[00:00:09.15] - Gordon
Hello.

[00:00:09.25] - Taylor
Hello.

[00:00:10.04] - Gordon
My name's Gordon from Drayson Design.

[00:00:11.29] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from the Creative Tinker.

[00:00:13.25] - Gordon
And welcome to "This Week With Taylor and Gordon," a weekly podcast and vidcast where we talk about things that have affected our businesses over the last seven days. And welcome back if you've been with us before.

[00:00:24.18] - Taylor
Welcome back.

[00:00:25.22] - Gordon
It's been a busy week for me. I've had lots of shows, lots of things going on. I've had my drama teaching classes which are going well. I was expecting the principal to come to my last lesson to basically check up on me. But she wasn't able to make it, so I was getting stressed out over that and didn't need to in the end. And as it happens, the class went really well, so I was really pleased. But anyway, we're on half term now because in the UK, we've got half term coming up, and for Drama Kids it's the next two weeks. Anything of interest that happened to you this week?

[00:01:06.01] - Taylor
So I have been migrating a couple of websites to xCloud, which is a server control panel, which I have access to, and I thought I'd move them over, give them a try. I've been clearing out all of my emails, getting down. I had a lot that've been just sitting there, that half need dealing with, half were waiting for stuff. So I made sure I did something with them. And then obviously, if I need to revisit them or if I need to follow up with them, I've put them into my calendar to make sure I can follow up.

[00:01:40.03] - Gordon
Very good.

[00:01:41.14] - Taylor
And yeah, just getting organised and getting websites launched.

[00:01:45.22] - Gordon
Lovely. Okay, so let's get straight into our topics for the week. Would you like to go first?

[00:01:52.06] - Taylor
You can go first this week.

[00:01:53.26] - Gordon
Okay, mine's going to be quite simple today. I was out collecting a package that was delivered, or attempted to be delivered, yesterday and no one was here. And so UPS, in their wisdom, decided to drop it off at a dry cleaners and then tell me that's where they were going to put it. Now, that's all well and good, but the dry cleaners in question is in the middle of a town. Parking is impossible, and it took me about an hour, about an hour to go and get it. And I was really upset because it was just too much time out of my day just to do something like that. And that was only one of the packages I was expecting. I didn't realise there were two packages. And the other one arrived when I got home. It's like within 10 minutes, the package arrived. But they've changed the way they do things, but I'm not sure they've checked with their customers to see if they like it. So I said to the man when he arrived, I said to the UPS man, UPS. "I don't like your new system of dropping it off." He said, "Oh, where would be easier?" I said, "Well, just put it in a safe place like everyone else does when they deliver." He said, "Oh, okay." We've got a safe place that you can put packages if nobody's in. And UPS didn't want to do that originally, but I don't know if he took it on board. He said, "Okay," and walked off. But they've tried something new. While I was getting my package, I happened to go in and get myself a packet of crisps and a drink, and I came across a can of Tango, which is mango-flavoured, which I'd never seen before. It's sugar-free, which I don't normally like, but I do like mango, so I thought I would give it a go. And it's not bad. It's okay. Tango have tried something new, and they are seeing how it works in the marketplace. It might be that it's a limited edition. It might be that they're just going to see how it sells, find out if people like it or not, and then decide whether they're going to make it a continual product going onwards. But my point is that whatever it is you're doing at the moment, you may be able to offer variations or alternatives to it, and you might find that your customers like it and love it, want to do it, want to use it. You might find that they don't like it at all. Another example for you: we order food for our dog that comes in little packs, and we put them in the freezer and then every three days or so we get one out, we cut it into sixths and he has one sixth for breakfast and one sixth for dinner. And that's been working really well for us, for quite a long time now. And they've gone and made a change. So the next food that we order from them is going to be automatically cut into four pieces. So it's going to be in quarters, which is no use to us. We don't want quarters, we want sixths. So I emailed them back and said, "Great that you're trying something new. This won't work for us, though. Can we make sure we just get the normal food without any cuts in it or impressions in it?" And they came and they said, "No, it's for everyone now. All of our food is being done like this." It's like ahh, so they got the feedback from me that it's not great because it's going to make our life just that tiny bit more difficult. I mean, it's not a lot more difficult going from quarters to six, but when you have just a normal slab of meat, if you like, cutting it into six is nice and easy. If it's already cut into four, that's not so good. So they're trying something new, and I've told them that I don't think it's going to work for us and it depends if everyone else says the same. Our dog is going mad. Do you want to have a quick look? See if there's someone there. There might be someone at the door. So, yeah, what I am trying to say is that you should try new things, research them, and then just get feedback and find out if it's the sort of thing that your customers want and like, or if they don't like it and they don't want it, in which case you can scrap it and have a look and see if there's anything else new that you can try. So that is it, really. I'm sure there's going to be some people who can take something away from that. I think I should take something away from that and continually update and improve my product range and see if there's anything that I can do that my customers like better than what I'm doing at the moment. That's it. What would you like to talk about?

[00:07:04.21] - Taylor
So mine actually follows on quite nicely from yours. Mine is about iterating your processes and also iterating your products. So I have a child theme/starter site that I've built and I've probably put 40 plus hours maybe into it. And it's not something I've put 40 hours into straight away. I probably put a good couple of weeks in and spent a majority of my time working on that. However, what happens is as I'm building out new sites, I come across the need for a new functionality or I go, "that would be quite useful. And I've done this on three sites now, maybe I should add this into the core of my child theme." So what I've been doing is I've been iterating as I go. So as I'm building out sites and I've come across something that I've done more than once or I've gone, "actually, that might be quite useful. I could make this a standardised thing that I can reuse in other projects." I will pretty much just load up my starter site then and there and integrate it. I have a running change log of all of the changes that I've made and I've added version numbers so I can keep track of what was added and what's got, what's new, what's changed, what's been fixed and things like that.

[00:08:24.23] - Gordon
And that's important. If you go back to a site that you've done in the past and you need to add something, you can then look at the starter site version that you've got and see on your change log what's been added and if you need to update the starter site, for example.

[00:08:39.13] - Taylor
Yeah, exactly. A lot of the starter sites, I can't just update because they have a lot of custom code that are written for that site, but it at least gives me a ballpark of, "okay, this is the kind of functionality that I have. This is what I'm going to be missing because the change log has got later things. But I've been doing this in a lot of other places." I've been iterating on my processes for creating and managing my projects. I spoke about this a while ago where I created stages, and then I've pre-configured a lot of tasks that need doing so that there's a more standardised process, and so I don't forget things. It's very easy to forget things that need doing. If you've got them laid out and already set up as a boiler plate, it helps me really make sure that all of the steps are followed, all processes are completed. And there's been times when I've gone, "Oh, what do I need to do?" Because it's all written down, I just need to go through. Launching a website I used to hate. It used to take me ages because there's so many little things. But when I just broke it down and said, "this is what a launched website will look like," it takes maybe half an hour now. And that's because I've refined my process, looked at ways I can improve it, but also iterated upon it. If I find that something I'm doing is taking too long or there's a better way to do it, I've updated the process. And so it's just looking at ways you can keep iterating on your processes and your products, like you were saying, is adding new things in. If you add a new service or you add a new feature to one of the products, if you, for example, have a website care plan, for example, and you're adding something new in, see if your clients like it. And yeah, it's good to get feedback. And I don't think we ask enough about getting feedback. I manage a couple of different products and I get feedback regularly for those rather than my agency side. And I'm always trying to improve and try to make it better for the user, really.

[00:10:49.22] - Gordon
Yeah, I think it's good. Otherwise, you're just going to stay still and you're going to get stagnant and you're not going to be relevant anymore. We have to move and improve otherwise, we end up going backwards, really. So yeah, that's really good. Well done. Anything that you have seen recently that has come from these improvements that you've been making? Anything you can measure by? Because the reason for doing it is so that you get more customers, you can charge more, or it takes less time, or something else. So is there anything that you use to measure whether something has been worthwhile doing?

[00:11:26.22] - Taylor
No, but it's something I might look at doing in seeing if I can track how long projects are taking. I think that's probably the biggest one is tracking how long projects take and also how long each stage takes. I think is a very very good marker because it allows you to see where you're spending the most time and whether or not the reason you're spending the most time is because you're putting the effort into that, because of unforeseen things, or you're just not estimating properly of how long you think a project will take. And so that can help gauge, I guess, how long a project will take and also when you have availability next. If you can't measure-

[00:12:11.02] - Gordon
They have a knock-on effect, don't they?

[00:12:12.24] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:12:13.09] - Gordon
If something takes longer, then you're going to be later starting a new project and all of a sudden it can get out of control and deadlines loom.

[00:12:22.07] - Taylor
I've started doing this for Snippet Club as well. The amount of times I've written a tutorial and then created a code for a tutorial and then it's just sat ready to be written and uploaded. And because I just didn't enjoy the actual writing part, I've tried to streamline that and make sure that I can get everything that I need done and posted in a process that works for me, trying to do it then and there rather than leaving it in the backlog where I forget about the intricacies of the tutorial or just don't get around to uploading it. And by the time I do get around uploading it, someone's already released something.

[00:13:05.02] - Gordon
Something else, yeah. And you've done all that work for nothing in the end. Yeah, very good. Anything else you want to say today?

[00:13:11.20] - Taylor
I don't think so.

[00:13:12.22] - Gordon
Lovely. Well, thank you very much for joining us. As always, you can find us on YouTube. Please like, share and subscribe.

[00:13:19.19] - Taylor
You can also go to our website thisweekwith.co.uk to find all of our past episodes and anything we may have spoken about.

[00:13:26.11] - Gordon
And if you would prefer to listen to us, we are on all the major podcast platforms. Thank you for joining us. We will be back with you on Friday at 1pm. Until then, my name is Gordon and I'm from Drayson Design.

[00:13:40.11] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.

[00:13:43.21] - Gordon
Goodbye.

[00:13:44.15] - Taylor
Bye.

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Show Notes