Welcome to episode six of Inspect. My name is Ajakawal and in this week's episode I called up with Jordan Dwyer, a digital marketing manager from Workingham. Jordan has spent the past few months setting up an e-commerce website using WordPress and WooCommerce and we talk about his experience of doing this as a non-programmer. We also talk about the state of modern digital marketing and some of the techniques used for successful marketing campaigns.
So without further ado, here is episode six of Inspect with Jordan Dwyer. My name is Jordan and I am in digital marketing, but that's not how I started out. Started out as a cameraman Working for a video production company making videos for clients. That was in the beginning of the days when Google started to really come onto the scene and make a big impression.
So naturally I had clients asking me what do we do with these videos? What's the next step to do with this? Which is how I began my journey into digital marketing, search engine optimization. So we can advertise these videos on people's websites and get some traffic and get some real results for them.
So I live in a world now of ROI and PPC, SEO, SEM, a whole bunch of other acronyms which sound really cool. And one of my main focuses is on educating and making sure that I stay focused on goal-based digital marketing. Okay, sounds good. So when you were cameraman, I take it, that was while you were in South Africa.
Well, you're from South Africa originally. So that's what you were doing while you were there? Yeah, back in South Africa in sunny Durban went to tech, got my diploma in digital video and started out specifically as a cameraman. And then started making my own things.
You know, next thing is you start producing, you start directing, you start doing your editing, you start doing animations. So you make the whole package for the clients. And then you start asking the clients, you know, what is it that you actually really want to get out of this video? What is it that you're trying to achieve with having a video?
Because maybe we can actually help you achieve your goals of getting the right target market and finding out what people are really looking for when they're looking for your services. And then we can feature that in the video and then we can even take it further. We can make a web page for you, make a landing page, put the video on that landing page and then take it from there. Oh, yeah.
So is that basically what goal-based marketing is? Yeah, that's international goal-based marketing. Instead of just a client coming to us and saying, look, can you increase the amount of visitors, for example, that comes to our website? Which is very common.
Somebody would say, I just need to increase the amount of people who are visiting my pages. And then they would say, you know, I need to decrease the amount, the bounce rate that I'm getting, for example, the people who arrive on your website and then leave without going to another page or within a very short amount of time. And then you think, yeah, that sounds right. It makes sense.
You know, let's decrease the bounce rate and let's increase the amount of web visitors who wouldn't want that. But at the end of the day, you have to think, well, look, what is it that we're trying to achieve? And you go back to the basics, you say, I want to achieve, I want to make money from a company. And I want to do that by attracting a certain type of clientele, a certain type of target market.
And the way I do that is by advertising to them or marketing to them with a very specific message and a very specific goal in mind in terms of what I want them to do. And I want them to come to my website, but then I want them to take another action. I want them to contact me or I want them to buy something or I want them to go to another page and read more blog articles about what it is that I do and learn more about me. So it's not just about attracting and then gigantic amounts of people and getting as many people to your site as possible.
It's about actually getting people to come to your site, take an action and do something that's really worthwhile to you as a brand, as a company, as a business. What is it that you really want people to do that's going to the end of the day, turn them into clients, turn them into a customer. And then let's focus on that and let's use that as the goal. Let's say the goal is to, instead of attracting a whole bunch of people, let's say the goal is to attract people to your site and get them to fill out the contact form.
So that's goal-based marketing as opposed to just object-based marketing where you would just want to attract a whole bunch of people, which it can be endless if you go down that route. So is this object-based marketing the old ways that something that's not really done as much now? Are there two schools of thought and you're either on one side of the fence or the other? Yeah, that's a really good question.
The way I see it is Google's been around for a while now, digital marketing has been around for a while now, but traditional marketing, that's been around for so long. And it's still the mainstay of marketing. There's still a lot of people out there who still believe in traditional marketing and haven't taken that next step to bring that stuff into a digital world. And when you look at the two different types, it's so different now, the way Google works, the way Facebook works, it's all about engagement and it's about being able to target your rat market, the exact market that you want to target with the exact message that you need to give them that they're going to respond to.
The old days of the shotgun approach where you would basically blast out as much of a marketing message to as many people as you can on the newspaper, on an advert on TV, on the radio, where you would hit everybody, their uncle, their sister, the entire area will get your message regardless of if they're actually interested in your message or not. Those traditional marketing days are in a digital world now are numbered. So it's all about actually being able to fine tune that market now and make sure you target a very specific person with a very specific message and get them to take an action that's relevant to you and your business. And that's what digital is about.
Google charges you know the amounts of people that you reach, Facebook charges you by the amount of people that you reach. So you have to make sure you reach in the exact right person and make sure they actually are taking the right action that you want them to do. Yeah, suppose the beauty of the tools that we use like Facebook and Google is that these companies are capturing an overall picture of each person that uses a service which obviously people like yourselves, people in marketing can then use those demographics to really target individuals. So I can't really imagine this sort of granularity happening five, ten years ago.
So I suppose it's quite fortunate in that way that these companies are capturing all this data, even though a lot of people may be a bit weary about how much Google knows about them or how much Facebook knows about them and some people who shy away from these sorts of services. Just in last week's episode of the podcast I was talking about a new social network called Mastodon which is a sort of decentralized rival to Twitter where no single company owns all of your data. But on the flip side is that Twitter do own all of your data by using their service. So if you don't want to target those people, you can then pay Twitter for that information and buy ads and target very specific people.
So it's two sides of the coin I suppose, isn't it? There's the benefits to people in marketing, but then there's the apprehension from the people using the service who might not want all that data being shared with people in marketing. So how do you combat something like that? Yeah, that's exactly it.
I mean, it's like, I think the traditional marketing, I have to be fair, has given marketing in itself a really bad rep, you know, with the old days where we just basically blasted out to everybody. Now, now we've got digital, right, and we've got all these amazing techniques and strategies that we can employ. Facebook knows so much about you. They know exactly your interests.
They know exactly your behaviors. They know the device that you use. So we can really use that stuff now to make sure that somebody is actually getting the message that they want to receive rather than just receiving a blasted out message that is actually irrelevant to them. So when it comes down to it, at the end of the day, when you, when I think when people say, you know, I don't necessarily want to my privacy shared, I don't want everybody to, I don't want Facebook to know so much about me.
And I don't want to see adverts all the time in my news. And maybe they'll even have an ad blocker on their news. And Facebook is permanently at war with advert blocking people all the time trying to, there's a back and forth going on with the technology coming out. But at the end of the day, I think digital marketers can actually be useful to people because if we have the right product for them, the right service or something like that, that's actually going to make a benefit to them and it's going to help them and it's going to make a difference in their life.
And we advertise specifically to that person with a very specific message, telling them about this product, the service or whatever it is, then that person will be more receptive to that. And they'll be more open to the idea of receiving more similar adverts like that and having their information shared. If it means that they can actually get more relevant content to them because the one thing that irritates everyone and it's supposed to irritates me and maybe you as well as seeing an adverts or seeing something on social media that has nothing to do with you or something that you totally don't want to get what thought about buying and still never thought about buying it after seeing the ad. Yeah, it's true.
In terms of ad blockers, does that affect the cost of actually doing the advertising? I know a lot of advertising is based on impressions. So if there's an ad blocker, does that still count as an impression or is that impression lost because the ad has been blocked? Yeah, so the ad gets served and Facebook gets notified that the ad was served.
So in most cases, you get charged per impression. And then people have these ad blockers that come up on their browsers. So I'm not too sure about if Facebook can detect that and it would actually reimburse you the money for that advert because they knew that somebody used an employer, an ad blocker. But on the other end, I think basically, you have to appreciate the fact that you're saying to Facebook, I will pay you for certain amounts of impressions.
It's probably Facebook is probably not too phased about how many of those impressions were blocked. I have never seen any metric or anything like that measuring back to me telling me that an advert was blocked and they've reimbursed me the cash for that advert and for that spending or for reaching certain amounts of people. Maybe there's some kind of technology out there that let's Facebook know, but I'm not 100% sure that is like that. I think you're still going to get charged for that.
Possibly. How do you feel about ad blockers anyway? As someone who's in Distramarketing, knowing that a lot of these adverts which you're paying for are going to be blocked, because ad blockers are pretty much common practice these days. Everyone seems to have them.
We went to that event at Breaking Borders a couple of months ago where they were talking to the speaker. I can't remember the chap's name now, but I'll take it out and put it in the show notes where he was talking about the state of ad blockers and how you're now getting blockers for blockers. In the sense that sites like the New York Times or Wall Street Journal and things like that are now blocking content if you're using an ad blocker. They're blocking the actual content themselves.
And then there's blockers to unblock the blockers and it just goes a bit crazy. How do you feel about them as a person in marketing? Yeah, it's something I have to be aware of and I have to keep it in the back of my mind. And to be honest, I've moved away a lot from display advertising due to the fact that I know ad blocking is meaning that we're probably going to be blocked out with a lot of our ads that we're using on the display network, for example.
I'm talking about banners, things that appear on people's websites or things that appear on, like, if you're having a banner, you've got your side banners, you've got your top banners. All of those things are easily blocked from ad blocking program. Then it starts getting more more complicated. Now, you've got ad blockers actually going into your news feed on Facebook and you can actually block.
So your central column on Facebook where you actually see your status updates from all your friends and family and all the different things that you follow. There's some ad blockers that can actually get involved inside that now and start blocking some of that ads that pop up over there, as well as the ads on the right hand side of Facebook, which is your actual adverts column. So, yeah, it's a consideration. I do have to bear in mind all the time.
I don't necessarily, my first call is never to go to a display campaign due to that reason for one of them. But there's other ways around it as well. There's still search, there's still keywords, which even Google's moved that stuff over to the middle of the page now. So not everybody is blocking that as well.
And we're still seeing good numbers, we're still seeing good traffic from those. So it's not like ad blocking has come along and just taken all the wind out of our sails. It's something to consider, definitely display as a problem, but there's other ways around it. It's such a big business, isn't it?
Advertising, there's always going to be people battling this ad blockers that can be, they have pro subscriptions, so they're making money by blocking the ads and they're trying to make money by displaying them. It was a really good debate at that event that we went to as well. It was a, yeah, I don't know if that event was recorded, but I'll see if it was and try and post up some content from it because it was really interesting. Yeah, I like breaking borders.
Yeah. Just one other thing about that is that Google makes their money, really. So it's, I mean, there's a lot of people at Google who are dealing with this issue on a daily basis. So it's how they make their money.
It's adverts on your search. So there's a lot of brain power going on to work out ways around that. Yeah, I'm sure a lot of people will shy away from Google if they're charging for your service and not displaying ads, then who would actually use it. Can you imagine that?
Imagine that charges to use Google and use it for everything. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, a lot of people think that Google is the internet. Like my daughter, she's nearly six years old and to her, Google is the internet.
Just just Google it. Just go on Google and that's the way that she would find information. That's the way that she would find information. That's the way that she would find information.
That's scary. Yeah, no, no. So, so what are you actually working on these days? Yeah, so recently, or actually, first of all, I need to say, thank you for having me on your podcast.
This is my first podcast as a guest, which is really exciting. So I'm interested to see how your podcast goes on into the future and how well it does. But yeah, thanks for the shout out and for letting me come on. This is really exciting.
No, brilliant. Thanks for being on. You know, obviously it's early days for the podcast as well. You know, I'm still experimenting with the format.
I've had a couple of episodes towards the beginning where I had a co-host and then schedules changed. So I try to view solo episodes and now I'm focusing on trying to get some guests on who have got some interesting stories and from our previous conversations offline, then you know, I thought it'll be a good interesting story about your background and what you're working on. So yeah, it's early days and yeah, pleasure to have you on. That's great.
All right. So back to my question. Okay. So back to your question.
A few months, I think it's like over five months now. My wife and I have been working almost around the clock, I suppose, to get a WooCommerce website up and running. We've put a lot of time into it. And it's been a really interesting journey, I suppose, working with my wife and myself together.
That's been a learning curve just on its own. But it's been really exciting. We put a lot of work into it. You know, we've developed products.
We've played around with the technology and got really familiar with it, played around with a lot of you plugins. So it's been quite exciting. Okay. So you're not a web developer of any sort of you.
So was that a fairly easy task to get a WordPress site running as a non-developer? Yeah, that's always been a challenge, I suppose. I don't have a programming background. Like I said, I mean, my background is in video is how I started out.
But with the way the web is now, I mean, you can Google anything you want. But specifically for Google, specifically for WordPress and WooCommerce, you know, that's such a widely used platform. There's so many people using WordPress, which is like over 15 million people with WordPress websites and then WooCommerce being the first choice for WordPress if you want to sell online. You know, that's the most popular e-commerce version for WordPress, which means that if there's any problem that you've ever had, that you come across, if something stops working on your site, there's a really good chance that somebody else has had that exact same problem before and has written a blog or has written a question and has had a good answer.
And you can just check down that now and figure it out and go in there and fix it yourself. But with that said, I've been using WordPress for quite some years now. So I'm pretty familiar with the plugins that I like to use and the ins and outs of backing it up and uploading it and servers and databases and things like that, which I suppose in the beginning were quite difficult. But yeah.
Yeah, so in terms of WooCommerce itself, did you say that there was on such pretty much any problem that you ever had? Did you run into any major problems while you were setting up? Yeah, there's, I suppose, I can give you a recent example. I'm doing some speed optimization now for the WooCommerce installation.
Basically, we're basically just trying to get our speed for the site to load to be a lot quicker because a lot of our target market is actually using mobile phones. So what I'm doing is I'm using a plugin called Total Cache, which is a very widely used plugin for WordPress. I've installed that and I'm going through the pros and cons of using it and things like that. And just yesterday I came up with a problem trying to minify my CSS or trying to get the script that's blocking in the header to be moved out of the header so that it doesn't actually have to load with the whole site loads before the site loads.
So the site actually slows down and then you get a really low score in Google speed testing. So what I would do is then I would just go online and I would just generally find out. I would either type in the exact issue that I'm having where there's an error code that pops up or something like that. I would type in that exact phrase on Google because I know somebody else has had this exact issue before.
I'm using a really popular plugin. I'm using a really popular platform. And then it's just basically sorting out through all the answers that come there and trying to backtrack your steps and work out a better way of doing something if you do come across an issue, I suppose. It's interesting.
I don't have the developing background, which sometimes is frustrating. I just wish I could call out someone like you or someone who knows WordPress and PHP and just send them a login and just get them to fix it and come back in an hours time and it's ready and it's going. But it's never the case. Yeah, maybe not an hour.
But to be honest, you know what, that is exactly what programming is. It's knowing what to search for when it is. It is a 90% of what you do as a programmer is trying to find solve the problem. And a big part of that is actually knowing where to find the answer.
And of course that's going to be Google. The most sensible thing is if you've got an error message to Google what that error message is and then try and figure out what that error is. But no one gets it right the first time. Everyone's making the same mistakes, which is why you're able to actually find the answer in the first place because someone else is in the exact same boat as you.
But that's the beauty of sites like Stack Overflow and Google Groups and basically anyone who's helpful on the internet, people are sharing the solutions to these problems. They're having making it easier for the rest of the community overall, which is obviously a good thing. Sometimes wonder if I should actually, like sometimes I would go on an adventure and I would have a problem and I would search hundreds of different, not hundreds, but lots of different pages of websites trying to find this answer. And eventually someone would have commented and had the right answer for me, which is a little piece of the puzzle that you put together and then you can go back and fix it.
And you just sit there at the end of the day and you think, wow, this information is not easily available. And at that point, I should probably actually just sit down and write a little bit of a blog article just to give back to the community. But it's really great that so many other people have done that for us already because it's keeping the websites going all around the world, having this data easily available. Yeah, absolutely.
That's something similar to what I do as well. Quite recently, I've been writing more articles on my own website. And the last couple of all sort of tutorials of how I've set up certain things or how I've overcome certain problems. And they seem to be getting a lot of traction and it's just clear that other people are interested in those types of articles, those tutorials and people have got similar issues.
So now that you're an expert in WordPress, you should set up a little blog for yourself and talk about your journey into becoming a WordPress developer and all the bugs that you're fixing. Yeah, who knows? Maybe there's something in there. Maybe somebody will need that information at some point.
The trick is to work out why I'm doing that and what is my goal. Yeah. Well, especially if you found an answer which is a couple of years old, if you then go and repeat that answer, even if it's word for word, almost. Yeah.
If your result is more up to date, it's chances that your result will appear a little bit higher because it's a bit more current, right? Yeah. I think actually, you know, I should probably do this. It's just when I come across these issues that I have, I should be just right down on a list and just keep that on the side.
And then one day, you know, just get a whole bunch of blog articles out there just to catch up with all these different issues that I've overcome and found answers for. And then just keep keep a fresh blog post up every night again, just with all these different gems, I suppose, that's actually don't exist out there or maybe I'll scatter around all over the place and you just basically just consolidating it all and putting it into one article. Yeah. Or in 10 years, you're writing a book about your life.
You can talk about all the progress you've overcome. Oh, yeah. Yeah. All right.
Good stuff. So while you were learning to set up a WordPress and WooCommerce site, did you take any courses or anything? What was your source of learning to do these things other than just googling when you had issues? Were there any tutorials that you followed?
Yeah. I think at some point, I can't remember it when exactly, but I did get a little frustrated in the fact that I didn't really have a good grasp on what PHP was and obviously PHP being done. And I think that's really PHP being the main language of WordPress is what everything's written in. So I did do a little bit of a, I suppose, crash course on PHP.
It was online course. I probably found the notes and give that to you for to put in your podcast notes. And then basically just worked through the YouTube videos and copied them on what they were doing. So I can get it at the end of the day.
What I did was I built my own version of a PHP page that has a login, for example, which just gave me the basis of understanding how people are using PHP, how they are coding the basics and how it actually works. In terms of all this code that you see on these different pages on your header page and on your actual blog post pages. How does that actually work and how does it call information in and everything like that. And that was really useful just to understand all of that and just to know what a variable is, for example, and how that is written into PHP and how it fetches other variables and calls other pages.
So that's how it started out. And I suppose once I did that, then I was able to call on that information and use that as the basis, which helped me when I was doing searching for problems that I had with the site. On a site like if I came across all of a sudden, and someone giving me an answer about how to fix something and they just basically posted all their code. Before I would have probably just gone to look for another article where it tells me exactly what I need to do, whereas now I can look at that and be like, oh, okay, I see what they're doing.
They're using a hook, for example, and then they're hooking into that element, which is really straightforward. And why don't I just do that. And, you know, so it does help. And you do need to at some point, if you're serious about WordPress, even WooCommerce, you do need to at some point start paying attention to, like, for example, PHP.
And just maybe do a little bit of crash course. Yeah, absolutely. And that's really good advice. It's really handy to know exactly what the code is doing rather than just copying and pasting.
Even if you copy and paste the solution from somewhere, it may solve your problem, unless you actually know why you're going to be stuck further down the line. Yeah. So yeah, it's really good that you've done that. Yeah.
I think, like, WordPress, it's built so that you don't have to do that. You don't have to go into the code, ideally. In an ideal world, you would never have to look at the code of your WordPress site. You could just purchase a template, load your template up onto your WordPress installation, and work on the copy, for example, you know, you are about us page, change the heading, change the text that's written inside there.
That's in an ideal world. But at the end of the day, the first thing that happens is that you go into that and you be like, you know what, I really don't like the way the search engine optimization is handled on this page. I want to maybe add some extra code into the H1 tags, which is more of the schema format that I'm looking at now, schema being the new format that we're using to just tag certain things on a page to make it easier for search engines to understand. And if you start going down that route and you start getting serious about WordPress and SEO, for example, you're going to need to get into the code.
You're going to need to understand what's going on in there at some level, even if it's just a basic level. You're going to have to start looking at that. Yeah. And also, you don't want to just rely on these third-party plugins because then you're at the most of other developers.
And if they're plugging, stops working, and you're relying on that functionality, then it will be handy to be able to know how something was achieved so that you can maybe replicate it in the future. Yeah. Not everyone has covered everybody's either. So if you're trying to do something specific, then you are going to need to either write your own plugins or just delve into the code and write your own functions and PHP functions to handle what you're trying to do.
Yeah. That's good. Yeah. Yeah.
So did you start with a template or did you start with a blank slate? So with the WordPress, you just go on to WordPress. You download the letters WordPress files. It's really straightforward.
If you have a good hosting company, chances are they probably have an automatic WordPress setup. So that type of stuff is really straightforward. You just go on to WordPress.org, get the letters WordPress installation, put it onto there. You will need to set up a SQL database, for example, which WordPress uses for your copy and all your data and information, all the settings that you do and stuff like that.
So it's just those two things. It's the WordPress files and your SQL database that need to talk to each other. But now you're thinking, I want like a template. I want my site to not be just a standard generic site out there.
So these companies, like Monster Templates, for example, who offer like a wide variety of templates that you can choose from. And now they've also got WordPress, they've got WooCommerce, for example. So I was able to look through the list, find a type of template that matches the type of product and services that we were looking at selling. And then just simply buy that template and the installation is really simple.
The instructions are really simple. It's basically upload that stuff to your, with an FTP to your server and make a few adjustments, which are really clearly illustrated in the notes. And then you're up and away. It's not rocket science.
You can be up and away within a few minutes or so, I suppose, of making your purchases. If you want to go down that route of buying a template. And what about things like handling the payment side of things? Was that fairly straightforward with WooCommerce at all?
I guess it's all well documented and it's all built in from the beginning. So how was that process and how did you, did you run into any issues in terms of payment processing or taking payments and handling orders? So that's a good question. And yes, that is an issue.
So the more experience you have, I suppose, the easier and the quicker that would go. But I know it's an idea, you would think that it would be simple enough to set up, for example, PayPal to sell like somebody goes to your site, they click on your product, they add it to their basket, they then decide to check out and PayPal takes over at that point. And it sends people off to PayPal. And then they come back to your site after they've completed the PayPal transaction.
And then your site has a bit of a summary of the order that they've completed for them to be able to just see that everything's worked. But that sounds all great, but it doesn't, it's not as easy as that. There's a lot of, there's a lot of little tricks that happen along the way. PayPal and WordPress and WooCommerce, they do work really well together, but you are going to have to roll your sleeves up a little bit and get to work to figure out what's going on and just do a lot of testing.
I think PayPal has a sandbox account so that you don't have to spend real money to do your testing, which is quite useful. So you basically, you set up this WooCommerce, you've got your template, everything like that, you've got your products loaded, and then you use a sandbox. So basically, it's not a real PayPal account. It's just doing these fake transactions and you're just testing to make sure that it's working, to make sure that your site's talking to PayPal, PayPal's talking back.
Because PayPal has to basically not only respond, it has to tell your website that the order has been accepted and it's been received and that everything's okay and that everything's working, which is great when it is working, but when it's not working, you're going to have to hit the notes. You have to go into Google and do some research and report on what your problems are, what your issues are, just like we were saying earlier, copy paste that stuff into Google to find out what other people have. But there's a really good chance somebody else has had that exact problem and you can fix it straight away. Back to the community.
Go and, yeah, the community's got you back. They've done it all before. Yeah, definitely. So did you try out any other services other than WordPress and WooCommerce?
Is there a particular reason why you chose that setup and not something like another blogging platform or another CMS or a different payment gateway instead of WooCommerce? You're going to use maybe like Stripe or just PayPal directly, just integrate it directly. Yeah, that's those are good things. I'm probably going to integrate other payment platforms as I go.
PayPal is my first call because I've used it before. It's why I accept it. There's a lot of information out there. It's easy to, if you have a problem to troubleshoot it.
So I will definitely look at other payments platforms as well in the future, but just to get the shop up to get it going, to start things taking over and to make sure that it's all working. You know, my first call was PayPal, which is an easier integration, I suppose. And it's pretty straightforward. I've done it before.
But with that said, that wasn't necessarily my biggest concern with the payment side of things. For me, the biggest headache I've had in the past with these e-commerce sites is getting them to talk to your accounting program. Now, that's where it really comes into its own is finding the right program that, you know, after these transactions are made on PayPal, that PayPal talks to your website and your website talks to your accounting program to create the invoice to notify your accounting program that the invoice has been paid and that somebody's actually completed the transaction to make sure that the correct invoice number is named or the correct variables or added onto your invoice, your name, your date, the address of the person, the person's name. And then when it happens, if they change their mind and they want to cancel that order, then you want to refund them, make sure that your accounting program talks to that.
So at the end of the day, if you've got a website that keeps ticking over and it's talking to your accounting program, then that's really great. But if it's not, then you're going to have a whole heap of accounting work to do at the end of the day as well. Every time you get a sale, you have to go make an invoice in your accounting program to replicate it and everything. So, so that was one of the main things that I was making sure I got right from the beginning.
So I've got WooCommerce has a special plugin, which the program that I use to do my accounting is zero. So we make sure that WooCommerce can talk straight to zero. So we can, with a plugin, I didn't have to purchase that plugin separately. And it's quite sophisticated in terms of the security that it uses and everything like that in terms of the APIs and all that.
So it's not a straightforward installation. If I could say, it's going to take you a little bit of time to get it right. But when it is right, wow, you will be smiling. I've used it in the past as well.
And yeah, they've got a lot of integrations with a lot of platforms and they've got some really slick mobile apps and obviously their website is great as well. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.
I like how they talk to my, like there's a, they, if I got my accountant to involved as well, you know, if I had an issue with my account, and when I was, when I was importing all of my transactions, for example, you know, you just simply make a notification on there and it notifies your accountants and you can make a question like, you know, how do I, how do I, how do I do, I don't know, I don't know, I do a capitalization of assets or something like that, you know, or whatever it is, and your accountant can be able to reply to that and look at that exact problem, which I thought was quite, quite cool. Interesting. That's really good. All right.
Well, we've talked a lot about your actual website, but we haven't actually said what your website is. You haven't actually plugged it. So do you want to just talk about what your URL is and what the actual products are and yeah, what is your business that you are running now? Well, thank you.
Yeah. So it's party hop dot co dot UK. Don't ask me why we call it party hop. I've got digital hop, which, which I've kept for quite a while, which is just kind of my information about news about marketing, which I update every down again.
And now we've got party hop. So if there's any pattern there that you can spot. But other than that, it's basically my wife is, you know, she studied fashion. So she, she likes to make dresses and she's really good at making beautiful dresses for children and for weddings and things like that.
So this is a great opportunity to get her to be able to showcase her stuff to the world and for her to be able to have a viable product. You know, she's got stock. She's got ideas. She's got a range and she can keep track up on the website and she can market that on her stuff.
And she can market that on her spare time now as well to wherever she wants to market that and take that to any direction that she wants it to go to, which is quite exciting because we read the early days now. So we don't even know where it's going to go or what's going to happen or who's going to be interested in something, for example, or even if we've got the right range. So yeah, it's quite exciting. So that's party hop dot co dot UK.
Okay, brilliant, brilliant. And I'll add that link to the show notes, of course. And what about if someone wants to find out a little bit more about you? Are you active on Twitter, Facebook, your own website?
Yeah, well, I've got my website going it's digital hop dot co dot UK and I've got a bit of a challenge for your listeners out there if they are listening. Digital hop dot co dot UK now it's a WordPress installation, as you can guess. And one of the main things that I can pride myself on is the fact that on my blog pages for for this WordPress installation. I've done quite a lot of work into my schema setup.
So in terms of search engine optimization, if you know search engine optimization and you know schema. I've done quite a lot of optimization inside my pages. So for example, when I make a new blog post, I don't have to basically import any schema into that blog post. It does it all for me now automatically and that's all built into the system.
And it works. You know, you can do a test on on Google for that to see how well that works. So I'm interested to see if there's anybody out there who thinks that they might have a better way of doing schema for a WordPress blog post. But I'm quite proud of that.
I'm interested to see if you do have a better way. I'll probably steal it if you did. But okay. Well, yeah, hopefully someone will give you an answer and you can make it even better.
Yeah, maybe. Okay, brilliant, brilliant. No, it's been really good change with you actually. It's been quite insightful to see how a non developer should I say who's not a primary role as a developer has, you know, their sort of journey to setting up a WordPress site and even an email, any comments that as well, which is obviously a challenge even for, you know, season programmers.
It's really good. Thank you. This is great. I love talking about this stuff.
You don't realize how much you know you've gone on a journey until until somebody else is asking you about it, which is which is nice. And I think you've got a good show. Yeah, I think you've got the right idea. I think there's a target market for this.
And I think there's a lot of people out there who'd be interested in knowing about this. You know a lot of information. You have a lot of insight into the industry. And I think there's a niche for this.
There's a lot of people out there who want to keep their finger on the button and know what's happening and where it's a focus on. And I think you'll be a good ambassador for that. So I think you'll show do well. Thank you.
Thank you. Yeah. I mean, it's just early days. So I'm going to continue to obviously promote it.
And hopefully the word will get out as more as I get more and more guests on. Obviously they can promote to their network as well and push the word out. And yeah, hopefully the listeners will start increasing and, you know, we'll see where it goes. That's it.
That's how it starts. But I'd love to have you back on again in maybe in a few months time and we can have a catch up about where your project's going or if you're starting anything new and just generally how things are going. Yeah, let's do that. Hopefully by then I would have a, I would have more of a story to tell you about the site.
Yeah. You can tell me all about your sales and how that's all going. Yeah. All my millions of sales.
Yeah. Yeah. Definitely. And we could talk a little bit more about the journey of building a site with your wife, which I'm sure you've got a few comments on.
But most definitely we'll probably need another hour for that. So we'll save that for next time. That's true. Yes.
All right. Brilliant. Thanks for that. Anyway, so yeah, so if you want to find out more about Jordan and his venture, that's partyhop.co.uk and his own personal website is digitalhop.co.uk.
And what about your Twitter? Do you use to earn Facebook much? I do and I will give you my handle. I'll put it into the notes.
Okay. You don't want to say it out loud. Is it one of those sleeping ones? No, it's just, I'll be honest.
I'm not heavy. It's a user. Okay. That's very enough.
All right. Well, we'll put it in the notes if you want to. And yeah. So if you want to follow Jordan and his journey, then check out the show notes and his Twitter account might just be on there.
He might not. We don't know yet. Yeah. It's a surprise.
Yeah. If you have a message for Jordan, you can always contact me through Twitter or I can call and I can also. Yeah. Yeah.
You're just fax me something. Back to me. I don't have email. Just Google his name.
Oh, no, no. You want to go to the transfer. Oh, yeah. Yeah.
We were talking about that before we started recording. So I don't know what the hell that's about. Yeah. That's my goal.
And I think that's a good place to go.