Jesse Friedman: Welcome to Impressive Hosting, where we uncover the core tenets of great WordPress hosting. I am your host, Jesse Friedman. Before we dive in, remember to check out impressive host. It’s where you can comment on episodes, ask follow-up questions, and submit questions for upcoming guests. You’ll also find all our links to follow, like, and subscribe. Wherever you listen with me is Jeff Golenski, a very close friend, colleague, and someone who knows a whole lot about product management, design, user experience, and helping agencies to be successful online. You know, I mentioned before that you can go to impressive host to ask questions. I think a lot of you are gonna have some follow-up questions for Jeff because what we were talking about in the last episode was around what a hosting company needs to do to better attract agencies and help them to be successful. But we’re also talking about what agencies need to do to help with their customers, to help them sell better within the WordPress ecosystem to keep them within the WordPress ecosystem, all that. So if you have any other follow-up questions for Jeff, I am hanging out with him in person enough that I can actually punch him in the arm or something if he doesn’t answer. So I’ll make sure you get an answer to your question.

Jeffrey Golenski: Always resorting to violence. Come on Jesse.

Jesse Friedman: Not always. Just with you.

Jeffrey Golenski: I mean, I’m pretty active on LinkedIn and Blue Sky so if y’all have any questions feel free to reach out and happy to answer.

Jesse Friedman: Yeah, that’s perfect. All right. So before we jump back into what we were talking about, you know, it’s funny ’cause you are always at the cutting edge of technology and design and everything else. And it’s funny because you also kind of balance that as a juxtaposition within your own life where you are very connected to the planet and you’re very connected to nature. And I feel like you work incredibly hard within your working hours to be on the cutting edge of things. And then you drop it all and you disappear into the forest with a fat-tire bike or you’re kayaking or doing something like that. So, you know, like, just on a personal aspect, for anybody who’s listening at home, how do you balance that? Like, how does that work for you in terms of unplugging and like reconnecting, regrounding yourself? Like, I think that anyone who’s listening to this podcast can benefit from that these days.

Jeffrey Golenski: Yeah, it’s incredibly difficult and I think it takes an extreme amount of discipline over time to figure that out. Like my laptop doesn’t leave my office. Right. And my phone, I put away at night, make sure it’s away from the bed, things like that when I can. But like, I don’t know, especially around nature, it’s like, I try, if I’m going for a hike, the phone stays in the backpack unless I need it as my camera. Right? But like, just staying away from that, I think is incredibly difficult and I find it very important to have hobbies that are away from tech. I mean, as much as I love technology, I think it’s extremely important to get away because sometimes it feels like the earth is spinning faster than it should be. Things move so fast in capitalism at times. And it can be draining. So I find that very important.

Jesse Friedman: You know, it’s no kidding. It’s funny because you and I work in this industry, it feels very much like sometimes I think when you and I were coming up at least, we felt very much like we had to be super connected outside of work as well. Because how could we possibly be good at our jobs if we’re not spending our free time reading about what’s coming next and testing out the new things and trying out the new technologies and everything else. And like the reality of the situation, I think is that there are a lot of definite truths that exist out there that allow you to kind of like, rely on that. So we know what a good user experience is regardless of the way in which technology is changing and things are moving underneath of us. We know that we need to provide a good experience for customers. And a lot of that comes straight from just having conversations with them. Before we get into that though, and I want to segue into talking about like your role as a product manager and what that means. But you know, just on the point of technology moving around and kind of unplugging a little bit more, one of the things that I’m actually excited for is, I just got a notice that it’s being shipped in the mail, is that I bought a minimal phone. It’s an e-ink screen and it has a blackberry keyboard type keyboard. So it has a physical QWERTY keyboard. I’m excited for that because I was always interested in these e-ink displays. I have a remarkable tablet for taking notes and journaling and things like that. But the QWERTY keyboard, I think was necessary for an e-ink display because like I still want to be able to text my wife or my daughter or you and say like, I’m coming to something or I’m doing something that I don’t want to be waiting for an e-ink display to slow me down there. I do like the idea of an e-ink kind of like intentionally slowing me down in terms of like the way in which I browse the internet and the doom scrolling and all that stuff. But on the other side of it, you know, we got Apple releasing its glass design or what’s that? The liquid glass. Right.

Jeffrey Golenski: Right? Yeah, for sure. It’s really interesting just to dive back to what you were just saying, I think I wrote a blog post a few years ago, and it’s probably closer to a decade now, but thinking about how we experience technology has always been super curious to me. Like now if we’re sitting here like on our screens and we’re just looking at browsers, most of the time we’re just invoking our sense of vision, right? But when we talk about devices, you know, a lot of people are using more microphones, so they’re invoking their voice, and the physical keyboard is more of a texture and a sense of touch. And so our complete experience changes based on these different devices that we use. And I think your level of joy can also change because the more senses that we invoke, I think the better the experience. So if we talk about things like eating, for example, right? There’s a theory that, you know, if you use utensils and things, you’re not getting the full experience because your sense of taste is invoked, but you’re using a device that disconnects you from the food. Whereas if you use your hands, the sense of touch and texture raises the level of enjoyment. You know, it’s really interesting stuff if you really want to get meta about it.

Jesse Friedman: That is interesting. That must be why I like ballpark franks so much. ‘Cause you eat ’em with your hands. Yeah, but so like, that’s really interesting. So like, you know, we are now getting to a place, like, remember when responsive web design and Ethan Marcotte came out with that article and was talking about how we needed to be ready for that. And then everybody started trying to design for individual devices and they said like, you know, it was that Bruce Lee quote, which I think was actually taken from the Art of War or something where it’s just like, be like water, right? Like, just kind of fit to the form of the device. But now we’re not just talking about the size and the shape of the window, we’re talking about the actual physical way in which the device is interacting with the website or the app or whatever. So I’m interested to try this out, Apple’s glass design. Explain what that is because you and I were talking about that off the air.

Jesse Friedman: Then everybody started trying to design for individual devices and they said, you know, it was that Bruce Lee quote, which I think was actually taken from the Art of War or something where it’s just be like water, right? Just kind of fit to the form of the device.

Jeffrey Golenski: Exactly.

Jesse Friedman: But now we’re not just talking about the size and the shape of the window, we’re talking about the actual physical way in which the device is interacting with the website or the app or whatever. So I’m interested to try this app out, Apple’s glass design. Explain what that is because you and I were talking about that off the air. Basically what it makes it look like it’s transparent by using the camera. Is that what’s going on?

Jeffrey Golenski: Yeah, it’s all the rage this week. What’s fascinating about this, and I don’t think I need to explain it too in-depth, if anyone is listening to this podcast, I’m sure that they’ve seen it somewhere online just this week. And what we’re seeing is over the past several decades, designers are rediscovering things that previous designers designed decades ago. And I remember this whole glass thing was started, I remember back in 2001 when I was just a kid getting into web design and I worked in modified this JavaScript at App Outlet to have a ripply water glass effect on top of my website, which was terrible for performance and accessibility, but it was super cool. And now I’m seeing this coming back after all these years and it’s interesting. But my concern with a lot of these things as a designer is, again, you talked about the web becoming kind of sterile. I almost think it’s becoming like this monoculture sometimes where a group of designers, especially influential folks working at companies like Apple, where they do something, becomes so popular that everyone just copies it and then everything is just the same. So it’s fascinating how our society works in that regard. And it reminds me of, if we dive back to 2015 or so years ago when CSS Zen Garden and the web standards started coming around, bulletproof web design and we had this really flourishing community where everyone was trying so hard to be unique. And I think there was so much fun in that. And I feel like, not to be depressing about it, but it seems like we’re losing some of that and we have lost some of that. I believe it was Luke Dorny who wrote an article maybe a few years ago about the web that we lost and talked a lot about how we’ve lost a lot of that uniqueness.

Jesse Friedman: Yeah. Yeah, I think that I was actually thinking about something, talks about how I’m not on social media, so I’m not actually following this stuff as much. I was actually looking at something that might have been a little bit different in the way in which Apple was using the camera to kind of display what it sees behind it as the background of the phone. You are talking about the glass design of the texture and the layout that they’ve released now as the super sexy, sleek way in which the icons look. And they’re very simple and subtle. And it kind of looks like a liquid display, right?

Jeffrey Golenski: Yeah.

Jesse Friedman: Yeah, two sides of the same coin, I guess maybe, I don’t know. But yeah, so their innovation is through watching and replicating maybe because, you know, we see this in fashion and everything else, right? Like it comes back, it’s cyclical. We see this with the internet as well, and I love this idea that we’re maybe returning to a weird open web and all that. And maybe some of this stuff will allow for us to have the cool Angel Fire type fonts or whatever back and all that. But yeah, so I’m just thinking, you know, where innovation comes into play for you. You are taking feedback from agencies and end customers and you are listening and you’re spending your time hearing what it is, watching the way in which they work. And then you’re converting that into actual roadmap items, what it is that engineers and designers need to create to help improve these experiences. So you are basically innovating based on the feedback that you’re receiving. Is this something that you feel like all hosting companies should be doing? And how does that play into your day-to-day?

Jeffrey Golenski: I think it’s something everybody should be doing, regardless of who you are. If you’re building something online or in any industry really, if it’s the automotive industry, culinary, whatnot, right? There’s a set of problems that people have come across and they need those problems solved. How do we fix those problems? Very high level, right? So what we try and do is focus on determining what the most impactful problems are, where we’re seeing these reoccurring themes happening, what agencies need to do, we’re just trying to build solutions for that. And we’re trying to be innovative while we do those things, we want to be able to create things that are expected. They’re needed, but are new and fun as well. So I think there’s a lot of considerations there.

Jesse Friedman: Yeah. Well I think it’s interesting because the reason I asked that question, and maybe I should have worded it better, because I think, yeah, it was very obvious. Obviously, yes, if you’re building something on the internet, you should be making sure that you’re working with your end customers. But at the same time, we have to remember that a lot of the hosting industry is, so first of all, we have resellers, right? So there’s a lot of people who are marketing things that they’re actually not building.

Jeffrey Golenski: Right.

Jesse Friedman: We have people who are working in this industry who spend a lot of time just opening up their competitors’ websites and their competitors’ platforms and mirror what they’re doing. And I think I see this a lot where there’s a lot of assumption that the pioneers, the leaders in the industry know exactly what they’re doing and so they just start to mimic exactly what they’re doing. And so I get nervous that sometimes that innovation. You know, we mentioned this thing with Apple, they’re bringing back something that’s retro. But you know, Apple also has this history of watching what Android’s doing and then releasing it as innovative and amazing. But in reality it’s already been out for a few years. You know, I remember when the panoramic camera view came out, Android had had that for years, but Apple touted it as the most amazing thing that’s ever happened. I get, you know, in a more, it’s very much, it’s a lot more specific in the hosting industry, but I get a little nervous that there’s a lot of people kind of just watching, and that’s their level of innovation is just through watching, not necessarily working directly with end customers.

Jeffrey Golenski: Yeah, that’s a great point. I think there needs to be a balance. I mean, everyone looks at what everyone else is doing, of course, but you take a lot of risk, I think when you do that. If you’re looking at a competitive platform and you’re like, well, so and so is doing this, we’re gonna do it too. It’s like, but how effective is that? What problems are they solving? Are they just running an AB test that might be failing? You don’t know.

Jesse Friedman: That’s exactly right. Yeah.

Jeffrey Golenski: So let’s just circumvent that. That’s just a lot of wasted time and opportunity and let’s just discover what the actual problems are and solve for those problems, you know?

Jesse Friedman: Yeah.

Jeffrey Golenski: The best way to do that, I mean, from my history in design, I’ve always been really curious on how do I know what I’m designing is solving the problems it needs to solve. Sure it’s gonna, I wanna make it look great, but UX is always a major concern for me. And if it’s not fixing what it needs to fix, then it’s bad design, right? So I think a lot of what I’ve tried to do over my career is validate that work and you know, whether that’s user research prior or if that’s looking at quantitative data after to see what people are doing and how they’re using the thing. I think that can really help guide those problem solutions, you know?

Jesse Friedman: Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I mean a lot of what we do for hosting companies with the WP Cloud team is to make sure that they are getting the ability and empowered by WP Cloud to,

Jeffrey Golenski: The best way to do that, I mean, from my history and design, I’ve always been really curious on like, how do I know what I’m designing is solving the problems it needs to solve. Sure it’s gonna, I want to make it look great, but UX is always a major concern for me. And if it’s not fixing what it needs to fix, then it’s bad design, right? So I think a lot of what I’ve tried to do over my career is validate that work and you know, whether that’s user research prior or if that’s looking at quantitative data after to see what people are doing and how they’re using the thing. I think that can really help guide those problem solutions, you know?

Jesse Friedman: Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I mean a lot of what we do for hosting companies with the WP Cloud team is to make sure that they are getting the ability and empowered by WP Cloud to, you know, to run their business the way they want to, to go to market the way they want to. And WP Cloud operates underneath that as an API layer to allow them to kind of differentiate themselves in the market through, you know, any number of means. They can segment their customers, they can create niches, they can do different hosting plans, something super innovative and unique, and we will focus on the infrastructure, the speed, and all that stuff, and let you do what you do best, which is connect with your end customer. And you know, I think that that’s something that’s reflective in the work that you’re doing with A4A, right? Like, you guys know that what you’re selling is something that’s built on a platform that’s gonna be reliable, safe, and secure. And so it becomes, you’re spending a lot less time trying to convince people about the underlying infrastructure probably, and spending more time trying to relate to them around their workflows and the way in which they operate and the tools that they’re using to help them to be more successful. And that’s a common theme that we see throughout this podcast is that as we start to uncover what is super important for a hosting company to be successful, it’s a lot about this aligning of success. They align their success to the success of their end customer, and I think that you can see that really. It’s very evident when you look at a hosting company who’s very focused on just acquiring customers. They’re just using advertising to bring in customers as fast as they can, and they don’t have this responsibility or self-appointed responsibility to the end customers success and to the WordPress ecosystem. They just care about the bottom line. Let’s bring in customers and we know we have some level of churn, but we’re still gonna make a lot of profit. But when you think about the way in which A4A works, this is you taking a product that’s built by two other hosting companies, then you’re building a layer on top of that that provides solutions and tools to help agencies be more successful on top of those things. So it’s really interesting because, you know, how much of your work is actually impacting the way in which hosting is delivered, or the way in which these tools are delivered, or are you really more focused on taking things that are built by other people and making them work for agencies, and kind of adapting them to the needs of these customers.

Jeffrey Golenski: It’s a great question. It’s really mainly, I would say, it’s about improving efficiencies. So again, like you mentioned, you know, we kind of connect the dots between all these different products within the Automattic world. So it’s really helping agencies understand you’re gonna get the best hosting of course, but you also need tools to enhance the functionality of your site. So let’s see how Pressable and Woo can work best together, right? To just give you that one-stop solution. So there are multiple layers on top of that. And I think depending on the agency, we work with them all in different ways to help them understand that and also help their clients understand that. So there’s a lot.

Jesse Friedman: And how does that impact, like what is the role of a product manager in that, in that way? Like what are you doing day to day to make the product better?

Jeffrey Golenski: Yeah. A lot of what we’re doing within Automattic for Agencies, again, is building another layer on top of all these products. So we’re building things, like I mentioned, the referral stuff, being able to purchase and manage all your products in one space, which is great. We want to build these tools that really help enhance, again, I mentioned like we have the two layers of customers. We have the agencies and their clients. We want to help agencies reinforce their value to their clients. Building things like a reporting system to, you know, help build that trust between clients and agencies. And then we offer like, you know, the site management tools and things like that, plugin management security tools and all that through Jetpack as well. So it’s really like a really comprehensive suite. But I think the beauty of it all is, again, all these agencies have these established workflows, or maybe not, maybe they’re fresh, but most of the time they have these established workflows and we want to really allow that flexibility. So it’s like, sure, we want you to host with us because we have the best hosting that’s built specifically for WordPress. Of course. Sorry if this sounds like an ad, but if you want to be part of our program and you have hosting with a third party, that’s fine with us. You can come in and still get those benefits through us. Totally cool.

Jesse Friedman: Yeah. You know, it speaks to something that, you know, we talk about within this podcast often because of the fact that I work on WP Cloud and a lot of times we interview somebody from Automattic. There’s this power in the diversity of hosting, right? It challenges us to be better as a ecosystem. And so, you know, a lot of times Automattic could take the position of saying like, no, this is only gonna operate within our tool set. You know, create that kind of walled garden, the way in which Apple does, and that, you know, creating bespoke plugs so that like, you know, you can’t charge your phone unless you’re using an Apple certified device or whatever, right? Like Automattic could have taken that position years ago, but it didn’t. What it did was it said, we’re gonna create a higher standard of excellence, work on these products in a way that, you know, we can then educate the rest of the ecosystem and say, this is the standard we’re setting, this is where we are, this is what we’re working on, and we’re gonna make it available to you. Like, you know, you think about the genesis of like the Jetpack plugin, regardless of how you feel about the Jetpack plugin, it is a plugin that serves millions of customers with free services that cost Automattic millions of dollars. And we do it because we want to ensure that the WordPress experience is as good as it can be. And so one of the more complex things out there is setting up a CDN, right? Like if you are an end, you’re a business owner, and you have no idea how to set up a CDN, you don’t know how to, you know, you’re gonna turn on your computer sometimes, the idea that you’re going to, you know, you’re…

Jeffrey Golenski: You shut your computer off. I haven’t shut my computer off in years, man.

Jesse Friedman: This is exactly what I’m talking about. These services are perfect for you, Jeff. No, but like, you know, you think about the fact that like we have this very low barrier of entry into WordPress. It’s not hard to get set up. All you need is a credit card to build a website these days. And then, so then you’re being told like your site’s not performant. You need to speed it up. Well, the best way to do that is get a CDN. Think about how hard that is for someone who has no idea what they’re doing, right?

Jeffrey Golenski: Mm-hmm.

Jesse Friedman: And so then we start to think about the ways in which we can integrate that directly into our services. WP Cloud comes directly integrated with a CDN out of the box. You can’t use it without it, honestly. Maybe you can, but that’s not the point. The point is, is that it comes directly integrated so that we are solving these problems for these customers in the end. But Jetpack has its image accelerators used to be called Photon, right? And it’s an image content delivery network specifically for images. And now it does like JavaScript and CSS static files, things like that, but the fact that Automattic gave that out to the WordPress community, think about how much that costs to run right across millions of sites that are using this every single day. And so it speaks to this idea that like, you know, we’re not… There’s enough WordPress for everybody, right? There’s plenty of competition that makes us all better, but at the end of the day, like we can all still work together in a way that provides a great WordPress experience without sacrificing that in the face of competition. So I think that’s really great that A4A kind of works with no matter who, you know, whoever you’re bringing to the table in terms of a hosting company.

Jeffrey Golenski: Yeah, USB-C of agency programs. No, but it’s interesting, you know, you just went on a nice long explanation about CDNs and to just tie back our conversation earlier, it’s like, what’s the whole purpose of a CDN, right? It’s to make a site as performant as it can be, right? And so agencies are concerned with that because they have to be, I mean, they just want a site to work and be online all the time and be as fast as it can be. And they really have to dive down into the technical levers to make it all happen. And part of my job is to make that as automated as possible, right?

Jeffrey Golenski: Yeah,

Jesse Friedman: Jeffrey Golenski: USBC of agency programs. No, but it’s interesting, you know, you just went on a nice long explanation about CDNs and to just tie back our conversation earlier, it’s like, what’s the whole purpose of a CDN, right? It’s to make a site as performant as it can be, right? And so agencies are concerned with that because they have to be. I mean, they just want a site to work and be online all the time and be as fast as it can be. And they really have to dive down into the technical levers to make it all happen. And part of my job is to make that as automated as possible, right?

Jesse Friedman: Yeah. Very cool. Yeah, I like that. I mean, we used to, when you and I worked on the Jetpack team together, we used to talk about these things as light switch features. This idea that it just works and all the configuring and all that other stuff is optional. Like it just, you flip the switch and it just operates and then you can go in if you have more experience, you can go in and solve for it later. And I think that’s a lesson that a hosting company can take. is that like, you know, you can provide an experience to an end customer

Jeffrey Golenski: Mm-hmm.

Jesse Friedman: that is simultaneously opinionated and helping them to solve a specific problem, but kind of makes it accessible by anyone no matter what level of experience they have. And then based on your level of experience, you can kind of expose additional features and settings and configurations. To allow them to do like, you know, some fine-tuning and things like that. But having it work as a light switch feature out of the box is something I think every hosting company can benefit from, whether it’s a CDN, caching, you know, DDoS protection, WAF, whatever.

Jeffrey Golenski: Yeah. It’s for all my fellow design nerds who might be watching or listening, that the term is progressive disclosure, right? It’s like you only reveal certain features or functionality when it’s relevant to the user at that explicit time. So it’s

Jesse Friedman: Yeah.

Jeffrey Golenski: I think there’s also an education aspect to it, like, I’m a huge fan. Like WordPress.com just released a new performance tool and sure, there are all these tools you can do. There’s like performance monitoring. It can tell you on any given day versus another day when your site was more or less performant based on everything from service to image compression. Right? And then if something isn’t that performant. They’ll tell you why and how you can fix it. So in the future, if it’s user-related, you can then prevent that from happening, right? If you’re uploading images or video that aren’t compressed or optimized, you know, in the future you can prevent that because there’s also, aside from the hosting, there’s also the human error that can happen too. So yeah.

Jesse Friedman: Yeah. All right. So we talked a lot about like what a hosting company would want to hear in terms of how to communicate with agencies and the benefit of a product manager to help innovate on their product line. Let me ask you a question that, let’s get into some secret sauce here. If I’m a, you can relate to this. Imagine you’re a designer who is focused purely on designing and that’s the only thing that you do. Maybe you design logos, brands, you maybe design a website or something, but then you pass it off to somebody else. And you are thinking to yourself like, I can’t get into running a full-blown agency. I can’t do the hosting, I can’t do the development and all that stuff. What would you tell that person today? Like have things changed? Like do we have enough tools now? AI hosting that comes bundled with all the pieces, the functionality you need? Like can someone who has just design experience suddenly start running a full-blown agency?

Jeffrey Golenski: Oh, of course we see a lot of design-led agencies too. We have a few that we work with often. I think to get back to your prior point, like I think there are too many tools available and that’s part of what’s daunting, especially in the WordPress ecosystem, right. Choice is now, it has like a double-edged sword where there’s too much, there’s decision paralysis and there’s a lot of time and effort that may be wasted trying to discover the best tool, the most efficient tool. And what we see is like a lot of agencies simply don’t have the time. To dig through all the different plugins that are available or hosting that’s available. And so part of our job is to tell them what tools are the best for different jobs and things like that.

Jesse Friedman: Yeah.

Jeffrey Golenski: To talk more about your design question, I don’t know if you have any more specific questions about that to help me kind of

Jesse Friedman: Well, so like, let’s say I’m a designer and I’m currently getting some work off of Fiverr or something like that, right? And I’m designing landing pages or I’m designing logos or whatever, and I keep getting questions like, Hey, can you just make this into a website for me? And their answer is maybe no, because I don’t have the technical experience to do that.

Jeffrey Golenski: Mm-hmm.

Jesse Friedman: What advice would you give them to maybe say like, Hey, you can actually expand your business into running all the components that are needed to build a website and run the hosting and everything. Like, I guess I’m kind of giving you the floor to speak to like the value that A4 delivers or other agency programs that maybe empowers someone who’s currently focused on a very specific solution that maybe can expand into a wider area of business and actually grow and evolve.

Jeffrey Golenski: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I think, you know, as we, we’re halfway through the 2020s now, it’s a lot of the tools, especially in the WordPress ecosystem, are a lot easier to build with. Again, we mentioned early on in the call, it was like when WordPress came about, it was very dev-focused. The reason I got into it, I was a designer at first and I became a front-end engineer just so I could build with WordPress, right? Customize my themes. And before I knew it, I was writing PHP and all that sort of thing. So now, especially as a designer getting into the market, like it’s, I think it’s a bit easier in terms of all the tools that are available, whether you’re talking about the block editor with WordPress or you’re talking about Framer, or Figma just released their site functionality and I think building is a lot easier in the hosting aspect. I think it’s just once you find a good host, you don’t need to worry about it too much. You set it up. You get your site spun up, you start building, and then you can just focus on delivering the solution to if you have clients and things like that. So I don’t know if that

Jesse Friedman: Yeah.

Jeffrey Golenski: Jesse Friedman: Yeah, it does. You know, and I think it’s interesting to think that like, you know, as an, if I’m that designer.

Jeffrey Golenski: Jesse Friedman: I guess the advice I would give them is, I’m biased, right? But I’d say find a WP Cloud powered partner, whether that’s Pressable or WordPress.com, or Bluehost Cloud, or Conveo, or the list goes on in terms of those partners. Find someone like that because they’re gonna take care of all the hard parts of hosting for you. And then layer on top of that, services that you wanna provide to help solve building out a website. There’s so many AI tools out there now that I feel like, you know, you can get to a place where you’re taking designs and branding and you’re good at that stuff and you’re good at tweaking and styling things that you can rely on these other site builder tools to kind of get you most of the way there. Use the WordPress site editor to kind of do all the tweaking and the specific things that you need to do to change that design to kind of fit your client’s profile. I feel like at this point, if you are, if you are only doing one small aspect of a larger web design portfolio, it’s probably because it’s just your passion. That’s what you love to do. But I feel like the tools and the hosting and everything else has been solved in a way that you can expand into that anytime.

Jeffrey Golenski: Yeah, I think a lot of what you’re describing too, it’s sort of like a bandwidth issue. When I say bandwidth, I don’t mean in terms of like speed or loading times or anything I’m talking about. It used to be if you had an idea, you would need to take a lot of time to realize that idea, whether that be through coding or whatnot, right? Even designers, you would need to take time in whatever design tool. Back in the day it was Photoshop or Sketch or whatever, and it would take a long time to realize that idea. Now you have an idea, and then you’ve got all these AI tools like Cursor that can just handle that bandwidth issue for you, right? You have an

Jesse Friedman: Right.

Jeffrey Golenski: idea, maybe it’s for an additional WordPress, and you wanna build like a cool block for the editor. You don’t know how to code, but you really wanna see this functionality built into it. You can just have a tool like that build it for you, and your idea gets realized so much quicker. So I think that’s fascinating.

Jesse Friedman: Yeah, yeah. No, I agree. And I think it’s empowering. ‘Cause a lot of times people are saying like, AI is gonna take us out of the job market. But I think what it’s actually gonna do is empower the people to do a lot more than they ever could before. And I, you know, I look at something like, the other day I tested Bluehost Cloud’s AI site builder.

Jeffrey Golenski:

Maybe it’s for an additional WordPress site, and you want to build a cool block for the editor. You don’t know how to code, but you really want to see this functionality built into it. You can just have a tool like that build it for you, and the idea gets realized so much quicker. So I think that’s fascinating.

Jesse Friedman:

Yeah, I agree. And I think it’s empowering because a lot of times people are saying AI is gonna take us out of the job market. But I think what it’s actually gonna do is empower people to do a lot more than they ever could before. I look at something like the other day I tested Bluehost Cloud’s AI site builder.

Jeffrey Golenski:

Mm-hmm.

Jesse Friedman:

And it was cool because I gave it a prompt. I said basically that I’m an author and I’m building a website to showcase my books, and it launched a full-blown website powered by WordPress on WP Cloud in minutes. And it had all this dummy content in there and everything, and it completely erased the blank canvas problem. And then I think about Automattic’s Big Sky. It’s doing the same thing. It’s taking a slightly different approach, looking at it from a different perspective, but still using AI to take in your feedback and turn it into a WordPress powered website that uses blocks and everything else. And when you eliminate that blank canvas problem, you’re helping DIYers. But I think what’s really interesting is that we’re getting to a place where maybe people are commercializing that. I think it would be really interesting to see you take on a new client and you’re like, hey, I’m only offering this $4,000 website package. It gets you six templates and a blog or whatever. And they say, well, I only have 200 bucks and I don’t know how to do this stuff. I don’t want to become a web designer. You could maybe take that 200 bucks, but you just let AI do the work for you and everybody’s happy. I think there’s a way for us to leverage this stuff to expand your business and maybe take on work that you normally would not have taken on. Because it’s funny to me because you think about these agencies and they think that they’re not taking work that’s that low. And it’s because it’s not worth it. Right? The juice is not worth the squeeze. But if you’re using AI to handle that stuff and you’re charging so little that it’s managing the expectation that you’re not giving white-glove service, maybe you can take on 20 of those in the same time it would take you to do one of those $4,000 projects and now you’re still making the same amount of money. And you’re balancing that out. So it’s interesting to think about these tools that are being used for the purposes of building yourself a website. Maybe you can actually repurpose them and commercialize them.

Jeffrey Golenski:

Yeah, maybe. I wonder if there’s any ethical implications there in terms of setting expectations if you’re trying to expand your business a bit, and let’s say you’re working with a new client and they want you to do X, Y, or Z, and you use AI to do the thing, and then they want you to do B and C, and you’re like, well, I can’t do that. You know, because AI’s limited.

Jesse Friedman:

Because the AI won’t do it for me.

Jeffrey Golenski:

Like I want images of Disney and it’s like, I can’t do that. I don’t have any concrete examples right now, but I’m wondering if expectation needs to be explicitly set with clients. Yeah, I have an AI package and I will do it because I’m really good at prompts so I can create things in AI better than you can, you know?

Jesse Friedman:

Right.

Jeffrey Golenski:

It’s really interesting. And also too, what are you doing to the market if you’re then taking on that $200 work when you should be pressing them to pay more for it? You know, we might get into a world where design as a whole, or maybe even engineering is devalued because of these things, but I guess time will tell, right?

Jesse Friedman:

Yeah, it’s an interesting thing. It’s definitely a problem that’s worth watching, right? Because I’m not gonna pretend that I have the answers, but I think at some point you have to say to yourself, I run an ice cream shop. And there’s an ice cream shop that just opened up down the street from me and I was talking to the owner and they were saying how they need to build a website and how frustrating it is because it’s not that one tool is hard, it’s just that they don’t want to do it. They don’t want to learn it, they don’t want to be involved in it. But they don’t have the budget to hire somebody to do it for them. And so what do they end up doing? They end up just using a Facebook page, which sucks because as you said in the first episode, right? Maybe you don’t have Facebook, or maybe Facebook decides that your ice cream page doesn’t get ranked or whatever, and then all of a sudden you don’t have any ownership over that. So if it means that they are not going to build a website if they don’t have that kind of solution, then maybe there is a way to solve for that and bring those people in and keep them inside the ecosystem. But I definitely agree that if we’re not careful about it and we position it as unique, bespoke, beautiful designs that I’m just signing up for a hosting company and just going through their onboarding and then I present them with a finished website, did I actually do anything of value? And is that gonna actually water down what it means to be a web designer? You know, it could be a real problem.

Jeffrey Golenski:

Yeah, I mean, at that point, it’s like you’re almost just like a middle person. You know, you’re also very replaceable if AI then takes on the responsibility of doing all these things. So I think it’s important that everyone find their niche and find irreplaceable qualities in the market, you know?

Jesse Friedman:

I love that. Finding irreplaceable qualities in the market. Jeff, that was the perfect segment to take a break and say goodbye on. Thank you so much for taking the time to meet with me and share your knowledge with this group of people. If you want to hang out with Jeff more like I get to, I’m very lucky. Check him out on Blue Sky. What’s your handle on Blue Sky?

Jeffrey Golenski:

I am Jeff Golenski everywhere in the world. As far as I know, I’m the only Jeff Golenski, so if you just Google me on any social media, you’ll find me. Just look for the guy with the beard and the hair and the glasses.

Jesse Friedman:

Nice. All right, cool. Thanks so much, Jeff.

Jeffrey Golenski:

Thanks for having me, man.

Jesse Friedman:

Thanks for joining us on another episode of Impressive Hosting, where we uncover the core tenets of great WordPress hosting. Do you have a follow-up question for today’s guest? A thought or comment on anything we talked about? A future guest suggestion? A hosting horror story? What do you think makes great WordPress hosting? All your comments shape the show. Drop them on impressive.host. We also appreciate you following us on social media and subscribing to the podcast on your favorite platform. Finally, do check out our list of open-source projects that need support at impressive.host. Whether it’s code, community, or cash, you can make a difference. See you next time.