[00:00:09.940] - Gordon
Hello.

[00:00:11.020] - Taylor
Hello.

[00:00:11.440] - Gordon
My name's Gordon from Drayson Design.

[00:00:13.340] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.

[00:00:15.720] - Gordon
And welcome to "This Week With Taylor and Gordon," a weekly podcast and vidcast where we talk about things that have affected our businesses in the last seven days. And welcome back.

[00:00:26.100] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:00:27.200] - Gordon
[cough] Pardon me. I've got a little bit of a cough today, I don't know what's going on. So if I do cough, I do apologise. How are you doing this week?

[00:00:34.430] - Taylor
Yeah, I'm doing well. I've had my weekly infusion... Or my sorry, my eight weekly infusion. So yeah, doing well.

[00:00:43.740] - Gordon
Very good. So let's just get into some news first of all. The Sanderstead Community Day is tomorrow and I decided that I would take on the role of host for the entertainment. And so I've managed to get all of that sorted now, as we spoke about... Was it last week?

[00:01:05.830] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:01:05.830] - Gordon
Last week I think, yeah. However, I also decided that they had some leaflets and I thought, "wouldn't it be kind and nice and good for the event if I went and picked up some leaflets and did a leaflet drop in the houses all the way around my road and all the way around the road next to me?" And so that's what I did this morning and there's a lot more houses than I thought they were.

[00:01:32.240] - Taylor
How many are there? Did you count?

[00:01:33.740] - Gordon
Well, I didn't, but there is about 70 in each.

[00:01:38.000] - Taylor
How many did you go with?

[00:01:40.340] - Gordon
Well, I thought there might be about 80, in total.

[00:01:43.100] - Taylor
Okay.

[00:01:44.060] - Gordon
However, the lady in the shop gave me a big chunk of leaflets, which is just as well because I needed quite a few more than I thought I did. And there was about 70 houses, not quite 70, in each road.

[00:02:00.300] - Taylor
Wow.

[00:02:00.300] - Gordon
Yeah. So I took the dog with me and we went for a little wander around the roads, putting leaflets in everyone's house and the dog was just checking out everybody's gate.

[00:02:11.300] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:02:11.740] - Gordon
To see if it was open or not. Found one that was open. Found that the lady also had the conservatory door open as well.

[00:02:20.040] - Taylor
Of course!

[00:02:20.040] - Gordon
So managed to get into the house, which was interesting. And that confused the lady because she had two cats and she thought, "this isn't a cat. Where did he come from?" But yeah, got home from that. And I'm not used to going out walking for an hour, posting leaflets into doors. So yeah, I had a little sleep.

[00:02:39.500] - Taylor
Yeah, tired.

[00:02:40.300] - Gordon
I needed it, and so did Marty in fact, so it wasn't just me. So anyway, tomorrow? Tomorrow. Yes. Tomorrow's going to be a very busy day for me. So if you are listening to this ahead of time and you are in the Sanderstead area, then do come along to Sanderstead Recreation Ground between 11 and 4:30. We are going to have lots of fun. There's inflatables; there's live bands; I'm doing magic at 12 o'clock; and there's lots of stalls, arts and crafts; there's food; there's all sorts. Fun for all the family.

[00:03:14.940] - Taylor
That's great.

[00:03:16.180] - Gordon
Yeah. That's the news. That's my little plug over. So do you want to start this week?

[00:03:20.630] - Taylor
Yes. So this week, I... So, give you a bit of back story, I've started streaming, which I will talk about in another episode, which I said I would talk about in another episode another episode ago. But yeah. So I started streaming and I don't like the... well, it's not that I don't like; the webcam on my computer isn't great. So that's why we used your phone for a very long time for the camera.

[00:03:50.390] - Gordon
Yep, as the video feed.

[00:03:51.420] - Taylor
We had an audio microphone, which we kind of synced up when we stream. So I didn't like it, so I wanted to see if I can find an alternative. And I have a camera because I'm into photography, I like photography, and I was talking to a couple of people in the discord for the Claw team. And they recommend...

[00:04:15.410] - Gordon
Which you'll have to explain as well.

[00:04:16.430] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:04:16.430] - Gordon
That will come in the streaming video. "Claw team."

[00:04:19.000] - Taylor
And yeah, they recommended this kind of HDMI converter where you can take an HDMI output from your laptop. Sorry, from your...

[00:04:28.920] - Gordon
Camera.

[00:04:29.280] - Taylor
Camera yeah, and then you can convert it and plug it into your laptop. And this is why, hopefully the video, if you're watching the video version, looks hopefully a lot better in terms of how clear it is, in terms of the...

[00:04:46.340] - Gordon
Sharpness.

[00:04:47.440] - Taylor
Sharpness.

[00:04:47.440] - Gordon
Clarity.

[00:04:49.320] - Taylor
Depth of field, Bokah

[00:04:49.320] - Gordon
We will see. We don't know do we 'til we watch the Stream back.

[00:04:53.600] - Taylor
But yeah, hopefully it should be better. Yeah. So that's kind of what I've been working on. And I also then have my own microphone upstairs that I hook up to, so I have both the camera and the microphone.

[00:05:06.940] - Gordon
So it's a little bit like a portable studio, because you bring it all down here to do, or you will be doing it now, for "This Week With," and then take it back up for the rest of the week when you do your multiple streams.

[00:05:18.530] - Taylor
Yeah. So I mean, I normally keep my camera in my drawer and the tripod I leave down the side of my desk. Because of the way my desk is set up there isn't space to leave it there all the time. And also it's quite a big and heavy rig, so I don't want it to get knocked over and smashed and break and stuff. So I just put it in my drawer when I'm not using it and get it out, which is perfectly fine because I don't need it for, you know, I don't really need it for Zoom meetings. It would be nice, but it's not necessary really.

[00:05:50.100] - Gordon
Well, you know, you have it if you want to impress someone.

[00:05:52.230] - Taylor
Yeah, exactly.

[00:05:52.920] - Gordon
Or you've got something intricate for people to see, and it needs to be clear, you can use that. Very nice. And yeah, please leave a comment below; let us know what you think of it and compare it to previous episodes where we've been using a mobile phone as our camera source.

[00:06:09.630] - Taylor
It would be interesting to go back to you know, maybe one of the first ones we did because that was using a different phone as well.

[00:06:15.500] - Gordon
It was.

[00:06:16.560] - Taylor
And that was one of the first couple videos that we streamed and set it up, and we weren't sure what the best way to do it is. And you know, over time we've perfected the, our kind of travel set up.

[00:06:32.400] - Gordon
Yeah. Yeah, so we should actually you know, we should show you at some point the set up we have now, because you can't see this, but we have a microphone just here. There's a microphone stand that's going across the top here. The cable comes out of here comes all the way down into the laptop, which is sitting on the table here. And then the camera source is going into the laptop as well so that we can stream it.

[00:06:57.770] - Taylor
And we now have a spare camera that we could... So we can...

[00:07:02.700] - Gordon
Okay. I'm not sure how we hook up two sources, but we could, yeah I guess we could because OBS allows it, so...

[00:07:09.180] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:07:09.180] - Gordon
Yeah, we could do that. We'll have to see. Let's just see if we like this first of all, because we might not stick with this. We might go back.

[00:07:16.081] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:07:16.090] - Gordon
Depends. Yeah. So very good.

[00:07:19.180] - Taylor
So how about you this week? What's your topic?

[00:07:21.780] - Gordon
So, my topic. We're whizzing through it this week, aren't we? My topic this week is 'site maps.'

[00:07:28.760] - Taylor
Okay.

[00:07:28.760] - Gordon
Now a site map, for those who don't already know, is something you have on a website. And what it is is, it's a document which is normally in XML format, which is just a list basically that computers can understand.

[00:07:46.180] - Taylor
Yep.

[00:07:46.180] - Gordon
And it's a list of all of the pages in your website. Now, the reason for having this file is that search engines look for it. And if they find a site map, they know that instead of having to do a manual 'crawl,' which is what they call it. When they go from one page, follow all the links to another page, follow links to another page and try and find all of your pages; it just goes and looks for this sitemap file and once it's found that sitemap file, that site map has a list of all of the pages in the site, which the search engine uses to index your site.

[00:08:25.180] - Taylor
Yep.

[00:08:25.180] - Gordon
It basically knows where to go. And that's why the site map is really important. And there are lots of ways to do this. Most of them are automated, so that if you change, or add, or delete pages to your site, the site map will automatically be updated. However, it's really difficult to visualise what your site looks like. You know, that you've got [cough]oh pardon me. You know you've got sort of one, a home page; you know you've got maybe another four top level pages, as in you've got one click from the home page to get to it. But then you've got secondary level pages, which is two clicks from the home page to get to. And then you may have third level and fourth level and fifth level, and it may be that you have quite a lot. It depends on your site. It might be that you've got an e-commerce site, for example, which may have hundreds, maybe even thousands of pages, which is why having a site map is essential to make sure all of your products are indexed. But as a visual person, I like to be able to see what a site looks like, and it's not easy to do unless you have something that I've just got, which is called a 'visual site map tool.' Now this is really cool. I've forgotten the URL, but it's visualsitemaps.io possibly, don't quote me on that. Look in the notes; the notes will have the correct URL. But it's a site that I found a little while ago and they have a free package which allows you to crawl or index 25 pages every month.

[00:10:18.380] - Taylor
Okay.

[00:10:19.600] - Gordon
So what you can do is, when it runs out of credits if you like, it will then wait until, it will pause that crawl, until maybe next month, when you get another 25 credits and you can then continue crawling that site. Or you can have a paid account, which is what I've got. And this allows you to get a really good visual...

[00:10:44.460] - Taylor
Bird's eye view.

[00:10:46.480] - Gordon
Yeah, it is. Because it's, well it's a bit like a family tree. [cough] Oh dear, what's going on? I've got a show to... Well, I've got my hosting tomorrow. I hope I don't have a cough tomorrow. That'll be terrible. It's a bit like a family tree in reverse. So normally the family tree would be you at the bottom and then you would go up the tree and it would branch out to all of your relatives. Whereas it's the opposite for this: you would have your home page at the top and it would branch out going downwards. And the visual site maps that it creates make it really easy for both you, and your customers, and anyone who's a site owner, to actually get a good feel for how their site looks and how, you know if it's top heavy in one area; if it's got a whole section that is taking a lot of customers to it and pulling people away from other pages, which might be more important, that sort of thing. You can also do site maps for your competitors sites, so you don't have to own the website to be able to see the site map for it. So you can look at your competitors and see what they're doing; how they're laying out their site; how the structure of the site has been created, and maybe learn from it and decide you know, maybe they're doing something better than you are and you could then change what you're doing and improve it. Which at the end of the day will hopefully improve conversions if that is your, whatever your goal is.

[00:12:23.500] - Taylor
Yeah. I mean, if you've got a funnel, for example, it could be a nice way to visualise how they're all laid out, how the flow looks, for example.

[00:12:34.660] - Gordon
Yeah. Yeah. And most people, not all people, most people are visual people, and so they'll be able to see it and understand it better than if they were to see it written down. And you can very easily go through and make a drawing of your site map. Chances are you're going to miss things, though. Having it automated is very useful. And one of the tools that this site map, visual site map tool that I use, has is that it will allow you to schedule new crawls on existing websites, and it will compare them with the previous crawl or the first crawl. So you can basically then see what has changed on the pages.

[00:13:22.900] - Taylor
Yep.

[00:13:22.900] - Gordon
And it takes a thumbnail view of every page it goes to, so you can click in and see the whole page. So you get an idea of what the page actually looks like. It's a great way of sort of capturing a website in time as well. So you can see what the website looked like at a particular moment in time, which is you know, quite interesting, I think as well.

[00:13:47.140] - Taylor
Yeah, I agree.

[00:13:47.780] - Gordon
And you can save it out as an XML file, I believe. I think. You can definitely save it out as a PDF file. You can save it out as a CSV file, so you can bring that into spreadsheets. You can save it out as JSON, for programmers. I don't know if you can save, well PDF is probably the closest you can get as image, but you can load that PDF into 'Sketch' or into 'Adobe Illustrator,' because everything is vector, so you'll be able to change it around if you want to sort of have a play and tweak it and see what it might look like if you were to move some of the pages to different places, that sort of thing.

[00:14:28.750] - Taylor
Okay, that sounds really good.

[00:14:30.230] - Gordon
Yeah. So the link for that is in the show notes. As I said, it's something I looked at a long time ago, but I've just recently sort of taken the plunge and bought it, and they've had a lot of people buy it just recently, and as of this moment in time, it's incredibly slow because their servers just are unable to handle the amount of traffic that has been generated by all these new customers. And they are looking into fixing that. But normally, under normal circumstances, they say it takes about 6 seconds per page to index.

[00:15:07.440] - Taylor
So that probably, I'm just trying to think, because of the way I saw it the other day is that it takes a screenshot as well, which I'm guessing is going to be using some sort of NodeJS back end to kind of create a virtual browser to then take a screenshot of...

[00:15:28.060] - Gordon
Possibly.

[00:15:28.850] - Taylor
To generate an image, and then obviously save it to their database.

[00:15:32.140] - Gordon
Yep.

[00:15:32.140] - Taylor
So that's probably what takes the most time as they've just got to visit the page, screenshot it, move onto the next one.

[00:15:37.400] - Gordon
Yep. And this is early days for this software as well. I'd like to see sort of mobile versions or responsive views so you can see what a site looks like and then click in and see what it might look like with different sized images, different size browsers and devices. But, you know, there's lots of things that can come on this. I just thought I'd mention it because there might be people out there who would find that useful so that they can visualise what their website looks like. It's something that I'm going to be doing when I build websites for new customers. I'm going to be, once I've finished and it's all been signed off, I'm going to make a visual site map of it and send them a PDF so that they can see what their site looks like, and the branches that come off each page.

[00:16:24.780] - Taylor
That sounds great.

[00:16:25.940] - Gordon
Yeah. So I think that's everything from me.

[00:16:29.380] - Taylor
Yeah, and me as well.

[00:16:30.910] - Gordon
Okay. Well, thank you for joining us. As always, you can like, share and subscribe. We're on YouTube and on Facebook.

[00:16:38.200] - Taylor
You can also go to our website: thisweekwith.co.uk to find all of our past episodes and see if we've spoken about any topics. I did have a couple of suggestions for future topics, which was more like business and I guess, not agency but kind of getting clients.

[00:16:57.460] - Gordon
Okay.

[00:16:57.460] - Taylor
Which is something someone was interested in. So we can talk about that. And if there's anything else you guys would be interested in, or girls, please let us know.

[00:17:07.820] - Gordon
Yeah. If you're having any challenges, or something that you're struggling with, let us know. And if we've got any experience or information we can pass on.

[00:17:16.010] - Taylor
We can just give our view on it, even if we don't know much on it, get someone else's perspective, even if it's something completely different to what we do.

[00:17:24.730] - Gordon
And we know lots of people, so the chances are, if we don't know much about that particular topic we'll know someone who does, and we can send you their direction, in their direction. So thank you for joining us. Next week we will be here at 1pm on Friday. Until then, my name's Gordon, I'm from Drayson Design.

[00:17:45.000] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.

[00:17:47.270] - Gordon
You got it right this week.

[00:17:48.290] - Taylor
I did yes.

[00:17:48.740] - Gordon
If you don't know what I'm talking about, go and watch last week's. See you next week.

[00:17:52.500] - Taylor
Bye.

[00:17:52.900] - Gordon
Bye bye.

This Week's Topics

Show Notes