S5E30
· 30:30
Hey. It's Matt. Welcome to Money Lab. I'm walking around the brewery and just wanted to talk about some things that happened recently, which one of them I've been I've been working on the about page for Sym University. And what's interesting is I so I finished it.
Matt Giovanisci:I finished a a version of it, and I published it, and then I went on Twitter and I was like, hey, Twitter people. I don't know why I do this to myself, but I said, hey. Critique my website. Be brutally honest. And I and I try to take it with a, you know, a constructive I knew I was gonna get feedback that was, like, not helpful, but, you know, some feedback was really helpful.
Matt Giovanisci:And so and, again, I wasn't really concerned about usually, I don't like to ask for feedback from non designers, you know, because most people just don't have a design eye. They just have a opinion. So, I kind of expected, like, you know, maybe I'll learn something from this experience. And, yeah, like, I absolutely learned something from this experience. And a lot of the suggestions were good.
Matt Giovanisci:One suggestion was, and again, I have to, like, pry it out of people because I don't know. I guess people are sometimes really bad at feedback I know I can be. So one of the pieces of feedback I got was, it's annoying to read. And I was like, what the hell does that mean? Like, what do you mean?
Matt Giovanisci:Is it is that is my copy annoying? Is the font annoying? Is, like, what's annoying about it? And he, this this tweeter or xer or whatever the fuck they're called now, was like, oh, like, check out this post about typography and mobile design and blah blah blah. And I was like, oh, that's really interesting.
Matt Giovanisci:He he mentioned something called a rag. It's like a ragged edge. So when you justify text, when you justify text in one side or the other, you have one side that's ragged. If you look at a book, a book is fully justified, so each side is completely straight, there's no ragged edges. But on when you center text, you have ragged edges on both sides, and your eye doesn't know where to jump to the next line.
Matt Giovanisci:So I thought, oh, that's interesting. Center I always thought centering the text was a better reading experience for mobile, but it turns out, if you have, like, more than, like, 2 to 2 or 3 lines of text, it really should be justified left for for, you know, Latin languages or whatever, non Latin languages, I guess. Or I don't know how that works. I didn't not a language expert, but, yeah, I was like, oh, okay. That's that that was super useful, so I went and changed that.
Matt Giovanisci:Other people said that they were kind of like digging in on me a little bit, which I kinda knew, like, I knew the about, like, the it it goes in, like, the about at the top, and then it goes into the founder. And that's supposed to do 2 things. 1 is that's my author bio, so that I link to in every single post. So I wanted that to be pretty early on the page, and people were like, I don't care about you. Like, I care about, like, what you can do for me.
Matt Giovanisci:So I was like, okay. Do I that makes sense. And somebody had mentioned, like, where's your credentials? Like, because you've been doing it for a long time isn't credentials. And I'm like, I mean, yes.
Matt Giovanisci:It is. What what, like, so, like, for example, if I was a home brewer, right, there's no there's no credentials for home brewing. It's a hobby. I'm a woodworker. There's no credentials.
Matt Giovanisci:I mean, I guess you could get a credential, but I was like, that's a weird piece of feedback. I'm like, what do you mean the age of me doing this doesn't apply? Thought that was interesting. So I was like, okay. Well, maybe I I took that advice and, like, maybe I can spin it differently.
Matt Giovanisci:Maybe I can say, you know, I've been you know, I so I took it as like, alright. I don't really understand how I could not use the one credential that is the most impressive thing. You know, like, if you ask any pool boy out there, pool guy, you know, they would say that, like, there's 2 certifications. There's I've been doing this for a long time or I'm a CPO. Only one of those two things, an actual pool owner knows what the fuck is.
Matt Giovanisci:No one knows no per person in the pool cares if you're a CPO. Certified pool operator is what it stands for, but it's a I could give out a CPO license. Like, it's not a it's a credential that anybody can give out. So, like, you know, I I just I just thought, alright. Well, how do I take this advice?
Matt Giovanisci:And I was like, alright. I need to be clearer in what I've been doing for 30 years. Not that I've just been in the industry for 30 years, but that I've been, you know, taking care of pools for 30 years and helping thousands of customers and all of this other thing all other other stuff. And somebody I kinda paired that advice. Somebody else wrote, there's a picture of you, but there's no picture of you taking care of a pool.
Matt Giovanisci:Like, there's no proof that you as a human being can do this thing. So I thought, alright. That's a good piece of feedback. You're right. I don't have that.
Matt Giovanisci:I I obviously have pictures of me taking care of a pool, so I could use those. I did use pictures of me as a kid in pools, not the same thing. So I thought, alright. That's kinda funny, and, like, I've been doing pools for a long time, and that was sort of my thought process. Like, I don't have any pictures of me as a child taking care of a pool, but I have pictures of, you know, me as a kid in a pool.
Matt Giovanisci:So I was like, I thought that would just be funny, but, yeah, no. I I totally agree with, like, combining those two pieces of advice to kind of, you know so so weeding through that. The one I got this once from somebody or twice, and I was kind of like, I can't like, not what I asked for and annoyed me and made me think about it. Because it's like, hey, if it's if it's annoying me, what is the what's the underlying truth there? So one person said, your logo looks a little shaky.
Matt Giovanisci:Right? Okay. I was like, okay. I don't understand what shaky means. It's a static logo, but it didn't look solid.
Matt Giovanisci:And I was like, alright. That was one criticism. The other one was and by the way, the the the, the logo for Swim University I'm talking about. And then the other critique was, oh, I landed on your website. I thought you taught swimming lessons.
Matt Giovanisci:And I said, uh-huh. So he's like, this is the first time I land on your page. I'm like, okay. So you took all of about you only read one word then. Or may perhaps you read 2 words.
Matt Giovanisci:You read swim and university, and you thought immediately, this is about take this is about swimming lessons. I was like, okay. And so I took those two things and I asked about the shaky thing and I didn't get really any, you know and then, somebody else chimed in like, yeah. The swim university, it's not very clear that you do pools or hot tubs. I said, okay.
Matt Giovanisci:So that's that bothered me. So why did it bother me? Because, one, I've had this name and logo for 20 years, so kinda too late to change it. But also, it made me think, like, okay, 1, do you know, like, why am I bothered by it? It's like yeah.
Matt Giovanisci:Because it's like you're you're now critiquing my entire business existence. It's not I wasn't just asking you for design things about the about page that I can change. You gave me something that I clearly have no intention of changing, my entire identity as a brand. That's like you know, it's saying, like, you know, I I saw your your logo for Pepsi, but it doesn't scream cola to me. What is a Pepsi?
Matt Giovanisci:And it's like, okay. Well, Pepsi has been around for a long time. Like, everyone knows what it is. Now I thought, okay. Let's let's address the shaky logo.
Matt Giovanisci:I go, is it just because the letters are not solid? Because the word swim in the logo is is purposefully not solid, but the word university is, meaning it's on a straight line. And the reason for that is brand. 1, swim is is is the words are bobbing in the water. The water icon appears right next to it.
Matt Giovanisci:So it's the letters, s w I m, all bobbing in the water, which is why they're not on a straight line. University, much more rigid, in a different font, straight line. I've had that logo since literally the day I started swim University. Was the first logo I ever designed for for the company, and I've never changed it. Never never touched it.
Matt Giovanisci:The only thing I've ever did done is add the registered trademark icon at the end because I it is a registered trademark. So then it got me thinking, okay, logo aside, the name, swim university. Again, obviously, too late to change it, but I thought, okay. I maybe maybe let's let's talk about brand for a second. So under that same logic, if you think you land on my website and it's called Swim University, you think I give swim lessons, and you read not a word further to to realize that it has nothing to do about swimming or, like, swimming lessons.
Matt Giovanisci:So that would say, okay, Matt, and I've heard this from several people over the years, why don't you just call it Poole University? And I've talked about this before, but I go, okay. Let's take that. Well, 1, I can only talk about pools, can I? Right?
Matt Giovanisci:Because, like, I'm now pool university. So I have this all this hot tub content, and there's cold plunges. There's swim spas, there's all these other things. Like, I can't talk about those because now I'm locked in. Pool University.
Matt Giovanisci:Also, Pool University, I landed on your website. I thought it was about billiards. I thought you were teaching us how to play billiards. Isn't that what pool means? So that logic doesn't work.
Matt Giovanisci:And then I thought, alright. Well, hey. I'm in the spa industry. Why don't you just call it spa university? I'm like, what what is that?
Matt Giovanisci:Am I teaching people how to start a day spa? What's a day spa? That's not the same thing as a spa. So words have different meanings. Swim, yeah, it could be about swimming lessons.
Matt Giovanisci:And, certainly, there are there's a company called Swim University that teaches kids how to swim. Not not my field, but that that's on them. No one's gonna confuse our 2 companies, and and they're related. So it's not like they're completely not related. Like, pool university could be about billiards, completely unrelated to pools.
Matt Giovanisci:So, you know, I'll I'll take the I'll take the relation. Also, spa, completely unrelated to hot tubs. So, I mean, I guess sauna's close, but yeah. So, yeah, I I I didn't make any sense to critique that. And then I thought, well, then, like, what happened when Walmart came out?
Matt Giovanisci:Were people like, oh, is that a store that sells walls? It's like, why are you being so literal? And I think that that just comes from and I'm just maybe I'm I'm just grasping at straws here, but that critique comes from niche site world. You know? Because it's like, why don't you just call it what it is?
Matt Giovanisci:I have brew cabin. Right? Brew cabin on it's called brew cabin on purpose. Even though I talk about home brewing, which is the term, I didn't call it home brew cabin. It's the cabin is the home.
Matt Giovanisci:So it's homebrewing reversed. But also which I actually it's pretty interesting. But brew, the word brew means I can do more than just beer. I can brew tea. I can brew coffee.
Matt Giovanisci:I can brew kombucha. I can brew a lot of other things. So that's why I named it that. But if it was beer cabin, well, now it's like, oh, I thought you sold beer. It's like, see how it does it get if you get super specific or you think that everything is so specific, then it's like you're taking zero action and steps to look further or or understand the brand.
Matt Giovanisci:There's you know, if you watch our content, no one thinks, oh my god. I've been watching this content for, like, 4 years, and this whole time, I thought he was talking about swimming lessons. It's like it doesn't it's not what brand is. So I think it's just I don't know. It didn't wasn't helpful.
Matt Giovanisci:It wasn't helpful because it's just like, yeah, I can't change that now. Anyway, so that was, like, a big change that I made to the website, and I nervous about it for sure. Still not a 100% locked into that being the home page, or sorry, the about page. But the other thing that came up was, I also put our brand kit, our brand assets on that page. So like, you could download our logo, you could see our colors, our fonts, all that stuff.
Matt Giovanisci:And a lot of people were like, move that to its own page. And I was like, okay. I I see that. Like, I think I was trying to cram I was trying to make the about page significant. And, like, oh, wow.
Matt Giovanisci:This is a helpful resource for anything to do about some university and it's you know, it does need to be separated. So I did end up doing that. The other thing that people said, and I didn't understand this one either, but I'm I'm sticking with it. But I guess the more I think about it, the more I was like, alright. I I took the advice.
Matt Giovanisci:I ran with it. I don't know if I agree with it, but I'm gonna run with it for a bit. So the the the the critique was I had the about us section at the top. Right? Planning on putting a video there soon.
Matt Giovanisci:Then it's me, meet the founder. Then it's meet the team. Then it's then it was a contact form or a contact area, and then it was press clippings, essentially. Somebody had said, you should move press above and make the contact section the last section on the website on that page. And I was like, well, yeah.
Matt Giovanisci:But what if the press section gets so out of control? Like, it just like I get so much press and I keep adding to it, and it becomes this monstrosity. The I think that that means I'm gonna have to move the press section to its own page, and then basically put a somebody else had said, you should make the contact page separate as well, and put it all on the footer. So now the footer just keeps getting bigger and bigger, which is like, okay. Now you have about us, you know, press, brand assets, and a contact page.
Matt Giovanisci:It's like I was trying to accomplish all of that with 1 page. I still is where my brain differs from a lot of so my brain differs. I try to make things simple, and sometimes when I make things simple, it makes things unclear. To me, they're very clear. Now I'll give you an example of this problem that I have.
Matt Giovanisci:I like to name my folders on my computer with one word, 2 Macs, but one word. When other people have to use my folder structure, it's confusing. It's not clear because the because I'm I'm trying for very to me, it's specific. I know what I'm looking at. But if you were to look through my folders, you'd be like, I can't find anything because I'm like, why don't you've named everything with one word.
Matt Giovanisci:So, yeah, I can see that that's a problem. And separating the pages, 1, it's giving me more pages on the website, which I guess is good for SEO and, you know, link juice between the 2 between all the pages. Like, I I yeah. Let's go with that. So that's the about page.
Matt Giovanisci:And now there's a brand assets page, and I guess, eventually, there'll be a press page. Now with the press section, I had issues with I don't really have a lot of press. So I changed it to press press and podcasts, because I I've been on a lot of podcast as an entrepreneur, as someone who, you know, built some university. So I thought, let me just add one of those, you know, links to those press or those that podcast. Who knows?
Matt Giovanisci:I I don't really want that. I'd rather I'd rather be on podcasts that are related to pool care, which which just lends credibility to the brand in general. So, yeah, going forward, I'm gonna slowly start replacing those with more updated press clippings, with more updated podcast, where I'm on talking about pool care and not just entrepreneurship. I don't want those links on Zoom University, to be honest. So it's a temporary fix just to fill the space, and then eventually, I'll go in and update it.
Matt Giovanisci:Now to sort of wedge this into the conversation, the other thing that I am working on and I did today, and I I just pulled the trigger, and it's always scary to do this kind of stuff, but, you know, when you have a site that's large and you get a lot of traffic, making big sweeping changes to the website always sort of freaks me out a little bit. Because I don't know, like, what if I fuck something up in the code and then it's, you know, it it it hasn't been working this whole time. And that actually happened recently. I I I thought I'd come up with a clever solution in our in some of the custom pages that I was designing. And it turns out, like, none of my WP Rocket stuff was loading.
Matt Giovanisci:Like, it was like screwing up, the HTML and the CSS and this and the you know, like, it worked, but it wasn't fully working. So I fixed that. And so this time around, I'm like, I'm doing massive changes to WordPress itself. So 2 things that I looked into. And I was trying.
Matt Giovanisci:So one of them was I I I've always kinda been on the fence between using something like Yoast SEO and Rank Math. And I noticed in plugins, in default WordPress, they're now promoting RankMath, not Yoast. So I go, okay. That's interesting. And then I saw that they have rank math has this, like, pro feature that does AI and all this other stuff.
Matt Giovanisci:And I was like, woah. That's really advanced. And a lot of their SEO stuff in rank math is just really good and really advanced, and I'm like, just looking at the screenshots and looking at the video, like the sales video, I'm like, this is better. I know this is better than Yoast. I've been using Yoast for 10 plus years.
Matt Giovanisci:I know this is better. Man, what a switch that's gonna be. Because it affects my front end of my website. But they make it super seamless. It it it worked.
Matt Giovanisci:Everything worked. I clicked the button, went through the wizard, and it was like, Yost never existed. It just I was like, oh, I guess they do this a lot. I guess that's the competition they're up against. And I signed up for pro, so I'm no longer paying I think I was paying like 80, $90 for Yoast a year.
Matt Giovanisci:I think with rank math, it's, like, $60 a year. So it's cheaper, and it does way more shit. One of the things so so that's the first thing. So I did that. I pulled the trigger on that.
Matt Giovanisci:It was super nerve wracking, but it's done. And I was I tested the site and I was like, alright, everything's seems to be working fine, just the way it always was. Now whenever you watch anything any videos that they do, they're always using the Gutenberg editor, and I have been on the classic editor forever, since the invention of WordPress. And I tried to go to Gutenberg a couple of times and just, like, never liked it. But when I saw what rank math can do, I was like, okay.
Matt Giovanisci:This might be the the time where I actually moved to Gutenberg. And and what what is Gutenberg gonna do that's better for me? It actually has a lot of features that I'm like, oh, I kinda like that. And I and it's happened enough. Now I like having full control over the content.
Matt Giovanisci:So, like, jumping in the HTML and changing things, I like that stuff. And I don't like that well, at first, I didn't like that when you switch to Gutenberg, it puts classes in all of your tags. So, like, all of your heading tags now have a class. They wrap, they wrap videos and images in figure tags, which I was like, ugh. And I had to go fix that.
Matt Giovanisci:So I I I tried it on the staging site, and I was like, yeah. It's got some features. It's like I it's I kinda like the flow better. A couple things that it's it's so minor. But and I go, okay.
Matt Giovanisci:Well, they're gonna you know? That's the other thing too. It's like they're never gonna update classic editor. It is what it is. You're stuck on it.
Matt Giovanisci:Right? Gutenberg, at least you get updates. And it's pretty flexible. Now short codes, not the best. So I use a lot of short codes in my content.
Matt Giovanisci:But I was like, okay. I can customize my own blocks if I had to. So that's kinda cool. What's nice is, like, I use Lasso, and that's for my affiliate links. And it used to just be short codes in in the in the classic editor, but now I actually see the block.
Matt Giovanisci:So what I used to have to do is I used to have to publish the post and then go to the live site and make sure that all the affiliate links looked good. Like, all the all the display box for affiliate links looks good. And if they didn't, I would have to go in, up you know, like, change it, update it, blah blah blah. But now I see that in the editor, so that's a nice little feature. It also has a button, which is crazy to me that this I love this.
Matt Giovanisci:It's so when I update a post, right, and this is gonna be, like, no brainer shit for people that are on Gutenberg, and I've just never used it. So it's just, like, kinda shocking to me. But with Gutenberg, when you go to update a post, you can change the date just like you can in the classic editor. But you can just click a button and it will change it to the exact day and time where I used to just have to manually enter the date and I used to just set the time at 7 AM as, like, a default time. And I'm like, oh, I like this.
Matt Giovanisci:Like, just it just got one click and boom. I'm I'm updated. I'm like, I don't know. Like, I like that. Little things.
Matt Giovanisci:1, one thing that I really like is that the sidebar stays in place, which is, like, that's really helpful when using Clearscope, which I was not able to do before that. So I was like, oh, that saves me a ton of time, actually. It's pretty sweet. So, yeah, it's it's got a lot of, it's got a lot of pluses that I have been holding back. Now, again, I didn't like that it would stick these tags or these classes, these class names into my elements.
Matt Giovanisci:But actually, when it came time to update in the CSS code, I'm like, oh, actually, these are pretty useful. Because now I can just go, oh, what's the class name for an embedded YouTube video? What's the class name for an image? Oh, okay. What's the same for okay.
Matt Giovanisci:Great. And it did that too with with the old one, but it just never did it for headings. So I can change different headers. It's pretty flexible, so I'm digging it. So anyway, that's what's going on.
Matt Giovanisci:Just like some major changes to the back end, to the front end of the website, and, you know, somebody also, I I posted about it. And, you know, this is like, I get a little bummed out sometimes, like, when people dig into my stuff, but, you know, we can't help it. And I I look at, like, Peter Levels. It's like when he's when he shares stuff, it's, like, super transparent. And that's what I've tried to be as well.
Matt Giovanisci:Right? And I I try to be transparent because I'm like, I you know, this is proof that I can do this stuff. Whatever. And, also, like, what am I gonna do? Constantly, like, just live in fear?
Matt Giovanisci:Does this make any sense? So anyway but I don't like when people are like, ugh. Like, they look at my code and they scrutinize and, you know, like, something what I didn't ask for. So, like, I I posted that, you know, roast my about page just hoping for content stuff. Somebody wrote, how the fuck I don't think they said fuck.
Matt Giovanisci:But they said, how did you get how did you get this to be so fast? So they ran my page through a page speed, page speed insights from Google. And they're like, how the hell did you do this? So it's like I have a very image rich, about page, and I think it scored a 100 or 99 or something like that. And I was like they're like, how'd you do that?
Matt Giovanisci:And I was like, I don't know. Like, this is what I taught for a long time. But, honestly, it's like I coded it myself. So every single line of code was written by me. So nothing is in that code that I didn't write.
Matt Giovanisci:That's unnecessary. And, honestly, like, being somebody who can do that, it's a fucking superpower. And it's I it's I'll it's like, if I need to make any updates to my website, I could do it in seconds. If I you know, somebody was like, oh, you didn't put, you didn't have alt tags on your, images. Alright.
Matt Giovanisci:2 seconds. Boom. Manually, literally entering in alt tags. Not doing it through a plugin, going into the code because that's a custom page, and adding it. But I said I wrote yeah.
Matt Giovanisci:I wrote every line of code, and I used WP Rocket with Cloudflare. And with with and I'm I don't know if WP Engine has anything to do with it, but, sure, I'll throw that in the mix too. I use, you know, high level software. Alright. That's it.
Matt Giovanisci:You know? Nothing crazy. But yeah. So that's the that's, the updates to Swim University that I'm heading into this pool season with, so I'm excited about that. And, yeah, if we have anything else to go over, I'll pop on.
Matt Giovanisci:If you have any questions about anything that I'm doing, this podcast, you wanna ask me a meta question, you wanna ask me anything, perhaps give me some fodder for the wet for future episodes, hit me up, matt@moneylab.co. Alright. Bye.
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