paul Learned

The web is a form of communication, not a funfair of carousels or a game of hide and seek.

HTML is the easy part.
Finding empathy and making the message clear and understandable is the hard part.

CSS styling can be easy if the HTML is right and the design is simple, but is best overseen by an expert.

He did not need a minimum of 5,000 dollars to get started.

Branding, SEO, and UX Design

Branding (The Soul):
The emotional, visual, and verbal identity that makes you memorable and fosters trust.

SEO (The Bridge):
The process of optimizing your site so search engines and users can find you easily.

UX Design (The Experience):
The structure and functionality that makes interacting with your brand easy, enjoyable, and efficient.

Brand Guidelines

Brand Story & Core Values
Logo Guidelines
Colour Palette
Typography
Imagery and Visuals
Voice and Tone
Formatting and Layout
Application Examples

Trap or Trade-off?

Trap

Vendor lock-in
The “90% done” problem
Performance and SEO limitations
Hidden long-term costs

Trade-off

Speed and time-to-market
MVP (Minimum Viable Product)
Budget and resource constraints
Standardized use cases (templates)

Links

Research:

Transcript

[00:00:06] Nathan Wrigley: Hello there and welcome to the No Script Show. In our last episode, we talked about unification, how we are losing our agency to big tech, and how we might reclaim it through the indie web. Now, the indie web is popular with influential developers as well as hobbyists using platforms such as neo cities, yet its growth is considerably outpaced by commercial, no-code platforms that dominate the spaces where small.

And local businesses seek website advice. In this episode, we're looking at how these types of businesses might get a website that avoids the lock-in and quality trade-offs that come with no-code platforms. You can find our show notes and supporting resources over on the website. The URL for that is no script show slash 28.

So that's the numbers two eight. And if you're watching this on YouTube, the link for that will be the first comment just below the subscribe and the like buttons. And as always, I am joined by David Wamsley. Hello David.

[00:01:08] David Waumsley: Hello Nathan. yeah, so do you know what I was looking at? search results? I was, pretending I was, A new person, a new small business, trying to look for a website, and it was really quite stunning. I tried different search engines as well.

[00:01:24] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.

[00:01:24] David Waumsley: It was almost entirely all the things that I saw were almost entirely focused on getting us to adopt a commercial platform. There were either sort of ads to get on something for free affiliate content that was.

Given you the different options or indirectly, and I was checking these out. There were, web designers who effectively are upselling. The, builder that they used to clients had to go and check. 'cause they weren't saying, oh, I see, okay. Around this thing. So I checked on their portfolio and thought, yeah, and I really, HTML, the thing that powers all websites and belongs to all of us is now, I think it's concerning that it's now just increasingly falling behind a paywall.

So businesses, yeah, I think businesses have two basic choices. They still have these, which is either. I'm calling the corporate web where you are offered freedom from code for the price of locking, or you've got the indie web, which is offering freedom from locking for the price of having to wrangle some code and.

I think, well, you and I both know each other from builder communities, so

[00:02:35] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, we do. Yep. Yep.

[00:02:36] David Waumsley: A decade ago I saw code or no code solutions, that kind of fair trade off between cost and quality. but I think as more builders seem to get, and ified and browsers allow us to do more with less, I'm changing my opinion on that, which is where this is really leading to.

And, I think if we to do it based on merit, you would expect to reverse in the trend. We'd expect more people to be talking about HTML these days, but we're seeing a wider division, so I think we need to look at both parts of web design. For this one, we need to look at the. Web, which is the technology that's needed.

So, and I think ideally we'd follow the W3C's role of lease power and start with what we can first achieve with a website using just simple HTML and. If anything, really, if there's a takeaway from this show, it would be for me that HTML, which is getting forgotten, is the web. And if we own our own HTML, then we effectively own and control our own digital space.

So we probably don't wanna give that away. prematurely. and design is the other bit that we should look at in web design, which is I think some of the appeal with a lot of the no code solutions is the templates. And even though that's the opposite of design, it's beats a blank page, which is what a lot of people who want a website is stuck with.

Really, how do I get started? So I think we'll need to look at this at, just ways to get an effective online brand. But first, shall we start? I've got a whole bunch of statistics me to read. Help Nathan. yeah, look, yeah, look at this, unregulated industry. We call web design, which isn't at all shark infested.

[00:04:32] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So just before I launch into these, web design is changing statistics, just say, it'd be curious to poll the owners of websites. And so by the owners of websites, I don't mean agency people, the people who literally have paid to have the website for their business, for their whatever it is that they're doing.

It'd be interesting to poll those people and ask them what is their website made of. And I'm sure that the answer will, that will come out of their mouth, will be the paid for platform. That they're using. So, the Squarespace and the Wix and the page builder or whatever, whether it's WordPress or something like that, as opposed to, it's HTML and CSS that you, I just think it's been so wrapped up, commoditized, and, We're trying to get us back to something a little bit more, a little bit more straightforward. Okay. So with that in mind, here we go. I shall just read these four bullet points, some stats about the, changing nature of web design. First one is the website builders market was worth 3.8 billion.

Gosh, dollars in the year 2025 and over the next five years, that's projected to more than double. So by 2030 go up to $6.68 billion blind. That's interesting. Hand coded websites have declined from 76% in 2011. To 33% in 2022. And is, it is expected to be under 9% by 2030. So Wow. So I'm going from three quarters of the market down to less than a 10th over the next period.

That's interesting. Third,

[00:06:15] David Waumsley: just adds start something on that one that, that bit of research, it's all creditable. And I'll put the links actually in the show notes. but that one is actually before chat, GB. T came out and then we got all the vibe code and things. So yeah. Anyway, sorry. And

[00:06:31] Nathan Wrigley: that is trending south even more than, the 9%, which sounded pessimistic, but probably is rather optimistic.

Okay, so STAT three 58% of web designers have been bus, have been in business fewer than six years. 40% in their first three years, a much higher newness rate than most professions. That's also curious. And then the last one for now, web design is the number one freelance skill. Oh, I did not know that.

Offered by 36%. 72% of workers in 2025 have considered a freelance side hustle. Wow.

[00:07:10] David Waumsley: Yeah, so it, it's painting this newness, it's newness is an actual proper term, for how you measure industries and yeah, it's very high. I've actually got some more stats for you to read through this. The last ones here on the builders,

[00:07:24] Nathan Wrigley: oh yeah, sorry, there was a further slide.

I forgot about that. So three more. Here we go. so about WordPress. WordPress dominates the CMS market with a 60% market share. Approximately 60% of WordPress sites use a commercial page builder, Elementor is 30% of that. Wix dominates the dedicated website builder market with a 45% share. That's curious.

And last stat we've got is again about Wix. Wix reports that DIY builders account for 73% of active sites, while 27% are managed by professionals. 80% of active Wix sites are owned by small businesses with fewer than 10 employees. All of these stats paint a picture. Which is not ideal for the lovers of HDML

[00:08:15] David Waumsley: and css and certainly anecdotally, backing up what weeks are saying.

I know. from my time in the builder community, a lot of people were reporting, that they were getting more customers, the people just selling the sort of builder software. Were getting more customers that were coming from actual businesses themselves, DIY rather than the developer who was using it as a tool to, yeah.

But, sorry. I've got a whole long bit, which is my interpretation of these statistics, and they support what I think. I saw as somebody was originally a no co, sorry, a hand coder who, became an early adopter of page builders, how we met and, yeah, I was active in those communities. So initially when I, this, we're going back to sort of 2014, most of the people when I joined the builder that I did, were experienced coders who were adopting a page builder because of its main selling point that allowed for cheaper and quicker websites.

Builds for certain types of clients, and a way also for those clients to be able to alter their own content. And, but this was also at a time back then when CSS was really cumbersome. It was starting to change. We responsive sites were still new. We didn't quite have that. And when you could still find builders that weren't too bloated, what I noticed was fairly quickly that the page builder.

Peers that I had at that time changed to professionals, people who were making sites for people who were non coders. And they generally demanded more and more flashy stuff from their builder subscriptions. 'cause you're paying for that yearly. And I. I, I always felt uncomfortable because with less experience that these people had who were coming in, they were unaware of the sort of technical debt issues that you get and the UX issues that come from the types of requests that they were asking for.

But I also noticed that builders would have to keep adding them or appease them as otherwise their competition. Do that. So it's regardless really, because most of the people I know who started on that no coder route, have swapped their builders multiple times anyway. But I think most concerning for me, being in that sort of arena was that, What's really what entered the no code builder market were these sort of lifestyle gurus, if you like, business gurus who were promoting value pricing to get website clients to pay upfront the highest amount that they could get out of them really on the promise of results, and they encourag. New developers to reframe the no-code builder tools as professional tools that clients don't really need to know about.

So it always concerned me because effectively they were repackaging the skills that went into their software as their own. And then armed with, typically these gurus would give you sales scripts. They were able to charge more than what you'd have to pay for a coder and, Yeah, for me, we talked about this before and now.

Other podcasts that we were doing. and it reminded me of the South African Independent State website back in 2011. They were charged the equivalent of, $15 million for design and development of that site. And what they got was a $35 WordPress template.

[00:11:45] Nathan Wrigley: I remember I read that yesterday as I was preparing for this episode, and that is.

Insane. Such a bizarre statistic.

[00:11:57] David Waumsley: I know, and it, I mean it's seen as corruption in it, but to a value pricer, that's a good deal, isn't it? That the client got what they asked for. They delivered what they want. Yeah, exactly. That was the result they wanted. But for the rest of us, we think, that, it must have probably spent the more, they must have spent more time.

Writing and signing the contract than they did actually developing the site, but Right,

[00:12:20] Nathan Wrigley: right.

[00:12:26] David Waumsley: Yeah, but I think also, one thing to be aware of and you're not in those circles, is that enterprise and public bodies have long learned not to pay these upfront budgets on web projects because things need to change. You don't know how they're going to work out, and we have. Agile, which has been around, for what, nearly 25 years now, is the process that people adopt dealt where they start with the minimal viable product, the thing that they can first put out there, and then they improve it with ongoing iteration.

So effectively they're paying for it as results come in, which of course if you're. A value pricer, you want the money upfront and you promise the results. So, and I suspect really that the reason why we're seeing a lot more companies, DIY in it is because of the lack of trust that there is in the industry.

We can't trust, web designers necessarily to. To guide you in the right direction on this thing. So I think a lot of people are just moving to DIY, but this again, causes a problem. It solves the issue of not getting ripped off and they have more control, but with a lack of understanding of how websites actually work.

We just see, I think it's almost provable now that websites are generally getting a lot worse and owners are completely unaware of why they're worse, so, which is leading to us. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:13:49] Nathan Wrigley: it's, so, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy in a sense, because if, you are the. if, let's say you've got a, small business, there's a few of you running that business.

There's 10 of you and you're all heads down doing the busy work that you have to do to make that business work, and the website is just an appendage. It's just something you know, that you've got to have and then somebody displays to you, okay, here's the finished product. You're looking at it like a magazine, you're looking at it like, oh yeah, that looks great.

But with, how would you understand the process that the magazine had in order to be put on the shelf, all of the graphic designers that needed to be done, the, paper that needed to be ordered, the ink that needed to be ordered, and so on and so on All the things that make that.

the magazine possible. Well, it's the same thing in this arena. All of the things that will make it successful are the things which are hidden underneath that have got not, well, not nothing, but certainly there's a lot, there's many more layers beneath it than just what it looks like on the front end.

Accessibility, whether it's optimized for, search in the correct way, and so on and so forth. But, we've taught our clients just, there it is. Does it look good? Are you happy with the way it looks? Yep. Great. Sign the dotted line. We're done.

[00:15:03] David Waumsley: Yeah, I know. and in a way that's why, it's really mostly in Europe, but this is why we're having to see things like legislation for GDPR because what people aren't thinking about whether data's going, they're not thinking about accessibility.

So we've got new laws for that. It's happened to be enforced because websites are just getting generally worse on the whole.

[00:15:22] Nathan Wrigley: Right.

[00:15:23] David Waumsley: but let's just move, I'll just quickly, this slide didn't need to be there, but, there's nothing ready to read here, just a little. For those who are on the audio, it won't be meaningful.

But there's just a little slide that is showing the results of someone who tested a no-code solution or low-code solution. I'm lumping them together, element against using, hand-coded using Astra. So it's basically just HTML and CSS and it just shows there's a massive difference in the sort of performance.

So the sort of lighthouse scores that you'll get. Page speed from Google and everything, they're very low and the page size is what's 300? Sorry? 3,200 on this one where it's 180 for a Handbuilt site. So it's so much heavier. Than it needs to be. But I think, always hand coding is going to be on quality.

It's always been about the expense thing. there's, there are other concerns as well about accessibility, on the limited flexibility you get with no code stuff. So, and I think particularly those in the EU have to be concerned about the builders that they use now because of these things. Because even though there's.

for marketing purposes, most software will talk about their co compliancy, but they generally are not, they will sell where they are compliant, but they won't tell you where they're not really Right. Right. And most of it's a little bit like, lipstick on a pig. It's bolt on solutions to improve the performance or improve the accessibility.

Anyway, I'll move on. But I think really Okay. What, I wanted to say was just that I think most of us in the industry, and that definitely includes me, I've been caught up in this, I've tended to undervalue the unique reach of the web.

[00:17:32] David Waumsley: Okay. Yeah. I think most of us in the industry have undervalued the. Unique reach of the web, how easy it, when you've got text on the web, how it can be translated.

And we've reverted a little bit to knowing what we already understand, print, we understand visuals as a way of communicating on that. So we tried to recreate that online. But often in doing that, we've often excluded kind of billions of people with permanent, temporary, or situational disabilities over the time, so we're not watching out for that.

I'm as guilty as anybody for this kind of stuff.

Anyway, I'll, we'll move on. Let, I think we need to cover a little bit about understanding the web, so I'll leave it. You Nathan to read this?

[00:18:16] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. I'll just read what's there and then we'll hand it back to you. So, here we go. The web was invented initially for scientists, I guess over at CERN is what I'm guessing.

Yeah. You are thinking there to make information sharing around the world easier. It used simple document tags so everybody could use it. See in commercial opportunities, the brochure website appeared this advanced the web, but brought significant problems such as. Number one, mimicking print layouts involve complex code hacks, which made learning CSS difficult and led to the commercial.

What is what you get builders, which we were talking about earlier, number two, wizzywig. So what is what you get. Always fail eventually because unlike print, the designer has no control over what the end user sees. It depends on the user's, device and preferences. That's such a profound point.

And number three. This all created a back to front. Understanding the web is not a visual vehicle into which content is added, but a flexible vehicle for content that can be visually enhanced, nicely put. I like that.

[00:19:22] David Waumsley: Great. no, I think that's really, and definitely that's the way I see it because you started with the brochure site and the only thing that people are concerned about is how pretty it looks.

And then you end up, and we've just got so used to that and it's taken me, coming back to HML the second time round and, listening to what people said to realize that, well, everybody already knew that the visual. Website builder never worked in theory right from the beginning, but it has worked for limited time in practice.

So the first wave of these, things like expression, web and Dreamweaver, they died as soon as devices changed. As soon as we got the mobile web taken off and we got devices there, suddenly the way that you designed around visually around those pages didn't work for that. But

[00:20:09] Nathan Wrigley: Right, right.

[00:20:10] David Waumsley: There's such a delay because, they still made money because the majority of people still.

Thought that was the tool they would get to make the visual web and would be unaware of the people who were damaged as a result of the way they're making their websites. So, it took over a decade for these to close their shops. There were still money being made on it, and I think the present ones are having to deal with a similar thing because we now have over 2000 different unique view port sizes to deal with.

Yeah. All new

[00:20:37] Nathan Wrigley: nty, that's a naughty. Statistic.

[00:20:41] David Waumsley: I know. It's it's incredible. We've got so many different devices and so many new user preferences. We've got black and white screens and all this. So hence, I think people in the industry are realizing, you'll see a lot of the builders are now pivoting towards, code 'cause a lot more other long term no coders have realized that they need to learn some codes, so there's more of that or AI or both of these.

But I suspect it's a little bit like the gold rush where more people sold. Solve the shovels at the end of the gold run when there's nothing to get that we're, we're peak. This is the way markets go. We're peaking. So all these planned where we think that builders are going to be in the future, how they're going to take over is based on the projection and the peak we're on at the moment.

I think things will have to turn around, but rather than blame the builders, I think we, we have to look at it. Realistically and say that the real problem is the HTML and CSS, that it, even though it was given to us for free, for us all to be able to use it, didn't meet our expectations, at least as sighted people who are what we wanted from the web and as an open language, that only progressed.

Based on the cooperation of everybody in the industry and big players in that other browsers and those browsers at war with each other, it was slow to adapt. And I think why we've seen a sudden change and why really this show has been created because of the fact this change is the fact that we now have browser interoperability agreement between the major browsers that they're going to work together on this.

And as a result, since about. 2018 HTML and CSS has advanced more in a few years than it has in all the previous dec decades. Yeah. So, yeah, so I think, the real point of that one is if we want resilient sites now we really need to start to turn around that original mistake we made of seeing things as visual rather than something that's content that we can make visual.

we'll need to start putting HTML content first in it. I've got

[00:22:46] Nathan Wrigley: you have indeed. So this one labeled HTML first, which is obviously what you were building up to. Nice segue. three bullet points here. HTML is a website, structural foundations. I hope that you knew that, dear listener or watch. if you didn't, there's a lot of Googling to do, around the letters HTML go and have a fun time with that.

it defines content and allows it to be shared and understood by people with disabilities as well as machines for search engines, it's simple, yet over 90%. Of websites do not use it correctly. And I would go back to your point earlier, David, when you said, maybe a fourth bullet point here is it's totally free.

Yeah. It's just completely and utterly free available to everybody. You just need to learn it. yes. Bits of it. So over to you.

[00:23:36] David Waumsley: I know. Well, the name doesn't help, does it? Hyper architectural markup language doesn't.

[00:23:40] Nathan Wrigley: No, not really. I never thought about that. That's true. It's a rubbish name isn't It?

Ought to be given some sort of, slightly more, I don't know, user pronounceable, less intimidating name. Simon.

[00:23:55] David Waumsley: like that. Well, actually, yeah, his. His products actually since the thing that, Tim Burnes Lee's been working on. I've gotten friendlier names, but, but I, like what, Bruce Lawson calls it.

He is one of the, early people, web standards and he calls it How To Make Loveliness.

[00:24:14] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, that's nice. Yeah, I love it. I love that. I love it. Okay. Right. Anyway, we wound you up. No go.

[00:24:24] David Waumsley: Yeah, there's a few, there's lots of statistics out there, but Web Aim does a yearly look at the, I think, top million websites.

So in. 2025. This is relating to the last point about over 90% of sites are not using HTML correctly. They've got it as 92.8% of websites still use non semantic div based layout. So basically it's HT ML, which isn't making sense of the content, but it's there for styling and they also. Come up with a figure that 73% of accessibility issues could have been resolved with proper HTML markup language.

Now, this is so simple stuff, but the problem is we've been focused so much on the visuals that CMSs and builders are really where the problems found, because that's where everybody's concentrating on the visuals and not what the content is and how it's marked up on there. Yeah.

[00:25:19] Nathan Wrigley: Can, you remember 15 years ago or something, you would go to websites and the whole point.

Of the markup was about getting the pixels to go in the places like, you'd wrap everything. You'd put a div round a div, and then a span here and a bit of, CSS there, and there was no consideration whatsoever to the content. It was purely about making it look nice that was like the whole point of HTML was how it looked.

And, and we forget that literally isn't the point.

[00:25:51] David Waumsley: Yeah. Yeah. And, really it's so simple. If we get h tml right, then we are largely getting accessibility for free. We get better. SEO, we get performance all around. That's better. And actually it makes it easier to make sites attractive as well if you use the right markup.

It actually, so in future episodes, we will, we're, gonna go step by step with the process of creating some different types of small business sites. So we're gonna. Keep going through this sort of process, but here, just to give an example here, obviously this is mostly audio, so we can't cover too much.

We're just gonna start with a simple example of a minimal viable product website. So again, I've got a slider for you.

[00:26:33] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, here he is. Meet John Brown. No, it doesn't even say that. It says Meet Paul Brown, so I can't read. so there he is. He is a plumber in Lincolnshire by the looks of it. He's a, chap that needs a website.

So here's our sort of MVP, the, let's set the stage for what's gonna happen here. So Paul Brown Paul, who is a plumber. Is one of the 25% of small businesses who do not have a website already. So he's, primed. He is ready to go. He wants to be on the web. He's got a business. He contacted a professional, some professional developers, but they were too expensive, so he decided I'm gonna try a DIY builder.

But that was all very confusing. bear in mind, he's busy, he is got other things to do and his skillset is not necessarily being online. He wants to do plumbing for people. So a friend reminded him that a webpage is only a document of content. Start there. So he looked at the competition.

Most sites were overwhelming in their animation, stock images, and sales brag. I dunno if you wanna say anything before we move on.

[00:27:39] David Waumsley: No, I'll move on to talk about what you did. Yeah,

[00:27:42] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. So I'll, shall I just read these out quickly? Yeah,

[00:27:44] David Waumsley: yeah, please.

[00:27:45] Nathan Wrigley: so he decided that his authenticity was his main selling point.

So we're stepping away from the markup and the HTML. He's just trying to figure out what it is that he wants to do. By the way, that is the point of it, isn't it? It is that when you, want a plumber, you don't want a plumber's website. You actually want some person who's gonna show up who is actually credible and who knows how to fix leaks and put pipes into, plumb toilets in and basins and bars.

That's what you want. so he looked up the basics of web. Writing web copy. Got a few photos of him working and created a Google doc. He next found free resources on how to turn this into HTML, which he did with the vs coded editor. Should that say code? But let's go with code. Is it vs. Coded?

[00:28:35] David Waumsley: well I tell you, I swapped that one because I've studied you vs.

Coia, which is vs code without Microsoft being involved, so.

[00:28:42] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, interesting. Okay, well let's go with that then. vs. Coia editor. And with a few lines of added CSS, this was presentable, not well branded.

[00:28:52] David Waumsley: another slide.

[00:28:54] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, here we go. Paul created a logo using free, a free Canva account. He's doing all right, isn't he?

Considering how Yeah. How busy he is. for now, a one-page site is enough to establish his presence. He knows he can get a, some free hosting and upload his HTML to GitHub where he can edit his site and collaborate should he need a professional knowing his HTML is semantic, he gets an LLM to add CSS.

Knowing AI is not intelligent. I'm just gonna repeat that. Knowing AI is not intelligent, he asks the CSS coder to check it and he goes live. He's doing very well, all the while on the picture. Still busy underneath the basin. Right over to you. I guess we've got three things here. Website, URL, GitHub, repository, and Google Docs.

I'm guessing they're the three things that he really needed to get himself up.

[00:29:42] David Waumsley: Yeah, and I think we'll just need to pause and we'll bring up my screen, so we'll look at his work. So we just pause a second.

[00:29:49] Nathan Wrigley: I'll pause it back in a sec.

[00:29:51] David Waumsley: Yeah, so here is Paul's site. It's not gonna win any awards, but, as a sort of a job he could do himself.

It's there, it covers all of the main things he's. Main, call to action is over here. So what he did initially was that he got some web copy tips, which was right for scanners, not readers, focused on the benefits. go for clear rather than clever, no fancy words. Try and build some trust on it.

One action per page and consider some of the keywords, but don't stuff it. So that's basically the advice he got. And then all he did was get a few of his photos that he could add here. And followed that started with the most important stuff on the top and. Pretty simple and then he could turn that into H TM L.

Now there are various courses and I've put them, actually, lemme just go over to here where he's got them on GitHub, I've put them over here. Couple of resources for anybody wants to do that. It's a great four hour video, which really goes into everything about HML. Probably you could do two hours of this.

And one hour in fact of this. And you could probably know all that Paul needed to know. and there's HTML for the people, but anyone can do that. And this is on, that's such a great name for a resource, isn't it? HTML for the people. I love that. I know. It. It, and it's. It really is about what this is about as well.

trying to get people to reclaim it and use it as a, tool that they can use to, enhance their own lives as Paul is doing over here. what else do I want to mention? So I mentioned that I should mention the, particularly as the last episode we were talking about vibe coding and the use of ai.

So this was AI did it, he did the, the. Code, and let me just show you that first. Actually, if I go in here, okay, you can actually, because he's uploaded it to GitHub, and GitLab is an alternative to this, which I'll probably be using more often. And if you go in here, so Paul could work this way, create his H TM L, upload it to here, and then collaborate with anybody when he needs a professional.

So if you need somebody to do the coding rather than. Relying on AI to give him some CSS help. He could do that. And it's quite simple 'cause once you've done it here, you've also got an online editor. So effectively it's like having your own little, CMS really. So if I just go into here. I can just quickly show you that the code is simple.

Now there is literally about as simple as you can get with this. There are no CSS classes in this HTML. Let's just see if I can, there, it's coming up there. oh. Everything's collapsed here, so that's okay. Only really? Yeah. So what is missing? When we were talking about, what we are saying is that very few people are using the proper.

Tags to mark things up. And you've got, you put, obviously you need a body else, nothing shows up, but you use these headers for the header area. They're the main area and then different sections, he's got over that in his, and then the main and then the footer. simply having these basic things is enough.

And when you use something like VS Code or vs. Codem, which are the same thing, it's pretty easy to write. So when you want to write anything, you'll write in a paragraph. You put P here. You just tap here, it gives you the tabs you write in there. So anything like this was pretty easy for anyone, I think, to understand.

there are a few more things about how to add in images, but again, you get guided with something like this. You've typed image, it starts to give you the code. Yeah. When it's so uncluttered like that. When it's just so bare bones, it's so, yeah. it's, to call it human readable is a bit of a stretch.

[00:33:36] Nathan Wrigley: I'm sure that for some people, e even that is too much. But I would imagine somebody with a, with an hour of application, most people, many people would be able to just look at that and say, okay, I get how this has worked. I get how the nesting affects things. I get that if you put things inside of other things, that has an impact on where they will be viewed and so on.

It. Yeah, really nice and simple. And I think actually, when you think how difficult it can be to learn a page builder and a UI to get to HTML to change, if Paul had just got somebody to write his HT ML phone and he kept it simple like this with, that wouldn't work if you wanted.

[00:34:16] David Waumsley: To rely on a framework like Tailwind or something, which crams the HTML full of all sorts of instructions, how to, lay out the CSS. But if you keep it here, there's no classes in this, at all. So you can read it. So I think anybody could go into the section that they needed and go, oh, that's a paragraph.

I want to change the text here, or I want to add. So again, so if he wanted on his design here to add in this new little, details and summary thing, 'cause he's got something else he wants to add to it. Well, it wouldn't be too much hard work for Paul to come in and go down to his details and just take this and copy it.

Create a new one. Yeah. And then change it. So I think it's as simple as a page build out when you keep it like that. So that's really what I wanted to show on this. is there anything else? Oh, I'll just show you just for interest, I think on this. So. I'm not a big fan of AI being used anyway, but it's a tool that can be quite helpful if there's expertise behind it.

And obviously Paul doesn't have that with it. So I think if you got something AI generated this, you would definitely need to get it checked out. But I did do, and I'll just go onto inspect so you can see them quickly. There are in here, but just go to the head. There are a few other styles. So something you might do if you did a HT ML course anyway.

Oops. Let's just click in this so I can get to this. If I just go and. Change this to style here. you might get told this is just a few lines of CSS just to center this and give it a background. That's what you get with Hasty Mel on its own with really very little styling. Yeah. Yep. What I did, so anybody could probably create something like that.

I did get, various ais to do different versions of it. So another one, which is okay, wouldn't have said keep it simple. Is this one. Which just basically made it look a little bit like a website over here. Pretty much the same thing. Okay. That's, and then I said, yeah. I said, why not do something a bit crazier?

So I said, okay, give us a brutalist look of modern brutalist look. And, if I can get this to change. I was gonna say, can you, all you can't do is get your mouse in there. Here's the car. Yeah, there you go. It. If I go to three, we will see We've got, oh, now actually, sorry. You'll see this is buggered up and, sorry, I'll put it on dark mode here, which I wouldn't normally be in.

It looks fine like this and quite interesting what it came up with. But here's, I put this in and I didn't change it on purpose, just to show you that if somebody came in dark mode, this is what it gave us. You wouldn't be able to see. Yes, I saw that there was, there was, you can't the text. The text, wasn't it?

[00:36:55] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. There you go. Yeah, so ai, is not something you would want to trust. And I did one final one, if I can just get to it here, which is not very interesting, but I'll show it anyway. there we are. Just one. I said give us a sort of. Old fashioned newspaper. Newspaper, yeah. Newspaper feel, that's right.

Yeah. Yeah. So he did that. So, but, the ones that was there, but they will AI on this one generated and needed. So if Paul went to and had to pay somebody, they would probably only charge an hour of their time if that, to be able to correct something. Very simple because it works in this case, rather than vibe coding.

[00:37:34] David Waumsley: 'cause usually vibe coding, what you're doing is you're losing control of the HTML. You're saying Create me this whole thing and it will not give you some anti HTML by default. It will give you a sort of bunch of styling with divs and it'll probably use something like Tailwind. Whereas if you've got the HTML set up and it's meaningful, everything's put into.

Has a meaning to it. This is the head of stuff. This has got a proper meaning actually with the content. It gives it quite a good cue. good idea what to do. Yes. Anyway, I think that's probably all wanted to show. It was just to show that you could make a fairly simple one page, which I think. Given what given.

I actually looked at Paul's competition would be around and I wasn't, inflating it. When I say most of the sites that you'd be competing against are just a blur of animations and boxes all over screaming for your attention, salesy nonsense. I think I'd probably go with this simple site to pull over any of those.

[00:38:33] Nathan Wrigley: So he is got a fighting chance right out of the gate just by doing it, making it simple. Isn't that interesting? Yes. For a morning of really working out what he wants to say as his message and then turning that into simple HTML and that. Yeah. So yeah, that was it. I think I'm done with this. We'll go back to our slides, so we'll need to pause again.

Okay. I'll pause the video and we will return in a moment. Okay. So here are some learnings that Paul has had, after his experience with HTML. the web is a form of communication, not a fanfare of carousels. Or a game of hide and seek. I like that description. HTML is the easy part. Finding empathy and making the message clear and understandable is the hard part often overlooked.

That's interesting. CSS styling can be easy if the HTML is right and the design is simple, but is best overseen by an expert. And finally, here's the important bit for Paul, at least anyway, he did not need to spend a minimum of $5,000 to get started. Over to you, David.

[00:39:35] David Waumsley: I know this is probably what's prompted this.

There's so much in this sort of builder industries about people you know, particularly with the value pricing that you know, they're not sensible. Don't need a website unless they can spend all of this good money on the whole thing, but actually just get something help. is the Yeah. The way to go no cheaply.

[00:39:55] Nathan Wrigley: but also it's like such an impediment, maybe if, you're starting out in business, if Paul has just decided to become a plumber, he doesn't have 20,000 pounds burning a hole in his pocket, he needs to make the first 20,000 pounds so that he can employ somebody to take over his website if that's what he wants.

So, exactly.

[00:40:14] David Waumsley: And it's the minimal viable product. He's got a very simple one column thing, which says all that. It needs to say probably easier than most of his competitors do, and then he can expand on that. there was a little thing I didn't mention on it, which I think is the way that perhaps, with the indie web going is that.

It. He is, he had a little slot where he is doing sort of bathroom redesigns and that which he does with somebody else. And I think there needs to be a lot more of that where people start to promote each other in their own trades, in the same way that I'd expect, if we're going to compete with things like b bookings.com than hotel, people are gonna have to team up, I think, and promote each other in different places and say, well, they have a good one in a different location that you might wanna check out.

Yeah. That sort of thing. Yeah. So I think, that's the way. Future, the future of the web as far as I'm concerned. Anyway, sorry, let me just go back on this. So we've really focused on just the technical side, the web bit, the HTML and what you can do with that. Keeping it simple. But there are other aspects of course, and that's the design thing that we're talking about, which again.

Any client has to get involved with, regardless of, the technology that's used anyway. So we'll move on to the sort of design bit and,

[00:41:26] Nathan Wrigley: okay. Yeah. So now we're moving on. I guess we're approaching the end. So he's He's finessing things now, really, isn't he? So this is more about branding s.

CO and UX design. So branding, which you've put in brackets, is the soul, the emotional, visual, and verbal identity that makes you memorable and fosters trust. I suppose that once, once you've actually reached the page, that's the bit that is gonna convert you into. Into one of Paul's customers. However, in order to find that page, you need a bit of this, SEO, which is the bridge as you've described it.

Oh, I like these. The process of optimizing your site, so search engines and users can find you easily. And then finally, UX design, which you've called the experience well. This is the structure and functionality that makes interacting with your brand easy, enjoyable, and efficient.

[00:42:18] David Waumsley: Yeah, and I think Paul, he obviously is made up and he's done it instinctively.

So he's recognized that he is the brand and he's shown a photo of himself right at the front, because guess his competitors, even the ones with the, who are by their name, they are the brand. There's no photo of them. It's the first thing they're gonna want to know. So he knows, he's kept the, web copy, simple and honest.

He's used, SEO friendly semantic, h. TML all the way through that's gonna help him anyway to be found. Whether it's with, Google or whether it's with now ai, both of them want semantic HDML, which is missed by people and he's put keywords in his titles. His design was kept simple. So there's none of this kind of fairground antics left to, Move around things to find your content all over the place. And it is designed with the AI still gave him some consistency in color and spacing so it doesn't jar with people on that. So he's there. But perhaps a better way to start for him would be to create a sort of comprehensive brand guideline document and.

this is something I'm gonna stop doing 'cause I never did. I used to skip over this and I've got another slide. You do? Yeah. Maybe you'll read out. Yeah. Okay. Maybe you'll read out the key things in that.

[00:43:30] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So, brand guideline again. Yeah, I'm with you. I never did this kind of stuff. I just either adopted what they already had or ignored it altogether.

So, it's made up the brand guideline. It may be made up of some of these following things. Brand story and core values, logo guidelines, color palette, typography, imagery, and visuals. Voice and tone, formatting and layout and application examples as well. Okay.

[00:43:56] David Waumsley: Yeah. And I would also into that I would add, some SEO keyword research and competitor analysis.

So when you're starting this, so it might be a better way to start. And honestly, I used to skip this, because of the fact that most of the time you're getting people to sign off on a, if they had no branding at all, you're getting them to sign off on your website. So you'd create my website. I've come to realize this is problematic with, for myself working out that we must start with HDML and we must start using the modern techniques of making the design fit around the content.

So you, are effectively needing to design a little bit in the way that the browser works rather than in a set rigid image. So what a brand guideline does, I think it's good for a lot of things because. What it does is, well, it sets out why a website is being built, so most never formalize why they're in business at all enough to be able to convince other people to buy from them.

So, so they tend to fall back on cliches, he could have done where family run businesses, blah, blah. Just the same stuff here on every page because they don't know how to do it. And I think. That's the bit that I think businesses do. And that's where I think there's tensions often when they get designers in.

'cause it's very difficult for a designer to do that unless they've been able to go through that process. the other thing is, I think this is key for me, still doing the designs, is that it allows you to get the look and feel without setting these absolute. In what your website should look like, so you get the sense of how the brand looks because in making one of these documents and you can borrow them, which already nicely beautiful.

The. Branded anyway, so you can steal a lot of their stuff, but you get your typography, your colors all in a document anyway, so you get the look and feel of what a website might look like without pinning down that this is the absolute size of the header and this is this box for this bit of text here.

It gives you that ability to be able to start to style around the content. Rather than the other way round.

[00:46:01] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah,

[00:46:02] David Waumsley: which I think is the wrong way round. This is what we need to change now for our whole industry has been based around the idea of, look at our portfolio. We're gonna make your website that looks like this, sign off on this, and then we have to force the browser to work whatever device is put before it to honor this.

And that's what causes much of the problems that we have with the designs not being very good. So, so you do lean into

[00:46:27] Nathan Wrigley: a particular tool to get. Those kind of brand guidelines you are using, I dunno, Canva or something like

[00:46:32] David Waumsley: that?

[00:46:33] Nathan Wrigley: yeah.

[00:46:34] David Waumsley: I think, we'll do this, we'll go through these in next episodes and Canva's the one, I started when we did some earlier ones using Figma, which is more, I guess the professionals use.

But Canva, if you were trying to encourage people to do it for themselves a little bit or show how they could. Pre prepare, even if they get a professional in later with getting the stuff Canva's much more friendly because you can do lots of stuff, create your logos there. style your photos and, cut and paste them and that kind of stuff.

[00:47:03] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So, yeah.

[00:47:03] David Waumsley: But yeah, and I honestly, I think this is where we missed that. We know they, we've talked about this before about the longstanding issue that we have. If you are a designer with a client where you present something, so that. Meal comic where it shows this process, which is very memorable.

Where it shows, yeah, the client and the new designer laughing at the old one going, yeah, that's rubbish. And then he comes and crates and they say, yeah, it's brilliant, but just one thing, change it, and

[00:47:31] Nathan Wrigley: on

[00:47:31] David Waumsley: it goes and on it goes until you get the mess. Well, I think if you've got this sort of stuff there, everybody then works around a framework.

It works around a framework of. Gets to your core values, what you're trying to do, what's different about you, to your competitors and what reflects it. So at least you've got some, it reduces the likelihood of it going awry and everybody hated each other.

[00:47:54] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:47:54] David Waumsley: So,

[00:47:55] Nathan Wrigley: yeah.

[00:47:55] David Waumsley: Yeah. So that's it. So that's really what we're going to do next time.

Shall I just, I think

[00:47:59] Nathan Wrigley: Final slide. Final slide. Yeah. Okay. So I guess we're summing it up here. So at the beginning. Trap or trade off, came up. So here's the, here's the two different things summed up the trap in all of this, I guess would be, vendor locking. What you're calling the 90% done problem performance and SEO limitations and hidden long-term costs.

Do you wanna do, you wanna dig into that a bit first and then I'll do the trade off bit?

[00:48:25] David Waumsley: Yeah, sorry. obviously the vendor lock-in is what I started with the 90% done problem. You still see people talking about that often with the AI now about the fact that it gets you 90% there and then it's such a nightmare.

Getting

[00:48:38] Nathan Wrigley: the

[00:48:38] David Waumsley: final 10% The system Yeah. That it takes more than final

[00:48:41] Nathan Wrigley: 10% is actually the 90%. Yeah,

[00:48:43] David Waumsley: exactly. Exactly that. And obviously we know about the performance in SEO limitations that come with anything else that's third party on there that's not custom and the hidden costs. And the next things are what are commonly the trade offs.

So do you wanna read those? Yeah. Okay. So,

[00:48:58] Nathan Wrigley: speed and time to market. MVP, minimal, minimum viable product budget and resource constraints and standardized use cases. So for example, templates. So over to you.

[00:49:09] David Waumsley: Yeah, so people say, it's fine because if I need speed, I need it to market quick.

If I need just something that is a minimal viable product, then you know, it's okay. A builder again, if the budgets are low, this is good. And, if you've got standardized use case, maybe. In most cases, if you were running a shop, they have a similar format, a template where you might just borrow one of those and that's fine.

But when it comes to talking a real message, I think it's a bit different. But what I would argue, or what I hope I've shown partly through this, is that most of the things that we now accept as trade offs are largely illusional when it comes to the simple sort of small business side, which is powered by HD and CSS.

It's no. It's no quicker to use a builder. I'd say slower now. the way that CSS and HTML got a lot easier, to, so the builder's not saving you, I don't think on anything. Time to market.

[00:50:04] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:50:05] David Waumsley: A minimal viable product. We've just shown one. So you could probably do that without having to have a builder, and the budgets are not there.

Really, I think overall, given that many people who are selling you a website. Using a builder, a non code builder are going to charge you probably the same as a coder would to come in. I don't see there's a saving there and standardized use cases, unless you ask something like e-commerce, if you really want to get over your personality, you want to design that for yourself.

It's gotta be your words and what you think is most important showing and that needs to be semantic there. So, so what I've argued is that basically most of the trade offs that we accept for simple sites are really ought to go into the trap. Category, really. There's

[00:50:49] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.

[00:50:49] David Waumsley: Unless you need to. Yeah. there's no reason.

No, I think that was,

[00:50:53] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. Sorry. Go on.

[00:50:55] David Waumsley: no. That was it. I, it was just really, it's just about not getting more than you need following that rule of lease power. If you can start simply with HML, do that, and then you could always upgrade. It's difficult to downgrade.

[00:51:09] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's right. I think you've made a fairly compelling case.

Obviously, we laid out the case of all the things that you really need to do, and in many cases they are very limited. What you actually need to do is, very small amounts of things. It doesn't need to have whizzbang, this, that, and the other thing, just something like, like the website that we saw there for the plumber, whose name I've already forgotten.

Was it Paul Forgotten? It was Paul

[00:51:33] David Waumsley: Brown.

[00:51:34] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, they go Paul Brown. that's all that person probably needs. you can take them on a journey after that, after they've got their first few clients through the door. And, so yeah, I think you've made a fairly compelling case for that, David.

[00:51:48] David Waumsley: Okay. Thank you. And, I think, you know what? What we've done and we all fall for it. we see, builders, produce lots of really wizzy stuff that looks great and you think, ah, that's gonna show me off so much. But it really, most of the time, it just gets in the way of the user who needs the information and it causes them problems.

But there's also one other point I think when it comes to local businesses, if you are one of them. Why not just give your business to another local, somebody who works with HDML and CSS? 'cause I'm sure the tech billionaires in Silicon Valley are not going to starve without your data and money, so,

[00:52:23] Nathan Wrigley: good point.

Good point. also just leading into what you just said, when was the last time you hired somebody Because they had a flashy website, and the answer is literally never. It's because. The, what they say speaks to you. Yeah. It's not because there's an animation. The animation never sold anything to anybody.

Never. So, keep it simple. Stupid. Yeah. As they say.

[00:52:50] David Waumsley: Yeah, exactly. So next time I think, we'll just do some hands-on. It'll probably be over. We'll take one site, maybe we'll take pause and turn him into a bigger site with a new design and we'll go through this hole.

Branding exercise, which is quite new to me, and we'll see how that works out. we might have to do it as a visual only, because I dunno if it'll work on audio, but I think that's what we'll do next time.

[00:53:13] Nathan Wrigley: All I can say is I hope Paul's paying you $20,000 for this. David, he's getting a lot of, he's getting a lot of free work and you're giving him a lot of value.

So value pricing, no, that's the antithesis of what we're talking about. So I guess. I'll stop sharing the screen unless you've got one more slide. I see there is one more slide. No, but we probably,

[00:53:33] David Waumsley: yeah, that's, no, that's just a print out for our thumbnail.

[00:53:36] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Ideal. In which case you'll see the last slide in just, well at the beginning of this video on the thumbnail.

Yeah. we will see you back here soon when no doubt Paul, the plumber will receive some kind of update to the website that they've already got. Okay, David, nice to see

[00:53:52] David Waumsley: you. Thanks very much. Yeah, you too. See

[00:53:53] Nathan Wrigley: you soon.

[00:53:54] David Waumsley: Bye. Bye everyone.

Enshittification: Why We Need Independent Websites

2026-01-07T00:00:00Z

Show Notes:

Here's the presentation slides. Below is the text version with notes not included on the slides.

Introduction

Borrowed from Cory Doctorow’s 2025 book “Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It”.
2025 marked a shift from seeing the internet as empowering to seeing it as unhealthy.
Australia banned social media for under 16-year-olds.
“Slop” became Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year, referring to low-quality AI-generated content.
Trust in digital services declined, AI faced backlash, and concerns about mental health and the internet grew.

The Current State of Web Development

Most website creators have been doing it for less than 6 years.
Many learned via commercial platforms rather than through the W3C.
“Vibe coding” got most of the attention.
This seems magical, but controlled by wealthy techno‑optimists.

Critical Voices

Ed Zitron’s podcast and newsletter: https://www.betteroffline.com
Carl Brown’s YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@InternetOfBugs

Key Authors and Perspectives

Cory Doctorow – “Enshittification”

Canadian‑British author and journalist.
Has spent 25 years advocating for digital rights, copyright reform, and technology policy.
“Enshittification” was Macquarie Dictionary’s Word of the Year for 2024.
Book published in late 2025.
Not anti‑AI; argues AI should be “socialised” like the web.

Karen Hao – “Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI”

Book published in May 2025.
Former Chinese tech reporter for The Wall Street Journal and senior AI editor at MIT Technology Review.
Previously an application engineer at a Google X spin‑off.
Shows how fragile AI and its key players are and the quasi‑religious fervour around AI.
Argues ChatGPT was OpenAI’s last hope after past failures.
Focuses on human and environmental costs of surveillance capitalism.

Yanis Varoufakis – “Technofeudalism”

Greek economist, politician and UK professor.
Book published in 2023.
Argues that “Cloud Capital” owned by platforms like Google, Meta and Amazon turned people into “cloud serfs”.
People effectively volunteered to become renters.

Ed Zitron – Tech Commentator

British tech commentator.
Critic of “growth‑at‑all‑costs” culture in tech.
Highlights its high cost and limited real‑world problem solving.

Carl Brown – Software Engineer

Software engineer with about 35 years of experience.
Critical of AI in software development.

Tim Berners‑Lee – “This Is for Everyone”

Book published in September 2025.
Explains how the web was created on top of others’ work.
Describes the struggle to keep the web in public ownership.
Critical of unregulated algorithmic control.

Three Stages of Enshittification

Lure Users: Offer a valuable service, often at a loss, to attract a large user base.
Lure Business:Shift value away from users toward business customers (advertisers, publishers) to monetise.
Extract Everything: Once businesses are dependent, extract value from both users and businesses and raise fees and degrade service.

Financial Dynamics

Stage 3 benefits shareholders and investors short‑term, but Stock buybacks are used to inflate perceived value while effectively looting the company.

Ed Zitron’s “Enshittifinancial Crisis” discusses:

Changing depreciation values of GPU stocks.
Valuations based on intent rather than contracts.
Misleading narratives about AI‑driven layoffs.
Circular investments (e.g., Oracle, Nvidia, OpenAI).

Doctorow and Zitron don't see how OpenAI cab survive. No government could bail out the trillions needed even if profitability were possible.

Three Examples

Facebook

Attracted users with privacy and friend‑centric feeds.
Shifted focus to publishers.
Now prioritises boosted posts over organic content.
Procter & Gamble cut a $200 million/year Facebook ad budget and saw no loss in sales.
Early on, Facebook warned MySpace users about Rupert Murdoch’s ownership while later becoming a similar surveillance platform.

Amazon

Initially subsidised goods and shipping.
Search results now dominated by “pay‑to‑play” ads.
Seller fees can exceed 45% of the sale price.
Sellers are contractually prevented from offering lower prices elsewhere, so users ultimately pay the platform’s margin.
The Diapers.com acquisition signalled that competitors would be undercut until they sold.

Google Search

Was known for highly relevant results.
Results worsened to increase search time and show more ads.
Alternative engines like Kagi show what Google’s data can do without ad‑driven friction.
Google originally supported free academic thought.
With AI, scientific constraints began to conflict with fundraising goals.

The Enshittiverse

Removes interoperability.
Weakens antitrust.
Reduces worker power.

Removing Interoperability

Locks in user data, especially on social media.
Prevents tampering with devices and buying supplies on the open market (e.g., printer ink).
Uses DMCA Section 1201, which criminalises bypassing digital locks.
Smart TVs are often sold at a loss and monetised via surveillance.
Companies prefer apps to websites because apps can more easily bypass privacy regulations like GDPR.
Uber can: Charge higher prices if a customer’s battery is low. Lower driver pay if they accept rides “too quickly” too often.

Weakening Antitrust

Antitrust enforcement weakened since Nixon, with some tightening under Biden.
Many of Google’s innovations were acquired rather than built in‑house.
Marc Andreessen is a prominent techno‑optimist and influential conduit between Silicon Valley and political power.
Trump has proposed a 10‑year ban on state and local AI regulations.

Reducing Worker Power

Apple’s use of Foxconn includes stories of suicide nets to prevent worker deaths.
Journalist Oobah Butler exposed Amazon drivers resorting to urinating in bottles due to relentless schedules, then selling “driver urine” on Amazon as a prank.
Companies deploy extensive tactics to discourage unionisation.
Karen Hao documents how AI depends on low‑wage, hidden labour. For example, Kenyan contractors for OpenAI moderating violent and sexual content developed PTSD.

The Vibe Coding Hype of 2025

Timeline

February: Andrej Karpathy coins “vibe coding” in a viral X post.
March: Merriam‑Webster adds the term as a “slang & trending” entry.
July: Y Combinator notes 25% of its Winter batch companies use codebases that are 95% AI‑generated.
September: Major tech outlets report a “vibe coding hangover” as senior engineers struggle with brittle codebases.

Tools and Business Model

Tools: Cursor Composer, Replit Agent, Lovable, Bolt and others.
Many have strong revenues, but only Replit shows a profit.
All pay significant fees to foundational providers (Google, NVIDIA, OpenAI), while competing with those providers’ own coding tools.
Raises the question of whether these companies can escape their own version of enshittification or whether they are “techno‑serfs”.

Technical Reality

Experienced developers note that about 80% of development is problem‑solving, not typing code.
LLMs operate on probability; each prompt is akin to pulling a slot machine lever.
This makes iterative, agile development hard when the system re‑writes large portions of code each time.
Version control becomes difficult when outputs are non‑deterministic.
GitClear’s analysis of over 211 million lines of code found: An eight‑fold increase in duplicated lines. A doubling of code churn.

Vibe Coding in 2026

What Its Proponents Now Say

Andrej Karpathy built NanoChat largely by hand, saying AI tools were not helpful there.
Boris Cherny (creator of Claude Code) says vibe coding is fine for throwaway code and prototypes, but not for maintainable code.
Michel Truell (Cursor CEO) says vibe coding is useful for quick prototypes but unstable for serious applications.

Good vs Bad Vibe Coding

Good when: Used by developers who understand how LLMs work and their limitations. Applied to personal tools, experiments and internal utilities.
Bad when: Used by non‑coders for public‑facing websites. Resulting systems are insecure and hard to maintain or migrate.

Several large firms (Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Meta, Tesla) have:

Laid off developers.
Then rehired for similar roles later, often at lower pay.

What’s Fueling the AI Hype?

Monopolistic tech firms need new growth narratives to satisfy investors.
AGI is framed almost as a religion, enabling imperial expansion of influence and capital.
Consolidation of power includes undermining democratic oversight and regulation.

Socioeconomic View

Doctorow and Zitron stress the problem of needing growth when a company already has a monopoly.
Karen Hao notes that Sam Altman’s 2013 writing framed founders as religious‑style leaders, not just company builders.
Techno‑optimists (Musk, Andreessen, Thiel) see democracy as an obstacle to “progress”.
Many famous tech leaders are investors and fundraisers rather than core inventors.
Most foundational tech was publicly funded and developed in open contexts.
Commercial players later took ownership and only “socialise” technology to gain adoption or share losses.
There are already calls for government backstops as the AI bubble inflates.
Free social networks raised questions about why investors funded them without clear revenue, given the obvious surveillance value.

The Web Is for Everyone

Tim Berners‑Lee’s Web

The HTTP protocol enabled direct connections between computers without logins.
Hyperlinks and basic HTML‑style tagging existed, but he made them more powerful and general.
He worked through the W3C to keep the web in public ownership and evolve it gradually.

Attempts to Capture the Web

Marc Andreessen, during the Mosaic era, attempted to pull the web into proprietary directions.
Ian Hickson of Google led a splinter group (WHATWG) away from W3C, involving Mozilla, Opera and Apple.
Concerns emerged about accessibility, personal views, and Google’s hidden plans for Chrome.
This fragmentation helped justify and implement proprietary algorithms and tracking.
Cambridge Analytica, Brexit and the Trump campaign exemplify how data‑driven manipulation can exploit this environment.
Policy steps like Australia’s social media ban for minors do not address the underlying commercial incentives.

New Initiatives

Tim Berners‑Lee’s work at https://www.inrupt.com explores:

Web 3.0 concepts rooted in user agency rather than speculation.
Solid pods for personal data ownership.
Agentic wallets and agents (e.g., “Charlie”) built on open standards.

Reclaiming Agency as Web Creators

The web is fundamentally low‑tech; no large third‑party platform is required to build an effective site.
People can own their data and syndicate copies elsewhere.
Sites can be designed for human visitors, not algorithms.

Practical Approaches

Avoid overspending on websites that then demand constant paid promotion.
Favour a “dumb” web: Use the rule of least power: simple HTML and CSS first.
Use static site generators where a site is mostly static.
Use open‑source tools for dynamic sites, while watching who controls the project.

IndieWeb and POSSE

POSSE: Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere.
Post on your own domain first; then automatically share to silos (social platforms).
Use Webmention and related standards for interaction.
Hard to completely avoid big tech infrastructure: Example: hosting on Netlify (backed by AWS), editing in VS Code (Microsoft).
The key is minimising lock‑in rather than achieving perfection.

AI as a Tool, Not Master

AI is useful for:

Translating between programming languages and frameworks.
Surface‑level debugging and linting.
Supporting graphics and content drafts.
Environmental impact is real, but worse if human thinking is fully outsourced to a few companies.

The End or the Start?

The goal is to build sites that:

Counter slop with quality.
Counter enshittification with ownership.
Counter digital feudalism with federation and federation‑friendly tools.
Counter AI empires with human creativity, empathy and respect.

Why Small Sites Still Matter

The internet’s problems arise from platform monopolies, not from the web’s basic design.
A “dumb web” approach can restore the early sense of empowerment and global connection.
About a quarter of businesses still lack a website.
Even aside from lead generation, the process of creating a simple site and brand can: Clarify purpose and strategy. Provide support and structure in the offline world.

Transcript

[00:00:05] Nathan Wrigley: Hello there and welcome to the No Script Show. Happy New Year. 2025 seemed to be the year when many switched from seeing the internet as an empowering beacon of democracy to something slightly more sinister and unhealthy. It ended with Australia banning social media for the under 16 year olds and slop becoming the word of the year For the Miriam Webster Dictionary, this is referring to the overwhelming flood of low quality AI generated content.

But throughout last year, we've seen a decline in trust of digital services across all sectors and AI backlash and increasing concerns over mental health and the internet. For this first episode of 2026, we're going to try to make sense of this and find the positives for those of us who love the web and building websites to help.

We're borrowing a concept from Corey Doctor's 2025 book entitled and Ification, why Everything Suddenly Got Worse. And what to do about it. You can find the transcript, the show notes, and the presentation slides over at no script show slash 27. So that's the numbers two seven. And if you're watching this on YouTube, the link will be the first comment just below the subscribe and like buttons.

As always, I'm joined by David Waumsley. Hello David.

Hello,

[00:01:26] David Waumsley: Nathan Wrigley. Yeah, indeed. Well, last year was I, I think, you know, for somebody who loves the web of quite depressing, I mean, I'd love for this episode first to be talking about all the amazing things that we can now do with the new HTM HTML and CSS that we have.

And now empowering that can be for people who just need small websites, but, uh, we're in a. Bifurcated industry. I don't think I've ever said that word out loud. Oh, it's a good word. I'm, I'm proud of you, David. Ated. Bifurcated. Bifurcated. Um, yeah. Where most creators now, kind of, I was checking this out. Um, 'cause it was just a sense that most people now who are building sort of sites, we do small kind of business sites, that kind of thing.

I mean, I do. You don't so much. Um, I haven't been doing it very long and haven't got that connection with the W three C. And, and that seems to be the case. Most people have, you know, the majority have done it for less than six years and have learned via commercial platforms so. The big thing for last year really was vibe coding, which is, you know, the idea that you don't have to bother with the code at all, you just tell AI what you want and suddenly you've got buy magic this website.

And um, so really what I wanted to do here is to try and get us back to some of the things that our show is about, making websites simply with HT ML and CSS and talk a little bit about what a lot of people have been saying through that year and are as we go forward about the magic that we see with some of this ai, particularly vibe coding.

We probably should be looking for the man behind the curtain, or rather as they would see it as the wealthy techno techno optimists who have accumulated so much wealth that they now probably believe they are actually wizards. So, um, so really what we're gonna do with this is to just, um. Take a critical, uh, sort of use their views to critically analyze where we're at now.

So, mm-hmm. This is gonna turn into a bit of a book review if I go to Alice. No, that's fine. Let me, shall I put the screen on? Shall I share our screen? Yeah, that'd be great. There we go. There we are. There's our topic in stratification, why we need independent websites. That's what we call this. And I'll move on to next screen here, which is really the range of sort of.

Sources that we're gonna use for this to sort of inform this conversation that we're gonna have. Nathan, would you read out some of the, um, books that we're referencing?

[00:03:56] Nathan Wrigley: Indeed. I'll just crib directly from the slide. So the first one is Corey, Dr. Os already mentioned and ification why everything suddenly got worse and what to do about it. Then there's, um, a book by Karen Howe called Empire of AI Inside the Reckless Race for Total Domination. Uh, the titles are very sort of incendiary, but also that I feel that they need to be because of the, the nature of where we're at.

Yan, um, Jannis, I don't actually know how to pronounce this person's surname, but I'm gonna give it a go. Varo Farkis is how I'm gonna say that. Brilliant. Um, and it's called Techno Feudalism What Killed Capitalism. And then finally, the book by Sir Tim Burnley. He won't say it, but I will. Um, worldwide Web.

This is for everyone. Beautifully titled book. So four there. And then there's a couple of other resources which aren't books, but something you might want to tune into. The first is, um, a podcast and newsletter by Ed Zitron, who is, um, who's somebody online who's been talking about the financial side of all of this for years.

It's called Better Offline. You can find that@betteroffline.com. And then Carl Brown has a YouTube channel, uh, which you're gonna have to search for, but it's it's youtube.com/internet of Bugs, and that's the name of it. The YouTube channel is simply called Internet of Bugs. There we go. I think I've done that task.

[00:05:22] David Waumsley: Yeah. Brilliant. Um, so. Yeah, I should say actually the, the, the books here that we've mentioned, the four books, the authors have done so many interviews. So if you kind of look on YouTube, you'll find plenty. So you don't necessarily need to buy it. And all we can do here, 'cause these are so eloquent anyway, um, that you probably should tune into what they're doing, uh, rather than us.

But what we're doing here is trying to make that a little bit relevant to web design, which is not really their background with this one. And interestingly, I mean these are things that have influenced me, particularly, I've been reading these books on. Partway through a couple of them, but most of all I've read through and they all seem to have a, a similar view on what needs to happen, if you like, for the future of the internet.

And I, I wouldn't say any of 'em necessarily are anti AI in any way. It's just that what I think they share in common is that they believe that the web should be socialized, it should be something that we all publicly own and take part in, like the worldwide web is itself. So yeah. Should I just say, I did make a few notes actually here about the D author if you wanna know.

So I'll just quickly go through them. So interesting we're talking about Word of the Year and ification became the word of the year for the Australian Macquarie Dictionary in 2004, I think in 2003. 'cause he was using the term way before his book came out. Yes, I think you're right. Yeah. Was used, I think some international dialect society or something, picked it as the, so it's a, a word that many of us use and I think it's a really good way of understanding where we're at, at the web.

But he's a Canadian, British author and journalist. You've read a lot of his books, haven't you?

[00:07:03] Nathan Wrigley: I've read. He, he produces novels as well, and that was what first got me into him. Yeah, I don't know, a decade or more ago. But he's, uh, he's extremely eloquent, very knowledgeable, and uh, and, and able to communicate a lot of ideas in a very short space of time because he speaks, he speaks very rapidly actually, and, uh, a lot of things fall out of his mouth in, in the time it would take me merely to think of them.

So it's definitely somebody credible.

[00:07:27] David Waumsley: I know, I think he's given us such a great framework for understanding things, and that's why we call this episode after his title. He says, we can use it for, anybody can use it as long as they're representing what it means in his book, which we'll try and do. Um, but he's also 25 years he is been an advocate for digital rights, for, uh, copyright reform and, and, and really been active in, uh, technology policy.

Um, the other one, the em, uh, the Empire of ai, Karen, how She's somebody, well, you read out the title, which is actually the British title, the uk Oh, that's interesting. I didn't know that. Yeah. Yeah. The, the, the US subtitle is, uh, dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's Open ai. And that was published last year as well.

Okay. That's so, yeah. Yeah. I mean, she's somebody who technically knows her stuff, but she's been, uh, covering Chinese tech for the Wall Street Journal. She's a senior AI editor at MIT Technology Review. MIT is how, yeah. MIT. Yeah. Yeah. And, um. Yeah. Uh, her book's great because it gives you a real insight because she's done so many interviews with open AI into the key players, how fragile, if you like, AI is how there's almost, uh, religious fervor fuel in it.

And, uh, she exposes a lot of the kind of half truths that we were told really about it as well. So it's really good.

[00:08:50] Nathan Wrigley: I, I think that religious fervor that you just mentioned is so self-evident. Whether or not you are bullish about AI or have like, shackled yourself to AI and, you know, anchored yourself to it.

You can't deny that there is a lot of that. There is some kind of almost evangelical, um, proclamations out there. It sounds almost like, um, a, a religion in some respects. You know, people are really adopting it and, and not, not necessarily questioning it in the same way that obviously these people are.

[00:09:17] David Waumsley: Yeah, exactly. And I've thrown, um, Janni, Fuke in because it is, um, I think his book comes a couple of years before, and really how I think he underpins a lot of this is the fact that he's spotting the fact that we have this techno feudalism, which is killing capitalism, is the fact that somehow we've managed to end up with a situation where all the cloud capital that we have in the world is owned by a few platforms, Google Meta, Amazon, and as such, because we've volunteered into using all these services and become dependent on it, we've become cloud surfs.

So we've kind of gone into this new era and I think that kind of, I'm not really talking about his book in this very much, but uh, I think that kind of underpins where we're at. It's a good way I think, of understanding it. Um, ed Zirin as well, as you've mentioned there, I mean, he's a British tech commentator.

Um, he's a bit sweary, uh, he's, but he's really looking into. Well, he's a critic of growth at all costs and that culture and highlights really the expenses, how much has been paid at the moment for GPUs, how this is inflating everything, but the, it doesn't seem to be solving real world problems. So if you really want to look into the ai, um, boom that we're in at the moment is probably somebody to listen to.

I'm just throwing in Carl Brown on this list, on the slide here because he's one of many, uh, software engineers that's experienced. He's got 35 years experience on this, who is a bit critical of ai, particularly within software development. So, um, that's it. And

[00:10:56] Nathan Wrigley: then No, Tim Burners

[00:10:57] David Waumsley: Lee. Yeah. Yeah. Well finally, because his book came out in September of last year, so it's quite new.

There he is explaining new that. Yeah, he is explained. It's a really good book. Um, the creation of the worldwide web, um, and. I think what I took from it mostly was how easy it can be lost to those same sort of techno optimists if you like. You would like effectively to see a world where democracy's removed, where this kind of tech giants make the decisions in our interests on there.

And just to throw this in, I haven't got a book from him, particularly I I saw, although they don't really mention each other that much. Similarities with Jan Koon, who's one of the three godfathers of AI who left Meta at the end of last year and is working on open source ai. Um. They both seem to have a similar idea, if you like.

I think all of them do about how things need to be in public ownership. So Tim Burnley talks about Wikipedia being the ideal way to sort of share knowledge online. Jan is the same with his. How he thinks that everybody should be pulling their knowledge together rather than doing it in commercial silos.

Right, right. So we, uh, let's move on to the next thing and Nathan, if you'll read that out, let's explain a little bit going back to Cori and, uh, the stages of in notification.

[00:12:18] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay. So here we go. So, there are three stages, according to Corey, a doctor o of Ification, and they are as follows, number one, re users.

The platform offers a valuable service, which is typically at a loss to attract a massive user base. I think we can all identify that as easy to understand. Number two, lure the businesses or just LEO business once invested, the platform shifts value away from them, the, the users, I guess, towards business customers.

So for example, advertisers and publishers in order to monetize it. And then three, the sort of final stage, uh, extract everything. When business customers are dependent, the platform extracts value from both groups, so both the users and the businesses raising fees and degrading the service. And, um, it's, it's not really in the abstract.

This is it. I think you can chart this across lots of different platforms. This, this sort of three stage approach, it does seem to be a, a playbook. Yeah. I don't know whether it, it started out as an, an intentional thing, but it definitely. Feels like it's a thing.

[00:13:24] David Waumsley: Yeah, I think all of these things just kind of happen.

We just find yourself where we are. We'll, we'll take some of the examples in a minute, but maybe just to sort of go on with that a little bit. I mean, one thing about sort of stage three, if you read CO's book, is that you, you might just see that as being, uh, a benefit to the stakeholders and investors.

You know, that, that, that stage three only they are winning, but also I think, you know, we see that they are becoming the victims as well. So if you take something like Ed Viron, he wrote his longest article ever, which was the and shitty financial crisis where he talks about a lot of the things he's talking about, which is.

How valuations are going on. So how the stock market is being affected by all of this and how they can be, investors can lose out because there's been sort of changing depreciation values of GPU stock, you know, lots of compute power is needed, the buy in everything up, it's raising the prices of this, but they've changed the valuation, how, how it will depreciate to make things look better.

We've had valuations in the stock market growing on the basis of intent rather than contracts. So recently we had Nvidia promising to invest a hundred billion into open ai, but it's just a promise. It's not something that really should raise prices. And there's lots of obviously misleading stories about layoffs due to ai, which actually a lot of people are just using that to break.

Um, workers' rights, if you like, you lay them off because of ai, but you recruit back at a cheaper price from somewhere else, often the case. And there's a lot of circular investments going on, which have been kind of revealed. So the best one is Oracle investing in nvidia, which is invested in open ai and it's going backwards and forwards.

So from his point of view, I think him, both Ed and Cory, if you see them on talks, will say it will take a minor miracle really if open AI is to survive the bubble that they think we are because, and uh, as we notice, we notice that we've got Altman and Zuckerberg at the moment saying that we're in a bubble, sort of talking as if in the third party it's got nothing to do with their kind of theory list search for, um, a GI.

But, um. That seems to be where we're at, but from their point of view, this isn't gonna be possible to bail out anyway, because they were talking about trillions that are gonna be needed and there's no route to profitability at the moment. So

[00:15:50] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, he's, um, ed Tran's definitely doing the rounds. He's appeared on quite a few of the, the sort of podcast that I listen to, and you mm-hmm.

You're right. He, he's quite a sweary, quite a, quite a colorful character. Um, but the underlying message is, um. I guess that he's, he's following the money, isn't he? That's his, his, his take is sort of follow the money and see where that goes. And he's, in his mind, he's extremely sure that the bubble, uh, is not far off collapsing.

I, I don't know exactly what time horizon he's looking at there, but, um, if AI was delivering what it promised to deliver, maybe he'd modify his view. But it's, it's anchored to the fact that he doesn't think it is delivering what it's promising to offer. There's always this distant horizon of, oh, it will do this.

It imagine if we got to this, wouldn't it be great if it did this? And without the investment, it simply can't. And, um, you know, I guess at some point the investment dries up because it doesn't deliver what it

[00:16:46] David Waumsley: possibly deliver. Yeah. I mean, it, it goes to the Y thing where he doesn't believe that this particular way, this language learning machine's neur network approach is the way to get to artificial intelligence.

As everybody understood that, you know. Nobody really understands this. 'cause no one can agree what intelligence is. But effectively, you know, this is a route, but it's a very expensive route to get there. Right. So much has been invested and it's not gonna have, you know, the commercial returns on it because we've seen plenty of reports which haven't listed here, which I think there was one recently towards the end of the year saying 95% of businesses who have invested in it hadn't made any money out of it and Right.

[00:17:24] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. And, and then of course there's the whole environmental thing, which you just sort of touched on there with the, um, you know, if, if like me, you believe in climate change and global warming and all of that, the, the last thing we need is more. Um, power hungry computers being switched on, and, and it feels like this is not just, it's not like a few machines were added to the internet.

This is an awful lot. Yeah. Um, I, I heard some descriptions of the size of some of the data centers that are being added to the, the world in order to satisfy the, the power needs of the, you know, the, the expected use of AI in the future. I'm not gonna say what they were, because I'll definitely get it wrong, but they were fairly eye wateringly large, um, data centers which consumed, you know, like city.

Giant city level amounts of power just in this one data center. And, um, yeah, that, that doesn't seem to be aligned particularly with what humans need.

[00:18:20] David Waumsley: No, and it is Ka Howe's focus, I think, with that empire building. And, you know, she picks out the fact that. Um, you know, it's often shell companies will kind of set up these places, data centers, and then it's like, ta-da, we're meta actually, here we are.

And suddenly, you know, people don't have the water or the electricity. They have, they have power outages and stuff like that. So, yeah. Yeah, it's a lot of that going on at the moment. Um, that's to keep with the ification, that's just. Take a few examples. Should

[00:18:48] Nathan Wrigley: we do them one at a time or do you want me to read out all three?

[00:18:51] David Waumsley: Yeah, read them all out and I'll just

[00:18:52] Nathan Wrigley: fill in. Okay. So three examples. Um, would be the first one. Facebook, I think everybody knows who that is. Um, attracted users with privacy and friend feeds, then shifted to publishers and now prioritizes boosted posts over organic content. This is such a slow and inexorable thing that it's hard to have noticed it, but I think if you look back, the data would clearly show that this sort of stuff is happening and your feed is no longer what it once was.

Right? Anyway, sorry. Um, Amazon, uh, is the second example. Initially, subsidized goods and shipping. Now search results are dominated by pay to play ads and seller fees can exceed 45% of the sale price. And finally, Google search. Once known for relevant results, it made them worse to increase search time. To show more ads.

Yeah. All of it's a fairly pessimistic picture there, isn't it?

[00:19:44] David Waumsley: Yeah. I mean, this is, you know, taken directly from Cory, Dr. O's stuff, and he also, in his book, he looks into other things like dating apps, the gig economy platforms, uh, Twitter and Uber and others. But, uh, you know, his, he often starts when he talks about it with Facebook because he talks about how really it was real users who turned.

Zuckerberg's tool for rating really college girls, which it started off into a sort of useful social platform. And then when they went after MySpace users, uh, when they got investment on that, they, they largely were warning them not to trust the new billionaire owner, Rupert Murdoch with buying history.

Um, which is a tough sell at the time because people, uh, like to be where their friends are, you know, the other people who are signed up to the same platform. So he offered a way to see their posts via Facebook. Of course, when he became the billionaire spy, he close this down. So operability, you know, interoperability was only a sort of one way street with it.

You can't do the same now for Facebook and have people see your Facebook from another platform. Right, right. Um, so it is, um. There's also, I mean, one of the interesting things I think he mentioned, which I thought in the book was a, a fascinating stat was, was Proctor and Gamble. Um, just to look at stage two, when it's there for those people who want to publish or advertise or whatever on the platform, they stopped their, um, 200 million a year, that's dollars.

Um, Facebook ads and saw zero losses, which I thought was quite interesting. So, oh, that

[00:21:20] Nathan Wrigley: is an interesting stand. Yeah. Yeah, it's a very murky thing. The online advertising systems, well, not just Facebook, but all of them. I, I think it's very hard to understand exactly what the ROI is, but that's, that's an eye watering number, isn't it?

So 200 million just curtailed in investing in Facebook ads. But, um, according to this, zero loss in.

[00:21:41] David Waumsley: Sales.

[00:21:41] Nathan Wrigley: In actual sales, yes. You can't

[00:21:43] David Waumsley: chart it, so it didn't seem to make any difference to their overall business. But I mean, the idea is that everybody's caught up and you have to advertise there because your competitors are there.

That's the kind of trap for most businesses. Yeah. It's a

[00:21:54] Nathan Wrigley: beautiful system for the Facebook shareholders that isn't it? Yeah, absolutely. Capture of everything. Yeah.

[00:22:00] David Waumsley: And Amazon, I think is the, I mean. The, the thing is, we all pay more because of Amazon because when they've shifted to charge more, once they've got dominance and everybody needs to be on their platform to sell the stuff, their deal is that you can't sell it elsewhere cheaper.

Which means that in order to keep paying to be on Amazon, they have to put their prices up everywhere. So whether you use Amazon to get your things, you're going to pay more as these individual businesses have to pay Amazon. So that's the kind of trap that we're caught up in there as, yes. Amazon make it more difficult.

Finally, um, Google search. Well, Nathan, you'll know 'cause you are a CGI user. So CGI is an example that Cori uses as our way of showing how Google's data, which is used by CGI can produce a lot of different results to what Google have decided to show with their algorithm at the moment.

[00:22:54] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, so there's an, there's a, a search engine, which is several years old now, which I decided to give a go, give it a go, and I'm, I'm still using it. Um, I'm paying for it. But that's the difference. You pay a dollar amount a year, um, and you, you do get a very different set of results despite the fact that I, again, I'm not really technically knowledgeable about how that platform, uh, gets its results, but I think Google is in the mix somewhere and, um, they, they definitely look different.

The results that you get, um, you know, you don't get the, the ads for example, that's one of the reasons why you pay. You don't get the sponsored bits.

[00:23:29] David Waumsley: Yeah.

[00:23:29] Nathan Wrigley: Um, and you can modify the, the search in, in a way that you kind of prioritize your own things. So you, you might, for example, want news to come from this particular website and you can sort of favor that.

So you can wait it in your own way if you like. So, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Definitely different.

[00:23:44] David Waumsley: And I think, yeah, um, Curry, Dr. O makes the point about Google, uh, something, which I think we felt ourselves with that one 'cause it's one of the few, if you like, meta Meta Corps out there that I think used to promote free academic thought.

You know, it started that way. You've got Larry Page and you've got Sergei Brynn who were the students who came up with page rank, which told us how we could organize the web search for it. I mean, it was brilliant science, if you like, at the time. But, and they've always had that tradition of introducing, um, academics who will come in.

But this seemed to change quite considerably when ai, when they needed to, when they'd reached a level of sort of 90%, um. Use of Google, where do you go from there? So, you know, AI becomes the next big thing that they want to put it in. So when people are critical of ai, they're the people who have been having to leave Google or sack from it or leave themselves.

So there's a big change in what you can say now 'cause they need to raise funds there. Um, so a lot of people, yeah, I mean Cory, Dr. Row says, you know, when he is presenting this, or I'll say the same thing that, um, and certification may sound like it's just good old fashioned capitalism, but really it's anti-capitalism in a way.

And I'll move on to the next slide.

[00:25:04] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. This has got a great title. Um, let me make sure I get this right. The inverse. Um, so three strands to this. The, the first one is removing or removes interoperability. We can get into that and what that means. Uh, weakened antitrust regulation. And uh, it also reduces.

Worker power. Okay, let's prize this one open. 'cause there's a lot in here. Yeah.

[00:25:29] David Waumsley: Yeah, so I mean the examples of removing interoperability, one I already mentioned anyway with Facebook, you know, locking your data in, which of course, you know, because of the fact that MySpace didn't allowed them to compete with them.

You can't really do that in reverse now. So that's one example of it. But there's generally, and it often starts, a lot of talks about this one, uh, he mentions a lot one piece of legislation that's in there, which is section. 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and apparently this law, which is also known as the anti circumvention role, makes it a felony to bypass any digital locks.

So when you've got chips in things a. That's a way of being able to say, ah, you can't bypass this and this is how it can lock people in. So you remove this interoperability. And the example that is often used is with printers, how you can't go and buy your ink from a third party, whoever's given you the cheapest, you have to buy it from the printer that you've got because they've got that sort of legal right because you, they've got that chip in and you can't bypass it.

[00:26:33] Nathan Wrigley: Right. And the, the printer ink costs more than, I dunno, crazy statistic. Like it's more expensive than platinum or something like that.

[00:26:40] David Waumsley: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Absolutely. And, and there's so many examples of this one, the most recent one I heard, which isn't in his book, which is about smart TVs. I mean, they're being sold at a loss now because we're paying for them to install something which spies on us and gives us the adverts that we want.

And everything's gone smart. We've got smart beds, we've got smart everything. So you know it, it's using this kind of law, if you like, to be able to stop that in. Interoperability, which is a key thing to being able to sort of share our technology and move things around as we like.

[00:27:10] Nathan Wrigley: Mm-hmm.

[00:27:11] David Waumsley: So, I mean, it makes the point as well, you know, that, and again, this is something related to the web that most companies would rather that use their app rather than the website.

'cause they can bypass some of their GDPR laws much easier. It makes it easier for them to spy. And as a great example he gives is of Uber who, and there's a lot of talk about this in not just them, but they will use an app. So if somebody's calling for a ride and they see that their battery is low on their device, they may up their price because they know they'll be desperate to get.

That ride quickly. And if a driver, um, is too quick to respond to lifts or has a certain pattern that shows that they might be a bit more desperate for the money, they're likely to get paid less for it. So there's a lot of price fixing that can be done via apps. Yeah,

[00:27:58] Nathan Wrigley: I heard that. I, I didn't hear the first story about the, the low battery, but that, that is really interesting.

But I did hear the second one. I can't remember where I read it, but that as I was reading it, I was just thinking, God, it, it's like evil genius territory, isn't it? You're sort of, you know, stroking your little cat. Yeah. On your big, big chair in your evil underground layer. It's just remarkable. You know, the idea that if, as a driver of the service of, and again, ca caveats around this, we're saying what we heard, um, yeah.

You would as a driver. You would be penalized because you are good at using the Uber service to get more rides. They see you as somebody that's, you know, just like desperate. Well, we can pay you less if you're desperate. That's just so I know. Again, not in,

[00:28:42] David Waumsley: not in his book. I've seen some other reports where people are looking into, um, some of the, the shopping delivery things and how they will charge you differently for different customers.

They've been testing this by using different apps depending on their spending behavior that will price up the items that are in the shop that they're bringing to you. Really, really interesting stuff.

[00:29:01] Nathan Wrigley: It's such an interesting psychology though that, that everybody is like a commodity. It's like you are something, yes, you are like the sack of money, um, and whatever the conditions are that allow us to get more of our hand into your sack of money and pull out more a any condition that we can use to make our hand bigger and your sack more wide open.

You'll use those, whether that's the battery on your phone or the, the desperation, um, of you as an Uber driver. You just sort of prize, open all these things and try to maximize it. It's so. Peculiar a way of thinking about just life and relations and everything in general. It's such an, oh, I have no words.

It's so strange.

[00:29:48] David Waumsley: Yeah. Antitrust. I mean, uh, obviously that's stopping monopolies. If we want capitalism, we realize that it does have some downsides, so we need, you know, to regulate against those. And Cory makes the point that really these have weakened really since Nixon and only started to tighten up a little bit under Biden, which was a surprise to me.

But I think that the example that he uses is diapers.com when, um, you know, we'll come out of the, the bubble, uh, of the.com bubble. Um. This was aggressively bought by Amazon, uh, because they just had the money to be able to out, you know, at loss. They would sell the same stuff until they basically folded.

So it was a kind of warning, if you like, an early warning to everybody that wants these mega corps that got to a certain size, you sold to them. You know, I'm gonna,

[00:30:36] Nathan Wrigley: I'm gonna dwell on this a little bit 'cause I remember reading that in the book. 'cause I think it's really interesting how that. Story unfolded.

So the, the story that Corey tells is that Amazon want, if I get any of this wrong, just correct me, they wanted to buy diapers.com. Mm-hmm. diapers.com didn't wish to be sold because they thought that they had a, a thriving business. So they were selling what we call in the UK nappies, but diapers everywhere else.

Mm-hmm. And, um, and so Amazon said, we'd like to buy you. They said no. And so Amazon's tactic was to sell the, an equivalent range of products at a remarkably reduced rate because they could obviously, you know, just consume that loss over and over and over again, thereby driving the business of diapers.com out just it, you know, it vanished.

They then bought divers.com a rate, which was significantly less than they would have done previously. And, uh, and, and then presumably, I don't know if this is the tail end of that story, then presumably raise the prices again. Um, yeah,

[00:31:36] David Waumsley: exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Oh, I, I mean, we've seen, I've, you know, friends of mine, I think I told you about this before, I had the same happening with Starbucks.

They had a cafe, Starbucks turned up. They offered free coffees, trying to put them outta business, that they actually were, they moved on eventually. So. Gosh, the one out the public decided they knew what they were doing. It was too obvious. But, um, yeah, same sort of thing. So, I mean, it was a sort of warning and I mean, he makes a point in his book as well about most of the Google inventions that we see, um, were bought, you know, they, they few, you know, were there.

So that's kind of the way we're going. And, and, and it's no surprise I think to me that we have the sort of techno optimist like Mark and Andreasen, who has a kind of hotline to Trump, really always is Trump's person to be able to communicate what's going on in, uh, Silicon Valley. It's no surprise that Trump wants a sort of 10 year ban on state and local AI regulations on this.

They wanna sort of free that up. So, you know, antitrust is being weakened there. Although Cori sees though is, uh, an opportunity, there's a sort of growth in it as well. At the same time, you know, we've got more antitrust, um. Action's being taken against the big corporations at the moment against Google, against Facebook.

So there is something changing there. Um, let me just finish off the notes I got here as well. Okay. Which is just about the reduced worker power. I mean, Cory again touches on Apple using Foxcon in China there where they needed suicide nets for the treatment of their employers there. So that's how you get your cheap Apple stuff.

It's at the cost of some poor Chinese workers. And there was a wonderful documentary, if you can find it on YouTube, it's well worth watching 'cause it's hysterical. Um, UBA Butler, um, is a sort of prankster and journalist who got into Amazon as a worker there. He spotted that Amazon drivers were, because there was such a tight schedule, were having to urinate into bottles.

So he managed to take some of these bottles, package it up and make it into a bestseller on Amazon.

You can't beat that. Um, yeah, I mean obviously he didn't sell it to real public, public, it was his own friends he was selling to, just to make the point. But within that, he realized that the place where he got a job, they were just recruiting loads and loads of people. That's why he got in, because they were trying to break the attempts to create a union there.

Uh, and they have to get over 50%. So as soon as you get close to getting 50% of your workers will join a union. They can fix this by employing lots more people to make sure you can't have a union. So, oh my gosh. Yeah. So that's the kind of things there. So, um, yeah. Um. There's a lot more in Karen. How's book though on the other side of AI as well?

I mean, her concentration is on really what it's doing to the environment, but also about how the magic of AI isn't quite the magic. It relies on a massive amount of hidden low page human labor. So in terms of if they just left all the stuff that is scraped to go out there. It, uh, it wouldn't be something we'd use, it would send out all sorts of stuff so they get low paid workers working for like a dollar a day or something to be going through the most awful content that you can find on the web, sexual and violent content and stuff like that.

So they're getting all kinds of mental health problems with that one. So, so we definitely, uh, kind of see that going on. Can I move on? Sorry. Did you want

[00:35:08] Nathan Wrigley: No, no, no. Uh, it's just you have to take a breath, don't you, and sort of think about all this for a bit. And I mean, we all know that humans have the capacity to, to do Yeah.

Interesting things to one another. Let's just put it that way. And it all sounds so almost like a dystopian. Novel. Yeah. Some kind of version of the future in some science fiction book, but, um, we, I think it's, you know, we, we know that humans have the capacity to, to do things in the pursuit of profit and, um, disregarding all sorts of things that you probably wouldn't wish to happen to yourself and your family.

It's very easy to disregard those exact same things because it will turn a profit for you. And your accompany and keep food coming onto the table and so on. And, uh, yeah, we're, we're a curious species, let's put it that way.

[00:35:57] David Waumsley: Yeah. So when we're using chap GBT, we don't realize that, you know, the, these Kenyan workers who have made this ex, you know, uh, a a dollar a day who are making this and.

You know, seem very human and nice to us. So something to bear in mind. But anyway, talking to the magic of AI on this, shall we move on to the sort of vibe coding hype of 2000? Okay. Nice segue.

[00:36:17] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. And, uh, the colors of the slides change. Woo. So here we go. Um, so vibe coding hype of 2025. Um, I don't think we need to describe what vibe coding is, but I'll do it anyway.

Vibe coding. The idea that I, it's such an unusual word. I don't even know how like vibe coding became the word, but it did. Um, in February in 2025, the term was coined by, I'm gonna say Andre Cari. Um, forgive me, Andre paid.

[00:36:45] David Waumsley: Yeah.

[00:36:46] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Thank you. Uh, who was one of the co-founders of OpenAI. Uh, it was a viral post on x formerly Twitter, uh, vibe coding became the term.

And then in March, the phrase spread so rapidly. That it was added again to the Miriam Webster dictionary. The Miriam Webster dictionary has had an, an unusually large presence in this, this particular epi particular episode. Um, it was put in there as a slang and trending term. I think it's fair to say. It appears everywhere on the internet nowadays.

Uh, and then by July, the startup accelerator Y Combinator noted that 25% of its winter batch was building. So, Y Combinator is a kind of organization that you can get involved in if you've got a thing that you want to launch into the market and, you know, you wanna prove that it's got legs, um, and you want funding for it.

So 25% of its winter batch was building companies with code bases that were 95%, uh, generated by ai. That's quite a statistic. And then towards the end of the year, September, major tech outlets began reporting a vibe, coding hangover. A senior engineers struggled to maintain the brittle. Code bases. Okay.

Give us more, David. Yeah.

[00:37:57] David Waumsley: Yeah. I really followed this hype. It was depressing to me. I mean, it was fueled, there was books, there was, by the summer, there was books, courses, and then also the tools that were coming out. So we had Cursor, which, uh, Andre, Ty was talking about actually Cursor when he was doing it, and he was saying, you know, you could just go with the vibe with this.

I can let it do all the work. That's where Q came out of. There was rep agent, there was lovable, there was Bolt. People were talking about that. You just type it all in and just go and it'll send out what you want. And, uh, you know, I think the interesting thing is we look at these, um, and I don't see this talked about, this isn't in Cory's book or anything, but, uh, I, I looked at, I for myself, all of those companies, they have good revenues at the moment, people are interested in, but only Repli, which was only recently pivoted to AI.

First. It used to be a good sort of. Develop a training tool before shows a profit. And if you listen to the users of rep, there's some real horror stories about it. Completely deleting, um, databases doing its own thing with the AI ruining all the work that's gone before. So it is quite interesting to look at this.

And I think also if we're thinking about the certification side of it, you could say they're kind of the stage. Two people, the businesses coming in to make money out as the ai, but they're all paying high fees to the foundational AI providers like Google, Nvidia, open ai.

[00:39:19] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:39:19] David Waumsley: Whilst at the same time trying to compete with those same tools.

So, you know, you wonder whether they're going to escape stage two and certification. I mean, are they, it was also

[00:39:29] Nathan Wrigley: kind of interesting how much of a sort of hype cycle they, they they're in, because some of those tools were kind of everywhere in my feed. You know, people were talking about 'em all the time.

And then quite a lot of them sort of seemed to disappear off the radar of popularity that maybe I, it's just that, you know, they were no longer, it's no longer worth talking about 'em 'cause it's no longer new and the use continues. So they're very, you know, they might still be successful, but there was a lot of, lot of hype and buzz around what they could do and, uh, how point, you know, basically you just write a sentence and dah dah, everything's working.

But, uh, yeah. Anyway, so I dunno if that remains to be true, whether or not they've got. Users still sounds like one of them at least, is is still credible rep, the one that you mentioned.

[00:40:10] David Waumsley: Well, still sort of profitable. I profitable, that's the word I meant. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah, so that, I mean, they're all doing, they're all there and people are still using them.

I, we'll move on to this one, but I mean, what I found interesting at the time was I was listening. I mean, I'm not a developer myself who's into, you know, proper software development, but pretty much all of 'em, all the big players you'll see on YouTube, all thought this is all just very stupid because it doesn't, doesn't follow anything that they know about development.

So, because l LMS are a probability machine, so it's like. You know, this is Ed Trons term. It's like pulling the arm of a slot machine every time it'll turn out something different. So there's no way of being able to work in an agile way and have version control. So you know what you are building on. You should start simple and keep building up.

So it's really interesting. And there was some reports, um, Git Clear, uh, does a comprehensive analysis of it says 211 million lines of code, which come out of Git. And over this time they've seen this sort of eightfold increase in duplicate lines. So there's less global management, less, uh, dry as used.

Don't repeat yourself in code basis and code churn doubles because you're just constantly, if you're using this, you are just making new code each time. So there's no way of being able to do what developers have always needed to do. You know, they start with. The most simplest thing and build up and with a process, but if you use that, so, um, should we look at what Vibe coders are saying at the moment?

[00:41:42] Nathan Wrigley: Indeed. Indeed. Okay. Yeah. Okay. So Vibe Coding in 2026. Um, so again, back to this chap, uh, Andre Carpe, the, or Carpathy, I'm not sure. Uh, built nano chat by hand, uh, stating AI tools weren't helpful for that. Then Boris Cherney, who created Anthropics Claude Code acknowledge vibe coding works well for throwaway code and prototypes, uh, but fails when developers need maintainable code.

And then Michelle Trull, who's the CEO of Cursor told Fortune's Brainstorm AI conference, that vibe coding may work for quick prototypes, but creates unstable foundations. For serious applications. Thi this is some, somewhere I sort of arrived at independently of any of these three characters and it just felt that really, maybe if it's something on your local machine where you had a use for it and it was disposable.

And I use the example of, I dunno, let's say you're about to file your tax and all of the bits and pieces that you've got lying around on your desktop and what have you is, is difficult for you to pause. Maybe you'd get something, it would do that work on your computer and then after you've submitted your tax return, you just mothball it, dispose of that thing.

But, but it's not out there in the wider world to be used by anybody. It's just you and you. You take the consequences of, of whether or not that spits out nonsense for you. But it's a personal project which kind of gets thrown away at the end. That seems to be where I was getting in the latter part, 20, 25.

Sorry, over to you.

[00:43:13] David Waumsley: Yeah, no, I think you're right. And I, I feel that's how, 'cause the ones that I saw, because of the type of crowd that we have to sort of people more do it yourself websites or building small websites. I saw Canva as being the big thing. It was all ai. You could build everything. But I see following.

The backlash you got from Figma when they tried to do that same where you could turn your designs into code with that one, it got such a slate in. I see. That canvas seemed to be talking more in the terms that you are talking about. These are nice little applications for your own use, you know, a little calculator or whatever.

But, but there is, I think there's a split in now if you, you hear people talking about good and bad vibe coding rather than abandon the whole idea. Okay. Um, so you've got, it's good in the hands of coders who actually know how LLMs work and know that they're not going to be accurate all the time. So you make it into small little chunks that you decide what goes into the code base.

That's one use of it. Good for the personal lapse that you are talking about, but bad for. The non coder who have live public facing websites that they're gonna put out because they're gonna be insecure and also they're going to be locked in, aren't they? To that? If they want to change it, they rewrite the whole of their page again, they have no control of it, and suddenly they are serfs because they are something that they could have probably done with HTML and CSS on their own.

Quite simply, is now something which you have to rely on, the AI and whoever's providing it to keep control of it. And, you know, it's dangerous, isn't it, really? If you, if you put something up that has insecurities that you wouldn't normally have, because a lot of these, these sites are using technologies that you wouldn't need to have.

If you HTML CSS, that's fine. But most of these are churning out things with lots of JavaScripts and lots of, you know, really complex stuff.

[00:44:59] Nathan Wrigley: So, Hmm. It's very interesting, isn't it?

[00:45:03] David Waumsley: Yeah. Sorry. We'll move on to something more positive. I mean, it's interesting. I think that, you know, most of the major technology companies, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, meta, Tesla, they've all gone in cycles of laying off developers only to rehire them again at a lower rate.

I mean, they use AI as the reason, because that boosts the idea that AI is important. But they, they get people back because it's not that important. But also they get them back at a lower rate, you know? So, so you're breaking the workforce again. And that's kind of the thing. So, you know, maybe the devs, um, Cory's, you know, he's quite amusing on these sort of things.

So he says, you know, he's always telling devs to watch out. You know, they, they can't yet treat you like Amazon workers or someone is working in a Chinese company for a, uh, for Apple or something. But, you know. They really don't want you to have these wonderful sort of offices where you've got fuse ball and cappuccinos on demand.

Right. The old Google

[00:46:01] Nathan Wrigley: offices that everybody was, you know Yeah. Exactly. Wasn't working at, yeah, yeah, yeah. You

[00:46:06] David Waumsley: mean with your pink mahoan and you can have tattoos, you can have, you know, whatever piercings that you like, you know, at some point, you know, if they can get rid of you with AI, then you know, that's what's gonna happen.

But, ah, y yay. Anyway, so right next I think we'll finish off with a bit more depressing stuff there. Oh, great. Before we get Lovely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just to end it, um, we'll finish off just with the sort of socioeconomic perspective of, you know, this kind of authors that we've been featuring.

[00:46:36] Nathan Wrigley: So this one then is entitled, what's Fueling the AI Hype?

Um, so three points here. Monopolist easy for me to say. Uh, monopolistic tech companies need, uh, fresh growth stories to satisfy customers. Um, then this one, which is much broader imperial expansion using a GI as a quasi religion. That's kind of interesting. And then the final one here, consolidating power by undermining democracy, right?

This is, you're really opening the, uh, opening the jaws of this conversation, getting on a global, uh, civilizational, uh, level. Let's, uh, let's see what you got. Yeah,

[00:47:16] David Waumsley: well I think this is what all the authors are kind of looking at in a way. So Dr. Ro and Ttra are really pointing out the problems, sort of mentioned it anyway, the problems of growth when you've already got a monopoly.

When you are, you know, you, your Google search, you've already got 90% of your people you need to find the best thing and the, the, the latest thing quickly. And ai, anything that looks really good with AI needed to be that thing. So there was this kind of need for growth there. You need something for investors.

You need to tell 'em you are there at the forefront. 'cause they need more money, we need more growth, you

[00:47:46] Nathan Wrigley: know, um, growth is always the thing. David, you have to be growing. There's no, yeah, there's no point in existing unless you're growing.

[00:47:54] David Waumsley: And, uh, the, I mean, it's about imperial expansion because, you know, the tech and governments are kind of into it.

Twined these days really for this, you know, that they're both financing each other in some sort of way. But I think Karen Howe is the one, I mean, she points out, particularly with Sam Altman, how he had diverse investments. I mean, most of these people are, you know, they're not inventors, they are investors and they look for new business opportunities.

Sam Altman had, um, you know, lots and lots of 'em at the time. He jumped on this and she, she quotes really at the beginning of her book, something that was in a post by him in 2013 where he was saying about the most successful founders do not set out to create companies. They on a mission to create something closer to a religion.

And that's very much the way that open AI have gone about this whole thing. Interesting. Yeah. So I think, you know, most of 'em will be pointing to the fact that we have those techno optimists. We have Elon Musk and Dr. Uh, mark and Andreas and Peter Thiel. Panier, um, Palantir. Sorry, Palantier,

[00:48:56] Nathan Wrigley: that's right, yeah.

[00:48:57] David Waumsley: Was tripping over my Wednesday. Um, you know, who generally as a view they see. Democracy as a problem to progress. You know, it really needs to be in the handful of geniuses who will be able to do this. And this is why we're there is this sort of consolidating of this power, trying to make sure that it's only led by a few people.

If everybody's doing it, then it just ends up with a mess. So that's kind of, um, where we're at at the moment. It is interesting though, I mean, Karen, how makes the point about Sam Altman where you, you never know where somebody like him stands on everything. 'cause he's got the, the, uh, he does what his home product does, which is kind of mirror what you want to kind of hear all the time.

So he is good at raising investor money, but if you are somebody who, with artificial general intelligence, you believe you are a, a dor as Karen calls 'em, somebody who thinks that it's gonna. Killers all in the end, or you are a boomer that is going to, you know, we're all going to live in abundance forevermore.

It, it just really depends who you're talked to because as far as, as far as this whole project's concerned, Sam is both of those, but. Both talking about this is, is really good for the hype and I don't think, yes. Yeah,

[00:50:11] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, yeah. That's an interesting point. Anyway, sorry, go on.

[00:50:14] David Waumsley: Yeah, no, it's fine. Um, what, um, there was just some other points here to make, I mean, there's so much we could talk about this, but I probably should skip on actually and we should talk about, um, the very obvious exception to.

Kind of what we've been talking about there is the worldwide web itself.

[00:50:32] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So the strap line here is beautifully encapsulated. The web is for everyone, which is a lovely sentiment. So Tim Burnley, the inventor of the worldwide web published, this is for Everyone in late 2025. That's the book that we showed on one of the first slides.

Um, it's a modest account of how this invention was built on the work of others, but it's also an account of the struggle to keep it in in public ownership. Um, it is critical of unregulated algorithm controlled. So you sort of summarized the, the book in just four bullet bullet points. Yeah. Was there, yeah.

Was there more that you wanted to flash out on that?

[00:51:12] David Waumsley: Yeah, just a little bit. I mean, I suppose what, what it was is that, um, it is quite modest in the fact that mostly what you did is the add, the HTTP protocol really making us be able to connect for one computer to another without the logins. Things like link and basic HTML style tags, which we used today, which were obviously fleshed out what already there in place.

So, you know, he is good at acknowledging that shared resources. This kind of openness about your technology is there. Um, I mean he just made it obviously considerably more powerful for me. I would like to say. I think he deserves all the accolades that is, he's. Been given really for his ability to be able to keep the web in public ownership.

Mm-hmm. So we have something like the W three C that makes all of these big powers have to work together. It doesn't progress. It's slow, but it doesn't progress until everybody agrees and everybody's on the same side. And it's one is few examples and I think that's why, uh, it's so great because, I mean, just recount a few little details and I think they're worth just sharing here.

I mean, obviously in the early days there was Mark and Andrea and, uh, with the mosaic. Um, browser and he very much, I mean from Sir Tim's point of view, it was very much he could see that, uh, he, he liked to take credit for the web, take credit for the mosaic against his sort of partner. And he very much was keen to set up, uh, uh, sort of conference, if you like, to bring everybody together really around his vision.

It's only that. So Tim managed to get something together, which turned into the W three C ahead of him. Otherwise, I think it would be slightly different. It would be a little bit like open AI not being ai. And he also makes a point, I'll tell this story anyway. He talks about, uh, Google's. Ian Hixon, who was the chair of the HTML development group around the time of HTML five, and he, um, managed to create a sort of splinter group taking in Mozilla opera and Apple away from the W three C at that point, um, to create the WA work.

I never know how to say that, but it's the web hypertext application technology working group. Yeah. Obvious wish I would come up with short names for these. Um, but you know, from his point of view, he said he seemed to have a problem with accessibility reviews, you know, that he had to do for this one, and it was very, you know, good at being able to pull people away.

So there was a break off from the WCC at that point on it. I mean, what. White was foiled eventually is because they discovered posts on his belief in human, uh, humanitarian eugenics. He believed that mothers should have a license to be able to have children and everything. So the, the tide turned against him.

But what was revealed later is that the reason this splinter group was there, because he was working for Google, seen as someone neutral at the time before they had Chrome. But what was discovered there was that, you know, Google was secretly working on Chrome at the time, so it would favor them to splinter off on the W three C.

So yes, it makes a just a, just a small thing. Yeah, it's quite interesting. So I think the book, from that point of view, you just have to say. You know, inventing is one thing, you know, but he's done that with the help of other people there. He's put the, he's joined the dots together. That's why he's so keen on this kind of open stuff and everybody being brought together across the world.

And I think, you know, that's the, the key thing with that, where people want to kind of take this away really, if they can. So he is managed to keep that going. And I think it's really successful at the moment. At the moment we've got why we've got this show is because of the fact finally the browser walls are over and we've got this interoperability that's running at the moment, allowing HT ML and CSS to really advance quickly.

So I think, you

[00:55:01] Nathan Wrigley: know,

[00:55:02] David Waumsley: you know, without that, it would've been lost on that. Um, he does make the point, and I'll go in about the, I think one of the key things he wanted to make was the, the fact about these addictive algorithms that they're legally allowed. That you can, you know, w. People like Facebook and uh, TikTok or whatever, they know what's addictive on this.

They know that. What gets us angry into this, he talks about Cambridge Analytica and how that had an impact on Brexit and Trump's campaign in the first place. And as you mentioned in the beginning about Australia's social media ban for the under 16 year olds, he, you know, he points out that something that I felt as well, but it's nice to see that he felt the same, was that it's just not getting to the root cause.

The root cause is somebody needs to do something about harmful algorithms.

[00:55:51] Nathan Wrigley: Yes. It's kind of, um, trying to put a, I don't know, a visor over, you know, a a blackout blind over somebody's eyes. Um, and yet it's still there in the background doing Its doing its interesting things. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

[00:56:04] David Waumsley: Yeah, I'm a, I'm a victim of it and I'm, you know, what's 60, 60 something now, so, yeah.

Yeah.

[00:56:10] Nathan Wrigley: You only have to look along, uh, any row of any human being, uh, in, in this era, uh, to see the, uh, the addiction to the phones and the, uh, the social media. It's pretty rampant everywhere, isn't it? And I guess the systemic root cause is because the algorithms are incredibly successful. They're jolly good at doing what they're doing.

Um, yeah. Making us feel angry. Yeah. Yeah. And, and engaged, you know, just like, or maybe engaged is the wrong word, but it captures our attention very successfully. You know? Incredibly successfully. Yeah. Um, okay. Right. So, and just,

[00:56:46] David Waumsley: just finally with him, I should mm-hmm. Just mention the things that he's doing.

'cause I think they're quite interesting. So he has a, a company, anyway, interrupt. Um, and they've, he, he, he doesn't get much publicity really for those kind of things that he wants to talk about, but his idea for Web3 0.0 if you like, so apps and Facebook and all of that stuff. The social media was, if you like, 2.0.

What he would like to see is that data goes into our own ownership. So he has the idea of these agent wallets and he has two sort of products, which is going out, which has been used commercially, but isn't out for us all at the moment. Which of course will be all open source stuff, uh, solid. And Charlie, so solid is, uh, a way that we can store our own data where we want, wherever we want.

We might choose to use it on, you know, with Google some of it and we can disperse it. And Charlie is this sort of AI that he's working on that will kind of allow you to take the information from the web and then align it with how your life is to remind you how you've done your work. So it's a very different route around it.

Interesting.

[00:57:52] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Yeah, I guess we'll put links to those into the, uh, description below the, yeah, below the video or the audio. Okay, great. Yep. And, and then we'll one

[00:58:01] David Waumsley: last couple.

[00:58:01] Nathan Wrigley: Um,

[00:58:02] David Waumsley: yeah, we're our reclaiming agency, so

[00:58:04] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So more or less the penultimate slide. We've got reclaiming agency. So three points here. The worldwide web is low tech. Uh, there's no need for a third party platform to make an effective website. All true. Um, the second point, we can own our own data and syndicate elsewhere.

Again, all true, albeit not at the minute, but it'd be nice if we could spin it that way. And the final one, we can build for people rather than algorithms. That, personally, from my point of view, that's the, uh, that's the crucial one. That's the one that I think needs to be in everybody's mind when we're thinking about this.

Yeah. Yeah.

[00:58:40] David Waumsley: I mean, I've been thinking a lot about why they. Why I sort of feel no energy about websites and used to be so excited about it in the early days. I think the early days it represented this way of cutting out the middleman, being able to do things for our own, didn't matter what they were, whether they're capitalist ventures, whether they were socialists.

You could cut out and, and be your own person and put something out, connect with people across the web. But, and it felt very empowering in the first place. Yeah. Now it seems to have got really stodgy, but I don't think it has to be the same web is there and it's got so much better Just recently since interoperability has finally been achieved, you know, with the browsers.

So I think, you know, it'll take a bit of time, but if we're willing to give up, um, you know, sort of this need to go for short-term conveniences and stop falling for the marketing, you know, we can start making websites. Um. That, that you know, that it's so much easier. And that's what our kind of show is really about.

It's about making some of the new hasty l and CSS, which is kind of vibe coding, just kind of took over. Nobody was really talking unless you were a developer. You weren't talking about how great CSS has become and how Right. Much more you can do in, so that's really the reason for this one. So, I mean, we can't, as people do much about things that I, you know, I hate the fact that we seem to be creating lots of fake enemies to fear around the world all the time.

The fact that we've got wealth inequality, which is getting worse. The fact that, you know, NHS data in the UK is just being shipped off as every other bit of data is to a few US companies. But we can avoid spending a fortune on a website and not have to continue to pay to promote it and update it. So if you, if you spend a lot on a website, which is on a platform, you have to maintain it.

If you. Then spend that money, then you are almost, you have to get your visitors back on that. So then you're on with your Facebook and your Google ads. In order to do it, it's kind of like a trap, but we could go with the dumb web first and follow the rule of lease power like most professionals do, and just start with what we need, which in most cases for the sites most of us build, all we need is the htm, LCSS.

And maybe we'll just need an open source, um, generator like, uh, eleventy, which we're using if it needs to do a lot or, uh, WordPress or something like that to be able to create our stuff without getting locked into. All kinds of systems. So we talked about it before, didn't we? On the show, we did something on the indie web and they got that position where you publish that, that posse thing where publish your own site, syndicate everywhere else, and they talk about web mentions and all of that kind of stuff.

So it's just something that we could be jumping on. Yeah. And, um, anything you wanted to say here before we get to the final? No, I, I

[01:01:38] Nathan Wrigley: mean, apart from the fact that it's just, it's just a lovely alignment of where we, we would like, well, you and I would like the, the arrow to be pointing in the year 2026. I mean, you've laid out the case there.

You've done obviously a lot of research for this episode, for which I'm very grateful. Thank you. Lots of show notes that you can't see, by the way, dear listener. Um, and you've painted a, a, a, a picture of well. Some, some sort of dismaying version of how we are in the beginning of 2026. And then right at the end, here's some solutions there.

There's this, there's this technology that exists. It's free, it's open, it's available for everybody. And somehow we've, we've been wearing blinkers for the last decade or more, and we've been all kind of co-opted, um, voluntarily. Let's go with that. We've kind of, mm-hmm. Maybe walked into things without really realizing what was going to happen again, maybe it wasn't intentional.

Maybe it's just the forces that work that slowly over time get us to where we are. Where, you know, this ification that Corey Ero talks about, maybe it wasn't intentional, but it certainly happened. But there is a, there is a little bit of light at the end of the tunnel and it's, it's free, it's open, it's available, and it won't stop you doing anything.

Um, but maybe we just have to realign and realize. What we're doing. Yeah. Before it's too late. Yeah.

[01:03:00] David Waumsley: Yeah. I think it's just a case of like ai, I mean, I think AI is wonderful. You can use it in your own way. As long as you have control over it, it's not going to take away your agency and give that to a small number of companies to Yeah.

You know, then have control. And I think that's it. So, and last slide here. Um,

[01:03:17] Nathan Wrigley: yep. The last slide is, uh, is it the end or the start? Do we have to record this all again? Um, so this show, the aim is all about building websites that counter slop with quality. Ification with ownership, feudalism, with federation, ai, empires with human ingenuity, empathy, and respect.

Did you write those four PO points or were they some out of the mind or somebody else?

[01:03:43] David Waumsley: No, they're, they're, they're mine.

[01:03:45] Nathan Wrigley: I love those. They more or less encapsulate it perfectly, don't they? It's very pithy and gets to the heart of it all perfectly. I love that. Really nicely gone. Ah,

[01:03:53] David Waumsley: okay. And I, I, I kind of felt that we're going into a new year and we've been doing a show, not kind of moving into it, not knowing what we're doing, but in some ways, I, I think the show should have been called The Dumb Web Show.

Actually. You can have certainly based

[01:04:07] Nathan Wrigley: upon me, it should be called

[01:04:08] David Waumsley: No, no, no. But I mean, you know, dumbing down the web because you could do so much more with simple technologies, uh, without having to make it so, you know, like you're trapped into the new thing all the time. You have to jump on for what we do.

Make small websites where we can connect with people still, I mean. Nobody knows. You don't need to spend a lot of money on SEO 'cause nobody knows if the AI is going to be the way with it. But if you put yourself out there and you do it and you keep the cost low, you're going to reach other people, you know?

Mm-hmm. And you can still use the resources there. So I think, you know, it's our, I, I wanted to do this one because it's kind of our mission, I suppose, for the show, because what we'll try and do throughout this year is, we'll, we did it before, we tried to make some websites, but we kind of skipped over it.

And we're still learning, uh, you know, CSS and stuff and some of the complex stuff. What we'll try and do this time is to. Show the simple process how anybody really people with no prior coding knowledge can simply make their own simple, say business websites or something for local business. And I think we'll try and do some episodes where, break that down into very, very simple thing so it won't be sort of highfaluting, uh, academic stuff for that.

Um, right. This is just a way of introducing it as far as i's concerned.

[01:05:22] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So a, a bright future for the year 2026 for the, the, the newly titled Dom Web show. The Dumb Web Show. We should talk about that. That's actually a, I think that's quite an interesting title. Um, but anyway, we'll see, uh, maybe we're already captured by our title and the SEO and the Google.

The Google search listings that go with what we've already done. But, um, I guess that's, that wraps it up for this particular one. Yeah. Does it? Yeah. Yeah. It was a long one. Yeah, it was a long one. Um, but thank you. Um, so the year 2026 begins with a bang for this show. There's, uh, there's an awful lot of stuff that we would like to leave behind, but we're giving ourselves the opportunity to do things differently in 2026.

Uh, David, anything you wanna say before I click the stop button?

[01:06:10] David Waumsley: No. Thank you very much for your time today. Yeah.

[01:06:12] Nathan Wrigley: You're very And everybody else who's got to the end. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The four people who've got to the end. Thank you very much for listening. We'll be back at some point in the near future.

Cheerio, Dave. Bye.

Google Ads for local businesses

2025-11-27T00:00:00Z

Show Notes:

Here's the presentation slides.

About Google Ads

Google's search is so dominant that "Googling" has become a universal verb. Its suite of services (Gmail, Maps, Calendar, Docs) are embedded in our daily life.

The world's largest advertising platform through Google Search, YouTube and its Display Network.
Google's economic impact report puts advertisers average ROI at 800%.
An average ROI can not be expected as there's no normal distribution.
Success varies across industries and depends on skill.
Google ads won't give suckers an even break.
It's a subsidiary of the profit focused Alphabet, worth over 3 trillion.
Google supplies free tools because the data support its primary business.
Neil Patel claims that 8 out of 10 businesses lose money on Google Ads.

Traditional vs Digital Marketing

More traffic won't make a bad offer good.

No Message Match

Bob pays more per click because his homepage has a low quality score.
He's at the top of Google search, but attracting those with the least patience to search his site.
There's other distractions and no specific CTA.

Conversion Focused

A tweaked landing page for each ad type.
Builds in urgency with FOMO.
Includes a lower risk conversion option.

Mistakes Setting Up Ads

Not using 'Negative Keywords'.
Wrong location targeting.
No conversion tracking.

Time and Money

Google Ads is not "set and forget".
Most campaigns need 2-3 months of testing and optimization before hitting profitable ROI.
You need to be responsive and have the budget.

Hired Help

A red flag is someone approaching you offering to get you more traffic.
Don't place too much faith in badges.
Look for transparency and someone who can show examples of returns for clients similar you.

Checklist

Have you optimized your Google Business profile?
Have you checked Google's Local Service Ads?
Have you optimized your on-site SEO?

Transcript

[00:00:05] Nathan Wrigley: Hello there. Welcome to the No Script Show. This episode is going to be all about Google Ads and is for those new to pay per click advertising, particularly small businesses, for example, vets, accountants, therapists, electricians, et cetera.

From our experience helping these businesses build websites, many don't have the time to learn the differences between traditional marketing, so for example, advertising in newspapers, local radio, buying sports kits for local teams, et cetera, and digital marketing to which Google. Ads belongs as this is key to spending marketing budgets.

Well, we're going to go over what to consider before launching a Google Ads campaign. You can find the transcript, the show notes, and the presentation slides. They're gonna be at the website. No script show. Forward slash 26. So the numbers two, six, and if you're watching on YouTube, the link will be in the first comment just below the subscribe and like buttons, which you incidentally should press.

Should you wish to get more content from us in the future. As always. I'm joined by David Wamsley. Hi there, David. Hey

[00:01:12] David Waumsley: thanks Nathan. Oh, well, I'm hoping this episode might be of use to future clients of mine. That's really my intention behind it. Even though I kind of do a bit of marketing strategy when I'm building client sites.

'cause obviously I have to think about the users when I'm doing that. Rarely does this stick with them at all. So it's fairly common. A few years later when things had gone quiet on the website for me to get a request to add a Google tracking script or when with a WordPress site to give access to a Google ad campaign manager.

And recently, and this is what prompted me to want to talk about this, a client forwarded a. Appointment with a Google technician, support team member. Right. And the, there was no information. So there was an expectation that I would attend this meeting and but I wasn't sure, so I thought it was a phishing email or something because Right.

Google. Google are huge. They've got, 300 billion in ad revenue, so they've never been interested in handholding small businesses before. But it seems looking this up that it's just one of several defensive actions that Google's been taking since a recent decline in their search dominance.

Okay. Experienced advertisers are starting to report that they're getting poorer ad performance. So I think they're acting accordingly and looking to beginners who previously wouldn't have spent anything because they couldn't get beyond that sort of setting up of the campaign and the Google Tag Manager, the way of being able to analyze the results.

So that's really what's brought this on for me. Maybe this is a good thing that Google are doing, but there's a bit of me, the cynic in me that's thinking, well, this. Did this complexity mean that it was stopping people from who shouldn't have been doing it, doing this? Should you be flying a plane really if you don't know how to take off?

So I think, right, good point. Probably, yeah, give some advice on this. So we'll move on to our slides probably and talk a little bit about what Google and Google ads are.

[00:03:20] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay. So that's a, I guess that's a good place to begin. So just cribbing from the slide here a little bit. Google's search is really pretty dominant.

I mean, I don't know exactly what the numbers are, but it has become like a universal verb to say to Google things. We definitely used to say search, but now we say Google. And then of course it's got a massive suite of products behind it. I mean, there's four listed here, but there's way more than this Gmail maps, calendar docs.

Pretty much everything in my life is embedded in those. We, for example, share docs in Google Docs for this show, and I use Google Maps and I'm a Gmail user. It's pretty much everything. If Google went down, I'm in big trouble. It is the world's largest advertising platform, which is kind of strange to know through Google Search, for example, YouTube as well.

And it's got its ad display network and Google's economic impact report puts advertisers average return. At 800%. That seems like an eye watering figure, but okay. There it is. 800%.

[00:04:21] David Waumsley: Wow. Yeah. Yeah, I know. And well, I did a bit of research onto this one and I should probably mention as well that for those who don't know, Google Display Network, it.

It's really this collection of over 2 million external sites and apps, often blogs and games that make money from displaying ads. So, they put their ads on their site. If somebody clicks on it, they make money from Google. There are other creditable reports that suggest that the number, the return on investment might be more like.

200 to 400. And then I think typically as an industry, it seems that most people will say that the average return on an ad spend is for every. For every $1 spent, you'll get $2 in revenue, but it's still pretty good, isn't it? And you can see why. Well,

[00:05:07] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. I mean, so long as it's more than $1 for $1, it's probably a good business decision to start using things like that.

I'm staggered that it. Is as high as that. In all honesty. I kind of thought the days of that were all over. But anyway, so there's more in the about section. So for example this whole ad thing is a subsidiary of the profit focused Alphabet. So Alphabet is the parent company of Google.

That I don't know. Quite why they did that move a few years ago. But they did. And alphabet itself, gosh, really $3 trillion is apparently the worth of alphabet, which is pretty amazing. Google supplies free tools because the data supports its primary business. Yeah. They're not giving it to you for No Yeah.

Reason at all. And Google Ads won't give suckers an even break. What did you mean by that exactly?

[00:05:56] David Waumsley: Well, I.

[00:05:57] Nathan Wrigley: They, they're

[00:05:58] David Waumsley: a business and their ads are set up. If you go in with no skill or no knowledge and you go with their defaults, they're not going to necessarily work in your interest but work.

Yeah. In their business interests. And I think we'll see that as we go through. I mean, really this slide is just to, because I think many of us will see Google through rose tinted spectacles that you know Yeah. But they are one of the magnificent seven out there, apple, Microsoft, gosh, Amazon, no script show.

No script show. Satan I dunno who the others are. But and we, I think particularly I talk to clients all the time because I, people who came in on that wave of. The digital revolution saw Google as this wonderful people who just did things right, who had a really good culture.

Yeah. People wanted to work for them, but I think, we have to realize that their ethics has kind of been watered down over the years. They are big corporate business. There don't be evil motto has long gone. And more recently, the longstanding commitment to avoid AI in weapons development that's gone.

Google's face multiple. Privacy violations and probably in terms of that, just taking the most tinted spectacles off. One thing that if you're going into this, that you need to be aware of, 'cause. They won't make your way off because of GDPR. If you are sending any data, which you will do through Google Tag Manager, you actually need the consent to be able to do that before someone's data is taken over there.

Right. And of course, like most businesses who are set up to trade in data like Google. They're only really going to advertise where they meet GDPR. They're not likely to advertise to somebody who's setting up Google Tag Manager that you need to add this. Quite intrusive off putting privacy pop up to your website which you will need to do if you get into Google Ads.

So I'll move

[00:07:52] Nathan Wrigley: on to another slide. Okay, so I guess this is our final about slide. So there's some more information about Google and whatnot. So an average return on investment cannot, can't be expected as there's no normal distribution. The success is gonna vary across industries and depending on skill.

I I'm just gonna dwell on that point. I think that skill bit is the crucial bit and probably what we're doing here, in all honesty, setting it up properly. Like the defaults are probably not gonna get you anywhere. And it's a bit like something like Google Analytics. The devil is in the detail, which is in a menu, buried in a menu, buried in a menu, buried in a menu.

And also a familiarity with the interface and the ability to adapt as that interface changes over time, which inevitably will. And the final point in our about section is Neil Patel. Claims that eight outta 10 businesses lose money on Google ads, which is about everything you need to know about that.

Really? Yeah. If the ROI is claimed to be 800%, but eight out of 10 businesses seem to lose money on it, you, there's definitely something going wrong for those 80%, and yet the 20% seem to be making all the headway from the platform.

[00:09:00] David Waumsley: Yeah, I mean, Neil Patel, I mean, he is a prominent digital marketer.

For those who don't know Nathan, and I know his work, he's authored books and he creates a lot of SEO content and I think he still owns a keyword research tool as well, but it's not really backed up. But I will say in this, with my limited number of clients that I know of, maybe there's about seven or eight of them who I know of who have spent money on Google ads.

None of 'em are particularly knowledgeable about this. Actually, they all lost money on it, basically. So, what Neil Patel's saying is probably likely a lot of people go in not really knowing what they need to know.

[00:09:39] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay, so we're gonna drive the conversation forwards a little bit and we've got a number of different slides to promote that conversation.

So here we go. The first bit we're gonna tackle is traditional. Whatever that means versus digital marketing. So we've got this strap line here of more traffic won't make a bad offer. Good. It kind of stands the reason, doesn't it? Yeah. If you if you've got a bad thing, it doesn't matter how much you spend on the advertising, nobody is gonna buy it, but you've got some more data to back this up.

[00:10:06] David Waumsley: Yeah I'm just gonna concentrate on this a bit 'cause I think this is the crucial thing about anyone getting into this, because traditional advertising, I think most of us know of moving to digital, it's hard to get your head around that. So traditional advertising through old media. Was fairly intrusive and blunt.

You would've to advertise to everybody. So where you and I might have enjoyed the body form TV ads or something, you and I as gents wouldn't have been interested in the sanitary towel product because apparently according to Jimmy Carr, it's not a proper gift. Oh, okay. Right. Okay. But and I think similarly when we go into the first wave of digital marketing, a lot of people carried that mentality around just get more traffic.

So people were gaming Google we keyword stuff in all the stuff that you knew about in the two thousands and 10 Google. Kind of got their act together and punish people who were gaming the algorithm. 'cause it wasn't in their business interest. And a lot of people kind of went out that time.

And that's saw, I mean, it was always there in the first place and offline. But there was a concentration in our way to think about conversion. The idea of using sales psychology to present an offer in a targeted way. Which you can do. That's the beauty I think of Google Ads.

Unlike any other sort of search engine work that you might do it allows you to kind of really finely tune who you're going to Yeah. Have come to your site and. I mean, I'm gonna go on a little bit on this, but I, we, I think we just instinctively know this in the real world. So if for my example here, if I was setting up, I'm not going to do this a shop, and it, this shop only has one product.

It sells classic black dresses. We'd know instinctively that value of that dress would depend on the person coming through how they would value it. So if a young teenager came through. I'm probably going to guess when they come through that they're not gonna be interested in stuff that I might have worried about.

The fabric that it's durability, that it's easy, washable, that's probably not gonna be their primary concern, whether it's called who's wearing it now might be their thing. If it's an older person, they might be like me, they change their weight all the time and they want to know that it can adjust to that.

If it's a man coming into the shop or something. Assuming that they're not like me and they'd like to go by the name Susan at the weekend. I'm joking there. By the way. It's Jenny. I prefer, sorry. No, really? If they come in, they're probably looking for a gift so they won't reassurances.

That this might be the gift for the right kind of person, and you might sell the fact that it's easy returnable, that sizes don't matter too much. It's quite forgiving and that you gift wrap. So if you see what I mean. Yeah. One product Yep. Can be sold. And the highlighting and that I think is the key thing about where Google Ads come in is because it allows you, with pay-per-click, you can target who's coming into your shop so you can greet them.

With the best story, if you like, to be able to convert them. So, I will move on. Sorry, we'll move on to this side.

[00:13:09] Nathan Wrigley: Well, no, it's okay. I've just got a couple of things to add to that, and that is to add to that. And that is that, that sort of hyper targeting whilst yeah. Whilst it's like the unicorn, it's what everybody wants.

There's also a boatload of work in there, isn't there? Because each time that you identify this, let's go for avatar, that word, this persona if you like. Yeah. You've gotta tweak the message for that eventuality and then tweak it for this other possible eventuality. And so, in the same way that putting a shop op.

You're gonna have expenses in terms of, rent, electricity, gas, staffing, and all of that. This isn't a quick fix. You're probably just gonna have to divest some of those resources into other ways. You won't have the gas to pay for, you won't have the electricity to pay for, but you still have to pay for stuff to make this work because time will be the thing and expertise will be the thing.

So it's not like you just move everything and it's instantly rainbows. Yeah. There'll still be an awful lot of work to do to figure out how these people, who these people are and figure out the language to correctly sell to them. And yeah. So, sorry, that brings us to the next slide, which is the yeah, the irascible Bob Smith, who is a gardener.

[00:14:20] David Waumsley: Yeah. So I'm just gonna use him as an example of this. Yeah. I mean, most websites, the homepage. Do things that you would never do in a shop. So, somebody entered your shop, you wouldn't say, welcome to my black dress Emporium. We were established in blah blah year. Yes. And we are passionate about, you would move straight into it.

And that's the problem with homepage. So if we imagine we are Bob Smith and we're a landscape gardener in the uk, in the county of Lincolnshire, which we. Both hail from. Yeah. And let's imagine that he gets lots of work from his website, but it's general gardening work. He doesn't get the stuff that he would ideally like to be doing, the hard landscaping, making patios, walls, driveways, and past that kind of thing.

So he's told, he's got his website. It's doing its job, it's not giving him the work that he wants. He is told he can target people via Google ads, so he sets up campaigns for them. But the problem is that he. Sends all of this traffic to his generic homepage where there's kind of very limited message match.

And I'll let you read

[00:15:21] Nathan Wrigley: out these main points. Yeah. Okay. So I guess this is like the golden goose, isn't it, of the internet, the ability to target things. So for example, in the case of Bob Smith he's gonna be paying more per click because this page has a low quality score. So in other words, the people that are arriving at that page.

The intuitions are not quite aligned to what it is that they're looking for. He's at the top of Google search, but attracting those with least patience to search. His site, which is kind of curious, isn't it? That's a weird juxtaposition of information. The idea that people who are quickly searching around on Google might be the people who are the least likely to dwell and stick around.

And then also there's a dis, there's distraction and no specific call to action as well. Yeah. If we, you can just about see the picture. Yeah. Under David, there, there's, it's very generic. There's nothing particularly leading you to the next step.

[00:16:14] David Waumsley: And I think that quality score is an important thing, but it's about relevancy.

I mean, if you are going to cheat your way to the top by paying Google to surface on the top, the less relevant your page is. And that's gonna be about keywords. So in a typical website like Bob's, he's probably gonna have a section that goes into hard landscaping, but on his page, he's probably got no mention of patios, the thing that he's advertising.

Right? Right. So when somebody goes there, they land on a generic page with a generic. Call to action to get an estimate and no mention of the thing that sent 'em there in the first place. And given that those people are probably clicking on the first thing that they see, they're probably least likely to go search and they expect it to be handed to them.

[00:16:53] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So, oh, I see. Yeah. Yeah. That's a really interesting intuition. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:16:56] David Waumsley: Yeah. So I think that's the thing. I mean, quality score, I should just probably emphasize is a little bit more than just having the words in there because Google use this as a way of predicting how likely your ads.

Likely to be clicked on the sort of relevance to what you're talking about and your site and you know how closely your ad copy, which is quite important if you're setting up the schemes to get that right. Match the user search intent. So Bob really, like most people, would have no time. To work on a landing page that was specific for each of the people he was sending.

He'd be too busy to do keyword research to know, which is the sort of low hanging fruit to pay the least. And he's probably unlikely to set up lots of variations of the copy of the ad to see which one performs best as a quality score on all of this. So you end up, and I'm sure this is the case with a lot of people that.

They're willing to pay to bring more the people that they want to see, but in that they are ignoring. The key thing that Google Ads does is that it allow you to get a specific type of user, and it's the user and how you accommodate them that ultimately makes it possible for him to get the work that he wants.

[00:18:10] Nathan Wrigley: The other thing for Bob, sorry, can we just, if we just stay with Bob for a minute, is Oh yes. That, given that Bob is a gardener Yeah. Like he's just doing this whole gardening thing and the internet is probably not his thing. Maybe it's his thing, but probably not. And so that whole intuition of, okay, you need a page for this and it needs to be configured in this way to attract these kind of people.

That's not. Bob's thing. That's kind of your thing. My thing. You've got a background in psychology, which always bleeds into these conversations. You probably don't even notice it, but there's always some psychological driver in what you say, and I think that's really interesting. What are the intuitions?

What are the incentives that people arrive at that page on? Yeah. Is gonna be really important. The other thing is that Bob is failing. I'm assuming a bit about Bob, but I'm imagining Bob is watching the pennies and every single thing that he spends on a Google ad, it could feel like a complete black hole of money, yeah. I've just spent 200 pounds and I don't have any intuition as to what happened to it, whereas the ad that I put in the local paper, I got a phone call. And I know that gave me something back and it's so much less obvious. Yeah. It's easy to say 800% ROI on Google ads. It's, but it's harder to know.

Where that 800% is coming from, because the internet just doesn't give you that information. Well, it doesn't out of the box, obviously. We'll maybe get into that in a future episode. Anyway, that's me finished about Bob. Sorry. Yeah,

[00:19:41] David Waumsley: no, that's fine. I mean, I, what I've done is, and I'm gonna have to talk on a bit there, I've contrasted it with Bob's wife, who's Mary, who runs a marketing business.

So she knows this stuff and she has a web designer, she has somebody who does the Google ads managing for, but they coordinate the two sides of this. Through her strategy. So one of her clients wants to promote a summer music festival a year ahead of the event. So what she would do as somebody with a kind of marketing mindset or digital marketing mindset, she'd set up a landing page for that.

Early on to try and get listed on search as soon as possible, and then via social media and blog posts in particular, she'll create links into it to hope that it'll get promoted in organic search and not have to pay for anything. Right. So she's likely to do keyword research for the blog, so you know, she'll be.

Doing that sort of psychology, thinking about who are the people who might be interested in this are the potential customers that might be holiday makers coming to Lincolnshire in the summer. There'll be regular music lovers, concert goers. There'll be fans of the performers that might be on that show, and she can write blog posts on all of these and create this kind of hub and try and get free traffic.

And that's the ideal, she would start with that a year ahead, hope to sell all the tickets, but she would also know, and this is where Google Ads could be useful, is that on something time sensitive where she doesn't have the time for this to rank higher in, in organic search. Right, right. We use Google Ads to boost, what does less well organically, and she's already done the keyword research for a blog post anyway, so that's gonna give her, when she's doing that, she's going to note what the cost per click is, what she's doing that. So she's already set up, if you like to be ready for Google ads. So. She is well, conversion focused.

Conversion focused.

[00:21:27] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay. So the skinny on conversion being conversion focused is a tweaked landing page for each ad type. So we kind of alluded to that with Bob. So rather than just generically dropping in on the homepage, there's a place. Where each of the ads will end up, and hopefully it's fine tuned to what the ad message was saying.

Builds in urgency with a bit of fomo. So the fear of missing out, I guess that's in the case of a concert, that's nice and easy to achieve, isn't it? Because there's a deadline in terms of the calendar, but there's also a finite amount of tickets may be more difficult for Bob Special offers, things like that.

Who knows? But also includes a lower risk of, sorry, includes a lower risk conversion option. As well.

[00:22:09] David Waumsley: Yeah. Sorry, I put this in the notes there. But yeah, so with her, she could do the fomo ad can stand out 'cause she can say this is the last chance to get your 20% off this concert. To try and increase the urgency.

And then of course, what she's going to do with her landing page says it's built and it's gonna have lots of different imagery. She can change that imagery. So she's attracting families. She'll have more family stuff with kids in it, on images of the stuff. And she can change all the headlines to match what's going in.

So. Some of those ads will be set up to see if the money is gonna help 'em convert. But also I think what she'll know, and this is something that Neil Patel and people like that would allude to as a digital marketer, is that most of them will know and we know. That over 70% of the people who will visit a website will leave.

They'll get distracted and they'll never return again. They'll just completely forget about it. Life takes over. And so what you would generally do, if there's a possibility you would add in a lower risk conversion option to go in that. So for Mary, there were a lot of options that she could do that would build into what she would do.

So if she's trying to attract the tourist or something coming into Lincoln she might add into the bottom of that. For the, in exchange for an email that there's a guide that they can download here. To find out about other events for music lovers, similar music events for bargain hunters where there are discounted events in the area.

All that kind of stuff is a way of just getting an email of somebody so you could follow them up later at some point and just say, here it is. And encourage 'em to go again. So your cost for your click, you've got another chance to reuse that, so, right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's, I mean. Obviously there's so much more we can go into about the sales psychology and the conversion side, but I mean, anybody who's new to this, hopefully that sort of gives you a flavor for the different type of mindset that Mayri might have compared to Bob.

Yeah. When looking

[00:24:01] Nathan Wrigley: at this. Yeah. So it kind of feels like everything that we've done so far is a bit of the why. Yeah. And now it feels like we're moving into the how the practicalities of doing things. So here's our, here are some examples of making mistakes whilst setting up the ads. This is basically where I would always fall down.

There was always things that I think. That I didn't do correctly. I didn't understand the tool and what have you. So, so just a few, three to begin with, not using negative words. Wrong location targeting. Ooh. Yeah. And also no conversion tracking, so you're not following that through and figuring out when people did a certain action.

So yeah. Over to you, David.

[00:24:39] David Waumsley: Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, negative keywords, I mean, I looked this up myself. There were people giving various estimates about how much that might loot waste in your budget. It went from 30 to 80% of your budget. Wow. So it's that example of, well, even you, I mean, we can't get into all the details, but you get an option of basically a broad match for your search terms.

So you can bring in people that are. Words that are very similar to what you've put in your ads or what the keywords you're working for. Or you can have an exact match, but even with an exact match. And this is where you need to keep up with Google 'cause it changes the rules on you. So, there's a lot of work in that, but even with an exact match, you need negative keywords.

So Bob, obviously he wants to maybe promote his patios that he's doing, but of course he wants to get rid of the people who are searching for DIY patio. And as he is at the top, he doesn't wanna get. People who are just gonna click on it 'cause they think that's what they search for. DIY. And he came up so they've clicked on him.

So you wanna get all these negative keywords, words that people could type that are similar to what you are doing. If you were a carpenter, you might wanna remove the word canon 'cause you don't want people searching for music by the carpenters or whatever.

[00:25:45] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:25:45] David Waumsley: So there's that.

And then. Wrong location targeting. There's a little, this is what was mentioned in before about Google, kind of set it up for their interest, not necessarily yours. They set it up so it says presence and interest in an area where most people will want to change that to just presence. They are actually coming from the area.

Yeah, itself. Now, in Bob's case that would be the case because, I might need a landscape gardener actually for this house that we've got in India. But, and I've got an interest in Lincoln's share. So if he left it at the default, I would see his ads and think he's for me. Yeah. So where Mary might want to.

For a particular campaign where she wants the holiday makers from out the area, she might want to leave it on the default for that particular campaign. So yeah. You can really make a mistake by advertising to the wrong people. I think this is gets much more complex these days, particularly with the sort of new digital acts and everything and people move into VPNs.

You're not quite sure where anybody really is these days. But anyway, that's just one of the challenges. Yes, it's, yeah. Yeah, and the other thing to just let that's the targeted, the conversion tracking, obviously this is the thing that Google are helping people with by now. Setting that up, I think it has to be noted that when you've got somebody like Bob, he's got, he's going in and it's very simple, I think for Google to give in a little bit of time to say, okay, we can just, we can track.

Who's coming through your contact form or maybe your clickable telephone number. Whereas Mary, I don't, I, I dunno if Google would spend all the time that they would need to do to set up something with Mary where she's got lots of different calls to actions and buttons going on for different pages, lots of different funnels that people can go through to take up the secondary option.

So I'm not sure if Google would be helping the professional in that way. Okay. That's interesting.

[00:27:36] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. So the other thing to think about shall, about, shall I take this or do you wanna go with it? Yeah, please. Yeah. Okay. So, okay, thank you. The next one time and money. Probably the secondly word anyway at least is why we're doing this.

Google Ads is not a case of set it and forget it. Oh, I wish it was a case of set it and forget it. Everything's gonna change, isn't it? Your offers are gonna change, your pricing is gonna change, but also there you are is probably gonna change. So you need to stay familiar with that.

Most campaigns, this is fairly amazing. Most campaigns need two to three months of testing, gosh. And optimization before. Hitting a profitable ROI. That's the bit that Google definitely won't be alerting you to out of the gate. I wouldn't have thought. And you need to be responsive and have a budget, so able to change and able to spend and adjust your spending as things ramp up, time of year, whatever it may be.

[00:28:29] David Waumsley: Yeah, well I used a bit of AI to try and pull together what other people were saying about the sort of time that's required for this. And they came out with a sort of minimum of an initial setup, four to eight hours. Yep. Monitoring one to two hours and a monthly optimization of two to four hours. But I think in truth, 'cause it's a changing platform, you, there's always something new to learn and to set up.

And you're really going to, you need to have an analytical mind. I mean, to get the best value you need to do a bit of. Keyword research anyway on this.

[00:29:00] Nathan Wrigley: And it's not nothing though. That is it, that's quite a considerable amount of time, in, in a busy working week that's already ramp packed with things.

Especially Bob, the idea of one to two hours a week, where's that coming from? A monthly additional two to four hours to optimize things and tweak things. It's just that's tough. That's a difficult justification when there's gardens to be landscaped,

[00:29:23] David Waumsley: yeah, and I think, they're saying, I mean, putting this into pounds, that you generally need to be thinking that you're going to be spending 400 quid per month for at least a couple of months without expecting anything to come back.

And that, in my experience with people I know have done it, they've pulled out after a couple of months, after months. That's brutal, isn't it? Months, yeah. Yeah. Of investing to be able to get some return. 'cause you need to test all these different variations. So a lot of people are just not into that kind of thing.

So. And also, unless you know what you're doing, you want to avoid. And now I don't think it's a default at the moment, but there was a point where it led you to put yourself on the display network, which means that you can end up on all of these blog posts or you can end up on these games. And of course, these people are making money to people clicking on their.

So they're gonna put them quite near to some control. So you accidentally click so you can really burn through money. So you definitely, if you did do that, you need to set a max, spend off Google or just take all the money that you've got and make sure, so it's quite a minefield, but you can set this.

But you know, the problem is this balance, people don't allow enough time or loss to come with it. And then. They might burn it up in the wrong way for that. So,

[00:30:31] Nathan Wrigley: well, like the example that you gave of 400 pounds over two months, so 800 pounds in that case. Yeah. It's, that's a, if you're just starting out or you've, you're struggling that, that's a healthy amount of money to lose.

Yeah. With, at the end of two months, no expectation that you won't be at 1200 pounds by the end of month three. At sort of 1600 by the end of month four. In other words, it just seems like a ca a chasm of money. And of course, the intuition there is to pull out because I've lost quite a lot of money that I can't afford to lose the next month and the next month.

But counterintuitively, if you give it some time. Then the results hopefully will come. But that's a diff, that is a difficult psychological bridge to get across, I think.

[00:31:18] David Waumsley: Yeah. I think you need to go in knowing that you're gonna lose some money in there. The last person I know, the client who told me what happened, very good client, smart person as well, but he'd spent in two months, 4,000 pounds, and you got one lead out of that.

And that's it. He pulled out, then we did something else. So that was quite a big hit. It's more than what he spent on the stuff that we've done together. So yeah, that was a lot of money. So yeah, I made the point actually on the slides that you read out that you need to be more responsive. So I think generally there's a view that if you are in.

Advertising people know that you are advertising your stuff or even if they don't and you are on the top, so you are selecting out the least patient people. You need to be quicker with your responses than you might be with your normal website. So you probably want to adjust your campaign so they're not displaying when you are not around, you want to be replying within an hour or two generally.

I think that's what people say if you're getting. Click through from those ads.

[00:32:13] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, of course. At this point, the you are kind of thinking to yourself, okay, this is all. Lots of money to be lost here. Lots of difficulty. So what I'm gonna do now is I'm just gonna hire somebody to take all of this burden away from me, and they'll be brilliant because they've got lots of badges on their website saying how great they are at this kind of stuff.

But David has some, I guess, red flags or some things to be mindful of here. Let's just read them out. One red flag. Is someone approaching you offering to get you more traffic? I think you are gonna go into that in just a moment and explain. Maybe there's a, there's something different there. Don't place too much faith in badges.

So I'm guessing, this accreditation thing that they have on their website. Maybe not. And also look for transparency in someone who can show you example, like real, actual. Examples of clients, which are basically, I guess, similar to the business that you are running. So three things there, which you are gonna develop some more.

[00:33:09] David Waumsley: Yeah, I think so. I I never really know with clients whether they've been approached by somebody or whether they've decided to employ. And I think with some of them they have, just been approached for this. And I think it comes that sort of, we'll get you traffic and get you to the top of Google thing, which you hear a lot of the spams people saying.

And that sounds good to somebody who doesn't really know. But it's quite. Because that's what Google adss offer. You give them money and that's what you get more traffic and you get to the top. So that's an easy thing to do. If they're not talking about conversion or the quality of score, that's probably a really worrying sign, particularly the way that most will charge for their time.

So there's a range of how campaign managers who are experienced do this. Some will go on a retainer and or an hourly amount, some will even do it on performance. But generally only if it's a big. Ad spender what most local businesses are likely to be offered, which is the most common thing, which is to charge by percentage of the spend.

So if that is their promise only to get you traffic and get you on the top of Google and not. Quality and conversions, then they're incentivized to burn through as much of the old money as possible and as quickly as possible. Yeah.

[00:34:22] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. That's a really interesting in intuition. Yeah. Sorry, I interrupted.

Yeah,

[00:34:26] David Waumsley: No, that's fine. And I think the badges is the other thing about the you've got Google Partners and you've got Google certified agents, and they have to be certified once a year on this one, and it can be reassuring and it can be a sign of something good, but also, again, in this case.

Google can be gamed because I mean, you can pass this certification every year by just googling your answers and putting them in. And mostly your search partners are people who are spending $10,000 over a 90 day period as, and that's the primary driver. And unlike with this type of gaming Google, it's in Google's interest because they earn money from the people who are.

Generating this money for them. It's not like the search where that's being gained, where it, ruins their reputation. So, so I think, from that point of view, it can be a good sign and at least it means that people have made that effort to do that. But I think you've also gotta look beyond that, which is why.

Probably you need somebody who can show you examples of similar help they've given conversions that they've given for industries similar to yours. That would be the best

[00:35:23] Nathan Wrigley: sign. Yeah, and I feel that, well, certainly my inbox, my email inbox is definitely from time to time full up with people promising a lot with this kind of work.

It seems to be almost the most spammy thing you can. Possibly imagine, I'm cold calling you with a, or cold emailing you demonstrating my credibility. And it is, as you say, it really is often just about, I'm gonna get you to the top of Google. And of course that's great if you've got an infinite amount of money.

But exactly as you said, really what you want is, I wanna make it so that you are getting loads of conversions. Okay? Yeah. Right? Yeah. And I don't really have anything to add here, so I think you should just crack on with your checklist, so, yep.

[00:36:01] David Waumsley: Yeah, it's the last thing that we're covering here.

So just really the main things I, there's so much we could talk about on this one, but I think the main question you need to ask yourself if you'll move into Google Ads is. Firstly have you optimize your Google business profile, even if you have one. Now, I'm always encouraging people to do this and set this up because it's free traffic for you.

You are, you have your business account on there. They've called it different things over the time, but you set it up, it's for free. And then if somebody's in your local area asking for your service, you can show up on the map. Now you've got all your competitors there, but if you optimize this, get lots of reviews on it, lots of good reviews, send people to it.

People just don't do this. And you fill in all of the stuff that they want you to tell them, like your opening times and all of this, and put in all the images. You've got a really good chance of getting a lot of free traffic and people move straight to Google ads before even setting this up as local business.

So I think that's a key one. There's also something which I didn't know about until I started researching this. Shame on me. I think it's only been around since. 2020 mostly started in the US but they have a thing called Google's local service ads, and this is a pay by lead. Thing. So basically you pay more than you might do for your clicks to appear at the top with a call to action directly in that, to either call you or to email you from that.

And they will charge as that event happens. But you do have the option to say to Google, no, sorry, that was a spam thing. Don't charge me for that, and they'll refund. So, okay. That's interesting. I didn't know about that. So they No I didn't as well. And it, if you're in the uk, the I would check in their site and the, for a lot of the clients that I was checking out that it wasn't available for their industry in their area.

Okay. But it's wanted to check out. Okay. Because it might be the way to go if you really do need to. It might be more expensive, but at least you know it. You skip out all of that. Yeah, there's a lot of

[00:37:56] Nathan Wrigley: qualification litigation going on there, isn't there? Yeah. There's a lot of, and you skip

[00:37:58] David Waumsley: out of sticking all that nonsense on your scripts on your website as well.

You just go directly to Google, sends you the traffic for your lead. That's it's much more simpler thing. Yeah. And then finally, and I think this is my plea as somebody who always feels, like I should say something to clients that have you optimized your, on your onsite SEO now? Generally when I'm building a site for people it's not always what everybody wants, but it's what I try and build into it.

I'll try and build in landing pages, if you like, for the different things that they do, and I'll try to do more, but I usually always feel that I want, even if they I will go as far as making. Content for them for blog posts or something if they give me a clue. But often I don't get to see this through and in all my experience of working with the clients who have gone to Google ads and then we've worked together to increase their blog posts and to focus on something in every case.

And it's just due to the nature of the fact that they've got so much low hanging fruit. I my, what they pay for me really outstrips anything that Google ads. Yeah. Interesting. So far it's not that I don't think Google ads are good, it's just that I think the missing, the low hanging fruit. Yeah. With this first, so that's really been my experience.

I often think. It's always one of these difficult things I think in the industry, I've talked about this before, is the fact that so many clients, when they come to a website, they come with the solution. They want this, they want a website. They don't come with a business problem. They want a slider, they want a bookings form, but they gen generally don't come with a problem and that the person provide the solution.

So I think anybody who's looking into that, they might wanna see if they know somebody who's working in some sort of marketing digitally and ask them, come with your problem. To them. Yeah, and they might say Google ads because that might be the perfect thing for you, but they might say, you've got other things you can do First.

[00:39:50] Nathan Wrigley: There we go. I think did I just ran then? No. That made perfect sense. And I agree. It's kind of curious that the very last bullet point kind of, upends the entire conversation we had, but at the same time, that's the bit you've gotta get, right? There's no point in having an online presence without getting the free benefits of.

Just having a good online presence. If the entire purpose of your online presence is to spend money on Google ads maybe you've missed the point. And there's lots of low hanging SEO through, especially in the long game. If you're in this for the long haul, you can definitely tweak that over time and make it work for you.

So there was. The no script show, episode number 26. You can find it at no script show slash 26. So the numerals two, six, what's gonna be the follow up to this? David, what are we doing after this one?

[00:40:41] David Waumsley: I have absolutely no idea. Well, I could talk

[00:40:43] Nathan Wrigley: about this. Well, we shall find out is all that I'm gonna say when we.

When we're joined for episode number 27, is there anything you wanna add before we knock it on the head?

[00:40:54] David Waumsley: No, that was great. Well, I enjoyed doing it through these presentations. It's a little bit awkward really for doing this for the first time, but it was a slight change

[00:41:02] Nathan Wrigley: in. Do things normally. We're not driven by slides, but this time you had created these slides, which kind of drove us forward.

I liked it. I thought it was a really good way, and no doubt we'll we'll get slightly better at the the machinations of doing it in a slide driven way. Okay. That's it. We'll call that a day and I'll see you on the next one. Yeah, thanks Nathan. Bye bye.

Form options for static websites

2025-09-10T00:00:00Z

Show Notes:

Expectations and clients

In the era of heavily marketed no-code products, it is not unreasonable for many website clients to think web interactivity is easy.

They may think:

If they build it, they will come (the form will itself generate business).
Complex forms are plug and play and easy to manage.

Most are less likely to think about

UX and accessibility.
the responsivity needed for today's devices.
The impact on page load and in turn SEO.
The potential cost of support and maintenance.

ℹ️ As freelancers, it's tempting to buy an off-the-shelf product to match a client's request. But, if we don't probe enough, we can find ourselves responsible for things we can't control for clients who cannot manage them and that were not actually needed.

Do all websites need a form?

The only form many personal and small business sites have is a contact form. There’s lots of debate around whether these are needed these days.

For

Avoids the spam of a public email.
Lets you collect structured, required information.
Can route messages to multiple or specific recipients automatically.
Makes it easier to automate leads into CRMs/databases.
Standardizes subject lines, making inquiries easier to manage.
Keeps users on the site rather than opening an email client.
Can log and analyze submissions for tracking and insights.

Against

Forms can still attract spam without proper CAPTCHA or filtering.
Users may find forms restrictive compared to writing a direct email.
Accessibility may suffer if the form is not properly coded.
Misconfigured forms may fail to deliver messages.
Requires technical setup and ongoing maintenance.
Risk of poor design creating confusing or frustrating user experiences.
Server or plugin vulnerabilities could open security risks.
Meeting GDPR requirements is more complex with forms.
If forms are too long or intrusive, visitors may abandon them.

Additional points

Many UX experts say an email address is a key trust factor.
Perplexity's search of studies concluded contact forms convert 3-5%.
Clickable Emails & Phone Numbers convert up to 38%.
Website chat converts at 33-50%.
WhatsApp message links can achieve click-through rates of 45–60%.
A phone number field can lead to a drop in submissions.
No research over disabled users preferring email or forms.

ℹ️ Links not included as the statistics were amalgamated by Perplexity AI.

There is certain to be bias, a difference in methods, and well, it's AI!.

If accessible, short, and the options do not overload the user, a contact form seems a good idea.

What are our form options?

Sending form data from a website safely requires us to have a client and server side.

The client-side is the HTML the user interacts with. We can think of it as the bouncer on the front door of a night club.

They do first checks. We have basic HTML form validation, but presently for accessibility, we typically need ARIA and JavaScript to make them fully accessible.

The server-side acts more like the security guarding the VIP section. It checks the data is safe to allow through and stops the riff-raff (spam).

1. DIY server and client side

Along with the HTML, CSS, ARIA and JS, we have to manage a self-hosted backend server. Perhaps using:

Serverless Cloud Functions.
Static Site Hosting Plus Separate Backend/API.
Email-to-Form Solutions via Mail Server.
Open-Source Form Server Software.

We are not going to do that!

2. DIY client-side with a 3rd party server-side service

The No Script Show is doing this for our (yet to be improved) contact form. As we are hosted on Netlify, we could use their service that offers 100 free form submissions per month.

Without adding Cloudflare's Turnstile CAPTCHA Replacement, we were getting about 5 spam emails a day, so without this, we would have used this up. We are presently using Formspark, listed below with similar services:

Form Backend Services
Service	Free Plan	Pricing Range	Submission Limits	Key Restrictions
Formspark	No free plan; $25 lifetime	$25 lifetime	50,000 lifetime submissions	Suitable for low-traffic. Could not submit in India. Unresolved!
Basin	Free trial	$4 - $108/mo	Up to 25,000 (plan dependent)	Paid plans for advanced features
FormBold	Free plan. 100 Submissions/mo	$5 - $59/mo	For personal/hobby use	Some features may be premium
FormBackend	Free trial	$5 - $50/mo	Unlimited forms/fields (paid)	Advanced features may require payment
Formzillion	Open source/free. 100 submissions/mo	$5 - $100/month	Up to 30,000 monthly	More suited for self-hosting
Web3Forms	Free tier. 250 Submissions/mo	$12 - $33/mo	Limited submissions (free)	Focus on email notifications
Formspree	Free limited. 50 Submissions/mo	$5 - $50+	50/mo (free plan)	Higher tiers for integrations/features
Formcarry	Free limited. 50 Submissions/mo	From $5/mo	Unlimited forms (paid)	Team features paid
FormKeep	Free limited. 50 Submissions/mo	From $4.99/mo	Restricted features (low plans)	Limited autoresponses, integrations

3. 3rd party with a client and server-side service

This, for us, is the most suitable option if we need complex conditional forms for bookings and taking payment. The downside is you lose control over page load, UX and accessibility.

Form Builders
Service	Free Plan Submissions	Free Plan Forms	File Uploads (Free)	Accessibility (WCAG)	Stripe on Free Plan?	Stripe Fee	Notes
Paperform	Free 7-day trial (Full access)	Unlimited during trial	Not specified	Not specified	Yes (trial only)	None (during trial)	Stripe/Paid features only after trial
Fillout	1,000/mo	Unlimited	Unlimited	Partial, improving	Yes	None	No added fee, just Stripe
Jotform	100/mo (10 Stripe payments)	5	100 MB	Full (2.1 A & AA)	Yes	None (max 10/mo)	Upgrade for >10 Stripe pmts/mo
Cognito Forms	500	Unlimited	100 MB	Full (2.0)	Yes	1% per Stripe payment	Unlimited pmts, 1% fee plus Stripe's
Typeform	10/mo	Unlimited	2 MB/form	Full (2.1 AA, direct links)	No	N/A	Stripe requires paid plan
Formester	100/mo	10	100 MB	Basic (no compliance claim)	Yes	None	No extra fee, just Stripe
Youform	Unlimited	Unlimited	10 MB/form	Not specified	No	N/A	Stripe/pro is paid only
FormNX	Unlimited	Unlimited	100 MB	Not specified	Yes	7.5%	Stripe fee drops to 0 on paid plans
Survicate	25/mo	1	Not specified	Full (2.1 A & AA)	No	N/A	Payments not supported
Tally	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited	Improving, not fully compliant	Yes	None	Ongoing WCAG work, no extra fee
AidaForm	100/mo	Unlimited	Not specified	Not specified	No	N/A	Payments require paid plan
FormSmarts	Not specified	Not specified	Not specified	“Best effort”, not certified	Yes	Depends on plan	Stripe fees/plans vary, read T&C

Missing is the popular Google Forms which appears to value accessibility and can be extended via addons.

We will talk more about these in a future episode. Presently favoured is Tally because of the philosophy behind it. They are based in the EU and are proud to be a bootstrap company with a small team.

Also they do not by default load huge amount of JS. Formapp, was also not included here because it loaded 1.5MB of JavaScript over 49 files with a basic form. It has a focus on AI.

Paperform is added because David has used it due to a low cost life-time deal many years back. It is slow loading with over 0.5MB of JavaScript and presently is not yet accessible, but other than that good.

ℹ️Luckily, we can lazy load iframes so we can prevent heavy forms failing us on Core Web Vitals by putting the form lower in the page or containing it within a details element.

Transcript

[00:00:06] Nathan Wrigley: Hello there and welcome to the No Script Show. This is part of our series looking at components that make up a website. And today we're talking about forms. Forms turn the web from a passive medium into something dynamic and interactive. Without forms, users can't search, comment, access, private content, or shop online.

As it is such a huge topic, and the aim of this show is to keep things simple. We're gonna start with an overview. When we might need forms and what services are available to help us.

For static sites like ours, the no script show, we certainly need additional services to add forms, but this episode should also be as relevant to those on dynamic platforms like WordPress.

As always, if you head to our website, you'll be able to find the show notes. This time, there are no script show forward slash 25.

And just a quick message, if you like, what we do over here, don't forget to hit the subscribe button. My understanding is that if you do that, you'll be notified by YouTube when we create content and that will help us out no end. So and subscribe, they say, David, I understand. Okay, over to you.

[00:01:11] David Waumsley: Yeah. I had some trouble trying to, put together something on forms because, it's just such a huge topic Yeah. As you've mentioned. And, so I decided this overview might be a good thing because, a couple of things I guess happen with me.

One is that, I've been moving towards static sites and our own society is static, If we want anything dynamic with a server, then we have to employ a service for that. And we have got a contact form which needs fixing, on our site. But also, I've had clients as well who I've put onto static sites who need to then manage some more complex forms.

So I needed to start, and my assumption was, I know there's been a big, huge move. I. Think it was the Web Almanac, for last year, 2024 that said that in the top, I think it was 10,000 sites, there's been a 67% increase in the number of static and hybrid sites. Wow. Yeah, I know. So when I was first moving that direction, when I looked around, maybe it's just me bad at searching.

There wasn't much available in terms of form solutions now. And of course looking now, and I think this has been reflected since to be so many of them around. Yeah. In different forms. So I thought we'd look at those. And what other thing did I want to mention, I should say? I think we'll break this up, so we'll talk about this, but in.

A later episode, I think we'll need to do a video bit of content. Okay. Where we'll look at some of the form solutions. 'cause we'll need to explore how they look and how they behave. Yeah. and then we've got other things that we'll need to do as well for the show, which is, at some point, I think it's its own topic, is to look at search, search options for static and also look at commenting systems.

[00:02:54] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Yeah, it it's freaky when you think about it that essentially. There's no interactivity on the web without forms, basically. I know that with things like JavaScript, we can move things around and what have you, but anything, or you want to submit something so that isn't just limited to the typical use of content forms, every time you go put something on, I don't know, blue Sky or Master On or X or Facebook or whatever it may be.

Basically interacting with a bunch of forms. It feels like half the web became forms when social media came along. You wanted to communicate with other people and the only way to do that was with forms. So very important, not just for contact forms, but the wider web as well. Shall I pop the show notes onto the screen?

Yeah, that would be lovely. Okie

[00:03:39] David Waumsley: do

[00:03:39] Nathan Wrigley: also, 'cause I'm going all white as well. Yes, it's very sunny where you are. You've definitely been illuminated. Fear not, you're only a small circle on the screen now, so it's not so important.

[00:03:51] David Waumsley: okay, so yes, show notes. Let me just get my mouse over them here. So I thought we'd just start by talking a little bit about when it comes to forms, expectations and clients.

That sort of is my title here, because we're in an era where, you know. So all know code products are being heavily marketed. So certainly my experience is that the clients I now get, they think that getting any kind of interactivity is a pretty easy thing, something that they'll be able to manage themselves and it doesn't always prove to be that way.

and a lot of clients that I've had have actually come to me for. literally a form really. A couple of people have come just for a, booking thing. they've seen that, they've had rooms that they've got for hire as part of their practice or something, and they want to hire them out.

And that's the main reason they've come to me is because they want someone to make this form magic happen.

[00:04:49] Nathan Wrigley: Okay?

[00:04:50] David Waumsley: so I dunno how much you've experienced this, but that my feeling is that there's a real sense that. With a lot of clients who are not that familiar with the web, it's that they see the, our forms out there and they think it's a case of build it and they will come Oh, in, in other ways.

So the form just having a form up there for bookings, then bookings will come because it's, yeah,

[00:05:11] Nathan Wrigley: this is What I, my experience was back in the day when I was doing client websites, was that exactly that you put on a form and the expectation would be that it would arrive, and often you'd get into conversations about, the, deluge of things and how they would manage it.

And in the end, you. You just had to silently and in some circuitous way say, I wouldn't worry too much. It's highly unlikely that it's gonna be, hammering your inbox all the time. Then again, you never know if you, if you suddenly go viral somewhere on the web, maybe the form will become the thing that brings your site to its knees.

Who knows? But, yeah, this whole thing of build it and they will come maybe. Yeah.

[00:05:53] David Waumsley: And I know, I'm one client who I really but it was, it's taken me so long to convince her because she says, a competitor down the road doing so well from their bookings form. But I said, but it, but they are, but it wasn't that.

It's because they put so much extra work into making themselves visible. on the ground advertising, the reason

[00:06:13] Nathan Wrigley: the form is getting filled is 'cause of all the other things that person is doing, which obviously dunno. Having said that, I am working with a friend of mine on a WordPress product at the moment, and we've made extensive use of a WordPress form solution for the support.

Which we anticipate, and it's not really a case of build it and they will come. In our case, we're trying to work out ways to prevent people filling in the form unnecessarily, if So we're putting all these different roadblocks in to say, have you tried this? Can you try this?

blah, blah, blah. I dunno how successful that will be. But certainly we're, trying different ways on the assumption that we really don't want people filling out the form too often, if

[00:06:56] David Waumsley: Then another thing that I think, some clients think is that, if they do have a sort of solution, for forms that they'll just be able to manage it, it'll just take care of itself.

And because I'm doing the static side and I now really, I think it's quite important for me to give the dynamic stuff over to the client so they can control that. So it can separate what I've built for them against other services. but there's a real, the same client who wanted the booking forms, it's become very clear over finding lots and lots of solutions for her that she wouldn't be able to manage it anyway.

She's just hates computers. She's just not, she wouldn't be able to manage to do the things, to change the appointments as needed or to cancel, to get back just to, to run it. So it, it was a good thing that we never. Built it and spent all this money, because I don't think there was a solution out there.

[00:07:48] Nathan Wrigley: I think it's this beguiling idea that you can offload stuff to the internet, and the internet will magically do these things. I don't know, for, in the case of booking. The idea would be that, everybody's on their phones all the time, so if I put a booking form up there, my calendar will suddenly become full.

they've gotta find the page to start with, and then the form's got to be not that confusing. And honestly, I am more and more getting to just gimme the phone number, just, and we'll get into that in a bit. But if I can find the phone number and talk to a human being, I will, try to miss out forms as much as possible just 'cause I know that I've then spoken to a person and that thing has been dealt with and I've booked the thing at 4:00 PM on Friday and now everybody knows that's happening and it's guaranteed.

Whereas with the, I don't know the online bit, I'm a little bit more, I dunno, I've been let down by people misunderstanding how their own technology works, let's put it that way.

[00:08:43] David Waumsley: Yeah, and there's another client as well that, that's what came up recently. I was looking for something where they can manage it because I've allowed them to use one of my accounts that I've got for form.

And this form needs to, they've got events and people need to pick an event and then, pay for that, which goes through to Stripe. And I'm using one of the solutions which we'll talk about later, but. What I realized is that I let 'em use my account to do that and they add access to it, but actually it really confused them anyway because it's got these conditional logics in it.

Yeah. So it's not that easy for them to work out. So I still had to go in and

[00:09:14] Nathan Wrigley: sort that out. So figure it all out for them. Yeah, they can get very complicated. very quickly. So what, on the front end might appear really obvious? you've ticked a box and then a bunch more fields become visible.

The, logic behind that can get infuriating. Pretty quickly. Yeah,

[00:09:31] David Waumsley: so I, and I've just listed a few things which, which will be typical for this show to mention, but, what clients are less likely to think about is UX and accessibility of the forms that they're gonna use, whether they're responsive to today's devices, where it needs to be fully responsive really, isn't it?

We can't just go to standard sizes. the impact that the form solution has, on. Page load and in turn, SEO and the potential cost of support, maintenance for the forms that they might want on their site. So I think, yeah, that is generally not considered when a client comes. And I think, yeah,

[00:10:07] Nathan Wrigley: and may the, maybe the subscription model as well, they've got to pay the yes of that, for, having a plan on whatever service that is as well.

You've done a lot of work with, ai, I think, to draw out some of that, which we'll get to later.

[00:10:22] David Waumsley: Yes, exactly. I think, certainly I did that when you've got a client in the early days and that you are just keen to give them what they asked for, so you'll rush off straight away to get something that, we can't build.

'cause we're not, back and front end developers, who can do everything. so we're gonna look for a solution and then often without probing enough, it's, Very easy, I think, to end up providing a solution that the client really can't manage themselves and haven't really thought about and may not be needed in the first place.

Yeah. that's what's happened with the people who came to me for bookings. They've actually never had a bookings. That's what they came to before, and they've been talked out a bit because what they needed more than anything was somebody to come to a website they owned, That was the first hurdle.

[00:11:10] Nathan Wrigley: Get them. Yeah. the booking form will not be viewed. Yes. By anybody. So it's pointless. But there is this sort of beguiling nature. It's the whole build it and they will come thing as well in overcomplicating what you've got. Yeah. so as the purveyor, I don't know, let's say that you've got a hair, a hairdressers or something like that.

You, you provide 50 different options and you wanna know exactly what they want and what time they wanna come. And ada rah, before you know it, the form takes 10 minutes to fill out. And actually all you needed was date time. And your name and that's it. that's really all that you needed, but you overcomplicate it because you can.

Okay. Do all websites need a form? Is that where you're going to now? Yes,

[00:11:55] David Waumsley: I think so. Because this is a ongoing debate because I think you see it somewhere maybe on Reddit, every year, I think you say, do you still need forms on your basically small business sites? The sort of brochure sites as people say in 2003, four, five, it keeps going on the debate.

And, so I thought we'd just, I've summarized basically what I've seen in all of these debates. The, can I just

[00:12:19] Nathan Wrigley: interrupt you there? Sorry. because what you're about to say, if it's true, I never knew. Any of this. Okay. And it's so interesting 'cause I, my answer to that question would invariably be yes, it can't hurt.

You might as well have a contact form, but what you've discovered here, again, caveats if it's true, and let's hope it is that, I'm so wrong. I was so wrong about that. So sorry I'm interrupting, but I just thought it was an important metric. Keep keep. watching. No, I

[00:12:51] David Waumsley: think that's interesting. Your, I would've, I think I would've said the same, but now I question it a lot more.

one reason I question it is because, I'm keen to promote the indie web, the fact that people can just manage their own H ml and CSS and keep it as simple as possible. And as soon as you get into forms. Then in some form or another they're onto dynamic servers and that makes the whole thing more complex.

So if you can just use third parties and avoid the form, then that's great. And also, forms are such a, one of the things that I've been doing, which we'll talk about later, is I've been really jenning up on how to make a good form. I've been reading a book by Adam Silver, who's, on, as well as some other people on accessibility and forms get really complex to do them right.

so Can we avoid them all together? yeah, the debates are going on. I suppose it's no different from, is SEO dead in whichever year? it's the same sort of thing. But, yeah, I'm thinking about just the contact forms with this really on the sort of personal and small business sites.

That might be the only dynamic thing they need on the site. If you put a form and do they actually need it? So the people for adding a form will generally say it avoids the spam of a public email. It lets you. Collect, structured, structured and required information, you can route messages to multiple or specific recipients automatically.

It makes it easy to automate leads to, CRM or databases or whatever you use there. Standard subject lines is something that you can control with that one. Making inquiries easier to manage. It keeps the user on the site rather open A email client or something like that.

[00:14:34] Nathan Wrigley: yeah.

[00:14:35] David Waumsley: And you can log and analyze the submissions for tracking and insights.

So that's the fours and they

[00:14:41] Nathan Wrigley: all make perfect sense. None of that is weird. And, I think I was, I would've said all of those things without thinking about any. Of this stuff, which is about to come. Yeah. Yeah. And especially the additional points. So anyway, sorry, carry on.

[00:14:55] David Waumsley: Yeah, no. I'll do the gates list that I've got here.

Forms can still attract, spam anyway, so you need a proper capture. So you've got another third party in there or some form of filtering, so that's another service you rely on. users may find forms restrictive compared to writing a direct to email, so they might not wanna just follow that message, but they might, I dunno, they might, Want to add more than your form allows. Accessibility might suffer if the form's not properly coded, which in most cases it's not. misconfigured forms may fail to deliver messages. It requires technical setup and ongoing maintenance. With these things, of course, and a. Even with the services I've had, we've had flaws.

So you introduce that there's a risk of poor design, creating a confusing or frustrating user experience server or plugin vulnerabilities could open up security risks. Meeting GDPR requirements is more complex if you've got form 'cause you have to highlight what's going through that way. And and also if you make your forms too long or, intrusive visitors may abandon them.

And I got some extra points to try and Balance these out. So this is the fascinating bit. This is the bit that I just

[00:16:07] Nathan Wrigley: didn't know, and I'm so curious about this. Go on.

[00:16:10] David Waumsley: Yes. I think everything I say has gotta be taken with a pinch of salt because some of it has been generated by perplexity ai, and amalgamated some of these statistics.

So bear that in mind. Okay. Let's just

[00:16:23] Nathan Wrigley: put all of that to one side and assume that AI never hallucinates about people and all of this is true. I'm sure there's a kernel of truth in every one bit of this, okay.

[00:16:32] David Waumsley: Carry on. Okay. there's definitely a case that many, UX experts, and I've actually put link to the, Norman Niland group or the Neil Nielsen Norman Group.

We never remember to, but anyway, whether they're talking about the, email being a, key trust factor, so one of those four was the fact that you can obscure your email address and just use a form so you don't get that spam. But to be honest, if you do that, it's quite a key trust factor. People want to see an email address anyway, so that's gone for one of the four.

And then there's some, there is amalgamation from publicity of the studies, so there's they, and I've seen this in a few places actually, that the forms themselves, and of course it depends what the situation is, but the form itself only converts at about three to 5%. These sort of surveys that are shown, which is not very high, is it?

And when you look at clickable emails and phone numbers, they can be converting up to 38%. Of course, context is all important that with this. But, website chat, I think a lot of these studies are presented by people who have a product, a website chat widget. Yes. But they come from something like 33 to 50% and then.

Also WhatsApp. And I think, there's obviously people who want to promote that. Those, message links that you can get where you can click open to chat through that, they can achieve rates of somewhere between 45 and 60%. That seems very extreme and I'm not sure if I believe that, but it's just interesting when you look at it, when you get, I asked it in a few different questions actually for ai, and I got something very similar, which really put the form, the contact form much lower than all these other.

methods of context, so do we need it? And there was a few other things that, I found out as well, from a few different places that phone numbers, fields can drop, submissions. So if you are adding that one, even if it's optional, just someone seeing, particularly the youth as we were talking about earlier, if they see a phone number being required or, looks like one's being asked for, that will put them off.

[00:18:38] Nathan Wrigley: interesting. Anyway, sorry, you finished the bullet points and then we'll go into, oh

[00:18:41] David Waumsley: yeah, there's only one more, which is just there was no research. I was looking for research to see whether I thought disabled users for accessibility, whether they would generally prefer to click on an email with a familiar system that they use or over a form.

And of course, obviously a non-accessible form. The email's going to be better for them, but there's no real research into which people prefer. There's just generally a lot of people. May prefer what they're familiar with, so they would probably go for the email clickable link rather than the form.

[00:19:10] Nathan Wrigley: There's so much interesting stuff in that, so I'm just gonna pause it in the way that I see. So first of all, that the, again, let's just assume it's true, if it's wildly inaccurate, apologies. But the low conversion of, forms. Somewhere in the region of 5%, let's go with that, is amazingly low.

if you present that 20 times, one person will fill it out or less in this case. So that's remarkable. But also the, clickable email and phone number converting somewhere in the region of 35 to 40%. That's also curious, but that really does jive with me because if I see the phone number.

Okay, so first of all, let's assume it's like some local business. I'm gonna ring that a hundred times out of a hundred. I'm not gonna fill out the form if it's possible for me to speak with that person. I've decided years ago that's the best way to conduct almost any negotiation is to speak to the person.

So I don't know if it's a plumber. I just wanna know when don't you come in. Let's get it all sorted out. I'll talk to you, we'll establish trust. You can figure out who I am and I'll tell you where I live and, I'll get all of the details out. And it's because of that conversation, it's because something surprising will inevitably come up.

And I, wanna know that I've given all the detail in all of its fine, gory detail, whatever that may be. And I've also decided, that I can get a across in one minute, probably what it would take me 20 minutes to write out in an email. So that whole phone number thing is brilliant. Second email.

Yeah, I'm all about that as well because it's this, I can put all of it down. I'm not constrained to a field. you've gotta say all the thing, you've gotta list the things here. What's the reason, what have you I just wanna explain the reason in this one big email, text box area, if you like.

And so that works for me. I'm, not so sure in, my case. This statistic about WhatsApp and website chat. That doesn't ring true for me. But obviously, the why I, try not to use those things. If, possible, if they're there, I will use them. Not if it's a bot. As soon as I get the notion that it's a bot, my first thing is can I speak to a human?

I just type that in and see what happens. so those kind of don't work for me. But that's the one about the, if you just put a form field asking for a phone number, that just, that it drops submissions That's so curious to me. Because I can get that as well. I don't wanna give my phone number up as a part of this exchange, and I don't know if you do the same thing.

I often put a incorrect phone number in if it's required. I'll just make up some random phone number which satisfies the length of digits. But I don't wanna give some random person my phone number because I don't know where that's gonna end up. Yes. and yeah, and then obviously the, the bit about, disabled users and what have you at the end.

So all of that to me is basically extraordinarily fascinating. And the whole chat bot thing and the clickable email and phone, I hadn't given that any thought at all. But it would definitely skew my advice to somebody going forward, depending on their need. if it was a local business website, I think that's telling me, promote the phone number more or less, above almost anything else.

[00:22:39] David Waumsley: Yeah, it's, it's interesting 'cause, context is gonna be important, how these are designed. I, do believe the loan number on the contact forms because of the fact that I've seen. Roughly, with some statistics, how many people have gone to a contact form but not filled that in? Yeah. So that doesn't surprise me that it's so low because they've gone to that page a lot, but very few submissions come from it.

but the other numbers which are saying how high the high numbers are, the ones that I don't trust so much.

[00:23:07] Nathan Wrigley: So interestingly as well, I think the device that you are visiting that page on will really be critical. So I'm far more likely to fill out a form if I'm sat. With a keyboard Yes. On the phone because of the pain of, typing anything into a.

Form field on a phone that probably, it is probably part of it. And as more and more of us are viewing more and more of the web online with a mobile device in our hand, that probably skews us away from it. I do wonder if Form Fields had an audio option where you could, click a button, record some audio and send that a lot, I wonder how that would, work.

Never really thought about that. You can do that.

[00:23:49] David Waumsley: Anyway, it was just, most of this, it was just me thinking, do I need to put a form on everybody's site? And I will just mention just on the WhatsApp, which I hadn't really thought about before, but because people are so used to that as a way of contact and the way of being able to share imagery, it very useful for where I've put it on, electrician site on that, because.

What he's saying is that, people often want to show him a picture of what needs fixing.

[00:24:15] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So, I have done this, so I have a, I use a plumber and, w we know we've known each other for many years now, but that is the modus operandi that he has. And so I'll explain that something is broken.

Yes. And it needs to be replaced. And so the immediate thing is can you show me a photo of the bit that's broken and that must make his life in immeasurably more straightforward? 'cause immediately he's captured, okay, I know what that job involves now. Whereas before he'd have to show up, then probably go and get the part that.

Demonstrated was needed. So there's two journeys there. Whereas the photo, the photography bit there probably cuts that out. So yeah, that's really interesting. Really interesting. Yeah,

[00:24:58] David Waumsley: it's just made me think a little bit about what I think I've come to the conclusion that, and interesting enough, I was talking to Paul Lacey, who's been a guest on the show and is a good friend of ours, and at the moment he's doing some designs for the.

Page builder that he does some occasional work for. He is doing some, pages and I looked at his contact page and I thought, although were quite well thought out, he's got different ones. And that contact pages as the Nielsen Norman Group or Norman Nielsen Group say about contact pages. It should have all the sort of things that you might need if you're going to make contact in any form.

parking and where they are on the map and all that needs to be included. But on his, and that he made very clear is. Telephone numbers, a sort of little box that was very clear and what needed to know about telephone and what you needed to know about the email. And then the contact form followed later and I thought that layout, just the design of it, seemed to be perfect for this.

So I put it, but I think, you could easily skip the contact form on some sites and not, I asked the AI in various forms, the question, do you think, given these bits of information here, whether, a contact form would lose, not having a contact form would lose you any business. And they generally came out to the fact that they didn't think it would make much difference.

And in fact, another argument would be that you can overload people with too many options and then lose people that way. Yeah. And also it means that you've

[00:26:21] Nathan Wrigley: got to man several options, haven't you? So if you present a phone number. And an email address and a contact form, and I don't know, WhatsApp as well.

There's four places where you've got to be visible. Whereas if you, put it down, I guess the contact form provides convenience, especially on the side of the business that's got the website, because they just have to man that inbox, don't, they just have to keep an eye on that form and, yeah. The kind of data that they're gonna get is predictable.

So it's definitely got its benefits. but I always went with the, the options on the Contact us page. I would, always list out phone number, address and things like that, but I, didn't apply the amount of thought that. Paul obviously has some in this scenario, but that's interesting.

[00:27:04] David Waumsley: Yeah.

Sort of laid out in a way where it's not just a bit of text, which you'll skip over and then see the big form, which

[00:27:10] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:27:10] David Waumsley: Is the eye. Most is actually made the telephone and the email capture eye more than the form the forms. Okay. Secondary and I thought that's probably how I'll do it with most of my type of clients.

obviously. But some people, they need, there are circumstances with people where they do need to collect that into Yeah. a system, Yeah. Google sheets or something. So a form is needed. yeah. Okay. So, let's, assume, ah, we need a form of some kind. Yeah. Let's assume that, shall we?

Okay. form options. So I put some stuff here 'cause I needed to get this straight in my own head. let's start with some sort of basic facts. that in order to be able to send some data via a form on our website safely, we do need a client and a server side. Working. We need that sort of dynamic server on there.

So I've, I might as well read the notes out. So the client side is, for anyone who's not familiar with that, is the kind of HTML that the user interacts with. And we can think of this, I like this analogy. I, somebody else gave me this one that we can think of that as the sort of bouncer on the front door of a nightclub, but it's doing the basic, yeah, it does the basic checks.

And if we're creating our own forms, then it's up to us to make sure that people know when they've made a mistake before they. Click the Submit Sore out there doing those sort of safety checks, but they're just basic ones. And then the server side, acts as, the security in the club, guard in the VIP service.

So it is gonna check whether the data is safe to send onto your email and whether it stops, some of the riffraff getting into that special area. So that's the spam, that's, we need to connect the anti-spam, we need to connect that to some sort of server in between. Be right. So I like it.

I quite, yeah, I like the analogy. The, most interesting thing for me though, is what I've learned, and we'll talk about this in another episode, is that even though HDML form validation comes built in, it's probably not good enough to say it's fully accessible for everybody. okay. 'cause it's not going to read out without using RVO and JavaScript.

It's not going to tell somebody necessarily. When they've done it in real time or point them when they need to go, if they need to, Correct. An email address or something. So

[00:29:27] Nathan Wrigley: do you know if that's an endeavor of let's say, browser manufacturers to make

[00:29:32] David Waumsley: the,

oh gosh. The service stuff? Yeah.

we, didn't get it until H ML five, although that's very old now. We didn't have that and we needed JavaScript. there has been that move, but I don't see, there's much that's changed to alter and make forms easier. Basic, contact forms, I think, because the majority of people only need that.

And I think, yeah. Yeah, because I think. It will correct you automatically if you're do nothing with the html. It will correct you to say you haven't put an AT sign in your email, but I don't think it pulls you out if you, yeah, if you've left the dot out from, dot com or whatever your email address end is.

Yeah. I don't think it'll call you out, so it does allow you to. Anyway, it's for another time, but I think when we get to, yeah, this one. Okay. Yeah, Sorry, derailing. So yeah, so our options are, firstly is to either DIY, the server and the client side. So we write the front end code and the backend code, but we're not going to do this 'cause this is really going to mean that we have to host this.

Backend server. So we can do that either, with serverless cloud functions we have these days, we have more choices. We could do it with static host plus their own backend APIs. We could do it with, email to form submissions via mail server, or we can use some of these new open source, server softwares to be able to manage this stuff.

But that's way beyond me. Certainly. I think it is for you Nathan, as well. yeah.

Yep,

Yeah, I think you are better at this kind of stuff than I would be, but anyway, I'm not touching that. The next option then is to go where we've gone with our, 'cause we have got a contact form. It's not very good. that's on our site.

And, that's used the next option, which is DIY, the client side. So I've put the HTML in there. And we use a third party for the server side. And if that's the route that we want to go with this one, then there's a load of services, which, for those who are listening to this, won't be able to see.

But if you go to our show notes, you'll see there's a big, table here. We are basically ones that fit into that category. So both you and I, Nathan, we bought, didn't we? Form Spark, and that's the one I've been using.

[00:31:37] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So this is a, it doesn't do any building of the form. You have to build the form yourself.

you have to either write the HTML with the form fields and the submit button and whatnot, and then you connect the submit event to their. I, can't remember how it works. You basically copy and paste some endpoint, don't you? And that data then gets sent to Forms Spa. It worked pretty well.

it did, everything. Obviously it's not check, it's not sanitizing things, it's not checking for errors and what have you. But the, submissions once. The end point had received it did what it said it would do, which would be forward it on to. Yes. But it it was technical. Not tremendously technical, but there was a little bit of a learning cover.

I certainly wouldn't have thought a client would like to be involved in any of this process. Yeah, definitely the sort of developer's job, but it worked. It was fine. And it was cheap as chips. Yeah. Still going I guess. 'cause I've stopped using it. Yes, it's still

[00:32:34] David Waumsley: going. Yep. from personal experience, I, you're not gonna get much support from that.

this is a one-off, it gives you 50,000 lifetime submissions for this fee of, 20, $5. And that just lasts as long as it needs to us. And on my deal that we got the same as you, I think, where it keeps adding each month. 'cause it was a slightly different deal, which we got there. So I'm never gonna run out of forms there.

My only beef with that particular thing is that once I, contacted them through support and never got an answer, the second time I did it, I did get an answer, but they never resolved it. And that was the fact that in India on my, IP address, which is actually, the state, Broadband service.

I couldn't submit. It wouldn't go to them. It failed, and it's constantly failed. They had to put a VPN on to make it work. Now, I'm not worried about that because I don't think the couple of clients who are using that at the moment are gonna lose anybody because, but we could be, because Yeah, that's

[00:33:34] Nathan Wrigley: not a great thing though, is it?

And especially, no, if the support, 'cause obviously you, they're obviously doing an IP. They've obviously got some IP blocking somewhere in there and who knows.

[00:33:45] David Waumsley: Yeah. And I think they bounce off other people's services as well, don't they? To Yeah. Send these things. I dunno what that was about, but otherwise it's worked pretty perfectly for me.

but the rest of them are all the same. there's one called Basin, I think the well-known one, I'll just skip down the chart, was, forms Spree, I think is one of the earlier ones, meeting that new demand for static sites. And 50

[00:34:09] Nathan Wrigley: submissions a month on Forms spree for free, and then you're onto their paid tm.

Yeah,

[00:34:15] David Waumsley: to be honest, there's nothing, I won't list them all. maybe I should, I list them all out for, I'll just say 'em.

[00:34:20] Nathan Wrigley: Shall I just read 'em all out loud? So you've got forms Spark Basin. There's a common pattern here. By the way, they all have ingeniously titled names. form spark basin form, bold form, backend form, zillion web, three forms, form spree form carry.

And form keep, if I was in the SAO business, I think, I think there'd be some conversation to be had here. but there's loads of them. Yes. And I bet there's loads that you didn't find. 'cause they didn't start with the word form.

[00:34:48] David Waumsley: Yeah, I know there were some that I've missed off on this. So they've all offered these sort of like free limits.

50 50, 50. There's one form, zillion offering, a hundred form bold offering a hundred for the free. And given that you get a hundred, if you use something like Netlify, which we can use as well, you get a hundred with that, they're not really offering much other than the fact that you. You may want some of the individual services that they offer on the backend, the way that they might connect up to other things, like maybe directly to Google Docs or something if you, or spreadsheets.

But they all behave differently. And I think most of these are exactly the same thing. You write your HTML, you put this one line saying to submit to this address that you've got, and that's what it does. So that's them pretty much. And then the one that's. Interesting to me is the third one, which is really the form builders we're talking about where we get third parties to do both the client and the server side of

[00:35:42] Nathan Wrigley: things.

So this is

[00:35:42] David Waumsley: much

[00:35:42] Nathan Wrigley: more SaaS service login set up your form. Yeah. They make your form code into a website and you're done. Yeah.

[00:35:48] David Waumsley: Yeah. and this is where I was blown away with what choices are, and I know I haven't included everyone that I came across here. and I got. Certainly AI struggled to find all the ones.

So obviously this is hugely competitive. the ones that I thought about on our list of these, is, oh,

[00:36:08] Nathan Wrigley: Shall I just read them into the record again? Just form Oh yeah. Read them into, so we've got paper form, fill out jot form, cognito forms type form. You're gonna have to scroll it. There you go. Thank you. Forster U Form nx. Oh, that's a nice title.

ate tally ADA form and form. Smarts I've never used. Oh no, I have, I've used paper form, the one at the top, but the others I don't believe I've ever used.

[00:36:32] David Waumsley: Yeah. And you, you were mentioning to me that you'd use Wooo from Oh yeah. Wooo,

[00:36:39] Nathan Wrigley: wooo, wooo, whatever, W-U-F-O-O back in the day. Yeah. That was one I tried out when this whole thing was brand new.

this allowed you to do all sort, it was clever. It was a really in innovative product. But now I think all of the products have got all of the features that they have. Yeah. and I also actually downloaded a few. paid for scripts which did things like fu So I downloaded a whole bunch of things which mimicked what these do, but it was self-hosted and in some cases it was open source.

There was one called Mac Formm, MACH Oh FORM, I dunno what it's called now. But yeah, there was that as well. yeah. what are you using? Are you using one of these on our website then?

[00:37:22] David Waumsley: Yeah. no I'm not because the, we've only got our one contact form. Oh, of course. Sorry, you've already said you were using the, forms spark thing.

Yeah, I have for a client, I've been using the paper form because that's the deal I've got on that. And, it works well. But, in fact, on my list here, 'cause I, set AI on the. The, task of trying to find out what was a, what was accessible, that was a key thing for me and, what we could get for free and whether they could connect up to Stripe for free Okay.

On that, because that's what a client particularly needed at the moment, who I'd put on paper form. Now, the problem was, is that. With the deal that I got, it's my account. And up to that point I could give him, 'cause I'm not using it for any other site other than this client. 'cause it was there and they've now put a security check.

So every time you try and log in, then it sends an email to my address. Oh, that renders that whole thing. Absolutely. Yeah, exactly. So we're looking for other solutions and that's really what set me off on this one to

[00:38:26] Nathan Wrigley: see I've actually overcome that problem in the past by setting up a filter. In my, email client, which then forwards that email to them, but just, it's a

[00:38:36] David Waumsley: real clue.

It's not ideal. I thought that very thought and I thought, no, let's have a look, because I had a bit of an issue Anyway. I put it on their own domain because it's a heavy load, and that was another thing that's not on my chart. If you are, if you're looking at our show notes, it's all there. I haven't included it because I think we'll do an episode.

We'll come back and we'll look at all these when I've tested them all out and see, you know what my preference is. I've already got a preference so far, but I haven't tested them all out and spent some time. 'cause one thing that's quite interesting to me is now I signed up for the free accounts for a whole bunch of these who's.

Filling up my e email box with all sorts of, it's free, but not free of spam. No. And so jot form, which looks really good because it's, fully accessible and it does a really good job actually. It's beautiful actually how it works on their forms. Because if you've made a mistake, it comes up with this big red.

thing on the top, but it also announces to somebody using a screen reader, that they've made an error on where to go to and where to skip to and all that. It's really good. Oh, that is good. Yeah. Yeah. And they've got a free amount. You can, but very limited. For Stripe payments. You can only get 10 for free, but there's no extra charge on that one.

And you've got a hundred. Per month for them. So they look really, good. But I'm totally put off by the fact that they have just every day sent me some sort of email trying to Okay. you're the product, David, you are the product. Yes. Yes. and the same thing, I'll just quickly mention as well you form, which I didn't really like.

I have tested it out. I like the way that it's designed and the fact that it takes one question at a time and it'll move to the next screen and stuff. All that. Beautiful, but totally inaccessible on that one. I tried it with a screen reader, just, you don't know where you're going at all. So that's outta the question.

They call those conversational forms, don't you? Yes. One question

[00:40:29] Nathan Wrigley: and then you slide to the next, and I, to me it's nothing like a conversation, but

[00:40:33] David Waumsley: anyway, there you go. Yeah. we'll. We'll touch on that. I think having that ability to do that is a great thing, and many of them do that. And I think, as I say, I'm reading this book by Adam Silva's, and he's very keen on the fact that it's very good for, usability.

it does kind

[00:40:48] Nathan Wrigley: of lock you into the one question at a time thing. Yeah. But the bit that I don't like about it is that it disguises how much of the form is still to come, if So you might embark on a form and four minutes in you're like, I've no idea.

[00:41:02] David Waumsley: Exactly. If you know the stages and where you are going on this and that's, but then you don't know what the next, when you go to the next slide, effectively with these things, you how many entry, so you might think you are 90% there.

And then the last one's got,

[00:41:17] Nathan Wrigley: they get over the problem with things like a. Progress bar or something. Yes. bound to the top of the screen, but I'd still just rather see the form, the whole thing and work it out for myself.

[00:41:26] David Waumsley: Yeah. Anyway, paper forms, it's, it was easy to set up. It's logical, it's got lots of options there if you are, but there's no free option on this one.

But it wasn't accessible and they don't even mention anything about accessibility. And it was still, although it's got a lot lighter, it was still heavy. On the load. Okay. So I put it on their domain for his site because I didn't want it ruining the core web vitals, which were all pretty much close to a hundred, across the board.

And you only need one page that's listed on your site that's out and that can throw your whole fail, can't it? So, we put it on its own place there, but. We'll come back on this one because there's not much to say other than the fact that, you do get some more generous offers. And I think the one that I particularly like at the moment is Tally.

So is there, okay, this is new to me. I've not

[00:42:16] Nathan Wrigley: come across this, but very nice looking website. They've done a great job with that. What was it that you liked so much?

[00:42:23] David Waumsley: I like them. I like, the way that they talk, their blog, what they're talking about. They, went out on purpose to do it because things like these things to get.

Some of the things that you might need gets very expensive. you're on $25 per month to get, you get something free. Soon as you overstep it, then it gets really expensive and they've gone out to not do that, to make it as free as possible. And they've been very open and transparent in the blogs that I've seen about how they're making money on it.

So it, it's unlimited. For everything here, but you don't get some other things that you might want. remove the branding of course. And also, if you want to be able to style these forms with your own CSS, then you are limited on these kind of things. But they say they only need, they've been running basically on 2% of the people who are, their customers are paying for the pro version and that's enough for them to run their small business.

And I like them 'cause they're based in the eu. They're very open. They, They very much committed to a small group and bootstrapping rather than using venture capital, which I think, that's appeals to me anyway. So aligns with your, yeah. Fibers, shall we say? Your moral fibers.

Okay. Yes. Good. And what did it, and I missed it, completely missed it. I only caught it because I watched a YouTube video by Al Adam Silver and Become a bit of an expert because he is advising people like, gov UK and BBC and people like that. And the fact that he, obviously, he builds his own forms, but for one thing that he needed for his personal site, he used tally forms for this intermediate thing that he needed.

And I thought, if he's using it, then it's gotta be you. So a stamp from him. Good, Yes. Yeah. So that was basically it. And what else? There was some, as I say, there was some that I didn't include on this formed apps, because the fact that, and this is, I think. Might be common when I've checked them all out, but it was loading for the most simple form, which was basically your name, your email, and a message and nothing added.

We, we got, just in JavaScript alone, there was 1.5 megabytes over 49 different files for that. That was on form app, was it? Yeah. Their focus is on ai, which a lot of people are moving towards, so that's another off-putting thing for me personally, if they, okay. If they want to encourage you to use AI to create your forms now.

As I'm learning, there's a lot more to build in a good form and AI's not going to do a good job on it, so, those ones that head in that direction are not for me personally, I might suggest some of these just because of their ease. If I'm passing this on to a client and I say, that's your responsibility, this can sit on their domain.

we will just put a link on your site where they can do whatever they want there and book you and pay and all that and you are taking care of it, then that's fine. It doesn't interfere with me, and if they find one of these others a lot easier, I think probably. Many of these will be a lot easier than Tally, which is my favorite.

[00:45:25] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. So there's a whole load of choices there. Yeah. So you feel that a piece of content in the future will be a more deep dive into the features and what have you. So you've obviously put a table together there. Yeah. But deep diving in on video to how these ones fare against each other given, I don't know, you maybe do a price comparison or you maybe do a JavaScript load comparison or something like that.

[00:45:46] David Waumsley: Okay. Yeah. Okay. I think it's amazing what we've got now these days for these form builders that can, do payments and do all these really complex and, a hundred per month of submissions. So as long as you can control spam, Which is the other side of it, that's the problem I think with a lot of them that give you a hundred, or netlify, I knew where I put our form, we were getting at least five spam emails a day.

that's over your a hundred used up straight away. So if you don't control that.

[00:46:15] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, some kind of capture like, I don't know, cloudflare's turnstile or something like that. Just in between it and the submit form. yeah. Okay. Yes. Okay. so there we go. Do you need a website to have a contact form? I don't know.

But certainly they're there, they're available, they can be used. Is that it? Are we done for today, do you think?

[00:46:34] David Waumsley: Yeah, if you were using one of these, one, just one little thing that I discovered, which I thought was quite interesting is say Google Docs, which I didn't, me, sorry. Google Forms, which I didn't mention earlier.

Google Forms. Yeah. it's great. You can embed it. You can't do much. It is good for accessibility, but if you wanted to put it in your, embed it in your, site. It downloads all of the fonts that are available in the form. So it becomes very heavy download.

[00:46:59] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:47:00] David Waumsley: But you can get away with that one, which I was just playing around with because of iframes allow you to lazy load.

Oh, the call my vitals is not hit. Yes. If it's down in the bottom of the page or you put it in, details and summary. Okay. So it only appears when it's clicked on, so you can overcome that. Page load difficulty. So yeah. Okay. So the drawback is it's downloading

[00:47:22] Nathan Wrigley: all the fonts. The pro of that is you don't need to load the form Yes.

Until you're ready to see it. Okay. So from an SEO hit, that might not be quite so bad. Still curious that it's loading all the fonts you mean? All the fonts?

[00:47:35] David Waumsley: All the fonts. I think all the fonts that. I wish I'd brought it up on here because I did do a test on it, but it was all of the fonts that, certainly were in the forms.

God knows why. I told you, I did question this and got AI to say, why on earth did they do this, and is there a workaround? And, they gave a plausible thing to me with my small brain when it comes to backend stuff about why they did this for everybody's, to. It's just so it's available to everybody.

I don't know. You would imagine

[00:48:08] Nathan Wrigley: though, that you only need the fonts that you need on the

[00:48:11] David Waumsley: form

[00:48:11] Nathan Wrigley: that are being used on the form, but it is,

[00:48:13] David Waumsley: it's ridiculous with Google, isn't it? It's the same with YouTube. We have to take all these extra precautions to stop it. They're the people who have really got us to think about page load, and they're the people who make it so difficult for us.

Make it difficult to achieve it. Difficult. Yeah.

[00:48:26] Nathan Wrigley: The the, the, hand doesn't know what the leg is doing or some. Thing like, yes, I don't remember. Okay. In which case, I will remove the screen share and I will say thank you. So that was our first look at forms in follow up episodes. Looks like we're gonna be doing, yeah, content in which we'll describe what each of the forms does and what have you.

and so I guess. We'll see you next time. It is. Oh, thanks for that. Oh, like I can subscribe. David, let's say that one more time. If you enjoyed this. Yeah. Please, hit the subscribe button onto the YouTube video and that enables YouTube to, to notify you when we produce new content, which would, be nice for you and

[00:49:04] David Waumsley: nice

[00:49:04] Nathan Wrigley: for us.

[00:49:05] David Waumsley: Yeah, I think generally, because we don't, we're not promoting any, we've got no commercial element to this. to be able to keep going with this one, we need to feel that people are actually,

[00:49:15] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. I haven't told you about my new SaaS service. It's called Forms Bank or something like that.

I haven't told you about that. We'll leave that for the next episode. I'll, review it on that, bomb. Shell see you next time. Yeah. Cheers byebye. Bye.

Don’t quote us on this!

2025-08-20T00:00:00Z

Show Notes:

Where we quote

In testimonials for credibility and social proof.
In blog comments for engagement.
In "pull" quotes for style and highlighting.
In articles to support our arguments.

The difficulty with semantic HTML

We have the <blockquote>, <q> and <cite> elements, but the specifications have changed over time and don’t entirely line up with our design patterns.

Michelle Barker's article I’ve Been Doing Blockquotes Wrong highlights how difficult HTML can be at times.

The official HTML specifications are with the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG). This tells us:

Quote elements are for external sources only. Presumably to the page rather than the domain?
The cite attribute is used to specify a URL source. This is invisible to humans and most screen readers.
The visible cite element is for the title of a creative work only and should not be included in the quote element.
A blockquote is a sectioning root. It marks a distinct part of the content, but not part of document's outline as with sectioning elements (such as aside, article, nav).

This means:

We should not use quotation elements for (self quoting) pull quotes.
We should not use cite elements for authors of quotes.
The citation is orphaned from the quote. Not ideal accessibility.

It's hard to find consistent advice

Many expert sources have encouraged us to use blockquotes in ways that seem technically incorrect including platforms (code example).

Haydon Pickering suggests placing blockquotes and cites within <figure> and <figcaption> elements.
Adrian Roselli recommends against using figure as it's verbose for popular screen readers. However, his preferred approach breaks WHATWG rules as he uses cite within the blockquote and uses them for authors too.
The W3C design system uses a <footer> element to cite an author Unlike Adrian Roselli, they do not use the cite element because of the WHATWG specifications.

Design systems for local governments reveal many other variations. Probably due to changes in the original W3C documentation that was not carried forward to WHATWG. The W3C essentially defers to WHATWG's HTML Living Standard as the authoritative specification.

Our approach to the HTML

We don’t have the standing to influence specifications like Haydon Pickering, Adrian Roselli or Michelle Barker so we'll stick to WHATWG rules to be consistent from here on (until told otherwise).

Testimonials

The typical pattern is the external quote followed by the author's name sometimes with a link to their organisation and image of them (example).

For this we will use the W3C design systems approach of not using cite, but putting the author credentials in a footer element within the block quote.

If there is a URL we will add the invisible cite attribute.

If the testimonial contains a heading the markup would change depending on whether the heading was part of the original quote. If it was, we would add the heading as part of the quote.

If not, we'd use an <article> as below.

<article>
<h3>Review Title</h3>
<blockquote>
<p>The review content...</p>
<footer> — Reviewer Name</footer>
</blockquote>
</article>

Note: Google's review snippets can not be self-serving.

Comments (blog posts)

According to WHATWG

A blog entry on a site that accepts user-submitted comments could represent the comments as article elements nested within the article element for the blog entry.

Pull quotes

According to WHATWG

The aside element can be used for typographical effects like pull quotes or sidebars

Jeremy Keith set off debate in 2016 by asking Why do pull quotes exist on the web? It's a great question given it is a duplication of content that visually does not look impressive on small devices. It is also not easy to code with many employing JavaScript to achieve it.

Regular quotes

To keep things easier for both sighted and non-sighted users it seem to make sense to cite before the quote.

<p>In NAME's article/song/presentation
<cite>
<a href="https:/www.example/">NAME OF THE WORK
</a>
</cite> 
s/he says:
</p>
<blockquote>
 THE QUOTE
</blockquote>
<!-- or <q></q> if inline  -->

Block or inline quotes?

Haydon Pickering points out that the term “block quotation” precedes the blockquote element. The Chicago Manual Of Style recommends block quotations are over 100 words. Some examples in the specification have very short quotes and so it remains unclear when (semantically) you should use one over the other.

Styling quotes

Please join us for part two where we look at adding styling with CSS (this is a video only episode).

Mentioned

The State of HTML 2025

Transcript

[00:00:06] Nathan Wrigley: Hello there and welcome to the No Script Show. This is the fourth in our series, looking at components that make up a website. Today we're looking at testimonials, block quotes, pull quotes, and the site elements and how these are most likely coded wrongly.

As with other episodes in this series, we'll be considering these from a technical design, accessibility, and SEO perspective, and we'll follow up this chat with a YouTube video looking at some coded examples. This time it is slightly different in that we will be focusing on the HT RL markup in this podcast, as there is a surprising amount to cover.

And CSS styling is what we'll cover in the follow up video only content. As always Joined by David Wamsley, who's over there? Hello, David? Hello? Hello? Nathan Wrigley. You're sporting a slightly different background.

[00:00:57] David Waumsley: Yes, I'm in London, usually I'm in India. but we're a bit closer. We were almost close actually.

Yeah. we nearly got to see each other. Yeah. It all happened in this time, but yes. anyway, let me move on to this. 'cause you were the one who really set me off on doing this topic a bit earlier. We would've done it anyway because you shared with me a video by Kevin Powell, called is HTML the Hardest Language, and he was demonstrating with his, followers and everything, how.

Everyone, he gave them a card component to code up and everybody did it in slightly different ways, which really asked you that's what is the semantic way. And this really reminded me of a post by or series by Hayden Pickering where he is looking at various, has HTML elements and. It really highlights the fact that there's a lot of confusion on how to do HTML and it really caught my attention, the block quote one that he did and the site element.

So it set me off experimenting about, how, 'cause we're trying to set up our own, if you like, design system and have a consistent way of marking things up. And yeah. So I went on a bit of a journey. Yeah, sorry

[00:02:13] Nathan Wrigley: about that. All of that. With me DMing you on blue sky and set you off on a complete, laundry list of things to cover.

So apologies about that, but hopefully there's some useful content in here. Should we switch to your screen? Do you wanna do that one? Yeah, let's do that. Okay. We've

[00:02:28] David Waumsley: got a lot of notes to get through actually here. I'd be largely reading these out I think, 'cause the research has been done. Yep. So let's talk about, so we called this one.

don't quote us on this, or I should mention as well. I'll put a little note. It actually is already in there that another reason for doing this is that the state of HTML 2025 is still open as a survey. I, haven't done it myself, but I will. No, I

[00:02:54] Nathan Wrigley: took a quick look at it. I didn't fill it out, but I will come back and fill it out.

It's not a long enterprise, it's fairly quick, but, obviously somebody somewhere needs to know where we're all at. and yeah. Useful to fill out. I would've thought so. We'll provide the link in the show notes,

[00:03:09] David Waumsley: Yeah, it's down there in my. So for those who are on YouTube, you will be able to follow along with our notes.

So I put first where we quote, where we use quotes. So in testimonials for credibility and social proof, we use, in blog comments for engagement, effectively where user submissions are a quote Yeah. Of some form. Yep. in pull quotes for style and highlighting. I'm not sure. do you know what?

When I say pull quotes, does that mean

[00:03:40] Nathan Wrigley: anything to you? Do you

[00:03:41] David Waumsley: have an expectation?

[00:03:42] Nathan Wrigley: No, I'm, basically imagining the, things that you've described previously. So to me, a pull quote is a block quote. I, genuinely wouldn't have known what the difference was.

[00:03:53] David Waumsley: Yeah, it's all, it's just interesting. We'll, move on to this one.

'cause there's an article by Andy Clark where his interpretation of a poll quote is different to what I think, I'm talking about here. But generally it's a self quote, I think, where we put it. Usually in an article where there's this big thing that gives you a, some styling, it gives you some highlight of text that's to come.

So it's a, okay. It's duplicate content. and we use it in articles, for, oh, I've made a. To support our arguments. Okay. often,

[00:04:25] Nathan Wrigley: it's fairly widely used throughout the web. I think the, place that I see it most is, comments on blogs and things like that are out of fashion, aren't they these days.

But I see it all over on testimonials. you, somehow want to, I don't know, link the words to the image or the person's name or something. And in order to do that, you adopt this different style and maybe some iconography around it. And,

[00:04:49] David Waumsley: yeah. Yeah, exactly. this is the interesting bit really of what we're gonna get stuck on, the difficulties with Symantec HTML.

So we have the block quote element, the Q element for inline quotations. We have the site element, which Haydon Pickering says really ought to be called citation rather than site, but, But the thing is with this, the specifications have changed over time and they don't entirely line up with the design patterns that we use.

And after reading Haydon Pickering's article, I also stumbled across Michelle Barker's article, which says what exactly what I experienced. I've been doing block quotes wrong. Through, listening to or reading his article, she realized that, and I've got it up over here. And there was quite a lot of, and this has helped me look into this more because there's a lot of comments here on that by some really.

quite clever people. She's a very clever person as well. She writes some of the M dms, we've mentioned her before. Yeah. Articles and, that was

[00:05:54] Nathan Wrigley: me saying comments or dad and Yeah. No, there's a load here. I, on this

[00:05:58] David Waumsley: topic. I think it's particularly popular. Yeah. and also she's actually using eleventy as well on that.

Oh, interesting. Add in our comments myself. Yeah. yeah, so that was quite interesting. But the, I think the, a lot of the changes due to the fact that the official HCML specifications are with the web hypertext, applications, technology working group. Easy for you to say no. What w what? What wg, I think, 'cause it's, the working group, so we'll call it what, I dunno how people say it, but we'll say what working group.

I think that's be easy. So what they tell us through their documentation, which I've got over here, is go back that quote elements are for external sources. Oh, so we should only be, so if we're using those, if we're using a block quote, it should be for someone else's comment, not our own, but presumably, because it's not spelt out.

This is to the page, at the page level rather than the domain level. But. I'm not sure that's unclear. Okay. the site attribute, attribute being the site equals quotation mark should be where you put a URL to that source of the quote. Okay. Okay. And it's invisible to humans and most screen readers, but the visible site element, the, one, the actual tag itself is for the title of Creative Works only.

and it, and there's another element of this, that the site element shouldn't be included in the quote element, so it shouldn't be within the tags of our block quote.

[00:07:44] Nathan Wrigley: So there's a lot more depth to this than I imagined. That's yes. rules upon rules, not rules as such recommendations, But nevertheless, I did not know that there was that level of granularity, so that's fascinating.

[00:07:57] David Waumsley: It is, and it's also quite confusing as well because it's some of this comes in, so this idea that it's only for the title of Creative Works only rather than an author comes only after HTML five. I know that's been around for a long time, so there has been changes over time and it's.

Disputed. I, think Jeremy Keith is one person who was trying to argue against that at the time. anyway, I'm going into things that we don't need to, and the last point that I got here is that the block quote is a section in route, so it marks a distinct. Of content, but is not part of the documents outlined in the way that section elements such as side or article or Nava.

So with screen readers, they will be able to look at different makeup of a page or something by looking to those section elements, but it is still something distinct. What I wrote down here is that it means that we should not use quotation elements for self quoting, pull quotes, and that's what I generally think.

A pull quote is something where you are referencing something within your own document to stylize it and say, here's a bit of a teaser of what's to come. So we shouldn't be using, the block quote tag really for our pulled quotes. we shouldn't use the site element for authors of quotes.

And the last point on is that citations are, or orphaned from the quote, which is not ideal for accessibility because again, it's Haydon Pickering, it picks up on how uncomfortable that is because it's a little bit, I think he does make this example, but it's a little bit like how, if you. Have on a blog archive page, these read more buttons that you have, which are separate to, or links separate to the description, then it's very difficult.

It's not, It's not, yeah, it's outta context with it. So I think that's a similar thing happening, but really that's what we're encouraged to do if we go with What wg

[00:10:00] Nathan Wrigley: have you managed to memorize that in your head now, such that if you were just writing out HTML and you were trying to deploy citations, block quotes and so on, have you got that cascade of things figured out or would you have to go back to that and say, which example does it fit into here?

I think I've got it sorted

[00:10:19] David Waumsley: out now. Yeah. But that's what I'm trying to do for this one. We can have something is, is the no script shows way of doing it, I think. But this is the next thing. I've put it on my notes here that, this is where it gets really difficult 'cause it's hard to find consistent advice.

So we have. Many expert sources and I've only actually put one in here and that is, lemme just go back here, is the HTML five doctor, which is supposed to be the place to really get, to learn all your stuff. it says different things Wow. To watch. Yeah. so that becomes a problem.

And we also have, as well, with WordPress as well, it is quite interesting because if we go to. press.com and it looks at it's, quote block there. So it works against it as well, because what it literally says is that you can use this, it will add in your citation will be the author, and there's nothing on that.

and the citation was in with the block quote. So technically according to what wg Yeah, what WordPress does on there. And there's a code example on here. it calls no problems for. and this will make sense for, there's an article here looking up the Block quotes by Amber Hines, who's a big accessibility person in WordPress.

And she sees no issue with how that does it. He thinks she's doing it semantic, and I think you'll understand why she doesn't see an issue with this one. Yeah, maybe she's not looked into it, but let's have a look. if we go here. So there is that side of it. So technically these. Experts there, and this platform is wrong according to the present specifications.

But also when we start to get to experts like Haydon Pickering in his article, what he suggests is a get around the fact with, lemme just go to his posts for those who can see, that one. Yeah. Yeah. So in terms of accessibility as a problem with the idea that you would put the citation. Separate to the quote, because it's not programably linked together.

Yep. Yep. So his way around this is to put everything in a figure. So you have a figure. Then a block quote, and then you have a fig caption, which contains your citation within there. Citations

[00:12:42] Nathan Wrigley: in there.

[00:12:43] David Waumsley: Yeah. So that's his approach. However, then we come to Adrian Ly, who's one of the big players when it comes to accessibility, who's gone and tested all the different ways that a screen reader will read these different ways of doing it.

Oh, interesting. Okay. Yep. Yeah. So his own approach is to not do that. What he recommends is because it's so verbose for screen readers, all the popular ones to read out, fig not to do that. Yeah. So he goes with block quote, and then he puts in a footer where he puts his citation and then closes the, block quote.

Yeah. So that's his way as an accessibility expert who doesn't, let me say that all of these people say this is how they've dealt with the situation. Not necessarily this is the way to do it. I don't think anybody feels confident in what rules we have at the moment, so, anyway, you could see a contradiction there.

So you can go two different routes on that. And let's see, gosh, what, it's really surprising. Open a hole. Disagree. I know.

[00:13:46] Nathan Wrigley: Isn't as fascinating. Yeah,

[00:13:47] David Waumsley: I think attention's going to H-D-M-L-A lot more at the moment. it's been on CSS, but yeah. But I think we need to get these fundamentals right. And finally, the one that I think we are effectively going to use is the W three C design system.

So if I just move on to this one, so it's similar to Adrian ly in the sense that there's no fig with this one. It's put in a block quote. Then it's adding a footer. Yeah. 'cause this is a section in route. It's perfectly fine to add in a footer element and, ending it with a block quote. So if you like, but what they, and they point out in the considerations.

They point out the fact that, and this is really where it all goes wrong, there's been some leniency when HTML was decided by the W three C itself on their own documentation. But since. I think 2019, this has gone to the Living Standards Working Group, which is the what wg. And not everything that has been changed there has transferred over.

So our official documentations may not be up to speed, if you like. This is where we get some of the confusion.

[00:14:59] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I was gonna say officially then. It's really confusing officially.

[00:15:03] David Waumsley: It's confusing. Officially. It's confusing. Yeah. Yeah. When you've got brilliant experts like that, but I think. I think the way for us to deal with it.

and again, I went and had a little search around just what people did well, interestingly enough to search around what some of the people say they do and what they actually do as well doesn't always match. So they've changed. Okay. They've changed over time. Like we, we will be changing over time and when we go and look round, there's not much in the way of the big design systems out there for this specifically, but there is a lot of sort of local government, Design systems out there. So if you go and look at them again, they're all different variations. Gosh. Yeah. It's a, spaghetti, isn't it? It is. And yeah, I, just think it is due to this. And in fact, there's a point that was made on Michelle Barker's, I've been doing. Block quotes wrong. I think the last quote on here.

Yes. This is by Amelia Bellamy Rhodes, and I know of her, she's on the working group for SVGs, I think so I've seen her name for this one, and that's it. How she's spelling it out how the three C spec was modified. If you allow two. Be a little bit more flexible to do what Jeremy Keith, I think years back wanted to do to be able to contain authors.

So when I was pointing out that sort of WordPresses basically got it wrong in terms of the official spec, you can understand why it's like that? Yeah, because, We were generally leaning towards that, although I think, it would be better if it did have a little footer to separate the citation within the block quote.

But, so that's really, I think, what we'll do, I think as we don't have the kind of standing and influence like people like Adrian Rosalli, Haydon Pickering, or Michelle Barker. I think we'll try and stick to the what WG rules. Okay. Just to get some consistency. Yeah.

[00:16:59] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:16:59] David Waumsley: And, until we're told otherwise.

[00:17:02] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Yeah. Until they've finished that bun fight and, sorted it out, frankly. Yeah. Okay. Testimonials now then, is it?

[00:17:10] David Waumsley: Yeah. So, rationalizing the code, so this took me some time to kinda work out, so exactly how we're laying things out. So a typical pattern, and I've got an example up here. On that sort of little demo site I made first, which we'll use at some point.

A typical pattern for a testimonial might be something where we have what someone said about us, maybe a picture of the author and their name, and maybe a link to their organization. Or one of the other. and that's a sort of common pattern here, That would be straightforward. What we're doing here with something like that is that we'd be putting it all in a block quote.

Yep. And using W three Cs and putting all of the stuff where their names, their image, their where they work, or their company or their t yeah. We would all go in that footer within a block quote, so that would be fine. there is the circumstance where. Sometimes you see with these, this pattern, you will see a header as well as the quote.

sometimes, there's just a sort of summary of what the quotation

[00:18:20] Nathan Wrigley: says. Oh, interesting. I'm trying to remember when I've seen that, but I, can't conjure it up. Okay.

[00:18:26] David Waumsley: I think sometimes if you're taking from a source, that does that some, reviews do allow you to put the title and then like a name, like a too long

[00:18:36] Nathan Wrigley: didn't read kind of thing where you summarize the quote.

Is that what you mean? Yeah. You might just, Yeah. Like, stunning.

[00:18:43] David Waumsley: And

[00:18:43] Nathan Wrigley: then the quote, which is, yeah. Okay.

[00:18:45] David Waumsley: Got it. they might just pull out the main, because we know people read titles and some of the review, things are set up, which is another point actually I should mention really. 'cause, just thinking about the SEO perspective on this one, when it comes to testimonials, we can't really use, that review markup, the rich.

Text or the schema for that one because it can't be self-serving, so we can't say something. You can't use other people's quotes about us. yeah. To self serve. So for testimonials that, that doesn't become an issue. Anyway, thi this did make me think about that pattern. So if it was a pattern where, the.

Header was part of the quote that was submitted by the user. Then I would just put a header three probably that would be the likely one, and then it would be the block quote. Okay. In the block quote, itself. Got it. but if it was one where we decided to sum up their block quote, then what I would do is wrap the whole thing in an article.

Okay. Yeah. Again, this is another one where it's another Hayden Pickering, topic where he talks about article, and I think it's from him that I got this idea. 'cause when I thought of article as a tag, I tended to think

[00:20:04] Nathan Wrigley: of just blog posts. Yeah. that's where my head goes. It, doesn't, in my head, it doesn't land as a container for more broad stuff, even though I know it should be.

[00:20:13] David Waumsley: Yeah, and I think if we look at the actual spec for it, I won't pull it up here at the moment, but it actually says it's any sort of standalone element that you could use on its own. Yeah. So an article would be right for this, and I think it was Haydon Pickering or something. It said, is, and I think this is that way of looking at it, and now I think of it as like an article of clothing.

[00:20:33] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, interesting. Okay. You do you know what

[00:20:35] David Waumsley: I mean? It's like a pair of gloves or something. They stand aside, but they're not the entire thing. And, because we can use, yeah, because I think it's any sort of standalone. So I think it would be suitable. So that would be the semantic way. And I've put the code here, sorry for those who are just listening, but basically it would be the surrounding, wrapper, if you like, would be the article tag within that, then I'd put our header, Because we're making that up ourselves in that would be the block quote with its footer, with the reviewer's name, and then it would close with the block quote, and then finally the article wrapper so that you got article

[00:21:11] Nathan Wrigley: with. Children of a heading and a block quote. And then inside the block quote, you've got your content paragraph, footer and so on.

Interesting. Okay. yeah.

[00:21:22] David Waumsley: I was wondering about comments as well. not that we've got them, but we're gonna have to get like blog

[00:21:26] Nathan Wrigley: posts, that kind of thing. Yeah. So

[00:21:28] David Waumsley: when we're inviting people to use a generated what, where they would fit in, and I think the official specification tells us this, what we can use, and that is a blog entry on a, this is.

Quoting from them, a blog entry on a site that accepts user submitted comments could be represented as could, sorry, could represent the comments as article elements nested within the article element for the blog entry. So I wouldn't be using blog quotes for that kind of quoting, and we would just stick them in nested articles.

Articles.

[00:22:05] Nathan Wrigley: So you'd have articles nested within articles. Within, an article.

[00:22:10] David Waumsley: Okay. Yeah. So I think that's how, it is interesting because I think later we'll try and put some form of commenting system on our own, site. So I think, it's interesting to see,

[00:22:22] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. Especially given the user submitted nature of things.

obviously with modern CMSs, you've got the capacity to, put things into a pending state, so they don't make it there. But if you're worried about SEO and things like that, then. User submitted content might really run against what you're trying to do, or I don't know, mention your commercial rivals with links and things like that, so there may be something there.

Yeah,

[00:22:46] David Waumsley: I did look, Michelle Barkers, I, because I was there, I thought I'd poke around at the code there and I noticed that her articles, which obviously she said to create the whole HTML for that one, we put in a block quote, which is seems appropriate. For it. but when you think about it, people just shove all sorts of stuff in there, which isn't necessarily a quote that might be quoting somebody else.

It wouldn't fit the quote. So I actually think, and, when I looked at examples of at least classic WordPress sites that I've seen, I think most people have marked it up in the way that, what WG would suggested by using the Raptors articles in the, okay. Okay. So I think that's what we would do in that case.

So pull quotes, Again, we've, what WG has given us, and I'm quoting here, is the aside element can be used for typographical effects, pull quotes or sidebars. So it literally mentions where we can use the aside. so as a sidebar,

[00:23:48] Nathan Wrigley: the aside being a side.

[00:23:51] David Waumsley: because they've spec specified pull quotes.

So if you like Paul quote, is that duplicate of content that we put on somewhere in style separately? It's an aside to our main article.

[00:24:02] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, that's pull quote. Is it? 'cause at the beginning we talked about, so a pull quote is where you. You literally are pulling something out of the article. It's duplicate from an SEO point of view.

Yes. But you wanna highlight it. So it's like when you're reading a newspaper sometimes, or a magazine, sometimes they'll just, I, don't know. It's eye catching, isn't it? They'll throw that, that one sentence, which kind of encapsulates the next two paragraphs. Yes. As a, as an easy way. It's almost like a heading, it's navigates you into what's coming or what has just been said.

Yes. Okay. Okay. I didn't know that.

[00:24:34] David Waumsley: Yeah. So block quote isn't appropriate. No. that's what people have used of course, because of the confusion. But an aside seems to be the thing to do. no one really knows, but that seems the most. But there is an interesting debate that goes back.

Jeremy Keefe set one off in 2016, got tons and tons of comments, asking the question, why do Paul quotes exist on the web? And it is a great question given that if your screen reader. And in his own post, it gives that example, if he was to read it with a screen reader, it's terrible because it's got this pull quote out and then it repeats the next thing you know.

Yeah. You're just hearing this constant re repetition. Yeah. With no visual clues to know what the heck is going on. Why is this article repeating itself? So there's that difficulty. There's the difficulty. Some people, although I don't think duplicate content is an issue for SEO, but some people have been conscious about that, but also, you do all this work.

To pull quotes. Generally they are pulling slightly out of the main body of content. You mean physically? they look, yeah. Physically. They usually pull to one side left. Yeah, Do that to the main content. Yeah. If you're

[00:25:44] Nathan Wrigley: a left to right reader, then it's slightly to the right.

[00:25:47] David Waumsley: Yeah. Yeah. And they're really, difficult to code.

We'll move on to that when we talk about CSS, but, a lot of people have had to employ JavaScript in order to make this thing that's outta the main body. Move to where you want it to do, and then it doesn't look all that impressive necessarily when you get down to smaller devices where you can't see that it's pulling out you, you've literally only got the room for your text.

Yeah. So yeah, so there is that. and, what did I put here for regular quotes? Okay. So our format, in. unless you disagree on any of these ones, I think to keep things easier for cited and non-sighted users, not non-sighted, as I've written here,

it, seems, I'll put an s in there later to make sense to cite before the quote. So I think when we're doing our articles, generally it's better to you'll have your paragraph that will be running, you'll put the name of the order. Author and then, reference their article, song, presentation, whatever it is, as the title of the work, with a link to that one, and that will be in the citation.

And then. he or she says, and then it will just be in the block quote doing it that way. So if you are put in as, I think most people when they were thinking about HTML spec, were thinking when you use a block quote, you're quoting generally, you might introduce it first. Yeah. Before you do the block quote.

So in. General, general blog posts. That would be my format. I think so

[00:27:26] Nathan Wrigley: I guess it's almost serving as a little signpost of Okay. This is why it's now, okay. It is out of the flow of the normal text, but here's a, flag saying this is what it is. This is, as you've written there, the name of the work.

It's like a mini title. It's alerting you to here's something different. Yes. Then the quote comes afterwards where if you had it the other way around. the site. At the end of it, after the block quote, then it would just go straight into that. It would feel like an ordinary part of text and then the name of the title would randomly come and you wouldn't know where that started or stopped.

Okay. Yeah. That's interesting. And I think that's presentation. you often see it. Differently, don't you? You'd see the, you'd see the quote first encapsulated in some container, which is, I don't know, a rectangle or something to differentiate it. Different color background or something. Then the person, let's go for person's name.

no. The name of the work might be at the bottom. In an old font or something like that. And, you can capture that 'cause you can see it all. But if you're doing it. With a screen reader that's all back to front. 'cause you need that indication at the beginning. Okay. Yeah.

[00:28:35] David Waumsley: Yeah. I think the pattern's different and I think most of the haste, this is my understanding of it, is that the, when writing out the spec there, they've generally been thinking of written text and articles where you might.

you'll introduce as part of your copy who the author and what work it's citing before you move to the block quote where it all gets thrown out. And we get into trouble is when we start to think about this design pattern of the testimonial, where we tend to put the quote up front. yeah.

And then the author after, and it doesn't work anyway, I think we've solved that. Yeah, there is, another interesting point again from Hayden Pickering on his article, and that is, when you use the, we've been talking about block quote all the time, but there's the, there's the Q tag, the inline, quote and.

For those reading the notes here, I will correct these later 'cause it says it's okay. yeah. He points out the, fact that, the term block quotation precedes the block quote element ever existing in HTML and the Chicago Manual of Style recommends that a block quotation is over a hundred words. There are some examples as he points out in the specifications, which have very short quotes and they use block quotes. So it still remains quite unclear when at least semantically you should be using block quote over the queue. Interesting.

[00:30:03] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah,

[00:30:04] David Waumsley: it's a visual thing in the end, doesn't it?

Ends up you say block quote because it's basically. Style wise, it's taken up the whole block where it's not in line. But, semantically, I don't know. There isn't any clear guidance on

[00:30:16] Nathan Wrigley: No.

[00:30:17] David Waumsley: Which you should be using.

[00:30:18] Nathan Wrigley: No. Interesting that, we reference things like the Chicago Manual of style. I love that.

that's Hayden. No, but just the fact that there. A Chicago manual of style. I think I need that in my life. I don't have enough style basically, and it's got to be over a hundred words. Oh, fascinating. Okay.

[00:30:38] David Waumsley: Alright. Yeah, so I, anyway, I guess that's this, our aim of our show was to try and simplify things and I think I've just made things as about as complex as they, no, you highlighted

[00:30:49] Nathan Wrigley: complexity that all of us have ignored, basically.

we, I think it would've been fair to say that most of that, nobody's pricing off the. The lid to appear inside that jar just because you rely on, especially in the WordPress world, you rely on a block increasingly to just take this work for you. Yes, you put a block, quote, block in, and you assume it's doing everything correctly, whereas in fact, perhaps you need to roll your own or certainly be thinking about the context in which you're using it, be it a block quote, a quote, a testimonial, a citation, whatever it may, be.

There's a lot more to it, honestly. Way more to that than I thought, so that's fascinating.

[00:31:26] David Waumsley: Yeah. And I would be really interested, if anybody does have any thoughts or, they spot anything that I've completely missed on this or want to change our mind, then I'd love to hear on that one. But I think what we've decided to do on this as a design system sort to make sense 'cause we're not, breaking any rules.

I think the interesting thing is about the site element. It really, it doesn't seem to have any purpose. It's there for semantics. Yeah. But it's not read out by screen readers. Certainly, when we're using that as the attribute, nobody sees it. So what's it? Therefore it's, the, full use of this isn't in place.

But perhaps one day if we all do the right thing, maybe it might be useful.

[00:32:11] Nathan Wrigley: Is there any more on that, page that you want to go? No. You just got some links there at the bottom, styling quotes, part two and what have you. So are we. Are we a wrap? Wrap? Wrap? It's a wrap. Wrap as they said.

Yeah. We'll just move

[00:32:23] David Waumsley: on. And this will be quick, I think, just part two because we've talked all about the HTML and said, we'll just quickly talk about how we might. Go about styling some of these.

[00:32:33] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so in which case, if you want to follow along with the show notes that David's been displaying there, including typographical corrections, you can go and find those as well.

Then head to no script show. And then this episode is 24 so slash 24, the numerals two four. Go and check that out. And then there will be a corresponding episode in which, this is demonstrated. David gives it a bash, and that is no script show slash learn. 15 1 5. So those two things will correspond and overlap.

So we will, see you then. So shall I, shall I, hit stop on this recording and yeah, we'll go into the next.

[00:33:16] David Waumsley: Alright, see you

[00:33:16] Nathan Wrigley: soon.

[00:33:17] David Waumsley: Thanks Nathan. Bye.