meeting transcriptHIOUSA
Impromptu Zoom Meeting - May 07 VIEW RECORDING - 31 mins (No highlights): https://fathom.video/share/fyBCTRNmN-Qs8qXoNt1Vu933zWP2TxZt
0:01 - Amy Fanter This meeting is being recorded.
0:03 - Tristan Thomas (ProtonMail) Hey, Amy.
0:04 - Amy Fanter Hi, Tristan, how are you?
0:06 - Tristan Thomas (ProtonMail) Good.
0:07 - Amy Fanter Good. I am so sorry. Thank you for being with me now. This is great. Appreciate it very much.
0:17 - Tristan Thomas (ProtonMail) Fair thing. Does my eye sound okay?
0:20 - Amy Fanter Yeah, absolutely. Hopefully I'm not screaming too loud.
0:24 - Tristan Thomas (ProtonMail) Nope, you're perfect. All right, let me just get myself.
0:29 - Amy Fanter Sure.
0:30 - Tristan Thomas (ProtonMail) Yeah, I was starting to move on. I've done a little bit of digging into the overall, just your overall organization and stuff.
0:47 - Amy Fanter Just trying to get a better feel for it.
0:51 - Tristan Thomas (ProtonMail) Obviously, there's still a lot. I don't know.
0:54 - Amy Fanter I'm not totally sure.
0:59 - Tristan Thomas (ProtonMail) I've done a brief. I've There's a lot of things I can suggest. I want to hear what you have, and then we can dig into some of the other things if you want.
1:08 - Amy Fanter Sure. So just to kind of give you a broad overview, I've been with this organization for 20 years. We bought, during the pandemic, the site that we are having issues with right during the pandemic. And we basically did a facelift on it, moved it to a new host, and it actually ended up beating our flagship site. For many years, we were in position one, our company Hole in One International. And then we bought this company, it moved it into position two.
1:49 - Tristan Thomas (ProtonMail) One of our competitors jumped over us. is Hole in One USA you're talking about?
1:54 - Amy Fanter Yeah, Hole in One USA sits in number two. Our number one competitors in number one. And now my flagship brand, Hole in One International, is down in four. That's a whole other different problem for another day. My reason for reaching out to you is we have been doing work overseas with contractors based out of India to do work on this site, giving us a mobile, making it mobile friendly, fixing things when they got broken, blah, blah, blah. And it is getting to, I can't, it's too long of a distance. It's too much of a communication error. And I am trying to find somebody who can help me do the things that I cannot do, that our internal developers don't have time to do, that when I need a fix or I need to modify and to improve the site. In particular, our final thing was we have three. And I think this site also needs a theme update. So I'm just going to lay that out there as well. And it's really And we really don't want to change design or anything at this point, but we need to make it as functional as we can. And we don't want to do too much because we're sitting so nicely with rank. Obviously, we'd like to be in one, but we'll take two. That's not anything to complain about. But the big thing is, is I have three CSS files that keep going missing every time we're doing a cache clear or basically I can't even tell when it's happening. ACTION ITEM: Send Tristan problematic CSS files for HIOUSA.com - WATCH: https://fathom.video/share/fyBCTRNmN-Qs8qXoNt1Vu933zWP2TxZt?timestamp=198.9999 So it's just these three WordPress content cache files that keep going away. And we need to get to the root of the problem and to correct it if we can. And we've been back and forth with this team that we've been working with for months. I finally eliminated two plugins that I thought was the root cause. Clearly, those were not it. And so it's obviously related. It's within the theme. And so I think it's... But they did some work in there that I think has created more problems than it fixed, if that makes sense. And so I don't know how to, I mean, there was a lot of good work done, but we also need to make sure that these pieces, because basically what happens is I leave my homepage formatting every, like every few months. But it was over the winter, we were fine, but then it happened again last week, kind of unexpectedly. So that's where I'm at. And this is one of where I am looking for somebody that I can work with, that can help me with. We might have Elementor is pretty easy to work with. We have a local designer who designed that prize identity holdings page. It's super simple. There's not a lot of content there. Odds-on, the blog doesn't look right. The site itself is in Codeigniter, but the blog, we do control. And that could absolutely be looking sharper and better. Would love to do some work on that. And then the big thing, the big project is we have a new version of our hole-in-one international site. And if things go well with these initial projects, I am looking for somebody who can help me get that site live. And that's in Divi. I'm not a huge Divi person. I've had to learn it. It's very complex. I wish it was in Elementor, but it is what it is.
5:33 - Tristan Thomas (ProtonMail) And so that's it. That's everything. Cool. Well, I will definitely say up front, I'm not going to be able to compete price-wise with an Indian developer.
5:45 - Amy Fanter I'm fully aware of that, and we don't want to. We know that.
5:49 - Tristan Thomas (ProtonMail) Well, I also hopefully can give you a lot better quality and And we know that, too. Yeah. So... So, just to recap here, basically the project right now you want to just deal with before we do anything else is fix whatever the CSS disappearing files are. ACTION ITEM: Give Tristan WP Engine + WordPress access for HIOUSA.com. CC Dave for IP approval - WATCH: https://fathom.video/share/fyBCTRNmN-Qs8qXoNt1Vu933zWP2TxZt?timestamp=374.9999 Is it, is the site, this is the H-I-O-U-S-A dot com site, right? Is it formatted correctly right now or is that?
6:26 - Amy Fanter It is right now as far as I know, but what I'd be more than happy to do is give you the opportunity and access to get into that site. It's, it's at, we're present, it's at WP Engine, okay? And we'll give you whatever access you'd like to get in there and take a look and give us a good idea of what might be going on. Basically, Dave is my IT director and I know SEO. I understand the basics, I can update some plugins, but when it comes to understanding CSS, And the actual functionality of that site, I'm way above my head, I'm in over my head. And so I can pull something updated, and it impacts everything. And then I'm rolling it back. And, you know, I know better than to ever touch a theme. So I know that's updated, because I won't touch them. But yeah, I hope that helps. And Dave is an amazing IT and technical guy, and he can do any number of things with servers and networks, but he's not a WordPress developer. ACTION ITEM: Analyze HIOUSA.com site issues. Provide quote for fixes by mid next week - WATCH: https://fathom.video/share/fyBCTRNmN-Qs8qXoNt1Vu933zWP2TxZt?timestamp=450.9999 And that's, that's the issue is we just don't know what we're looking at. And we don't know, we can't figure out the root cause of these three stupid files, but we need to get you in there so that you can actually take a look at what's going on.
7:43 - Tristan Thomas (ProtonMail) And I can send you the files that we're having the issues with. So that would be great. I actually make a guess to as to what the problem is right now, just because this isn't the first time I've run into this. We're especially working with overseas developers. Indian developers, they like to get into the WordPress back-end code and PHP a lot instead of just going through the settings and stuff, and they'll go change things. They'll install Google Fonts from the PHP instead of installing the correct plugin, and unfortunately, that can be very hard to crack down properly.
8:28 - Amy Fanter Yeah, and that makes sense to me, because some of the stuff that we're seeing is, why is this individual character missing on a page? Awesome. Yes, that makes what you've just said absolutely aligns with what I think I'm, with what I would say we see on the site.
8:54 - Tristan Thomas (ProtonMail) You might be cleaning up more than... Yeah, and that's why I don't want to give you a quote or... Right. Yeah. My just just so you know how I tend to work with these because I've dealt with several of these are in the last few months actually. Yeah. The best thing especially for a site that's honestly the site isn't that big is back it up and pretty much start over. Okay. With something like that simply because once you start messing with that.
9:25 - Amy Fanter Okay.
9:26 - Tristan Thomas (ProtonMail) You know I'm more of a Upwork guy. I can write code.
9:30 - Amy Fanter I can read code.
9:31 - Tristan Thomas (ProtonMail) Yeah. But even the guys who are writing the code for that are like once you start messing with that it turns into a big project.
9:42 - Amy Fanter Yeah.
9:42 - Tristan Thomas (ProtonMail) Yeah. So.
9:44 - Amy Fanter Well we have a staging and we have development. We have an entire development site that you can have to do whatever you want to do with. Okay. And then we can pull that and we can pull that live then to the main site. Whatever. However we can work with you but we have a Paging site that we typically keep for, we have a, you'll see on that site, a page that's got, that interface, that's that quoting piece that sits on the homepage where somebody goes for a quote. That piece is called Quick Quotes, QQ2, I think is the version that's on there. And QQ2 is a quoting system that goes up to Amazon to get information and sends them to a completely different site. Okay. That piece is separate from the rest of the site. And that's, that, you don't have to worry about that particular piece. The rest of it is, is like kind of whatever you, whatever you want to do. I just need somebody in there to take a look at what's going on. And I know that we may have to look at, like we talked about maybe doing a theme update, but they came back to us with like a, an overhaul price. And we just felt like for that, we could get a better. Quality person here in the States for the number that they came back to us with that would be easier for me to work with one-on-one. So I'm also willing to look at that. But in the interim, I'm in the midst of offseason, and I can't lose my formatting. So I've got to have like a quick fix while we work on getting what else needs to be done. So I think step one is giving you access in there to WordPress engine. And I think it's going to take like, you know, the basic stuff and then obviously giving, I think Dave's got that locked down by like IP or something else.
11:34 - Tristan Thomas (ProtonMail) So there'll be a little bit of a back and forth on that. So we can at least get you in there and take a look at everything and give you access to whatever you need. Cool. That sounds good.
11:43 - Amy Fanter And then I've got one job I'm finishing up tonight, tomorrow night. Great.
11:49 - Tristan Thomas (ProtonMail) And then a quote by...
11:52 - Amy Fanter Like early next week, next end of next week, how many, you know, whenever, you know, whenever it's good.
11:58 - Tristan Thomas (ProtonMail) Cool. I will... It would probably be beginning to middle of next week.
12:03 - Amy Fanter Okay, great.
12:05 - Tristan Thomas (ProtonMail) I'll get that to you.
12:06 - Amy Fanter All right. I am going to go ahead and send over to you these files, David. I'm going to send exactly what he... I don't think it's related to the cache because I had cleared the cache well before. Sorry. Cleared the cache well before. I think it was something when I went to do updating of plug-ins that broke it, but that's just me. What do I know?
12:37 - Tristan Thomas (ProtonMail) Do you have an automated backup system or anything?
12:44 - Amy Fanter It will automatically take it at midnight. WP Engine automatically takes that at midnight every night. So you'll be able to go back. I think my final night of doing changes on that site before it broke was the 24th of April. Because that's my notes from when I am, when I, and I can put that in here too. Put that in there. Last is, was, was like the night that I did the backup before. And we didn't see anything until Monday, like Monday, or yesterday. And it does automatically backup each night on the main, and then you can, the stage and development are the same. I had pushed changes to both stage and development because we've made a bunch of content changes that needed to be carried across the other two sites. And that staging site is kind of where our developer plays with these quick quote things. Because the way that quick quote works, it has to have set links that are related to the page that the software is installed on. And so staging, we kind of wanted to have you stay on, I think it's the. Developer one is what I call it, so, and I'm just writing some notes.
14:06 - Tristan Thomas (ProtonMail) I will definitely also do some just reading up. I've never dealt with that particular plugin or thing before, so I'll do some reading on it.
14:14 - Amy Fanter Yeah, it's a great place to host sites. It's fantastic. I just have a feeling you're going to know way more about operating in WordPress than I do. And then I'm going to cc Dave. So it had been midnight on April 23rd. I'm going to take care
15:05 - Tristan Thomas (ProtonMail) Do you have a preferred communication method, emails, good for you?
15:09 - Amy Fanter Emails, the best, and normally I'm not, we actually were trying to, we were trying to, we set up an interview on our person no-showed on us, and I was running around trying to figure out why they didn't show up, thinking that I did something wrong. So I'm not in feed, but I haven't feed just no-showed, so, okay.
15:36 - Tristan Thomas (ProtonMail) I understand, I'm always like checking time zones and like, oh shoot, did I get the time zone wrong?
15:42 - Amy Fanter No, it wasn't you, it was me, it was me, I'm so sorry. Okay, so David Debo is RIT, and is TJT work at Proton?
15:56 - Tristan Thomas (ProtonMail) Will that be good for your- Yeah, that's my word. Good. Thank Thank You I can also give you my cell if you'd like. I do have two jobs. I work the first part of the day. Available almost every evening, afternoons.
16:15 - Amy Fanter Perfect. It's perfect. And we don't need, look, I've been, even just being able to have, normally it wouldn't be this, like, even if we were to be able to have a conversation four or five o'clock, that's so reasonable and efficient compared to what we've been dealing with. So, I'd like to give Tristan access to WP Engine and TrailUSA to, I'm just going to say to do some analysis on this site right now.
17:10 - Tristan Thomas (ProtonMail) Is there anybody else in there working on or adding content or changing anything?
17:14 - Amy Fanter Not at this time. Not at this time. And that's the kind of situation where I don't, right now, I don't want to do anything in there until, until, because we're in golf season. So, especially that dev site, I won't be in it all. So if I were to change anything, it's going to be textual and I would give you the heads up that I was going in there to do something. I think it's in page builder and site origin. One of those two. It's all kind of a blur to me. I'm not great. I'm getting better with my HTML, CSS is well, just don't know yet. And I think, I think you've nailed it. Yeah, because we have like, you know, like when you go into WordPress, if you take an image out and you replace that image, it should populate across, right? And that's not what was taking, like things were individually changed. Things were individually sized, mobile versus not mobile. We did have mobile issues, but this became, I think it's very, things got done that might be very messy. And so it may have to be read the theme and go from there, update the theme. don't know if it's a reasonable, you know what I'm saying? Yeah, I don't know. Like I said, it's beyond me. And what I think, I know I'm more dangerous than anything else.
18:46 - Tristan Thomas (ProtonMail) Well, I will definitely verify that for you. Okay. hunch is probably that somebody went in and added Google Fonts or something through the PHP. It didn't do it. Didn't do it properly.
19:02 - Amy Fanter Yeah. I'm hoping it's not crazy, crazy.
19:09 - Tristan Thomas (ProtonMail) Let me get your cell, if I can. I'll put it in the chat here, but it's also 208-27-2791. 208-627-2791.
19:32 - Amy Fanter Put it in the comment or the chat. there we go. Thank you. You can tell I'm old. Great. Thank you. Grab it from there.
19:46 - Tristan Thomas (ProtonMail) I miss typing, miss hearing things all the time, so like seeing it in writing, it's a lot easier to copy and paste.
19:53 - Amy Fanter Okay, I'm to see you on this. And then... And I am in marketing. I'm usually always at my desk, my 800 number. That's a direct 800 right into me. So anytime you call it, I'm usually here to pick up. My hours are typically 10 to about 6.30, 7, sometimes later. And I'm going to be traveling in June, but I will work around your schedule. So just to get these, to get this worked on. And my best contact, you already have, is my A Fanter of Odds on Promotions. And, okay, so is this the best email for us to enter for the WordPress, for WordPress Engine and all of that?
21:10 - Tristan Thomas (ProtonMail) Yeah, that should be fine, as long as it'll get deleted after I'm done on it or something.
21:16 - Amy Fanter Yes, absolutely.
21:18 - Tristan Thomas (ProtonMail) I do have another email a lot of if I'm setting something up I'll use, but... Okay.
21:23 - Amy Fanter That basically is for WordPress to get all sorts of WordPress emails to get dumped on that I don't actually watch very closely. Ah, okay.
21:31 - Tristan Thomas (ProtonMail) So for this purpose, as long as I can get it deleted afterwards?
21:35 - Amy Fanter Yeah, we can change it to whatever. I think Dave's probably going to, the way that he usually has that set up is it's going to be for IP. He'll probably want to, you know, give a, like, however he isolates that. don't know, it's not, what he does on this side is different from me. So, but it's usually like he has to approve a few different layers. Cool. And so he'll... Or with that address, and then, yeah. And, okay. Okay. Yeah, like I said, April 23rd was the last time before things broke. This most recent time, I've pulled off Google's site. I've pulled off a bunch of different stuff. There were a lot of plug-ins being added that I wasn't familiar with. There was a lot of stuff going on to try to speed the site up, which was their directive, trying to fix some things that I felt needed to be fixed technically, but it wasn't what we weren't ever getting corrected, what we wanted to get corrected when it came to speed and other issues. And then, like I said, the big, this one. I got to get it fixed and then we can go on to bigger and better things. And I do, these are going to need maintenance on and off, but there'll probably be some, you know, big projects. And then if we have something that we need, there will be big projects too.
23:14 - Tristan Thomas (ProtonMail) So, but this is our first, this is our first foray into using up work and trying to have somebody, you know, do some, do some work that's here locally.
23:23 - Amy Fanter And I think worth every penny, believe me.
23:28 - Tristan Thomas (ProtonMail) I, 100% believe my parents actually own two fairly large online companies and that tried to work with the Indian developer route for a very short period of time.
23:41 - Amy Fanter Yeah. Yeah, it really worked until it didn't. And then it's been very difficult. And so, okay, let's see, is there anything else that I can answer for you at this point, or you probably need to get in there and get an idea?
23:58 - Tristan Thomas (ProtonMail) For the most If you have a, a lot of companies have like a Google Docs or something where they keep track of all the different issues and stuff, if you have something like that for reference, that'll be helpful. Sometimes something seems unrelated, but then I'm like, oh, that actually, if you don't, it's no big deal.
24:18 - Amy Fanter We don't. We don't. I can tell you that the big issues that we were having for the last year was these files going awry. Prior to that, the directive was, let's get this site faster because I felt there were things that could be done. And instead of using a plugin or a tool that would help to address that, they did code based things. And so that and scripting things. And so then that gets you off of. Staying within the plug-in world, and the plug-ins are clean, right? That's the best way I think that you've nailed it. You nailed exactly what I think it had been.
25:10 - Tristan Thomas (ProtonMail) If you build a site with no code, try not to code any more than you absolutely have to. If you build it with code, then using code is fine. But if you're going to go the no code route, don't...
25:24 - Amy Fanter Don't do that.
25:25 - Tristan Thomas (ProtonMail) Don't do that. I'm actually running a performance test on it right now.
25:30 - Amy Fanter Yeah. And I think that... So I'll tell you what I think why we have the issue that we have with our flagship site, which is old data, but we're not going to be able to redesign it. Redesign isn't really in our world right now. Having said that, there's no reason why it can't be cleaned up.
25:52 - Tristan Thomas (ProtonMail) That's the oddsonpromotions.com?
25:54 - Amy Fanter Odds on is a whole... That's a whole... That's Code Igniter and a WordPress. And the blog, I mean, is a mess. Just doesn't look good. Doesn't look right. We band-aided it together. Again, we've been, I had a, we had an employee pre-pandemic who knew more about code and HTML, who knew CSS, knew HTML, was able to do some of the stuff that I couldn't do, but she, she took a different job during pandemic and she was based out of Texas and she was a sharp young lady. And so she, she's moved on to bigger and better pastures. So, but we, she was able to, like the theme went out of date and she did a new theme, but it could look better. The big problem site that I've got to deal with is Holy One International. And when you get into work, when you get into WP Engine, you're going to be able to see everything that's. There are three sites in there, Prize Indemnity Holdings, BDUSA, and the HIOI, the new HIOI, which is the one in Divi. And I didn't like what the developers were doing with Divi at all. And I've had to learn Divi. I don't like, I'm struggling with getting the blog working. As soon as I get the blog working the way I want it to work, then I can migrate to that new site. But I can't do it yet. And again, it's outside of my skill set. So I don't remember if you were good with Divi or not.
27:40 - Tristan Thomas (ProtonMail) I can't remember. I do have a bit of experience with Divi. Not as much as Elementor, but I've got it. That's okay. I'm quite proficient.
27:49 - Amy Fanter Yeah, you're going to be far more proficient than I am, for sure. So, and I think once I tell you what I want to do, you're going to be like, oh, that's easy.
27:56 - Tristan Thomas (ProtonMail) This is how you do it. So. Cool.
27:59 - Amy Fanter Well, let's focus on that.
28:01 - Tristan Thomas (ProtonMail) Let me get you a quote for that and figure out what needs to be done, if it's a theme update or if it's a simple fix. Once we figure that out, then we can put together a game plan.
28:11 - Amy Fanter Yeah, perfect, perfect, perfect. And then as far as once we come, once you get us a proposal, take a look at it. Dave may want to talk to you as well at that point, which I don't expect will be a huge issue. ACTION ITEM: Message Tristan via Upwork portal to start official dialogue - WATCH: https://fathom.video/share/fyBCTRNmN-Qs8qXoNt1Vu933zWP2TxZt?timestamp=1702.9999 And then do we pay you through the – we've never used Upwork, so we pay you through the Upwork platform.
28:34 - Tristan Thomas (ProtonMail) Is that kind of how that will work? Yes, and I was actually going to ask you to message me or send me – if go to the – Portal. Yeah, sorry. I'm having a hard time with words this evening, apparently.
28:50 - Amy Fanter But where you saw my proposal there, you should have – I've never actually seen it from the client's site.
28:57 - Tristan Thomas (ProtonMail) You should have a way to message me or interview me or something.
29:00 - Amy Fanter If you can just do that, that'll start a dialogue, and then I can submit proposals to you through that.
29:05 - Tristan Thomas (ProtonMail) I'll also do it via email, but Upwork's policy is if you're finding jobs on their site, they don't want you to take it. That's it, yeah, I appreciate all that. They do give you a lot of protections and just a lot of things.
29:18 - Amy Fanter Yeah, and we're all about that too, so that's great with us. And it's the first time, like I said, it's the first time we've done this, and this might be a new solution for the IT director and I. We have lots of developers. We have even WordPress developers in this building, but they're on just tasks that are customized code for our casino property promotion stuff. That's all on that, that's on stuff, so yeah. Cool. Yeah, yeah. All right, Tristan, thank you.
29:48 - Tristan Thomas (ProtonMail) I might sleep tonight. That'd be good.
29:53 - Amy Fanter This has not been good. I can't go through another golf season with those three finals breaking, and neither can they. So, okay, great. I'll go ahead and send this to Dave. He'll get me, if we'll get you going on the passwords and access to WP Engine and that site. And then, like I said, you can do whatever you want in the development stage is kind of designed for our quick quotes developer. And then the production is kind of, I do some stuff in there as far as like copy, pretty much trying, you know, try to, I know I'm supposed to do things on the other sites before I pull it live, but I don't always do that. So, bad on me. And I do like the idea of having better documentation. I think we've just kind of gone with, can you do this? Can you try that? So, okay, great. Thank you so much for your time this evening. Certainly. Thank you for the opportunity. Yeah, absolutely. Okay. And I'll message you. Through the Upwork Portal. Thank you so much. Sounds good. Okay. Bye.